Time to Change Tracks

Ben Wildsmith

The last legitimately elected and stable government we had was David Cameron’s ministry in 2015. Once that was undone by Brexit a year later, the country has been effectively ungovernable with traditional parties unable to reconcile their factions.

The resultant chaos of coalition, a deal with the DUP, and endless leadership changes has resulted in much of the electorate losing trust in the entire political class.

Last year’s Labour victory represented a last, desperate investiture of hope by voters that there could be a return to governance as we used to know it. Keir Starmer’s managerial style seemed to promise a steady hand. He, himself, promised a government that would ‘tread lightly’ through our lives, recognising that happy societies don’t want to be dominated by political concerns.

Friendly commentators like LBC’s James O’Brien sighed in relief as the ‘grown-ups’ took the wheel of the UK.

Just over a year later, in the wake of this week’s horrendous, antisemitic attack in Manchester, the new Home Secretary is drawing up plans to curtail protests.

Reactionary responses

The light touch that was promised has been superseded by a series of reactionary responses to unrest, epitomised by the baffling decision, in August, to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group.

This weekend, the police were under justified pressure to protect Jewish places of worship as a matter of priority. Instead, a great many of them were deployed to arrest and carry away 500 entirely peaceful protestors who were holding placards with the illegal words, ‘Palestine Action’ on them.

The mass arrests at these protests are the largest ever made for any reason in UK history. The numbers involved are too large to accommodate in police custody and reports from the forces involved suggest that exhausted and embarrassed officers are at the end of their tether because manhandling docile pensioners is not what they joined up to do.

There is a strictly limited number of people who are willing to risk arrest under terrorism legislation. The protestors trend older because people of working age risking their employment and travel prospects for the rest of their lives if they so criminalised.

Gaza

The regular protests against Israel’s behaviour in Gaza, on the other hand, are attended by many thousands of people and have been since the atrocities of October 7^th two years ago. Since that time, pro-Israeli commentators, echoed by figures on the right like Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage, and, laughably, ‘Tommy Robinson’ have sought to delegitimise these protests as ‘hate marches’ and have them curtailed by legislation.

If, as seems likely, the Home Secretary is to accede to these demands, how are the police supposed to cope with the inevitable mass disobedience that will ensue? The government is signing cheques that its employees can’t cash. What’s next…the army?

The government’s predicament is of its own making. Its fundamental mistake was to waste the small window of tolerance it was granted by the public upon election.

A dull, doctrinaire Treasury insisted that reimposing George Osborne’s economics and effectively governing to the right of Boris Johnson would bear fruit over the course of the Parliament and allow it to loosen conditions in the economy later on.

The government hubristically believed it had breathing space that the country was unwilling to allow. By now, people should be putting their names down for council houses that will be ready next year; waiting lists in hospitals should be tumbling noticeably; potholes should be filled.

Bond markets

Instead of quaking before the bond markets, the government should have won genuine popular support that caused creditors to retreat in the knowledge that it would be in power for many years to come. Rachel Reeves should have drawn a clear distinction between borrowing for capital expenditure and running costs. A case could have been made for the rebuilding of the UK from which investors could have seen a return.

Instead, with goodwill exhausted, the government is now engaged in a rear-guard action against Reform UK to keep itself afloat. Lacking the moral authority to defend principles like the right to protest, or to request moderate language at protests, it is enacting Trumpian legislation as a matter of self-preservation.

It won’t work. Just as gestures towards the left like reversing the two-child cap on benefits will be seen as inconsistent pandering, these concessions to authoritarianism will come off as weak sauce to the voters they are aimed at.

The legislation, though, will remain, and that is why this government is becoming a danger to society.

The precedent set by proscribing Palestine Action, for instance, will be there to exploit for an incoming Farage government. Instead of having to overturn the settled way of doing things, Farage will find the structural work done for him by a Labour government in desperation to save its own skin.

In Caerphilly this week we have seen Reform UK mischaracterising the Nation of Sanctuary legislation in an attempt to baffle low-information voters. We’ve also seen Labour promoting a graph suggesting that a vote for it, and not Plaid Cymru, is the only way to stop Reform being elected.

Misleads 

What else can we deduce from that other than Welsh Labour’s loyalty to itself means more to it than the likely dismantling of Wales as a distinct civic entity? As Reform peddles its lies against a background of Putinism and personal disgrace, our governing party misleads electors in the service of a Westminster leadership that impoverishes us as a matter of reflex.

There are nearly fours years to go before a scheduled Westminster election, and I fear that this government will have destroyed all constitutional barriers to a Trumpian government before then.

We, rightly, feel sheltered from the worst excesses of populism in Cymru. What self-governance we have has at least been conducted without calls for violence and repression. It’s no time to be diffident now, though.

Our Senedd and media must stand apart from the dystopia in Westminster and proclaim what we will not accept. That needs to start with the Welsh branch of the Labour Party finding the minerals it was founded upon and refusing to collude with Keir Starmer in selling our birthright for the illusion of victories in elections that are already lost.

Events are gathering pace, and many of them are subject to international pressure from hostile nations and malign individuals. If Cymru does not cohere to assert its distinct values now, we could find our nationhood erased in the tumult.

We have reached the point where Labour and Reform are riding the same train. It’s time to change tracks.