You must read this excellent article by Patrick McGuiness which was printed in yesterday's Western Mail. While you are doing that, I'm off to read up on the enlightening viewpoint of Gordon Brown in the Observer that next week's Assembly elections, local election in England, and Scottish Parliament are of little importance to him ( !), and to prepare myself mentally for a hard week of campaigning up until Thursday. I will probably watch the BBC Leader's debate tonight, but I must say that I was disappointed earlier with the standard of debate on the Politics Show. Jane Davidson's patronizing smirk was enough of a switch off!
It's getting to the point where I am increasingly nervous about the election. I can't sleep, I can't relax, and I'm so engrossed in this election now that I seriously don't think that I would be able to predict how it goes for fear of cursing the whole affair!
What did make me feel good today though was that on my weekly last minute rush around the supermarket, I overheard two people talking glowingly of Plaid, and how we were a threat to Labour in this election. Made my day!
Tribalism the Enemy- Patrick McGuiness
Politicians will blame everyone but themselves for our cynicism and apathy about politics. But cynicism and apathy are our way of protecting ourselves against the routine deceits and disappointments of the political class in Wales. When the government announced, earlier this month, that it would not meet its own child poverty targets, when Unicef statistics revealed the UK’s children were at the bottom end of the scale in the developed world in terms of welfare, or when New Labour and the Tories voted through billions of pounds for Thatcher’s Trident system, our first reaction was disappointment. Our second was to say to ourselves: ‘What did we expect?’, ‘They’re all the same’, ‘Why bother to vote’. Apathy and cynicism are not always the opposite of political passion and engagement – often they are their flip side. It’s much safer to be cynical – the cynical can never be let down.
But the biggest reason for ordinary people’s apathy and cynicism about Welsh politics is Tribalism. Tribalism is the cancer in our system, and it comes in two forms: the first puts party gain over the both the electorate and the political institutions; the second is negative campaigning, where a party spends more energy and initiative creating fear and suspicion of others than it does creating trust and belief in itself. In Wales we’ve seen plenty of both from our ruling party.
The 2003 Assembly election campaign saw some of the dirtiest politics in recent years waged against Plaid Cymru: extreme emails claiming to come from Plaid members were traced to Labour’s Millbank HQ and accusations of ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ bandied around with chilling abandon. There is nothing nastier than a party on the ropes, but perhaps the lowest point in Welsh Labour’s campaign history is a website called ‘Natwatch’, which mocked not only the Welsh language (we’re never far from the anti-Welsh underbelly here) but attacked a Plaid politician for being English, stooping so low as to mock her North East England accent! To think we were told that the Assembly would put an end to Westminster posturing and bullying. Instead, they are replicated on a smaller scale, like watching charmless children act out adult arguments in a playground.
This time around, Labour’s sole weapon (ironically in a month when used Tory votes to get Trident through parliament) has been ‘Vote Plaid Get Tory’. What is most depressing about this is that Labour is effectively saying: ‘your vote has no positive value, only a negative one’. After all these years in power in Westminster and Cardiff Bay, is this the best a ruling party can offer? They value our vote – our opinion – so little that they only want us to use it negatively.
This strategy looks set to rebound on them with the kerfuffle caused by rumours of possible Labour/Plaid deals. Judging from the overwrought contribution, on Tuesday’s Good Evening Wales, of Huw Lewis, one of Labour’s most obsessive Plaid-bashers, there could be some blood-letting ahead. He was already making serious threats against whoever in his party had the audacity to think in these terms. What! Co-operate with another party? String ‘em up!
But Tribalist ranters aside, do we really think that political co-operation is such a bad idea? After all, there is plenty of common ground between Plaid and Labour voters, and it is a fair bet that many people in Wales would be in favour of some form of Plaid/Labour partnership. It would reflect a large and coherent voting base, and it would reach across different parts of the spectrum.
But Labour won’t hear of it – power is not there for the sharing. They think they’re the natural party of government, and they’re prepared to do some pretty unnatural things to keep it that way. Anyone who dares to challenge Labour on the territory to which it feels entitled – John Marek, Dai Davies or Trish Law, not to mention Plaid – has felt the force of an exceptionally wealthy and ruthless machine that now puts more effort and money into negative campaigning than it does into running things properly.
Much of this obsessive negativity comes from Tribalism. For the Tribalist, any form of co-operation with other parties is an abomination.
But in real life, that strange rumoured realm politicians rarely visit, we are all different. Different people work together at home, in business, in offices every day. Are our politicians so stupid or mean-spirited that they can’t do something similar? Diversity is good, they keep telling us, yet do their utmost to avoid any form of political diversity.
Labour’s Tribalists have succeeded only in damaging the possibility of a progressive consensus in Wales and lowered the esteem in which our new political institutions are held. They have also done untold damage to their own party’s standing as a mature political force, and alienated swathes of voters from the relevance and seriousness of politics. It is sincerely to be hoped that in the post-Rhodri leadership struggle, they are pushed into the margins of the party they have already so badly damaged.
As for May 3, there is a simple solution, and Labour don’t want you to see it: vote for who you want, for the reasons you want. If someone represents what you believe in, vote for them.
Your vote is your expression, not a politician’s means to power. Though they have forgotten that, but next week there’s a chance to remind them.
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