Plaid Cymru can offer a positive vision for Wales for voters who want to reject the divisiveness of Reform UK, the party’s leader has said after a triumphant Welsh parliamentary byelection.
Rhun ap Iorwerth said the 47% win for his party in the Caerphilly byelection was a rejection of Reform and its focus on immigration, which, while important, did not overshadow more pressing issues, such as healthcare and housing.
Speaking to the Guardian on Friday outside Caerphilly Castle, ap Iorwerth said the win for his party’s candidate, Lindsay Whittle, also underlined a crash in support for Labour, which had “abandoned its values”.
He said he accepted tactical voting was in play, but that it was only part of the picture, with some lifelong Labour supporters making a permanent shift in support.
“The scale of the results shows the positive engagement with our vision,” he said.
People were “looking for a positive alternative in politics,” he added. “They are after ideas. They are after somebody who who can show that they really care for our communities and for our nation. And I think that is something that bodes well for the next six months.”
Setting his sights on the full Senedd elections next May, ap Iorwerth said: “We have to build that trust across the whole of Wales in the way that we have with the people of Caerphilly.”
Ap Iorwerth said he agreed candidates and parties across the UK would be looking to the Caerphilly byelection as a lesson in how to stave off the threat from Reform, which is polling strongly.
“People will be looking to the fact that we have been able to keep that populist right at bay, and to do it in such a strong way,” he said.
“I’d say there are a number of elements to that, but part of the story around the growth of the populist right has been the story of immigration.
“But it’s not only that. It is people looking for answers because they are desperately feeling that governments have let them down. Well, how about actually showing that governments can address the problems that they face?”
Ap Iorwerth cited his party’s childcare proposals, worth more than £30,000 in childcare costs in the first four years of a child’s life, as an example of policy that showed it had a “radical understanding that our communities feel left behind”.
He continued: “On the question of immigration, it’s a willingness to actually engage with it for what it is, reject the divisiveness that Reform want to use that issue for, and then recognise there are issues that need to be resolved around the way migration is processed and so on. But actually say, no, that is not at the core of what our communities face as problems; it’s on health, on housing.”
Pinning problems on immigration was a “blame game” Reform would “always want to play”, he said, adding that Labour had been “willing to play along”.
Labour returned 11% of the vote, a plunge of 35 percentage points in vote share and an embarrassment for a party that has governed the Senedd since devolution in 1998.
“Keir Starmer has behaved in ways that make progressive voters and lifelong Labour voters in places like Caerphilly feel that the core values of Labour have been set to one side in pursuit of something else that they don’t recognise,” ap Iorwerth said.
Commentators have already argued that Plaid’s landslide was driven by tactical votes to keep out Reform.
“Of course, there was some elements of Labour members voting Plaid Cymru to keep out Reform. And of course, that’s a straight tactical vote.
“But when it was people who were saying: ‘I’ve been Labour all my life but we’re with you now’, it didn’t feel temporary, and it didn’t feel in any way begrudging. They were coming to us because they believed us and now we have to repay the trust they put in.”
