jamie
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Post by jamie on Sept 28, 2019 16:54:59 GMT
Imagine Plaid Cymru ceased to be (or never even was) a significant electoral force in Wales. Where would their voters go? Who would win in places like Carmarthen East and Dinefwr? Would the Plaid vote break in a way to allow a different party to win in some Lab-Con marginals?
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Post by gwynthegriff on Sept 28, 2019 17:10:07 GMT
Imagine Plaid Cymru ceased to be (or never even was) a significant electoral force in Wales. Where would their voters go? Who would win in places like Carmarthen East and Dinefwr? Would the Plaid vote break in a way to allow a different party to win in some Lab-Con marginals? If it ceased to be, something very similar would replace it. If it had never been Lib Dems would take Ceredigion and (probably) Labour elsewhere. |
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Harry Hayfield
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Post by Harry Hayfield on Sept 29, 2019 8:26:12 GMT
Imagine Plaid Cymru ceased to be (or never even was) a significant electoral force in Wales. Where would their voters go? Who would win in places like Carmarthen East and Dinefwr? Would the Plaid vote break in a way to allow a different party to win in some Lab-Con marginals? Plaid Cymru contested their first election in the Caernarfon County constituency in 1929. Comparing the change between 1924 and 1929, the Conservative vote (from a standing start) was 12%, Labour fell from 49% to 39%, the Liberals fell from 51% to 48% and Plaid (from a standing start) polled 2%. Generally speaking, in the modern era, I believe that most Plaid support comes from Labour (as seen in 1999 and at the last election) therefore would help Labour in their marginals. |
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Post by johnloony on Oct 1, 2019 0:30:38 GMT
If PC had never existed, their constituencies would be safe Lib Dem or LD/Labour marginals.
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Post by polaris on Oct 1, 2019 10:05:13 GMT
Imagine Plaid Cymru ceased to be (or never even was) a significant electoral force in Wales. Where would their voters go? Who would win in places like Carmarthen East and Dinefwr? Would the Plaid vote break in a way to allow a different party to win in some Lab-Con marginals? I imagine that, in the absence of Plaid Cymru, many of their supporters would have voted for the Liberals / Alliance / LibDems over the years, given the ancestral Liberalism of Welsh-speaking areas in the North and West, and the longstanding Liberal support for devolution (or 'home rule' as it was once known). |
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The Bishop
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Post by The Bishop on Oct 1, 2019 10:20:46 GMT
Welsh Labour was pro home rule in its early days, as were a number of Liberals. So that can't be assumed. |
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Post by polaris on Oct 1, 2019 10:29:49 GMT
Welsh Labour was pro home rule in its early days, as were a number of Liberals. So that can't be assumed. But it was the rise of Plaid Cymru in the late 1960s and early 1970s that put some impetus behind the campaign for a Welsh Assembly. Welsh Labour may have been keen on an Assembly, but the party in the rest of the UK wasn't interested in the idea until the 70s. Plus there was traditionally a large element of Welsh Labour - particularly in South Wales - which was deeply hostile to devolution, hence the overwhelming defeat of the 1979 referendum and the knife-edge result in September 1997. |
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The Bishop
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Post by The Bishop on Oct 1, 2019 10:34:03 GMT
I was going back some way before that, to the first part of the C20.
One of the interesting things about both Welsh and Scottish Labour is how original pro-devolution sentiments faded and they became strongly unionist parties post-1945.
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Post by greenhert on Oct 1, 2019 10:43:31 GMT
If PC had never existed, their constituencies would be safe Lib Dem or LD/Labour marginals. For comparison, see how heavily the Liberal vote in Scotland was squeezed by the SNP in the seats they captured in February/October 1974, or came within 5% of capture (Ross & Cromarty, for example). |
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Sibboleth
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Post by Sibboleth on Oct 4, 2019 21:47:48 GMT
But it was the rise of Plaid Cymru in the late 1960s and early 1970s that put some impetus behind the campaign for a Welsh Assembly. Bit more complicated than that...  The woman is Megan Lloyd George, the man handing her the bundle of papers (the petition for a Parliament for Wales) is Goronwy Roberts. Neither were exactly Plaid adjacent. What is true is that the perception of a severe electoral threat from Plaid (based on a misinterpretation of a run of poor by-election performances in the late 1960s) made the idea more attractive to the Wilson leadership, although given the scale of the rout at the 1979 referendum we can say that all that happened before the Thatcher government was not of great importance. It's more that the wider party wasn't terribly keen because the bulk of the party in South Wales was overtly hostile, including influential figures like Nye Bevan, George Thomas and Ness Edwards. Administrative devolution and the creation of the Secretary of State for Wales were not minor changes, though. |
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Sibboleth
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Post by Sibboleth on Oct 4, 2019 22:00:40 GMT
I was going back some way before that, to the first part of the C20. One of the interesting things about both Welsh and Scottish Labour is how original pro-devolution sentiments faded and they became strongly unionist parties post-1945. Unionist is not a word that has any real meaning in a Welsh context. Labour activists in Wales were often broadly in favour of some kind of political devolution before 1914 because they all came from Liberal backgrounds, and a certain mild form of Welsh Nationalism was a very important part of the Liberal brand in Wales. After 1918 things were different; the Labour Party in South Wales became the political expression of the South Wales Miners Federation, and the Fed by this point was dominated by Syndicalists and also had a strong Marxist element. 'Wales' was not seen as a particularly important political issue when weighed against the international solidarity of the working man. An alien concept now, the sort of thing that only exists as slogans and humbug, but they really believed it, and made political choices based off that belief. Bevan's sarcastic remark in the Commons on the first Welsh Day (he was opposed) about whether sheep in Wales were really so very different to those in England stemmed from that. |
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Sibboleth
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Post by Sibboleth on Oct 4, 2019 22:07:09 GMT
Anyway, if Plaid had never managed to get off the ground, then the political energies associated with Welsh Nationalism would presumably have remained in their traditional home: the Liberal Party. The question then would be what would have happened after the radicalising events of the 1950s and 60s: would the Liberal Party in Wales have been taken over by more radical nationalists, and if so what then? What sort of tensions might there have been with the national party? Probably pretty severe. So you might have ended up with a split and with some form of 'Plaid Cymru' anyway.
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