THEY will plunder will-nilly/Say the bells of Caerphilly

And indeed, will-nilly, the bells of the Welsh town have tolled for more than a century of Labour hegemony, with Plaid Cymru and Reform doing the plundering.

Despite being merely a by-election for a seat in the Welsh Senedd, and thus accompanied by all the usual qualifications, last week’s vote seems historically resonant.

The balance of commentary has turned on what the result — a Plaid win, with the hard-right Reform in a strong second place and Labour at a humiliating 11 per cent in a constituency it has held since soldiers returned from World War I — means for the governance of Wales after next year’s Senedd elections, and for British politics as the Starmer government limps from crisis to crisis, a study in self-evisceration.

But the vote is also replete with significance over a longer perspective, a shifting in the political geology in a region so shaped by the real one.

The valleys of south Wales have been described as “the last bricks in the red wall.”  

And they did indeed remain standing even in 2019 — the only former coalfield in Britain to return a full slate of Labour MPs in that calamitous election.

The harder they came, the harder the fall.

Who killed the miners/Say the grim bells of Blaina

Strong walls must rest on deep foundations, and those in the valleys have been eroding a long time. The connection of work, union, community and party rested on an industrial dynamic that has been declining for generations and evaporated altogether around 30 years ago.

Since then, traditions have been waiting for a bleak contemporary reality, of a world gone to be replaced by something much less, to engulf them.

Those traditions live on in both memories and memorials. It was just outside Caerphilly that the worst disaster in Britain’s much-scarred coalmining history occurred, the Senghenydd colliery catastrophe of October 1913.

Some 439 miners died in the explosion, eight of them just 14 years old. The mine manager, Edward Shaw, was fined £24 for negligence. He remained in post nevertheless until 1928.

The pit owner, Lord Merthyr, was docked a further tenner, thus valuing each dead miner’s life at one shilling and one-and-a-quarter pennies, or about seven pounds in contemporary currency. So, a tradition paid for in blood and grief.

And who made the mineowner/Say the black bells of Rhondda

The miners have long gone from Caerphilly. Yet their exploiters, curiously, are still among us. The big owner of pits in that part of the world was the Powell Duffryn company. Social democracy showed a touching concern for its owners, paying £16 million for coal assets valued at just £12.6m at nationalisation in 1947.

Most of this sum, worth more than half a billion of today’s pounds, was passed straight on to Powell Duffryn’s shareholders. Today the company, reincarnated as PD Ports, owns Teesport and is invested in other east coast docks, down as far as the Thames.

So the surplus value squeezed so violently out of the miners of Caerphilly, chiselled underground for generations and then laundered through the bourgeois state as “compensation,” now reproduces itself in the spiral of accumulation along the river Tees.

Little good that has done the people of Caerphilly or the valleys at large. Still their wealth goes elsewhere.

They have fangs, they have teeth/Shout the loud bells of Neath

The fangs too are an enduring bourgeois inheritance. Once bared in the valleys by Churchill and his troops, later by Thatcher and her cops, today they hide behind the faux bonhomie of Nigel Farage, neoliberal authoritarian nationalist.

He stands to profit from the collapse of the betrayed proletarian tradition in communities where the folk hatred of Toryism — who, incidentally, polled a majestic 1.5 per cent of the by-election vote — still brands anyone wearing the Conservative rosette.

Caerphilly heard the loud bells of Neath at the by-election, but proportional representation in the Senedd poll will likely muffle them to Reform’s advantage.

Farage, Tice and their gang are the class power of the undead mine owners made manifest, waving one magician’s hand to direct rage at the migrant while the other picks the pockets of the poor. The Shaws and Lord Merthyrs of our time, predatory Thatcherites feasting on a generation of social despair. A labour movement that fails to articulate this truth is sleep-walking to perdition.

Is there hope for the future/Cry the brown bells of Merthyr

Caerphilly rallied in sufficient numbers behind the alternative most likely to defeat the Farageists, in this case Plaid’s well-entrenched and popular candidate. Doubtless that tactical nous accounts for some of the collapse in the Labour vote. One cheer for hope then.

If Reform remains in pole position by the time the next general election rolls around, such tactics may prove widespread. That seems to be the expectation of Labour strategists, imagining that they will be the main beneficiary of anti-Farage sentiment, in England at least.

That seems like overoptimism on their part. There is no shortage of viable alternatives — Greens here, Your Party there, even the Liberal Democrats in many parts. There are also seats where Reform will not present a realistic threat, and in those Polanski, Sultana and Corbyn should be well placed to secure the progressive vote.

But it is very hard to see Labour as the most potent alternative to Farage in any case. Starmer’s record in addressing the besetting social ills of a country full of Caerphillys is woeful; workers will not vote for a government that attacks them fairly regularly; and Starmer is not the man for a moral crusade by any stretch.

His new-found anti-racism, test-driven in his party conference speech last month, is unconvincing. If he was sincere, he would have been challenging Reform’s increasingly brazen racism from the get-go, instead of waiting for someone with a flipchart to persuade him that there were more votes to be lost by failing doing so than there were by continuing with the previous plan to appease the prejudiced.

So the hope for those brown bells must lie in the emerging voter coalition to reject the hard right, bypassing the pusillanimous Labour leadership in doing do.

What will you give me/Say the sad bells of Rhymney

Larger issues than electoral prognostications loom. How can the labour movement be reconstituted as a hegemonic force in the communities which gave it birth? Places like Caerphilly. Starmer richly merits last week’s humiliations, but the sword of history which lays the party of trade unionism that low in one of its strongholds is certainly double-edged.

The ghosts of Senghenydd are still abroad. They move through Rana Plaza, and Bhopal, and in the mines of Kamituga in the Congo and Listvyazhnaya in Russia, sites of recent catastrophe — wherever the ruthless extraction of value is pursued to its limits.  

The capitalism which has ravaged and discarded Caerphilly is with us today but with a still wider sphere of operation.

All this demands more than simply opposition to the resurgent, dictatorial and racist right. It must generate a renewed class project, forward-looking, hopeful, global and co-operative. Not a task Labour appears remotely equal to today, but Marx’s old mole must carry on burrowing.

All be well if, if, if, if/Cry the green bells of Cardiff.

This column acknowledges its debt to Idris Davies, the great Welsh socialist poet who wrote Bells of Rhymney as part of his Gwalia Deserta (Wasteland of Wales) in the 1930s.

To spare knowledgeable purists writing a letter of remonstrance, it is true that Davies had Blaina’s bells asking who robbed, rather than killed, the miners.

The lyrical “improvement” was apparently made by pioneering folk-rock group the Byrds in their 1965 recording of the song – set to music originally by Pete Seeger – which drew Davies’s words to a considerably wider audience. Their revision, doubtless driven by a desire for drama, has been followed here.