By Alf – PGC Member

Many people have woken up this morning and looked at the result with a mixture of feelings, a landslide victory for Labour, but with one of the worst turnouts of this century and a low Labour vote share. The rise of Reform is also deeply worrying, but to many people unsurprising – as we will go into later. To us, this election has been a circus.

Elections roll around (allegedly) every 5 years. We get a few weeks of politicians appearing on our streets for the first time, acting like they’re true locals, pulling bad pints in pubs they’ve never been to before and then swanning off to a nice paid job in London or to lick their wounds. What is left? Well, us. With all the same problems we still had at the start of the election, the same rates of poverty, the same decrepit infrastructure, the same waiting lists for the NHS, and no appointments for the GP.

And we wait, we wait eagerly for our newly elected saviours to fix it all, we wait for it all to get better because we did our duty, we used our democratic right! And we keep on waiting, we wait for change, we wait whilst kids’ bellies go empty and politicians’ wallets fill up. At least we did our duty, 6 months pass, nothing, a year passes, nothing, 5 years passes, nothing and now it’s election time again! Here comes the Good Party who talk about how the Bad Party did nothing during the last 5 years, it’s time for a change right? It’s time to get This Country Working Again. So we vote, we do our duty, we swap the Bad Party for the Good Party, now it’s time to wait again, and again, and again, and again.

Maybe this time we had a third party, who swear that if we elect them we can change things, maybe they won their first seat, it’s the promise of a political revolution to come! If only you just wait for the next election. Maybe the third party is actually the Extra Bad Party, and the people who vote for them are the Extra Bad People. It’s best not to ask any questions really, you might find out that people are getting pissed off that the Good Party hasn’t done enough to fix poverty and all they want is change.

It is a circus, but the clowns aren’t funny, and whilst you’re watching them perform, their mates are robbing us blind. It’s a circus, except one clown says “we should shoot refugees” whilst all the clowns in news reporter hats look solemnly on and say “well we have to listen to his opinion”. It’s a circus, and the best act is when they bring out that one silly clown who talks for 5 minutes about how we’re all being robbed right now, he’s funny isn’t he? We should keep him around.

The Circus

Maybe leaving the circus is the wrong way to put this, because almost half the population didn’t turn up, I guess they saw the lineup and thought it was better to stay home last night, who can blame them?

In Wales, we had a turnout of 56%, down about 10% from 2019. Labour may have won a landslide but their vote share dropped by -3.9%. Even more drastic was the Tory vote share, which dropped by -17.9%, it seems likely that Reform picked these up with an +11.4% increase in vote share, and lost Labour votes likely went to the Independents, Greens or Plaid Cymru. However, the reality is never simple, many traditional working class areas had Reform in close second place to Labour – think Llanelli – Reform had only 4% fewer votes than Labour.

I don’t want to dwell on statistics for too long, as everyone will be picking apart this election to find some kind of nugget of truth – and ignoring the 46% of the population who just did not vote. What I want to talk about is leaving the circus, about fighting outside of an election for a better Wales, grasping onto the fact that people don’t want to be told at an election time “if you vote for me, it all gets better”. They’ve heard it enough and it isn’t true.

‘Reform’ or Revolution?

One thing to cover is Reform UK, who are now the 2nd largest party in Wales in terms of vote share. As alluded to earlier, this is the Extra Bad Party, and therefore the people who voted for them must be Extra Bad People. The argument I’m going to make isn’t that we must shift to the right, and adopt the anti-refugee rhetoric as some solution, but instead we must recognise the material reasons people in Wales voted for them. If you’ve read our previous articles on Welsh Labour here and here, you will know that Welsh Labour in the Senedd has done very little to actually improve the material conditions in Wales, in fact we argue that they’ve maintained poverty in Wales!

What is true, is that local communities are drastically starved of resources, of good, well paying work, of infrastructure, of enough schools and teachers, of enough doctors and practices. There is a whole swathe of things which desperately need investment, and the Labour Party is saying “We won’t spend a penny as it is against fiscal rules”. Reform UK then turns up and says “Well actually, we’re spending billions on refugees, there’s your issue”. This rhetoric then becomes “get rid of the refugees so my local community gets investment”. 

This of course is not true, if you put Reform in charge, the first thing they would do is give all their big business mates tax cuts, they are actually not that different from the Tories or from Labour in most regards, they are just playing on people’s fears and capitalising on the repeated mistakes of Labour and the Tories.

Unfortunately, Reform have got exactly what they want, a bunch of votes and no responsibility, and they will spend the next 5 years using that to inflict and influence Westminster to drive them rightwards.

Back to leaving the circus.

No Clowns! No Bosses! 

So what comes next? I want to make the case for organising ourselves differently, of ending the prioritisation of electoral politics. This is not to say that electoral politics, campaigns and short term victories should be off the cards, as Marxists we should not completely disregard any form of struggle, but we also shouldn’t 100% commit to something without benefit – every election must be a question of “what do we win?” and “will it hasten and aid the working class revolution?”. We have seen pro-Palestinian independent campaigns make huge wins this year – sometimes electoral politics is immensely important and useful.

As Lenin put it in ‘Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder?’:

“To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilisation of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one’s enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating or conditional allies)—is that not ridiculous in the extreme?”

Essentially, the fight we face is gigantic (but not impossible) and it is irresponsible and un-Marxist to reject electoral politics entirely. There may be a time where we must enter the circus, even if it is only to throw a ‘pie’ at the clown, so long as we do not become clowns ourselves. 

So what do I suggest? 

• Go to your local community and ask them directly what the issues are, respond to reactionary anti-refugee rhetoric with anti-capitalist rhetoric, and redirect their anger toward the bosses, not those fleeing war.
• Once you have identified issues, set them into two lists. List one: is this something you can fix yourself and with your comrades? Is it something urgent like “we can’t feed the kids over the school holidays”,  something as simple as “the graveyard needs weeding” or something which just needs people-power. List two: these are the issues that only state power can deal with.
• Make two separate campaigns then, one is targeted at fixing what you can, create genuine goodwill between your movement and the local community, and begin to bring them onto your side. Show them that unlike those in Westminster, you’re willing to get your hands dirty. 
• The second campaign is against useless politicians, against the capitalist state which prioritises “balancing the books” over feeding children and caring for communities. Take your unapologetic fury and direct it at the capitalists and the state which serves them, take the anger of the working classes in and hone it into a clear argument for better.

This is the mission of the Plaid Gomiwnyddol Cymru, hand in hand with the Welsh Underground Network. We refuse to wait for change. We will make our communities better, one dirty job, one angry conversation, one local action at a time. Leave the circus and join the real world – we are taking applications now.