‘It was always the way to vote Labour here’: party’s proud Welsh heartland makes a clean break of it

Labour’s sometime safest seat in the UK, birthplace of Aneurin Bevan and Neil Kinnock, last week sent no Labour delegates to the new SeneddReminders of the Labour movement’s roots are inescapable in Tredegar, south Wales: murals pay tribute to party giants Aneurin Bevan and Neil Kinnock, both of whom were born here.The Workmen’s Hall Library is long gone, replaced by a car park, but the Cambrian Inn, which hosted early trade unions and Chartist groups, survives. The Tredegar Medical Aid Society, which Bevan used as a model for the NHS, was across the road; today it is a heritage centre paying tribute to the public health pioneers and the area’s coal-mining and steel-making past. Continue reading...