I WOULD like to comment on Darren Williams"article "Welsh Assembly plans advance" Socialist Outlook April 1997.
The unity of the workers' movement in Britain is threatened by our home grown coalitionist and renegade Labour leaders on the MRC of labour Party Wales, along with Ron Davies. As Tony Blair's agents in Wales they have refused to fight for a majority Labour gorernment and subordinate the Lahour Party in Britain to the pro-capitalist Liberals.
in waics they subordinate the struggle of the Weish working class against British imperialism and bureaucratic centralism to the ideo. logical illusions of petty bourgcois Welsh Nationalists.
The referendum in Wales is a diversion, an attempt by the Labour and TUC leadership to tie up the workers' movement from within our own ranks.
During the general election campaign we in Brecon and Kadnor Socialist Campaign Group advanced the following slogans:
Labour to Power!
For a Majority Labour Government!
Only these slogans, we argued, would allow the Labour Party in key marginal seats like Brecon & break from the umbilical cord of pro-capitalist parties.
We told the bitter truth that a fight for a majority Labour government would not come by itself. It must be fought for even against our own leaders who are the saboteurs and architects of our defeat.
We did not fight for these slogans for Ron Davies or Darren Wil. liams to give power back to petty bourgeois nationalists in Wales by supporting the election of a Weish Assembly on the basis of a proporWe call for the Welsh Assembly to be the tribune of the working class in Wales. PR for the Welsh Assembly is a fraud against the working class in Wales.
The Labour leadership want a coalitionist Assembly for the purpose of making deals with the pétty bourgeois nationalists and Liberal privileged cliques in Wales.
Williams seems to want the same thing, the only difference is that he presents a leftist face to on constitu.
tional change.
It is very easy to blame in print but much harder to fight inside the Labour Party the "reactionary South Wales bureaucracy" of which he is a member, sitting as he does on the Welsh Labour Party Executive.
This is the same "reactionary bureaucracy" including Ron Davies which Welsh Labour Action seems to court rather than fight. Williams is fostering illusions within the labour movement in Wales that the amperialist bourgeois British state and the bourgeois democratic pro: cesses are in some way progressive, reformable and can be used by the working class in Wales to advance its interests by merely advocating change in the clectoral system, by introducing some form of PR system. This is parliamentary cretinism of the most reactionary kind.
The nationalism of the working class and small farmers in Wales is only the shell of their social rebellion against the centralised capitalist state; while the nationalism of the petty bourgeois and Liberals is only a pawn in their play with the British state against the Welsh working class.
It scems that not only Ron Davies fails to draw the line between the nationally oppressed workers and small farmers in Wales and the ruling class and their shad. ows.
Davies is in no hurry to throw the nationalists and Wales off the back of the Labour Party. Williams would also rather spend his time constructing a 'popular majority through a Welsh Assembly elected by PR (ic with petty bourgeois political parties) which in my ABC of Marxism is the same thing.
Marxists construct alliances with nationally oppressed workers and small farmers, not with reactionary and nationalist political parties who use their political machines to line up declassed elements and the financially distressed petty bourecor sie behind them and against the organised working class, only to al. low them in turn to be exploited in the name of international finance capital and the bourgcois imperial.
ist state.
This drama is not without its comical side. New Labour in Wales moves alongside the restless work.
ing class with the precious load of nationalists and Liberals on its back.
It answers the protests, complaints and curses coming from the working class in the voice of a slapstick comedian: "Look at these creatures on my back! They are my sworn enemy. I will list their crimes against you: pay attention!
etc etc."
And when the crowd, amused by this spectacle, begins to laugh, New Send us your letters on any topic, to PO Box 1109, Lordon N4 2UU. Letters over 400 words may have to be edited for length. are a stameral concrap:
Emphasising the responsiblity of the German state in the aflair does not mean being in any way "soft" on the disgraceful role of the RUC and the British state. It does mean not letting the German state off the hook.
Finally, I do not know if you are aware of the "Kontraste" programme on German television. In this, Manfred Schmidt, named as a key eyewitness in Róisin McAlis. key's extradition case, denied the