Plaid showed Labour that you don't beat the far right by pretending to be it

TetleysTLDR: The Summary

Plaid Cymru’s stunning surge past Labour and Reform signals a revolt against Starmer’s hollow centrism. Once the party of the working class, Labour now mimics Tory rhetoric on borders, welfare, and war, governing like a corporate caretaker terrified of upsetting donors.  Starmer’s purge of the left, support for draconian immigration laws, and moral cowardice over Gaza have exposed a party stripped of soul and conviction.  Plaid, by contrast, offer authentic socialism rooted in community, equality, and courage, proving you can fight fascism without imitating it.  Their success shows that trust and clarity beat spin and cowardice.  Labour’s obsession with appeasing the right only legitimises it, shifting politics further toward authoritarianism.  If Starmer’s Labour continues to chase Reform voters with Tory slogans, it will lose not to the far right but to a resurgent democratic left that still remembers what solidarity means.  Perhaps that would be for the best. 

TetleysTLDR: The article

For the first time in living memory, the red wall cracked not under the weight of Tory bluster, but from the hollow thud of Labour’s own betrayal. In a stunning upset, Plaid Cymru surged past both Reform and Labour, capturing the hearts of communities that had flown the Labour banner for a century. Towns once defined by solidarity and working-class pride finally turned their backs on a party that long ago traded conviction for careerism. The message from Wales was deafeningly clear: you don’t beat fascists by pretending to be them.

When you watch Sir Keir Starmer speak these days, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d tuned into a Tory broadcast with better diction. The flags, the ‘hard-working families’, the ‘secure borders’ rhetoric, it’s all there, like a reheated UKIP manifesto with a polite accent. The Labour Party, once the party of the people, has become the political equivalent of a Tesco meal deal: bland, corporate, and pretending to be nourishing. 

Yet across Offa’s Dyke, Plaid Cymru, with a fraction of Labour’s resources have managed to articulate something Starmer and his grey army can’t: conviction.  Plaid have proven that you can stand up to right-wing nationalism without capitulating to it. The lesson is clear: you can’t beat fascists by copying their policies. 

Since taking office in 2024, Keir Starmer’s government has governed like an embarrassed accountant rather than a reforming party.  His ‘five missions’  growth, green energy, crime, NHS reform, opportunity sound fine on paper but amount to managerial waffle without ideology.  Even the Institute for Government called them vague aspirations lacking measurable ambition. (Institute for Government, 2024). The Guardian captured the public mood bluntly: “Starmer won power without a purpose” (The Guardian, 2 April 2025). His government behaves like a caretaker administration terrified of upsetting the boardroom class it once pretended to challenge. Polling reflects that fatigue: Ipsos found Starmer’s dissatisfaction rating had hit 61 percent, a record low for a new prime minister. (Ipsos, 2025). The British public can smell a fake and Starmer’s Labour stinks of calculation. 

^{Y ddraig Goch, the Welsh Red dragon slaying the twistedly co-opted St George of Reform.  The poster reads 'Well done Plaid, Fascists are not welcome in Wales'.}   

Starmer’s strategists claim their rightward drift is tactical, a bid to neutralise the far right and Reform UK by stealing their talking points on immigration and ‘British values’.   It’s a strategy lifted straight from the Blairite playbook: triangulate, posture, move right, and hope the left has nowhere else to go. 

There’s only one problem with this.  It’s bollocks.   

History shows this is suicidal. Tony Blair’s accommodation with neoliberalism didn’t defeat Thatcherism, it entrenched it.  Similarly, Starmer’s mimicry of authoritarian rhetoric doesn’t blunt fascism, it legitimises it.  Every time Labour echoes Tory or Reform talking points, it moves the political centre further right. When the government pushed its Secure the Borders bill in February 2025:  legislation tightening asylum restrictions and expanding detention powers, even Liberty called it ‘a moral disgrace and a breach of international law’.  (Liberty UK, 2025).  Yet Labour MPs dutifully marched through the lobby to support it. 

Starmer has managed the near-impossible: becoming the most unpopular Prime Minister in modern British history. That’s no small feat given the rogues’ gallery that came before him: Cameron’s austerity, May’s paralysis, Johnson’s corruption, Truss’s chaos, and Sunak’s soulless technocracy.  And yet somehow, Starmer has outdone them all. He promised competence and integrity, but has delivered only cowardice and contempt. His government reeks of managerial mediocrity, obsessed with optics while Britain crumbles. From Gaza to the NHS, from housing to workers’ rights, his moral void is breathtaking.  He governs not with conviction but with calculation, terrified of offending the very elites Labour once existed to challenge.  The result is a vacuum where leadership should be, a man so determined to please everyone that he inspires no one.  Starmer isn’t just unpopular; he’s toxic, a walking symbol of betrayal, hollow ambition, and the death of Labour’s soul.

He purged the party of its left, smeared critics as extremists, and turned Labour HQ into a McCarthyite compliance factory.  Jewish Voice for Labour, Stop the War, and Palestine Solidarity activists have all been hounded, suspended, or expelled. (Middle East Eye, 2024).  This is where we are at, a none Jew expelling Jews because he says they are antifuckingsemitic.  That’s not just through looking glass, that’s sticking the V’s to the real world from the other side.   

In short, Labour’s leadership thinks you can beat the far right by behaving like them banning dissent, stoking nationalist sentiment, and waging war on the poor. This of course will never happen. 

Plaid Cymru on the other hand shows there is another path.  Founded in 1925, Plaid have never held Westminster power, yet they’ve consistently punched above their weight in shaping Welsh political discourse.  Unlike Labour, they haven’t disowned socialism or working-class identity, they’ve modernised it. Their commitment to equality, language, and self-determination sits within a clear anti-fascist, pro-community framework.  At the party’s centenary conference in 2025, leader Rhun ap Lorwerth declared: “We are here to build a fair nation, not a fearful one”. (Plaid Cymru Press, 2025). 

Plaid’s policies on universal free school meals, a Welsh Green New Deal and publicly owned energy aren’t radical slogans: they’re functional socialism.  And people respond. In the Caerphilly by-election, Plaid took 47 percent of the vote, hammering Labour into third place. (Financial Times, 2025). They succeed because unlike Labour they don’t try to appease bigotry, they confront it with vision.   Plaid are living proof that when you speak with conviction, people listen.  Their success is based on listening to the people unlike Labour who rule through focus groups and of course there’s a big difference in the outcome. 

Labour’s real problem isn’t policy, it’s fear.  Starmer is terrified of the Daily Mail, terrified of the corporate donors, terrified of his own membership. That cowardice seeps through everywhere: 

• Immigration: Labour has retained the Tory framework of “illegal migration”, despite the UN warning it breaches refugee conventions. (UNHCR, 2024).
• Welfare: The party flirted with resurrecting sanctions on benefits claimants, until a rebellion forced a U-turn. (The Guardian, 27 June 2025).
• Palestine: Labour MPs were whipped to abstain on a ceasefire motion while Gaza burned, leading even The Independent to call it ‘a stain on the party’s soul’. (The Independent, 2024).

Each decision reinforces the far-right narrative: that compassion is weakness and cruelty is strength. This isn’t leadership. It’s cowardice wrapped in a red rosette. Plaid Cymru’s politics, rooted in localism and solidarity, offer five lessons Labour desperately needs to relearn. 

• Authentic identity matters: Plaid connects cultural identity to progressive politics. Welshness isn’t exclusionary — it’s emancipatory. Labour, by contrast, treats “Britishness” like a PR prop, waving flags while outsourcing national assets to hedge funds.
• Communities need power, not pity.
  Plaid’s emphasis on devolved decision-making gives people agency. Labour’s top-down managerialism tells working-class communities to wait for Westminster permission.
• Consistency builds trust.
  Plaid’s message hasn’t changed with the wind. Labour’s has changed with the polls.
• Courage wins respect.
  Plaid stood against austerity, against privatisation, and against militarism  even when unpopular. Labour sacked MPs for doing the same
• Local roots beat London spin.
  Plaid’s success stems from being of Wales, not merely in Wales. Starmer’s Labour, meanwhile, is a party of think-tank alumni, corporate lawyers and Oxbridge PPE clones,  a party that speaks fluent focus group but not the language of the street.

Starmer’s political project often sold as grown-up politics is, in truth, moral bankruptcy disguised as pragmatism.  

Take the NHS.  His health secretary Wes Streeting has openly courted private providers, declaring he wants to 'use spare capacity in the independent sector'.  (BBC News, 2024).  Well, the one thing the NHS doesn’t need is more private vultures: it needs funding, staff, and democratic accountability.   And yet Labour seems determined to hand what’s left of the service to Serco, Palantir and Virgin Care.  

Look at housing: Labour’s so-called pro-growth reforms are a charter for developers, not tenants.  There’s no plan to re-empower local councils to build social housing, no rent controls and no move against MPs who moonlight as landlords. The rot goes deeper.  The Labour Party that once defended miners, dockers and nurses now defends Israel’s genocide in Gaza, NATO’s endless wars and billionaire donors like Sir Trevor Chinn.  Its soul has been sold for a seat at the grown-ups’ table where it behaves like a petulant child if it is challenged. 

And here’s the thing that Labour has really fucked up on: copying fascists doesn’t neutralise them, it normalises them

Plaid, by contrast, demonstrates that progressive patriotism is possible. You can celebrate national identity without scapegoating migrants.  You can demand security without surrendering rights.  You can defend communities without succumbing to nationalism.  Labour could learn from that:  if it still had the humility to learn and if Starmer wasn’t such an arrogant power hungry weapons grade turd.

And here’s the thing that Labour has really fucked up on: copying fascists doesn’t neutralise them, it normalises them. When you parrot their talking points, you validate their worldview. 

One of Plaid’s key insights is that democracy is not a spectator sport.  They have long argued that devolving power is essential to defeating extremism.  Fascism , on the other hand, feeds on alienation - people who feel voiceless are easy prey. Wales, with its Senedd and civic institutions, shows what regional democracy can achieve.  Yet Starmer’s Labour treats devolution like an inconvenience.  Central control is baked into their DNA,  a bureaucratic reflex left over from Blairism. 

If Labour truly wanted to renew Britain, it would emulate Plaid’s model of participatory democracy: regional banks, community energy, citizen assemblies, worker-owned enterprises.   Of course that requires trust in ordinary people,  something Starmer clearly lacks and almost certainly doesn’t want. Every major moral test of the past three years has found Labour wanting. 

• Rwanda deportations: Labour abstained on the vote to scrap the policy, fearful of appearing “soft on borders.” (Sky News, 2024).
• Gaza ceasefire: Starmer refused to back an immediate ceasefire, even as the death toll passed 40,000.
• Strikes: The party disciplined MPs who joined picket lines while praising ‘fiscal discipline’

This isn’t a movement.  It’s a corporate holding company in red livery.  The same soulless managerialism that gutted public life under Blair now returns under Starmer, only with less charisma and more cowardice. If Labour wants to survive as more than a vehicle for careerists, it must learn these lessons from Plaid Cymru: 

1. Rebuild ideological clarity.  Stop pretending ‘centrist realism’ is anything but surrender.  Britain needs a moral economy,  wealth taxes, green jobs, rent controls, re-nationalisation.
2. Decentralise power.  Empower local governments, unions, and communities. Westminster isn’t the centre of the universe.
3. Defend human rights.  From Gaza to refugees, stand for something principled.  You can’t lead with your spine removed.
4. Re-democratise the party.  End the witch-hunts.  Restore member power. Without internal democracy, Labour is just another cartel.
5. Ditch the donors.  A workers’ party cannot be funded by hedge-fund managers and arms dealers.

Plaid Cymru’s success isn’t mystical, it’s moral clarity married to community power. Labour’s arrogance is breath-taking.  It assumes that the left has nowhere to go.  But anger is brewing.  The Green Party’s membership has skyrocketed. (The Times, 2025), trade unions are quietly regrouping outside Labour’s orbit, independent left movements are re-emerging. If Labour doesn’t change, it will be overtaken not by Reform, but by a revitalised democratic left that refuses to bow to fascism in a red tie. 

The fight against fascism isn’t won in focus groups.  It’s won by conviction, courage, and solidarity.  Labour once understood that.  The party of Bevan and Benn knew that you can’t beat reactionaries by imitating them, you beat them by inspiring people with a vision of justice.  Furthermore the bundish socialist ancestors of Jewish Voice for Labour learned the hard way in Cable Street under the truncheons of the London Police that the state always sides with the fascists.

Keir Starmer has turned Labour into a machine for suppressing dissent, sanitising radicalism, and flattering the establishment.  The result is a party hollowed of purpose, marching in step with the very forces it claims to oppose. Plaid Cymru show another path: one grounded in community, identity, and moral integrity.  They remind us that socialism doesn’t need to apologise for itself, it needs to organise. 

So yes, Labour should learn from Plaid Cymru. Because if it doesn’t, it will soon discover that when you spend your life copying fascists, you end up indistinguishable from them and history never forgives cowards who stood for nothing when it mattered most.  Perhaps it would be for the best, because Starmer's Labour is unrecognisable from the founding principles of the democratic socialist party it began as.  Now it is neither democratic or socialist and thanks to Starmer it deserves to sit in the dustin of history.  

A bit of shameless self-plugging here. This is www.TetleysTLDR.com blog. It's not monetised. Please feel free to go and look at the previous blogs on the website and if you like them, please feel free to share them.