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“I was a proud Labour supporter,” says Pete, a prominent member of Aberystwyth’s LGBT community. When it came to the union of nations that make up the UK, “my feeling has always been that we’re better together. In 2014, I was delighted Scotland remained.”

“I would say now I’m undecided.”

It’s not just Pete. When the UK Supreme Court gave its ruling on biological sex in April, Aberystwyth saw a protest of “a couple of hundred people” – a decent size for a small town, which Pete describes as “the gay capital of Wales”. Within the LGBT community as a whole, “we’re looking at a shift from Labour to Plaid Cymru and independence”, he says.

Down on the promenade, with its back to the roaring Atlantic, is a horse box, which a young man named Tom has transformed into a coffee shop. Tom has a Thames Valley accent, though he’s lived in Wales since his parents moved here when he was seven, and is trying to learn the language.

“I was very political,” he says, “but I’m feeling disenfranchised at the moment”.

Specifically, Tom was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. When I ask him about independence, he’s also undecided, and questions if Wales could afford it. Then I ask him if he’d support independence if it was presented as a route to getting rid of Westminster and establishing the more egalitarian country (something most Welsh people have voted for in almost every election for two centuries), and if someone explained how the British state is the cause of, not the solution to, Welsh poverty. Tom says he’d jump at the idea. 

Opinion polling on Welsh independence is sporadic. There have only been two polls since Keir Starmer came into office, and only one since the freebies scandal took off in September, derailing Labour’s popularity and firing the starting gun on a run of pro-independence polls in Scotland. But that poll in March put 35% in favour of Welsh independence, 50% against, and another 15% – like Pete and Tom – as ‘don’t knows’. Or 41% in favour, excluding undecideds.

Obviously, 41% isn’t a majority. But it is the second highest score for ‘Yes’ ever – 1% behind a single poll at the height of Covid. It also means support for Welsh independence is now as high as that for Scottish independence was before the 2014 referendum campaign. And the (bigger margin of error) crosstabs suggest younger voters are strongly in favour, registering 72% of 25 to 34-year-olds supporting independence. 

What’s more, when voters were asked in March whether they would support independence if it meant Wales could rejoin the EU, 51% said they would. This is the first time any Welsh independence question has produced a pro-independence majority – though the contingency means we need to apply some salt. 

These figures are more significant when you consider the longer term change. In April 2014, as Scotland’s Yes campaign hit its stride, YouGov found only 12% of Welsh people wanted independence, and 74% were against. Until 2019, no major polling agency asking a straight yes-no question had put support levels above 20%. It was only in 2011 that Plaid adopted full support for independence as its official policy – before that, the party always focused on ‘increased autonomy’ or somesuch.

As in Scotland, this shift partly came about because some former Corbyn supporters threw themselves into Welsh independence activism. Corbynism, arriving shortly after Scotland’s referendum, offered a route to democratic socialism through the British state. As it’s become more and more clear throughout Starmer’s leadership that that path is blocked, Welsh leftists have increasingly adopted another strategy. For some, that’s been a conscious shift in their politics. For others, it’s been a subtler, more subconscious change: those who spent the last decade and a half desperate for a Labour government finally got one, only for it to deliver cuts, arm a genocidal Israel, ape Donald Trump and flood itself in corporate freebies. It’s not surprising that, like Tom, many are despondent. It’s also unsurprising that many latch on to the next idea which comes along, offering progressive hope. And, in Wales, independence is becoming that idea.

Politics sometimes operates like a pendulum. At other times, it avalanches. It’s possible the Labour government will do some good things before the next election, and people will warm not just to the party, but to the British state it currently steers. But looking at Starmer and the people around him, that doesn’t really seem likely.

Growing support for independence is partly about attacks on devolution. In January 2024, the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales released its final report. Its dull, establishment-sounding title is matched by the great-and-good chops of its co-chairs: the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and professor Laura McAllister, a Welsh sports icon and now academic at Cardiff University (joined by an equally hefty panel of commissioners). 

Their conclusions were anything but conservative. After touring the country, speaking to hundreds of people, interviewing expert witnesses and much more, they concluded that the current constitutional position of Wales is “vulnerable and unstable”. As they put it: “The UK government and parliament have overridden the Sewel convention on 11 occasions since the 2016 referendum to leave the EU with virtually no scrutiny or challenge at Westminster […] It is clear to us that the current devolution settlement cannot be taken for granted, and is at risk of gradual attrition if steps are not taken to protect it. Citizens should be able to choose ‘no change’, but without urgent action there will be no viable settlement to protect.”  

As a result, they argued, serious change is needed – either enhanced devolution, a federal UK, or independence, each of which, they concluded, was perfectly viable. 

I asked McAllister what response they’d had from the UK government to their report. 

“The UK government hasn’t responded in any shape or form to our independent commission report,” she told me. “[This stonewalling] reflects the huge imbalance of power between the Welsh government and the Senedd, and the UK government and the parliament.” 

“This is […] fundamentally wrong, in my opinion, because the Welsh government comes from a democratic parliament in the Senedd, and yet it’s treated with disdain and a lack of respect – and that’s the same under Labour as it was under successive Conservative governments.”

Even Welsh Labour’s gentle demands for justice and policing powers to be devolved have been ignored by Starmer and his administration. If devolution isn’t made to work – and the report shows a consensus in Welsh civil society that the current model isn’t working – then many will shift towards supporting independence.

“One would imagine,” says McAllister, that unionist parties “would be concerned about such fundamental threats to the union”.

The polls don’t just show support for independence growing. In the 2021 Senedd election, Labour got 40% of the constituency vote, with the Tories on 26% and Plaid on just under 21%. The most recent poll put Plaid first on 30%, Reform second on 25%, Labour third with just 18%, and the Tories on 13%. 

The next Senedd election is more than a year away, so we can be confident things will change one way or another before then. But as one close observer of Welsh politics put it to me, “Plaid is running a brilliant campaign”. This leaves a serious prospect that Labour isn’t just about to lose a major election in Wales for the first time in 100 years, but also that a pro-independence party has a good chance at leading the Welsh government.

It’s not just the polling that’s changed. Last year, the Senedd overhauled how it operates. The somewhat-proportional Additional Member System was abolished, to be replaced by a more proportional system, and a chamber of 96 rather than 60 Senedd members.

The result of this for Plaid as an institution is likely to be significant, even if the party doesn’t get into government. At the moment, Plaid has 12 Senedd members, four MPs, two Lords, a single police and crime commissioner, plus control of four councils. It is, in other words, a relatively small political institution. It’s easy to imagine Plaid’s Senedd members – with the associated staff, policy capacity, and potential to keep bright political minds in Wales – doubling or even tripling. This sort of institutional power, without having to bend for London leaders, is what has allowed the SNP to bed in for nearly 20 years.

Similarly, the larger, more proportional Assembly gives the (pro-independence since 2020) Welsh Greens, currently polling around 5%, a good chance of winning a seat. Were they to achieve this, it seems likely that they would make a break from their English comrades and become an independent party, meaning Welsh members’ subs would be invested in building another pro-independence political institution in Wales.

Even if this doesn’t happen, the current leadership election within the wider Green party of England and Wales offers the prospect – via a Zack Polanski leadership – that the Greens will become the primary political party of the left in England. This would mean that, for the first time in British history, the English left would be led by a party in favour of Scottish and Welsh independence. (For the Welsh Greens, this possibility is tantalising – Anthony Slaughter, their leader, has endorsed Polanski, while another senior Welsh Green told me that an Adrian Ramsay/Ellie Chowns victory would be a ‘disaster’ in Wales.)

None of this means that Welsh independence is about to happen. Indeed, Plaid has already said that if it does win the election next year, it wouldn’t hold a referendum in its first term – and in any case, coming first in a proportional system isn’t the same as winning a majority. 

But what it does mean is that within a dozen years, the idea of Welsh independence has gone from being so marginal that even Plaid wouldn’t support it out loud to being a major strand of Welsh opinion. It’s gone from being an idea largely bound up with romantic mysticism and language activism to the dominant view of younger voters and the Welsh left. It’s gone from being a minor quirk on the Celtic fringe of the British political map to a fact around which everyone will have to navigate.

It’s not hard to imagine that this time next year, Scotland will have a freshly re-elected SNP first minister, backed by a pro-independence parliament, demanding an independence referendum, joined at a press conference by a Sinn Féin first minister of Northern Ireland, a Plaid first minister of Wales, and an English Green party leader with an insurgent movement behind him. I think it’s fair to say that this would scare the British establishment in all the best ways.