It’s been a good spring for Labour in Wales. While socialist breakthroughs in England are painfully rare these days, Welsh Labour utterly dominated in the local elections earlier this month. From an already strong base, Labour managed to pick up an astonishing 66 more seats in the country, putting the party’s meagre gains in England (just 22 seats, to the Lib Dems’ 192 and the Greens’ 63) into stark relief.

What is the secret to the growing British anomaly that is Red Wales? At least a part of it is that Welsh Labour has in recent years combined canny awareness of local identity with broadly Corbynite social policies, a formula that is—to the dismay of both the Tory establishment and the Labour right—actually rather popular with ordinary voters.

A new policy announcement this week showed why Mark Drakeford’s party is leading the way when it comes to outlining a socialist future for these islands. Under the new National Plan for Music Education unveiled by Drakeford and his Senedd colleague Jeremy Miles on Tuesday, £13.5 million will be invested in state provision for music education in Wales over the next three years. Every Welsh primary school pupil will get a minimum of half a term of ‘taster’ music lessons. The creation of a new national instrument and music equipment library, and the foundation of a ‘National Music Service’, will provide an organisational hub for this and other initiatives.

Away from demoralising ongoing debates about left strategy and leadership, these proposals are a timely reminder of what socialism is for. Far from being a distraction from supposedly more weighty concerns like organising and the class struggle, providing a nurturing environment for cultural expression and experimentation is—or should be—one of the ultimate goals of the whole socialist project. Rather than a more narrow definition based on a handful of clumsy protest songs and endless discussion of ideological nuances, this is what a truly political approach to art should entail.

Perhaps mindful of the inherent radicalism of simply giving young people the space, time, and resources for cultural free-play, neoliberal governments in Britain as a whole have increasingly tried to stymy state provision for the arts over the last few decades. Often, of course, late capitalism’s war against the cultural public sector has been fought on the ground of economics. From the first onslaught of monetarist policy in the Thatcherite Eighties, to the near-total elimination of local-authority arts budgets under 2010s austerity, funding for activities like music is usually the first thing to suffer when spending cuts start to bite. More generally, the chronic underfunding of the education system—always most acute under Tory rule—has further eroded the provision for performing arts in British state schools.

But the marginalisation of culture in the state sector has also been achieved by more indirect means. While consumerism has thrown up an ever wider variety of private kids clubs and leisure activities in recent years, this is largely a market that caters to middle-class families. Meanwhile, working-class parents and their children are often unable to access or afford such extra-curricular extravagances. What has been jettisoned along the way is the extra-curricular culture of the late-twentieth-century comprehensive school, which, at its best, provided time and resources in the state system for children of all classes (or at least, despite its frequent failings, always aspired to do so).

As the public sector has increasingly succumbed to processes of marketisation, embodied by the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s notion of ‘market Stalinism’ (whereby targets, exam results, and league tables become an obsessive focus for teachers and educational managers), the idea that education should be a holistic process based partly on goalless extra-curricular experimentation has largely fallen by the wayside.

This is why the revival of public-sector arts provision under a left-leaning Welsh government has the potential to be such a radical development. Of course, any movement towards empowerment of the public sector is encouraging in itself (the Drakefordite National Music Service seems like a pretty obvious 2020s successor to the ‘National Education Service’ floated in the 2017 Labour manifesto—and therefore a promising example of how Corbynism-beyond-Corbyn might actually be put into practice).

But it is also a symbolic event which carries a lesson about what Oscar Wilde might have called the Soul of Socialism. No dour economic theory, socialism is at its best when it becomes an expression of the basic human need to build a society comprised of spaces of joy and unfettered self-fulfilment.

At the end of his 1888 story ‘The Selfish Giant’, Wilde found an image of this miraculous political philosophy in the image of children playing merely for the sake of playing in a beautiful garden:

And the other children, when they saw that the Giant was not wicked any longer, came running back, and with them came the Spring. ‘It is your garden now, little children,’ said the Giant, and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall. And when the people were going to market at twelve o’clock they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.

Today, we might think of the real-world vision of Welsh schoolchildren of all classes being given the time and space to sing and to play music, and use it as the basis for a 2020s socialist project intent on smashing the walls of our own, dehumanising, and selfish society.