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This week sees the publication of The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution. Published by Parthian Books with a forward by Michael Sheen, it is a volume of 22 chapters from a collection of academics, writers, practitioners and activists, analysing the negative impact of neoliberalism and how consecutive Welsh governments, in spite of the radical and ‘socialist’ rhetoric, have failed to protect us from its worst effects. In an extract from the book, its editors set out their main arguments. 

Cover image: A closed Citizen Advice Bureau, Bargoed, by Glyn Owen

The Welsh Way

During the referendum campaign in 1997 Devolution was pitched as a way of protecting Welsh communities from the seemingly endless succession of callous Tory governments, while simultaneously benefiting from the fruits of its relationship with the British state. The best of both worlds.

Every devolved government that has sat in the Senedd since 1999 has been led by the Labour Party. And in May 2021, with Tory polling skyrocketing across the UK in the wake of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, the party under Mark Drakeford once again returned a comfortable victory, securing for itself another five years of power, amongst assertions from the British commentariat of Welsh Labour’s bona fide socialism. 

The problem, of course, is that none of this is, or indeed ever has been, remotely true. Despite Welsh Labour’s relentless self-mythologising over the past twenty years, Wales is, in practice, a deeply neoliberal country. Devolution has so far achieved little except to shore up Labour’s dominance in this struggling, disenfranchised, poverty-ridden enclave of the British Isles. 

If the UK is an innately neoliberal project as Mark Drakeford claims, why are he and his party so committed to it, and so hostile to the idea of seceding from it? If the Welsh Government is radical, why had there been such a concerted effort to distance itself from the Corbyn project? If the devolution of welfare could help, why had Drakeford resisted calls for this to be devolved, despite pressure from anti-poverty campaigners and groups like the Bevan Foundation?

It is not polemical or partisan to ask these questions, but a basic democratic necessity. The Welsh Way, however, is to avoid confrontation – to not ask questions or challenge, in a nepotistic culture enabled by an anaemic public sphere. In Wales, it does not pay to point out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.

Murky Brown Water

In contrast to the dominant image of Wales as a progressive, socialist country safely distanced from Tory policy by Welsh Labour’s ‘clear red water’, The Welsh Way offers a dose of the truth. 

As one commentator described it in 2003, the reality, even back then, was much closer to ‘murky brown water’.

While politicians clink glasses at the success of ‘radical’ policies such as plastic bag charges (which have in fact enabled supermarkets to make vast profits from plastic bags), proposed changes to residential speed limits, and penalties for parking on pavements, children go hungry and people live on the streets.

The logic of neoliberalism and its pernicious practices of targets, datafication and economism have poisoned and diluted policy ideals the world over. At best, Welsh Labour has remained the passive observer of this tendency; at worst, it has actively implemented straightforwardly neoliberal economic policies and Blairite social strategies, with devastating results. 

Neoliberalism and Wales

Neoliberalism is the dominant model of contemporary capitalism. Above all, it is a socio-political project designed to ‘re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and the restoration of class power’ of elites through the suppression of organised labour and collective action. Wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people – the ‘1%’ – whilst the bulk of the world’s population has become immiserated.

It inflects and infects all areas of personal, social, cultural and political life. It has profoundly changed the way we think about ourselves, and how we view and relate to one another as citizens and as human beings. It is, to quote one commentator, ‘in here, in our heads and in our souls’.

There are two related historical and political streams that have converged to influence the direction of neoliberalism in contemporary Wales. One is Wales’ uneven and combined development under conditions of political and economic absorption into England. 

Wales’ status as an appendage to British imperialism resulted in a perilously narrow industrial economy based on the extraction and refining of natural resources, with its internal infrastructure painfully underdeveloped and geared almost entirely towards English capital and trade.

Second is the (related) hegemonic dominance of the Labour party in Wales, which remains without comparison in world politics. In a country possessed of an outsized proletariat, the Welsh economy and its attendant political institutions were only belatedly and partially ‘national’ (i.e. developed for the sake of the Welsh nation by a national bourgeoisie), and were set up to service the empire and international capital.

The post-war welfare state represented a remarkable (and never to be replicated) hegemonic project of class collaboration which accrued significant material concessions to peripheral regions and subaltern classes through schemes like mass council house building and the (relatively brief) nationalisation of key industries. In the decades that followed, as crisis and deindustrialisation engulfed the Keynesian project, Westminster administrations became increasingly desperate to ‘prop up’ Wales, and moved public sector work like the Royal Mint and DVLA into once heavily industrialised areas. 

This acculturation and integration was mediated by the Labour party, who thereby consolidated their power in Wales.  However, as this book argues, Labour’s dominance in Wales has emphatically not equated to Welsh socialism. 

Thatcherism involved the rapid privatisation and sale of public services, the accelerated transition to a service economy, the agglomeration of manufacturing on the South Wales coastal belt, the culture of seeking Foreign Direct Investment (which was begun under the Wilson government), and the powerful cultural-economic phenomenon of right to buy. 

Thus, regardless of devolution and Welsh government policy, Wales had been a ‘neoliberal’ state in the sense that it had been part of the UK, and hence totally transformed by this mode of capitalism from the late 1970s onwards. Devolution under Labour was therefore layered on top of this deeply entrenched settlement. 

Welsh Neoliberalism

The apex of actually existing Welsh distinctiveness was the One Wales coalition (2007–2011), where Labour were dragged to the left by Plaid Cymru in numerous areas of policy. However, following the end of this coalition and the ascendency of Carwyn Jones in 2009, coupled with the coming to power in Westminster in 2010 of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, any traces of Wales’ supposed ‘clear red water’ began to evaporate. Under Jones’ tenure in particular, Wales became a cosy place for international capital. This has continued unabated throughout Drakeford’s tenure. 

Take the recent Ineos debacle. In 2019, Welsh Government was under pressure to act on Ford’s decision to abandon its Bridgend plant, which was about to leave thousands of skilled employees out of work. Ignoring calls to repurpose the site, it instead embarked on one of its ‘social partnership’ investment schemes. It made an agreement with Ineos, a vast multinational petrochemical company who had recently announced it was to start manufacturing a gas-guzzling, eye-wateringly expensive 4-wheel drive vehicle.

Consider the facts for a moment: Welsh Government – whose two greatest ‘progressive’ achievements in twenty years of devolution were the introduction of mandatory plastic bag charges and signing a Well-being of Future Generations Act committing future Welsh governments to action on climate change – made a multi-million pound agreement with one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies, indeed one of the world’s 20 largest producers of non-recyclable plastics and a major voice in the UK fracking lobby – to build 4-wheel drive vehicles for the wealthy.

By any objective measure, the Welsh Government has wholeheartedly embraced a system of capitalist accumulation which prioritises growth, which disregards the environment, and in which human flourishing is marginalised. 

The Labour-led Welsh Government refuses to push for the levers it needs, content instead to exist in a purgatory of helplessness. Labour claims it is unable to do ‘x’ because it doesn’t have the political-economic levers, yet the party is unwilling to agitate for more powers as this would be ‘nationalistic’. This resistance to any bold steps towards greater autonomy can itself be understood as a symptom of neoliberalism, in its lack of underlying political conviction.

However, despite claims that Welsh Government is powerless in the face of grand global forces, this new statelet has significant agency. The Senedd, its state apparatuses and devolved institutions, have their own culture and logic. They must be held to account.

These essays encourage us to move beyond the stagnant Labourist view of the Welsh past and present, towards a tentative political-economic theory of Welsh neoliberalism, both in its outward appearance as well as its underlying logic, rooted in a Marxist understanding of Wales’ distinct historical development and political culture. Ultimately, these essays encourage us to imagine, and demand, another future – this book argues for a new Welsh Way, one that is truly radical and transformational.

The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution is Published by Parthian