Alexander Rooney is Chairman of Clwyd East Conservative Association.

Twenty-seven years. That is how long Welsh Labour has governed Wales.

Twenty-seven years of missed targets, broken promises, and an ideological stubbornness that has placed political vanity above the lives of the people they were elected to serve.

On 7th May, the people of Wales have a choice. It is the most consequential choice since devolution began. And getting it wrong could mean another five years, perhaps another generation of managed decline dressed up as progress.

Let us be honest about what 27 years of Labour rule has actually delivered.

Nearly one in four Welsh people are currently waiting for NHS treatment. Wales still has 19 per cent of its total waiting list sitting beyond the one-year mark, compared to less than 2 per cent in England. The cancer treatment target, that 80 per cent of patients should begin treatment within 62 days has never once been met under Labour, with performance languishing at around 61 per cent heading into this election year. Yes, the overall list has fallen in recent months. Labour will shout that from the rooftops. But a structural failure 27 years in the making is not fixed by a few months of marginal progress before an election.

This is not a blip. This is the consequence of a government more interested in expanding its own apparatus than fixing its own failures.

And who has helped them do it? Plaid Cymru. The party that wraps itself in the language of Welsh identity while consistently voting to give Labour the cover to continue. A vote for Plaid is a vote for more of the same, or worse. Their prospectus for Wales includes independence from the United Kingdom and realignment with Brussels. Strip away the sentiment and ask the practical question: what does Welsh independence actually deliver for a family in Rhyl waiting 18 months for an NHS appointment, or a farmer in Flintshire already buckling under Labour’s Sustainable Farming Scheme? The answer is nothing. Plaid’s vision is a distraction dressed as a destination, and Wales cannot afford it.

Then there is Reform.

Reform arrived in Wales wrapped in the language of revolution. Fresh faces. Clean hands. A new start. But look a little closer and the story unravels fast.

Nathan Gill, the first leader of Reform UK in Wales has been jailed for ten and a half years after pleading guilty to eight counts of bribery, having been paid to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament. The sentencing judge described his conduct as a “grave betrayal of the trust vested in him by the electorate” that had “fundamentally compromised the integrity of a legislative body.” A traitor sat at the very top of Reform’s Welsh operation, pocketing £40,000 to do the Kremlin’s bidding in the corridors of European democracy.

Reform’s current Wales leader spent 27 years as a councillor, in Barnet. His idea of “coming home to Wales” was buying a £1 million house in Bath.

Their manifesto, rushed out days after ours, recycled our policies and in some cases the very people who helped develop them, before dressing it all up as something new. They are not a party that understands Wales. They are a party using Wales as a staging post in Nigel Farage’s longer game. Wales is not a priority for Reform.

So, what is the real choice?

It is the Welsh Conservatives, under the leadership of Darren Millar, a man who has spent years in the Senedd chamber holding this Labour Government to account, forensically, relentlessly, and with the kind of grip on detail that only comes from genuinely caring about outcomes rather than optics. Under Darren and the team, we went into this election first, the first party to publish our manifesto, because we were ready, because the work had been done, and because we have nothing to hide.

Our plan — Fix Wales — is a serious, costed programme built not by focus groups but with industry experts, clinicians, farmers, and business owners who know what Wales actually needs.

On tax: we will cut the basic rate of income tax by 1p, putting £450 a year back into the pockets of the average working family. We will scrap Stamp Duty on primary residences to get people moving on the housing ladder again, and cap council tax increases at 5% requiring a public referendum for anything higher.

On health: on day one, we will declare a health emergency. We will reopen closed wards, increase hospital bed numbers, build new community hospitals, and establish surgical hubs and diagnostic centres open seven days a week across Wales. No more targets set and quietly abandoned. No more promises made at election time and forgotten the morning after.

On transport: Wales’ road and rail networks are creaking, not from age, but from a decade of Labour’s anti-motorist ideology. We will end the war on motorists, unfreeze all road projects, scrap the 20mph default speed limit and replace it with a targeted approach that makes actual sense. We will build the M4 relief road, upgrade the A55, deliver a third Menai crossing, and progress the dualling of the A40 in West Wales. We will also work with the UK Government to electrify the North Wales Main Line, because good connectivity is an economic necessity.

On the economy: we will re-establish a Welsh Development Agency to attract investment and create jobs. We will scrap business rates for small firms, pubs, and post offices. We will deliver 125,000 apprenticeships over the next Senedd term. We will boost the farming budget by £100 million and replace Labour’s damaging Sustainable Farming Scheme with one that puts food security first. Wales has world-class assets in energy, aerospace, defence, agriculture, and financial services. We intend to back them.

And on waste, we will scrap Labour’s overseas mini-embassy network, stop funding tree planting in Uganda, abolish the Future Generations Commissioner, and reverse the Senedd expansion that added 36 politicians nobody voted for and nobody wanted.

At Westminster, Keir Starmer’s Government has lurched from one U-turn to the next, forced into reversals on Winter Fuel Payments, Grooming Gangs, and Immigration by Kemi Badenoch and a rebuilt Conservative opposition that is once again fighting with purpose and conviction. Kemi is doing the hard work of renewal, building a serious party back from the ground up, shaped by values and earning genuine respect on the doorsteps across the country.

Wales can be bigger, better, and stronger. It has the talent, the landscape, the industry, and the communities to compete and to thrive. What it has lacked is a government willing to trust its own people.

On 7th May, you have one opportunity to change that.

You can vote for 27 more years of the same, with Labour propped up by a Plaid Cymru that wants to break Wales away from the United Kingdom entirely.

You can roll the dice on a party whose first leader in Wales is serving ten and a half years in prison, whose current leader’s idea of ‘coming home to Wales’ was buying a £1 million house in Bath and whose loyalty lies not with Welsh communities but with Nigel Farage’s personal ambitions.

Or you can choose the grown-ups. A plan that is costed, credible, and built for Wales. Darren Millar and a Welsh Conservative Government that will fix this country, not continue to manage its decline.

The sun does not have to set on Wales. But only if we choose the light.

The post Alexander Rooney: Is Wales about to sleepwalk into another government of failure? appeared first on Conservative Home.