UKIP has arrived in Welsh politics

The results are now in; the fever pitch of political excitement of the last few days can begin to subside. With it all over (bar a fair bit of shouting), what can we make of it all?

Before I get into that, though, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate our elected representatives here in Wales: Derek Vaughan, Kay Swinburne and Jill Evans on their re-election to the European Parliament, and Nathan Gill who has been elected for the first time. I’d also like to wish them well in representing Wales in the European Union.

Now, onto the results. The table below presents the overall result in Wales: the number of votes cast for each party, the share of the vote (with the change from 2009 in brackets), and the number of seats won.

Party	Votes	Share (change from 2009)	MEPs
Labour	206,332	28.15 (+7.86)	1
UKIP	201,983	27.55 (+14.76)	1
Conservatives	127,742	17.43 (-3.79)	1
Plaid Cymru	111,864	15.26 (-3.25)	1
Greens	32,275	4.52 (-1.04)	0
Liberal Democrats	28,930	3.95 (-6.73)	0
BNP	7,655	1.04 (-4.38)	0
Britain First	6,633	0.90 (n/a)	0
Socialist Labour	4,459	0.61 (-1.20)	0
No2EU	2,803	0.38 (-0.87)	0
Socialist Party of GB	1,384	0.19 (n/a)	0
Turnout = 31.5% (+ 1.1%)

The final Welsh poll had indicated that the allocation of the final two of Wales’ four seats would be very tight. This turned out to be pretty close to the truth; what the poll didn’t pick up was how close the race for first place would be. The table below shows the calculations for each ‘round’, with the party winning that seat indicated in bold. (Those of you needing a refresher on the d’Hondt formula used to allocate the seats, please see here. For simplicity, here I have included only the top four parties, as these were the only ones relevant to the allocation of seats. We can see that while Labour won the first seat, and UKIP the second, there were barely more than 4,000 votes in it. The Conservatives then won the third seat, and Plaid the final one. But this final seat was also pretty close: had Plaid won 8,700 votes fewer across the whole of Wales – out of the nearly three-quarters of a million cast – then they would have lost the final seat to Labour.

	Labour	UKIP	Cons	Plaid
Round 1	206,332	201,983	127,742	111,864
Round 2	103,166	201,983	127,742	111,864
Round 3	103,166	100,991.5	127,742	111,864
Round 4	103,166	100,991.5	63,871	111,864

So what can we make of the parties’ performances? Let’s take them in turn.

Labour will clearly be pleased to have topped the poll once more in Wales; after the upset of 2009 there may be a sense of having returned to something like ‘business as usual’. And yet, as with their result across Britain as a whole, one cannot help but feel that Labour should have done rather better. Labour’s performance in 2009 remains its worst vote share in any Welsh election since World War I. But 2014 was its second worst.

Until the final poll of the campaign, Labour had seemed clearly set to win two seats in Wales (indeed, the figures from the inaugural Welsh Political Barometer poll in December had Labour on course to gain three of the four Welsh MEPs). There are two – not necessarily wholly exclusive – obvious potential explanations for this relative Labour under-perfomance, neither of which are very comforting for the party. The first is that YouGov’s polls in Wales have been systematically over-stating Labour support. The second is that much of Labour’s support in Wales in recent years has been pretty soft in nature, and the party was either unable to get these voters to the polls or some of them jumped ship to UKIP for these elections. Overall, these European elections (and last week’s locals in England) certainly don’t suggest that a general election victory for Labour next year is impossible. But nor can we say that Labour is clearly on course for victory: for the party to be confident, rather than merely hopeful, of winning in 2015, they really ought to be doing rather better than this.

For UKIP this was a truly extraordinary performance, and one which defied both history and the polls. In the last three sets of European elections, Wales had been either the second or third worst ‘region’ in Britain for the party (behind Scotland and, in 1999 and 2009, London). Nor had the polls shown UKIP making much ground until fairly recently, while even the final poll – with fieldwork conducted approximately 8-10 days prior to the elections – showed UKIP in second but still well behind Labour. Moreover, UKIP currently has no Welsh AMs or MPs, and made very little impact at the 2012 Welsh local elections. Yet Wales saw UKIP’s second largest vote share gain from 2009 of anywhere in Britain (only the East Midlands saw a larger UKIP rise in support from five years ago). The reasons for this will need investigating further; for the moment, it looks clear that UKIP has ‘arrived’ in Welsh electoral politics. What may be particularly troubling for the other main parties in Wales is that few of them seem to have seen this UKIP surge coming.

For the Conservatives this was another solid, reasonably satisfactory performance. They retained their Welsh MEP, despite a UKIP surge that some might have expected to cut particularly hard into their vote. The Tories also maintained their position, which they also had in 2004 and 2009, of being ahead of Plaid Cymru. Despite having been in government for more than four years in London, the Conservatives’ support in the polls, and in real elections, has shown an impressive resilience, and it continued to do so last night. As they face up to a general election in less than a year, the Welsh Tories have reason to do so with some optimism; there is little sign that they will gain seats next year, but they have fair prospects of holding most of what they currently have.

For Plaid Cymru, these results will surely be a major relief more than anything. Plaid had looked very likely to lose their seat in the European Parliament for most of the last year. Until the final Barometer survey, all the polls had them some way behind. Plaid’s attempts to fire up their support, and mobilise their voters, seem to have had some success – enough, at least, for them to cling on to the final seat. Coming fourth can hardly be rated as a good result for Plaid. However, we should perhaps remember that, with the singular exception of their 1999 annus mirabilis, Plaid have never performed very strongly in European elections. This year was about holding their ground, ahead of other electoral contests that may offer them better prospects. In that sense, 2014 for Plaid can be seen as ‘job done – just about’.

For the Liberal Democrats, failing to win a seat was a disappointment but not remotely a surprise. The Lib-Dems had failed to win a Welsh MEP in much happier times (1999, 2004 and 2009), so it was never very likely that they would do so in the current, more difficult, political context. What is more concerning to them, in Wales as across the rest of Britain, is the sheer scale of their failure: to win less than 4% of the vote is utterly humiliating, while their performance was abject even in places where the party holds Westminster seats. Given their party’s poor performance across the whole of Britain, and with the next general election less than 12 months away, the signs currently appear very ominous for the Liberal Democrats.

Among the other parties, the Welsh Greens performed respectably, if somewhat less well than their counterparts in both England and Scotland. The BNP lost more than four-fifths of their vote share in Wales from 2009 – something which really couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people. And on the fringes of the left, the Judean People’s Front – sorry, I mean the Socialist Labour Party, managed to edge out the People’s Front of Judea, otherwise known as the Socialist Party of Great Britain; while Britain First scored a similar ‘triumph’ over No2EU.