A friend of mine visits his sick uncle in Wales as often as he can. What he sees is so distressing, he can’t wait to recross the bridge and return to the relative luxury of his Home Counties retreat.
What on earth can be so disturbing? The answer is the dreadful state of some of the small towns he passes through, with Ebbw Vale (the donkey jacket dimwit Michael Foot was MP there for years) being of particular note.
Poverty everywhere, high street shops boarded up, and what people there are out and about appear to have no work or purpose.
No surprise there, as 26.4 per cent of Ebbw Vale is economically inactive, meaning they’re all on some kind of benefit. Paid for by the clever English.
This disaster of a country can be laid firmly at the door of Labour, who have emerged as the largest party in every election since 1922 – a hundred years of failure. Plus, Kinnock’s mates have cleaned up in all six Senedd polls following devolution in 1999.
That, especially if you’re Welsh, is going to change dramatically next May. Labour is going to be wiped out in the Senedd polls.
YouGov reports the Welsh Nationalists of Plaid Cymru are on 30 per cent, Reform on 29 per cent and Labour trailing miles behind on 14 per cent.
A fair indication of how accurate that survey is will come next month when there’s a by-election in Caerphilly, a traditional Labour South Wales heartland.
A change to the voting system is about to topple Labour. Nigel has timed it so well - Kelvin Mackenzie | Getty Images
The only polling for Caerphilly I’ve seen puts the party of Aneurin Bevan, the idiot who invented the NHS, in third place too.
My bet is that Reform will win both polls. The voters may be stupid – education in Wales is dreadful, with numeracy and literacy the worst in the UK- but surely not so daft as to believe that independence would solve anything.
What Nigel Farage is offering is hope. He wants to reindustrialise the nation. The world’s shortest queue is Welsh entrepreneurs. Last September, Tata Steel closed the steelworks, putting 3,000 people out of work.
Here we are a year later, and I find it hard to believe many of those poor souls will have found work in the area. It’s not easy if you are in your forties with a family and teenage kids to up sticks and move to England for work, but if you want to earn, that’s what they will have had to do.
There’s nothing in Wales except people on walking sticks claiming disability and incapacity benefit. Something like 15 per cent of working-age folk are making money out of claiming to be sick. How incredible.
The reason Reform will do well is that they aren’t the Tories, who will suffer the same fate as Starmer’s mob. Actually, they will do even worse. My bet is they will be lucky to get three per cent.
There’s a new proportional voting system in the May election, delivering 96 members instead of the current 60. Clearly, a revolution which will have dramatic effects back in Parliament.
Badenoch will be pushed out as Tory leader and not before time. She never captured the mood of the moment. But the same issue applies to Starmer as he will know that if the number is 14 per cent, that will be similar to what could happen to him in a General Election.
My own link with Wales is that I used to run a radio company which owned a successful station in Swansea.
I remember one day travelling with my CFO to meet the management team in Swansea. Basically, we got lost, and although there were a lot of signs for Abertawe, there were no signs for Swansea.
At the management meeting, I demanded that the station mount an on-air campaign to have more Swansea signs around the area and to take down the confusing Abertawe signs.
The meeting went quiet until the managing director pointed out that Abertawe was Welsh for Swansea. At that humiliation, I wrapped up the meeting pretty sharpish.
Watching Labour being destroyed after a century of running the nation into the ground will be as big a humiliation as the one that I suffered.
It will be a forerunner of what happens in 2029.
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