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.
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