AS a Liverpool fan Torfaen MP Nick Thomas-Symonds is hoping 2025 will bring success for his favourite football team.
“Liverpool are currently top of the Premier League and I’d like them to win it,” but he won’t say the English title is for the reds to lose despite their fine form at home and in Europe. Pushed on choosing between the domestic title and the European Champions League the MP says: “The Premier League for Liverpool fans because we’ve only won it once in the Premier League era.”
Politically Mr Thomas-Symonds is also in the red team which had its own taste of glory in July, 2024 when the general election delivered a landslide for the Labour Party.
That has taken son of a steelworker father and factory worker, from a terrace house in High Street, Blaenavon, right into the heart of power as Cabinet Office minister and paymaster general.
“There is a connecting door to Downing Street,” says Mr Thomas-Symonds sat in his Pontypool office describing his office in London.
In his wide ranging role he also has to juggle domestic policy with his specific responsibility to secure a better trading relationship with the European Union.
That could be no easy task for an MP representing a seat where just shy of 60 per cent of voters backed Leave in the 2016 referendum, held only a year after the former barrister and Oxford University lecturer was elected to represent his home constituency at the age of 34.
Mention of Brexit prompts an instant clarification Labour isn’t revisiting old arguments about the Customs Union or freedom of movement but “looking forward”. He believes progress is possible on “tearing down trade barriers” even within the confines of remaining outside of those European structures.
“We’re talking in a very tangible way about putting food and drink on tables here in the United Kingdom more cheaply than they otherwise would be. In our services, can we have more mutual recognition of professional qualifications so we can make export of our services easier to the EU? Can we make it easier for artists, our fantastic cultural sector a great source of soft power, to travel around without the burdens they face at the moment.
“If you are someone who exports flowers, and we’ve got lots of people who import flowers, but also about the kind of foods that we import and export it is something that will make quite a considerable difference.”
Rows over Europe dogged the Conservative Party for years and the fall out from Brexit appears to have opened a new threat to Labour. The Tory collapse at July’s general election also confirmed a new challenger in the form of Reform that has sprung up from leading Brexiter Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
The party finished 7,322 votes behind Mr Thomas-Symonds, with Torfaen one of 13, of 32 Welsh seats, where it achieved a second-place finish. A month later Reform also had its first councillors in Wales when independents, who had once been Labour councillors, formed a group on Torfaen Borough Council.
Mr Thomas-Symonds is keen to avoid commenting on any particular opposition party and is putting his faith in restoring public services which he says the government is doing with “urgency” by boosting public spending to try and revive a still sluggish economy and raise living standards.
“Whichever other political party you want to talk about it is about whether we as a UK Government can deliver across the United Kingdom that’s really what politics to me is about. I can’t control what other political parties seek to do. What I do have some influence over are the things I’m now responsible for in government. I don’t worry too much about the things I can’t control.
“What I do worry about is how the government will seek to deliver and that’s where my focus is and I think people do take a fair-minded view across parliaments as to what exactly the government has done. I think, for me, it is about that delivery job. We’ve got four and a half years left.”
On delivery he will also defend the Welsh Government: “I don’t think the Welsh Labour Government is failing to deliver. It has had 14 years where it was having nowhere near either the support or resource that it needed.”
Increased funding is part of what Mr Thomas-Symonds describes as Labour’s duty to deliver but he is unwilling to say the next general election is for Labour to lose just as he won’t place that burden on the Premier League front runners.
“I would never put it like that because I think it’s up to the British people to decide and here it will be for the people in Torfaen. It is up to that government to deliver, we won a big mandate in July, we know it was a mandate for change, for people to feel better off and improve public services.”