The betting money is all on Reform trouncing Labour in next year’s Senedd (Welsh Assembly) elections. But those who think that this means that Labour will lose control are very likely to be disappointed. Almost unnoticed, Labour have rigged the whole electoral system in order to stop Reform taking power in Wales.
The latest poll has Labour crashing into third place on 14% with Plaid Cymru on 30% and Reform on 29%. With the Tories facing even worse collapse than Labour, it is likely that still more of their supporters will switch to Nigel Farage in the months ahead.
On top of that, the prospect of what finally appears to be a real change will mobilise a fresh block of voters from the significant proportion who have sat on their hands in previous contests in the belief that no-one could ever beat Labour in this, their 21st century version of the 19th century’s ‘Rotten Boroughs’.
Thus, it is widely expected that future polls will have Reform creeping ahead of the Blaid (yes, cariad, I remember the mutations in Cymraeg) and then extending their lead.
Not, perhaps, to the same extent as in England; Plaid Cymru’s Welsh language strongholds and special appeal, and status as an ersatz anti-Establishment party, make it more resistant to electoral insurgency from an Anglo-centric force such as Reform. But it is highly likely that Nigel’s merry men and women will end up with at least the same level of backing as Labour secured last time around.
False Impression
That saw Labour took 36.2% of the vote and win control of the Senedd. This wasn’t surprising as Labour had at every sitting since its inception in 1997. Most punters out there are still under the impression that this would mean Labour being replaced by Reform as the party running Wales.
But they are wrong. Why? Because ‘Welsh’ Labour have seen electoral disaster coming and – quite shamelessly – gerrymandered the system to keep Reform out of office.
The mechanism for this grotesque piece of electoral fraud is the Senedd Cymru (Members and Elections) Act 2024, by far the biggest change to how the Assembly elections are fought since its creation in 1999. These changes will take effect for the election scheduled on 7th May 2026.
Various commentators have noted the fact that Labour have lowered the voting age to 16, in the belief that the majority of 16- and 17-year-olds are more likely to vote Labour than Tory. Undoubtedly true, but many of them (particularly the lads) are even more likely to vote Reform, so while this change will boost the left and the Muslim vote in the next UK general election, it is likely to have less of an impact that Labour hopes in Wales.
Far more important is the change to the actual voting system. (You may want to skip the next bit, which explains this in a bit of detail, as its distinctly boring to those of us who are not election geeks. I’m putting it in italics, so you know where it stops and my explanation of the Labour fiddle starts again)
Previously, the Senedd consisted of 60 Members of the Senedd (MSs), elected via the Additional Member System (AMS), a mixed-member proportional representation method. Under AMS:
40 MSs were elected in single-member constituencies using first-past-the-post (FPTP), where the candidate with the most votes in each area won the seat.
The remaining 20 MSs were elected from five regional lists (four per region) using proportional representation based on the D'Hondt method, to adjust for overall proportionality. Voters cast two ballots: one for their constituency candidate and one for a party or independent in their region.
The New System
For 2026, the system shifts to a fully proportional closed-list system, increasing the total number of MSs to 96. Key elements include:
Constituencies: Wales is divided into 16 new multi-member constituencies, each formed by pairing two of the 32 UK parliamentary constituencies. These were finalized in a boundary review considering factors like local ties, transport links, and geography. Each constituency will elect six MSs.
Voting Method: Voters will cast only one vote for a political party or an independent candidate, rather than for individuals. Ballot papers will list party names alongside their candidates' names in a fixed order set by the party (closed list), and voters mark an 'X' next to their choice.
Seat Allocation: Seats in each constituency are distributed proportionally using the D'Hondt formula, based on the share of votes received by each party or independent. This formula divides each party's votes by successive integers (1, 2, 3, etc.) after each seat allocation, favoring parties with higher vote totals slightly.
Other Changes: Elections will now occur every four years (reduced from five), and all candidates must reside in Wales. The reforms aim to enhance proportionality, representation, and the Senedd's capacity to scrutinize the Welsh Government.
And, needless to say, to stop Nigel Farage from standing, but that’s more a piece of childish spite than actual election fiddling.
So why did Labour wait 26 years before suddenly deciding that the electoral system wasn’t fit for purpose and needed drastic change? Because its purpose was to keep Labour in power and, thanks to the Reform surge, it’s no longer fit for that purpose!
True, now amount of tinkering can stop Labour losing control of Wales, but what has been rammed through could well be enough to stop Reform winning it. Yes, they may well be on course to take a similar proportion of the vote which Labour got last time but, under the newly rigged system, that will not translate into a majority of seats anymore.
The shift to a more proportional system Will reduce the "winner's bonus" that larger parties often received under the old AMS, where FPTP constituency wins led to over-representation relative to vote share.
In the 2021 election, for example, Welsh Labour secured 50% of seats (30 out of 60) with around 39% of the constituency vote and 36% of the regional vote, largely due to dominating FPTP races.
Denied an Outright Majority
Under the new closed-list PR with D'Hondt and six seats in each of the 16 constituencies, seat totals will more closely align with overall vote shares, making it harder for any single party—even one with the largest number of votes—to achieve an outright majority (at least 49 out of 96 seats).
Labour will be out of power, but Plaid Cymru and Labour between them will almost certainly win more seats between them than Reform. Indeed, they will probably win more seats between them than Reform and the Tories – their only possible junior coalition partners.
For a party with the largest vote share (e.g., 35-40%, based on historical Labour performance), the expected seat count would be roughly proportional: around 34-38 seats in the 96-member Senedd, assuming uniform vote distribution.
In practice, D'Hondt provides a modest advantage to larger parties within each district, but the smaller district size (six seats) introduces a higher effective threshold for smaller parties (around 8-10% per constituency to win a seat), potentially allowing the largest party to claim several seats in strongholds where they poll 40-50%.
In other words, Reform only stand a chance of actually taking control if they do some 10% better than Labour got last time around. Labour’s belief – probably correct – is that this is not going to happen.
Compared to the old system, Grok told me when I asked what this means, is that “the largest party is likely to secure a smaller proportion of seats relative to their votes but a similar or slightly higher absolute number due to the expanded Senedd size. This reduces the chances of single-party dominance and increases fragmentation”.
Keir Stalin
To simplify that: Reform have been robbed of meaningful victory a year before the contest even takes place. As Joe Stalin used to say, it’s not the people who vote who count, it’s the people who count the votes! Or decide how they take effect.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not shedding any tears for Nigel here. Not least, because when Labour played a variation of this trick against the BNP back in 2009, Mr. Farage didn’t say a word against the naked rigging of the system. (Just as, incidentally, he had nothing to say about the injustice of ‘debanking’ people for their political believes when the BNP, and I personally, was debanked back in 2000 – more than twenty years before Nigel and Co.
But to return to Labour’s penchant for changing the electoral system to rob the electorate of the chance to replace them with people perceived as really different, let’s look for a moment at what they did – without a word of complaint from Farage or UKIP – in Stoke in 2009.
Back in 2002, before the BNP became a threat in this betrayed and de-industrialised former Labour stronghold, the Blairites decided to use it to showcase their scheme for elected mayors in major cities.
By 2005, however, this was causing them problems; indeed, it gave Labour one of the biggest frights in the whole of the BNP’s decade-long electoral insurgency. In this contest, their Mohammed Pervez won with 48.3% of first-preference votes.
Thanks to various sub-fiddles (particularly sending the postal ballot papers out several days before the booklet containing the mini-manifestos of all the candidates landed on voters’ doormats) the British National Party candidate, Steven Batkin finished third with 17.3% of first-preference votes, just behind the Conservative candidate, who took second place with 18.1%.
When the booklet did arrive through the Freepost system, the phone line we advertised in it rang almost non-stop for several days with people saying they had voted before they even knew the BNP were standing, and asking if there was any way to change their votes now they did.
Uncounted BNP Vote Mountain
The raw figures conceal the reality of the contest. Under the system being used, voters also cast a second-preference vote, but these were only counted and added to the total of first-preference votes for the candidates who came first and second. Since the BNP were pushed by several frauds into third place, our second-preference votes were never counted.
This saved Labour from a sensational drubbing, because large numbers of Labour voters had given their second vote to the BNP, and huge numbers of Tories had given their second vote to the BNP. With the result that the BNP would have won the contest, had those votes been counted.
This wasn’t just our assessment. A group of our campaigners were leaving the count in the ornate town hall when they overheard one of Labour’s team saying to a colleague that “the untold story of the night is the huge fascist second-preference vote”.
By 2008, with just a year before the seat was due for re-election, Labour was in even deeper trouble in Stoke. The BNP won 8 out of 20 council seats up for election in June that year, a stunning advance on top of the single seat we had won before.
With the Tories reduced to just 6 seats, it was very clear that the BNP was in pole position to take the mayoral post the following year – which would have been our first position of real power in the country.
So what did Labour do? They suddenly discovered that the incompetence and corruption which had characterised their years in power had so disillusioned the public that the post just had to be abolished.
To give this blatant fiddling a fig-leaf of ‘democracy’ they hastily called a ‘referendum, in which a compliant local press constantly rubbished the position as full of failure and fraud. The referendum took place in October and a mass of publicity about the cost and failure under the two successive (Labour) mayors led to the post being abolished.
Just for good measure in Stoke, Labour also redrew the ward boundaries, absolutely classic gerrymandering of the kind the left howled about and claimed justified IRA terrorism when the victims were Catholics in Northern Ireland. By doing so, and by dint of other dirty tricks, they managed to take four of the BNP’s seats back in the next council elections, in 2011.
Dense Skulls Screaming
When it finally sinks into the rather dense skulls of Nigel’s current crop of political advisors that Labour fraud has robbed them in Wales, they will of course scream blue murder.
A Guardian cartoonist also notices the uncanny resemblance……
With justification, but not from any moral high ground, because when the BNP were the victims of precisely the same trick, Mr. Farage like the Cheshire Cat, said nothing, but grinned. Only he didn’t fade away, because the BBC was busy promoting him under their indecent sweet-heart deal to keep out the BNP by offering voters a safety valve option instead.
Likewise, Nigel didn’t utter a word of complaint when I and my fellow British National Party MEP, Andrew Brons, were attacked by an Antifa mob hurling, not milkshakes, but bricks, bottles and darts on College Green, Westminster, in 2009.
If you ignore Pastor Niemuller, it often comes back to bite you like this, as the civic right are now finding with leftist political violence. “First they came for the fash, but I wasn’t fash, so I said nothing…. And then they came for me…..”
Watch the video: youtube.com/watch?v=IMg6Ln
