Wayne Erasmus, Gwlad’s Lead Candidate for Carmarthenshire

Wayne Erasmus is one of the most personally distinctive candidates in the Sir Gaerfyrddin field, a first-language Welsh speaker, a retired Merchant Navy Chief Engineer, a founder of a grassroots football club, a food bank organiser, and a man who has experienced, with devastating personal consequence, the failures of the Welsh health system he now seeks to reform from within the Senedd.

Erasmus has lived in Hendy since 1986, nearly four decades, having grown up on the banks of the River Loughor in Swansea before settling on the Carmarthenshire side. He is a native Welsh speaker and describes Wales as his home in the deepest sense. He retired in 2014 and since then has devoted himself almost entirely to voluntary community work, local campaigning and, now, political candidacy.

His party, Gwlad, is a Welsh pro-independence movement with a distinctly centre-right economic outlook, a combination that sets it apart from both Plaid Cymru on its left and the unionist parties on its right.

Background and Career

Erasmus sailed as a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Navy, a career that took him across the world and gave him a practical, hands-on engineering perspective that he carries into his political thinking. He also worked on Ministry of Defence projects, adding a defence industry dimension to his professional background.

Since his retirement, he has run a number of local charities and food banks, served on local community and town councils, and founded Hendy Junior Football Club, nurturing youth sport and community spirit in the village.His advocacy work extended beyond Hendy into the wider Llanelli and Llangennech area. He formally put questions to the leader of Carmarthenshire County Council over the threat to community sports pitch fees, having successfully campaigned to prevent fee increases that he argued would have ended grassroots sport across the county.

The campaign to save community sports pitches was not simply a bureaucratic victory. Erasmus described it as being about “fostering youth sports and community spirit” and ensuring the vibrancy of local football for teams drawn from communities on both sides of the River Loughor, covering Carmarthenshire and the Swansea side of the border.

He was also involved in the Stradey Park Hotel controversy in 2023, in which local residents opposed the proposed use of the former Llanelli hotel as asylum seeker accommodation. He has described supporting peaceful protests against the plan, which the Home Office ultimately abandoned.

A Personal Tragedy at the Heart of His Campaign

The most sobering element of Erasmus’s candidacy is deeply personal. He states that his son was killed while in hospital and in the care of Hywel Dda University Health Board and the Welsh Government. He subsequently worked with the late MS Hefin David and the campaign group ‘Stolen Lives’ over what he describes as the Welsh Government’s failure to address the plight of individuals on the autistic spectrum and people with learning difficulties.

He has paid tribute to Hefin David, who died while still fighting the same cause. The human weight of this experience informs the urgency with which Erasmus frames his campaign. It is not an abstract political argument for him, it is the product of lived experience of institutional failure at the most profound level. His statement closes simply: “How many more have to die? Change is needed.”

This gives Erasmus’s candidacy a moral dimension that transcends party politics. He is standing not merely as a Gwlad representative but as someone who has personally navigated, and been failed by, the systems he is asking voters to let him reform.

Political Record

Erasmus has contested elections regularly since 2016, always finishing outside the winning positions but accumulating experience across a wide range of contests. His full record includes:

The vote tallies in local by-elections are extremely low, reflecting both the minor-party challenge and the typically small turnouts in single-ward contests. His 247 votes in the Gower constituency Senedd election in 2021 and 283 as an independent in the Gower Westminster seat in 2024 represent his stronger showings. He has been a consistent, persistent participant in Welsh democratic life across a decade.

Gwlad: The Party and Its Platform

Gwlad describes its core mission as making Wales a prosperous, successful independent country. Its instincts are for freedom, national freedom aligned with individual freedom, free speech and free action, underpinned by a commitment to enterprise and free markets.

Gwlad received 0.3 per cent of the constituency vote and 0.6 per cent of the regional list vote in the 2021 Senedd election. The party is officially syncretic neither explicitly left nor right wing but in practice and in policy it operates largely as a centre-right pro-independence party.

The 2026 manifesto, published in February 2026, sets out a platform that includes:

• Welsh independence as the ultimate goal, with the Welsh economy as the immediate priority
• Tax reduction: cutting the higher rate of income tax to 40 per cent; phased replacement of business rates with a land value tax
• Energy: completely repudiating net zero; no onshore wind turbines; no subsidised solar; dependable energy policy focused on conventional and nuclear sources
• NHS: moving towards more direct-salaried GPs and dentists; co-operative primary care; prevention-first approach with annual health checks; triage hubs outside A&E departments
• Education: all new schools to be Welsh-medium; statutory class size reductions to no more than 25 pupils; support for home education; scrap fines for term-time holidays; parental care allowance of £1,500 per month for parents caring for children aged 0–2
• Transport: reversing the 20mph default speed limit; prioritising north-south transport links; cutting at least one hour from north-south road journeys
• Nation of Sanctuary: scrapping the programme
• Housing: abolishing Rent Smart Wales; scrapping registration and licensing fees for landlords; national programme to tackle damp
• Farming: opposing net zero targets for farmers; opposing large-scale solar farms on agricultural land
• Welsh language: expanding Welsh-medium education to become the norm; bilingual schooling until age 14; student funding restricted to Welsh universities where possible
• Democracy: a Welsh Development Agency-style economic body; independent inquiry into the Welsh Government’s Covid response and children’s services

Gwlad positions itself explicitly against what it calls the Cardiff Bay bubble of political advisers, lawyers and charity chief executives, arguing that its candidates bring real-world experience as business people, entrepreneurs, professionals and veterans.

Local Issues Identified by Erasmus

In his own published statements, Erasmus identifies a series of specific local failures he holds Labour and Plaid Cymru responsible for:

• Reduced services at Prince Philip Hospital in Llanelli
• Decline in council care provision
• The 20mph default speed limit, which he describes as a “fiasco”
• The sale of the Royal Naval Supply depot at Llangennech, a locally sensitive issue relating to the loss of a significant community asset
• Carmarthenshire County Council being “deep in debt due to Plaid Cymru mismanagement,” with a need for greater honesty and transparency in how the council communicates with the electorate
• The failure of the Welsh Government and Hywel Dda health board to adequately protect vulnerable people with autism and learning difficulties

Assessment

Wayne Erasmus is one of the more personally compelling figures in the Sir Gaerfyrddin field, even if his party’s electoral prospects are limited. He is a first-language Welsh speaker with nearly 40 years of roots in the constituency, a founder of community institutions, a man who has engaged with local government, sometimes confrontationally, always on behalf of local people, and someone whose political motivation is grounded in direct personal experience of the systems he wishes to change.

His electoral record is poor in terms of vote share, but this reflects the Gwlad party’s broader struggle to break through under any electoral system rather than a personal failure of campaigning. He is persistent, active and clearly committed.

The fundamental constraints are structural. Gwlad received just 0.3 per cent of the constituency vote in 2021, and there is no indication from polling that the party has grown substantially since. The D’Hondt threshold of approximately 10 to 15 per cent in Sir Gaerfyrddin is far beyond anything Gwlad can plausibly reach on current numbers. Coalition potential is limited, Gwlad’s pro-independence position rules out working with unionist parties, and its centre-right economic platform makes alignment with Plaid Cymru or Labour complicated despite a shared independence goal.

What Erasmus does offer is a voice that cuts across the usual political divisions: pro-independence but economically liberal; Welsh-speaking but pro-farmer and anti-net zero; community-minded but explicitly critical of both Labour and Plaid. In a county where those parties have dominated for generations, that combination is unusual enough to be worth noting, even if the numbers currently suggest it will not translate into a seat.