Government is hard

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Government is hard. And the transition from opposition to government is not a smooth one. Things which it is easy to oppose from outside become more problematic from the inside. We saw it when Labour replaced the Tories as the UK Government: one obvious example is the way that all those Labour candidates who gave such fulsome support to the WASPI women when they wanted their votes found themselves in a government which has done precisely nothing to remedy the injustice. We’re seeing it in Wales too, with the news this week that the Plaid Cymru Welsh Government is facilitating and participating in the sort of arms fairs which many of its members, when in opposition, would have attended only in order to join protests outside the venue.

It may well be true, as the government’s spokesperson effectively claimed in response, that ‘arms fair’ is an over-simplistic description of an event which also showcases, for example, civilian aerospace industries which provide good well-paid jobs for people in Wales, although that didn’t seem to stop party members from describing them as arms fairs when Labour were in government. It’s also true, of course, that the defence sector provides jobs and boosts the economy in the areas where it operates, but it isn’t the only sector which does so; there are other ways of creating jobs. It’s true, again, that Wales benefits less from UK defence expenditure than many other areas of the UK, and that if the industries aren’t located in Wales, they’ll simply be located elsewhere in the UK. But demanding that UK government expenditure should benefit Wales to the same extent as other parts of the UK economy doesn’t mean that the nature of that expenditure has to be the same. It’s how much is being spent in Wales which matters not what it’s being spent on.

Plaid has never been an outright pacifist party, although pacifism has always been an important element in the thinking of many of its leading figures – and opposition to war and militarism has been an even stronger thread in its history. There must surely be at least some amongst the party’s members who are feeling at least a little uneasy about their government’s stance. Perhaps they’re even beginning to understand how it has been possible for many Labour Party members in organisations such as CND to manage their consciences over the decades as their party has enthusiastically backed upgrading the UK’s nuclear arsenal.

Wales needs to grow its economy, it needs jobs, it needs investment and it needs the government expenditure which promotes all those things. There is, though, a moral dimension to that. Do we want jobs at any price, regardless of their potential impact, or do we want to apply a filter under which not all jobs are seen as being of equal value when non-economic factors are taken into account? We won’t all draw the line in the same place, of course, but I know that I’m not alone in feeling a sense of disappointment here. Government is hard, but taking hard decisions doesn’t have to mean taking decisions which will be unpopular with the base support and seem to be in conflict with past stances even if that’s the way it is often presented. The difficulties of government aren’t much of an excuse for throwing away the compass.