The Tinplate Thatcher: Senedd’s latest insult

The decision to site a tinplate portrait of Margaret Thatcher alongside Nye Bevan in the Senedd has brought about predictable howls of outrage from all those who remember the devastation wrought on Welsh communities by the Tory governments of the 80s and 90s. Thatcher’s attack on the miners was a deliberate and premeditated act of class war aimed at wiping out the militant vanguard of the workers movement. In 1974 the miners destroyed the government of Ted Heath; in 1984 Thatcher first provoked miners to strike and then used every means at her disposal to destroy them, thus paving the way for the wonders of an untrammelled free market economy.

Thatcher’s victory was not inevitable. Solidarity action from other workers, together with militant defence of picket lines, could have created a different outcome. PR members, then in Workers Power, argued for the revolutionary tactics which the crisis demanded, and won a hearing amongst the most militant miners. But we were almost alone on the left in doing so. Scargill baulked at treading on the toes of other union leaders, the rank and file failed to gain control of the strike, and aided and abetted by the capitalist media and the yellow union UDM, Thatcher slowly strangled the life out of the NUM.

We are still living with the consequences today – not uniquely in the Welsh coalfields, but in all the mining communities of the UK. Hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their means of subsistence, but more than that, we have lost much of the political culture that grew up around the mining industry.

Nye Bevan was a product of that culture. Number one figurehead for the left in Wales, it is hardly surprising he was chosen for commemoration at the Senedd. After all, the image of this former miner already looks down on us when we walk into the concourse at the University Hospital, Cardiff, and left groups routinely set out their stalls beneath his feet on Queen Street.

Bevan is remembered, first and foremost, as the architect of the National Health Service, a reform which even the most hardline anarchist can hardly deny had some benefits. However, while there is no doubt that Bevan played a crucial role in facing down the BMA and ensuring that the NHS became a free service, his importance should not be overstated. The need for some kind of nationalised health service was accepted even by the capitalist class in the 40s; it was part of all three main parties’ 1945 manifestos, following the the Beveridge Report of 1942. Bevan’s reforms were built on a backdrop of mass agitation by workers demanding a better life for themselves following the sacrifices of 1939-45; this, together with the fear of the ruling class that those workers might regard the Soviet Union as a better model of society, made those reforms relatively easy to push through.

While unquestionably a man committed to improving the lot of the working class, Bevan was no model for those who want to see the workers usurping the capitalist class to take control of society, and until this happens, as we have seen all too well, reforms such as the NHS will come under attack as soon as the profiteers judge they can no longer afford them. And that would have happened in the UK with or without Margaret Thatcher.

It was the power of organised workers, not the personalities of individual politicians, that pushed British society to the left in the era between the second world war and the late 70s. It is the weakness of organised labour that enabled Blair and Brown to cement Thatcher’s legacy by means of the party to which Bevan professed such undying loyalty.

Cardiff PR are not going to criticise anyone who chooses to express their loathing of the Margaret Thatcher portrait. But given the craven submission of our supposed political leaders in Wales to the likes of the Metrix consortium, some might make the argument for not only siting Thatcher’s portrait in the Senedd, but renaming the place in her honour.

Labour poll collapse in Wales: Morgan can’t pass off blame

Rhodri Morgan blamed Labour’s collapse in the recent council elections on the leadership of Gordon Brown. But the simple fact is that the party founded by and still primarily funded by workers has been betraying those workers for eleven years – and Labour in Wales has played a full part in that betrayal.

The scale of Labour’s humiliation is staggering. With only a third of the electorate bothering to vote, and Labour winning just 24% of those votes, no more than one in twelve voters put their cross next to a Labour candidate. In Wales Labour fared no better than in England – and in the Vale of Glamorgan, proposed site of Morgan’s beloved military academy, the Labour-Plaid coalition lost power to the Tories.

The Morgan administration has enacted reforms at the Senedd which have counteracted some of the effects of the neo-liberal Westminster government. But the depressed state of so many Welsh communities demands urgent and radical action, paid for by public funds, which in turn requires outright opposition to free-market ideology and privatisation in all its forms. So why are Labour trumpeting the biggest PFI in history at St Athan, costing £11 billion of taxpayers money to create at best 2000 jobs at an incredible £5.5 million a job!?

Iraq is often cited as a major reason for voters’ disillusionment in Labour. So why did Rhodri Morgan fail to utter one word of condemnation of the invasion? If this was, as has been mooted, part of a deal whereby Blair would not interfere in Morgan’s running of Wales, then Labour’s collapse here is due reward.

Time and again, from the axing of the Llanwern steelworks to the closure of the LG factory in Newport, Labour politicians in Wales have no answer except they are sorry, but we are all helpless in the face of the all-powerful market.

However, Morgan and co are quite happy to embrace capitalism when it promises ‘jobs for Wales’, even when this is based on a complete lie, as at St Athan. Devolution in Wales, as in Scotland, has spawned a narrow nationalism which has played straight into Plaid’s hands by declaring there is such a thing as a “Welsh interest”, when in reality the interests of the working-class and those of their exploiters remain as incompatible as ever.

As PR have constantly argued, there is no short-cut to a revival of class-consciousness amongst workers without the rebuilding of labour organisation and the defiance of anti-union laws in order to succesfully prosecute struggles. For this reason we welcome wholeheartedly the upsurge in working-class militancy which the government’s loss of credibility is fostering. And for this reason also we have criticised the wholesale capitulation to electoral politics into which much of the left has fallen. It is a sad fact that, however derisory Labour’s results have been in this election, the results of groups further to the left have been correspondingly awful.

This phenomenon was not limited to Cardiff, where the Socialist Party and the SWP/Respect/Left Party shared a few dozen votes between them. There is no dressing up the scale of the left’s defeat throughout the UK: in the London mayoral election the fascists got 53,000 more votes than the only left of Labour candidate. Respect Renewal did little better, winning no more than a single additional councillor in Birmingham. Its combined vote in London was lower than that of the BNP, who now boast a seat on the GLA – a presence every socialist in London must actively campaign against and challenge.

So what way forward now? The idea that the left can mount a united electoral challenge is comprehensively refuted by the experience of the last decade. The various attempts at left unity – the SLP, SSP, SA, Solidarity, CNWP, Respect and Respect Renewal – have all failed.

This was certainly in part because of the conflicting interests of the various groups involved. However, more importantly it was because, rather than addressing what the working class objectively needed to take it forward, these groups were all premised on something the working class certainly did not need – the abandonment or watering down of huge chunks of the socialist programme in order to make their electoral message more palatable.

The left has to rebuild itself first and foremost in the struggles outside Parliament. When it engages in electoral activity in future it must present an uncompromising revolutionary anti-capitalist programme – it could hardly fare worse than it did this time around! If we do not raise revolutionary socialist arguments, how will we ever build a revolutionary vanguard within the workers movement?

Instead of another false unity initiative the left needs to honestly and openly reassess its mistakes over the last decade. No single party however nominally broad can at present encompass a spectrum of activists both inside and outside the Labour Party and on the left of the Greens as well as non-aligned socialists and members of the various left groups.

But socialists from all these strands of the left must begin to organise and work alongside each other now. The demand that before we can unite in action we must join a single party or quasi-party organisation is a sectarian barrier to the real regroupment that urgently needs to take place.

Rather, activists need to agree to fight together around the key priorities of the working class now. That means starting right now to build the base organisations of the unions ready for a renewed offensive by Labour and the Tories. It means fighting any upsurge in repossessions or evictions with the oncoming housing crisis. And it means standing firm against the continued attacks on women’s rights and immigrants, campaigning resolutely against the war and using opportunities like the Convention of the Left in Manchester this September to agree on joint campaigning priorities and to begin a real debate about the way forward.