How election defeat for Reform would be far from the end of the story

Gareth Leaman

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.

1: 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. Next we’ll look at the party positioning itself to best exploit this.

2: Reform’s rise is a symptom of liberalism’s failure

The nature of Welsh devolution described in my previous blog, combined with the wider backlash against liberal capitalism, leaves Welsh Labour fatally vulnerable to a political force like Reform. As noted in my Caerphilly report,

‘Welsh Labour is the political embodiment of [the administrative class]: the ultimate middle managers, with the Senedd the ultimate institution of passive mediation between capital, state and public. With minimal autonomous economic powers (which Welsh Labour has historically resisted expanding), devolution can achieve little more than treating the symptoms of Westminster austerity to varying degrees of effectiveness. 

At best it attempts to inoculate Wales against Tory inhumanity. At worst, it internalises and embeds the logic of neoliberalism that has plagued every level of UK governance for decades. It should shock nobody that support for the party – and confidence in the institution it has run for 25 years – is collapsing in line with this worldwide upsurge in discontent.’

(Most of that article – and everything which explains Reform UK’s influence on Welsh politics – is based on this thesis. So, again, for a deeper understanding: go and read it if you haven’t already.)

Reform’s popularity must be understood as an ‘anti-establishment’ phenomenon

Organised opposition to Reform will achieve little until it recognises Reform as an ‘anti-establishment’ force.

Clearly, capital is failing. Or, more accurately, capitalism is failing people: capital itself remains intact. In real terms, the management of the economy is increasingly unable to sustain adequate living conditions for the majority, while remaining capable of reproducing the conditions of wealth accumulation for an increasingly selective elite minority. Our liberal economic custodians cannot account for this, and have spent decades insisting that everything is structurally robust even as the social order disintegrates around them.

Into this wreckage step the likes of Reform and the politics they represent: circumventing and exploiting crises of capital – an ‘anti-capitalism’, in a perverse sense – in order to become its last remaining beneficiaries. In this, they fully acknowledge the failures of capitalism, which the broken polity recognises and identifies with, and leave its defence to ‘the liberal establishment’.

Again, from the Caerphilly article:

‘As tolerance for the political establishment breaks, we’ve seen a concurrent rise in the ‘anti-elite’: not anti-capitalists as such, but those lauded as having mastered capital for their own ends, in opposition to the public-servant ‘capitalists’ directly overseeing the managed decline of communities.’

Reform’s appeal, therefore, lies in acknowledging systemic failure while purporting to be capable of bargaining with capital to extract the most value for its voter base, in a form of reactionary anti-establishmentarianism. As I’ve noted in a previous essay:

‘Through their success, such figures set the coordinates for ruthlessly negotiating the landscape of capitalism, demonstrating ways of ‘bargaining’ with capital in order to thrive (or at least survive) among its indentured hardships. Whether presented as an against-the-odds everyman or victorious strongman (or elements of both), each notable new-right ‘capitalist’ possesses their own variation on the same basic mission statement that tacitly posits capital itself as the ‘enemy’. It says, “the demands of capital can rip you to shreds, but follow after me and I can help you make the most of it”.⁠ Where they acquire political influence, provisions can be made for further, more severe shortcuts to help get ahead in the thrive-or-die society, largely by eliminating or repressing large swathes of ‘the competition’ from the market, or stripping away supposed institutional impediments to success: immigrants, women, traitorous leftists, the social state, etc.’

It should, of course, go without saying that the promises of salvation here are mostly illusory. In many ways, Reform’s politics is simply a crude intensification of the culture of Thatcherism already sadly dominant in modern British culture: the false freedom of the individual, predicated upon the suppression of others’ individual freedom, and at the expense of true liberation through collectivism.

Postindustrial Wales is the perfect place for Reform’s politics to take hold

Wales has endured a decades-long socioeconomic decline, in which deindustrialisation has given way to all the malign consequences of marketisation. Little economic life remains beyond institutional residue and a weak industrial base: public bodies, a service sector and the wild west of self-employment – the ghost of a social state mopping up the crises that insecure or low-quality work engenders.

Capitalism no longer expands through new spatial frontiers, but through dismantling existing, stagnant territories of production and reappropriating the ruins. Wales’ lack of economic sovereignty leaves it particularly vulnerable to this recomposition being imposed on it. We’ve seen this plenty already: manufacturing heartlands transformed into sprawls of warehouses and call centres, its inhabitants offered up as cheap and exploited labour, its land appropriated for private housing stock.

Such conditions are ideal for Reform’s disaster nationalism to take hold. Frustrations created by the current political settlement, with its inability to produce public prosperity, are redirected towards a politics of resentment that manufactures consent for yet further subsumption into the market and all the misery that entails.

3: Defeating the politics of Reform will be a long, hard fight, whatever the result of this election

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 simply, 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.

Shortcuts

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 be able to tame 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 in place 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.

Powerless

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.

This article was first published on the Undod blog.