PARC Against DARC, the campaign which was established in 2024 to oppose the US military’s proposed DARC radar array in Pembrokeshire, has spoken out on Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan’s announcement which called for the UK Government to ‘pause’ the DARC project while Trump is in charge in the US. The campaigners say that while they welcome any opposition to DARC from the First Minister, her calls lack any real substance when viewed under scrutiny as she is only calling for a pause and has not come out in outright opposition to the project.

They add that there’s nothing to stop her doing another U-turn if re-elected.

Reports suggest that over 500 opposing emails were sent in response to the MOD’s recent public consultation on DARC (Deep Space Advanced Radar Concept) and many to Morgan and South Pembrokeshire MP Henry Tufnell, which campaigners believe may have contributed to what they describe as Morgan’s ‘election jitters’ over the issue, adding: “It’s clearly in the minds of voters for the upcoming Senedd Elections and may well also be a key issue being reported back to Morgan from the doorsteps too.”

The campaign has also been quick to criticise Henry Tufnell’s rebuke of Morgan’s remarks where he cited ‘Pembrokeshire DARC jobs’ as a key pro-DARC factor, with a spokesperson for PARC Against DARC stating: “It’s absolutely unbelievable how out of touch Henry Tufnell is on the whole DARC debate. You can tell that ‘somehow’, he hasn’t even got the memo from the MOD that they stopped trying to use jobs to try and sell their disastrous radar as soon as their Environmental Impact Assessment forced them to officially admit that the number of jobs for locals would be a meagre 20 at a maximum! And that’s with the rest of the tiny operational staff being made up entirely of US personnel.

“Given that the EIA also shows that a necessary condition of DARC being built is that the entire existing staff would have to evacuate the Brawdy base, what we’re actually talking about with this proposal is a net loss of about 300 to 500 Pembrokeshire jobs, and that’s before we even get to the knock-on job losses from the huge damage to tourism.”

“Henry Tufnell has done what all of the very few DARC advocates left in the county always do: they just lie and lie and lie.

“Both he and Eluned Morgan recently trotted out this MOD lie that the statutory consultation just passed was publicised to all residents in the area, yet if they had paid attention to even a single email we know they were sent by local residents, they’d realise that not a single one of the leaflets the MOD distributed to the community ever even mentioned the consultation, and that the whole thing was a huge scandal.

“For them to miss something so glaringly big just confirms that they continue to be utterly clueless as to how contemptuous the MOD’s handling of the local community actually has been. Either they don’t know, they don’t care, or they just can’t possibly believe how bad and out of control this project actually has been.”

Prior to Morgan’s unexpected announcement, the campaign had been critical of what they described as “an abject silence and lack of any meaningful comment from local Labour officials on DARC.”

This announcement, they say, is a clear sign that there are deep ruptures within the Labour Party over DARC and that Morgan may well have seen the ‘writing on the wall’ for Starmer with an electoral bloodbath predicted for Labour on May 7, and effectively has nothing left to lose with the prospect of losing her seat and Starmer being forced out as leader after the elections.

The PARC campaign says, both Plaid Cymru and the Wales Green Party have publicly opposed DARC from the beginning and with polls showing Plaid as the largest party in Wales after May 7, a likely Plaid/Green coalition could well be set to stop DARC in its tracks by a means of ‘calling in’ the planning application to the Senedd once in power.

A Plaid Cymru spokesperson said: “This is nothing but a last-ditch attempt by Eluned Morgan to cling on to her seat. Since becoming First Minister, she has chosen to stay quiet on defence and international affairs, only now speaking up after polls show her losing her seat.

“Plaid Cymru has consistently called on the UK Government to focus on rebuilding European ties in response to Trump’s increasingly dangerous positions.

“We have consistently opposed DARC alongside local communities, passing a motion at our annual conference in October 2024 and tabling a parliamentary motion in Westminster in March 2025.”

Green Party leader Zak Polanski referred to Morgan’s comments as “Absolutely right.” responding on X - also saying: “Standing up the USA must mean more than words. Let's get serious about national security by working closely with our EU neighbours & rapidly decoupling from a rogue US president.”

With public divisions now seeping out from inside the Labour Party itself and DARC becoming an ever more hotly debated election issue, the campaign believes that now is the time to put DARC to bed once and for all, campaigners saying that they have repeatedly ‘blown up’ every single justification the MOD has tried to make for it.

Campaigners stated: “The fact that in the recent war on Iran, the IRGC destroyed all of the $Billions worth of US military radars in Gulf countries within hours of hostilities beginning proves that radar sites like DARC would make Pembrokeshire a ‘first priority military target’ in any conflict, which is completely unacceptable and should not be supported by our ‘parachuted in’ Labour MP.”

They added: “Comments from Downing Street and Henry Tufnell yesterday which sought to minimise local impacts are simply laughable too and are an insult to the intelligence of Pembrokeshire and its people. The MOD’s Environmental Impact Assessment does nothing but outright and openly confirm that DARC would have significantly adverse effects on literally every environmental level assessed, particularly in its visual impact on the National Park skyline.

“The MOD’s had to admit that the visual impact is adverse in 100% of the 33 assessed viewpoints, and substantially adverse in at least 21% of them.”

“Having to admit all of this, all the MOD can then try to do is make out that DARC, which we’ve now extensively proven to be for targeting enemy assets in space and is considered a huge escalation by China and Russia who are now having to basically enter an arms race because of Trump’s increasingly unstable global aggression, is some kind of civilian system for space management.

“Yet anyone who knows a single thing about that subject would see that claiming to have solved one of the most legally and diplomatically difficult endeavours of building an actual international space traffic management regime with just one radar site in West Wales is just simply yet another one of the most easily discredited and brazen lies the MOD have told so far.”

As the issue gains national attention following Morgan's remarks, campaigners concluded: “DARC must be stopped, it’s as simple as that, and to achieve that we urge people to vote for the anti-DARC parties on May 7.”