Adam Price on possibility of a Lab, Plaid, Green progressive alliance.

The Wasting Mule Online has been contacting Welsh Politicians  on the future of Labour under Jermey Corbyn the favourite to win the Leadership next month

Most of them are Labour

 Neil now Lord  Kinnock, whose was once a Labour firebrand himself said

Kinnock whose battle with the hard left led to Bairism and the end of the soft left of  Labour. and its heart.

“I can see why people are angry and want to protest. But then they’ve got to make a decision on whether they want to be part of a labour movement which produced a political party to seriously contest for democratic power or they want to be in perpetual demonstration, which is fulfilling and noble, but ultimately rarely effective.”

So its interesting that the most effective   response came from Plaid's Adam  Price  who responded to Mr Kinnock’s description of the choice between protest and power, saying: 

“Principled opposition has its place and can often be a brake on the worst excesses of right-of-centre governments but ultimately the purpose of democratic politics for progressives is the prospect of change which can only be delivered ultimately through winning and holding power. The problem with modernisers within the Labour party is that they ultimately sacrificed so much of their principles in the pursuit of power, when victory finally arrived they had forgotten what the original purpose was.
“The fact that even the soft left within Labour trod this path, jettisoning idealism and essentially becoming a slightly more compassionate version of Thatcherism is why they are facing a Corbyn victory as the mother-of-all-pendulum swings. If Corbyn does win though he will be a leader of a parliamentary party that distrusts him and the members that elected him – a recipe for division and potential electoral disaster.”

 

He went on to say

“Corbyn’s best hope it seems to be would be to return to the pluralist roots that gave birth to the Labour Party, the kind of progressive alliance that first saw Keir Hardie, another unlikely and atypical leader, elected 100 years ago. It would not be easy for Labour, Plaid, the Greens and even a re-invented Liberal party to cooperate, but if the 2020 vision were compelling enough – a confederal Britain, abolition of the House of Lords, social ownership of public monopolies on the Glas Cymru model in each of the nations, a massive programme of public works, especially housing and real public transport (not national vanity projects like Heathrow and HS2) then I think a progressive alliance could not only repeat the achievement of a Tory-free Wales, we could see a reforming, revitalising Government on the significance scale of 1945, or 1906.”

Its certainly an intriguing prospect it would depend on whether a Corbyn led Labour party was not only a Left leaning party but progressive and decentralised.

Something tells me that the current crop of Labour MPs under Corbyn would rally behind his left agenda for now especially ambitious ones but be overwhelming  against the sort of Constitutional change needed to put forward such Progressive Alliance.

I wonder why Adam hasn't included the SNP in this he may well have come to the conclusion that Scotland time in the Union will be over sooner than later and    the Scottish members of the UK parliament will not be there for long  enough to join such a progressive alliance.

It may be dreaming on Adam's part but by God we need something to give us an alternative to the current Red Tory- Blue Tory  impasse that has left so many disillusioned with politics.