21.04.2004

Plaid Cymru conference: monolithic stage show

The message from Dafydd Iwan, president of Plaid Cymru, was that “every road will lead to Pontypridd” for the spring conference of the ‘Party of Wales’ on April 17. Given its poor election results last year and its recent history of in-fighting, such a daft claim was no doubt intended to rally his troops for the imminent local and European election campaigns. Around 200 attended.

This was my first visit to a Plaid conference but what I heard did not surprise me much. A quick look through the agenda indicated the control freakery and appallingly low level of politics that was planned for the day: ‘Trafodaeth/debate’ had been arranged with speakers preselected and allocated a fixed time. Looking hard for policy proposals, I came across ‘Y cynnig/the motion’. Yes, one motion - and that in itself was hardly contentious, reading more like a pep talk to a thoroughly demoralised membership in the run-up to elections, now a mere seven weeks away. Indeed, the naive observer might have been fooled into believing that Plaid has solved its internal problems over the past few months - open disagreement was non-existent, open dissent was nowhere to be heard. No vote on the motion was taken anyway. Clearly, here was Plaid putting on a bureaucratic show of monolithic unity in a crude attempt to fool the electorate.

Given press speculation about “serious differences” within the party - for example, over the Richards report on the future of Welsh devolution - you would have thought that this conference might have been an ideal opportunity to thrash out such issues and perhaps arrive at a consensus. Alas no. What about the advertised fringe meetings then? Here surely I would be able to hear an analysis of Richards, or perhaps a discussion on Plaid’s stance against US and British imperialism’s war in Iraq. No again. Three of the four meetings were put on by Age Concern, the Environment Agency, Carers Wales, and that was that.

Despite Plaid’s claimed socialist credentials - repeated on its website and in its manifesto - proceedings were completely dominated by the party’s real raison d’être. Getting elected and getting grubby hands onto power. Dafydd Iwan called for the Welsh assembly to become a “sovereign body”, but not with a view to deepening working class unity and bringing forward the socialist break with capitalism. Plaid’s AMs and MPs, not least their leader in the Welsh assembly, Ieuan Wyn Jones, dream of the day when they will run their own independent capitalist state and all the perks that go with it, such as an army and a seat at the UN.

To that puny end what they do is attempt to divide the British working class by splitting away its Welsh component and play the patriotic (read chauvinist) card for all its worth. Those who do not fall in behind their petty nationalist agenda - first Welsh autonomy, then full independence - cannot be properly Welsh. Plaid’s MEP, Jill Evans, took exactly this line in her attack on the assembly’s Labour first minister: “Rhodri Morgan may be able to sing the Welsh national anthem, but that doesn’t make him patriotic!”

And here is Plaid’s real, ugly, face. How on earth can you be a nationalist and a socialist? How can you square the promotion of separatism with the fight for working class rule? There is a historically constituted British nation and a historically constituted working class movement in Britain. Nor does Wales exist as a homogeneous national entity, let alone one without class contradictions. Championing Welsh separatism has nothing to do with either the interests of capital or the working class. The only people who can possibly benefit from it is are frustrated politicians eager to get their snouts in the trough of corruption.

Of course, when I spoke to Alun Cox of Plaid’s NEC he assured me that there was no contradiction between being a nationalist and fighting for socialism: “Plaid is presenting to the people of Wales a socialist programme.” He went on to claim that his “socialism is outward-looking” and that Plaid is “internationalist”. Apart from the fact that the party’s socialism is thoroughly bourgeois - wage labour is retained along with the bureaucratic state - this remains a forlorn and at the end of the day damaging perspective.

It is true that under the United Kingdom’s constitutional monarchy Wales cannot exercise the right to self-determination. That is something communists aim to change through the fight to achieve a federal republic. But surely the task of anyone living in Wales who calls themselves a socialist and an international is to enhance and broaden working class unity, especially when that unity - in the form of unions, strikes, movements and parties - goes back well over 150 years.

Those who attempt to weaken or even break that unity might well be sincere leftwingers, earnest supporters of a Palestine state and oppose the Blair government over Iraq, etc. Nevertheless clearly their socialism owes more to Joseph Pilsudski, David Ben Gurion, Fidel Castro and Tommy Sheridan than it does to the tradition represented by Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and William Morris. More than that, they are members of a party, though it might pose to the left of New Labour, which is in practical terms simply set on running the existing system, albeit from Cardiff, rather than Westminster.

Most speakers at Pontypridd did not even pay lip service to socialism of any kind. The only ones to talk in terms of the working class were Cox himself, Leanne Woods AM, Jon Blackwood (prospective Euro candidate) and Cardiff councillor Neil McIlvoy. All of them from Plaid’s left platform, Triban Coch. And to give him his due McIlvoy made a fine, political speech. His contribution defended migrants from racist attacks and demanded a fightback against imperialist war. Good stuff, especially when compared to Plaid’s mainstream speakers.

I am reliably told that Plaid’s annual conference, to be held in Llandudno in the autumn, will feature debate - perhaps even of a controversial nature. If so, it will be in marked contrast to last weekend’s stage-managed election rally.