Communist Party

2003 Welsh congress

23rd November, Cardiff Centre for Trade Union Studies

UNITE THE PEOPLE OF WALES FOR POWER, JUSTICE AND EQUALITY

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Main congress resolution

'Unite the People of Wales for Power, Justice and Equality'

The general political situation

 

British and international politics have recently been dominated by the illegal, unprovoked and barbaric attack on Iraq. The people of Wales played a full part in the world-wide movement against the war.
The mobilisation needs to continue against against the predatory US-led occupation, which is designed to meet the economic and military needs of US imperialism rather than the economic and social needs of the Iraqi people.
Because the attack on Iraq, like that on Afghanistan, is part of US imperialism's drive for world domination, there is the real danger of military aggression in the near future against Iran, Syria, North Korea and other independent, sovereign states.
This highlights the requirement for closer cooperation and coordination of peace and anti-war forces on all-Wales level, and for the involvement of the Wales TUC and trade union organisations in such an initiative alongside the Stop the War Coalition, CND Cymru and local peace groups. It also underlines the importance of the work done by the Cuba and Palestine solidarity campaigns in Wales - and of the need for organised solidarity with the people of Colombia.
At the same time, the argument that closer British integration in the European Union provides a progressive alternative to the lickspittle alliance with US imperialism has to be resisted. As well as championing monetarist economics, privatisation and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in the interests of European transnational corporations, the EU is developing into an undemocratic, militarised and imperialist United States of Europe. Such a perspective is not in the interests of the people of Wales nor humanity in general, and highlights the role that Wales Trades Unions Against the Single Currency, the Wales TUC and the labour and progressive movements must play in alerting the people of Wales to this danger.
New Labour's shameful involvement in the war crimes against Iraq has further discredited the New Labour government. Its pro-big business policies of capital export, privatisation, public spending restrictions and regressive taxation have eroded our manufacturing base, undermined our public services and the public sector generally, and widened the gap between rich and poor. Its social policies in the fields of housing, health, education, immigration and asylum will continue to deepen social divisions of every kind.
In these circumstances, it is no surprise that many electors are turning in anger and despair to alternative parties such as the Liberals, the Scottish Socialist Party and fascists.

New political conditions in Wales

 

Recent General and National Assembly of Wales elections indicate that the Labour Party has retained a higher level of working class support in Wales than in England, due largely to the social-democratic approach being pursued by the party in Wales, particularly through the assembly.
This approach has been reflected in the National Assembly's more progressive health, education and transport policies and in statements from Welsh Secretary of State Peter Hain - which were repudiated by New Labour - supporting progressive taxation and criticising US foreign policy. Despite set-backs, Plaid Cymru remains a significant left-of-centre force which takes a principled anti-war stance in international affairs.
Yet neither party operates as a consistent socialist force in Welsh life, although both can count many socialists among their members and supporters. In these conditions, attempts to build a mass socialist alternative - especially in electoral terms - to these parties in Wales are unlikely to succeed - and are a diversion from the mobilisation needed to reclaim the Labour Party for the labour movement.
The Communist Party therefore continues to put forward a different perspective:
Firstly, that pressure must be stepped up on Labour MPs and the Labour administration in Cardiff to fight for progressive and left policies. This includes more energetic campaigning by trades unions and the Wales TUC, more systematic participation in the Labour Party by affiliated organisations, and organising the left more effectively inside the Labour Party. The Bevan Foundation can contribute to the ideological struggle for socialist values and policies to the extent that it reflects Aneurin Bevan's commitment to economic planning, public ownership and progressive taxation.
Secondly, advances by the left in Plaid Cymru should be welcomed and supported.
Thirdly, every opportunity should be taken to involve and unite socialists and progressives from the Labour Party and Plaid Cymru in campaigns which express their common values, aspirations and policies.
While recognising the different strategic orientation - and the electoral rivalry - which currently exists between Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru, sectarian attempts from within and outside those parties to deepen divisions on the left should be refuted and rejected by all socialists in Wales.
At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that neither party is fighting for policies that will fundamentally challenge the huge inequalities and injustices which persist in Wales, and which are rooted in a society based on exploitation and oppression.
In particular, the Wales Labour Party fails to take advantage of new political conditions created by the establishment of the National Assembly to develop bold policies and campaigning for the devolved powers with which to carry them out.
Plaid Cymru, on the other hand, pursues the myth of an 'independent Wales' in what is set to become a centralised, military, imperialist United States of Europe dominated by the transnational corporations, an unaccountable European Commission and an unaccountable European Central Bank.
Yet all socialists want to see a Wales in which there is social justice and greater equality. For the Communist Party, this can only be achieved as the result of a direct, planned intervention in the economy which forms the basis of our society.

What kind of Welsh economy?

Working people as a whole will only prosper when we have a modern economy which utilises the most advanced technology, providing full employment for a high-skilled, high-waged workforce. It must be the key objective of the Welsh labour movement to create such an economy in every sector.
Private enterprise has no such objective, and there is no reason to believe that today's transnational corporations are more likely to produce such an outcome than the iron and coal monopolies of the past. All the great initiatives to diversify and modernise the Welsh economy and to overcome mass unemployment have come about as the result of public sector planning, intervention and investment.
We need such a medium- and long-term strategy now. The labour movement must take the lead in campaigning for an Economic Plan for Wales, and for the powers and resources of the National Assembly to be increased in order to implement it.
The Welsh Developent Agency could play a crucial role in drawing up such a plan in consultation with the trades unions, local authorities, business, transport and environmental organisations etc., but it must at all stages be democratically accountable to the National Assembly. It should also be restructured as an integrated Welsh national economic development authority, an objective assisted by the recent incorporation of the Rural Wales Development Board - a step long advocated by the Communist Party.
Central to the plan should be the protection and extension of our industrial and manufacturing base. Between 1999 and 2003, some 51,000 manufacturing jobs were wiped out in Wales - 19 per cent of the sector compared with the loss of about 17 per cent of manufacturing jobs in the UK as a whole.
The plan should also give a prominent role to support for co-operatives of every type (worker co-ops, community and market co-ops, credit unions), thereby reviving one of the aims set out in the original 1975 Welsh Development Agency Act.
The WDA has preferred to spend hundreds of millions of pounds of public money bribing foreign transnational corporations to come to Wales, the low-pay metropolis of western Europe, and partly fill the 'investment gap' left by the mass export of capital from Wales and Britain by British transnationals. The LG fiasco in Newport demonstrates the bankruptcy of this approach, although only the Communist Party publicly challenged the LG scheme at the time.
Other transnational corporations have simply shut down whole factories in Wales and exported production to eastern Europe and the Far East, where pay is even lower and labour even more flexible.
Even today, after all the bribes paid to incoming transnationals, they account for just 6 per cent of all the jobs in Wales, showing the extent to which the public sector, utilities and local businesses should be the focus of any strategy for full employment.
The alternative to the failed low-pay, semi-skilled, labour-flexible, foreign-capital, market-forces model of economic development in Wales is a high-pay, high-skilled, job-security, home-grown, planned model. This can only be brought about by an Economic Plan for Wales, implemented within the framework of a Welsh parliament with primary law-making, economic and financial powers, including the power to outlaw mass redundancies in viable enterprises, to take failing companies into public ownership, to direct economic development and to raise capital funds.
The labour movement in Wales, notably the Wales TUC and the Labour Party, must take up, develop and campaign for such an approach to provide the secure economic base for a socially-just society.

The fight for social justice and equality

 

Public and social services continue to make a substantial contribution to the quality of life - such as it is - of many people in Wales, as well as being a major employer. These services are often best defended by alliances between trades unions, progressive councillors and local people in their communities.
But the current funding arrangements of a Whitehall block grant via the National Assembly together with regressive council tax do not provide a secure basis upon which those services can be maintained and enhanced. This especially so in housing, where local authorities try to offload their responsibilities through housing stock transfer, and in further and higher education where the current funding shambles restricts access for working class students.
While amending the Barnett block grant formula to fully recognise the needs of deprived working class communities would produce a fairer distribution of central government funds, it is not the fundamental solution. This would have to include the replacement of council tax by a local income tax, freedom for local authorities and the National Assembly to raise investment funds in capital markets and powers for the assembly to retain a share of PAYE revenues in Wales, to supplement income tax rates - including at the top rate - and to introduce its own taxes and levies for example on wealth (as can the provinces of Spain), development land and 'prestige' projects.
The people of Wales suffer some of the worst levels of ill health in Europe. Improving industrial, economic and environmental conditions - and not least reducing poverty - will alleviate this situation in the longer term. But what is required immediately is yet more investment in the health and medical services, including in wages and training for NHS staff. The Welsh labour and progressive movement should press the National Assembly to abolish all private health provision which competes with the NHS and so draws off staff, resources and public funds for private profit.
Low pay is a major cause of poverty in working life and in old age. The average wage in Wales is less than four-fifths of the UK average. The problem of the wages poor helps to explain why the the proportion of the Welsh population on Income Support has risen to 10 per cent.
Full-time women workers receive 88 per cent of the average male full-time wage. Women also constitute four-fifths of all part-time workers, a section of the workforce which experiences lower pay and greater job insecurity than any other. Compulsory equal pay audits are required to expose and eliminate pay systems which are discriminatory.
But the single biggest blow which could be struck for the working poor is to raise the national minimum wage (NMW) for all workers so that it equals half the median male wage - about £6 an hour - in line with the TUC formula, rising to two-thirds over time. This policy should include 16-18 year olds who are currently excluded from the NMW, and 18-21 year olds who are currently on a lower, discriminatory rate.
This should become a top campaigning priority for the Wales TUC, uniting the interests of hundreds of thousands of workers including young, women and black workers. It would attract non-unionised workers, especially in notorious low-pay and anti-union sectors such as hotels, catering and retailing which play a major part in the local and Welsh economies - and where many employees are seasonal, work long hours and receive little or no training.
Linked to this campaign should be the demand for the Welsh Assembly to have the power to increase the NMW, just as individual states in the US can do, which can be taken up by the whole labour and progressive movement in Wales.
For unions to become more effective on this and other issues, the anti-trade union laws have to be abolished. The Friction Dynamex dispute and the courageous, principled stand taken by the Caernarfon workforce have exposed the injustice of laws which allow rogue employers to sack workers after 8 weeks, import strike-breakers and then defy an employment tribunal by shutting the factory and selling off the assets.
Similarly, the scandal at Allied Steel and Wire in Cardiff demonstrates how easy it is for companies to sack a workforce, threaten to devastate a local community and then reveal that they have also stolen workers' pension funds.
Our National Assembly should demand the necessary powers to prevent and penalise such abuses, and so make the assembly more relevant to the real needs of working people and their families.
Another major factor which makes Wales one of the poorest nations and regions of western Europe is our higher degree of dependence in old age on a miserly state pension. A stronger campaigning alliance between the National Pensioners Convention, local groups and the Welsh labour movement would help ensure that the aim of a substantial, index-linked, non-means tested state pension for all remains high on the political agenda.
The health, transport and other public services highlight the priceless contribution made to our country's economy - as well as its social and cultural life - by many people who have settled in Wales over recent decades. Yet parts have Wales have also seen some of the biggest increases in racist attacks in Britain.
This shameful situation is primarily the result of prejudice and bigotry whipped up by the monopoly mass media and New Labour government ministers and their policies, which provides some people with a 'scapegoat' to blame for personal, economic and social problems. High levels of deprivation in so many of our local communities therefore provide fertile ground for organised racists and fascists to peddle false solutions to real problems.
Racism and fascism have to be opposed on at least three fronts: firstly, it is important to take a public stand against the New Labour and mass media attacks on asylum seekers, as the National Assembly did so splendidly over the treatment of asylum seekers in Cardiff gaol; secondly, the activities and real beliefs of the BNP (British Nazi Party) and others have to be countered on the basis of the widest possible unity - a strategy being promoted by Wales Friends of Searchlight with the support of the Wales TUC; and thirdly, people in their communities and workplaces must be mobilised to fight for policies which help to solve the deep-rooted problems which afflict many parts of Wales.

The labour movement and the Communist Party

The organised labour movement has played a substantial role in Welsh industrial, social, cultural and political life for more than a century. But its greatest challenges and opportunities still lie ahead.
The National Assembly offers the potential for an alliance between the Labour Party, the Wales TUC and other progressive parties and forces to change the lives of the Welsh people at work and in their communities fundamentally for the better. Within its very limited powers, the assembly has already implemented progressive policies in education, health, the Welsh language, culture and other fields. The 2002 Wales TUC congress adopted many advanced policies across a wide range of issues.
What is required now is a synthesis: the assembly needs to be transformed into a powerful parliament which involves and mobilises - and not only represents - the people of Wales. The Wales TUC, Labour Party and other progressive movements need to develop and integrate their policies into an alternative economic and political strategy for Wales - and to fight for such a strategy to be taken up by the Welsh parliament.
Strengthening the role and influence of the Wales TUC and trade union movement must also include rebuilding the local trade union councils. These are the bodies which can unite trades unionists, organise solidarity and take campaigning initiatives within local communities. They can forge mutually benefical links with other progressive organisations. But their effectiveness is conditional upon unions ensuring that their branches play an active part in the local trades union council.
The Morning Star plays an invaluable role in Wales, not least through its coverage of the Wales TUC, CND Cymru and struggles such as that at Friction Dynamex. But more could be done to supply the paper with news and features from Wales, to organise Fighting Fund collections at trade union and other meetings, and to create and strengthen Morning Star Readers and Supporters Groups as a forum for political discussion, as a force for left unity and as vehicles for promoting Morning Star sales and fund-raising initiatives.
The Communist Party continues to make a distinctive contribution on many fronts to political, trade union and cultural life in Wales. As the Marxist party of the labour movement, it formulates and projects a strategy for progress in Wales and socialist revolution. This strategy is based on the following principles:

• The people of Wales should fight to maximise the powers and resources devolved to the National Assembly and transform it into a genuine people's parliament.
• The Welsh labour movement must seek and win the leading role in this process, with a stronger Wales TUC at its core and acting as a force for unity across labour, left and progressive parties and movements.
• The left and the labour movement must formulate and project an integrated economic and political strategy for Wales which challenges exploitation and all forms of oppression, rebuilds our industrial base, enhances public services, enriches our culture and expands democracy.

In order to promote and project these principles more effectively, the Communist Party intends to re-establish - with the support of friends and allies - an annual Communist University of Wales in 2004.
The party will continue to act as a force for unity and mobilisation across a wide range of popular and democratic movements in Wales. At the same time we will utilise the opportunity provided by elections to project our distinctive principles and strategy among the mass of the people - steadfast in our view that communism is still the hope of Wales and the world.