Caerphilly County Borough has voted to leave the European Union in a decisive and clear vote.
The vote to leave was 53,295 (57.6%) compared to 39,178 (42.4%) to remain – difference of 14,117. Turnout was 70.7%.
At the time of publication, there was still a long way to go until the overall result was declared with the combined total votes nationally from each side determining the outcome.
UKIP Caerphilly’s branch chairman Sam Gould, from the Leave campaign, was visibly emotional after the result was announced, with Leave members cheering when Returning Officer Chris Burns was making his announcement at Caerphilly Leisure Centre.
Mr Gould: “This means that we have fought here in Caerphilly for freedom and democracy and the opportunity to elect those governing over us, rather than unelected EU commissioners and bureaucrats from Brussels.
“This is the biggest political triumph I have been involved with – it is amazing. We have had three massive results. The first was the General Election last year with a massive swing to UKIP and coming second. In the Welsh Assembly election we took votes off Labour and Plaid Cymru, and now this. When will it stop?
“Will we see a UKIP councillor next year? UKIP has the momentum and UKIP in Caerphilly i going from strength-to-strength. This has been shown by this strong and decisive vote here tonight.”
Caerphilly AM Hefin David, a member of the Remain campaign, said whatever the result nationally, there needed to be plan on what happens next – and in Wales, that plan had to be Welsh-led.
He said: “People had concerns and it is certainly the case that the message of Wales getting less money by leaving the EU didn’t get through, or people felt it wasn’t as important as other issues, like border control.”
All this could have been avoided if politicians had listened to peoples concerns instead of telling them what to think.
Quite right. Even last night a labour bigwigs answer to people’s concerns of immigration was to provide more housing, more money for the nhs and more school “spaces”. His complete inability to comprehend that a severe limit to immigration might be the answer people were looking for has been the downfall for the “in” this election. Make no mistake about it labour voters in working class areas voted to leave in massive amounts which means labour has categorically failed. Labour refused to look at the elephant in the room and positively denied its existence on multiple occasions causing a massive disconnect with the proletariate. Labour has failed its core voters and this is the result.
There is nothing wrong with having an immigration policy that takes in people that you need, but open door policy the EU allows is madness.
It’s was the blindness of halting mass immigration as an option that I was referring to.
Any political debate on TV where immigration was mentioned all parties dodged questions on the issue, well they have had a shock today.
There has never been any opposition to it from the establishment just as there was no opposition to eu membership from the official parties. Red,blue, yellow and green all officially backed eu membership and unfettered mass immigration. They all have Gaurdianitis, a terrible condition that can bring on instant bouts of convenient blindness.
It’s entirely their own fault, people screamed on question time and shouted it in politicians faces and they just answered a different question. Either the more sensible backbenchers step up or the establishment goes into damage control.
All parties bar UKIP that is, which is the only party to have a proper immigration policy; which is to judge people on a points basis. The criteria in future will hopefully be based on whether our country benefits from foreign workers coming to live here, rather than accept anyone who arrives from EU countries, even if they are beggars or criminals.
In fact a return to the norm for a sovereign nation, we can now be like Canada, USA, India or Australia and not have to accept however many people as the EU wants to foist on us.
Hefin David, Assembly Member for Caerphilly is correct in his comments, but, there is another angle to consider why people have voted to exit the EU. It is the issue of `who governs us`? 17,000,000 (seventeen million) people can`t be wrong
Now the decisions have been made, and the result is to leave the EU, there is one issue not considered by Hefin David, at least in this report, as to why people voted the way they did, I see a positive outcome being that the people we elect in general elections and Assembly Elections now have a clear mandate to govern this Country make ALL the rules and regulation we have to live by, and, they stand or fall by the quality of that representation. I have faith in the people we elect election after election, and I have faith in Wayne David and Hefin David to do what they feel is required to improve the lives of the people they represent, now they will have to do so without external influences above those of the people who elect them. and I see that as a positive outcome of this result to leave the EU.
Spin spin spin. Labour failed its core voters.
So said; Predictably, Yevett Cooper Balls.
If it is to relevant in future the Labour party needs to reflect the views of the members and the supporters of the party. When on campaign for ‘leave’ I tried to discuss the issues, quite openly, in public places with senior Labour figures including our MP and Police Commissioner. They declined to do so and the result of the vote today was their ‘come uppance’.
Contrast their attitude with that of Sam Gould who is delighted to talk with all members of the public and has worked his socks off for his belief in a better Wales and a better Britain.
Hefin David may be made of sterner stuff and seems willing talk with people and argue about the issues. If Labour is to survive it will have to attract more people like Hefin and fewer of the old fashioned Labour type who think they can just put on a red rossette and win the election. If it does not Labour will soon be as redundant in Wales as it is in Scotland.
I am pleased Wales voted to leave. If Wales voted to remain there would be politics from Cardiff Bay about the validity of the result and the effects on Wales. This way, Wales was as eurosceptic as England.
I’m glad too, otherwise we would have Carwen Jones trying to say the result does not apply to Wales. The Welsh have never liked being in a massive European political experiment, they voted for democracy yesterday and Jones has to accept it.
Not sure how coming out of Europe will be better for Wales. It’s likely the Tory party will be in power for the considerable future due to the way Scotland votes. Why would they waste money on initiatives in Wales which wont win votes for them when the people of Ebbw Vale have based their decision to vote out on hating Cameron. Anyone remember the 1980’s when the Tory’s pulled the plug on the miming industry but did next to nothing to support these broken communities? Would we have got the investment without the help of the EU – I don’t know the answer to that. Lets hope the Brexiters called it correctly. Only time will tell.
Time will indeed tell and I assume that British MPs, with more money to spend after leaving the EU, will look favourably on investing in poor areas including Wales. Apart from anything else it is in their interests as, unlike the EU commissioners, the voters can remove them.
Let us not forget that the Welsh coal and steel industry were destroyed whilst we were members of the EU. We must also examine the puposes to which money invested is put. An example of poor investment which affected Welsh workers was that of a few years ago when an Italian company was granted huge amounts of money to set up a brand new paper mill in Baglan Energy Park.
This mill was in direct competition with a paper mill in Bridgend. This mill employed mostly locally born workers who enjoyed good wages, final salary pension and other benefits. The new plant, built by the EU, paid minimal wages, no pension and sourced workers from other EU countries. As it was also subsidised by the EU this was very bad news for the Welsh.
I’m reasonably sure that the mines were closed well before the Maastricht treaty so EU wouldn’t have had any significant say. Maybe things would have been different if they had. We’ll never know.
A lot of pits were shut before the treaty, some were not. My thoughts are that huge investment used to take place in Wales well before we were even in the Common Market, as it was once named. This investment, such as that in Llanwern in the early 1960’s did actually bring tangible economic benefits to Wales, not just to the direct workforce but to the wider economy. Much of the EU money has been spent on projects that deliver little for the amount spent.
I want to see long term investment in Wales, harnessing the tide for energy production in the Severn estuary is just one project crying out for implementation. We used to be quite good at this sort of strategic investment in Britain, maybe we have lost the knack but, as you say, only time will tell.