STANDING in the main square in Tonypandy, deep in the Rhondda valley, history comes at you from all directions.

Here, in 1910, troops dispatched by Home Secretary Winston Churchill battled striking miners. Down the road, in Clydach Vale, the miners of the Cambrian combine took the landmark strike action which had led to the clash.

A stone’s throw away, on De Winton Fields, the community rallied in 1936 to drive Mosley’s Blackshirts out of the Rhondda in the fascists’ first and only foray into the valleys.

Wander a few hundred yards south and you are in Penygraig, which elected Annie Powell as the borough’s Communist Party mayor — your reporter was in Rhondda on polling day in 1979 when her re-election secured the achievement.

Yet this neighbourhood, steeped in the struggles of generations, is now a front line in a new battle — to prevent the hard-right Reform party gaining a powerful base in Welsh politics via next year’s Senedd elections.

It would have seemed inconceivable just a few years ago. For generations, the Rhondda has been overwhelmingly Labour — since before there was even a Labour Party, in fact, its politics rooted in the communal experience of exploitation and solidarity generated by the coal mining industry.

Often, other parties did not bother to compete, allowing the Labour candidate, sponsored by the miners’ union, to be returned unopposed. A serious challenge came for a while from the Communist Party, with Harry Pollitt coming close to winning the Rhondda East seat in 1945.

Subsequently, Plaid has sometimes made a showing but has never really troubled Labour in a general election. All that is now history.

A small statistic caught the eye in last year’s election. In the new Rhondda and Ogmore constituency, uniting Rhondda with other, smaller former mining valleys with very similar pasts and present demography, the Labour vote fell below 50 per cent for the first time in more than a century.

The undistinguished Chris Bryant MP still retained the seat, since the 55 per cent non-Labour vote was split several ways. But still. It felt like tectonic plates moving.

The South Wales coalfield has not actually been a coalfield for many years now. But its Labour traditions died hard. In the famous “red wall” collapse of the 2019 election, every former coalfield in England returned at least one — often more — Tory MP on the back of Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit done” slogan and generations of being both neglected and taken for granted.

Not South Wales. The visceral hatred of Toryism in the valleys remained, and remains, too strong for that. I recall then-premier Jim Callaghan, no leftwinger by any stretch, taunting the junior Winston Churchill in the Commons in 1978 with his grandfather’s historic antipathy to the miners of South Wales. 

That folk tradition was too much even for Johnson’s cynical charm and fluent fibs. Nigel Farage — now that seems to be a different matter. 

Addressing a public meeting in the NUM hall — branding has outlasted social reality by a distance — in Tonypandy, a woman rises to denounce the perceived corruption of politicians — Rachel Reeves was the target of her particular animus — and eagerly anticipated Farage “sorting it all out.”

I pointed out that the Reform leader had been happy to draw handsome expenses in the European Parliament for doing little for decades, and now topped the outside earnings league table for serving MPs.

It would be fantastic to report that these facts changed a mind, but I am not at all sure they did. For that, more is needed and, fortunately, more is at hand.

I was sharing a platform with Beth Winter, an outstanding former Labour MP rooted in the valleys. She represented the neighbouring Cynon Valley until the last election, prior to which the Starmer gang de-selected her amidst the usual shenanigans.

Today, she campaigns around community empowerment in entirely disempowered communities in the valleys, often alongside Leanne Wood, the former Plaid Cymru leader who is probably the only figure from the party to have really established herself in those parts, largely because she is a socialist.

When Winter speaks, she illustrates what Labour is now missing on its back benches — MPs who combine both a deep-rootedness in working-class experience with a broad socialist vision. She is a powerful orator and, unlike so many Labour MPs in similar areas, very clearly not a visitor from another planet.

Speaking to the Star before the event, she is clear-eyed about the challenge the left faces in former strongholds like Rhondda.

“The valleys have become fractured, and there is a huge vacuum. Many people — up to 50 per cent — didn’t vote in the last parliamentary election. They are disillusioned, disenchanted, distrustful of the Establishment,” she says.

Communities have “suffered the ravages of capitalism in the valleys — we have been exploited and our wealth extracted. Labour has only been interested in maintaining the status quo. The PLP is now authoritarian, cutting benefits, keeping the two-child benefit cap and complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

“The vacuum has sadly and frighteningly been filled by Reform and the far right. In the general election last year, they came second in 13 seats in Wales, eight of them in the valleys. It is a direct reflection of the complete disillusionment.

She warns that “Reform could win 20 to 40 seats out of 96 at the Senedd elections” due next year, in an expanded assembly to be chosen entirely under proportional representation.

But she sees the hard-right party as vulnerable to challenge. Just a few days before our interview, Farage himself had been at Port Talbot pledging to restart the blast furnaces shuttered at the steel works last year, and even reopen coal mines — the last pit in the Rhondda shut 35 years ago.

This was, Winter says, a misstep by the Reform leader-owner, promising what working people know full well to be impossible. “No-one is under any illusions — the coal mines are gone,” she said.

“But the next year will be pivotal for Reform. They could form a minority government, which will be a springboard for parliamentary elections in the future. We have not had many migrants here, they have just tapped into the hopelessness of ordinary people,” she said.

To counter that, she is working with others to rebuild a progressive politics. “There is a strong tradition of political struggle, change and trade unionism. 

“We know people are looking for something else — equality, fairness, tackling economic crisis, new jobs from the green industrial revolution. People voted for hope in 2017, not so very long ago.”

Warming to her theme she adds: “And tax the rich! Tax the 1 per cent more. Take utilities back into public ownership, everyone would support that. We have got to work together. There is scope for a left alternative.”

Winter is involved in trying to develop that alternative. She left Labour last year but has redoubled her political activity, taking community wealth-building initiatives and setting up a monthly socialist reading group in the Cynon valley.

She is categoric: “Labour has had its day. Its historic link with the industries, the workers has gone. Young people now think differently — they are into issue-based campaigns. 

“I help at a foodbank — people are living day-to-day. There is not that fire in the belly; they have been so downtrodden. But if a realistic alternative is offered, we can build, a movement developing around people not profit.”

The past, Winter says, must be “used to inform the future.” Her own grandfather took part in the 1930s hunger marches from Rhondda, and I meet her parents, long-standing communists. We exchange reminiscences of the late Bert Pearce, long-time leader of the party in Wales.

And yes — inform the future. Winter walks the talk. Her speech wins warm applause from the crowded hall.

“Farage is resonating with people who have lost hope,” she tells listeners. 

“We deserve a future where you do not have to choose between heating and eating, do not have foodbanks, where everyone has a safe, secure, well-paid job, where young people think they have a future here, do not have to leave, where public services are properly funded, and not outsourced to the private sector.

“The seeds of hope are all around us — to get the change we need — and we can succeed,” she concludes.

Her analysis is shared by Wood, the former Plaid leader, Rhondda-born and bred. Speaking to the Star the next day, she describes the slow-burn neglect that has led to this moment.

“This is a moment of despair, frustration, and anger among people over economic breakdown. It has been slow, incremental over the 40 years since the end of the miners’ strike. Each decade since there has been a diminishing of people’s economic circumstances. 

“There has been a big increase in the number of people requiring foodbanks, the number of job losses, the NHS is in crisis, people waiting longer for operations. The cost-of-living crisis, rises in bills for food and energy,” she says.

“People feel overall they can’t see a way out. The far right offers simple remedies to these problems. But they are leading people up the garden path.

“Farage’s man of the people act is just bull,” she adds. The left, by contrast, has real roots in these areas. “We have the ability to connect with people that Reform does not. It is not working in our communities — it is social media only.”

She describes her work with Winter “on a pilot project about how people respond to coming back into communities and working to make things better.” It has so far targeted Gurnos near Merthyr Tydfil, Aberdare in the Cynon valley and Treherbert in Rhondda.

“We are doing something in communities which is positive on the left. People value coming together — they are so disconnected today, social spaces closed — pubs, libraries, community centres.”

And she too is an advocate of mobilising the proud past of struggle. “We are not celebrating our own history — the young generation is so uninformed about what happened in the past, the victories the miners had, the Tonypandy riots, the changes in conditions that happened. 

“There is a lot on that list — I don’t know what is happening in schools now,” Wood adds.

So, how does the left make an impact in the Senedd elections? “Where Wales is going in its constitutional future is an interesting debate. In economic terms, this is about how we can ensure that the economy meets the needs of the social programmes rather than the other way round.

“A lot is riding in Wales on these elections, but there will be an opportunity for some people on the left to be elected in the opposition, with Greens putting the environmental argument. The threat is Reform,” she emphasises.

Can the threat be seen off? If anything can rouse the slumbering radicalism of the Rhondda to vanquish the right, these two socialist women can.