Wales as victim

Tweet I’ll admit that I’ve been surprised at the extent to which, and the speed with which, the Labour Party in Wales have adopted the ‘Wales as victim’ narrative in response to the planned cuts by the UK government. It is, after all, precisely the sort of narrative for which they have spent years criticising Plaid Cymru.

At a political level, it certainly seems to have had the effect of wrong-footing many Plaid spokespersons; it sometimes looks to me that they end up sounding like copies of Labour rather than promoting a different message – and I’m convinced that only the Labour Party will gain from that.

The problem though is that Labour seem to have the zeal of the convert – they’ve picked up on the negative side of the message, with no attempt to promote the positive. Pointing out the ways in which Wales loses by being governed from London has always been a valid part of a nationalist message, but it has never been adequate in itself.

Unless accompanied by a positive message about the advantages of self-government, it just sounds like whingeing – and that’s exactly the accusation hurled at Plaid by Labour over many years. I’ve never thought it an entirely fair criticism – but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely unfair either. It has often been the case that it is easier to get coverage for a negative, critical story than for a positive one setting out an alternative view. That in turn means both that the coverage of Plaid’s views never properly reflected the output of opinions – and it also encourages more negativity.

‘Protecting Wales from the cuts’ is not something with which I can disagree, of course. But it needs to be more than what it sounds like at present – which is that the cuts should fall on someone else rather than on us; it’s a narrative which seems to be saying that cuts are fine as long as they don’t affect me. And that’s a narrative which seems to be increasingly common – it’s a self-interested reaction to the situation rather than a collective one.

Given that the effect of Labour’s spending plans would not have been that radically different, I can see their problem in trying to put an alternative across; it’s much easier just to ‘go negative’. Plaid have no such difficulty; the party’s manifesto for the last election set quite a different direction economically.

A self-governing Wales could take a different view on the rate at which the Welsh deficit should be repaid; it could vary (downwards) the rates of business taxation to aid the recovery; it could decide on a different mix of cuts and tax increases; it could decide to invest in a number of small scale renewable energy projects instead of the grand schemes favoured by London; it could decide to spend public money on sustainable developments instead of huge military projects.

Far from being, as some claim, damaging to the concept of Welsh independence, the current economic difficulties are a real opportunity to put the case for an alternative, more decentralised and local, approach to economics. And not just whinge.