The challenges facing Welsh Labour at this year's party conference

Welsh Labour members are joining delegates from across the UK at their party’s annual conference in Liverpool, a conference that should be a victory rally but is turning into something much more challenging.

Expectations were high after a landslide election result in July which took Keir Starmer into power with a record majority.

But, since then, criticism over a decision to scrap winter fuel payments for all but the poorest pensioners; and controversy over large donations which paid for clothes and spectacles for Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner; as well as a row about the Prime Minister’s chief of staff’s salary have overshadowed much of what the new government says it hopes to do.

For members in Wales, you can add in the months of turmoil which saw Vaughan Gething forced out of office after just four months as First Minister.

Even with the choice of Eluned Morgan as new First Minister, the challenges keep coming for Welsh Labour.

Polls suggest that it is heading for a difficult Senedd election in 2026 that has been made even harder by the introduction of a new, wholly-proportional electoral system.

Eluned Morgan’s answer to that has been to focus her government on ‘priorities’ - cutting NHS waiting times, creating green jobs, boosting schools standards and improving transport links including an effective rolling-back of 20mph zones.

That’s been criticised by opponents and some within her party as being too little and too late, considering Labour has been in power in Wales for 25 years.

There has also been dismay at the corollary of prioritising: de-prioritising. What policies or projects will be jettisoned to allow this focus to happen?

But, Eluned Morgan believes it’s what she has to do to turn around the many challenges Labour now faces in Wales.

Some within Labour think it’s what Keir Starmer and the UK leadership should be doing too: reminding those voters who chose Labour why they did so and setting out more clearly what his government is for and what it aims to achieve, and how it will make people feel better.

That work probably needs to start with his own membership meeting at their conference in Liverpool.

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