As we launch our Senedd election blog and look to provide you with some insight into what’s going on, we’re pleased to welcome back contributor Gareth Leaman – who has gone on to write for Novara among other things – and who in this three part article gives us a sense of the lay of the land, why Reform are popular, and how election defeat for them would be far from the end of the story…
Gareth has discussed aspects of these issues in his article for Novara analysing last October’s Caerphilly by-election, so we’d thoroughly recommend reading that too!
With the next Senedd election fast approaching, time is running out to say more about what the rising popularity of Reform UK could mean for Wales. So here are some of the major points to reflect on between now and the 8th of May.
Under Siege
To understand how Reform UK is galvanising the political base of the Welsh right, we must situate our analysis within the global popular backlash against the liberal managerialism that has been the ruling political force across the western world in recent decades.
This administrative class has long presided over political institutions while lacking the will and the means of resolving the crises of capitalism that negatively impact their citizens. Having dominated every level of governance for a quarter-century or more, it now finds itself under siege from above and below. From above, it is constrained by global capital flows largely beyond its control: international finance, globalised production and supply chains, multinational corporate power. From below, it faces widespread discontent at the consequent decline in living standards and the psychosocial malaise that ensues. In Wales, one way or another, that siege is about to break.
Mass support for Welsh Labour is ending forever
The British Labour party is one such beleaguered institution. In Wales in particular, their long-crumbling political authority is finally on the verge of collapse. This shouldn’t come as much of a shock, for it is the inevitable consequence of Labour’s own politics.
In the wake of Britain’s post-Thatcherite transformation, Labour has long neglected – and at times willingly dismantled – the very social conditions that produced the party and the culture that sustained it. Parties exist as the expression of the vested interest of a certain sect of society. In the case of the Labour Party, its historical reason for being is tied inexorably to the history of industry, the communities built around it, and the trade unions that bonded its workers. As these institutional pillars disintegrate (which we can see all around us in postindustrial Wales), so too does the Labour Party, for it is no longer the articulation of a coherent, mass voting bloc. The infamous Peter Mandelson assertion that the working class are wedded to the Labour Party because ‘they have nowhere else to go’ may have held true for a time, but this means little if the labourite working class has been fragmented and disempowered beyond recognition.
This world of Labour and Labourism is never coming back. If they somehow cling to power in May, even a tentative glance at the material conditions that constitute Welsh politics will tell you that their era is over.
Labour seems to have become an afterthought in public consciousness remarkably quickly. It is suddenly received wisdom that they are finished as a political force. Reform’s rise is monopolising the popular media narrative, and left-liberals are regrouping with desperate agility under the auspices of Plaid Cymru and the Green Party. Yet despite all this, we can still only understand this election through the lens of Labour, for it is specifically the phenomena driving Labour’s collapse that are simultaneously catalysing Reform’s rise: deindustrialisation, the hollowing out of the social state, community disintegration, cultural anomie, mass political impotence, and so on.
Welsh devolution’s legacy is mass resentment for the class that has overseen it
As has been documented countless times now, Welsh devolution’s ‘passive revolution’ (essentially Labour’s control of a potentially radical process, for its own political ends) was always destined to engender a crisis of legitimacy for the political class responsible for administering it. The limited autonomy of the Senedd has led its custodians to be seen – correctly – as patsies for political decisions made elsewhere: Westminster, at one point the European Union (hence the popularity of Brexit in Wales), international quangos and private capital, etc.
The Senedd has little means of making meaningful material improvements to people’s lives, and so its popular perception – sometimes unfairly, but often not – is that it has little impact upon its citizens beyond impotent, bureaucratic meddling. As a result, devolution as a concept is widely resented and discredited – and with it Welsh Labour, for they have come to be seen as one and the same in the eyes of many.
We are witnessing in the Senedd an intensification of the problems we see at local council level, and will soon see in Westminster: a backlash against capital’s failing managerialists. In the next instalment of this series, we’ll look at the party positioning itself to best exploit this.