People protest the Tory Government’s Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill in Cardiff last month. Photo, Tom Davies
“IT’S CLEAR THAT THE TORIES AIM TO FURTHER EXPLOIT THE UK’S INTERMINABLE DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT AND SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITIES TO FURTHER DELEGITIMISE ANY INSTITUTIONS THAT THREATEN TO DISRUPT THIS ZEAL. YET OUR PROGRESSIVE ELECTORAL PARTIES ARE STAGGERINGLY NAÏVE REGARDING THE POTENTIAL SUCCESS OF AN INEVITABLE ESCALATION IN THIS ONWARD MARCH: THE ABOLITION OF WELSH DEVOLUTION.”
As expected, rather than producing conditions conducive to an immediate political rupture, the coronavirus crisis has instead presented the Tory Westminster government with an opportunity to convert their unwarranted triumphalism and jingoistic hubris into a brutal reconsolidation of power.
Despite the latent potential for mass discontent in such times, the social consequences of the pandemic – increased job precarity, debt crises of all kinds, the inability to physically organise or freely assemble, and so on – have enabled the government to increase the pace of an authoritarian project that was already long in motion.
From the administratively banal efforts to redraw constituency boundaries and change voting systems, to the more overt state violence of the proposed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, we are witnessing a fundamentally antidemocratic politics assert itself with near-total impunity, telegraphed in the crushing electoral victory of December 2019, and inevitable as thirty years of neoliberalism pivots to a more repressive form.
In their inadequate responses to this dangerous escalation, the acquiescence of the centre and the organisational paralysis of the left have both been painfully exposed. Now, with May’s Senedd elections on the horizon, in Wales as in the rest of the UK, there is little indication that any electoral resistance is forthcoming.
Many centre-left politicians and commentators are keen to characterise this poll as epoch-defining: an opportunity to reject the encroachment of Anglo-Tory rule once and for all, and a watershed moment in the development of Welsh sovereignty. Yet such proclamations are self-indulgent and short sighted: regardless of the outcome, it is instead merely the latest flashpoint in the longue durée of the British state’s extended twilight, a key feature of which is the rise of a right-wing fundamentalism that Welsh liberalism will struggle to overcome.
The shortcomings of Wales’ ‘progressive’ parties
The positioning of our two major ‘progressive’ parties make these inadequacies starkly apparent. With Welsh Labour this has been documented and analysed so thoroughly and ably that it approaches tedium, so it suffices here to say that any pretence of establishing a Welsh socialism that transgresses British conservatism is long dead.
The charges are numerous, but let us simply note that a political party that has enjoyed two decades of uninterrupted power, yet presides over sectors of governance that are still dominated by the interests of capital rather than the needs of the people, rescinds the right to call themselves socialists. This paucity of ambition, compounded by the inherent limitations of devolution, leave the party with little other function than the conversion of authentocracy into apologia for the state machinations that they were ostensibly formed to oppose.
Their erstwhile challengers for the mantle of flagbearers for Welsh progressivism, Plaid Cymru, possess a similar aptitude for riding the ‘passive revolution’ of devolved power: harnessing a liberal-nationalist analogue of Labour’s tired ‘clear red water’ trope to posture at radicalism without ever needing to deliver it in any meaningful sense. Again, there are a litany of sins here, but to take one recent sorrowful example, much egalitarian kudos has been lost through their inability to assuage the concerns of trans members and allies as to the party’s approach to dealing with transphobia in their ranks.
While far from their only shortcoming – they are evidently unable to resist the logic of austerity in the pockets of power they do hold, for instance – this abrogation of solidarity has shed further light on a longstanding issue with the party. Namely, that their rhetoric vastly outpaces their convictions, and so despite surfing the wave of cosy liberal identitarianism, it remains to be seen whether they can be trusted to protect vulnerable citizens looking to escape from a Westminster government that will surely look to rescind their right to exist as soon as it becomes viable.
Instead, they appear content to rely forevermore upon a vapid techno-nationalism that, having suppressed any overtly socialist positioning, proposes independence-as-panacea, with rhetorical flourishes that owe more to intellectual hand-me-downs from nineteenth-century bourgeois thought than a modern, liberatory, class-antagonistic politics.
There is thus the distinct impression that neither party can offer a politics capable of breaking from the deeply embedded right-wing composition of the British state. Both tendencies belie the complacency in thinking – whether through independence or the multiple varieties of ‘home rule’ advocated by left-liberal unionists – that the mere possibility of a sovereign Welsh polity is inherently radical, or that the promise of such a prospect is enough to ward off a Westminster establishment increasingly adept at mobilising the public.
The limits of the liberal defence of devolution
It’s clear that the Tories aim to further exploit the UK’s interminable democratic deficit and socioeconomic inequalities to further delegitimise any institutions that threaten to disrupt this zeal. Yet our progressive electoral parties are staggeringly naïve regarding the potential success of an inevitable escalation in this onward march: the abolition of Welsh devolution.
While many are content to rest easy upon flattering polling numbers and social media narcissism, such inflated confidence is wholly misplaced. The British establishment has barely even begun to train its sights on The Senedd, but early skirmishes indicate that it will have no problem at all in cynically exploiting the role devolution has played in Wales’ chronic impoverishment and democratic detachment in order to build the case for its abolition.
The parallels to Brexit here are obvious, yet Welsh liberals have shown no signs of having learned lessons from that failed campaign. Most pressingly, that the British-nationalist right could harness a mood of popular disenfranchisement that centrism was incapable of countering, not only because they were ideologically predisposed to an ignorance of engaging with material conditions, but because they themselves were perceived – correctly – as being at least partially responsible for it. It will be relatively straightforward for the Johnsonian government to follow this playbook once again, ably positing themselves as a transgressive force against the ‘out of touch elites’ of Cardiff Bay.
Whether these assertions are fair or not is neither here nor there, because as with the liberal response to Brexit – and Trumpism across the Atlantic – the right-wing critiques of Welsh devolution, however cynically deployed, will contain a kernel of truth. They can point to the destitution that devolution has failed to alleviate, they can cite the embarrassingly low turnout figures for Welsh Parliament elections to highlight its democratic illegitimacy, and so forth.
This will not be adequately challenged by Welsh Labour or Plaid Cymru, as neither possess the ability to articulate a materialist solution to these problems, remaining oblivious to the notion that, in a polity disorientated by the neoliberal smashing of modes of solidarity, it is a spirit of re-enfranchisement that motivates like nothing else.
The hope of popular rebellion
In Wales there is thus a terminal ignorance of the central conceit of our political malaise: the lack of true democratic control, and the limited means of subverting the ‘pseudo-democracy’ promised by the British government’s dangerous authoritarianism. This lack is experienced not merely at the ballot box, but in everyday life: in the workplace, in the streets,in our living spaces. Of these multifarious sites of conflict, it seems unlikely that this fight can be won electorally any time soon.
Even if we were to delude that such a proposition could ever be achievable, the left will be locked out of state power in the UK for at least the next decade. Meanwhile, even if it becomes viable, it is far from guaranteed that Welsh independence will provide the liberatory egress required for a satiation of democratic desires. Short of this, nor is it a certainty that a settlement as paltry as devolution outlives this decade. Given these insurmountable challenges, it is unsurprising to see the left return to extra-parliamentary action as the prime locus of class war.
Though such activities are increasingly perilous considering the UK government’s heightened suppression of dissent, there is much to be heartened by in this regard. Eschewing a reliance on leadership from political parties, the communities most affected by the brutality of the state are more than capable of taking matters into their own hands. From Black Lives Matter to Sisters Uncut, grassroots organisations know implicitly that they cannot wait for conventional backing – likely never to be granted – in order to organise against state violence. It is this self-empowerment, and the visceral intoxication of righteous, riotous protest, that will define the demand for real democracy in the years to come, and not the meagre concessions proffered by electoral politics in Wales and beyond.
The writer is a member of Undod – radical independence for Wales.
