Welsh Voters Are More Unionist Than the Scottish, but They Still Offer Limited Comfort to Labour and the Tories

Wales used to be a different political world from England and the rest of the UK, with vast Labour majorities in the South and Welsh nationalists winning scattered victories in the North. It has forty seats in the House of Commons. But does it still have a distinct national identity in its political loyalties? The latest results of a YouGov poll covering Wales suggest not — but that offers only qualified rapture to the main Westminster parties. Here are the latest percentages, with the change they represent from the 2010 results in parentheses for comparison:

Lab: 40 (+4) Cons: 26(-) UKIP: 13(+11) PC: 12(+.7) LD: 6(-14) Grn: 4(+3.5)

The poll doesn’t show anything like the massive shifts of opinion we see in Scotland — and in particular the Welsh nationalist vote, far from soaring, has risen less than a point. The two UK Westminster parties share two-thirds of the vote. This suggests that Wales will remain part of the United Kingdom in a relatively contented relationship with England for some time to come. Indeed, it’s been suggested that English people moving to Wales were beginning to change its political complexion in an Anglo direction. We shall see.

Not coincidentally, the figures for the two main UK parties are fairly stable and promise only marginal changes. But they are still interesting. Labour may win a few seats in addition to its current 26. If this proves to be the case, Wales may be returning to its usual Labour loyalty, though that loyalty is less massive in this less politically tribal age. The Tories will boast a respectable performance that consolidates their 2010 improvement in Wales. They will lose one of their eight seats, or gain one, depending mainly on shifts of support between the smaller parties.

And that is where the main interest lies. Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, will probably keep its three seats despite a slight downturn, partly because their voters remain concentrated in those three constituencies, and partly because they will presumably gain some votes from the Liberal Democrats who have collapsed in Wales. The latter have gone from 20 to 6 percent, losing more than two-thirds of their 2010 votes. It is hard to see them retaining any of their three seats. But none of the small, local parties seem to have risen as a result. UKIP, however, previously dismissed as foreign or “English,” has risen from nowhere (2 percent in 2010) to become the third party in the principality. The cruel electoral logic of the “first-past-the-post” voting system will likely deprive them of a single seat — their 13 percent will be spread too widely to get them a majority in any single seat. They will win second place in many seats and threaten Labour and other parties from a strong base in 2020 — which is nice, but a bird in the hand is worth two in 2020.

That caution aside, the slow transformation of the British political landscape — from the rise of Scottish nationalism to the draining of votes from the major parties to “protest” parties that are about more than protest — continues apace. Discontent, like water, finds its own level eventually.