After less than three months in office, Welsh First Minister Vaughan Gething faces a no confidence vote in the Senedd, the devolved Welsh Parliament, this Wednesday.
This follows a string of damaging revelations and developments for Gething – including dodgy donations from waste-dumping bosses, deleted texts, and disintegrating cross-party agreements.
This whole farce demonstrates the rank self-interest of the capitalists and their representatives.
Scandal
For the last few weeks, Gething has been under pressure to hand back a £200k donation to his Welsh Labour leadership campaign from David Neal – a waste recycling boss, twice convicted of environmental offences.
Though not uncommon, such blatant and sordid links between the capitalists and their lackeys is an embarrassment for the political establishment.
Notably, these financial connections shed light on Gething’s push for Natural Resources Wales to ease restrictions on Atlantic Recycling, a firm run by Neal, back in 2016.
While still dealing with this scandal, another soon bloomed after it was leaked that, back in August 2020, Gething had told ministers in a group chat that he was deleting the chat’s messages, fearing that these could be revealed under a Freedom of Information request.
Gething maintains that the messages were related to internal party discussions, and were not covid-related. Regardless, this episode begs the question: what do these politicians have to hide?
In response to this exposé, Gething sacked Hannah Blythyn, the minister he believed responsible for the leak.
Following this, Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru announced its intention to break with the ‘cooperation agreement’ it had with Welsh Labour.
Hypocrisy
The Welsh Conservatives have also tabled a motion in the Senedd to force a vote of no confidence in the First Minister. But the Tories are not in a position to lecture anyone when it comes to dubious donations, cronyism, and other such political stink.
In reality, every capitalist party is riddled with this same sleaze and corruption; guilty of similar shadowy backroom deals.
Coming from these establishment parties, a motion of no confidence amounts to little more than political point-scoring – a cynical attempt, with a general election imminent, to benefit from the genuine mood of disgust amongst working-class voters.
Ultimately, all these parties are manoeuvring to suit their own narrow interests; jostling into positions that they believe will best serve their electoral prospects. There is no fundamental difference between any of them. All will implement the same attacks on workers.
Crisis
Whoever is in power, regardless of their intentions and promises, they will seek to manage the same crisis-ridden capitalist system that Welsh Labour are currently overseeing.
Prior to the Welsh Labour leadership election, for example, Gething dashed from town to town, from city to city, decrying the Tories for allowing the jobs massacre in Port Talbot to take place.
Yet mere weeks later, after he had won this contest, Gething defended cuts to museums in Wales that would see the loss of 90 jobs.
If Labour can’t save dozens of jobs, why should we believe that they could save several thousand?
Every party and politician that does not break with capitalism will be forced to make the same ‘tough decisions’ in this epoch of crisis.
That’s why the RCP is organising across Wales: to offer workers and young people a party of a new type – one that would clear out all these gangsters and their system!
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