Has Wales given up on Corbyn? Credit: GEOFF CADDICK/AFP/Getty Images
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You wouldn’t know it from the boos that greeted new prime minister Boris Johnson as he arrived in Cardiff Bay earlier this week, but the Conservatives are now the most popular electoral force in Wales.
While Brecon and Radnorshire voters are today expected to hand a victory to the Liberal Democrats, the governing party will most likely only lose because of the strong showing of the Brexit Party, with Labour way behind in fourth. Across the country the Tories sit on 24%, two points ahead of Labour, with Nigel Farage’s outfit following close behind in third. This means that in one of the EU’s most deprived regions – and historically Britain’s socialist heartland – more than four in ten voters opt for Right-wing parties.
We are accustomed to hearing that politicians are out of touch with public opinion, but then activists often are too, which accounts for the stark contrast between those who turned out to jeer the new PM and public opinion in Wales more generally.
It’s true that many still harbour a great deal of resentment towards the Conservative Party. Some areas of South Wales have never recovered from the crash-deindustrialisation programme enacted by the Thatcher government, and the unemployment rate remains one of the highest in Britain. According to NHS data collected in 2013, one in six residents of Blaenau Gwent was collecting a prescription for antidepressants. Life expectancy in the region is among the lowest in England and Wales.
I spent time in South Wales in 2016 conducting research for my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. I spoke with hundreds of people in the region and the anger was palpable. Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t particularly popular in the pubs and social clubs I visited, but nor were the New Labour politicians who had moved the party into the centre ground. As a former Blaenavon collier called Ron phrased it, establishment politicians in Westminster were the “shiny men” who “turned up once every five years and then you don’t see them again”.
The residual anger felt by many in Britain’s former mining areas is often dismissed by outsiders as nostalgia, yet few of the people I spent time with wanted to go back underground and dig coal in the pits. They just missed the sense of community, fraternity and solidarity engendered by the shuttered industries.
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