The 2026 Senedd election was undoubtedly a major turning point for Wales. For the Welsh nationalists and the far right, huge advances. But for the politics of class, in one of the world’s most class-conscious nations, a giant leap backwards.

Tony Blair is rightly castigated as the man who sold the Labour Party to Thatcherism and started a disastrous illegal war. But it’s not so often mentioned that he was the architect of devolution.  His aim was to neutralise the growing independence movements in Scotland and Wales and to provide Labour with strongholds even under Tory UK governments.

It didn’t take long to demonstrate that the plan wasn’t working in Scotland; now, admittedly aided by tactical voting, Wales has followed suit. A nation which in 1979 rejected devolution by 4 to 1 had elected a party committed to independence. What had changed so much in those forty-eight years?

The first factor is obvious. The destruction of mining and manufacturing in Wales not only shattered communities and condemned workers to unemployment, insecure jobs and various ways of hustling for a living, but also destroyed unions which tied workers together in a common struggle for their advancement and brought forward the likes of A J Cook and Nye Bevan to argue the case for socialism. 

The loss of union power, and representatives of that in parliament, was a key to the degeneration of the Labour Party.  As a party founded to pursue workers’ interests, yet having to manage capitalism, it was always a contradictory phenomenon, but with Blair its embrace of capitalism was unapologetic. 

At first the new Welsh Assembly did seem to offer something more akin to the Labour governments of the 60s and 70s, holding the line against the marketisation of schools and social services, removing payment for prescriptions and openly calling for ‘clear red water’ between Cardiff and Westminster.

In practice, however, the idea of ‘standing up for Wales’. which could be justified when talking about, for example the funds allowed to the assembly, soon came to dominate all discussion, at the cost of the language of class struggle. The battles between Wales and England on the rugby pitch were echoed in the political arena, one result being that both Labour and Plaid celebrated the victory of St Athan over Cosford in being awarded the contract for a privatised military academy – a development which should have horrified any socialist.

The ‘clear red water’ idea was also put to the test and found wanting by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Rhodri Morgan had backed Yvette Cooper against the ‘hard left’ Corbyn, and when Morgan was succeeded by the man who would become Baron Jones of Penybont, that clear red water was getting a bit muddy to say the least.

Meanwhile the right had been gaining influence in post-industrial Wales and the ‘yes’ vote in the Brexit referendum came as an unpleasant shock to the nationalists. A central plank of the argument for independence was that a predominantly left-wing Wales never voted for the right-wing UK governments they so often got.  

The response of nationalists was predictable: the Brexit vote was the fault of the English incomers to Wales. And this explanation would be heard again with the growth of Reform – “English nationalists” as they are regularly described, as if Wales could not possibly produce racists and fascists without help from its neighbour.

But it remains a fact that a clear majority of Welsh people still support the union. With the left in the Senedd now overwhelmingly pro-independence, this gives the right an advantage they never enjoyed when Labour were in power. Yet there is still a powerful socialist argument against independence, the one once raised by Nye Bevan, that the best solution to the problems in Wales is a socialist government of the UK which redistributes the massive wealth of the world’s fifth richest country to those in need, wherever they may be.

After nearly thirty years of devolution, however, the distrust of the Thatcherite governments we have had in Westminster has now widened to a distrust of any UK-wide organisation, including left parties, even those committed not to defending the British state, but to overthrowing it. And the generalised Wales v England narrative not only obscures the class struggle going on in both countries, but the divisions within Wales, where devolution has also had the result of concentrating more and more power and wealth in the capital while former mining towns just a few miles away remain in a desperate state. We need to deal with the specific problems of specific areas, and a priority of a socialist government should be another form of devolution – restoring the powers and finances of local councils – exactly what Bevan did as Minister of Housing to tackle the housing crisis after WW2.

There is another side to the argument for a united working-class fightback, however, and that is the necessity of both English and Welsh understanding the issues in each other’s countries. The kind of philistine comments made by Farage on issues such as the Welsh language need to be vigorously opposed by the left on both sides of the border. Again, however, the right may be calculating there is an advantage to be seen to be on the side of English speakers in Wales., They will surely try to cash in on the unpopularity of compulsory Welsh in secondary schools and-to play on the divisions that result from two separate schooling systems, as well as the perception that Plaid is the party of Welsh-speaking professionals rather than the party of Wales.

In the short term it is a valid tactic to vote tactically to keep the far right out of power. If they win a general election we will be entering a phase of authoritarianism which will criminalise dissent and put the working class at war with each other. Should we in Wales then exercise our democratic right to secede, Farage or his successor will surely not hesitate to use force to prevent it.

Tactical voting, however, is merely keeping the wolf from the door. We have now reached a stage where the beleaguered working class can only turn the tables through a radical programme of change which no so-called centre left parties are offering. The decline of the Labour Party, for all its gross faults, has marked the end of an era in which the working class became, to some extent, a class for itself, and the task now is to replace it with a party which will make no compromises with the massively rich and powerful forces that control our lives, wherever we live.