A society that was built by ‘radical pragmatism’ In his latest Martin Shipton Meets podcast, our chief reporter talks to historian Dr Daryl Leeworthy about his book Labour Country: Political Radicalism and Social Democracy in South Wales 1831-1985
FOR Daryl Leeworthy, Wales is a far less potent political entity than “South Wales” – always to be written with a capital S in South.
His new book looks at the growth of radicalism as a counter to the oppressive employment practices of ironmasters and mine owners.
He also writes of what he depicts as a golden age where municipal socialists in the Valleys created an alternative kind of society based on co-operation and community-centred institutions like leisure centres.
In the podcast he speaks about the “radical pragmatists” who in the early part of the 20th century won out against the idealists for control of the Labour movement.
He says: “In Russia, where some of this debate [between the two factions] takes its inspiration from, they were able to overthrow the old state, but then had to build a new one, which wasn’t necessarily of the character that idealists had in mind when they started off.
“The radical pragmatists, who gained power in the early 1920s – some councils turned Labour as early as about 1912 – have a choice to make. We have to look out for the people who put us in power, but we also have to deal with the consequences of economic decline, and quite stark economic decline, in a way that we have some familiarity with in recent times.
“We have to make choices about what we cut. There’s a huge austerity programme implemented from central government in the mid-1920s.
“We have to deal with unemployment that is in some places upwards of 80% or 90%. We have to do with emigration.
“We have to deal with poor housing. And housing is a really major issue because the private sector is non-existent.
“There is no private sector housing at all in Wales, particularly South Wales, in the 1920s and 1930s, except in the leafier bits of Cardiff and to a lesser extent Swansea.
“How do you deal with that? You can reject central government completely, and you do find some legacies within the records, where Labour councils are writing quite honestly saying: ‘Whitehall has no love for us, we understand this, but we still have to deal with them’.
“The impossibilists on the other side are going: ‘well of course they hate you, but you should hate them too and try to overthrow them’.”
The situation came to a head in Merthyr Tydfil, where the council decided it was going to be the first authority in the country to provide secondary education for free. The councillors were told by Westminster that if they didn’t charge fees for secondary education, they would be got rid of, with commissioners sent in to run the council.
Merthyr came up with a radically pragmatic solution: they would charge fees, but only to those who could afford it. With unemployment at between 70% and 80%, not many had to pay.
Dr Leeworthy said: “They’d won the point, which is that we can be pragmatic, but we can also be radical at the same time.
“The impossibilists would have stuck to their guns and rejected the idea of charging a fee, which would have caused all sorts of problems, and potentially opened up local government in Merthyr to worse conditions.
“We may think of it today as a fudge – but it worked.”
When it was put to him that while there was a great sense of the Valleys and more broadly South Wales as a distinct region, there wasn’t much sense of Wales as a nation in the book, Dr Leeworthy said: “For me Wales is an idea that people can subscribe to, but I don’t think it’s necessarily an inherently essential part of us.
“There are things that mark us as distinctive from other parts of Britain, parts of the UK, parts of Europe and the world, but we have an awful lot in common with those other parts as well.
“And those commonalities are more significant, I think, than the things that we hold to be distinctive in the national character.
“I did my master’s research in Nova Scotia, in the former Cape Breton coalfield. I was wandering around with fellow researchers, looking at what was going on – all of the same problems of deindustrialisation in mining communities, very many of the same problems in terms of isolation and peripheral positioning, in the sense that Cape Breton is right on the edge of the Canadian land mass.
“I did not feel out of place there. You could have lifted up Sydney [an urban community in the region founded by the British in 1785] and dropped it on where Pontypridd is and have had the same features and effects, minus a couple of tweaks because Sydney is a port city rather than a central Valleys town.
“That diminishes national identity for me. Those commonalities are more important and we have to come up with common solutions for both of them, which are lost if we stress consistently this idea that there is this nation which is distinct and we must cultivate those distinctive characteristics.
“We’re past that, I think – we can move on from that, move on from those senses of division.
“We mustn’t lose sight of our distinctiveness – but we mustn’t lose sight of that division, that artificial border between places. That’s my radically pragmatic response!”
■ Labour Country: Political Radicalism and Social Democracy in South Wales 1831-1985 is published by Parthian at £20.