General Election 2017 - Plaid Cymru and Wales: Poor, fractured and ignored, Wales needs a new and radical alternative

Plaid Cymru want to pick up the baton from Labour, but Wales needs a much more radical revival.

Wales is poor, fractured and ignored. To get to the bottom of the needs of the country, it's necessary to start by accepting that. The next step is to accept that very little has been done to address the first step.

The fault for that doesn't fall only on Labour. Since the party spent thirteen years in government at Westminster, and in office as the government of Wales for the last eighteen, it is unsurprising that Tories see Wales as Labour's weak(est) spot.

But the Conservatives have little to offer now and have done little for Wales in the past - other than shut down the last primary industry upon which the country had depended, when they closed the coal mines.

Through three eras of Westminster centralisation - one Labour, two Conservative - Wales has been left with an economy painfully dependent upon public sector employment and its remaining industries are in a perilous state.

Steel in South Wales is struggling to stay afloat against the sudden flood caused by China's mass dumping of its huge stocks of steel onto markets. The scrambling efforts of Conservative ministers and Labour MPs to find a way to secure jobs bought time for Welsh steel.

This desperate scramble shouldn't be necessary. But so little attention has been paid to Wales that it has fallen into dependence: on a narrow few industries, on public funding, on EU funding - it was in fact among the larger recipients of Europe's Regional Development Funds.

Yet even these few things are at risk. The established parties just keep papering over the cracks. The reality is that Wales needs a new party.

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru would very much like voters to see them as just that. But the trouble is, that they're not.

At the core of their manifesto is a commitment to protecting funding and increasing investment, to be issued from Cardiff rather than Westminster, within the context of defending Welsh sovereignty. It's a vaguely nationalist, but otherwise ordinary, pitch for twentieth century social democracy.

Now. Properly implemented, there is plenty that social democrats could achieve for Wales. From fresh funding, to supporting new industries, these are essential projects that only the public body capable of providing.

Investment in infrastructure, in rail and road, in telecomms and broadband, and in new homes; supporting small businesses with public contracts, reformed business rates and a Welsh Development Bank; caring for people with more compassionate welfare and better funded healthcare.

These policies are all progressive priorities and all necessary to boosting Britain's economy out of its doldrums. But they're all just focused on making the best of the status quo - even with a little more devolution.

The problem for Plaid Cymru are that they're caught between fighting their long battle to pull Wales out of Labour's grip and fending off Tory efforts to to take advantage of Labour's, seemingly, ebbing strength.

The party are also affected by being close enough to power in Wales to play it safe. Its an outcome for the party's internal historical struggle, between nationalism and conservatism on the one hand, and a Left-wing community socialism upon the other.

The outcome of the struggle was a Centre/Centre-Left party of social democrats, comfortable with public intervention - much the same as Labour, just with its policies filtered through the lens of national identity.

The party matches the progressive parties at Westminster in their commitments. But where is the rebirth that Wales sorely needs?

Rebalancing Wales

Wales is a country whose political bonds are breaking It is split geographically and economically between South and North, between just two concentrations of people with a dearth of infrastructure and wealth lying between them.

In important ways, the situation of Wales reflect that of Western Europe, Europe and the West as a whole - rural versus urban, towns versus cities, richer versus poorer, migration & concentration, the centres becoming intolerable and the fringes being abandoned.

Politics in Wales hasn't helped. How deeply Labour has embedded itself in communities is a huge impediment to progress. At the local elections, there were many independents that made life difficult for Corbyn's Labour. But beneath that simpler narrative was a more complicated one, of Labour versus unofficial Labour.

That situation is a problem, because Wales right now needs less Westminster and more grassroots. It needs an Ada Colau more than it needs a Jeremy Corbyn.

Plaid Cymru should be better positioned that any other party in Wales to offer some truly radical alternatives. Among the party's founders was DJ Davies, also a founding member of Welsh Labour, an industrialist and economist who believed in the economics of co-operation and putting control in the hands of workers.

In their current manifesto, the part that comes closest to a project for rebirth is "Putting energy into our environment". Their plans, to support a national electric car infrastructure, green energy tidal lagoons and decentralised public energy, strike a theme of industry reborn under community ownership that thrusts towards the heart of what Wales needs. But it gets too little focus.

A New Mentality

Wales needs a new mentality, based on a radical devolution to the local level - to reengage people with the power and funds to rebuild their communities. But it can't be just urban municipalism.

It needs a movement that can give towns, both urban and rural, back into the hands of their communities and reinvigorate civic life - a locally focused, municipal-agrarian movement that can be brave and rethink how we approach rural life and make it sustainable in the future.

A movement that is prepared to imagine new ways to build the bonds between communities. That builds a sense of common identity by building the bonds between communities, that builds a sense of country by building a country.

Wales needs a brave new vision. A revival. Yet nobody is truly offering one. As it stands, fresh polls suggest Corbyn's Labour may make it through it's dark Welsh night. It doesn't deserve to, but New Labour's cynical adage remains true: there still isn't really an alternative.

General Election 2017 - SNP and Scotland: To have a wider influence at Westminster, Scottish MPs must bring soft power to bear

Thanks to devolution, Scottish MPs occupy an awkward role at Westminster - dependent upon the soft power of Westminster outside of the reserved questions of foreign policy and defence.

MPs for Scotland, thanks to the devolution of powers, have a very particular role. The few matters still reserved to Westminster are foreign policy and defence, energy and welfare - and with the extension of tax raising powers, even welfare can now be influenced from Holyrood.

So, for those who represent Scottish constituencies, Westminster has become in fact a federal parliament - focused on collective questions of Britain's relationship with the world and how it makes use of its natural resources.

Scottish National Party

Strangely though, the SNP have chosen to release a full manifesto that covers even the devolved matters. Perhaps the opportunity to put across its intentions at Holyrood or pressure to appear comprehensive has forced the party's hand.

On the devolved matters are some major pledges: centred on an £118 billion investment package in public services to counteract Tory cuts impact on Scotland - including investment in the NHS and introducing a new 50p tax rate.

But it's on reserved matters, what the party's MPs will tackle at Westminster, that attention here will focus.

The party has pledged to push for devolution of immigration powers to ensure a fairer immigration policy. The SNP argue that Scotland has different needs to those of the UK as a whole - that free movement of working age immigrants is vital to the economy of Scotland.

The party has also pledged to fight against fight cuts to welfare, treading ground on which even other progressive parties have been timid. Labour have not pledged much and while the Lib Dems pledged a little more, they have not really campaigned on those proposals.

Now, welfare policy will soon be something that can be adjusted and added to in Scotland, but baseline will be set for UK in Westminster. The SNP has promised to fight funding cuts and to raise money to make welfare more generous North of the border.

On foreign policy and defence - including Brexit - the SNP have the advantage of a clear stance. While the party supports EU cooperation, remaining in the Single Market, and ending the use of the Trident nuclear deterrent, there is a not a lot of depth on foreign policy in the area of defence and intervention.

Historically though, the SNP has taken a similar, centrist line to the Liberal Democrats - that the military should be maintained and that interventions should be led by United Nations resolutions, in accordance with international law.

The lack of depth perhaps reflects the question which muddies the waters of the SNP's voice on foreign policy and how much it influences, or should influence, wider UK opinion: if the SNP wishes for Scotland to be independent of the UK, how can it hope to play a leading role in setting the tone of Britain's relationship with the world?

SNP and their opposition

The SNP's opponents have their own stances on foreign policy that might be more clear, for better or worse.

The Tories are now resolved to pursue Brexit, are very clearly prepared to intervene militarily, and are clearly pro-Nuclear deterrent. Opposite to them stand the Liberal Democrats, who are the pro-European party. They want EU cooperation on foreign policy. On other questions though, they tread a tightrope of centrist equivocation.

Labour has also faced being indistinct on some of these big foreign policy questions - though it has been a symptom of being deeply divided internal politics rather than pragmatism.

Despite Jeremy Corbyn's own stances, however, the party has resolved in favour of NATO and in favour of retaining Trident. The party's MPs also rebelled against the party line, following a Hillary Benn speech, to support intervention in Syria.

On foreign policy the SNP are pro-UN, anti-Nuclear weapons, pragmatists, in a field of pragmatists, with independence hanging over their stances. So it is unsurprising that they are trying to distinguish themselves by way of their role at the head of the Scottish Government.

Above all, the SNP are promising to be an anti-Tory party of strong opposition. But for the SNP, as with other parties in Scotland, MPs from Scotland's constituencies will have little voting power on the broad majority of issues.

Soft Power

Defending the party's ability to act as an opposition at Westminster, Nicola Sturgeon praised Angus Robertson - the SNP's Westminster leader - for being the effective voice of opposition at PMQs and raising important issues in key debates. The SNP have also repeatedly stressed that they are prepared to work with other progressive parties at Westminster, to cooperate and collaborate in defending common values that are threatened by Tory policies.

Sturgeon stressed how the SNP had played a pivotal role at Westminster in exposing the issues hidden within Tory policies and forcing Theresa May and David Cameron, and their respective governments, into one U-turn after another.

However, devolution for Scotland has created in fact a two-tier Parliament at Westminster and taken away the hard power, the ability to vote, of Scottish MPs on many issues. With devolved matters, the SNP's accomplishments have to be achieved with soft power. With speeches, by getting press interest on an issue, and then gathering public pressure - and bringing it to bear.

Voters in Scotland should keep this in mind when casting their ballots. Who represents them on foreign policy? On defence? On Brexit? And, who can bring the soft power of public opinion and rhetoric to bear on those issues that fall on the periphery of Scottish jurisdiction?

When it comes down to it, Scottish MPs go to Westminster with a very specific mandate to address collective UK matters of foreign policy, defence and reserved broader economic questions. It is really on these issues that Scottish voters should make their choice.

General Election 2017 - The Budget: Progressive optimism vs Tory pessimism

In the general election campaign so far, there's a determination on the Right to spread the idea that their own plans are sensible and that their opponent's are chaotic and don't add up. But that's a crudely simplistic narrative and it comes with a couple of main assumptions that need to be broken through.

On the first assumption: none of the six main parties in England, Wales and Scotland are calling for a drastic overhaul to Britain's economic system. On the second: most economic systems work on their own terms. The sums will add up, whoever is in government. The biggest difference between progressive and conservative versions is their contrasting optimism and pessimism.

While conservatives, and progressives, will try to make the management of the budget a question of competence, or a question of right and wrong answers, those are not the primary questions facing voters. The real question to consider first, is: what are you trying to achieve?

How Ideology affects Economics

All approaches to the economy are ideological: they propose a set of steps to follow, with an intended outcome - an intentional attempt at shaping society to maximise certain behaviours and to minimise others.

When looking at the pitches made by progressives and conservatives, there are two elements you should consider, one for each of the two main categories of public spending - Current and Capital.

For clarity: Current spending is the day-to-day spending on the departmental budgets, historically offset against government revenue. Capital spending is long term infrastructure investment, usually funded by government borrowing.

On Current spending, you need to consider the question of intervention vs laissez faire: do you consider government action in any given policy area to be helping or interfering?

On Capital spending, you need to consider whether to invest in the future or tackle public debt: do you consider public debt or out-of-date technology and buildings for schools, hospitals, or roads and rails for businesses, the bigger burden on the future?

These two questions are deeply connected.

How entwined they are can be illustrated by the long term plan pursued by the Tories. Planning to 'balance' the budget by having both Current and Capital spending offset by revenue, severely limits how much the government can do in the present and for the future. Even more so as they pursue a huge reduction in the proportion of Britain's GDP, the country's gross wealth, the government is spending.

Now, borrowing to fund Current spending, on the day to day department costs, would theoretically be adding to the public debt at the expense of the future (hence the Tories popular refrain about not burdening our children). But Labour - whether you take the vision for the treasury as assembled by Brown, Balls or McDonnell - has not and does not intend to do that.

Under Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the intention has been - from at least the leaderships of John Smith and Paddy Ashdown - to follow a Keynesian approach: to balance just Current spending against tax revenues, thereby not accumulating public debt to pay for the needs of the present.

This approach does, however, leave Capital spending to be funded by borrowing.

The reasoning behind this is that the longer term Capital spending behaves much differently to Current spending. For a government, borrowing is cheap and the added value created by using it for long term investment is huge - so much so that the actual cost of borrowing is ultimately offset by the increased economic growth that results, and the rise in tax revenue that follows.

How to fund investment

The progressive view of these budget questions has a particular focus on Capital spending, refusing the simplistic calculation that public debt equals a burden on the future. Public debts, within reason and where they result from investment in the future, are largely harmless.

But the negative impact of poor infrastructure, on every area of society, could be disastrous. Just look at the mess that resulted from outdated operating systems on NHS computers. But the same point extends to more mundane situations: old and crumbling school buildings, potholed and traffic strewn roads, ports with insufficient capacity, a telecommunications network that doesn't keep up with the needs of people and businesses.

There are, of course, always attempts at being clever in order to reduce borrowing for Capital projects, even when they aren't covered by tax revenues. New Labour tried something new, expanding on plans they inherited to seek out private investors for its controversial and now infamous 'Private Finance Initiatives', as a way to fund Capital spending without adding to the public debt.

The New Labour plan for private-funded public investment built hospitals - but the private sector expects returns. The PFIs left those institutions with the expectation to deliver astronomical returns on those investments - some £300bn all told - and private benefactors continue to receive interest payments from hospital trusts in the hundreds of millions.

In a way, New Labour's approach resembles the Coalition plan for funding higher education - shifting a public debt, weighing on the Current budget, onto citizens as private debt. In a stroke, a chunk of Current spending and public debt was privatised.

But like the burdens that were shifted onto the backs of hospital trusts, the treasury saw a clever accounting trick,  not the social impact of burdensome debt - though at least more limitations were put in place to protect students than the hospital trusts received with PFIs. In either case, the financial burden ends up on the public books anyway.

The Conservatives plan was to oppose borrowing and fund both Current and Capital only with tax revenues. From a progressive view this was reckless, as it would result in one of two outcomes: it would mean slashing spending on people's wellbeing in the present, while still having them pay tax to fund Capital projects that will never bear fruit for them, or it would mean slashing both to endlessly pay off mostly harmless debt.

The underlying motivations for conservatives to pursue this path is as simple as 'faith' in the market. A belief that private schemes are better than public action - seeing public action as interference that just distorts outcomes. Instead of taking the advantage of scale provided by the collective public option, where resources are pooled to maximise their use, conservatives prefer personal private schemes of insurance to pay for services.

How the government finances stand

The overriding aim of this privatising conservative mentality is to fight against 'dependence'. But to pursue that low tax, low interference, approach, that promotes private action, is not compatible with maintaining well funded public services. At some point, something will have to give. To emphasise the point, consider how the public finances stand after seven years of Tory government.

Current spending stands this past year at around £720 billion to £740 billion in revenue, while Capital spending sits at around £80 billion. As the Tories combine Current and Capital spending to calculate the deficit, the public debt increased by about £59 billion.

That will mean, in the coming years - helped perhaps if revenues rise due to economic recovery or growth - 'balancing' the budget will still require a combination of tax rises and budget cuts, to both Capital and Current spending, amounting to over £60 billion a year - and perhaps more, if the aim is to produce a surplus with which to pay down the public debt.

We know that some £22 billion is to come from the NHS, through the finding of 'savings'. Another £3 billion is coming from schools, thanks to recent funding changes. More will come from the welfare freeze. There is clearly an intention to clear some of the cost of social care off the public books by making middle class homeowners pay with their assets. But that still leaves a lot of cuts.

As for the Liberal Democrat and Labour plans, both are actually fairly similar and neither are that tremendously radical. In fact, they're downright sensibly Keynesian. Both intend to balance the Current, day-to-day departmental, spending against tax revenues - with modest tax rises, mostly on the rich, making more room for manoeuvre.

And here is something interesting. On the measure of balancing the Current budget: it's already balanced. In fact it's in surplus. By some £20 billion. It is projected to be in surplus by about the same amount next year. The previous year the Current budget was only £3 billion in deficit. If the job was to rebalance government spending and revenue, the job is nearly three years done.

With their commitments fully costed, either Labour or the Lib Dems would come into government with a very positive outlook on the public finances - seeing the public books as being in a healthy state. The positivity of either of these parties would alone be a drastic turn around from the doomsaying Tories, who promise nothing but ever more cuts.

It is remarkable the affect that optimism and positivity alone can have in economics, particularly in contrast to the Tories doom and gloom and neverending warnings. But the renewed public investment, called for by all progressive parties, could provide a huge long term boost to Britain. From the mass building of new homes to long term support for innovative new industries - particularly in green energy - there would be a lot to be optimistic about.

How we frame debt matters

As for the deficit and debt? Well, how these are drawn up may have to change when the Tories are eventually ousted, because the way we frame these matters. Conservatives have been very successful at getting into circulation the idea that fiscal credibility means opposing public debt. Progressives must counter that narrative by reframing the ideas.

If the value added by Capital spending vastly outweighs its cost - thus removing it as a factor in balancing a budget - it might well be worth starting to calculate it separately from the deficit and debt which results from the Current budget. That means separating out public debt into two categories: productive Capital debt and unproductive deficit debt.

The progressive aim will be responsibility with productive Capital debt and credibility in tackling and avoiding the unproductive Current deficits and debt. Consider: In the three years between 2015 and 2018, there will have been a Current budget surplus of £47bn. The deficit in that period, that Tories use to justify austerity, is the result of £233bn in Capital spending - investment in long term projects.

That means, at the end of that three year period, around 12% of our total public debt is just from that productive long term investment. When you consider the long term, positive impact of that Capital spending, it makes the public debt a lot less intimidating. It also resets priorities.

How we move forward

To be a progressive is to be an optimist - to be believe that people have the power to change things for the better. While government spending is not the be-all-end-all mechanism for that, progressives argue that it has an important role to play and is currently being poorly utilised.

There are huge challenges to face and most them require sturdy long term commitment. Poverty needs to be addressed with affordable housing and energy, and with compassionate welfare that gets people back on their own feet.

Britain's imbalanced economy needs restructuring around innovative new industries and businesses, spread out across the regions, with green energy power them and the technical skills to run them.

The public sector is able to deliver that long term investment in a way private finance has not yet been able to match. It is part of the solution. The next step is to grasp that idea and to pursue it with positivity and energy. Progress is possible and austerity not inevitable.