29th June 2007
Yesterday’s Men
In this morning’s Western Mail Ron Davies, the former Labour MP for Caerffili, says Plaid has been ’shafted by Labour while his successor, Wayne David, seems to think Labour has been shafted by Plaid. The truth of the matter is that neither party has been shafted but both Labour and Plaid have agreed to cooperate for the benefit of the people of Wales. This is something that most progressives in Wales should welcome and is, after all, a symbol of the ‘new politics’ that Ron Davies once argued the Assembly should embody. Continue reading Yesterday’s Men
28th June 2007
Seven for 07.07.07
Saying no is the default option that most of us will adopt in politics from time to time. It’s simply easier that way. As Alex Salmond mused on one occasion as we filed into the ‘No’ lobby in the Commons there are a thousand different reasons for voting something down, only one reason to vote for a proposition: because you agree with it.
So there may be multitude of reasons to vote no to the “One Wales” agreement on July 7th at my party’s National Council: but there are seven big reasons to vote ‘yes’.
1. Yes - For Wales. This is undoubtedly our best chance for the foreseeable future of achieving a proper Parliament for our country for the first time in our history. The probable election of a Conservative Government at Westminster in 2009 will make this the first referendum held against the backdrop of a Tory Government. It is difficult to imagine even the likes of Lord and Lady Kinnock arguing with gusto that the power to legislate for Wales should remain in Tory hands in London rather than the people’s hands in Wales. Plaid Cymru as a nationalist party has to put the advancement of the nation’s constitutional development above all other considerations. To do anything else would be a betrayal of our founding principles.
2. One Wales is more radical - on affordable housing with the suspension of the right to buy in hotspot areas and the redesignation of second homes vetoed by the Tories, on privatisation within the public services which the Tories would have pursued, and on the devolution of criminal justice which the Tories again opposed.
3. One Wales is more deliverable - unlike the All-Wales Accord, the One Wales programme has been costed and subjected to extensive and detailed civil service scrutiny (this was limited to a brief paper drawn up in twenty four hours in the case of the Accord which did raise very significant questions about the feasibility of the Accord’s programme). Senior Liberal Democrats, in justifying their decision to shelve the deal, said they did not believe it was deliverable - ironic considering that 119 of the 161 proposals in the Accord had actually come from them. The One-Wales programme is radical but also realistic. These are not pipe-dreams but concrete plans for the construction of a new and more confident Wales.
4. Red-green offers stability - there is little point having a dynamic programme of government if the coalition behind it is inherently unstable. The Liberal Democrats have proven themselves to be unworthy coalition partners by their initial prevarication and their attempt over the last few weeks to blackmail our party into discontinuing talks with the Labour Party. The actions of the Liberal Democrats have been driven not by the best interests of Wales, not even by the best interests of their party but by the personal agendas of Mike German, keen to get a deal with anyone in order to survive, and Kirsty Williams, keen to scupper a deal with anyone in order to ensure he doesn’t. Until the Liberal Democrats resolve their internal difficulties they are simply not fit to govern.
5. The choice of red-green now strengthens the hand of Plaid Cymru and weakens the hand of the Liberal Democrats in all future coalition negotiations. If we had chosen the rainbow then the Liberal Democrats would have established themselves - much like the German FDP in the 70s and 80s - as the ‘kingmakers’ in Welsh politics, able to swing left for a Lib-Lab deal or right for a rainbow. This would have given them maximal negotiating power - which they did indeed use to great effect in the All-Wales Accord (see point four above) though spectacularly failed to do so in discussions with Labour as we skilfully out-manoeuvred them. Before red-green the Liberal Democrats were the only party that had two options for Government. Now Labour and Plaid Cymru have two options as well - and the Liberal Democrats are weakened strategically and will suffer long-term political damage as a result.
6. In terms of party unity, this was the least worst option. Some people will be angry whatever we would have done. But turning this deal down and going into coalition with the Conservatives would have fatally undermined our activist base in the areas of Wales where we need to grow if we are to replace Labour as the largest party. It would have meant retreating to the party’s historic base in the West and giving up our dream of repeating the 1999 breakthrough in post-industrial south Wales where a third of our population live.
7. The final reason is simple: if we are what we say we are, a socialist party, a party of the left, then, all things being equal, when presented with a progressive programme in alliance with another party of the left or an alternative programme in alliance with the political Right, then our natural tendency should be to choose left. If we embraced the Rainbow under these circumstances then the mesaage we would send to the people of Wales is that our adoption of socialism in our party’s aims twenty six years was just for show. We would have appeared unprincipled, opportunistic and ideologically rudderless. In other words, we would have looked like the Liberal Democrats. And none of us would have wanted that.
27th June 2007
Why I Couldn’t Stand For Blair
While I can find the charity to forgive the former Prime Minister (God, it feels so good to write those words of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair) I couldn’t give him a standing ovation even if I was forced to do it down the barrel of a gun. Personally, I think the House of Commons took collective leave of its sanity today in applauding a man that has caused untold damage to the state of our democracy, our standing in the world, the reputation of international instituions, the Armed Forces, the long-term prospects for peace, our ability to counter international terrorism, and, last but not least, to the lives of millions that have died, been maimed or displaced as a result of his mendacity in taking us to war against Iraq.
People may say this was discourteous. It is not in my nature to be spiteful or rude. But it would have been dishonest for me to honour a man that I believe should be on trial at the bar of the House or in the dock in the Hague. Today was the British political Establishment at its sycophantic worst. The real discourtesy was to the memory of those that have died. We should be laying wreaths, not offering laurels to a man that misled his party, his Cabinet, Parliament and the people who elected him.
I can hardly think of a worse candidate for the job of peace envoy to the Middle East. A man that has fomented civil war between Sunni and Shia is hardly best-placed to pour oil on the troubled waters of Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.
25th June 2007
A short history of Wales in the last twenty five years as seen through the eyes of Antonio Gramsci
When I first joined Plaid in the 1980s with the miners’ strike still ringing in my ears, it wasn’t long before I first heard the name Antonio Gramsci. A Sardinian hunch-back Communist leader whose Prison Notebooks were not even properly translated into English until the 1970s is at first glance an unlikely intellectual guiding force for a nationalist party on Europe’s Atlantic rim. But through Gramsci we all learned some important things:
‘Hegemony’ was the domination - both cultural and political - of the ‘national-popular will’ by a historic bloc of social and politcial forces. Such was the power of this ‘formation that it permeated the entire society - creating a ‘common sense’ about the way the world is into which even subordinate groups were integrated either by coercion or consent.
This is rather terse and jargony - try reading it in the original - but the fundamental insight was sound whether applied to the power of the Catholic right in southern Italy - or, in our case, the overwhelmingly dominant role the Labour Party has played in shaping modern Wales, for better or for worse.
In seeking to challenge a dominant hegemony there are basically two choices, Gramsci said, either a “war of movement” - a rapid, frontal assault on the citadels of power or a ”war of position” - a slower, broader and less dramatic attempt to appropriate the ruling hegemony for one’s own political purposes. A quarter of a century ago Plaid Cymru opted for the latter strategy, positioning itself as a ’socialist’ party within the dominant discourse of Welsh politics but seeking at the same time to ’burrow into the contradictions’ thrown up by the Labour Party’s undying support for the unitary British state. The strategy has been electorally and politically successful, gaining Plaid Cymru seats and dragging Labour, however, unwillingly in a nationalist direction.
The historic Plaid-Lab agreement which is being finalised this week is the latest step in this twenty-five years strategy. But it is not its final act. Hegemony is always and in all places inherently dynamic The final chapter is yet to be written - we will write it ourselves - but it could involve the emergence of Plaid, as in Scotland, as the largest party of the left and inheritor of the Left’s hegemony, or the creation of a genuinely autonomous Labour Party which has finally broken its umbilical ties with the British State. Either outcome would accelerate our progress on the path to political independence.
The alternative project - the rainbow - would represent a radical and irreversible break with this strategy. It would mean the creation of a nationalist counter-hegemony that would inevitably define itself against Labour, but could also involve a more profound rupture with the Left itself. In this sense the choice that Plaid now faces (and indeed Labour who could yet force us down this road if they reopened talks with LibDems) is in Gramsci’s terms ‘epochal’ not merely ‘conjunctural’ i.e. it will determine the politics of the next twenty five years not just the next four.
That’s not to say that there would not be elements of the Rainbow programme that would be ‘progressive’. Gramsci made the point that every new ‘regime’ - even the Fascists - contained elements that were progressive or constructive. It’s just that the creation a of a centre/centre-right political hegemony in Wales would remove one of the arguments for independence - the distinctiveness of the Welsh radical tradition, our ‘common sense’ that society should be organised in the interests of the least well-off and not the wealthiest. If we lost sight of that, we lose sight of who we are and where we’ve come from. And the new Wales we create may be harsher than the one we’ve left behind.
23rd June 2007
He Who Dares Wins, eventually
I have just returned from Canada - a country that never entertains Coalition Governments because none of the Federal Parties can stomach allying with the Nationalist Bloc Quebecois. Defining one’s politics by whom or what we are against is universally easier than defining ourselves by what we are for. Debates within Plaid( or Labour) on whom do we hate the most - Labour (Plaid) or the Tories - maybe an useful starting-point but unless our politics is to descend into a vapid tribalism, they should force us to express our differences in something a little more enlightening than prejudice. Continue reading He Who Dares Wins, eventually
