Caerphilly By-Election: What Happened?

Caerphilly Castle (Image: Me)

Before I get into this, we need to remember why this by-election happened. Hefin David represented his constituency for 9 years until his tragic and untimely passing in August. He fought hard for his area, standing up for children with disabilities, particularly autism, for access to education, and for support for small businesses. He was a true character, willing to work with people from across the political spectrum, and brought a sense of humour to his role that is otherwise unmatched in the Senedd today. He will be missed by his colleagues and his constituents, and I continue to extend my heartfelt condolences to his family and friends, and in particular to his young children.

Former Senedd Member for Caerphilly, Hefin David (Image: Welsh Labour)

Caerphilly

The Caerphilly Senedd constituency's boundaries have been unchanged since the Senedd's formation in 1999. Labour had won it at every election from 1999 to 2021, though with a smaller share of the vote than in nearby constituencies. Plaid Cymru had always come in second, though they hadn't come particularly close to actually winning (they came closest in 2016, though were still 6 percentage points behind). The seat is notable for being home of former leader of Labour in Wales, Ron Davies, who represented the seat from 1999 until 2003, and stood as an independent candidate in 2007, failing to win, but receiving 22% of the vote. In 2016, Caerphilly was where UKIP had their second-strongest showing in a Welsh constituency, also getting 22%.

Plaid have always been a strong presence in the area, even controlling the council from 1999 to 2004, and again from 2008 to 2012, but they had never been able to capture the seat, only holding the Islwyn Senedd seat from 1999 to 2003. The Westminster constituency's boundaries changed in 2024, but it retained its name and encompasses a similar area to the Senedd seat. Labour have held the seat in Westminster since 1918, so despite it being probably Plaid's strongest area in the valleys, it was still very firm, reliable Labour territory. The only time the area didn't vote for Labour in the last 107 years was at the 2019 European Parliament election, when the Brexit Party (Reform's predecessor) won.

The Result

Plaid Cymru's Lindsay Whittle won the by-election held yesterday. He received 47.4% of the vote, the largest share for any candidate in Caerphilly at a Senedd election, beating Reform UK's Llŷr Powell by a margin of 3,848 votes, 11.4 percentage points. Labour's Richard Tunnicliffe received just 11% of the vote, a drop of 35 points on their performance in 2021. Every other candidate lost their deposit, with the Tories on 2%, down 15.3 points, the LibDems and Greens on 1.5% each, Gwlad on 0.3% and UKIP (who I'm amazed still exist) on 0.2%.

Table of Results at the Caerphilly By-Election

Bar chart of the by-election result compared to 2021

The first number announced on the night was the turnout: 50.43%. In the grand scheme of things, that is a very poor turnout, but in a sad reflection on the apathy we've seen in Senedd elections, it is actually the highest turnout ever in Caerphilly in a Senedd race, and the highest at any Senedd by-election.

My Take

I must confess that I had thought Reform were going to win this by-election from the start. I even said in a conversation last week after the Camlas Cymru poll (Reform: 42%, Plaid: 38%, Labour: 12%) that I still expected Reform to win 'possibly by quite a big margin', but my predictions for local council by-elections had been on a losing streak lately, so I kept quiet. As recently as Wednesday night I refused to make a prediction, but now I can say that the prediction I would have made was totally wrong. I expected Plaid would come second, and that Labour would come third, but even after the local poll, I still thought Labour would do better than 12%, perhaps they'd be in the region of 20%, but yet again I was wrong.

It is clear to me that there was tactical voting all over the place. Conservatives voting Reform to keep Plaid Cymru out, Labour voters backing Plaid to keep Reform out, and there was even talk of Tories voting Plaid to keep Reform out, and Labour voters going Reform to get a unionist Senedd member. I doubt this happened on a large scale, but statistically in a pool of over 33,000 voters, there probably were instances of this. The record-high turnout figure suggests to me that considerable number of 'not political' people voted for the first time, in many cases for Reform as their populist message reaches these types of voters, but there also seemed to have been a mobilisation of young and first-time voters going for Plaid Cymru, partly a genuine and organic base in this group, but also an element of tactical voting by people who really didn't to be represented by Reform.

This is complete speculation, but I think the mass influx of Reform councillors from outside Wales, as well as MPs and other senior party officials to Caerphilly, might have been alienating to voters. Many of these people are not widely known, have no connection to the area, or are just unpopular. Reform's campaign never felt like it truly cared for Caerphilly, at least not in the same way Plaid's, and even to some extent Labour's, did. It was all about the party, and not the people. Most voters don't want their local area to become a political theatre for an extremely powerful and well-funded party, with figures they've never heard of. The Nathan Gill scandal won't have helped Reform's case either. It seems like their populist messaging on the 'Nation of Sanctuary' didn't have the effect they expected. Most people, if they knew what the scheme actually entails, and who has mostly benefitted, wouldn't be bothered by it. Perhaps it could benefit from a change of name!

Despite the confident, cocky, and at times downright cringeworthy campaigning by Labour, this seat was always going to be a lost cause for them. For all their claims based on dubious polling, subsamples and even Westminster level predictions, they were never really going to win. Their base has collapsed in the Valleys, and the overwhelming evidence of a two-horse Plaid v Reform race meant that even their own base of voters were going to vote elsewhere. Their 35-point fall in vote share shows the scale of their losses. Opinion polls were showing a strong downward trend, but to see an actual election going this way lends them legitimacy. To see Labour underperforming every national poll, and the local constituency poll is staggering. I suppose the only hope for them is that tactical voting will be a non-factor under the new election system in 2026 (which I will have more to say about soon, no doubt), so some of their base may come back. If they don't, and 11% is their actual level in Caerphilly, they face near-extinction in 2026 without a considerable rebound in support, which we shouldn't rule out.

As for the Conservatives, their utterly abysmal showing of just 2% should surprise nobody. We all lived through the last Tory government. We all know that they are completely incapable of governing in their current form. The soundbites and policies broadly echo Reform, which shouldn't be a surprise given that's where most of their former support has gone, but this isn't a sustainable strategy for them. Any pledge they make can be countered with 'but you had 14 years to do that' and there's nothing they can come back with, at least not yet. Can they turn this around? Maybe. In time for 2026? I doubt it. I think there's a real possibility of the Tories having a low single-digit number of MSs come May, unless they can make a serious comeback. As it stands, I see no sign of it.

There's very little to say about the prospects of the LibDems, Greens, Gwlad and UKIP. Caerphilly has never been an area where the LibDems or Greens have done well, and tactical voting will have affected them here. They are stronger than 1.5%, and I don't think this result tells us anything whatsoever about their chances in 2026. Gwlad are a new-ish party who may yet grow coming into 2026, though it remains to be seen where and by how much, and UKIP... are all but finished. I'll round this section off with a fun fact. Gwlad have more incumbent councillors who were elected for them in Great Britain (1) than UKIP do (0). UKIP do have a councillor in Kent, but she defected to them from Reform.

What's next?

Lindsay Whittle will represent the Caerphilly Senedd constituency until its abolition in May 2026. He will almost certainly be the final person elected to the Senedd by First-Past-The-Post. He is second on Plaid Cymru's closed list in the Blaenau Gwent Caerffili Rhymni mega-constituency in 2026 (behind Delyth Jewell) so has a pretty good chance of getting re-elected. Reform will, despite losing this race, remain confident of picking up plenty of seats next year. The new system will benefit them. 

New MS for Caerphilly, Lindsay Whittle (Image: PA via Sky News)

If last night's result was to be replicated across the Blaenau Gwent Caerffili Rhymni constituency, the seats would be split 3-3 between Plaid and Reform, with Labour not winning a single seat. Obviously there is a caveat here that voting patterns will be different both as a result of the system change and the boundary change (Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney are likely more Reform and Labour-friendly, and Plaid might not do so well there). With the new system being what is, the lower-ranked seats can be decided by very small number of votes, in this scenario the three parties are within 325 votes of each other at the sixth count.

This campaign was toxic. I didn't follow it particularly closely, but the social media postings I saw, and the brief part of the TV debate I watched showed some of the worst of Welsh politics. I worry this won't get any better before May, and although Reform's defeat has perhaps spared us from the worst of it for now, they will be back stronger, better-funded and more determined than ever in 2026. Plaid Cymru will have the confidence boost of a convincing win, and Labour and the Conservatives have a lot of self-reflection to do, which many have avoided until now.

Thank you for reading, and I'm hoping to post a bit more here over the next while!

One more thing... hosting this blog isn't free, so if you enjoyed reading this, or found it informative or insightful, you are very welcome to leave a small donation here: https://paypal.me/LloydCymru. Diolch!

My COVID-19 Stats Project: Four Years On

Exactly four years ago today, I posted the very first of my 436 daily COVID-19 updates for Wales. From starting on 11th of March 2020, to the final daily update on the 4th of June 2021, I missed just 15 days, all of which were due to Public Health Wales not reporting on those days. After the 4th of June 2021, I continued to post a weekly bulletin (almost) every Saturday, until the 8th of April 2022, as mass PCR testing came to an end. Since then, I have kept an eye on the data, but haven't really shared much.

The Beginning

At the start of March 2020, I was a 16-year-old at Ysgol Penglais, getting ready, and increasingly anxious, for my GCSE exams. In 2019, picked up three A* grades in my science exams, so I was optimistic for good results in 2020. At this point, COVID was one of the least of my worries.

The question I was probably asked most during the duration of the project was why I was doing it. The answer was very simple: I had always had an interest (or, one could say, an obsession) with statistics, be it related to sports, politics, or demographics. I saw COVID-19 as another thing that was tracked with statistics, so I created a very simple PowerPoint slide with the numbers of COVID cases in in each region of the UK on it. Very soon after, I created one with the local authorities of Wales on it, though there were only 19 cases in Wales at the time, so I didn't think it was particularly helpful.

As the inevitable tidal wave of COVID approached, the UK government ran a dashboard with very basic, but, at the time, the best available data on the pandemic. Several people complained on Twitter that it wasn't particularly accessible, and didn't break down to anything smaller than simply the country of Wales, so I decided I'd tweet my primitive but very accessible chart publicly. At first, the reaction was small, as I'd expected. It was supposed to just be a hobby project that a few dozen people might see, and, after all, COVID was going to pass in a few weeks, right?

Early on, some people asked to be tagged in the daily updates so they didn't miss them. I was happy to do so, but it quite quickly became unsustainable, so I stopped.

My following rapidly surged as we approached, and then entered, the full lockdown. This was definitely overwhelming to me. For the first time, the number of people seeing anything I was tweeting exceeded the number of people I could ever theoretically know personally. As a 16-year-old, I had no idea how to deal with it, but ultimately I decided to accept it, and carry on the daily updates. There was absolutely nothing else to do, so the choice made itself. 

The very first of my daily COVID-19 updates for Wales, posted four years ago today.

Public Health Wales launched their Wales-specific dashboard in early April 2020, making their data visual for the first time, but I had already been visualizing their text-based data for weeks by that point, and people found their dashboard clunky, bloated and unusable on mobile devices, so they stayed with my updates. The launch of their dashboard, and the start of the ONS reporting more comprehensive deaths data weekly, made my work a lot more interesting, and thorough.

Ultimately, I stopped posting daily in June 2021, as real life started to catch up with me again. I had just sat my internally assessed AS level exams, and was generally in a much more stressful place in my life. I decided would continue to update the website daily (it wasn't difficult, and most of it was optimized by now), but I would only post a weekly summary to Twitter, as they were, believe it or not, harder for me to make.

The last of my daily COVID-19 updates.

I discontinued my weekly updates, and my website, in April 2022, as mass PCR testing came to an end in Wales, and data became increasingly unreliable. To this day, I continue to monitor and analyse what data is still available, but no longer to a public audience. I feel the demand just isn't there anymore, and my time is a lot more restricted.

The final weekly update can be found here: https://x.com/LloydCymru/status/1513153330453041152?s=20.

Where am I now?

By now, I am in my second year studying biology at Aberystwyth University. It hasn't been too difficult overall (yet), but the hardest period was in early to mid 2023, as me and my partner, Charlotte, had a very bitter and public falling-out with the Students' Union. This blog isn't about that, but I'm glad to report that, whilst I still have no interest in re-joining them, the situation has been quiet for a number of months now, and we are in a constructive dialogue with the University.

Since restrictions ended, I have traveled a lot more, in large thanks to Charlotte, who loves travelling. In all, I have visited the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Albania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway and Scotland since the end of lockdown, and am planning to visit more countries in the coming months. I didn't have much interest in travelling before meeting Charlotte.

Charlotte and I in Kraków...

 ...and in Albania.

In terms of work, I have worked some part-time jobs alongside studying, but the most exciting of them is being a football referee. I qualified as a referee in mid 2022, but didn't register until
January 2023. It's not easy, and I do take a lot of dissent, as all referees do, but the experience in terms of communicating with people, explaining things clearly, and making new friends and contacts is amazing. It's not for everyone, but I do recommend going into it, if you have the fitness, time and patience!

Looking Back Honestly

In hindsight, the whole pandemic period was a horrid time for everyone. I look back at it with great frustration with how the Welsh and UK Governments responded. It feels like we had the worst leadership we could possibly have had for a major crisis, and that a lot of the damage done was a result of that.

At the beginning, I would never have predicted that COVID-19 would contribute to the deaths of 12,600+ people in Wales and 238,000+ people (and counting) in the UK. My heart still bleeds everyday for the countless people who lost loved ones to the virus. I hope that the inquiry teaches those in charge the lessons they need for the next pandemic, but I'm not holding my breath for it. I'm disgusted that the Welsh Government, to this very day, refuses to hold an inquiry of its own, despite what we've seen so far in the Welsh part of the UK inquiry has seemingly raised more questions than it has answered. They owe it to the bereaved families, and they owe it to all of us, who were affected by the decisions taken by them through the pandemic. I don't know I will ever forgive those in charge for the loss of life, especially in the wave over winter 2020-21, when it seemed that they were investing far more effort into avoiding another lockdown than saving lives, a decision which probably cost tens of thousands of lives in the UK, and thousands in Wales.

Politics aside, I look back at my own experience with a strange mix of pride, nostalgia and sorrow. Pride that a project I started in the school library at Ysgol Penglais on a Wednesday afternoon grew into something that informed thousands of people. It was never supposed to, but it did, and I can't thank the countless people that supported my work at the time enough. I know it was so long ago, but honestly, it means more to me than I can put into words. Thank you all so much.

I invested an insane amount of time and effort into the project, and that meant I missed out on a considerable amount of time outside, that I could have spent enjoying the beautiful spring of 2020. I started walking long distances through the countryside that summer, but I should have done more. I just don't have the time to do things like that anymore, but I want to. These walks perhaps weren't the best for my mental health, my mind would drift often, and fixate on the suffering of the world at the time. The normality of the past that seemed so distant, and the uncertain mist of the future. But the physical benefits from the walking, and the feeling of exploration and freedom is something I remember fondly, and would love to get back.

I still haven't wrapped my head around the fact that four years have passed since the start of the pandemic. It's unfathomable to me. It changed my life, and the lives of so many others in countless different ways. I still sometimes struggle to this day to come to terms with how society changed, struggled, and at times came together in 2020. I still feel like I have unfinished business in year 11, having been preparing for GCSEs, which never happened, and yet here we are, four years later. The world has moved on, but I will admit that, in my mind, just sometimes, I wish it could be early 2020 again. I wanted to sit my exams. I wanted a normal year. I wanted a smooth transition into the sixth form.

The biggest lesson I learned from the whole COVID-19 experience is to appreciate what we have. We need to appreciate the world we live in, the people around us, and the experiences we have, because we never, ever know when it could be uprooted. I have always been a reflective person, and perhaps this blog reflects that, but I think the pandemic really entrenched this in me. The natural progression of time has been something I have never been able to comprehend, but when the world takes a pause, that progression is broken, and my memories are now split into pre-lock-downs and post-lock-downs. The period of the main part of the pandemic feels like a blur in time. Even four years later.

Thank you for reading! Feel free to ask me any questions you might have in the comments, and I will try my best to answer them.