Boris Johnson needs a rails run in Wales

On election night December 12, eyes will turn to five Welsh seats: traditional Labour heartland that wants to leave the EU.

Boris Johnson catches the train to Somerset on Thursday. Picture: Getty Images

On election night, December 12, eyes will turn to five Welsh seats: traditional Labour heartland that wants to leave the EU.

If British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is to form a majority Conservative government, these are the bellwether seats he has to win, but to do so he has to fight 160 years of left-leaning voting.

Other parts of the country are generally cemented in their views: the Scottish National Party will score swags of seats in Scotland, and Labour will pick up none north of the border, which is expected­ to be fatal to its ambitions of winning outright.

The Political Studies Association has dissected polling figures from around the country and believes it’s almost impossible for Jeremy Corbyn to form a majority Labour government. The political scientists believe the outcome will be binary choice: either a Tory majori­ty or a hung parliament.

“Either Boris gets a majority and we leave the EU or we will have a hung parliament in which we have to anticipate a minority Labour administration, which will apply for an extension and there will be a referendum,” said John Curtice of Strathclyde University.

“The problem the Labour Party has is they’ve tried to satisfy everybody and have ended up satisfying nobody’’.

Sir John said that this election will be decided by the location of Leave and Remain voters.

‘’The concentration is the key,’’ he said. “The majority of Leave voters are voting Conservative but Remain voters are dispersed.’’

A key factor could be whether the Liberal Democrats split the Remain vote in Labour seats in England’s north beyond their core support base in the southeast and parts of London such as Kingston upon Thames and Richmond.

In Wales, about a quarter of seats will be affected by the Remain­ alliance: a loose non-aggressio­n pact of Plaid Cymru, the Greens and the Lib Dems candidate­s to ensure the Remain vote is not split. This makes Welsh electorates such as Wrexham, Clyde South, Alyn and Deeside, Delyn, Vale of Clywd and Ynys Mon highly significant.

Roger Awan-Scully of the University of Cardiff said this was the path for a Tory victory, but the last time anyone but Labour won in Wales was in December 1918 under Liberal Party prime minister Lloyd George. “He had just been victorious in World War I and his political capital was high. Labour then finished first in all 26 elections in a row since 1922,’’ Professor­ Awan-Scully said.

The Conservative Party’s history­ in Wales is even worse: it last won Wales in 1859.

Professor Awan-Scully said if the national swings were projected onto the result of the previous election, in 2017, Labour could lose 10 seats, the Tories could pick up nine and the Lib Dems another.

“Any such result in Wales represents an electoral earthquake,’’ he said, cautioning volatility was high and voter intentions could change in the next few weeks.

But he stressed that a place that didn’t get much attention was northeast Wales. “It is not the most glamorous part of the UK, but there are a clutch of five Labour­ seats, none of which have huge margins, and they could go to the Tories on swings of between 2.6 and 5.9 per cent,” he said.

Professor Awan-Scully said this handful of seats, all of which adjoin each other near the border with England, would be crucial. ‘’If Labour defend all of those, Boris Johnson will be an ex-prime minister. If the Conservatives win all of them, the Tories will win with a majority,’’ he said.

These Welsh voters are socially conservatism and their economic pragmatism rails against Mr Corbyn’s Marxist extremes including his high-tax, big-spending plans. In the 2017 election, a late Labour surge in Wales helped the party win 28 seats, while the Tories lost three seats and now have eight. Plaid Cymru, which has battled to get the same independence support of the SNP, has four seats, and the Lib Dems were wiped out.

“Now we have Labour and the Tories neck-and-neck each with just under 30 per cent support,’’ Professor Awan-Scully said. ‘’For Labour, this is a decline of 20 percentage points. The Tories … are declining much less rapidly, and we see Plaid Cymru picking up a bit and the Liberal Democrats picking up a lot.’’

Aisle Henderson of the University of Edinburgh said there was a four-way tribal split in Scotland: Yes to independence/Remain on 29 per cent, No to independence/Remain 33 per cent, Yes to independence/ Leave on 16 per cent and No to independence/Leave on 22 per cent. She said no one would move to Labour.

Labour is deeply unpopular north of the border because of Mr Corbyn’s wildly contradictory stance on holding another Scottish referendum. The independ­ence issue trumps Brexit in Scot­land in voting priorities. “There is a (Labour) silence, a statement no one likes and then it’s contradicted (by other Labour figures),’’ Profess­or Henderson said.

The antipathy for Labour in Scotland is mirrored by the anger towards the Tories in Northern Ireland for the Brexit deal that introduce­s a Customs border in the Irish Sea. Jonathan Tonge of the University of Liverpool mused at the prospect of the republican Sinn Fein welcoming a Tory victory.

“Under Johnson’s Brexit deal you could have an economically united Ireland and Unionists in Ireland are apoplectic at Boris Johnson,’’ Professor Tonge said.

Across the country, an audit of what moves voters illustrated that Brexit was the most important issue, but health was a good second­ and sometimes a rival to the EU divorce. Sir John said the future of the National Health Service­ resonated particularly strongly with Labour voters.

“As for the economy, years ago we would be in deep angst about the economy — it is there, but it is a weaker issue; crime, the environment and also immigration is there too, but are much weaker issue­s,’’ he said.