Plaid Cymru’s staggeringly large victory in Caerphilly is a warning to both Labour and Reform

By Matt Wall, Associate Professor, Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University
Louis Bromfield, Postdoctoral Researcher in Politics, Swansea University

If any seat has a claim to be part of Labour’s electoral heartland, it is Caerphilly. Labour’s electoral dominance there reaches all the way back to the creation of the constituency in the 1918 UK general election, when Alfred Onions became the the first of many Caerphilly Labour MPs. This pattern has heretofore been replicated in Wales’s devolved elections, where the seat has always returned a Labour member.

This gives a sense of the blow dealt to Welsh Labour in the Senned byelection held there on October 23. Plaid…

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