Calum Davies is a Conservative councillor in Cardiff and former Senedd candidate.
They can’t say they were not warned. If you enable separatists, it will always be at your expense. This is the message I tried in vain to get across to Unionists for years. Will they now heed those words?
As readers already know, Plaid Cymru emerged victorious in the Senedd election, forming a minority government. Reform came a convincing second with the Conservatives and Labour reduced to single-digit seat totals. The new top two ruthlessly pursued a squeeze message about keeping the other out of power and kicking out a discredited Labour Party, just as they did during last year’s Caerphilly by-election. This turned the traditional parties into minor players in this election, ironic given the new proportional system.
Winning just 11 per cent of the vote and returning only seven MSs was an avoidable result for the Welsh Conservatives. Three of our MSs came within less than 1,000 votes of re-election. A strong turnout message could have gotten them and others over the line.
I have long advocated for the abolition of the Senedd as this would be a fruitful position for the Party in Wales to take. Not only does polling show a majority of Conservative voters in Wales want the same, but so does Reform’s. This would have had the twin benefit of stemming the flow of candidates, members, and voters from the former to the latter, but also created an avenue for it to go the other way.
I do not claim it would have led to a Conservative victory in this election. The aftershocks of the general election are still being felt and the fundamental disadvantages the Conservatives face in Wales still apply. However, we will have been able to give a distinct and motivating reason for people to vote Conservative, providing a strong base for further elections in pursuit of abolition.
Instead, Reform basically copied our recent manifestos, flirted with further devolution, supported Senedd expansion, and somehow claimed to be a new, anti-establishment party, dwarfing us. We could have been the insurgents. Turnout finally (just about) breached 50 per cent thanks to Reform’s image as an anti-system party. It could have been more if we gave all those I met – and didn’t meet – who said they were boycotting the election as they were anti-devolution a reason to vote.
When wipeout was a real possibility, all we could conjure was pedestrian Toryism. Even our commitment to scrap stamp duty was only included because we said we’d do it in England. Kemi Badenoch was brought up organically on the doorsteps quite often, almost always positively, but even her purple patch cannot overcome the Party’s long hangover, especially in a second-order election.
That was actually one of the more frustrating aspects of the campaign. Welsh Labour’s record has been terrible for a long time, but it’s not much different than it was in 2021. The change only came because of the appalling Starmer government. Wales itself was treating the election of the Senedd as voters in England often treat local elections – as a referendum on Westminster. Much of the campaign was not about Wales’ problems and the solutions. This was not surprising as it’s one of the reasons I want to scrap devolution, but it signals something else too.
Plaid has a mandate to lead the Welsh Government but not much else. It purposefully avoided the topic of independence throughout the election and followed the ming vase strategy Starmer pursued in 2024. It is hard to argue Plaid won this election as opposed to Labour losing it.
Yet we can be certain Plaid will do what Welsh Labour did for so long: blame Westminster for all our ills, never acknowledge the positives of the Union, and make grievance the main order of the day, whether that is about a lack of funding or being denied the devolution of more powers. It will be the same old story but worse. I have
written previously about how Labour’s separatist agenda paved the road for Plaid’s success and their own destruction, but it fits well for the new Welsh Government whose hollow argument cannot be undermined by colleagues in London. Three million people in Wales will still suffer as the failed devolution experiment continues.
We’ve seen another example of this false change relating to the Welsh Conservatives. Despite being advised by staff, members, and colleagues against it, our Senedd group leader kept flirting with the prospect of working with Plaid to oust Labour. This was embarrassing as Plaid said they didn’t want to work with us, unwise as our grassroots find the far-left separatist party worse than Labour, and naïve as one of the devocratic elite’s favourite pastimes is playing compliant Conservatives for fools.
Labour and Plaid have a record of using the Welsh Conservatives to serve their own interests, casting us aside back once they’ve done their job. We saw that when Leanne Wood used our votes to make her First Minister in 2016 to give Carwyn Jones a scare before making a deal with him, out of which we secured nothing. This is just one example of us being used as leverage.
We saw it again when all those eyelashes we batted at Plaid did not produce a Conservative Presiding Officer (PO) last week. As ever, we are locked out of the institutions and roles of power because that is where the devo-elite want to keep us. Our MSs called it a stich-up, but what did we expect? They literally did the same to us five years ago. They do not like us. It is time we got the message. Reform risk falling into the same traps having supported the Labour PO nominee. I tell those I know in Reform they’ll end up as Welsh Conservatives 2.0 if they carry on like that.
We are not just repeating the mistakes of our past but those of others too. In 2007, Scottish Conservatives enabled the SNP minority government in Holyrood. The result: an independence referendum in 2014 and continued nationalist dominance of Scottish politics.
For some, this epiphany came long ago, but our Party must now treat this as an opportunity to realise what is necessary. It is vital that centre-right and all Unionist parties form a cordon sanitaire around the separatists. I see the Scottish Conservative leader has pledged this already. Former Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies has also acknowledged working with Plaid would be a mistake.
The nationalists want to break up the country. Plaid and the SNP openly speak of a “Celtic Alliance” to “reform the UK”. Read this as “Separatist plan to use the levers of power to destroy the British nation-state”. I know some Labour figures that agree with me and I hope their resurrection strategy involves a recognition that they must reassert their Unionism.
There are multiple reasons for the collapse of our base, but what are we doing to reverse this? After the result, we cannot continue as if it is business as usual. There has been no attempt to take responsibility for the result from the Welsh leadership. The only email in Darren Millar’s name from CCHQ since polling day was to complain we did not get that PO role. We need more communication so know what we are for now.
The scale of the loss is significant. We only have any presence in the Senedd at all because of its enlargement and more proportional electoral system. The Conservatives (and Labour) did not just fail to come first in any constituency; we did not come second anywhere either.
During this election, a poll showed most people in Wales either do not care or are hostile to devolution. If the Welsh Conservatives, cannot be a voice for them, then it is a voice for no-one. And the votes in 2030 will be tallied accordingly.