‘Busted flush’: Welsh Labour prepares to fight byelection amid dire polling
For many in Welsh Labour, this summer was the last chance for a rest before the party faces the election battle of its life in next May’s Senedd elections.Instead, Labour found itself in mourning for the MS for Caerphilly, Hefin David, who died suddenly last month.Come October, Welsh Labour will now have to fight a byelection under tragic and untimely circumstances.Plaid Cymru and Reform UK are well ahead in the polls.Losing the longtime Labour stronghold of Caerphilly would deal another serious blow to morale in an election year.
It would also eliminate Labour’s narrow working majority in the Senedd – 30 of the 60 MSs, plus the sole Liberal Democrat – raising questions about Labour’s ability to govern and pass this year’s budget,“Hefin’s death is very sad and challenging for everyone,Because it happened over the recess, the first time we came together to grieve was at the funeral last week, and it’s still sinking in,” a senior Labour source said in Cardiff Bay,David left behind two children and a partner, Vikki Howells, the Labour MS for neighbouring Cynon Valley,The source said: “The final inquest isn’t until April.
Vikki is going to have to go through all that while campaigning,No one wants a byelection on these terms … It’s going to darken the whole year,”The Senedd reconvenes on Monday with a packed legislative agenda to rush through before it dissolves in April, including a landmark bill aimed at tackling homelessness,It must also decide how to retool its investigation into the Welsh government’s handling of the pandemic, after members of the Senedd committee – set up to address gaps in the UK inquiry – quit in July,It was never going to be an easy year for Welsh Labour.
After leading every Cardiff Bay government since devolution in 1999, polls suggest Labour’s base has collapsed and the party will come third next May,Voters’ top priority is Wales’s struggling public services,According to OECD metrics, Welsh children’s reading, maths and science skills slumped to the lowest ever levels in 2024, and NHS waiting lists are much longer than the rest of the UK’s – currently about 20% of Welsh patients wait more than a year for hospital treatment, compared with about 4% in England,Wales remains by far the poorest UK nation,Poverty rates have hovered at about one in five people for decades, and the proportion of that group considered to be in very deep poverty has risen from 33% in the 90s to 47% in 2023, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
“No one underestimates the scale of the fight we have on our hands,” said another Welsh Labour source.Labour’s strategy so far has been to attack Plaid Cymru and Reform UK as unknown quantities lacking governing experience.But those parties are buoyant – as are the Greens, who won a seat from Labour in a Cardiff council byelection last month and are hoping to go from zero to as many as four Senedd seats in May on the back of Labour’s draining support.The Caerphilly byelection means the starting gun for the spring elections has gone off early as the first real test of Reform’s support in Wales.This term, the party has entered the Senedd for the first time, thanks to the defection of the Conservative MS Laura Anne Jones over the summer, but an elected member would bolster the party’s legitimacy and momentum before May.
Nigel Farage appeared for the party’s candidate announcement at the Caerphilly social club on Friday, telling reporters that Reform would “throw everything” at the campaign,Yet analysis by the Welsh Election Study suggests most former loyal Labour voters are turning to Plaid Cymru rather than Farage’s outfit, which is yet to appoint a Welsh leader,Lindsay Whittle, the Welsh nationalist party’s candidate in Caerphilly, kicked off his campaign this week by calling Labour a “spent force in the valleys” and naming Reform as his biggest threat,That was quickly followed by leader of Caerphilly council, Sean Morgan, resigning from Labour, calling the party a “busted flush” and announcing his intention to vote for Plaid Cymru,A senior Plaid Cymru source said: “Whilst we’ve never been complacent about the work ahead … There is profound positivity within the party.
Our message is one of change being possible,”The byelection will be the last Senedd contest held under the first-past-the-post voting system,In May, constituencies will be redrawn, the Senedd will grow from 60 to 96 seats, and every race will become newly competitive under proportional representation,The changes are a particular boon for Reform, which could be the largest party in next year’s Senedd,But Labour and Plaid Cymru have vowed not to work with Reform in a coalition, so if the polls are accurate, only the Welsh nationalist party will have a shot at forming a government.
Another unexpected dynamic in next year’s election comes in the form of the new leftwing Your Party, put together by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.It has found supporters in Beth Winter, the former Cynon Valley Labour MP, and Mark Serwotka, a former general secretary of the PCS union.The pair are hosting a conference in October to discuss getting candidates on the ballot.“Your Party fielding candidates could pose more of a threat of splitting Plaid’s perceived voter base than ours,” said the second Labour source.“There are so many unknowns going into May … It’s going to be a long year but we’re up for it.
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ChatGPT may start alerting authorities about youngsters considering suicide, says CEO
The company behind ChatGPT could start calling the authorities when young users talk seriously about suicide, its co-founder has said.Sam Altman raised fears that as many as 1,500 people a week could be discussing taking their own lives with the chatbot before doing so.The chief executive of San Francisco-based OpenAI, which operates the chatbot with an estimated 700 million global users, said the decision to train the system so the authorities were alerted in such emergencies was not yet final. But he said it was “very reasonable for us to say in cases of, young people talking about suicide, seriously, where we cannot get in touch with the parents, we do call authorities”.Altman highlighted the possible change in an interview with the podcaster Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, which came after OpenAI and Altman were sued by the family of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old from California who killed himself after what his family’s lawyer called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”
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Snapchat allows drug dealers to operate openly on platform, finds Danish study
Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of leaving an “overwhelming number” of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA.The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. However, research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs.Researchers used profiles of 13-year-olds and found a multitude of people selling drugs on Snapchat under usernames featuring keywords such as “coke”, “weed” and “molly”
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On Tuesday, Apple announced the iPhone 17 series with the usual spate of new features, including a thinner design, improved displays and a camera with 4x optical zoom. If you’ve been getting frustrated with your old phone, or just tired of it, the lithe new model may look exactly like the device you need to launch your budding photographic career, reconnect with long-lost friends and maybe even save your life in an emergency.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more
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Nick Clegg chooses difficult jobs. He was the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, a position from which he was surely pulled in multiple directions as he attempted to bridge the divide between David Cameron’s Conservatives and his own Liberal Democrats. A few years later he chose another challenging role, serving as Meta’s vice-president and then president of global affairs from 2018 until January 2025, where he was responsible for bridging the very different worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington DC (as well as other governments). How to Save the Internet is Clegg’s report on how he handled that Herculean task, along with his ideas for how to make the relationships between tech companies and regulators more cooperative and effective in the future.The main threat that Clegg addresses in the book is not one caused by the internet; it is the threat to the internet from those who would regulate it
Apple debuts thinner, $999 iPhone Air at ‘awe-dropping’ annual product event
Apple debuted its latest iPhone on Tuesday, trumpeting the smartphone’s slimmest design yet. The device, named the iPhone Air, is one of several upgrades the company unveiled at its annual product showcase, promoted with the title “awe-dropping”. The event kicked off at 10am PT with the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, speaking in front of its Cupertino headquarters.“Design is at the core of everything we do,” Cook said. The CEO touted the company’s thin iPhone, which sports a width of 5
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