Last week in the House of Commons we voted on the government’s austerity charter. And a line was drawn.

On one side, the Establishment parties — the Tories, Liberal Democrats, Labour and Ukip — voting together to lock in public-service spending cuts for the next five years. 

On the other side, a few principled Labour MPs, and the new parliamentary grouping — the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru — determined to expose the deceptive assertion that the economy is an upscaled household budget and end the cruel absurdity of austerity. 

I was a teller at the No lobby door, counting 18 through. Counting the few, but still hoping that more progressive Labour colleagues would join us, or even some odd Liberal Democrats, eyeing their majorities.

Behind the Speaker’s chair, through the glass in the doors of the other voting lobby, I could see the faces of assorted whips, pressed against the glass, as ever keeping tabs.

I hoped and I waited, but in vain as Labour MPs trooped through, shoulder to shoulder with the Tories, including 25 of the 28 Labour MPs from Wales. The other three didn’t put in an appearance, for reasons as yet unexplained. 

So, in all, there were 500 on the other side. We lost. By a landslide. Nothing new in that. Nothing particularly heroic either. We would rather have won, of course we would. But I well remember the successive votes on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We lost those as well. By landslides. It was Labour and the Tories together who beat us back then as well — “knowing better” or closing their minds and just doing as they were told.

It didn’t mean we were wrong. It didn’t mean that the millions who marched against war were wrong either. Quite the reverse, as the further exposure of official half-lies and knowing omissions, our own harrowing casualty lists, the continuing brutal conflicts and the uncounted dead and maimed people of those countries prove.

Plaid Cymru MPs have a history on questions like this. From our first-ever member of Parliament Gwynfor Evans staging a one-person peace mission to Vietnam in the 1960s to our attempts in the last decade to impeach Tony Blair.

From our support for the miners and quarry workers to the long unfinished business of the Friction Dynamex lockout at Caernarfon,

where the workers won their tribunal case but still have had not a penny piece of compensation for their unfair dismissal.

And we promise to have form in the future too. That is an election pledge we will relish keeping.

As a decentralist socialist party, shifting power and wealth and tackling inequality are core Plaid Cymru aims.

We reject the rationale of austerity and oppose cuts that balance the books at the cost of poor and sick, older, disabled and working people. Now that’s a fair bit to get on with for a party that at present has three MPs.

However, we’re told over and over again that this will be an election like no other, or at least the result may be such. So we’ll work with our progressive colleagues to get the job done. And if we have the decisive power on any issue we will do deals.

But there will be no coalition with the Tories. It’s sad that I even have to say that. But already our opponents, to their disgrace, are peddling that lie. 

So what is Plaid Cymru’s programme? Here are some highlights.

We’ll fight to bring the statutory minimum wage up to the level of the living wage.

Labour offers a minimum wage of £8 an hour by 2020. That’s a lower rate of pay increase between now and 2020 than between 1999 and 2014.

In fact, following Tory policy would lift the minimum wage to £8.23 an hour in 2020. Either you are for the living wage or you’re against. We are for it. 

We’d press to outlaw zero-hours contracts, without the Labour and Tory exceptions where they allegedly “work for some people.”

We want a high pay commission, working on the same lines as the Low Pay Commission, and a cap on fat cat pay. Ending the scandal of this month’s “Fat Cat Tuesday,” when after only the three working days this year, City bosses had already earned more than their average company workers.

Today we are calling for a royal commission on industrial relations. This would examine government legislation and policy from the Thatcher years onwards and outline a plan for the restoration of proper workers’ rights. 

Plaid Cymru has also put forward plans for including trade unions and workers’ representatives in forming industrial strategy.

For too long the government’s door has been shut in the faces of those who stand for working people.

And even the IMF now says that collective bargaining should be extended in the developed world to tackle inequality and solve the low pay and low productivity crisis that afflicts Western economies. But this seems to have passed the Westminster Establishment parties by. 

Communities in Wales and beyond still bear the scars of the miners’ strike and are still ravaged by the deindustrialisation forced upon them.

We have called for an official inquiry into the use of state forces against the mining unions during 1984-5. The recent and successful Hillsborough inquiry proves that it can be done. 

This is an ambitious list, and there is more which I have not the space to include.

But Plaid Cymru MPs are in London politics for a purpose. And it is not to secure a coveted job as a junior whip or a fancy handle to our names. We are now three. But we are working hard to be many more and a fearsome force for progressive change.

Hywel Williams is Plaid Cymru MP for Arfon.