Should we support the Labour Plaid coalition?

You will find this of interest?

Plaid leader Ieuan Wyn Jones stikes me as the sort of dodgy bloke canvassing agressively for business.....Could hear him shout 'Hey missus, do you a deal on a new drive!' Wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. ...and on 'Hey Rodri, do you a deal with Plaid then.' ..lots in it for me and shoddy material and finishing.. ...don't think his team are whole heartedly behind him!
It will all end in tears.

Julian Tudor Hart on the debate as to whether we should support the proposed Labour-Plaid coalition. The actual text of the coalition agreement, 'One Wales' can be downloaded from the BBC website.

Dear comrades

The Labour Party was not formed as a socialist party, but as an attempt to create a virtually undefined voice for working people themselves, rather than through well-heeled Liberals – which as Jim says, Blair rightly identified as the key decision which he and the rest of New Labour seek to reverse. The newborn Party included a minority of socialists in organized groups, some of which (e.g. Clarion cyclists and all associated with Blatchford’s Merrie England) had a mass base and undertook mass agitational/educational activity. Others developed elementary Marxist ideas, the SDF on sectarian lines, the Miners’ Next Step men on syndicalist lines. In South Wales and on the Clyde these all together became a mighty force, helping to create the situation which in 1918 led to acceptance of Clause 4 state socialism by the entire Labour Party. However, a large majority inside and voting for the Party never had a socialist agenda in any but the vaguest terms.
For a large part of the Party and its affiliated unions this acceptance was, from the very beginning, nominal – a bow to circumstances, the worldwide hopes raised by the Russian communist revolution of October 1917 in the desperate conditions of a still unfinished world war, which have receded ever since, barring the exceptional circumstances from 1941 to 1945. The final collapse of that idea in 1990 knocked out cold the apparent foundations of all socialist beliefs. We are still only beginning to understand that there were and still are other, deeper foundations on which to build, and close to home, not in remote utopias. The Labour Party was then, and even today remains, a political coalition that is class-based, in which a large majority still asks only for a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, with all significant power and property left in the hands of the capitalist class. No doubt we wish it were otherwise, but obviously it is not. The politically educated minority of socialists is smaller and older today than it has ever been since 1903, and don’t we know it. It might also be wiser.

In these circumstances it is simply absurd to pretend that the minority of socialists in Plaid Cymru is essentially different from the minority of socialists in our Labour Party, in any respect other than organization. I don’t know about Plaid, but for Labour, organization means only work during and between elections to ensure that we win the next one. We do absolutely nothing – repeat, nothing – to recruit or educate new generations of socialists, committed to a society different in kind from what we live in today. In large part this abdication from responsibility is due to shame and embarrassment. We know that none of our leaders at Westminster shares any such commitment. How can we teach young people what we have not only obviously failed to do ourselves, but what is actively opposed by those leaders? New Labour is not just “not socialist”, it is antisocialist. However, both in the Labour Party and in Plaid, socialists can regain the initiative if they dare to take it; they, and only they, have the innovative ideas that could revive social solidarity in the electorate. And hopefully, our leaders in Cardiff see things differently from leaders at Westminster, even if they speak of their ideas only in whispers inaudible to the electorate.

Throughout the world, political parties and their voters are undergoing a transformation as profound as that which gave birth to the Labour Party, and to all other mass workers’ parties in the two decades preceding World War 1. We are in the middle of that transformation. We can at best only guess at its outcome. In these circumstances we should trust the capacity of everyone who lives and thinks from what they do rather than from what they own or control; all whose lives depend on their work rather than their wealth and power. Anything that brings these broadly defined working people together deserves our support. I think our coalition with Plaid could be a possibly decisive step in that direction, so I heartily support it.