29.04.1999

Cool Cymru?

Mark Fischer reviews ‘Wales: class struggle and socialism’ by Charlie Kimber (Socialist Workers Party 1999, pp47)

Kimber’s pamphlet represents the attempt of the Socialist Workers Party to challenge from the left the current Blairite rebranding of Wales as ‘Cool Cymru’ and to debunk the myths of the nationalists. His project is to dispel the harmful idea that Wales is “a land of harmony where classes do not really exist” (p5). This needs to be done ... but with politics other than comrade Kimber’s, I’m afraid.

The contemporary raw social material for such a Blairite process is extraordinarily sparse in Wales. It remains a country traumatised by the industrial havoc of the Thatcher years, with household incomes 14% below the British average and full-time earnings at least 10% below the rest of Britain. The popularity of Welsh bands like Catatonia and the Manic Street Preachers or the fitful successes of the Welsh rugby team (under the adopted Welshman, the Kiwi Graham Henry) is a pretty meagre basis on which to ‘redefine’ today’s Wales.

It is a country obsessed by history, so it is no surprise that the modernisers have been forced to lay claim to the past. As Kimber shows, this is explosive material for them to be handling. For example, a recent article by Blair’s ‘enforcer’ in Wales - Neath MP Peter Hain - is an interesting case study of how a proletarian heritage may be usurped by a virulently anti-working class trend. If a viable workers’ alternative existed in Wales, it would make him eat his article line by line.

Hain seriously attempts to hitch the history of the modern Welsh people to the Blairite bandwagon, even suggesting that “anchoring the Third Way … to libertarian socialist foundations, informed by the Welsh experience, can give it ideological clarity and direction” (Western Mail March 11). He notes that what he dubs “radical and libertarian socialist instincts have deep historic roots in Wales”, then defines these as “a strong sense of solidarity, mutual aid and cooperation” - a “radical third way in action”, in fact.

Incredibly, the man then has the gall to cite as evidence revolutionary syndicalism (ie, The miners’ next step, in which Welsh miners apparently called for “a form of decentralised industrial democracy”); the first great utopian to explicitly link his ideas with the fate of the working class, the communist Robert Owen; the firebrand reformist Kier Hardie and the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85. (“The South Wales valleys maintained the strongest cohesion, self-discipline and support of any across Britain” - no thanks to the scab Labour Party leadership under Judas Kinnock of course).

Hain thus claims the history of the Welsh for New Labour’s ‘communitarian’ values of “social justice, inclusiveness, radicalism … and above all, a commitment to community”. The fact that he does so confirms a perceptive point made by Eddie Ford, discussing the theoretical origins of Blair’s inane “stakeholding” vision, that it is “constructed on the backs of a defeated working class movement - but one which still has a sort of residual existence, a cultural afterlife” (Weekly Worker June 6 1996).

Many parts of comrade Kimber’s pamphlet are welcome antidotes to the horseshit peddled by the likes of Hain and the claims of the nationalists to present an alternative to them. He makes the self-evident point that Welsh history actually demonstrates

“the raw hatred between classes and … [that] the most inspiring moments in the last 200 years have been when Welsh workers united with their comrades elsewhere to fight together against their native ruling class” (p5).

To underline his point, he gives a potted history of some of these “inspiring moments”. These include the Merthyr rising of 1831; the insurrectionary attempt to seize Newport during the height of the Chartist agitation; the Scotch Cattle and Rebecca revolts (when Viscount Melbourne, the badly rattled prime minister, blurted out the very un-Blairite opinion that South Wales was “the most terrifying part of this kingdom” - p18); the real history of the revolutionary-syndicalists around The miners’ next step (who preached a “war of interest between the workers and employers” - p24); the 1926 General Strike and the mass influence of the Communist Party. If nothing else, the pamphlet is excellent reading for a novice in the intensely stroppy history of the Welsh masses.

Yet in two key passages, the SWP spoils the honey with this spoonful of tar:

“We do not believe that there is national oppression in Wales today. Welsh bosses, Welsh politicians and Welsh bureaucrats are central to the way that Wales is run. The very real poverty, inequality and alienation that do exist in Wales are the result of class division, not national divisions.

“However, our greatest enemy is the British state, not Welsh nationalism. We support the right of the Welsh people to decide what constitutional arrangements they want. If they want separation then Wales should be an independent state” (p42).

“National oppression” is here equated with a crude colonial form of domination. Yet the Welsh - as a historically constituted people - have no right to self-determination under the constitutional monarchist British state. To that extent, their national rights are denied.

Kimber should also tell us how self-determination is best exercised. Do we say ‘wait till the socialist paradise’? Or do we fight for democratic rights in the here and now, and by winning the whole of the working class to the politics of revolutionary democracy begin to build a bridge to that future? It is incumbent on Marxists to step forward with real answers to the national question in Britain - concretely the demand for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales.

For all the good material in this pamphlet, the SWP illustrates again that it is still a long way from a Leninist understanding.

Mark Fischer