Introduction: The Impasse of British Wales
I have written frequently about the dire state of my country on this blog. Our economy has suffered greatly as a result of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the complications of the government’s Brexit deal. We are soon to be hit with a cost of living crisis that the government admits will be worsened by Russian sanctions, energy prices are set to rise dramatically, along with national insurance contributions, but universal credit payments have been cut and real wages are falling by 0.8%, with any wage growth still too slow to meet rising costs. Our government, reeking of corruption and scandal, is stoking culture war divisions in order to preserve its grip on power by keeping the public divided, directing their rage towards minority groups such as LGBT people, Muslims, and towards so-called “wokeness”. The government is also openly attacking civil liberties, including the right to peaceful protest, and as it stands the Labour Party’s approach to opposition is to outflank this authoritarian government from its right.
What I don’t talk about often enough is the specific situation in Wales, the part of Britain in which I live. Since 1999, Wales has had a devolved government with its own parliament, known as the Senedd, which has a limited amount of powers which will be explained further on, and here in Wales we have a quantifiably different government to that of Westminster. Led by Labour’s Mark Drakeford, himself a Corbyn ally, the Welsh government has generally pursued a social-democratic agenda and rejected the reactionary social agenda of the Johnson government. Their co-operation deal with Plaid Cymru, the main pro-independence party in Wales, sees them committing to a range of progressive policies such as rent control, promotion of the Welsh language, childcare for all two-year-olds, limits on second home ownership, the creation of a publicly owned energy company, the creation of a national care service, and reforms to expand the number of members of the Senedd, among other policies. Their response to the COVID-19 pandemic has also been noticeably more rational than the response in England, which recently opted to get rid of all restrictions, with Wales’ cautious approach resulting in case rates and death rates continuing to be lower than in many parts of England.
Yet all is not so well is Wales either. Labour has been in charge of the Welsh government since the Senedd was established in 1999, but under their watch Wales remains one of the poorest parts of Britain, and indeed West Wales is considered one of the poorest areas in Northern Europe. One in three Welsh children live in poverty, amounting to the highest child poverty rate in the UK. Until 2018, Welsh Labour has been led by a standard centrist Labour politician whose agenda doesn’t really deviate from the militant moderation of the Westminster Labour Party, but even under Mark Drakeford, our social-democratic government has attempted to privatise parts of the NHS, relied on the same privatised test and trace system that the UK government uses, repeatedly voted against extending free school meals to all children in poverty, and the economy minister Vaughan Gething has even suggested that the government may implement austerity measures in response to the loss of economic aid from the EU.
On top of all that, the pandemic has drawn attention to the different approaches of the Welsh and UK premiers to the pandemic, how limited the Welsh government’s powers are, and the UK government’s contempt for Wales and devolution. The Welsh Parliament has the ability to pass its own legislation that applies specificially to Wales, as well the ability to decide its own electoral system for devolved elections, but it remains the most restricted of all devolved Parliaments in Britain. In particular, Westminster retains powers over justice, foreign policy, defence, public services, and finances. These limited powers came into full view at the beginning of this year, when the Welsh government could not even consider returning to Alert Level 3 restrictions (which grant the government the ability to implement a new lockdown if needed) in response to rising Omicron variant cases because that would require being able to financially compensate affected businesses, which is impossible because the UK government has no plans to restore the furlough scheme.
This is the impasse that Wales finds itself in. It clearly wants to pursue an agenda other than that of the rapacious reactionary regime occupying Westminster, but for as long as Wales remains part of the British union it will not have the powers needed to do so, and it doesn’t help that Drakeford’s Labour Party still supports the union. Among many other factors, the lack of powers the Welsh government has, the economic consequences of Brexit, and the aggressive English nationalism of the Johnson government has led to a surge in support for Welsh independence, with at least one poll showing levels of support as high as 39%. This has yet to translate into increased gains for Plaid Cymru, in part due to broad public satisfaction with Welsh Labour’s handling of the pandemic, and recent Senedd voting intention polls still place them third behind the Welsh Conservatives, but it is also worth noting that half of all Welsh Labour voters support independence even if they’ll vote for a unionist party. As we have seen, much can change in politics, often within only the span of a year, or even a month. We should also consider that Scottish independence had similar levels of support in 2007, when the SNP first came to power there, and now Holyrood is dominated by pro-independence politicians.
At any rate, more and more people in Wales are beginning to see that the status quo of devolution isn’t working, and that the British union is failing. Wales is not alone in this either. In Scotland, the electorate is consistently returning pro-independence parties to Parliament, angered by Westminster’s contempt for Scotland. The settlement reached in Northern Ireland looks set to fall apart due to Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, with the nationalist Sinn Fein currently set to win the upcoming elections to the Northern Irish parliament.
In the left there is plenty of skepticism and even outright opposition to the idea of Welsh, Scottish and Irish independence. As I mentioned before, Labour remains opposed to indepedence, whether in Wales, England or Scotland, with Welsh Labour continuing to persist under the delusion that Wales is better off as part of Britain. The Communist Party advocates instead for “progressive federalism”, where Wales and Scotland are constituent parts of a socialist federal republic. The Socialist Party of England and Wales similarly advocates for a “voluntary socialist confederation of Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland“. This in my view is insufficient at best, and at worst it speaks to an archaic view of the British state as a viable and effective instrument for the downward restribution of wealth to the poor.
In this essay, I intend to argue that the left should support Welsh independence, as well as Scottish independence by extension, both as a matter of anti-imperialist principle and as a matter of practical necessity. As part of this, I intend to argue why Welsh nationalism cannot and should not be seen as equivalent to malignant English nationalism, then I will explain the national question and some of the history of English colonialism in Wales, then I will criticise the unionist attitude of the Labour Party up to this point, and finally I will argue in favour of independence while criticising alternatives to independence and explain that we should insist on building an independent socialist Wales rather than a bourgeois republic.
Defining Nationalism, Vulgar and Progressive
Whenever you hear the word “nationalism”, your mind probably turns to right-wing or far-right parties such as UKIP, the BNP or Britain First. Maybe you think of fascists like Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin. This is unsurprising, considering that we are taught a flattened version of nationalism in grade school history, one which defines it principally as national chauvinism and racism, and this is the definition that all liberals and many progressives abide by when addressing the subject of nationalism. For sure, this is a form that nationalism can take when expressed by reactionary forces, but it is not the only version of nationalism you can find. Thus the first task of this essay is to properly define nationalism.
Often conflated with simple patriotism, nationalism is an ideology or ideological framework that emphasises the particular interests of a nation, in particular the right of a nation to govern its own affairs without interference from foreign powers, at least in theory anyway. What is a nation? To my understanding, a nation is a community of people formed on the basis of shared characteristics like a common language, history, culture, territory and/or other common characteristics. In my view it doesn’t necessarily have to be all of them at once, as Joseph Stalin would theorise in Marxism and the National Question, or else we would have to argue that multi-lingual nations are not nations. Some nations are formed principally on the basis of shared ethnic identity, and these are what we would call ethno-states. But not all nations are formed on the basis of ethnicity. Some form on the basis of a shared political project, and indeed civic nationalists propose precisely this when they describe a national project based on commonly held liberal values such as representative democracy, individual liberty, tolerance, egalitarianism and human rights.
Traditionally, the main cleavage within nationalism has been between ethnic nationalism, which defines a nation solely or primarily along ethinc lines, and civic nationalism, which defines a nation as a principally political project. What this debate ignores is the class character of a given nationalism and its relation to imperial hegemony. Throughout history there have been reactionary forms of nationalism which have been instigated and enlisted by the bourgeoisie as a means of tempting the national proletariat to unite with it against some foreign enemy, and there have also been more progressive and emancipatory forms of nationalism which were and still are employed by parties which seek to overthrow the yoke of their colonial rulers and institute a system that acts for the benefit of their people.
Thus we should instead use a different set of terms. First, the more malignant and chauvinist nationalism may be properly understood as vulgar nationalism, the nationalism of the coloniser. This nationalism is an expression of the imperialist (and historically colonialist) bourgeois countries, some of which still have outright colonies as is the case in France. We may also refer to them as coloniser nations in the sense that they may practice settler colonialism, the act of displacing a people from their native lands and settling them with people from your own nation. By coloniser nations we may refer to England, France, Germany, the USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, Russia, Israel, Japan and the like. The nationalism of these countries seeks to defend their national/imperialist interests by promoting national chauvinism and sometimes even notions of ethnic supremacy as a means of justifying oppressive capitalist hierarchies at home and imperialist actions abroad.
In contrast to this is the progressive nationalism, or the nationalism of the colonised. This nationalism is an expression of the interests of the oppressed peoples who are either directly oppressed as colonial subjects, or are former colonies whose peoples are indirectly victimised by neo-colonial exploitation. As such, these movements are often referred to as national liberation movements. Examples of such nations would refer not only to Wales and Scotland, but also Ireland, Catalonia, Palestine, Kurdistan, South Africa, Cuba, Vietnam, Bolivia, Ghana and the indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and Oceania, all of whom would probably react with bafflement at the idea that their nationalisms would be seen as equivalent to Nazism by Western liberals and anarchists.
The simple truth is that the different expressions of nationalism are often manifestations of the class character of these nationalisms. Returning to Britain for the sake of argument, the difference in the character of English and Welsh nationalisms could not be more obvious, especially in the era of Boris Johnson. The English nationalism promoted by the Johnson government represents the class interests of the English bourgeoisie, which profits handsomely from its neo-colonial practices both within the union and without. Even the more recent attacks by Tory politicians against devolution and the Senedd can be interpreted as a desire to claw back some of the profits they’ve had to sacrifice in order to maintain the devolution settlement. By contrast, although Plaid Cymru is certainly not a proletarian party, Welsh nationalism represents the interests of the colonised people of Wales which the union no longer even pretends to represent. To explain why the union is a colonial exercise, we must now move on to the next section.
The National Question and Colonialism in Wales
Although it was thought to have been resolved in the 1990s through devolution, the national question is now so prominent in British politics that it can no longer be ignored. There is much discussion now about the state of the union, with talk of a second Scottish independence referendum within this decade and Welsh Labour, although normally staunchly unionist, allowing pro-independence candidates to run under their banner and setting up a constitutional commission that actually considers indepedence as a possible option. Much of the discourse focuses on how the union has been fraying in the years since Brexit, particularly with Boris Johnson’s open contempt for devolution cited as a reason why many feel the union no longer represents their interests.
It is certainly true that Brexit and Boris Johnson have brought the issues with the union to forefront of political discourse, but it would be a mistake to assume that the union represented the interests of the Scots and the Welsh before Brexit happened. In reality, Britain as a project has always been little more than Greater England. Gwynfor Evans, Plaid Cymru’s first ever MP in Parliament, famously remarked that Britishness is “a political synonym for Englishness which extends English culture over the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish”. As it turns out, you don’t have to look very far to prove him right. The Bank of England recently demonstrated precisely this when it announced plans to change its logo to replace the English flag with the Union Jack. I don’t really need to point out how Wales is not represented in the British flag, but what should be pointed out is that all this gesture really does is establish that the British flag is merely the flag of England. They didn’t even think to change their name to “Bank of Britain”, that’s how little they care about maintaining the illusion of representation.
The truth is that Britain is not really a nation, but rather it is what Lenin would call a jailhouse of nations, a hodge podge of nationalities which are crammed together into a unitary government. Wales did not voluntary consent to being part of the union, it was conquered by England in the 13th century, and later legally incorporated into it in the middle of the 16th century. The same happened to Scotland, which was invaded many times by the English and then fully conquered in 1652.
For centuries, Wales had been an outright English colony, whose affairs were governed by someone who didn’t even live in Wales, whether this be the Prince of Wales or the Secretary of State for Wales. Our economy is practically dependent on London, the centre of English finance and political power, and our currency is issued not by a Welsh bank, but the Bank of England. As part of the process of colonising Wales, our colonial English rulers even sought to wipe out the Welsh language, justifying it through the same sort of rhetoric of ethnic chauvinism that is so characteristic of English nationalism today. As laid out in the infamous blue books:
The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects. It is the language of the Cymri, and anterior to that of the ancient Britons. It dissevers the people from intercourse which would greatly advance their civilisation, and bars the access of improving knowledge to their minds. As a proof of this, there is no Welsh literature worthy of the name.
Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales (1847), Part 2, No.9, p.66
England’s contempt for the Welsh language was perhaps best expressed through the infamous “Welsh Not” signs, which were issued to Welsh children who spoke their native language so as to shame them into speaking English. This represented an attempt to eliminate Welsh as a language, just as the English and French colonists always try to wipe out the native languages of the African nations they have colonised, and this is something colonists do in order to completely subjugate every aspect of the people being colonised. It’s not enough that the coloniser is using a people from a land far away from their own for cheap labour and taking their land to extract resources, but in order to maintain these colonial arrangements it becomes necessary for the colonisers to enmesh their subjects into the culture of the coloniser, to ensure that the coloniser’s language and culture is all they know and can relate to.
Today the national question is divided into two principal sides. One side of course are the nationalists, separatists or whatever you wish to call them, as represented by Plaid Cymru in Wales and the Scottish National Party in Scotland. On the other side are the unionists, who as the name suggests support the British union and seek to preserve it. The colonisation of Wales and Scotland is so fundamental to the British project that nearly all the mainstream parties in Britain are unionist parties. Thus the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats all support unionism, although the latter are open to federalism as an alternative to independence. Many right-wing populist parties are also pro-unionist, and this is particularly pronounced in the more overtly English nationalist parties such as UKIP, the English Democrats and the BNP.
The problem with the unionists, even those who style themselves as moderates, is that they ignore or even outright defend the one-sided nature of the union. In service of their arguments they peddle the argument that Wales is too poor to be its own country, as if we could do any worse out of the union than in it. They also peddle the myth that separatists are some sort of national chauvinists, taking advantage of liberal ignorance on nationalism while projecting their own pathologies onto their opponents.
As the contradictions of the union unravel and become ever more apparent to the public at large, the unionists have been dropping the pretence of localism and democracy and have been increasingly hostile to the existence of the devolved Parliaments, often calling for the outright abolition of the Senedd for astonishingly petty reasons. Delyn MP Rob Roberts, a disgraced Tory MP who lost the whip after having been found to have sexually harassed a member of staff, called for the “temporary” suspension of the Senedd citing “confusion” over differences between Welsh and English Covid rules. Shrewsbury and Atcham MP Daniel Kawcynski demanded that the Senedd be abolished purely so that he could go to a beach in Wales. Higher up the food chain, the Tory peer and former Brexit minister David Frost advocated for rolling back devolution as part of his plan to “save Boris, the Conservative Party and the country”.
This is the true nature of unionism. The unionists are the wardens of the jailhouse of nations, and their ideology, such as it can be called an ideology, represents the rationalisation of colonial force. The Tories have always been a party that does exactly this, after all their full name is the Conservative and Unionist Party. The main difference between the old and the new Tories is that the new Tories are more openly reactionary, emboldened in part by the fact that the so-called “opposition” has more or less ceased to mount any serious challenge to their reactionary ideology, with Starmer’s Labour in particular doing everything in their power to enable it.
The Failure of Labour Unionism
While unionism is mostly supported by the parties of the right, Labour has a longstanding tradition of supporting the union and opposing national independence. Indeed, the leaders of all three regional Labour Parties – Keir Starmer in England, Mark Drakeford in Wales and Anas Sarwar in Scotland – have made clear their commitment to unionism, and in so doing demonstrated their unwavering commitment to upholding the British state.
That a social-democratic party such as Labour would take this position should not be too surprising. That social democrats serve to reinforce the bouregois state is in fact a common and long-standing critique levelled at them by Marxists. The Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband pointed out that social democrats ultimately become functionaries of the bourgeois state in part because of their commitment to parliamentarism and in part because they cannot meet the demands of their working class supporters. As Miliband put it in The State in Capitalist Society:
But social democratic leaders in government illustrate particularly clearly the limits of reform. For while they raise great hopes among their followers and many others when in opposition, the constrictions under which they labour when in government, allied to the ideological dispositions which lead them to submit to these constrictions, leave them with little room to implement their promises. This, however, is only one half of the story. The other half consists in the fact that, confronted with demands they cannot fulfil, and with pressures they cannot subdue by reform, they too turn themselves into the protagonists of the reinforced state. Like their conservative opponents, they too seek to undermine the strength of the defence organisations of the working class, for instance, as in the case of the Labour Government in Britain, by the legislative curb of trade union rights, or, as in the case of German social-democratic ministers inside the ‘Grand Coalition’, by endorsing and supporting the promulgation of emergency laws principally designed to deal more effectively with opposition from the Left. Wherever they have been given the chance, social-democratic leaders have eagerly bent themselves to the administration of the capitalist state: but that administration increasingly requires the strengthening of the capitalist state, to which purpose, from a conservative point of view, these leaders have made a valuable contribution.
Ralph Miliband (1969), The State in Captialist Society, p.273-274
Another reason for Labour’s unionism and its servitude to the state is that Labour is simply not meant to actually represent the interests of the working class, but rather to mediate them and to assimilate the working class into the values of the bourgeois state, among them being the unitary project of Britain. This is indeed the argument made by Leo Panitch, who wrote in Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy that this, rather than any deviance from socialism or opportunistic middle class leadership, explains why Labour has yet to deliver on the promise of socialism:
The function of the Labour Party in the British political system consists not only of representing working class interests, but of acting as one of the chief mechanisms for inculcating the organized working class with national values and symbols and of restraining and reinterpreting working class demands in this light. The Labour Party, in other words, acts simultaneously as a party of representations and as a major political socialization and social control agent, mediating between nation and class. In a generalized way, by upholding the values of the nation, parliament, responsibility, against the values of direct action, revolution, or ‘sectional’ interests, it is performing a socialising role which both legitimises existing society and militates against the development of a revolutionary political consciousness on the part of the working class.
Leo Panitch (1974), Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy: The Labour Party, the Trade Unions and Incomes Policy, 1945-1947, p.235-236
As part of the process of socialising the working class into the dominant values, the party routinely argues that the union is ultimately better for the working class, in this case the Welsh working class. Thus it has been routinely argued that it is better for the interests of the Welsh working class to maintain the union on the basis that they supposedly benefit from the redistributive capacity of the British state, which would supposedly be lost if we embraced independence, the “narrow nationalism” as Drakeford called it.
The trouble is that it’s getting harder and harder to convince working people in Wales that the union actually serves their interests, in part due to the fact that we have a government that obviously doesn’t. In his article for the New Socialist, the academic Huw Williams argues that part of the reason the old arguments stuck was because during the immediate post-war era of social-democratic consensus, there really was a strong welfare state and the kind of social infrastructure which could in theory support the creation of a more equal society, with at least some of the benefits trickling down to Wales. After Margaret Thatcher ascended to the premiership, however, all of that was dismantled, and no government since has seriously committed to restoring that. On the contrary, the Johnson government is seriously committed to stripping the country of what’s left of its social infrastructure and entrenching nightmarish levels of inequality. Thus, Williams writes:
The British State is now one of the most unequal, unjust and anti-meritocratic states in the western world. Inequality has risen dramatically, and it is clear to both the working and middle classes that power and wealth is becoming more and more entrenched amongst the British elite concentrated in London. In thrall to neoliberalism (another failure of New Labour was an inability to challenge this paradigm) no potential government can hope to propose the sort of redistributive measures required in order to reverse these trends. Moreover, with the heavy industries destroyed, there is no longer the economic base for British-wide nationalised industries that fostered the trade union movement, working class communities, and which also created the possibility of a genuine socialist politics. Bevan’s Britain, and specifically its material conditions, no longer exist, and we realise now they are never going to return. Consequently, many are now concluding that we need new, communitarian, home-grown responses – answers to our poverty which the British state can no longer provide.
Huw Williams (2020), The 10 Crumbling Commandments of Welsh Labour’s Common-sense Unionism, New Socialist
As it stands, Labour doesn’t really have an answer to the deep crises that are afflicting British society. It did under Corbyn, but the Parilamentary Labour Party clearly was and remains so in thrall to neoliberalism that it did everything it concievably could to put a stop to that. Today, Labour are a party whose sole concern is winning elections with no regard for what they plan to do after that, and whose sense of identity comes from being a Tony Blair tribute act. All it can say about Wales’ place in Britain is to insist that remaining in the union is the best option even though it clearly isn’t, and to tell supporters of independence to ditch their dreams and take the job at Home Bargains.
However, while English and Scottish Labour are refusing to budge an inch on independence, it’s worth noting that Welsh Labour actually are making some concessions. They have allowed supporters of Welsh independence to stand as Labour candidates in the Senedd election, and they have set up an Independent Constitutional Commission which will consider independence as an option. I think that the reason you’re seeing these developments is that Welsh Labour knows that current devolved arrangements aren’t working, and that they can no longer look at their constituents straight in the eye and tell them that unionism works without trying to fix the glaring flaws of devolution. In other words, it is an acknowledgement of the failure of Labour’s unionism by the party itself.
But we would be fools to assume that a party of proud unionist traditions would be remotely serious about granting independence, mainly because they have a record of saying one thing and doing another. In fact, I think it is more likely that they will talk up things like this to create the impression that they’re looking into constitutional reforms and even independence, meanwhile they’re actually finding a way to kick it into the long grass. Leanne Wood, a socialist republican and former leader of Plaid Cymru, recalls meeting Labour’s Owen Smith (the rightist who tried to oust Corbyn) and seeing him side with the Tories against devolving policing powers to the Senedd, thus she remarks that “Mark Drakeford can say what he likes, but it will never be delivered”.
Why Independence?
The fact that the present constitutional arrangements are untenable in the long term has now been acknowledged by both the left and the right. The right-wing answer, of course, is to attack devolution itself and bring Wales under outright colonial rule. The left-wing answer, or rather the only answer the left should be considering, is to liberate Wales from its colonial shackles. For Wales and its working class, independence remains the only real solution to many of the problems afflicting the nation, and this is principally because the devolved Welsh government does not have the freedom to implement many of the policies that would actually address its needs.
That much should be obvious, but there are two angles from which I may launch a strong argument for independence. The first is based on the principle of national liberation, that all oppressed peoples have the right to shake off their oppressors and establish their own nation. As a matter of fact, this was the left’s position throughout the 20th century when they supported the national liberation movements in Vietnam, Algeria, South Africa, Cuba, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe and other countries. On the world stage, these national liberation movements were supported materially by countries such as the USSR, China and East Germany, both for ideological reasons and for the practical aim of replacing a Western-backed government with a government that is more likely to ally with them.
If we in the left agree that the Vietnamese, the Algerians, the South Africans, the Cubans, the Nicaraguans, the Zimbabweans and other peoples have the right to establish own nation and govern their own affairs free from Western colonial interference, then surely the same principle applies to the Welsh and the Scottish, even if the main parties representing these positions happen to be petty-bourgeois liberal parties. At any rate, I would even argue that the Labourism of much of the British left is a key factor in the independence movement effectively being monopolised by the liberals. In refusing to support the independence movement, and justfying this by drawing false equivalences between English nationalism and Welsh independence, they declared that Welsh independence is for the bourgeois liberals, and what happened next is what happens when the left ignores any social issue: it allows the liberals to present themselves as the only people who actually care about the issue, and to enlist supports of independence as part of the coalition of interest groups that they need to hobble together if they are to enter power.
Those who supported Brexit on the grounds of national sovereignty frankly have no excuse to oppose Welsh independence. If the main reason for Brexit was to “restore” Britain’s sovereignty over its affairs and laws, which was said to have been denied by the EU, then the exact same argument applies to Wales, whose sovereignty was actually snatched from it by England. Surely we the Welsh, many of whom even voted to leave the EU, should be granted control over our own laws and borders. Surely we should have the right to manage our own affairs and make our own decisions, but none of the halfwits and shysters on the right who vocally supported Brexit are even making that point, and in fact they oppose Welsh independence and devolution entirely, and in so doing they are showing their entire hand and revealing that they were little more than petty English nationalists who voted Leave because they hated immigrants.
The second is based on practical necessity, and whereas the national liberation angle was relatively straightforward to explain, here I need to expand on this further. As I explained earlier, Wales has the most limited of all of Britain’s devolved governments. While it is able to pass its own legislation, it is not able to decide which economic system it pursues, its own foreign policy, does not have its own army (the Royal Welsh are a regiment of the British Army), or its own bank, nor does it have any control over policing or how much funding goes to our public services. This arrangement is not a suitable environment in which a viable socialist programme can emerge. Even if we take seriously that Mark Drakeford is a committed socialist, there is no way a reactionary Tory government will ever let him go all the way as long as they have the power to stop him, and in fact they do considering they control the Westminster government, which has the power to either devolve powers to the Senedd or to reserve them begin with.
Simply put, it is impossible to bring about a socialist Wales without first declaring independence from Britain. The fantasy of Corbynism in one country remains just that, a fantasy dreamt up by demoralised Corbyn supporters desperate for a Shangri-la to which they can escape from the nightmare of Johnsonian reaction. The limits of unionism have already had contorting effects on the Welsh Labour government, as shown by its decision to eventually go along with the British government’s “living with Covid” song and dance, its attempts at privatisation, and its votes against free school meals.
You may retort that the answer is to make Britain socialist, perhaps even a federal republic. Most left-wing parties advocate for precisely this, with the Communist Party of Britain currently advocating for a “progressive federalism” similar to Lenin’s policy on national autonomy, justifying it by repeating the familiar Labourist line of how Welsh independence creates division in the working class and how we’ll be poorer if we leave the union:
The Communist Party does not advocate separation, because it would fracture working class and progressive unity in the face of a largely united ruling capitalist class. It might also cause substantial economic dislocation as big business uses threats and promises on jobs and investment to exert pressure on Scottish, Welsh and English governments to outbid each other in ‘business friendly’ and ‘pro-market’ policies. Moreover, ‘independence’ would prove illusory in nations whose economy is still dominated by the capitalist monopolies, the Bank of England and – should the SNP and Plaid Cymru get their way – the anti-democratic, imperialist EU or its ‘single European market’ rules, and whose foreign policy is framed by NATO and the EU.
Communist Party of Britain (2020), Britain’s Road to Socialism; Updated 8th Edition, p.46
While it is certainly true that a bourgeois Welsh republic would indeed be subordinate to more powerful capitalist monopolies, and this is one of the issues I intend to address in the next section, the trouble with using this as an argument against independence is that we are still subordinate to capitalist monopolies while a member of the British union, and our foreign policy is exactly the same as England’s. The main difference in this regard is that Welsh policy is directly restricted and often dictated by Westminster. In terms of independent policy-making, seceding from the union would actually be an upgrade.
In making the argument for “progressive federalism” they say that “it is essential that the Scottish Parliament and Welsh National Assembly have the full economic, legislative and financial powers necessary to protect and develop the economic, social and cultural interests of their peoples”. The problem there is that if Wales wanted full economic, leglislative and financial powers, it would simply secede, and if you want Wales to have those sort of powers, then why aren’t you advocating for independence? Why instead advocate for a federal system in which Wales is still not its own nation but with maybe enough autonomy that it could live with it?
The whole concept of federalism as a solution to the problems of devolution is fundamentally conservative both in its instincts and in terms of practice. The whole point of the federalist solution is that you intend to preserve the union, just that to do so you are making the devolved nations constituent states with powers shared equally, in theory at least. Again we see the implict Bevanite belief that the British state is the best vehicle through which to redistribute wealth downward to the poor, as if the days of 20th century social democracy are coming back. The problem is that there’s no guarantee that this will put the national question to bed. In fact, there was one socialist country which tried a kind of progressive federalism: Yugoslavia.
The SFRY attempted in practice what the CPB wants to implement here, in that it was a multi-ethnic socialist federal republic composed of the southern Slavic nations, who were given mostly equal powers and rights. Up until Tito’s death in 1980, the whole arrangement was working fairly well, but then came the shock treatment that subsequent leaders were forced to implement by the IMF, from whom Yugoslavia had taken out loans. In a way, the prelude to the rise of national separatism in Yugoslavia played out similarly to what had been happening in the UK. Throughout the 1980s, parts of the Yugoslav economy were being privatised (including the state-run banks), self-management was abolished and harsh austerity measures implemented. The economic and social dislocation these measures had caused was so severe that many in Yugoslavia had begun to conclude that the federation no longer cared about them, and were thus more susceptible to the siren’s song of the reactionary nationalist forces sought the breakup of the socialist republic. Upon its ascent to power in 2010, the British Tory government continued selling off or hollowing out what’s left of our social infrastructure, implemented a package of notoriously harsh austerity measures and cruel levies, and the deepening inequality that these and other policies helped to entrench had undermined the notion that the British union serves the people of Scotland and Wales, thus fuelling the local nationalist movements.
At any rate, the idea that Britain is going to become a progressive federalist republic is contingent on the idea that you can make Britain socialist, and it is increasingly clear to me at least that we are not going to see a socialist Britain. The nearest chance we had was Jeremy Corbyn, and you could see what happened to him. All the might of the state and its propaganda apparatus conspired to thwart him, and the labour movement, lacking the strength and militancy of its heyday, proved too weak to defeat these forces. The truth is that Britain has among the strongest and most effective state machinery in the bouregois world, despite it being geographically smaller than larger powers such as the US, Russia and China. The strength of the British state is only set to grow as the contradictions of capitalism continue to unravel, with the ruling class requiring ever more centralisation of power it order to crush the growing dissent.
This growing authoritarianism of the British state, along with the failure of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to oppose it (and indeed Labour under Starmer is now encouraging the growth of British authoritarianism), was a key factor in convincing me of the necessity of Welsh independence. Up until last year I myself had opposed Welsh independence for much the same reasons your standard Labourist would, but there comes a time where reality comes knocking on the door, and where you must lay down all your boyhood fantasies. It is becoming increasingly obvious that in order for socialism to happen at all, Wales must first be severed from the reactionary government of England.
You don’t even have to take my word for it either. In 1979, the CPB’s current general-secretary Robert Griffiths made much of the same arguments that I now make in a pamphlet called Socialism for the Welsh People, which he co-authored with the Welsh Marxist Gareth Miles. The pamphlet offered many strong arguments for independence grounded in a stridently Marxist analysis, and criticised Plaid Cymru for its failure to oppose a 1979 referendum on devolution. One key argument that stuck out to me was the one made in a section entitled “The Encroaching Corporate State”, which reads like a mostly accurate prediction of the Britain that has emerged some four decades later.
Another reason for Wales breaking away from the British State is the feasible danger of reactionary totalitarianism taking over Britain, as a result of the increasing crises and sharpening contradictions of domestic capitalism. This is not an attempt at scare-mongering. All the necessary ingredients are in the pot and coming to the boil, namely:
Gareth Miles & Robert Griffiths (1979), Socialism for the Welsh People
(a) The low productivity of the British capitalist system and its inability to compete successfully with that of its competitors, such as Japan, Germany, France and the USA.
(b) The dangerous contradiction between the working-class and the capitalist class: the former in a position of immense power industrially, but politically helpless and lacking in leadership; the latter, although its economic system is tottering on the brink of disaster, will maintain a very firm hold on the reins of political and administrative power, and on its ability to influence the thoughts and feelings of the population through the press, the mass media and the education system.
(c) The support of large sections of the petty-bourgeoisie (small traders, farmers etc.) and many workers even, for the tireless drive of the capitalists to weaken the economic and industrial power of the working-class by “bringing the unions to heel”.
(d) Nostalgia for the Empire and the shame at the “humiliation” of their country, strengthening the appeal of extreme British patriotism among members of all classes, this tendency receiving the support of the mass media and Right-Wing politicians.
(e) The radicalism of the Right succeeding among the workers because of the ineffectiveness of the Left.
(f) Convenient scapegoats at hand to promote British ‘national unity’ – e.g. The Common Market, coloured immigrants and the “separatists” of Wales and Scotland.
(g) A general desire for social stability and for “a return to traditional values”
(h) The plausible – although fraudulent – case being presented by State bureaucrats and other capitalist interests for introducing fast-breeder nuclear reactors: the “Plutonium State” means additional curbs on trade unionism, and a much larger police and military presence; North-West Wales is a prime site for nuclear reactors.
(i) The State’s use of Ulster as a training-ground for new techniques in intelligence gathering, riot control, military operations against civilians, police-army co-operation and other methods of suppression.
In response to the growing threat of British authoritarianism, represented at that time by Margaret Thatcher, the pamphlet called for socialists to advocate for the break-up of Britain, citing the progressive character of the national question in Wales, and even arguing that had a self-conscious and self-confident Welsh bourgeoisie come into prominence in Wales, it would have created with it a stronger Welsh working class “less debilitated by depression and imperialism”, and thus the class struggle in Wales would be stronger and more consistent. The most shocking part of reading this pamphlet, which I would recommend to all socialists, is that under the leadership of this very same Robert Griffiths, the CPB still supports progressive federalism instead of independence!
Now just as then, we face the threat of an encroaching corporatist state, whose development is egged on by an official “opposition” that is even more chauvinistic than it was four decades ago. Our current situation requires the same solution that the situation of 1979 called for: the breakup of the British state itself. Therefore, the left must join forces with the independence movement to achieve this. Only if Wales separates from the union do we have any shot of passing from capitalism into socialism, and only if the left is any considerable part of the movement can we have any effect in preventing it from veering towards a thoroughly petty-bourgeois direction.
The Pitfalls of Bourgeois Republicanism
Much as I recognise the necessity of Welsh independence, I am also obliged to discuss the attendant realities of what we would be getting into. First and foremost, we should dispense with any illusions that a socialist republic would be the immediate outcome of the triumph of the separatist forces. In all likelihood, an independent Welsh republic would begin life as a bourgeois nation, a viable one and certainly more tolerable than Britain in its current state, but bourgeois nonetheless.
This would in fact be the natural course of development. Firstly, because per historical materialism it would have to pass through the capitalist stage of development before it arrives at socialism, and after departing from a country which has barely shaken off the last vestiges of feudalism. Secondly, and this is a fact even if historical materialism didn’t apply, the proletarian forces in Wales are likely still too weak to guarantee any other outcome, the trade unions here are about as decimated and hollowed out as they are in the rest of the country and as far as I know Welsh Labour has done little if anything at all about it.
Third, the current leader of Plaid Cymru, the party most likely to lead the independence movement, is Adam Price, under whose direction the party has drifted notably to the right, reorienting from a left-wing socialist party to a petty-bouregois party that is more staunchly aligned with the interests of foreign capital, most notably the European Union. Whereas Wood privately opposed the push for a second Brexit referendum, Price relentlessly pushed for it, to the point of centring the 2019 campaign around it and refusing to support a Labour no confidence motion unless Corbyn committed the party to it.
Given Plaid’s long-standing opposition to NATO membership, it is uncertain that an independent Wales would attempt to join NATO unless an explicitly pro-NATO party were to take power in Wales. It would, however, seek membership of the EU, or at least pursue a more tolerable Norway-style deal wherein Wales is not a member but has access to the EU single market (which, if the Tories had accepted it, would have made Brexit much less economically painful).
So long as an independent Wales is governed by the Welsh bourgeoisie rather than the Welsh proletariat, it will enmesh itself into the global capitalist market in much the same way as England has done, opening itself up to foreign capital in much the same way Ireland and the Netherlands have been doing, which at some point will mean the adoption of anti-worker policies. Although Plaid has in theory committed itself to progressive economic policies such as a universal basic income, a bourgeois Welsh republic would at some point face the same capitalist crises which caused even the Labour government of Gordon Brown to begin implementing austerity measures which were then accelerated upon the ascent to power of the Tories, with independent Wales possibly having right-wing parties of its own that seek to do the same thing as the Tories, and perhaps there will be more reactionary parties that seek reunion with England, happily exploiting any discontent that the failure of a bourgeois Welsh government creates.
Conclusion: For a Socialist Welsh Republic
If we are not careful, an independent Wales will end up back right back in the same square one that it was under English rule. Combatting the forces of the right means fighting for an explicitly socialist Welsh republic during the struggle for independence and immediately after the republic is born.
In order for the left to have a chance at preventing this outcome, or to at least shorten the time in which Wales transitions from a bourgeois republic into a socialist one, then the British left must totally drop what is left of its commitment to unionism and the British state, including any notions of “progressive federalism”. The leftist parties, trade unions and working class movements must rally behind independence, lend their support to the independence movement and seek to become a part of it with the goal of enhancing its class consciousness.
We must insist that independence alone must not be the final goal of the movement, but rather a step forward in the wider goal of buidling a Welsh socialist republic, and ending capitalism and imperialism around the world. If we fail in this task then Wales faces the prospect of either reactionary rule as an outright colony or independence in name only under a bourgeois republic. As the Irish republican leader James Connolly put it best:
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs. England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.
James Connolly (1897), Socialism and Nationalism
The same thing applies to Wales today. You could drive England out and replace its flag with the red dragon, but your efforts will be in vain unless you set about creating a new social order, in which the economy is in the hands of the Welsh working people rather than in the hands of either English capitalists or Welsh capitalists who are merely seeking to compete with their counterparts in London.
That being the case, the building of a new social order in Wales can only begin once we are no longer weighed down by the morass of English reaction. We have no hope of building Welsh socialism unless we first throw off English capitalism. Those who decry Welsh independence as a “distraction” from class politics ignore that the British class system itself is bound up in colonalism, and that this colonialism began at home. Colonialism and capitalism are inseparable, thus the liberation of Wales is a necessary step in the establishment of socialism.
East of Eden 