ONE of the more terrifying trends associated with the rise in support for Reform in Wales and throughout Britain — and indeed in the far right more generally throughout the world — is the idea that they have captured the anti-Establishment ground. The idea that the liberal left is the Establishment and that as a consequence a challenge to the status quo must come from the right. 

Let’s be honest, in many areas of life the Establishment is far from helping ordinary working people and their families. On the left, however, we realise that this is precisely because the Establishment is in the hands of big business. The dominant ideology is the ideology of capitalism, the servant of the wealthy. 

Elsewhere in the Morning Star and Communist Party campaigns much good work has been done to point out the link between big business and the agenda being peddled by Reform and others on the right. If we hope to inspire working-class voters in a turn to the left we must also promote the positive alternative. The Morning Star trade union conference in Cardiff this weekend hopes to build that alternative and as part of that the Communist Party is launching a pamphlet on its economic plan for Wales.  

Decisions about the Welsh economy are currently in the hands of the wealthy few. Decisions such as where to invest, where to cut back, what to research, what to produce and what wages to pay, sit with those who own or control the means of production, ie those who own or control the financial and physical assets of the companies and organisations that operate in Cymru. 

The fundamental transformation that we need is to democratise ownership of wealth and put decision-making in the hands of workers and communities. Publicly owned enterprises are a common feature of many economies throughout the world, but Britain is stuck in its post-Thatcher blind spot that fails to recognise this.  

We need to ensure we expand the public sector while ensuring that it is responsive to the needs of ordinary people, though their local authorities and national governments and their trade unions. To move from an economy determined by the super-wealthy few to one determined democratically by the many. We set out new mechanisms for public ownership and for measures to ensure that no business receives public support without a return for the public. 

Spending is a key form of decision-making in a market or mixed economy. There are many advantages in moving these decisions into the hands of the many rather than the few. Ensuring that more of our nation’s wealth exists in the form of wages helps workers and their families directly by boosting their purchasing power and increasing their access to the goods and services they need. Wealth spent this way is much more likely to be spent locally and to be reinvested within our communities through our local shops and supply chain. 

A further way in which we can ensure workers and their families receive a fairer share is by ensuring they are not being ripped off in the first place. The recent cost-of-living crisis, felt across the world, has thrust this question under the spotlight. Even in Britain a price cap has been implemented (albeit poorly and at the wrong level) on energy bills.  

In France the new popular front has proposed price caps on a wider range of essentials including food and fuel. Measures of this kind were a common feature of the mixed economies of the post-war period up to 1980 (including in Britain). This was the period where inequality was actually reducing. In today’s climate of increasing inequalities and cost-of-living crisis, the debate on price controls needs to be revived. 

The most important way in which we can increase ordinary people’s control over spending of the wealth in our country is by equipping them with the structures they need to bargain for higher wages for the work that they do. We need strong workplace organising and militancy combined with a system of sectoral collective bargaining. Already, in Cymru we not only accept the importance of collective bargaining in the public sector but have made the extension of the proportion of the workforce covered by collective bargaining an objective of the fair work agenda in both the the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and Social Partnership and Public Procurement Act. This needs to be extended to cover workers in private enterprises not engaged with the public sector through an extension in trade union rights. 

We need a bold plan that demands the powers to legislate for workplace democracy in Cymru and at the same time unites with the struggle against the anti-trade union laws taking place across Britain. In the context of the UK government’s attempts to water down its own once-radical Bill for workers’ rights we continue to call for the implementation of the Charter of Workers’ Rights (produced by the Institute of Employment Rights) along with militant trade union campaigns to restore the value of wages and pensions. 

By developing these proposals we hope to recognise people’s concerns that the status quo does not work for them but also to outline a genuine alternative that sees them participate in and benefit from a new transformed economy. 

David Morgan is the policy officer on the Welsh communist executive.