Rob Hughes, YesCymru Director

It has been a long time coming.

Whilst following the result in Caerffili, there were some clear takeaways: Labour’s vote collapsed; Reform UK arrived expecting a coronation but left visibly shaken; the Conservatives and Lib Dems lost their deposits, and then some; and Plaid Cymru won by a wide margin.

Yet somehow, the London press and commentators missed what was potentially the biggest story of the night. This is not surprising given their complete ambivalence towards Wales, their failure to grasp the reasoning behind the result, and their uncertainty about what Welsh parties actually stand for.

But miss it they did. So here is a quick attempt to rebalance the narrative.

I’m from a Welsh family but was brought up in Reading. So I always felt like a Cymro oddi cartref (a Welshman away from home), and I moved to Wales at another critical time in 1997. On moving to Wales permanently, I was shocked by how few people backed independence.

The devolution vote in 1997 was far closer than my untrained eye expected it to be, and the game looked lost until the winner from Carmarthenshire deep into added time.

Scorned Wales

I had come from an area that scorned Wales, that looked to exploit it at any time. I remember during times of water shortages, rather than looking at how the south-east of England might solve its problems with local infrastructure, conversations commonly included phrases like “can’t we just drown another village no-one can pronounce and build a new reservoir in Wales?”.

An interesting observation that I’ve had since then is that many of those who believe in Welsh independence have spent some time in England – living there, working there, or going to university there. Maybe we could make it a thing!

So, in the Merthyr valleys, I was a bit of an oddity. Not because I was, in their eyes, an Englishman who supported independence, but because I supported independence at all. It was polling at about 3% to 5% at the time and genuinely looked as unachievable as living on Jupiter.

The shift towards supporting independence has been credited to key events and an awakening in national awareness. The Scottish referendum in 2014 gave people in Wales a realistic fear that Scotland might go, and we started to question “what is Wales?” on a national level.

Euro 2016

The formation of YesCymru is a direct result of that time. Euro 2016 brought us together as a nation – no north and south, no Welsh-speaking / non-Welsh-speaking friction, but an urban and rural one nation united behind Bale.

Covid gave us an insight into how a Welsh Government could govern better. And for independence, once you make the leap forwards, you don’t generally turn back. It has remained in the forefront since, with celebrities, politicians and a growing number of Welsh people, specifically younger people, supportive.

Which brings us back to the biggest story of the night in the Caerphilly by-election.

Since support for independence began to grow in around 2016, independence-supporting parties have won around a quarter of the vote, keeping pace with general support for independence (currently at around 40%) before stagnating. In 2016 it was 25.9%, rising to 28.5% in 2021. In Westminster elections the story is similar but slightly worse, with 25.5% voting for pro-indy parties in 2024.

In Caerphilly, on the 23rd of October 2025, at least 49.3% of voters chose indy-supporting parties: Plaid Cymru, the Greens and Gwlad. If, for the sake of mischief, we add the oft-quoted figure of half of Labour voters supporting indy, we get to around 55%. Before the cries of “lending votes”, “Plaid doesn’t really believe in independence”, or “it was to keep Reform out” start, I want to give you a little scenario.

In Wales, if you don’t vote Reform, you don’t like Reform. Reform have a small target area for potential new supporters – their vote is what it is. Labour are going to struggle. There is every chance that Plaid Cymru will be the biggest party in the Senedd and form the Government in May. For Scotland, see Wales, probably with the SNP / Greens / Alba winning a higher share of the vote. With no election until 2027, Sinn Féin will be the largest party in Stormont.

Seismic Change

If Reform win the UK General Election, we will have the perfect recipe for fundamental and seismic change in the make-up of the UK. A British nationalist Reform government in Westminster could well be too much to stomach – not only for the Scots to walk away, but for the Welsh too. Soft No voters will be far easier to convince if this plays out, and unlike Scotland we have no organised hard-core pro-Union networks to fight the Unionist corner.

So, as the Tories quite rightly predicted, we are sleepwalking to independence. Except when we wake up, it’s not the nightmare they promised, it’s an achievable, realistic dream full of hope and potential.

We are quite possibly sitting on the cusp of independence, and no-one east of the border has any idea that it is happening. That is the biggest story from Caerphilly – the Welsh are on the move! We are oddities no more. Independence is normal.

Just don’t tell the London media… long live their ambivalence towards Wales!

This article was originally published in Nation.Cymru on 29 October 2025.