Statement agreed by the Socialist Party Wales Conference Cardiff, January 28th 2007
Introduction
The main features of Welsh society are similar to the rest of Britain and this statement should be read in conjunction with the British perspectives document dealing with the main processes in Britain.
THE ECONOMY
The sustained economic upturn has continued into 2007 although it is unclear how long it can last. The boom built on consumer debt and the cheapening of consumer goods through the relocation of production to Asia and Eastern Europe rather than investment in production cannot last indefinitely. House prices, an important indicator of the boom, continue to rise in Wales – by 117% since 2001.
The benefits of the boom have not been distributed evenly across Welsh society. There is not a super-rich elite in Wales with the conspicuous consumption of wealth that has accompanied these strata in London or Ireland, but the tops of society have done very well in this period while a large layer of Welsh society continues to exist in poverty. Inequalities in Wales have grown through this boom and Wales continues to be the poorest “region” of Britain, possibly even the UK.
The economic upturn has not seen the creation of secure well-paid jobs except for the elite around the Assembly and related jobs in Cardiff Bay and linked “quango jobs” in the rest of Wales. Low pay is still endemic in the public and the private sectors helped by the acquiescent attitudes of the trade union leaders. The public sector provides a higher proportion of employment in Wales compared to the rest of Britain, which tends to have lower wage levels.
And as in the rest of Britain, the boom in the service sector has masked a severe decline of manufacturing in Wales. This underlines a severe weakness in the Welsh economy because, despite the pronouncements of New Labour and Tory politicians, manufacturing remains central to the underlying strength of an economy. Since 1998 there has been a 15% fall in manufacturing jobs and a new round of closures is threatened with the announcement of new closures at Burberry in Treorchy and the partial closure of TRW Automotive in Pontypool.
Union leaders in Wales have not put forward a fighting strategy to defend jobs but in general have argued for the best redundancy deals and where the workforce has been prepared to fight relied on gimmickry and stunts to hide their failure to fight back. Where workers have been prepared to fight back on wages and to defend jobs then victories can be won despite the dead-hand of the bureaucracy as can be seen at the recent victory at Visteon in Swansea in which our members played an important role.
There has been significant immigration into Wales but also emigration. The 2001 census found that 22% of those who identified themselves as Welsh lived outside of Wales, mainly in the south-east of England indicating a large accumulated emigration. Those who have moved away have been overwhelmingly young while those who have moved in have been older. The average age in Wales grew by 10% in the period 1991- 2001. This process has continued through this decade. Between 1996-2005 there was a net immigration from the rest of Britain of 75,000. But a study on the introduction of European Objective One funds found that while there had been an overall increase in employment in the affected areas between 2001 and 2003, it was mainly in the older age levels. The number of employed 16-35 year olds actually dropped by 34,000 indicating the loss of young people from these parts of Wales.
There has also been an unequal growth in the regions of Wales and between the cities and rural areas. The area around Cardiff has grown with the building boom in public and private infrastructure while the economy in the South Wales valleys has stagnated relying on commuter jobs in Cardiff to sustain the local economies. Swansea has grown, but at a slower pace while jobs in the rural areas in West Wales have declined. North Wales has not grown at the same pace as the South and is much more affected by the retirement home phenomenon, dubbed Costa Geriatrica by journalists.
Mid Wales is mixed, with affluent areas close to poorer areas, but the overall picture is of economic stagnation partially compensated by migration. High house prices coupled with migration has led to fears in rural Welsh-speaking areas of a cultural crisis as young Welsh speakers are forced to move to find jobs and homes while English-speakers move in. We support a council house building programme and the compulsory purchase of empty homes in these areas to provide cheap homes to young working people but are opposed to the restrictions on incomers advocated by some Welsh nationalists.
POVERTY
The high levels of poverty endemic to large parts of Wales are illustrated by the effects on health. South Wales is the unhealthiest part of Britain. Eight of the ten worst regions in the UK were Welsh local authority districts and six of the worst ten local authority districts in England and Wales with limiting long-term illness are in the South Wales Valleys. Professor Kevin Morgan of the Cardiff Business School commented “These problems have been with us for so long that they seem to have lost their capacity to shock, even though shocking is the only sober way to describe them. They signal a collective failure to provide the most basic amenities of a civilised life.” The growing social divisions have even widened the relative death rates. Official statistics show that the death rate for people living in the most deprived parts of Wales is almost twice that of those in the most affluent areas of the UK. Life expectancy for the ruling class has grown greatly while for the poorest in society it has hardly risen at all. Figures produced by the Office for National Statistics show how a boy born in Chelsea and Kensington can expect to live to the age of 82.2 years, compared with just 74.2 in Blaenau Gwent. And according to Wales’ chief medical officer the gap between those with the best health and those with the worst is widening.
The mortal health crisis in Wales makes an eloquent case for a fundamental socialist transformation of society, the only way to lift the poor out of poverty, but all the capitalist commentators instead look for partial solutions like dietary education. Even Professor Morgan, who specifically rejects Marxism, instead restricts his solution solely to investment in social housing, which on the basis of the policies of the four main bourgeois parties will not take place anyway.
THE HEALTH SERVICE
The NHS in Wales is poorly placed to deal with the effects of this ill health. As in the rest of Britain, the NHS has never recovered from the Tory cuts of the 80s and 90s. But Labour’s policies in the National Assembly have made matters worse. Waiting lists grew as cuts in hospital capacity begun by the Tories were continued by Labour. Between 1996 and 2006 the number of hospital beds fell by 12% from 16,000 to 14,000. This was partially offset by an increase in the number of operations per bed, but not enough to make up for the loss of capacity. At one point 10% of the population of Wales was on a hospital waiting list.
A short term increase in health spending has cleared the waiting lists somewhat but this was achieved with short term methods rather than an investment in the long term capacity in the Welsh NHS. The second offer scheme, by which Welsh patients were sent to private hospitals or to hospitals in England, has cleared some of the back log but has done nothing to address the lack of hospital capacity in Wales.
Even though health needs in Wales are the greatest, recent figures showed that health spending per head in Wales is the lowest in the UK. For the first time spending on health per head in Wales is below that of England: £1,420 per head in Wales compared with £1,540 in England.
Part of the reason for the higher spending in England will be accounted for by the more enormously wasteful privatisation of parts of the NHS which costs more without delivering greater healthcare. But the NHS in England also has greater flexibility to respond to health needs and move health funds from regions of lesser health needs to regions of higher social deprivation, which the NHS in Wales can do to a far lesser extent.
The Labour majority in the Assembly has therefore decided, with the assistance of the Derek Wanless, former Chief Executive of the Nat West bank, not to expand hospital provision in Wales. On the contrary, it has launched the Designed For Life initiative which specifically aims to close more hospitals and “downgrade” or cutback even more. The closure and merger of hospitals will inevitably provoke huge opposition and so most of the announcements have been delayed until after the Assembly elections in May.
Designed For Life claims that it wants to bring health treatment closer to patients by moving treatment out of district hospitals and into local primary care centres and major treatment to large specialist centres concentrated in a few super hospitals. But the real motivation behind this strategy, to provide healthcare on the cheap, can be seen in that while the Welsh Assembly Government and Local Health Boards have been preparing to announce hospital closures and cutbacks there have been no announcements of providing community services to replace them. There has not even been an announcement of how much money will be provided to fund them.
The organic crisis in the NHS in Wales is certain to continue. And there will inevitably be a reaction against the cutbacks by working class people in Wales as we have seen in the support for Socialist Party initiatives on the NHS and in the spontaneous movements in 2006 in the rural areas of Wales. The crisis strikes at the heart of devolution in Wales and the failure of the Labour-led Assembly.
There is also a rising tide of anger in workplaces in Wales against the intensification of work, the stress and low pay. Like the rest of Britain inevitably there will be increased militancy and strikes. Where Socialist Party members are able to intervene they have accelerated this process and overcome the obstacles to action placed by the trade union bureaucracy as has been shown in the civil service in Wales and in Visteon. This rising activity could fuse with a wider community militancy and take on a political expression in the support for a new workers party.
