The red Welsh way
This isn't a full essay, but the phrase 'the red Welsh way', introduced by Eluned Morgan earlier this month, is too annoying to ignore.
A clunkier version of Welsh Labour's ‘clear red water’, the party surely hopes it’ll serve a similar rhetorical purpose, at a similar political juncture. Keir Starmer is proving to be exactly what any leftist even vaguely associated with Labour in the last half-decade could have predicted. The ‘sensible’ centrist has mutated all-too-readily into a politician happy to dance to the tune of the British right’s greatest hits: punitive, reactionary, blood-soaked.
He has also, for not unrelated reasons, become terminally unpopular, and his government tired and embattled, at a pace that has taken even longtime critics aback. And as we’re seeing all across the world wherever the centrist establishment collapses, with nothing else to fill a void in popular appeal, a far-right alternative is gaining irreversible momentum. Reform UK is offering a technicolour, ‘authentic’ version of Starmer’s ‘grey’ charlatanism, and consequently their rise has metastasised in tandem with Labour’s floundering. Having already seemingly supplanted the Tories with breathtaking ease, and making significant gains in local elections, Reform has real national power within its grasp. In one election cycle, there is every chance that British political norms are being turned upside down.
With a Senedd election less than a year away, Welsh Labour will be the first to feel the full force of this reckoning. Perhaps this protracted timeline is compelling Morgan’s government to see what Starmer refuses to countenance: that the only course of evasive action – both strategically and morally – is a shoring up of left-wing principles, rather than chasing an appeal to reactionary zeal that can never be sated. It’s clear that Cardiff Bay cannot rely on Westminster to save it, and so Welsh Labour, terrified at losing a quarter-century of electoral dominance, needs to take matters into its own hands – at least rhetorically, if not in actuality.
But it won’t work. It’s hard to even discuss the meanings of ‘clear red water’ now, so worn out is the phrase, but it at least had the pretence of a forward-thinking programme for government to the left of Blairite UK Labour. Its half-hearted revival can invoke no such spirit. At the onset of the then-Welsh Assembly, it was yet to be realised by the public at large that devolution was inherently unable to deliver anything meaningfully free of Westminster policymaking. But everyone knows by now what ‘the red Welsh way’ signifies: we’ve had 25 years of evidence. It stands for the symbiosis of devolution and neoliberalism, a combination that Welsh Labour have never, can never, will never, have the means nor will to untangle. It stands for nothing beyond faux-radical rhetoric that never delivers.
As we enter a phase of post-neoliberalism, with hollowed-out states and infrastructure reaching a point of collapse, insurgent parties like Reform are well-placed to bulldoze the stasis of establishment parties like Welsh Labour, who have no idea what to do about it.
A few years ago a book was published that ‘interrogates neoliberalism’s grasp on Welsh life’, and in doing so sets the coordinates for a Wales ‘that is truly radical and transformational’. It was called The Welsh Way. You can still buy it from the website of its publisher, Parthian. I contributed a chapter.
I wonder if Eluned Morgan (or whoever came up with ‘the red Welsh way’) has a copy of the book, or is familiar with its title. If they do, I suspect it’s gathering dust, its lessons unlearned.
(This article was originally published at disposableeverything.com)