Political ignorance risks derailing Welsh democracy

Martin Shipton

Populist and far-right parties largely rely on political ignorance for their votes.

They rely on the fact that their target supporters won’t have the knowledge or astuteness to realise when they are being conned.

This poses a particular risk in a country like Wales, where many feel disillusioned with the way things are, but without a clear understanding of who or what is responsible for the poor circumstances in which they find themselves.

If you lived in a black township in South Africa during the apartheid era and were humiliated and discriminated against on a daily basis, it was glaringly obvious that those responsible for the poverty and suffering you endured were the white supremacists who ran the country in their own interests.

Likewise, if you were a Palestinian living in Gaza today, you would know through bitter experience that Israel was to blame for the murder of your family and the destruction of your home.

Victims in both places were wired into history and confronted with a brutal understanding of their oppression and who had caused it. The names of those wielding such dystopian power were etched into the brains of the unfortunate.

In Wales the situation is not so clearcut. Its position as a peripheral region of a highly centralised British economy has led inevitably to disadvantages, as have the closure of the mines, years of austerity policies, Brexit and other factors specific to particular industries and different locations.

In a relatively new development, AI is now also taking out lots of jobs.

One hundred years ago and more, when the mining industry was still thriving, the education provided by miners’ institutes and the South Wales Miners’ Federation, for example, equipped working class people with a sophisticated and realistic understanding of how society was organised, and offered a path to resistance that led to improved pay and conditions.

Today the trade unions remain largely embedded in the public sector, while most working class people employed in the private sector earn their living in low-paid, non-unionised workplaces like call centres.

Meanwhile the companies they work for often make huge profits with gigantic salaries and bonuses for the few at the top. The shareout of wealth has never been so unequal.

In a society where there was a general understanding of such injustice, it couldn’t have continued in such a rampant way. But those ensconced in a privileged position that they are determined to retain have been adept at constructing a simplistic alternative narrative that takes the heat off them and shifts the blame onto groups who themselves are disadvantaged.

This is happening now, in the run-up to May’s Senedd election.

Disengagement

The level of disengagement from Welsh politics – something that makes it easier for malign forces to spread disinformation – is evident from a poll released the other day that measured voters’ perceptions of named party leaders.

When asked whether Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth was doing a good job or a bad job, 60% of respondents either said they didn’t know or that he was doing neither a good job nor a bad job (surely a variation on ‘don’t know’!).

The equivalent figure for Welsh Conservative Senedd leader Darren Millar was 71%, and even for First Minister and Welsh Labour leader Eluned Morgan it was as high as 50%.

If a high proportion of the electorate has no opinion on the politicians seeking to lead them, it’s no wonder that many will be susceptible to influence by forces that want to profit from their ignorance.

Shameless

This is most obviously apparent in the shameless determination of Reform UK and the embittered former Welsh Conservative Senedd leader Andrew RT Davies to persist with their attack on the Welsh Government’s Nation of Sanctuary programme.

A few months ago during the Caerphilly by-election campaign both parties were exposed for suggesting falsely that the money spent on the programme was going to migrants who arrived in the UK on small boats from France.

In fact, as those pushing the lies knew well, 91% of the Nation of Sanctuary’s budget over several years was devoted to helping Ukrainian refugees who were fleeing from Putin’s invasion of their country to resettle in Wales.

We wrote extensively about this deception at the time, and Ukrainians who had benefitted from the project themselves gave testimony about how hurt they had been by the decision of the right-wing parties to misrepresent the true position.

Thankfully, most people in Caerphilly saw through the toxic nonsense that was elevated by Reform to prime slot in their campaign and their candidate was defeated.

But neither Reform nor the Tories have been deterred by this setback and they are peddling the same racist bilge again.

Andrew RT Davies has been distributing a leaflet dedicated to attacking the Nation of Sanctuary with disinformation to the voters of Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend, while Reform UK has been flooding social media with similar disingenuous claims.

Neither mention that the total cost of the Nation of Sanctuary represents just 0.05% of the Welsh Government’s budget.

It goes without saying that while they are banging on about the Nation of Sanctuary, they are ignoring other issues that they should perhaps be concentrating on.

Underfunded

By any fair measure, Wales remains underfunded. We have lost the EU funding we used to get when the UK was a member state and what’s replaced it doesn’t match up.

We have been deprived of consequential funding we should be receiving from the Treasury for the money spent in England on the HS2 rail project, but it’s been ludicrously designated as an England and Wales project, so we get nothing.

We’ve been refused devolution of the Crown Estate revenues.

Having been appointed by Nigel Farage as Reform UK’s leader in Wales – his predecessor, let’s remind ourselves, is serving a 10 and a half years jail sentence for accepting bribes from Russia – Dan Thomas has made it clear that he has no interest in standing up for Wales by asking the UK Government for the money we have been deprived of.

This is hardly surprising. His hope is that Farage will be elected as Prime Minister at the next general election, which must be held by 2029.

Farage has no intention of giving extra money to Wales. The idea that if Dan Thomas was First Minister he would dare to challenge Farage about funding or anything else is laughable.

There is no democracy in Reform and Dan Thomas is a puppet wholly dependent on the actual party leader who appointed him. As things stand, Farage could totally subvert Welsh democracy by sacking his party leader in Wales if he became too uppity, even if he was the First Minister.

This is by no means a far-fetched scenario, as Farage has a history of falling out with anyone who challenges him. A more likely eventuality, however, is that Dan Thomas would be supine in his acceptance of Farage’s orders and that Wales would become a branch office of the party’s HQ in London..

Is this to be the fate of the devolution project that seemed to herald a new dawn for Wales when people – albeit narrowly – voted for it in 1997?

We all deserve a better outcome than this at the Senedd election on May 7.