Where To Now?

I apologise in advance for this incoherent ramble, but there's a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and I'm late to the keyboard tonight. The current existential crisis of socialism in this tiny group of islands we call home - and it definitely is a crisis - stems from a number of sources. First and foremost, of course is the [genuine and justified] feeling amongst the ordinary voting public that they have simply been left behind and marginalised: left out in the cold by a Labour movement that speaks in bold, sweeping terms of change and an improvement in the daily lot of the many, but which has thus far delivered little that can be seen on the actual surface of people's daily lives. This of course is the soft flesh from which populists like Nigel Farage leverage their specious views in fictitious defence of the vulnerable [majority]. Myth-making is the stock in trade of the empty-headed, and Farage is deeply embedded in that process; in the absence of any real politics, he touts his spurious philosophies and hides behind a ludicrous guise of an everyman champion of the dispossessed.

Secondly, as I said last night, we are in a most perilous and parlous economic state due to many decades of economic liberalism and mismanagement by successive administrations following the shithead precepts of economic theorists such as Hayek [Thatchers God of choice]. The situation we arrived at when the final nail was hammered into the coffin of the last Tory abomination of a government, was all but terminal: out of Europe, economy in free-fall post-pandemic, and our 'special relationship' in tatters with a lunatic in the White House now hell bent on trashing the world's energy supplies, and hence the economy itself. It will take decades of socialist thought and praxis to pick the bones out of this mess.

Which leads me to the nub of the problem. Why has the working class vote started to desert - at a lick - the Labour Party that created the Health Service, social care, a universal education, social benefits system and nationalised industries that actually functioned in the post-war era? I suppose that one could go down the route of blaming the fact that socialism and left-thinking has largely been a product of middle-class intellectuals, and particularly of late, practitioners and politicians: '... the political classes ...' as Farage would characterise them, of course deliberately avoiding the fact that he himself is an arch exponent of that class, and a product of a privileged, upper middle-class upbringing to boot.

The problem with this view is that it denies the historical agency that the working population brought to bear on the class struggle in the first place. Yes, the theorists created the written canon of socialism, but the instigators and creators of working class socialism and the activists that actually wrested some power back from the gentry and the rentier classes were ordinary, exploited working people, acting together in unison. This collectivity of thought and action is what brought post-war prosperity, comfort and safety to people in Britain. However what we failed to do was continue to educate our children in that history and ensure that a reversal of time and fortune could never happen again and force on the population the kind of grinding poverty that was suffered prior to socialism's reforms. The outcome is now obvious to see, all around us, and rather than organise and gather together to the common good, as in the past, people are looking to false prophets such as Farage and the internet's myriad demigods for salvation.

There was a time when the South Wales valleys were solidly - and self-educatedly - socialist: organised in solidarity. Now, the working people of the south seem lost and are obviously willing to swallow the words of Reform rather than try and work things out for themselves, amongst themselves. Whether we'll ever find ourselves again as a political class in the true sense, I'm not sure, but all I do know is that my party - Labour - is trying its level best to destroy itself in much the same way that the Tories did. Not good for anybody. In Bethesda at least, all children in this area are taught from the age of four or five about Y Streic Fawr, and the class struggle of our people against the English landowners who thought they could do exactly as they pleased and ride rough-shod over basic human rights. We also stayed well enough away from Reform again this time to keep them at arms length, which is something to be proud of...