What do I make of the European election results?

It was certainly a bad night for us in the Labour party. We were outvoted in Bridgend and came second across the whole of Wales. More of that later.

The first thing that strikes me is that most people stayed at home; only 30% voted in Bridgend, and I suspect that many of them were Labour voters who were too angry to vote but who wouldn’t vote for anybody else. The trick for us will be to make sure they come out in future elections.

For the Conservatives, they came top of the poll in Wales for the first time since 1859. That said though, they only got 21% of the vote, well below the levels they were getting in the 1980s.

For Plaid Cymru, they will be disappointed. Nationalist parties overtook Labour in Scotland and even in Cornwall. They have become an establishment party over the last ten years and so don’t benefit from a protest vote in the way that they used to.

The Lib Dems went nowhere, and they consistently fail to do very much in European elections. Again they came fifth in Wales.

UKIP of course had a member elected in Wales. There’s no doubt that many Labour voters saw UKIP as a pain-free protest vote. UKIP politicians tend to be an amiable bunch, but they tend to think that Britain should go back to where it was around about 1962. There vote increased slightly, but won a seat because the top three parties did relatively badly

Then we have the BNP. They only polled 5% of the vote in Wales, although that was up on last time around. They didn’t do as well as they were telling people that they would. It’s disturbing that a party obsessed with people’s skin pigment colour should have two seats in Europe, but they’re still a small party and the vast majority of people wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.

Things will be difficult for us in Labour and we have suffered most from the expenses issue, although UKIP is the only party that has actually had somebody imprisoned for expenses fraud. We need to do more to reach out to those people who stayed at home and we need some direction in terms of what we plan to do. We have given the impression at UK level over the past few weeks that we’re running around in circles and that must stop.

We also have to show some unity as a party. Why anybody would think that resigning from the Cabinet just before an election would be anything else than self-indulgent I have no idea, but they certainly do not have the interests of the Labour party at heart.

A substantial amount of European money has been pumped into Wales over the past decade. We must make sure that our new MEPs continue to ensure that we continue to get or share.

- First published in the Bridgend GEM (June 2009) -