Passionate battle to maintain iconic Labour city from Reform’s circling vultures

On May 5, 2026

Mary Blake is in the front room of her terraced home in Tredegar, showing us a statuette of Aneurin Bevan, founding father of the NHS, and pivotal figure in Welsh Labour history. “This is great-uncle Nye,” she says. She shows us a photograph of her father, also Aneurin, named after his uncle. “Do you think he looks like him?” she asks. Today, as she says heavily, “Great Uncle Nye would be turning in his grave, and my dad too.” Mary, 70, is about to break a family tradition. “I’m not voting Labour this time,” she says, as Nye looks on sternly from the mantlepiece. “I can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

Next to her on the settee, her husband Gareth, a former member of the National Union of Mineworkers, is shaking his head in disagreement. “People think just because you are born and brought up in Wales you have to swallow it,” Mary says. “You have a right to change. “My problem is there’s no party I’d like to change to. So, I won’t vote. Not this time. And I tell you I fear for Wales, and I fear for the Valleys because Nigel Farage is going to get in.”

The mention of the Reform leader’s name is too much for Labour voter Gareth. “You mean, the devil incarnate!” he said, in his Welsh baritone. “The man who will privatise Nye Bevan’s NHS!” You don’t need to be steeped in the history of the Labour Party to know there’s a problem when Nye Bevan’s great-niece can’t bring herself to vote Labour. Tredegar is the beating, emotional heart of a party as born from and shaped by this landscape as the Valleys themselves.

At the other end of the motorway, in London, another famous son of Tredegar, Lord Kinnock – the party’s talismanic former leader – knows it too. If the M4 were a metaphor, it would be a thread unravelling between the people of Wales and the government at Westminster.

Years of his nation being “plundered” by Tory governments have had a “corrosive effect”, Kinnock tells me when we meet at the House of Lords. “The sense of being left behind gets into the soul. Despite the amazing community spirit which is still there in Wales, it crushes hopes and ambitions and confidence.”

He looks across at bookshelves heavy with Welsh history. “There are good reasons for Wales feeling left behind. It started off with Thatcher, there was an easing of it in the Blair-Brown years, and then it was battered again by 14 years of Tory austerity rule. This is not propaganda, it is just mathematics.

“For years, we were caught on the leash of underfunding and neglect from Westminster. Now a Labour government at either end of the M4 is bringing change – but reconstruction is always slower than destruction. It’s asking a hell of a lot of the people of Wales to have patience, but it has already started.”

This week, Wales will vote for an expanded and changed Senedd – a confusing re-imagining of the Welsh democratic landscape that Mary and others dismiss as a “gravy train”. The abandonment of ‘first past the post’ voting has heightened Reform and Plaid Cymru’s chances of slaying the Labour dragon.

The place where Labour and the NHS were founded, might be both of their undoing. A nation steeped in the traditions of solidarity has propped up the Labour vote since it collapsed in Scotland. Meanwhile, Farage has said the NHS “isn’t working anymore” and needs “fundamental” re-thinking.

In a microcosm of the conversations happening across Wales, in Tredegar, families, neighbours and even former comrades are divided. At the Coach and Horses – which features a giant Nye Bevan mural on its gabled side – every one of the bar staff is voting a different way.

While landlady Amanda Burrows, 60, says she won’t vote, and barman Shaun Carriff, 65 is sticking with Labour, the pub’s co-owner is prepared to commit heresy. “I admire what Nye and his mentor Walter Conway started here when they founded Tredegar Medical Aid, but I wouldn’t vote for Labour now,” Simon Griffiths says, against the clink of snooker balls on the television. “I used to get in trouble here for admiring Margaret Thatcher. Now I think Farage seems the best of a bad bunch.” He shrugs. “It’s caused some terrible fights in here, but they still drink my beer.”

Bevan called himself “a projectile from the Welsh valleys” that spread ideas across the world. In town, signs welcome visitors “to the birthplace of the NHS”. One man tells me, “I am going to close my eyes, mark a cross and as long it doesn’t hit Labour, I’ll be happy.” Others say they will stick with a party they have voted for all their lives.

Up at the Bevan Stones, off the A465 above Tredegar, “where Nye Bevan addressed his constituents and the world”, Kinnock’s words from the day before in London are ringing in my ears. “The people and movements of the past, of socialism and the Labour Party in Wales should be the source of enormous pride,” he said. “From sheer bravery and determination, came ideas that changed not only Wales but the world.

“But we don’t live there anymore. It is not a great address for the future. Our laser attention has to be on the realities of now and the possibilities of the future, rooted in the courage and determination of the past.” Kinnock joined the Labour Party at 14 in his hometown, Tredegar.

“I joined the Labour Party 70 years ago, because I knew if things needed to be done, they would be done best if we got organised,” he says. “I saw that the generations that had sod-all security, care, housing, opportunities, made it for themselves with collective action, guts, community spirit and care others that has never been equalled.

“That is a genuine Welsh heritage. It is our job to nourish the embers that are still there and make it the future.” Kinnock says Eluned Morgan is the right woman to tend the flame. “We have a phrase in Wales – chwarae teg, which means ‘fair play’,” he says. “Eluned is chwarae teg on legs. This is a leadership that won’t take second best from Westminster.

“I understand that voting for Reform or Plaid feels like poking the establishment in the eye with a sharp stick. But people should ask themselves why do Plaid Cymru refer even less to independence and separation than Reform talk about the benefits of Brexit? The only good thing to say about both of them is they have got a more practiced sidestep than most outside halves. Dig a bit behind their impassioned sentiments and ask, can they make my country better? And the true answer is, neither of them can.”

The last time I interviewed Kinnock was on the 40th anniversary of his ‘I warn you’ speech which predicted the years of Tory government. Does he have a warning now? “I warn you if you we don’t have a Labour government in Wales there will be standstill, and Wales can’t afford any pause,” he says. “I warn you that a positive future for Wales depends on sustaining the purpose and principles that ground Eluned Morgan’s Labour Party.

“I warn you that Reform is an expression of grievance that will generate division, and nationalism turns its back on tomorrow, and we cannot afford to be split or delayed.” For those vultures circling South Wales waiting for Labour’s heart to bleed out, the patient is not yet dead.

“Look at what we have done,” Kinnock says, addressing Mary and those who falter. “From workers’ rights to the highest-ever minimum wage, the green energy jobs revolution to ending the two-child limit… We are fighting back – and we will get there, as long as people are willing to stick it out.”