A Tough Nut to Crack

Ben Wildsmith

There’s a feeling, is there not, that we’re about to go through something epochal.

Having, since the 2008 crash, chugged slowly up a hill of despair, we appear to be at the top of the log flume, closing our eyes and gripping on to the rails before plunging into the rapids.

This disorientation is occurring on every level of our organisation as humans. Globally, nuclear codes are held by men we neither trust nor understand. We’re politically divorced from the continent we live on, feeling our way towards a necessary reconciliation in the face of war in Ukraine.

Our UK Labour government is being rejected from both the right and left of public opinion, less than two years since it swept to power on a similar tide of revulsion at its Conservative predecessor.

Here in Wales, the predicted end of Labour rule will shake the foundations of every institution we have. Whilst the headlines will focus on changes in the Senedd, Labour’s influence on quangos, public services, local government, and the true national religion – committees – will be wrenched into revolution like the cogs of a rusted engine.

People who have never even considered that they might not hold office will be left holding something else as Wales remakes itself at last.

All of that is either terrifying or exciting depending on your perspective. For those with influence it offers the boundless opportunity that chaos brings. This, for the moment at least, is where Donald Trump’s supporters are.

The plan is to redraw the entire world to America’s advantage. Having come to power promising border walls, their president now promises the opposite: anywhere within America’s orbit, whether Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, or Cuba, is to be subsumed into a nation that most of the world thought overmighty to begin with. The rest of the globe, whether friendly or not, can be left to burn on that ambition.

The Gulf states must be wondering what they ever did to deserve their fate.

Zooming in on the UK picture, Reform UK remain on course to govern in three years’ time and, here too, the application of raw power would become the only medium of exchange.

All those smirking generalisations about disabled benefit claimants, immigrants of all kinds, and supposedly parasitic public sector workers would manifest in cruel distractions from Reform’s prime objective to deregulate the economy.

If you fall into any of those groups, you will become an object of the mob with no more agency than the USA and Israel afford to Palestinians.

With that in mind, we in Wales should be alert to our inherent marginalisation. Whilst many here feel fiercely loyal to the UK, that will draw no water in a nation where the primary values are uniformity of culture and economic advantage.

It is one thing to be the perpetual whipping boy of the dominant culture but another entirely to be held as the exemplar of all that is wrong in the UK.

The unconscionable othering, by right wing politicians, of our Muslim communities could easily be refitted to focus on the things that are unique to Wales: our language and communitarian values.  If Reform take power in Westminster, whilst holding a vocal minority in the Senedd, such an attitude would make political sense for them.

So, what are we to do? The terrifying uncertainty all around us demands that our government plays to the strengths of the nation. Our communities, on the local level, remain largely coherent and sustaining.

Local ownership

Welsh government policy must be focussed, in every respect, towards reinforcing that where it exists and regenerating it where it has frayed. Local ownership of assets, as exemplified by the Cymunedoli movement offers a way to draw people into the governance of their own resources and acts as a local barrier to international chaos.

In all respects, the incoming Welsh government must prioritise the immediate concerns of people here above the ideological preferences of the political class.

If independence, for instance, is to become politically viable, that will flow not from grievance at the incompetence of UK governance, but from the demonstrated superiority of its Welsh variant.

In the same way that the abolition of prescription charges defined the early flourish of devolution, the democratisation of natural resources should fuel the success of a post-Labour Wales.

Precarious

The world is so precarious now that our identity and politics can seem irrelevant amidst the fears of fuel shortages and even mushroom clouds. There will be a Wales, however, after all of this shakes out.

The extent to which our nation is diminished by the actions of madmen, over whom we have no control, depends upon the resilience we build into it.

The job of Welsh government is to ensure that resilience is placed in the hands of us all, and not contingent on exploitative relationships with the wider UK and international finance.

Historically, Wales was the awkward squad. Looking forward, we must be a much tougher nut to crack than of late.