first published in mid-January 1999 by Roger Warren Evans

DEMOCRACY will be a byword, for Labour in Wales. Equality. Democracy. Community. In the politics of the new province, Labour has the opportunity to give new meaning to these socialist themes. For Labour in Wales remains socialist. Socialist without qualification. Socialist without apology. The language of New and Old Labour has made little headway in Wales. The democracy of Wales flows from a profound, unshakeable assertion of the equality of all mankind, and of the power of community, of mutual aid and affection, in the ordering of society. Socialism comes naturally, in Wales. These are Welsh gifts. They will be cultivated in Wales, and freely offered to the wider socialist movement.

THE WELSH ASSEMBLY WILL BE FREE to focus on the ordering of civil society, in all its local manifestations. No debates about taxation. Or social security. Or defence. Or foreign policy. Or matters of war and peace. The governance of the province will focus on matters falling within the proper purview of a UK province, according to statute law and political convention. And the outcome will be a flowering of socialist perceptions, a new understanding of the power of socialist analysis and thought.

EACH COUNTRY has its own socialism. This is not the cry of socialism in one country, which reflected the constraints of the nation state earlier in the 20th century. It is rather a recognition that, in a world of a multitudinous communal experimentation, each people, each country, has distinctive contributions to make to the fabric of human development. Wales, and South Wales in particular, has a unique contribution to make to the future of socialism.

THE SOCIALISM of the future will not be a reversion to the liberalism of a century ago. There was nothing strange about the death of Liberal England. Liberal philosophy proved no match for the challenges of more complex and more populous societies. The Liberals failed, as the Liberal Democrats still fail, to recognise the key socialist perception, which is that all the primary ground-rules of society are social, collective, determined by law and by the commitment of government. The public sphere predominates, determining the . scope of the private sphere. Nowhere is that better understood than in Wales.

FOR SOCIALISM is endemic to Wales. The remote Celtic kingdoms of mediaeval Wales, differing in culture, law and language from the majority Anglo-Saxon peoples to the East, remained separate and apart from their power and class structures. That differentiation was compounded by the remarkable phenomenon of 19th century industrialisation, which converted South Wales into a teeming Klondyke of work and opportunity, demanding new political solutions, creating an international, English speaking, egalitarian, tolerant, classless, and naturally socialist, modern society. That is Wales today.

Socialism is at home in Wales

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