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Daniel Morrissey

Welsh Politics after Four Years of the Assembly

[Workers Action 20 (Februray-March 2003), 11-14]

It hardly needs repeating that the five and a half years of the Blair Government has been a time of profound political upheaval, which has thrown up a number of new challenges for socialists. One of the developments which is likely to prove of greatest long-term significance, however, is also one that has been consistently neglected by the Anglo-centric 'British' left: namely, Scottish and Welsh devolution. It is typical of New Labour that even this - one of its most progressive initiatives - was diminished by the detail of its implementation, at least in Wales. The strength of popular support for self-government in Scotland was such that New Labour could not credibly have offered anything less than a full Parliament with primary legislative powers, and Scottish politics has indeed begun to develop a dynamic of its own. In Wales, however, the introduction of a weak and limited body, with a far from overwhelming plebiscitary mandate, has left its mark on Welsh politics.

The passage of the Government of Wales Act in 1998 gave Wales governmental institutions of its own for the first time since its incorporation into the realm of England under the Act of Annexation in 1536, which also forbade the use of the Welsh language in Government. Wales retained the character of a border country until the development of the iron industry from the late eighteenth century and the creation of a militant working class, which directly challenged the state at Merthyr in 1831 and in the Chartist march on Newport in 1839. But, as the Welsh Marxist Ceri Evans argued, the subsequent emergence of the coal industry 'placed Wales at the centre of the imperial expansion of the British empire. [...] In the process sections of the Welsh working class became corrupted by the profits of empire.' For the next hundred years, the people of Wales accepted their incorporation into the English-dominated British state, and the Welsh working class put its faith in the Labour Party to ensure that it received a fair share of the benefits of national prosperity.¹ The collapse of coal markets and the downturn in the world economy after 1974, hit Wales particularly hard, however, and this led to a loss of confidence that policies drawn up in London could deliver prosperity and social justice for the people of Wales. There was a rebirth of national sentiment, marked by the rise of Plaid Cymru and the Welsh language movement. The move towards greater national autonomy suffered a false start in the 1979 referendum, which was lost by a margin of four-to-one. Subsequently, however, the experience of Thatcherism finally convinced many of the need for Wales to control its own affairs.²

The Campaign for an Assembly

Labour's proposals for the Scottish Parliament were developed jointly with the Liberal Democrats, trade unions, churches and community organisations, in the Scottish Constitutional Convention. The process was the culmination of a national debate, involving every level of Scottish society. In Wales, notwithstanding the work of the Parliament for Wales Campaign, there had barely been a debate on devolution even within the Labour Party, and the bureaucracy felt able to announce its legislative intentions by dictat. Accordingly, Scotland was promised a Parliament with primary legislative and tax-raising powers, which was elected by proportional representation and provided for gender balance, but none of these features was on offer for Wales when Labour published its definitive policy on the Assembly, Shaping the Vision, in 1995. In response, Welsh Labour Action (WLA), a broad centre-left coalition of party activists, was established in order to campaign for parity with Scotland. Over the next two years it had some success in making the case for a stronger and more democratic Assembly, strengthening the hand of those within the bureaucracy with a genuine commitment to devolution, led by Ron Davies, who became Welsh Secretary in 1997. Concessions were made: first, 'an element of proportionality', in the form of the additional member system (AMS), and then the 'twinning' of constituencies to ensure a female candidate in 50% of the seats.

Labour's decision to hold referenda for Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, rather than simply go ahead and legislate on winning office, was a major climbdown, reflecting the superficiality of Blair's commitment to a 'radical constitutional agenda'. In the event, however, the conduct of the campaign for a 'yes' vote augured well for the future of a devolved Welsh politics, with a progressive alliance led by Labour, Plaid, the Lib Dems and the unions, making common cause to convince the Welsh people of the benefits of self-government, however limited. Within this, a 'Socialists Say YES' campaign was set up, led by activists from the left of Labour and Plaid, Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society), the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and even the SWP, which had recently renounced its long-standing hostility to devolution. A conference organised by the campaign attracted over a hundred people, including several future Assembly Members, and agreed a socialist manifesto for the Assembly, with commitments to push immediately for greater powers and to take the utilities in Wales into public ownership.³

The outcome of the referendum on 18 September 1997 was nail-bitingly close: the margin in favour was only 6,721 votes (0.6% of the total), on a 50% turnout. Nevertheless, the pro-Assembly forces remained optimistic: with an administration in Cardiff determined to make the best of this opportunity to deliver material gains for the people of Wales, the doubters could be won over, and the body acquire real popular legitimacy. This schema suffered its first major setback, however, when the resignation of Ron Davies over the 'Clapham Common' incident led to his replacement by Alun Michael. Michael was effectively imposed by Tony Blair in a fixed election where two-thirds of CLP members, and all unions who balloted their members, voted for his opponent, Rhodri Morgan, but the combined obedience of the TGWU, AEEU and GMB ensured that Blair got his man. Whereas Morgan, like Ron Davies, had been a consistent supporter of the Assembly, Michael had shown no interest in devolution since 1979, and had not even sought selection as a candidate (the selection process was conveniently 'reopened' in time for him to be parachuted in). In addition, the selection of Labour candidates was subject to an unprecedented degree of central control, to ensure that the politically unreliable (like Tower Colliery miners' leader, Tyrone O'Sullivan, and WLA Chair, Gareth Hughes) were filtered out, on some spurious pretext. Unsurprisingly, the manifesto on which Labour fought the election in May 1999 was distinguished only by its vacuity. Plaid Cymru, on the other hand, fought on an essentially 'Old Labour' platform, promising to restore the link between pensions and earnings, and to reinstate the student grant. Labour's response was to publish a particularly wretched document entitled The A-Z of Nationalist Madness.

But, as the left-wing Labour MP, Paul Flynn, commented in Tribune, 'the people of Wales found this insanity irresistible'. Plaid saw an 80% increase in its 1997 vote, winning the support of tens of thousands of Labour voters and capturing supposedly safe Labour seats like Rhondda and Islwyn. Labour spin-doctors tried to explain away their party's worst result in Wales since the 1930s, but the most credible explanation was that, in the absence of a serious Tory threat, many working class voters felt that they had nothing to lose in opting for a Plaid programme that seemed more authentically 'Labour' than the official version.⁴

Welsh Labour in Office

Labour was left three seats short of an overall majority and chose to form a minority administration with Alun Michael as 'First Secretary'.⁵ The obstructiveness of the three opposition parties exacerbated the lack of a clear Labour programme, the uncertainty about what the Assembly's powers might allow it to do, and the hostility towards Michael within his own group, and little was achieved by the Assembly in its first nine months. In February 2000, Michael, already damaged by the resignation of his Agriculture Secretary following a no-confidence vote, suffered the same fate himself. The Labour Group, many of whose members had been actively plotting his downfall, declined to re-nominate him and Rhodri Morgan took his place. This was a massive defeat for Blair's attempts to run Wales by remote control, and rekindled hopes that a distinct Welsh political agenda might yet be followed in Cardiff.

The reality, as ever, was disappointing. After six months in the job, Rhodri signed a Partnership Agreement with the Liberal Democrats and brought two of their six AMs into his cabinet. This went down very badly with large sections of the party, not just for the principle, but the manner of its execution. The coalition had been stitched-up between the Labour and Lib Dem leaderships behind the scenes and was presented to the Assembly Labour Group as a virtual fait d'accompli, only hours after some of them had first heard of the proposal. Four voted against. The coalition was then announced to the media, several hours before the Welsh Labour Executive Committee - supposedly the party's governing body in Wales - had a chance to discuss it. Rhodri was severely reprimanded by activists at 'consultation meetings' belatedly held across Wales, and acknowledged concerns about the indecent haste with which the exercise had been carried out. There was a more fundamental political problem, however. In being newly 'inclusive' to its right, Welsh Labour froze out its left: Plaid Cymru. In place of the 'coalition of ideas' advocated by Ron Davies, whereby all parties genuinely committed to making devolution work (i.e., everyone but the Tories) would work together, putting the interests of Wales above party advantage, the boundaries of acceptable policy formation were now set by the combined partisan interests of the two new 'partners'. While the Partnership Agreement contained very little that had not appeared in the original Labour manifesto, the inevitable result of the coalition would be to pull Labour to the right. By throwing in its lot with a party interested only in unambitious tinkering in the search for easy electoral rewards, Labour ministers were diverted from any idea they may have had of developing an agenda of radical reform to address the problems of Wales.

This is not to say that the Assembly Government has achieved nothing worthwhile. In particular, Education Minister Jane Davidson has pursued a coherent and progressive agenda. She has pointedly taken a different path from her colleagues in Westminster, eschewing selection and any private involvement in the running of schools. She has scrapped secondary school league tables and standard assessment tests for seven-year olds, and has reintroduced state support for less affluent FE & HE students, in the shape of the new Assembly Learning Grant. The administration has also made a number of services free at the point of delivery: school milk for children under seven; nursery places for three year olds; prescriptions and dental checks for the under-25s; bus travel for pensioners and the disabled; entry to all museums and art galleries. Potentially, such measures could help to rehabilitate the idea of a public service, freed from the intervention of the market, but there has been little attempt to present these developments as part of an overall strategy of decommodification; instead, they have been offered as 'one-off' give-aways. Only in a speech to Swansea University on 10 December 2002, did Rhodri finally join up the dots, claiming that these policies represented 'the creation of a new set of citizenship rights [...] which are as far as possible, free at the point of use, universal and unconditional'. Of course, Rhodri's belated attention to this is transparently driven by the need to beef up his Government's record before the election, and not by any sudden urge to 'set the record straight' and point out that he has been following a premeditated (but previously unacknowledged) strategy.⁶

Assembly's ineffectuality has been illustrated most clearly by its failure to meet the big challenges that have arisen since 1999 - in particular, the crisis in the steel industry. From the earliest suggestions that the days of steel-production in Wales might be numbered, Welsh politicians were reduced to pleading with Corus to put the interests of its employees and their communities before those of its shareholders. There followed a desperate scramble to secure whatever financial inducements might be permissible within the tight constraints of European competition legislation, and which could therefore be offered to the Anglo-Dutch multinational. As it became increasingly clear that nothing available was sufficiently attractive to dissuade the company from 'downsizing', AMs lined up to condemn Corus boss, Brian Moffat, for his lack of social conscience - demonstrating an almost childlike naiveté about the raison d'être of capitalist enterprises. Radical solutions to prevent the destruction of the Welsh steel industry were conspicuous by their absence. To some extent this is due to the Assembly's limited powers: there is genuinely very little that it could legally have done. But it is worrying that hardly anyone in the Assembly even suggested any radical action, by any layer of Government. Only the former Plaid leader, Dafydd Wigley, called in the chamber for nationalisation (although this call was taken up by Ron Davies in a TV interview shortly afterwards, as well as by one or two other Plaid Cymru AMs, and seemed to become Plaid's policy by default). In their timidity, AMs were, of course, no more remiss than the Westminster Government, whose powers are far greater. Politicians at London and Cardiff alike adhere to the neo-liberal consensus that national governments are powerless in the face of globalisation. But in Wales, this timidity also reflects an unwillingness to push at the boundaries of the devolution settlement - a lack of any determination to do a more serious job, requiring greater powers, and thereby demonstrating the need for those powers.

As with steel, so with the Foot and Mouth crisis and a series of other damaging developments in the economy: Wales' political 'leaders' present themselves almost as passive observers. Responding, in February 2001, to the loss of more than 5000 jobs in two months, Rhodri suggested that he was powerless to protect employment in Wales: "We do not control macro-economic policy. That is left to the Treasury." When asked how Labour plans to regenerate the Welsh economy, he and his ministers typically offer little more than vague generalities: 'developing the export potential of Welsh companies [...] establishing an innovation and entrepreneurship culture ... promoting our natural strengths', etc., etc. With such a lack of vision, it is unsurprising that most people in Wales are hard-pressed to name a single achievement for which the Assembly can claim credit.

The Labour Left

The apparent inability of the Welsh Labour leadership to get to grips with Wales' problems has been exacerbated by the absence of any real challenge, or even any sustained critique, from within its own ranks. Unlike its Westminster and Holyrood counterparts, the Assembly Labour Group has no organised left caucus and there is therefore no internal pressure for a more radical agenda. The most left-wing AM, Richard Edwards - the only Labour member to have publicly opposed the 'War Against Terrorism' from the outset - is stepping down due to ill-health, and is set to be replaced by a right-wing careerist. Ron Davies remains a potential alternative to Rhodri, and he has publicly set out some distinctive ideas on economic policy (notably on the inadequacy of the Barnett formula, which determines the level of the Assembly's funding) and on constitutional matters. He has made no attempt to build a 'left', however, preferring instead the role of the leader-in-(internal)-exile. Otherwise, the Labour Group is conspicuous for the absence of any political thought worthy of the name. As a consequence, such divisions as do exist tend to be determined as much by personal as by political factors. A case in point is Blaenau Gwent AM Peter Law, who has publicly criticised Rhodri and even launched an abortive leadership bid, but is essentially a populist rather than a socialist, and is nursing a grievance after losing his cabinet seat to the Lib Dems.

Outside the Assembly, the party's condition is little better. There is a handful of maverick MPs, the most energetic of whom are Paul Flynn and Martin Caton. Llew Smith, the only Campaign Group MP in Wales, is stepping down at the next election. He has been a strong supporter of public services, workers in struggle and the peace movement, but also a virulent opponent of the Assembly, with an almost pathological hatred of nationalism (although not British nationalism, of course). The left still has a presence on some GMCs (notably in Cardiff and Swansea), but many CLPs have been reduced to empty husks. Certainly, the Welsh party is by no means 'converted' to Blairism, but for many activists, accommodation to their right has become a way of life, and even those with more courage in their convictions have lacked organisation. The shattered remnants of the Bennite left have not been fully reunited since the pit closure campaign in 1992-93. Even the most promising subsequent initiative - Welsh Labour Action (WLA) - relied disproportionately on the social-democratic urban intelligentsia, strongly connected to academia and the media. It never fully connected with the industrial working-class left in the valleys, whose politics were more economistic, sometimes even to the extent of sharing Llew's hostility to devolution. In addition, many of WLA's leading figures were absorbed into the political establishment after 1999 - such as Sue Essex, who is now Assembly Minister for Environment - leaving the group to disintegrate as an independent force.

The current resurgence of the Labour Left across the British state in response to the war, privatisation and the Government's handling of the fire-fighters' dispute may yet find an echo in Wales. An initial meeting in Cardiff called by Labour Against the War attracted almost 40 activists from eleven CLPs and led to the circulation of an anti-war resolution that has been submitted by at least three GMCs to the Welsh Party Conference on 27-28 February. An 'After New Labour' fringe meeting is also planned for the conference, linking in with the successful series of events organised by the Campaign Group of MPs over the last nine months. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the Welsh Labour Left is in a healthy state, it can certainly not be written off just yet.

The Far Left

Meanwhile, the self-appointed guardians of the socialist faith, who seek to replace Labour as the voice of the working class, present a somewhat ragged spectacle. The Welsh Socialist Alliance (WSA) had high hopes of replicating the success of the Scottish Socialist Alliance/Party, but has never had anything like the same implantation in workplaces or working-class communities, nor the same political breadth. It was initially composed principally of the Socialist Party (SP) and Cymru Goch - the latter being a somewhat eccentric group that arose out of the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement (WSRM) and expounds its own brand of revolutionary socialist nationalism. An electoral pact with the SWP, under the name 'United Socialists' failed to make the heralded breakthrough in the 1999 Assembly election, scoring an average of 1.6% in the nine constituencies they contested and 0.5% in the regional lists.

The SWP finally joined the WSA the following year, and ploughed resources into the Alliance in the run-up to the 2001 general election. A similarly uninspiring performance at the ballot-box led, however, to its partial disengagement in favour of a return to more familiar activities under its own colours - for example, it has been the leading force in the anti-war movement in Wales. But the SWP has apparently maintained enough of a presence in the WSA to drive out both the SP and Cymru Goch in the course of 2002. According to a report in the CPGB's Weekly Worker, 'a high proportion' of WSA branches 'are inactive and rarely meet', new members 'are few and far between', its journal is defunct and its election preparations 'lethargic'.⁷ The project of a united socialist alternative to New Labour is not in good shape, it would appear.

Interestingly, Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party (SLP) has consistently polled more impressively than the WSA and its predecessors, despite having substantially fewer members and no visible presence to speak of. Most spectacularly, in the Ogmore parliamentary by-election on 14 February 2002, it saved its deposit, winning 1,152 votes (6%), while the WSA managed only 205 votes (1.1%), despite a far more energetic campaign and a vastly greater membership in the constituency. Significantly, the SLP's candidate was an ex-miner, reinforcing the conclusion that it is seen by some sections of the working class as the authentic left wing of the mainstream labour movement, whereas the WSA is dismissed as merely a marginal far left organisation. Nevertheless, the SLP in Wales is in no position to build on its limited electoral success. In many ways, the most significant Marxist organisation in Wales is the Communist Party of Britain, which at least has some implantation in the trade unions, as well as some understanding of the Welsh national question and of the need to take a united front approach to Labour.

Plaid Cymru

This leaves Plaid Cymru as the only credible left alternative to Labour. The party has existed since 1925 and in its early period espoused a romantic bourgeois nationalism, looking back to a mythologised feudal past. It took off electorally in 1966, when it won its first parliamentary seat and was subsequently able to capitalise on the failure of British labourism to deliver the goods for the people of Wales. It consistently won around 10% of the vote in general elections, drawing support mainly from the rural north and west of Wales. By the early 1980s, however, it also had a strong socialist wing, which to some extent mirrored the Bennite Labour left, led by Dafydd Elis Thomas, MP for Merionydd Nant Conwy. The crisis of socialism from the late 1980s saw the Plaid 'National Left' break up, and most of its leading members embrace 'modernisation' (Elis Thomas, once a self-styled 'revolutionary Marxist', ended up in the House of Lords⁸) or else drift out of politics altogether.

As Ed George has succinctly summarised, 'Plaid has since the 1980s maintained itself on a programme of "independence in Europe" (a plain contradiction in terms) coupled with a mild and largely inoffensive social democracy. Yet even this gentle appeal to "social justice" begins to look radical against the new model Blairite Labour Party, especially when measured against the degree of social and economic crisis that Wales has suffered since the 1974 recession burst the post-WW2 Keynesian restructuring bubble, and especially following the appalling consequences of the Thatcher governments' crash-and-burn restructuring of the British economy.'⁹ This is the background to Plaid's electoral breakthrough in the 1999 Assembly election, when it won the biggest swings from Labour in the coalfield and semi-coalfield constituencies - those hardest-hit by Thatcherism and with most cause to be disappointed by New Labour.¹⁰ While the Plaid Cymru Group in the Assembly has failed to develop a convincing alternative agenda to that of Labour, it has at least said the things that Labour should have said in relation to the steel crisis, PFI, the rail industry and the war.

Welsh Labour is all too uncomfortably aware that many of Plaid's policies are far more in tune with the views of most Labour supporters than are its own. Consequently, it gleefully seizes on any Plaid pronouncements on the national question, as the only stick with which it feels it can beat the official opposition. For example, Labour was quick to pounce when Seimon Glyn, a Gwynedd Plaid councillor, called for the 'monitoring' of immigration by affluent, and arrogantly anti-Welsh, English settlers into economically depressed Welsh-speaking communities. While denouncing such views as 'racist' or as 'divisive nationalism', Welsh Labour reaffirms its own obeisance to the imperial British crown, and dismisses legitimate concerns about the social disintegration of many parts of Wales. For some Labour politicians, the spiteful 'Nat-bashing' in which they regularly engage is no more than cynical opportunism. For others, however, it reflects a visceral Welsh anti-Welshness, which has nothing to do with the 'socialist internationalism' that they loftily proclaim.

The late 1990s saw the emergence of a new Plaid left, whose leading figures were all in their twenties and thirties, predominantly working class and from the industrialised south. They include Jill Evans, an MEP since 1999; Adam Price, MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr since 2001; and Leanne Wood, who is expected to become an Assembly Member in May.¹¹ They have won a series of battles over policy at Plaid conferences and have begun expounding their views - very cogently - in the journal, Triban Coch.¹² While more conservative forces, around the present (largely ineffectual) party leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, retain overall control, the left is growing steadily in strength and influence. Price, in particular, won acclaim for his exposure of the Lakshi Mittal affair, and is already being talked about as a future party leader.

Rebuilding the Left

It is too early to tell whether Plaid's electoral breakthrough in 1999 was a flash-in-the-pan, or whether it represents a longer-term pattern. Certainly, it was not repeated in 2001, but then Welsh working class voters may be differentiating between Assembly and Westminster elections - still predominantly voting Labour in the latter, if only to keep out the Tories. In any case, Plaid is unlikely to replace the Labour Party in the foreseeable future. The labour movement retains decisive social weight, and while Plaid has been assiduously courting the unions, the latter's link with the Labour Party remains intact. The labour movement as a whole (party and unions) remains the most important terrain on which socialists will have to fight for political leadership of the working class. Nevertheless, the failure of the Welsh Labour leadership to break decisively with Blairism, or to acknowledge the need for a distinct Welsh agenda, will continue to assist Plaid in winning support in the very communities that have historically been the bedrock of labourism. Any viable socialist project in Wales needs both to be grounded in the mass organisations of the working class and to have an understanding of the importance of the national question. Consequently, there has to be a non-sectarian engagement between the left in Labour and Plaid - and indeed, with socialists in other organisations. This has happened in the past, during the 'Socialists Say YES' campaign in 1997 and around the Cardiff Euro Demo the following year. Subsequently, the tendency to retreat behind party lines has been exacerbated by developments within the Assembly, but this must be overcome if the left in Wales is to be revived.

The range of current issues facing the left in Wales, and elsewhere - most immediately, the war, but also privatisation and the whole neo-liberal agenda - cannot be addressed successfully by socialists in any one organisation, but only by a united front embracing the whole organised working class and its allies. In Wales, the establishment of the Assembly presents a major opportunity for the left: a potential focus for a challenge to the policies being pursued at the level of the British state. The strategy for building such a challenge, and for developing a positive programme of the left in Wales, can only come about through the joint work of activists from the labour and nationalist movements. The sooner such work re-starts, the better.

Meanwhile, campaigning is already well underway for the second Welsh general election, which will be held on Thursday, 1 May 2003. In the next issue of Workers Action, I will examine the ways in which the election is highlighting or obscuring the broader political issues that I have discussed above, and will discuss more concretely the position that socialists should take in the election and in the Assembly's second term.

Notes

1 My analysis here draws heavily on Ceri Evans, 'For Welsh Self-Government', a document presented to a South Wales Socialist Outlook Summer School in June 1996.

2 It is not possible to do justice to the bigger issue of the Welsh national question, and the Marxist position on the self-determination of nations, in an article such as this. I intend to return to these matters in a future issue of Workers Action.

3 Only Workers Power opposed the statement, arguing that the Assembly was not a class issue.

4 The best analysis of the election results is C. Evans and E. George, Swings and Roundabouts: What Really Happened on May 6th? (Welsh Labour Action, 1999). Copies are available from me, c/o Workers Action. [Also archived here.]

5 The head of the Scottish Executive is called the First Minister, but Blair apparently vetoed the use of this title in Wales when he discovered that the closest Welsh translation, 'Prif Weinidog', means 'Prime Minister' - a title no-one but he could enjoy. Nevertheless, Rhodri Morgan adopted the style 'First Minister' after a few months in office.

6 I will examine this speech in greater detail in the next issue of Workers Action.

7 Weekly Worker 464, 23 January 2003. Of course, it would be unfair to take the CPGB's word for it that the SWP is to blame for these problems. But, as one of the few remaining organisations within the WSA (although it apparently has only one member in Wales!) the CPGB would at least have no cause to exaggerate publicly the scale of the problems.

8 He is now Presiding Officer of the Assembly.

9 Ed George, 'A Note on Welsh History and Politics', available on his website. [Also archived on this site here.]

10 See Evans and George, op. cit., for a detailed analysis.

11 She is no. 1 on the Plaid 'top-up' list for the South Wales Central region, and is therefore certain to win a seat under the Additional Member System.

12 Available on the web here. A print version is planned for the future.

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