The Great Red Blob

Ben Wildsmith

Politics is governed by people who have little interest in it.

It’s a dispiriting fact that anyone who reads columns like this is not the sort of fickle voter who holds destiny in their hands.

While I, like the rest of the Welsh political media, am fit to burst with the potential permutations at next year’s Senedd election, the people who will actually decide the outcome largely don’t know it’s happening yet.

They are caught up in ‘family life’ or whatever it is they do when we’re shouting at Laura Kuenssberg.

Immovable

Historically, their voting behaviour has been predictable. The Great Red Blob lay immovable, like a sedated walrus on the thin ice of our prosperity, whilst skirmishes around it saw occasional victories for Plaid, the Tories and the Liberals.

None of it mattered, particularly, as Welsh politics was ignored in the wider UK and the Senedd’s meagre powers were further diminished by a culture of complacent consensus.

We’ve gone from being the crucible of radicalism to a political playpen in which toothless protagonists barely phone in the discontent of their constituents.

It’s depressing, don’t you think?

For all the endless moaning in Facebook groups, our ire seems unreflected in the largely genteel goings on at Bae Caerdydd.

Cardiffians often snarl, ‘The Docks!’ when Wales’s premier destination for expensive coffee and empty rhetoric is mentioned. You can see their point.

But, it seems that change is a comin’.  The arrival of Reform UK on the scene is forcing some urgency into the Welsh political scene.

Three-way-split

The polls currently show a three-way split between Reform, Labour, and Plaid. Conventional wisdom has it that this should result in an arrangement of some sort between Labour and Plaid, with the largest of them providing the First Minister.

If that sort of outcome is being considered in advance by Plaid, I feel they will be making a grave mistake.

We are at an inflection point in world politics. The ideological certainties that have guided us since the late 1970s have been exhausted and found unfit for life as we live it now.

Despite the obvious decline that most western voters have experienced in the 21^st Century, our politics has failed to offer anything fundamentally new since the days of Thatcher and Reagan. As neoliberalism has failed us, we have been offered yet more of it as our cure.

The ill-tempered, brittle presentation of the current Labour government betrays the paucity of its offering. Rachel Reeves huffs and puffs about change whilst running the economy like George Osborne.

It’s a busted flush.

In the Senedd, Labour is paralysed. The evident contempt in which the Secretary of State for Wales holds devolved government renders the First Minister’s mantra about Labour ‘at each end of the M4’ humiliating and ludicrous.

Virtually every well-known Labour MS is standing down. The vultures are circling.

Frustration

In Adam Price’s heartfelt piece this week, he describes the formative experience of watching his father’s frustration and anger as a striking miner in the ’84-’85 strike.

It has been fashionable, of late, for commentators to bemoan the ‘obsession’ that some of us are supposed to have about the strike and the wider loss of industry in Wales. I would argue that recent events make a mockery of that objection.

The betrayal by Labour of the miners has resounding echoes in the ‘nothing we could do, butt’ response of the party to questions over its handling of the steel works in Port Talbot.

In the UK, neoliberal economics kicked in properly at the 1986 budget. Forty years on we are stood in the wreckage of that experiment.

We have a housing crisis, a mental health crisis, life expectancy stalling, widening inequality, unprecedented distrust of institutions, and public services that are failing us at every turn.

Here in Wales, Labour has allowed this to affect our population more widely than in most of the UK.

By the time of the election, there is a very good chance that the vandalism of Donald Trump’s regime will be apparent to all. That has clear implications for Reform UK, whose opportunistic mopping up of widespread discontent is likewise powered by unsubstantiated promises.

Radicalism 

Plaid must own radicalism if it is to prosper. The ersatz rebellion of Reform UK needs to be rendered laughable by the real thing.

Plaid should point at the direct line from the strike to Port Talbot, describe every wrenching loss on the way, and condemn the entire enterprise as Labour’s shame.

It must pledge not to sign any deals with Labour. If Baroness Morgan et al are concerned about Reform UK’s presence in the Senedd then they should respond by either governing in such a way that Plaid will support their measures or supporting a Plaid government’s programme out of principle.

No deals should be made, no quarter should be given.

The reputational damage that Keir Starmer’s government is doing to the Labour brand may well be unrecoverable. Plaid shouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.

If, eventually, Wales is to be independent of the UK, then Plaid must embody independence rather than preaching it.