Disregard from UK Labour and struggling public services are just some of reasons behind ‘astonishing’ collapse

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By Friday night, Keir Starmer and much of the Westminster Labour group were quietly relieved that the local election results in England hadn’t been quite as bad as feared. In Wales, however, Labour’s collapse in the Senedd was even more total than the most pessimistic predictions.

For more than 100 years, Welsh Labour was the democratic world’s most successful election-winning machine, but the political behemoth limped into third place this week with just nine seats in a 96-seat parliament. A new chapter in Wales’s political and cultural history has opened: pro-independence Plaid Cymru is set to form a minority government.