Welsh farmers are abandoning Labour

CARDIFF, Wales — At the edge of a sprawling wheat field on the outskirts of Cardiff, arable farmer Richard Anthony sticks a shovel in the ground and offers up a fistful of soil for a sniff. 

“The first thing [I do when] I walk into a field: I catch a handful of soil,” he says. “[The] first thing I do is smell it, to see if it smells healthy.”

His mind is on climate change.

The clump in his palm is indeed healthy — but it’s dry. It comes at the tail end of an unusually hot spring. Anthony and his wife, Lyn, are planting crops in increasingly short “weather windows,” dodging the wet days of the previous fall.

“It does worry me,” he told POLITICO, acres of wheat plants swaying behind him. “But we, as farmers, have always had to adapt. And we’re having to adapt to climate change.”

Farmers like the Anthonys are looking for guidance from the Senedd — the Labour-led devolved Welsh parliament down the road in Cardiff Bay. “Farming is seen as the biggest problem with climate change, and we’re not. We’re the only industry that can actually do something about it,” Anthony said.

But Welsh ministers’ key environmental plans are in disarray, delayed for over a year after farmers angrily rejected proposals they say would hit jobs and livelihoods.

Annoying farmers is bad news for Labour in Wales, a country where 90 percent of land is given over to agriculture. And it has consequences in Westminster, too, for a U.K. government that can’t afford another political bloody nose.

Welsh national elections next May will be a crucial mid-term litmus test for the appeal of Keir Starmer’s embattled Labour. The 2026 Senedd vote is seen by party leaders in London “as a staging post between now and [the general election in] 2029,” said one Welsh union boss in February.

Labour is going backward in Wales. 

Welsh polls published Tuesday show Labour, in charge at the Senedd since 1999, dropping to third place, losing support to both populists Reform UK and nationalists Plaid Cymru. The party is being punished, experts say, for its own perceived inertia and a far too cozy relationship with Westminster.

“The Welsh government are in a very difficult situation, in that both they are unpopular as incumbents and they’re also paying a price for the unpopularity of the U.K. Labour government,” said Jac Larner, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “So at the moment there is a general resistance, I think, to taking any tough decisions.” 

The climate moment

Faltering climate policy contributes to the sense that Welsh ministers are “losing perceptions of competence,” Larner argued.

The challenge is substantial. Within the next decade, agriculture could become Wales’ largest source of emissions. To hit a U.K.-wide target of net zero by 2050, most emissions cuts will have to come from high-polluting sectors like farming.

The Welsh government’s solution is the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) — a program designed to help farmers adopt low-carbon activities like planting more trees.

The thinking is that with the offer of cash, farmers will dedicate more of their land to mopping up planet-wrecking emissions, making the most of its natural potential to sequester carbon and store it deep in the soil. Wales should reap the benefits of these “natural carbon sinks,” says the U.K.’s independent climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee. 

But ministers paused the SFS roll-out after initial plans, published in December 2023, provoked protests and a backlash over a draft 10 percent tree-planting target, which farmers said would cost thousands of agricultural jobs.

The Welsh government says details will now be finalized this summer, with the scheme up and running in 2026.

With 90 percent of its land used for farming, Wales is seeing instability over climate and agriculture policy. | Abby Wallace/POLITICO

“I think we’ve come from such a bad place, it’s going to be quite hard to lift it back up,” said Abi Reader, a dairy farmer and deputy president of the National Farmers Union Cymru. 

Behind Reader, on her farm in the Cardiff town of Wenvoe, a large shed groans as rows of cattle diligently shuffle into the parlour, waiting to be hooked up to clinking machines for milking.

“It’s difficult to say whether we should be signing up to it [the SFS] or not, because we’ve got no details of any of the costings,” Reader said. 

“We’re all business people at the end of the day and, you know, we’ve all already done our budgets for next year. And there’s nothing to go to a bank manager with and say: ‘I want to borrow this, or can you support me for that?’”

‘Bang, bang, kick a man’

The SFS has caused unrest on another politically sensitive topic: livestock.

A Welsh government estimate suggested the scheme could reduce livestock numbers by as much as 120,000.

If ministers in Cardiff follow separate CCC advice published in May — on how to hit climate goals by 2033 — cattle and sheep numbers in Wales need to fall by nearly a fifth.

Some of this will come from wider trends toward lower meat and dairy consumption — but it will also be driven by policies like the SFS, which incentivize farmers to rely less on livestock. The Welsh government must “engage with farmers and their communities, and support them to diversify their incomes,” the CCC said.

This advice has spooked farmers, who see a threat to years of family-owned businesses.

“Would that mean I’d have to move away from here?” asked third-generation beef farmer Tom Rees in his kitchen in Cowbridge, gesturing to the fields beyond the window where his father and grandfather also farmed.

His farm slopes downhill toward a patch of land that often floods when a neighboring river overflows. It’s sliced up into rectangular fields by colorful hedgerows that act as corridors for local wildlife and as shelter for his cows on sunny days — but planting hedges isn’t how Rees wants to earn a living.

“I went to college to study agriculture, to come on the farm because I wanted to produce food,” he said. “I don’t want to plant a woodland.”

Rees hopes to pass the farm on to his 15-month-old son Henry — but is worried about uncertainty over the SFS, as well as issues around bovine tuberculosis and inheritance tax changes.

He said: “Dad’s left the farm in a better place than when he took it on. We want to take it on a bit further, so we could leave it for Henry. … [But] with the government in Westminster and the government in the Senedd — you just really feel, Why are we bothering?

“It’s bang, bang, kick a man while you’re down. That’s what it feels like, and that’s what a lot of farmers feel like in Wales.”

The Welsh government refused to comment on the SFS, confirming only that details will be published this month.

A spokesperson said the government is “reviewing” the CCC’s advice, which will inform decisions on a new climate goal for Wales before the end of the year.

“We’re trying to take forward a future for agriculture in Wales, which is to do with thriving, living businesses and communities within Wales,” Huw Irranca-Davies, Wales’ cabinet secretary for climate change and rural affairs, told POLITICO in an interview last year.

Annoying voters

Labour’s support has traditionally been low in rural Wales, where votes flow instead to the Conservatives or Plaid Cymru. But the mess over agricultural policies is deepening Labour’s woes, argued Cardiff University’s Larner.

“By annoying these people, you kind of block off the possibility that any of these people at all will vote Labour,” he said, “So it’s just a kind of narrowing of the vote pool in which you can fish for extra voters come other elections.”

Meantime, Plaid Cymru and Reform are making their pitches to rural voters.

“You have to take the farmers with you on this journey. And that’s one lesson, I think, that the Welsh government has learned the hard way,” said Llyr Gruffydd, Senedd member for North Wales and Plaid’s agriculture and rural affairs spokesperson.

Plaid will “reassess” the SFS when more details are published, Gruffydd said. His party is not about to announce plans to “plow a different furrow,” he said, but he didn’t rule out ditching the unpopular scheme either. When Plaid sees the plans, Gruffydd argued, it can decide “whether this is something that we can pursue, whether we feel we need to amend it — or, God forbid, whether we have to say, let’s get back to the drawing board.”

Nigel Farage’s Reform, riding high in the polls and fresh from smashing Labour in local elections in May, wants to scrap net-zero targets altogether. “Farmers want lower costs to stay afloat. Net stupid zero adds costs for no benefit,” said Deputy Leader Richard Tice.

Reform is set to benefit, too, from anger over the fate of Welsh steelmaking. Thousands of job losses loom at the Port Talbot plant as it shifts to a lower-emitting electric arc furnace, a political gift to Farage when he argues that climate-friendly policies wreck traditional industries.

“That’s the one big example we’ve seen of net-zero related policy, and is one of loss of jobs with not very much put in place to support workers to do anything different,” said Joe Rossiter, co-director at the Institute of Welsh Affairs.

“When it all shakes out, I do think the fight will be Labour vs. Reform for the top spot,” said one Labour insider who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. The U.K. government “has been completely focused on making sure the transition to green steelmaking is as good as it can be.”

Asked about the example of Port Talbot, Reader, the dairy farmer, was nervous about the precedent it set for other climate policies. “If they damage Welsh agriculture in the same way [as steel], I think that’s really letting down Wales,” she said. 

All in it together

The Welsh government’s other big problem? It has cuddled up so tightly to Westminster that Labour’s performance in Cardiff will rebound in London and vice-versa.

“There’s no ‘other’ for them to blame, because they’ve tied themselves very closely, rhetorically as well, to the U.K. government,” Larner said.

Some Welsh Labour MPs defend the U.K. government’s record. “If you look at the amount of money that the Labour Party is investing in the agricultural sector, that shows a huge commitment to the industry,” said Henry Tufnell, Labour MP for Pembrokeshire.

After months spent arguing the benefits of having Labour governments in both Cardiff and London, Senedd First Minister Eluned Morgan in May pivoted to emphasize the divide between them. Expect more attempts to put “clear red water” between the two camps, Larner said.

Yet when Starmer addressed the Welsh Labour conference in north Wales last month, the old closeness was back. “Next year it’s a clear choice. Two Labour governments working together for the people of Wales … or risk rolling back all the progress we are making,” the prime minister said.

As Starmer spoke, a clutch of farmers protested outside. ‘Starmer: farmer harmer,’ read one placard. Voters will say soon enough what they make of that bond between Labour in Wales and Westminster.