Wales and the 2019 Election
| Author | Roger Awan Scully |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905820911742 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
20POLITICAL INSIGHT•MARCH 2020
Electoral politics in Wales has long been
known for its predictability. Prior to
the 2019 General Election, the Labour
party had come rst in both votes
and seats in the previous 26 such contests
stretching back to 1922. The last person to
defeat Labour in Wales at a general election
was David Lloyd George – and he had just
won a world war! Labour have been similarly
hegemonic at other levels, dominating some
local authorities for decades, and winning every
single Welsh Assembly election thus far.
In one sense, the 2019 General Election
brought more of the same. Labour won again,
once more garnering the most votes and a
majority of Welsh MPs. But ‘victory’ has rarely
meant so little. Even in its ultimate Welsh
heartland, Labour saw a large fall in its vote
share, and suered signicant seat losses.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives made an historic
advance. And the general election has raised
questions about whether Labour’s long-
standing dominance of politics in Wales can be
sustained for much longer.
A very different election
The 2019 General Election looked and felt very
dierent to 2017. Doorstep campaigning, in
an autumn/winter election, was much more
limited than two years previously. But the
approach of the main parties had also changed.
This was particularly the case with Labour. In
2017, facing a Britain-wide context that initially
looked very dicult for the party, Welsh Labour
ran a campaign that did everything possible
to emphasise a Welsh branding and identity
and their distinctiveness from the party in
London. This campaign was energetically led
Wales and the
2019 Election
Roger Awan Scully reports on a general election that saw Labour’s
long-held dominance of Welsh politics called into severe question.
by the Welsh Labour leader, then First Minister
Carwyn Jones. But by 2019 Jones had stood
down, and been replaced by Mark Drakeford:
a man widely regarded for his policy expertise,
but also someone who has seemed distinctly
unenthusiastic about the ‘retail’ side of politics.
As an early supporter of Jeremy Corbyn,
Drakeford was also less determined for Welsh
Labour to present distinct policy positions. Thus,
Labour’s Welsh campaign in 2019 was much
more closely tied to the messaging and tone
coming from London – and thus shared all the
aws of that campaign.
As in 2017, the Welsh Conservative campaign
closely tied into the branding of the Britain-
wide campaign. The dierence was that in
2019 it worked. Rather than the asco of the
malfunctioning May-bot, now the campaign
focused around a relentless pledge to ‘Get
Brexit Done’. The greater the focus on this for
the Welsh Tories the better, given that the rst
ocial day of the election campaign saw the
Welsh Secretary, Alun Cairns, have to resign over
allegations relating to the collapse of a rape trial.
As with Labour, the Conservatives’ campaign
lacked much obvious Welsh leadership. But
provided the Britain-wide picture stayed
positive for the party, and in the absence of a
vigorous Welsh Labour counter-thrust, local
diculties did the Welsh Tories little harm.
The other parties struggled to achieve
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