We're fighting back...and we will get there

But Nye Bevan's great-niece has lost her belief in the Labour Party

- ROS WYNNE JONES

MARY Blake is in the front room of her terraced home in Tredegar showing us a statuette of Aneurin Bevan, the founding father of the NHS and a pivotal figure in Welsh Labour history.“This is Great-Uncle Nye,” she says. She shows us a photograph of her father, also Aneurin, named after his uncle. “Do you think he looks like him?” she asks.

She then says heavily, “Great Uncle Nye would be turning in his grave, and my dad too.” Mary, 70, is about to break a family tradition. “I’m not voting Labour this time,” she says, as Nye looks on sternly from the mantelpiece. “I can’t do it. I'm sorry.”

Next to her on the settee, her husband Gareth, a former member of the National Union of Mineworkers, is shaking his head in disagreement.

“People think just because you are born and brought up in Wales you have to swallow it,” Mary says.

“You have a right to change. My problem is there's no party I'd like to change to. So, I won't vote. Not this time. And I tell you, I fear for Wales, and I fear for the Valleys because Nigel Farage is going to get in.”

The mention of the Reform leader's name is too much for Labour voter Gareth. “You mean, the devil incarnate,” he says, in his Welsh baritone. “The man who will privatise Nye Bevan’s NHS.”

You don't need to be steeped in the history of the Labour Party to know that there's a problem when Nye Bevan’s great niece can't bring herself to vote Labour.