Adam Price's Kind Offer

I'm sure it is just a slip of the finger that led to Adam Price mis-spelling "comrade" at the end of his latest polemic. However, the slip is rather indicative and neatly sums up his clumsy courtship of doubters inside Welsh Labour in his guise of friendly counsel.

In this latest piece, Adam offers "advice" to Welsh Labour as to the way forward in difficult times. This amounts to suggesting we declare UDI from the rest of the Labour movement and fall into the embrace of alliance with Plaid Cymru "for a generation", this should - he says - save Labour from it's otherwise inescapable decline.

In case any of my Labour Party comrades should begin to ponder this proposal as a realistic way forward, let me remind them of the bleeding obvious – Adam Price has the same degree of concern for Labour’s wellbeing that a dog has for a lamp post.

Perhaps it is because his frequent pronouncements to the media - which are seldom run past his Plaid colleagues, including his leader Elfyn Llwyd - have become a source of such increasing annoyance inside his own party, that he has decided to spend some time and thought on Welsh Labour.

If you can be bothered to scratch the surface of his blog you uncover quite quickly some political assumptions that are - at best - an attempt at smoke and mirrors.

Let's look at this insistence that Welsh labour members can be divided into ‘National wing’ sheep and ‘Unionist wing’ goats.

He must think we were born yesterday.

As an attempt to shift the minds of Welsh Labour members away from what constitutes progressive politics in a devolved Wales – which is our core mission, after all - and onto the shifting sands of his identity politics, it’s a crude enough effort, but it must be answered. If guff like this goes unchallenged, then it can - surprisingly quickly - become malignant.

Price can only say this stuff by ignoring reality. That reality consisting of the central political stance of Welsh Labour – we are a progressive pro-devolution Party. We see the future of Wales as being a devolved partner within Britain, in common with the vast majority of Welsh people.

The circle he’s trying to square, you see, is that his party is not (pro-devolution, I mean). The central political aim of his party is to see devolution, and Britain, wound up as soon as possible.

The trouble is – he can’t sell it, despite this frankly risibile "party-within-a-party" idea floated this week. Hence the smoke and mirrors, and the attempted mind games with Welsh Labour members.

Argument and debate about the future shape of devolution, and how Welsh Labour works within it, are vital and must be worked through. But "advice" from malicious bystanders like Adam Price is not relevant to that debate. He encourages us to split ourselves into warring families, as if we were the Sharks and the Jets and we were all in a production of ‘West Side Story’!

Thanks for the offer Adam, but no thanks.