Calum Davies: Plaid has ruled out a deal with the Conservatives – but we should have done so first | Conservative Home

Calum Davies is a Conservative councillor in Cardiff and previously stood for the Senedd in 2021.

Plaid Cymru have ruled out a coalition with the Conservatives following the next Senedd elections. Hopefully, we’ll stop being asked about it now. It was never on the table.

Labour have run the devolved government, either alone or as the largest party in a coalition, since 1999; as such, there is often talk about the other parties teaming up to unseat them from their ministerial offices.

The closest this came was in 2007, when a rainbow coalition of Plaid, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat assembly members would team up to end Labour rule. It fell apart after the Lib Dems, who had propped up Labour for the first four years of devolution, decided not to go ahead with it.

Plaid then entered the “One Wales Coalition” as the junior party, taking their turn to keep Labour in power. They would follow this with less formal arrangements, the Compact and the Cooperation Agreement, after the 2016 and 2021 devolved elections.

In 2016, the vote for first minister was a dead-heat between Labour incumbent Carwyn Jones and then-Plaid leader Leanne Wood, after she was backed by her political antitheses, the Conservatives and UKIP.

She leveraged that to get better terms for her grubby deal, and that is how it has been since, with Plaid using the threat of an anti-Labour coalition to negotiate their own agenda into Labour’s programme for government. It’s been a successful strategy for them, less so for Wales. I wonder why journalists (like those at the BBC where Plaid’s leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, used to work) keep bringing up the coalition idea.

The decision for ap Iorwerth to, at last, rule out a deal with the Conservatives (as he has with Reform) is a blessing. It will give Conservative MSs the clarity everyone needs to stop the public pretence that the next election is anything but a foregone conclusion.

Much of the commentary about the Welsh election is about the three-way battle for first place between Labour, Plaid, and Reform. Reform have also started talking about winning a majority. However, the reality is that the new election system for the Senedd not only makes majorities near impossible, polling makes statements like Reform’s unashamedly disingenuous.

The new system – entailing an expansion of the legislature from 60 to 96 members – was concocted between separatist Plaid Cymru and the nationalist-leaning Labour faction that enjoyed superiority within the party when Mark Drakeford was running the show.

The purpose of this was to do more state-building, diverging further from the UK-wide status quo and protecting devolution from further challenge. In turn, this would entrench Labour-Plaid coalitions for the foreseeable future. With half of the Labour group standing down at this election, including Drakeford himself, it is easier to see why they have exchanged their party’s fortunes to secure themselves a legacy in keeping with their nationalist sympathies.

It was never therefore Plaid’s intention to enter an anti-Labour government, and everyone knows it. The question now is who is going to be the largest party in this coalition, Labour or Plaid. There is also the further dynamic of whether Reform come first but the Labour-Plaid coalition goes ahead, creating the perception that Reform have been cheated (even when its forming a one-party government would be arithmetically impossible).

I’ve been asked a number of times over the years in media interviews about a Conservative-Plaid coalition, and I’ve always said: “We don’t want it, and they don’t want it”.

Neither of these parties are remotely close to where they were in 2007. Back when Tony Blair was preparing to leave Downing Street, Plaid and the Conservatives were fairly close, like many other parties, occupied a congested zone on the political spectrum. It was also ten years into Labour government in Westminster and eight in Cardiff Bay.

Since, we’ve had 14 years of Conservative rule, with “austerity”, Brexit, and the culture wars alongside this. In this time, Plaid have not only used Conservative England as a bogeyman to contrast with “progressive” Wales (where support for capital punishment and Unionism is actually stronger than any other home nation) but has positioned itself as an explicitly left-wing party.

Talk of a revived partnership to take on Labour looks simply at numbers in the Senedd and ignores the chasm that has grown between the parties when it comes to values, policy, identity, and voter appeal. Since 2007, Plaid has become indistinguishable to the Green Party, while Jeremy Corbyn’s new party is only a commitment to independence away from being the same.

Given Plaid Cymru are now to the political left of Labour on cultural, societal, economic, and constitutional issues, all after radicalising their members and activists into die-hard Tory-haters, a coalition with the Conservatives would be doomed to fail. Similarly, Conservative members (although not MSs) have become more aggressive in their Unionism since the Scottish independence referendum, to the extent a majority of its members and voters in Wales want devolution abolished.

Essentially, even if the politicians could come up with some Faustian bargain to make a coalition viable in the Senedd, it would not be permitted by their memberships. Vote or no vote, the parties’ grassroots view each other as incompatible with their own political visions and would go to war with its own representatives.

I know that Conservatives in my patch of Cardiff West, South, and Penarth don’t want to work with Plaid – we want to wipe them out on a council level and win back our seats in Pentyrch, Creigiau and St Fagans, and Dinas Powys. In Cardiff Council, the separatists used their last two motions to talk about further devolution and Israel-obsessed foreign policy critiques, but nothing about local services.

I have no interest in working with nationalists who not only want to rip our country apart but are happy to sabotage it through their disastrous policies, from encouraging illegal immigration through the Nation of Sanctuary policy to anti-racist action plans that call the Welsh people inherently bigoted.

Plaid Cymru have ruled out a coalition with the Welsh Conservatives, but the truth is we should have done that first. It would have been both practical, realistic, and politically helpful for party campaigners. Conservative party members have been making such appeals for years.

With the mirage removed now, we can focus on what matters in this election. Labour’s record in power is rightfully in the firing line, but we must remember that Plaid would be much worse if they usurped them in power.