Welsh Labour 'has longest winning streak of any party in the world'

Labour's 100 years of electoral success in Wales is the longest winning streak of any political party in the world, researchers say.

Labour is marking a century since it first won more Welsh seats and votes than its rivals at the general election in November 1922.

It has emerged as Wales' biggest party in every subsequent Westminster election and at all six Senedd elections.

Cardiff University's Prof Richard Wyn Jones said Welsh Labour "is by some distance the democratic world's most successful election-winning machine".

Data compiled by his colleague Jac Larner compares Labour's Welsh success to other parties in regional or sub-state elections around the world.

The South Tyrolean People's Party has won every election in its province of Italy since 1948 and the Christian Social Union has been beating opponents in Bavaria, Germany, since 1953.

Prof Jones, director of Cardiff's Wales Governance Centre, points out that even if Welsh Labour suddenly started losing, both these parties would need decades to catch up.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico has been winning elections since 1929, but they were not all democratic contests.

A digital archive about Labour's history has been created online in collaboration with the National Library of Wales.

Labour is not the first party to dominate Wales: the Liberals did it between 1867 and 1918.

Across the UK, the Conservatives won the 1922 election after the collapse of the coalition government, led by David Lloyd George.

Labour broke through as the second party, overtaking the Liberals.

Historian Deian Hopkin said Labour was well organised and had a clear manifesto in 1922. It also benefited from the creation of new constituencies in the south Wales coalfield, which still form the bedrock of its support.

He said that while "Labour has maintained the heartland it won in 1922, with a small number of seats having remained Labour ever since, the rest of Wales is a more mixed story".

Although the trade unions that built the Labour Party have declined in strength, the boundaries of Labour's safest constituencies have not changed much.

Daryl Leeworthy - author of Labour Country, about the politics of south Wales - says the results of the 2021 Senedd election shows Labour still relies heavily on the same territory it won in 1921.

"It's the same places of power, the same constituencies and the same areas, the same sort of people they [Labour] are talking to," Dr Leeworthy said.

Women were an "essential component" of Labour's progress in 1922, he said, even though they were denied the same voting rights as men until 1928.

"We tend to think about Labour politics being dominated by miners' federations and male industry. But women were as much a part of it as men."

There have been Labour landslides in 1945, 1966 and 1997, but there is one seat - Montgomeryshire - that Labour has never won.