The Challenge for… Plaid Cymru

This is the second in a series looking at the challenges and opportunities for the 7 main Great Britain parties. This time we will look at Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalists.
Plaid have received a very consistent share of the vote (apart from the very first Senedd election). In UK General Elections, they do slightly better in years when the Tories are doing badly.

Geography
I would recommend Tim Marshall’s Power of Geography books. These show how geography has impacted countries’ borders but also their historical development (for example, Russia’s rationale for the Ukraine War can be at least partly explained by the fact that Western Russia is a vast plain with no natural defences until you reach the Urals.)
A topographic map of Wales shows Plaid’s problem. Wales, for the most part, is covered by mountains. There is a northern coastal plain and a southern coastal plain. The industrial valleys all link to the southern plain. The 3 largest cities in Wales were all originally ports on the southern coastal plain.

Topographic map of Wales – Source: Topographic-map.com
The issue for Plaid is that the mountainous geography makes it harder to unify Wales. The northern plain naturally links to Chester and then Liverpool, while the southern plain links to Bristol and then towards London. If you want to travel from Cardiff to Wrexham (whether by road or rail) then your best route is via Hereford and Shrewsbury in England.

Cardiff to Wrexham by rail – Source: Google Maps
These transport links are a big barrier to independence. A hard border between England and Wales would completely cripple the Welsh economy.
By contrast, the geography is more favourable for the SNP as there is a low population area between the Central Belt and the major English northern cities (The Borders, Cumbria, Northumberland)
Language
Plaid Cymru means Party of Wales, but I would argue their name should be Plaid Siaradwyr Cymraeg – Party of Welsh Speakers. Plaid win wide support amongst Welsh speakers but do much worse amongst English speakers. For example, in 2024, Plaid got 54% of the vote in Dwyfor Meirionnydd in their Welsh-speaking heartland, but only 2.5% in Monmouthshire on the English border.
Today, only 1 in 5 people in Wales speak Welsh and these are clustered in the parts of the country furthest away from England.
It’s worth a little historical detour here.
Once upon a time, Wales was entirely Welsh speaking, but this declined in the 1800s and 1900s for several reasons.
One of these is the Welsh Knot or Not. This was a token given to any pupil who was caught speaking Welsh and passed from child to child. The child who had it at the end of the day would be beaten or otherwise punished.
However, this wasn’t the only reason. In my family, my great-grandparents were both Welsh speakers but they made a conscious choice to bring up my grandmother and her sister as English speakers as they saw English as giving them greater opportunities.
A final lesser known reason is that many people were never Welsh speakers to start with. The growth of the Valleys during the Industrial Revolution meant that huge amounts of extra labour was required. The population of Blaenau Gwent went from around 500 people in 1779 to 120,000 in 1921. While workers came from rural Wales, many also moved from areas of England, such as North East Somerset and the Midlands.
While the decline in Welsh speaking has levelled out, it is still unlikely to see a revival to become the dominant language again. It is now taught in English language schools, but most English speakers will never need to use it. It is not just competing against a bigger neighbouring language but against the World’s Lingua Franca.
Returning to Plaid, it is interesting that they tried Leanne Wood, an English speaker, as leader. As far as I can see Wood, did no better or worse than other Plaid leaders, but she was ousted after 6 years in 2018. All the subsequent leaders have been Welsh speakers.
The economy and education
When we talk about the Barnett formula, it tends to be in the context of Scotland, but it also applies to Wales and Northern Ireland. Wales gets around an extra £1,000 per year per person in public spending and has the second lowest GDP per capita after North East England (In 2023, it was about £27,000 per capita vs. a UK average of £37,000 per capita).
For Wales to thrive again, the key question is how to reinvigorate the Valleys and former industrial areas. The coal mines went in the 80s and 90s and while there are a few factories, there has been nothing on the same scale. Again geographic isolation is a factor – the former coalfields of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire are closer to the key economic hubs and some former pit villages have become commuter hubs. In Wales, Cardiff has the highest level of prosperity, but it is not large enough to pull up the rest of the country.
One of the interesting things about Plaid is that their voters often live in rural communities and yet at General Election debates they often pitch themselves to the left of Labour. It too often feels that the economic debate in Wales focuses on redistribution and taxing the rich (e.g. the tourism tax), when they need to be thinking about how to grow the economy of Wales and close the gap with England. It certainly doesn’t help that Wales has the worst PISA educational scores of the 4 home nations by a long way.
The voting system
For the 2026 election, Wales will have a new voting system, which is a rare example of political turkeys voting for Christmas.
The old system was a mix of 40 constituency seats and 20 regional top up seats. This benefited Labour in 2 ways:
- There weren’t enough top up seats to make the result proportional to the region votes cast.
- The top up seats were split across 5 regions of 4 seats each. This meant that even though at a national level Labour weren’t entitled to any top up seats, they could still win top up seats in their weakest regions, e.g. Mid and West Wales.
Overall, this meant that in 2021, Labour won 50% of the seats on 36% of the list vote.
The new voting system will be PR. The 32 Westminster constituencies will be paired into 16 Senedd constituencies, which will each elect 6 Senedd members.
This means some sort of coalition will be required, but Labour are no longer assured to be the largest party. In fact, in recent polls, Plaid and Reform but have a shot at being the largest party.
The question is whether this translates to real change. The fact that Reform and Conservatives are unlikely to ever work with Plaid or the Greens means that some sort of coalition involving Labour is still most likely.
Plaid may have the chance to lead the Welsh Government for the first time, but Welsh independence still looks a long way away.
Next time – Reform UK
Gareth of the Vale