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Number 28 - February 2005 Workers ACTION In search of clearer, redder water Darren Williams explains how and why Welsh Labour activists have formed a new rank-and-file organisation Following the defeat of the miners' strike in 1985 and the third consecutive Tory election victory in 1987, Neil Kinnock and his allies succeeded in 'realigning' the Labour left, persuading many MPs, councillors and trade union bureaucrats who had previously supported the Bennite project that it was necessary to adapt to the 'new realities' of British politics. This gave rise to the 1987-89 Policy Review, which scrapped many of the party's longstanding policy commitments in the name of electoral expediency, and prepared the way for the more thoroughgoing revisionism of Tony Blair. In response to the first couple of years of New Labour in government, however, a new process of realignment began within the party, which has partially reversed what happened in the 1980s. The 'hard' left had been worn down by a series of defeats over issues like Clause 4, and diminished by the departure of many activists - either into demoralised inactivity, or to join new left formations like the SLP or Socialist Alliance. Now, however, it found that it was able to work with many activists from the 'soft' left, the centre and even some who used to be considered part of the right of the party: longstanding mutual suspicions were cast aside in the name of defending Labour's post-war achievements, and any semblance of party democracy, against the Blairite offensive. In the first instance, the product of this rapprochement was simply an electoral pact for the purpose of contesting the NEC elections: the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance. More recently, however, it has seen the creation of more substantial, campaigning organisations: Save the Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee. The revival of the left has taken different forms in different parts of the British state. Within the Scottish Labour Party, the Campaign for Socialism (CfS) was originally established to defend Clause 4; it adopted a newsletter, The Citizen, which had emerged out of the campaign against the poll tax. The CfS was, therefore, already well-established when the first Blair government took office, and counted among its members a number of those elected to the Scottish Parliament in 1999 - although few of them have consistently supported a left political agenda. Wales is different again. Here, a centre-left organisation - Welsh Labour Grassroots (WLG) - has come into being over the last 18 months. Popular perceptions of Welsh politics might suggest that WLG is pushing at an open door, yet - as I will show - this is a little wide of the mark. Welsh Labour: left policies without left-wingers? All this might give the impression that the Welsh Labour Party as a whole is a bastion of the left. This, unfortunately, is not the case. Notwithstanding the proud record of militancy of the Welsh working class, its political representatives have tended to be part of the establishment. Three consecutive Labour leaders - Callaghan, Foot and Kinnock - represented Welsh constituencies and they rarely faced their toughest critics close to home. The rank-and-file Labour left has historically been weak within Wales. Bennism briefly flourished in the early 1980s - when there was even a Cardiff Labour Briefing - but was finally outmanoeuvred by Kinnock, with leading figures like Ron Davies co-opted into the leadership. In the 20 years of its existence, the Socialist Campaign Group has counted only one Welsh MP among its members: Llew Smith, whose politics are certainly not consistently 'left'. The Wales Campaign Group - the 'official' organised left within Welsh Labour - slogged away through the dark days of the 1990s, but declined in size and influence and disappeared altogether at the end of the decade. Arguably its demise became inevitable when it shut down in 1995-97, unable to take a position on what was then the most important issue in Welsh politics - the Assembly - because of Llew Smith's opposition to anything that smacked of 'nationalism'.1 At the same time, a new group, Welsh Labour Action (WLA), was formed to campaign for the strengthening of Labour's devolution proposals, seeking to achieve the same powers and electoral arrangements for the Welsh Assembly as had already been promised to the Scottish Parliament. While many of its objectives remained unrealised, it made a significant contribution to the debate around devolution both within and outside the party. Politically, however, it was a heterogeneous group, united by little beyond the commitment to self-government. Moreover, the election of the first Assembly in 1999 saw several of its leading members become part of the new political establishment, and WLA too disappeared. Consequently, at the end of the first Blair government in 2001 - by which time dissent within Labour ranks at the British level had gathered significant momentum - there was no grassroots left body in Wales to turn members' discontent with New Labour into organised opposition. Palace politics The absence, until recently, of an organised grassroots left has meant that any socialist critique of New Labour and of the weaknesses in Welsh Labour have been overshadowed by political cleavages that are not strictly left-right in character. Principal among these has been the tension between the bureaucracy and activists, especially in south Wales valleys CLPs, over the selection of candidates. The bureaucracy is charged, as in England and Scotland, with imposing its own preferred candidates at the expense of local members' ability to exercise their democratic choice. There is certainly much substance in this, examples being the exclusion from the 1999 list of Assembly candidates of prominent left-wingers such as the Tower Colliery miners' leader, Tyrone O'Sullivan, and the WLA chair, Gareth Hughes, for blatantly spurious reasons such as 'lack of experience'. The selection disputes that have proven most controversial, however, have been over the attempt to ensure gender balance. In 1998, the Welsh Labour executive committee adopted the policy of 'twinning' CLPs, introducing joint selection contests that required that a woman Assembly candidate be selected in every other constituency. This policy resulted in the Assembly having 30 women among its 60 members - which is all the more impressive in view of the fact that there have only ever been seven women MPs representing Welsh constituencies. At the time, however, twinning was highly controversial, and by no means all of its opponents were hardened reactionaries. Many activists who were 'left' on public service and economic issues saw it as more important to defend members' right to elect their own representatives, than to address the exclusion of women from political power in Wales. Moreover, the most vocal opponent of such attempts to ensure gender balance has been Llew Smith. When he announced his intention to retire at the forthcoming general election, Transport House insisted that his successor in Blaenau Gwent would be chosen from an all-women shortlist. Llew - predictably - denounced this as an attempt to impose a Blairite woman rather than a local left-winger, who might just happen to be a man. He and the constituency's Assembly Member, Peter Law, led a boycott of the selection process, which seems to have been supported by the majority of CLP activists. Maggie Jones, a Blairite Unison official and Labour NEC member, was duly selected - apparently confirming Llew's prognosis. Of course, a more robust socialist response to the issue would have been to put up a local, left-wing woman against Jones. Any idea that no such person could be found in a supposedly active, left-wing CLP could hardly have been credible. Llew's 'left' credentials, and the bureaucracy's high-handed approach
to the issue, have allowed him to represent the supporters - any
supporters - of all-women shortlists as the right wing, which is
palpably false. Others, however, who share his views on this issue
but not, say, his support for re-nationalisation, do not even bother
to cast the issue in such terms: rather, they see a remote leadership
of metropolitan sophisticates in Cardiff using undemocratic means
to foist their trendy liberal-feminist dogma on the common-sense,
valleys working-class activists. This is almost a Daily Mail worldview,
but the situation is not helped by the failure of Rhodri et al to
recognise that the argument for positive action to attack gender
inequality - while it may have been won within the liberal intelligentsia
in the 1960s, and in the metropolitan Labour left in the 1980s -
still has to be patiently argued for within sections of 'Old Labour'.
(The issue is unlikely to go away, as Peter Law has threatened to
stand as an independent parliamentary candidate against Maggie Jones.
If he does, he will automatically be expelled from the party - and
from the Assembly Labour group, thereby reducing Labour's representation
from 30 to 29 of the 60 seats, and threatening the demise of Rhodri
Morgan's administration.)2 Although several of Welsh Labour's flagship policies were introduced early in Rhodri's premiership, it was more than two years after his ousting of Alun Michael before he publicly suggested that there was a coherent, social-democratic philosophy behind his governmental programme. In retrospect, it is difficult to know how far such a philosophy preceded the concrete policies, and how far Welsh Labour was 'making it up as it went along'. Either way, the immediate impetus for the 'clear red water' speech was surely the need to distance Welsh Labour from the Blair government's policies to avoid another disaster in the 2003 Assembly elections.4 Moreover, the focus of the Welsh Labour project has subsequently been very much on 'bread-and-butter' issues (the exception this year has been the debate around the Richard Commission on the Assembly's powers and electoral arrangements - but this was established at the behest of the Liberal Democrats, as part of the coalition deal). The fact that pensioners can travel the length and breadth of Wales by bus without paying a penny, or that NHS prescriptions will soon be free for everyone - as they already are for those under 25 or over 60 - can only bolster Labour's popular support. In most aspects of public service, people in Wales know that they benefit from a more supportive and inclusive approach than in England - the major exception being Wales's persistently lengthy NHS waiting times, which have tarnished Welsh Labour's image considerably and recently forced Rhodri to sack his long-serving Health Minister, Jane Hutt. The members of the Cardiff cabinet are pragmatists but, given the choice, they will generally take the social-democratic - not the Blairite - approach to any issue that confronts them. This kind of muddling along, armed with good intentions and a progressive worldview, is all very well but it lacks any real transformative edge. In short, it is not - and does not pretend to be - a roadmap for socialism. More immediately, it has no real strategy for tackling some of Wales's real social problems. For example: while unemployment is officially lower than it has been for 30 years, there is massive 'hidden unemployment', particularly in former heavy-industrial areas like the Rhondda, where many thousands - predominantly middle-aged men - have given up looking for work. Part of the problem is that the scope for radical policy-making is seriously constrained by the Assembly's limited powers and by the neo-liberal inclinations of Welsh Labour's watchful big brother in Westminster. Rhodri's strategy for exempting Wales from Blairism is to plead Welsh exceptionalism - 'different problems require different solutions' - and hope that Blair won't smell ideological unorthodoxy and start clamping down. Yet a truly radical programme for Wales would require a direct challenge to Blair - not least to demand extra powers for the Assembly. Rhodri's unwillingness to take this approach strengthens the need for an organised, rank-and-file left within Welsh Labour - a need that Welsh Labour Grassroots aims to meet. Rebuilding the Welsh Labour left - (almost) from scratch The task now facing WLG is to re-establish a cohesive socialist current in Welsh Labour politics, positioning itself as a critical friend to the social-democratic leadership while also reaching out to a rank-and-file membership that often feels marginalised. It must be able to add depth to Rhodri's 'clear red water', defending the break from New Labour and arguing for a still bolder, more decisive turn. This can only succeed if it involves activating a much broader section of the party membership. There is a large potential base in Wales for a more progressive, egalitarian and collectivist alternative to New Labour, but much of it consists of people who have lost the habit of doing anything more than turning up to meetings - or who never acquired more dynamic habits in the first place. A big obstacle to success, however, is the democratic deficit within the party, which is as great a problem in Wales as in England, excluding members from any real say in democratic decision-making or policy formation. In addition to the constraints imposed by the 'Partnership in Power' process, there is the prohibition of contemporary resolutions on anything other than devolved or administrative issues. Thus, at the 2003 Welsh Labour conference, five motions on the then-impending Iraq war were ruled out of order (as foreign policy is non-devolved), preventing the Welsh Labour Party from even talking about the one issue of obvious concern to everyone in the world - Wales included.5 At the following year's conference, a rule change submitted by WLG supporters, which would, if passed, have relaxed this restriction, was itself ruled out of order by the Standing Orders Committee - a truly Kafkaesque development. Equally ridiculous was the September 2004 special conference to discuss Labour's response to the Richard Commission report: delegates from all over Wales travelled to Cardiff, where the only item on the agenda was a single document, presented by the leadership on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Despite such frustrations, WLG members have become increasingly confident about our ability to take the initiative and begin to set the political agenda within Welsh Labour. A further attempt to open up the conference agenda will be made at this March's Welsh Labour conference in Swansea, and WLG supporters are also pursuing a number of contemporary resolutions: opposing housing stock transfer, defending public services, challenging the BNP and improving the political representation of black and Asian people. We may not win all the battles, but we will at least ensure that a clear socialist voice is heard. In the fight against Blairism, the Welsh Labour left is already punching above its weight. NOTES
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