PORT TALBOT, WALES — Julian Thomas has lost his job in the steel industry twice now.
The first time, he moved home to south Wales. He lasted 22 more years, driving trains loaded with freshly-coiled metal at the Port Talbot steelworks. But in November, he was made redundant again.
Thomas, 56, is a grandad. He thought he would work in Port Talbot until he retired; now he is seeking retraining. In his view, he was let down by decades of Britain outsourcing its dirty industries to the east — and by a Labour government that broke its word.
“I genuinely believed they would help to keep this works open,” he told POLITICO, browsing a jobs fair on the mezzanine level of Port Talbot’s 1970s shopping mall. Thomas voted Labour in the 2024 general election on its vow to secure the industry’s future. Three months later, the blast furnaces shut down. He will not vote Labour next year.
“I can’t vote for people I think are doing nothing for you,” he said. He is considering backing either an independent or Reform UK, the upstart party led by veteran right-winger Nigel Farage.
Never mind that Port Talbot plans a greener furnace to melt scrap metal from 2028; that an £80 million government support fund is helping staff and businesses; that a £2.5 billion “plan for steel” is in the works; or that Labour insists its deal was better than one it inherited, late in the day, from its Tory predecessors.
For many workers, these points are less salient than the 2,500 jobs lost in the short term — never mind the contractors, shops and cafes that depend on them across town.
Labour has held this seat for 103 years, as long as it has been Wales’ largest party. But polls predict a seismic upset in next year’s elections to the Welsh parliament, the Senedd — a test bed for the U.K.’s next general election in 2029.
Some of those caught in deindustrialization are eyeing Reform, with its anti-net zero and anti-immigration credentials — even if, like Thomas, they aren’t yet convinced Farage is the answer.
POLITICO spoke to around two dozen Labour and Reform officials and politicians across Welsh politics, in both Westminster and the Senedd. Such is the anxiety that many asked for anonymity to discuss party matters. But the overall impression was clear: a right-wing party in breezy ascendancy — and a center-left ruling party riven over what to do about it.
Welcome to Steel Town
Two blast furnaces still dominate the coastal skyline of Port Talbot. You see them from Station Road; from Cafe Remo’s on the beach; from the M4 motorway; and over rooftops from the hills that rise steeply above town. The white plumes and occasional smell of rotten eggs are gone, but they remain as symbols of a Britain slipping away.
The plant is run by Indian firm Tata, while British Steel is Chinese-owned. Labour insists it is helping an industry that is already changing to move with the times. As the U.K.’s single-biggest carbon dioxide emitter, Port Talbot, without change, was a hurdle in reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
Thomas is more skeptical. He points to U.S. President Donald Trump, who boasts of putting America first and threatens tariffs on steel imports. “He’s looking after his own interests. China are. We were just piggy in the middle,” he said.
Jordan Griffiths put it more simply: “If we went to war, we couldn’t produce our own steel.”
Griffiths, 24, was a welder fabricator contractor in Port Talbot for four years. His dad, brother and cousins all worked there too. He now hopes to find work at the Hinkley Point nuclear power station — but it’s a 100-mile drive away on a speed-restricted motorway (Wales’ Labour government scrapped a planned relief road due to environmental concerns). It would mean leaving his two young children behind for half the week.
“I would have to make that sacrifice to make sure me and my family are financially steady,” Griffiths said. Last year was his first general election; he voted Reform. He has friends who are on the housing waiting list, while “people coming over get accommodated in five-star hotels.” He has half a mind to leave the country.
Some younger workers are heading to Australia; others have less choice.
Many will end up in “lower-paid, less secure, less dignified” work, said one Welsh Labour strategist. “It’s professional men in their 20s and 30s who feel like they’re having their dignity stripped away.” A vast Amazon “fulfilment center” is a 20-minute drive away.
Almost 2,000 people have visited a bright, cheerful drop-in careers shop run by the Community union. In one period of less than two weeks, it received 24 calls about suicide.
Thatcher without the Thatcher
South Wales has been here before, when coal mines shut under 1980s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Her legacy ensured generations here would never vote Conservative.
Reform UK is different.
Of the dozen current or departed workers in Port Talbot who spoke to POLITICO, only three said they were likely to vote Labour next time. Five said they would either vote Reform or were considering it. Two were considering Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru — who challenge Labour from the left — and two said they might not vote at all.
“There is an anti-Tory sentiment in these seats, which protects Labour from the Tories,” said one Labour figure in Westminster. “Reform is a different package altogether — it’s something new, it’s not tainted by Thatcherism.” Farage is a lover of Thatcher who backed a statue of her in London’s Trafalgar Square, “but for whatever reason, people choose not to see that.”
Mark Turner, 60, was in the steel industry for 30 years. The Unite union official, a self-described “Corbynite” left-winger who will back Labour, says his old colleagues are “definitely turning to Reform because Reform is basically saying what they think.” He added: “Labour gained power, and literally within days their stance [on Port Talbot] completely changed.”
Nigel Parsons, 51, was made redundant Dec. 30. He’s lucky — his mortgage is paid off — but his next job will pay less. He believes a £500 million government deal for Port Talbot’s future should have had more strings attached. “I always used to vote Labour,” he said. “My mother and father voted Labour, and I did. But I’ll tell you honestly, I voted Reform last time and I will continue to vote Reform until he [Farage] comes in.”
Alan Walters, 58, who moved to the steelworks from digging up roads on night shifts, will stick with Labour. His last day is March 31, but he hopes to return when the new electric arc furnace is built. Other workers don’t trust that it will arrive.
One outgoing steelworker, 29, said “you can’t fault the government” for global factors. Others say the same. Yet he is currently backing Reform: “It’s to give [Labour] something to think about.”
‘All they’ve done is shaft us’
Port Talbot is not unlike the American “rust belt” towns that embraced Farage’s ally, Donald Trump.
“They like heavy industry, and they like big plates of food,” as one Welsh union official put it. There is no railway line or electrical grid link between north and south Wales. Skepticism of the establishment runs hot: The county of Neath Port Talbot voted 57 percent for Brexit in 2016. One steelworker said of politicians: “All they have done is shaft us.”
Turner said: “Reform is a bit like Brexit — a case of ‘I don’t like what’s going on, it’s not working for me … so I may as well vote for something different.’”
On a sunny Tuesday, Port Talbot doesn’t yet look like a left-behind town. The shopping center has a decent footfall and there are fewer shuttered shops than in Llanelli, a 40-minute drive away. But residents fear far worse if the transition stutters. Muhammad Usama, 25, tending a mobile phone stall, says it’s already quieter than a year ago. A tire shop down the road has had to lay off five workers because of the drop in trade. Leanne Kehoe, 43, is at the jobs fair after her weekly hours at a hotel were cut from 30 to 12.
Local Labour MP Stephen Kinnock won a thumping 10,354-vote majority last July but on a turnout of less than 50 percent; Reform came second. Not for nothing did Farage say last week he wanted to “reindustrialize Britain.”
Labour ‘voting itself out of power’
Whatever the cause, few doubt Reform is surging in Wales — and not just in the old southern coalfield, which is only one part of the national fabric.
Farage’s party came second in 13 of Wales’ 32 seats in 2024, and will be boosted by a more proportional voting system for the Senedd elections in May 2026. Sixteen mega-seats will have six members each, elected on party lists via the proportional D’Hondt method.
This will hand an advantage to Reform, whose support is spread more evenly than that of rival parties. Polls predict a three-way fight among Labour, Reform and Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru to be the largest party in the Senedd, with the Conservatives in fourth.
Defenders of Wales’ former First Minister Mark Drakeford, who brought the system in, note that Reform would have done well anyway because the old system was semi-proportional.
But Labour officials at the highest levels in London have been raising their eyebrows. “It’s a chaotic system, absolutely mad,” added the Welsh Labour strategist quoted above.
Labour politicians expect Reform to win at least one Senedd member (MS), if not two, in almost all of the 16 seats. A second Labour figure in Westminster predicted Labour could end up with fewer seats than its 30 now — even though the total up for grabs is rising from 60 to 96.
A third Labour figure in Westminster said: “The whole system is nonsense. We’ve got to be the only party ever who has created a system that could vote itself out of power.”
Farage’s upstarts have just two staff
Reform is not ready — yet. It has no Welsh HQ, and only two permanent staff in Wales (increasing to three shortly).
For now it is relying on the U.K. party’s heavy online presence, influx of wealthy donors and its charismatic leader.
Party officials expect Farage to be front and center of the Welsh campaign, and are mulling whether he should apply to front any head-to-head TV election debate, despite not being a Senedd candidate. One Reform strategist said: “He’s definitely going to lead our campaign — he’s the most popular politician in Wales.”
Reform is recruiting more staff, discussing plans for an office in the Welsh capital Cardiff, and sent out application forms for Senedd candidates on Feb. 17. The party plans a conference at a convention center in Newport, south Wales, on May 11.
It will be a chance for Labour to try out its tactics — a “laboratory for how to fight Reform at the general election,” as a fourth Labour figure in Westminster put it. But Farage will get to test his message too. The Reform strategist quoted above said: “If you want change, there’s only one party that can beat Labour at this election.”
Reform won a by-election for a council seat in Torfaen, a south Wales Labour heartland, earlier this month. The numbers were tiny — Reform had 457 votes to Labour’s 259 — but the result set off alarm bells within Labour.
“We probably knew we had this in the bag within the first week of knocking doors,” said Torfaen councillor Dave Thomas, 47, an independent who defected to Reform last year after Farage’s return. (“I kind of felt a little bit lost without him.”) Thomas predicts an “onslaught” that could see Reform lead the Welsh government — despite the numbers indicating a Labour-Plaid coalition. “I would pretty much bet my life savings that we will probably be the biggest party,” he added.
Labour’s question is what to do about it.
‘Fucked’
“Fucked,” “screwed,” “idiots,” “complacent,” “mollycoddled,” “nutty,” “naive,” “smug,” “heads in the sand,” “intent on their own destruction” — all words that Labour figures in Westminster have privately used toward the Welsh operation or the people in it.
The tension is partly because MPs and MSs face different electorates. Senedd elections breed low Tory turnout and nationalist sentiment, allowing Labour to make a more center-left pitch to voters.
Lee Waters, a Labour MS who is standing down next year, said: “There’s just a different set of values, a different political mandate, cycle.” Waters argued this is “the whole point of devolution — we’re not here to simply be a mini-Westminster.”
But the fourth Labour figure quoted above said: “It’s toxic … there is a dysfunctional relationship. The fact the Welsh PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] hate the Senedd group is a significant problem for the party.”
There are concerns too among Labour-affiliated trade unions, who are watching members turn to Reform.
Labour in Wales has in the past focused on more left-wing policies, while Labour in Westminster faces right. Many regret Wales’ rollout of default 20 miles per hour road-speed limits, down from 30mph. Waters, who as transport minister oversaw the rollout, defended the policy despite admitting it was “toxic with some people,” saying casualties are down by a quarter.
Welsh Labour MPs are also pushing for a tougher line on immigration to focus on blue-collar voters (a similar push is happening among MPs in England). Some Labour figures in the Senedd argue immigration should not be a hard focus in the 2026 election campaign at all — because policy is not devolved to Cardiff. That enrages some Labour figures in Westminster, who hear no distinction on the doorstep.
‘Help’ from London
It’s perhaps little surprise that Labour officials in London are involved.
Having benefited from Reform’s splitting the right-wing vote last year, Labour is aware of the threat to its own position across England and Wales. No. 10 strategists now speak of making Labour the “disruptor” to avoid being disrupted. Prime Minister Keir Starmer urged Cabinet ministers last week not to “look down at people” concerned by immigration.
Labour’s General Secretary Hollie Ridley and other senior officials speak regularly to their colleagues in the Welsh party, said a person with knowledge of the conversations.
Labour MS Alun Davies has a leading role on writing the 2026 manifesto, but Torsten Bell, a rising-star MP and former think-tank boss who is favored by No. 10, was asked to feed into the process, three people told POLITICO. The same people cautioned that his involvement would be limited now that he’s a minister; one said a different Welsh MP will be chosen to pitch in.
Matt Faulding, an official who was in charge of finding dependable (and Starmer-friendly) Labour candidates across the U.K. for the 2024 general election, is feeding into the work of finding new candidates for the Senedd, three people with knowledge of the process said. Selections will kick into gear in the coming weeks.
The cooperation goes both ways — Eluned Morgan, Wales’ Labour first minister, has encouraged MPs to come up with names.
But the Welsh union official quoted above said the U.K. party wants to “retain the same level of ruthlessness” with which Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, and allies such as Faulding, steered selections in the lead-up to 2024. “They see [Wales] as a staging post between now and 2029.”
There are plenty of vacancies. Drakeford promised incumbents they would top the party’s list in each constituency — a promise two people said has been kept, despite some Labour MPs hoping otherwise. But a dozen of the 30 Labour MSs have announced they are standing down, and colleagues believe more than half could go.
Drama still awaits. The Senedd super-seat for Port Talbot looks likely to have three Labour incumbents standing, including Deputy First Minister Huw Irranca-Davies. They will have to fight for first place in a ballot of local members.
Delivery from Cardiff
The unenviable job of getting it right falls to Eluned Morgan.
The first minister took the job last August after her short-lived predecessor, Vaughan Gething, resigned amid a donations scandal. She embarked on a “listening exercise” that produced four priorities — health, transport, green jobs, and “opportunities” in schools and social housing.
To her supporters, this was the reset Labour needed. A fifth Labour figure in Westminster described Morgan as a “good communicator” and “refreshing,” adding, in reference to a legendary if controversial Labour communicator: “She’s straight-up and honest about stuff. I don’t think she would be described as a sort of … Peter Mandelson art of spin.”
But they added: “There’s a period between now and the start of the campaign for the Senedd where delivery on objectives and priorities by the first minister is really key … She’s going to need to show people changes they can see and feel.”
This mirrors Labour’s focus on “delivery” in England. Welsh councillors have been offered training on making the positive sell on the doorstep, two people said, and Labour’s manifesto is expected to focus heavily on funding for the NHS.
Yet in Wales, Labour has been in power for 26 years, and can no longer blame its ills on poor funding from the central government.
And Starmer and McSweeney are working to five- and 10-year timelines. The Welsh Labour strategist quoted above said: “The question is whether it will be enough by 2026. I don’t know how we deal with the fact that the NHS has become terrible on our watch.”
Your local Reform candidate
Reform knows this. In Torfaen the upstart party campaigned on “local issues — council tax, local crime, potholes, refuse collections, street lighting, community facilities,” said Thomas. One party official said the plan for 2026 is to focus on bread-and-butter areas like health, education and the economy, more than on immigration.
POLITICO has barely sat down at Caroline Jones’ kitchen table when she brings up child poverty. The former MS for UKIP, Farage’s old party, talks about visiting an armed forces veteran who was living rough. Her home in the woods overlooks the Port Talbot blast furnaces. “When you look at people, they seem dragged down,” she told me. “They want some inspiration and some hope for the future.”
Jones held a Reform branch meeting on a recent rainy Wednesday night; 72 people turned up.
Labour’s response is to point out that Reform is new; untested; not to be trusted.
Former Port Talbot worker Alun Davies, 55, who works for the Community union, said the Labour government showed far more commitment to the steelworks — and got a better deal — than the Tories ever did. “People are just despondent because they’ve lost their jobs and the first people they’re going to lash out at are the government,” he said. “Farage has got no answers. It’s all pie in the sky rubbish … I think he’s full of piss and wind.”
A sixth Labour figure in Westminster said: “I think [Reform] will fuck up. My worry is … will they fuck up enough before the general election?”
So how to convince voters? One Welsh government figure insisted Labour is in “full combat mode” against Reform already, and “gloves will come off” as the party’s candidates and policies — and their flaws — become better known. They said the plan is also to challenge Reform on its “values and principles,” including Farage’s history of comments on whether to bring in an insurance-based model for the NHS, and to press the point that “Reform are the Tories Mark 2.”
But the second Labour figure in Westminster quoted above lamented: “Painting Nigel Farage as more Tory than the Tories just isn’t going to work. We tried it in 2015, we tried it in 2017.”
The asylum hotel
Then there’s the trickier divide — immigration.
Soothing pop music plays on the stereo at the Stradey Park hotel. Flowers garnish the tables; the windows look out on the hills around Llanelli. Martyn Palfreman had his wedding there.
But Palfreman, a Labour county councillor whose ward covers the hotel, knows it for another reason. In 2023 the Home Office (then run by the Conservatives) announced plans to temporarily house up to 241 asylum seekers in the 76-bedroom venue. The plans were withdrawn but left their mark.
Over a coffee at the hotel, Palfreman says he and local Labour MP Nia Griffith opposed the scheme from the start — but their narrative “just didn’t stick,” with voters skeptical of his party. Griffith’s majority was cut to just 1,504 in last year’s election, while the Tories were knocked into fourth place. Reform came second.
Palfreman said the hotel row had been a “massive catalyst” for the result, aided in part by “infiltration by the far right” of some protests. Lee Waters, whose Llanelli seat covers the hotel, agreed: “A large number of people in Llanelli feel that we let them down.”
But both men think the answer is not to adopt harder rhetoric on immigration more generally, as many others in Labour believe.
Waters said the “posturing and rhetoric about immigration is fundamentally missing the point,” given that Labour’s problem in south Wales is “generations of economic abandonment.” Tony Blair focused on a services economy; Chancellor Rachel Reeves has her eye trained on the City of London. “We don’t really have a lot to say economically to a community like ours, I’m afraid,” Waters added. “That’s the brutal reality.”
Palfreman added: “I think we should be sowing a bit of unity. It [also] alienates some of our more liberal, left-leaning core support, because they’ll say, well, Labour’s just the same as the others.”
A third way
That left-leaning vote is looking at Plaid Cymru — particularly in seats like Llanelli’s, which also includes Plaid-friendly Carmarthen.
For some politicians in Cardiff, the nationalist party — which could keep Labour in power in 2026 via a coalition — should be the focus. A second Welsh government figure said: “It depends on whether you think those people voting Reform can be won back to Labour … We can’t out-Reform Reform.”
One private session at the party’s Welsh conference in November focused more on beating Plaid than Reform, a seventh Labour figure in Westminster said. “The MPs in the room were like — ‘this is insane,’” they said. The union official quoted above added: “They’re living in cloud cuckoo land.”
In many ways, the Reform threat has crept up fast. Not even Labour’s U.K. HQ marked Llanelli as a battleground seat in 2024. Griffith was advised to campaign in Carmarthen.
But it may become too late to win back Reform voters. Working-class former industrial areas have been “moving away from the party for a long time,” Waters said. “The majorities that we were getting in 1987, 1992 were enormous. They’ve gone down as turnout has gone down.”
Richard Wyn Jones, who leads the Welsh Election Study, said evidence from the general election was that “almost nobody who voted Labour in 2019 voted for Reform in 2024.”
Wyn Jones agreed Labour is “in panic mode” but added: “These voters haven’t voted Labour for at least two or three general elections … [and] if Labour now decide they need to chase the Reform votes, there’s a huge danger that they leave their Plaid flank wide open.”
NHS and net zero
Wales’ devolved NHS will be a big target of attack for all parties. Liz Saville Roberts, Plaid Cymru’s Westminster leader, said: “They’ve been running the NHS for 25 years. So while Labour can say Farage would wreck the NHS, we can say Labour have wrecked the NHS and Farage would make it worse.” She plans to focus on other devolved issues too, including ownership of the sea bed where offshore wind farms will be built.
Reform will go hard on Britain’s net zero goals in the other direction. Over a pint in Llanelli’s Wetherspoons, Gareth Beer — a Reform candidate who nearly won last year — tells me net zero rules and the apparent blight of solar farms are coming up on the doorstep.
Beer, 49, who runs a building maintenance firm and lives in the coastal castle town of Kidwelly, said: “It’s about a political class that are in London, in their little community, bouncing off each other, and everything’s fine. But when you get out into the Rust Belt, it’s not fine.”
Beer is skeptical about man-made climate change: “On a macro level, we can’t affect the sun, and it’s mainly driven in my mind, in my research, by the sun. That’s the end of it. Not a trace gas that’s 400 parts in every million parts of the atmosphere … I’m not a solar expert, but there’s solar winds and all sorts of things, it’s a big red ball in the sky, isn’t it, and the output of that varies over the centuries, over the years. That’s why we had ice ages.”
Change?
In the end the problem may be simpler: disillusionment.
Behind the counter of her burger van in Port Talbot, Mandie Pugh, 59, has a roll call of complaints that you would hear in any left-behind town. Lying politicians; a country “over-run” by immigration; broken social care; an NHS that can’t see her for an ear infection; families living on benefits; Downing Street parties during the Covid pandemic. Her husband works in the steelworks, and she’s now “ashamed” to have voted Labour.
Though “I wouldn’t vote in the Welsh elections,” she adds. “It’s a load of shit.”
This could yet be Labour’s silver lining. The same disengagement that affects the ruling party will mean many are yet to be convinced about Farage.
Yet “change” was enough to sweep out 14 years of Tory rule in Westminster last July. In a world of anti-incumbency, Labour politicians in Wales will now hope they avoid the same fate.
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