In the last installment of his three-part analysis Gareth Leaman weighs up the long-term challenges.
“There is little to suggest that, within a term or two, Plaid Cymru won’t find themselves largely in the same position as Welsh Labour do now.”
Whatever the result of May’s Senedd election, it’s clear that the Welsh political establishment has neither the means nor the understanding required to stop the politics that Reform represents. Throughout the ruptures of the past decade – from Brexit, to the premiership of Boris Johnson, to the ascent of Nigel Farage – it has responded with the same old tired repertoire of pedantic proceduralism and empty moralism.
Liberal governance in Wales remains committed to the notion that the existing economic order is fundamentally sound, and that political instability is a mere deviation from the norm rather than a symptom of a failing orthodoxy. It cannot diagnose the politics of Reform correctly: it can only condemn it as an aberration, while leaving intact the material conditions that make it so appealing to the very people being failed by the incumbent caretakers of power. It is, put bluntly, systemically and rhetorically incapable of confronting a right-wing movement that exploits the collapsing socioeconomic settlement that liberalism continues to defend.
Media figures and politicians remain complacently convinced that Reform will either wither under endless charges of hypocrisy, or that they – along with their prospective voters – can be scolded and shamed back into obscurity. Neither strategy has ever worked, and they won’t work here either. Worse than that: scolding Reform’s prospective base only deepens the appeal of their ‘anti-establishment’ qualities. Liberal self-denial only pushes those whom they have abandoned closer to the welcoming arms of the far right.
Don’t let any polling in either direction fool you – however this election goes, we will remain stuck in a long-term, cruel paradox. The means of truly defeating Reform – and the politics they represent – are the very things whose destruction has led to Reform’s rise. The social foundations that in previous eras resisted surges of right-wing populism – tight communities, organised workplaces, local institutions – have been decimated nationwide. The politics that Reform represents feeds off this destruction.
Liberal shortcuts are useless – and, more than that, have directly contributed to our current predicament. What’s really needed is the long-term reconstruction of these means of (essentially anti-capitalist) solidarity – or more aptly, building anew, as very little remains with which to rebuild. Wales requires a total reprogramming of how we live, and the structures that support that, from infrastructure to consciousness and back again. Its negative has happened before; it can happen again. The challenge is temporal: this will take decades; the real danger is what the right can achieve in the interregnum between liberalism’s collapse and the hope of a socialist restoration.
Though polling mostly suggests this is unlikely, if Reform wins power in May, it seems probable that they will fail at the boring acts of everyday governance. We’ve seen this already in English councils. If this happens, there will follow a liberal assumption that support for the right will fall away when people see it unable to deliver on its promise. This, once again, is hopelessly naive. This situation is where the real danger lies. Reform won’t have tamed the movements that will arise from yet more frustration at politicians failing to improve people’s everyday lives.
If Reform is defeated outright in May, any outpouring of centre-left triumphalism will be all too premature. There is a lot of wishful thinking instead of analysis when it comes to interpreting the apparent rise of a post-Labour liberal-left. While traditional parties may be in the process of being discarded by the electorate (and how permanent this is remains to be seen), it appears that long-standing voter blocs are remaining largely intact.
It’s worth bearing this in mind when assessing the merits of Plaid Cymru’s apparent ascension to government-in-waiting status. The extremist bent of Reform’s British nationalism has made Plaid’s response all too easy: they can counter with their own brand of Welsh-nationalist social democracy as a simple contrast to Reform, without having to push hard for meaningful and contentious political change on their own terms. We have been here before, when the challenge of answering to Boris Johnson’s own flavour of reactionary nationalism fell into superficial grandstanding that quickly squandered any opportunity to engineer a true political rupture within the British state. With all the multigenerational problems it will face, and the intractable faults of devolution, there is little to suggest that, within a term or two, Plaid Cymru won’t find themselves largely in the same position as Welsh Labour do now.
The social problems mentioned throughout this article are systemic, and won’t be overcome any time soon, and especially not overnight with a mere change of government, however historic the ejection of Labour may feel. Taking the reins of the Senedd is the worst thing that could happen to soft-left parties that hope to retain an insurgent or transgressive energy, unless they can articulate to voters the institution’s limitations. If the only real outcome is that Plaid Cymru (and possibly a junior partner in the Green Party) become the new powerless technocratic establishment of devolved governance in Wales, an even greater post-Reform revenge will be enacted upon them in the future. The short-term risk for the real socialist left is that their support for this incoming government is too full-throated, and they become toxic by association.
And then, of course, there is the spectre of Westminster. Whatever happens in May, Wales remains at the mercy of the next UK General Election, where it seems far more likely that Reform could win power. At this point, the prospect of being able to abolish all forms of resistance – and all forms of what people like to think of as ‘Welshness’ – becomes more probable. I will write on this in more detail after the election.
So, whatever the result of this Senedd election, the conditions that make the coming ascendency of right-wing power a near-inevitability remain in place. This predicament is bigger than Reform, and certainly a bigger problem than their electoral opponents can handle. If people continue to fail to understand the slide to the right, and how to stop it, they will be condemned to watch helplessly as it transforms Wales in its image.