Bring in the thinkers

Ben Wildsmith

Years ago, whist studying in Arizona, I attended a lecture on the role of literature in Latin American societies. I was astonished to discover that poets were an integral part of political decision making in many countries, and that contributing to the national conversation was considered to be part of their role as artists.

This process differed from the celebrity-activist role that we are familiar with here, in which known figures from the arts or sport lobby government on specific issues.

In these societies poets were embedded in the decision-making process along with figures from business, trade unions, and the Church. Nothing of consequence changed without their input being considered.

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Naïve

Here in the UK, the artistic viewpoint is routinely derided as inauthentic or naïve. It is assumed that figures with an artistic background lack the seriousness to participate in national decision-making. As a broadly secular society, we have already effectively excluded religious input into the political process, save for occasional murmurings from the House of Lords.

Executive politics is done by professional politicians who are steered by business, academia, and the media. Trades union influence ebbs and flows but remains at a remove from the executive.

This narrowness of perspectives feeding into our national conversation has created a mode of governance that is unmoored from guiding ideology. Decisions like restricting winter fuel payments are made under advice from economists whose remit is purely technical. Such policies fall apart on contact with the real world, not only because real people are disadvantaged, but because they offend our collective idea of the national ethos.

Our imagination of ourselves as a society is a two-way street that runs between government and the governed. Just as royal propaganda, military jingoism, and demands for sacrifice come hurtling down it to us; we send our sense of community, fair play, and dissatisfaction back to them. The compromise that we arrive at determines the state of the nation.

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Despairing

The UK’s current self-image is despairing. Can you find a single person who thinks that we are doing well as a nation? A nation is something imagined out of land and people. It is conjured from emotion as surely as a symphony or novel and the quality of its imagining determines its fortunes.

The unholy alliance of career politicians with business interests that are transnational and precluded by fiduciary responsibility from acting for the wider good, has reduced the UK’s national dream to a banal nightmare.

When matters of morality are presented to government it is incapable of conceiving them because the people involved have never mastered anything beyond a soundbite or a balance sheet. There is nobody at hand to express the howling revulsion of ordinary people to our continual impoverishment, or our complicity in war crimes, or the surrender of our liberty to the owners of new technology.

The job of statesmen is to shape the big picture out of people’s values; to write it into legislation that enshrines an encompassing ethos. The absence of politicians who are capable of that has opened the door to the cheap, knock-off imitation of national values offered by Farage & Co.

In the absence of any vision for the UK at all from either government or the opposition, people can’t be blamed for being duped by something that at least pretends to be one.

Radicalism

Here in Wales, though, we have an opportunity to reject this. It seems likely that a Plaid Cymru led government will be installed next year and its radicalism needs to extend beyond social justice and the advancement of independence as the cure to all ills.

The governance of Wales needs to be ripped from mediocre placeholders in the Senedd and the parasitical lobbyists that buzz around it. Politicians should be the conduit for our national genius, not the permanently stifling enemies of it.

In the arts, business, and community activism, Wales is blessed with visionary figures who have proven they can create value from thin air. If Wales is truly to be governed as a distinct nation, then the input of our creative community should be platformed at government level and actively solicited in all tiers of civic decision making.

If Plaid Cymru do manage to beat back the encroaching tide of British nationalism, then their governance must be rapidly transformational if it is not to lose goodwill amongst an electorate whose patience is as thin as its savings. It will need ideas, and big ones.

Lose the lobbyists and bring in the thinkers.