ON A WALL by a road running south from Aberystwyth, arguably the best known Welsh nationalist landmark can be found. In white on vivid red, the words ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ have remained on the side of an abandoned building for several decades.
Usually translated as ‘Remember Tryweryn’ (the ‘D’ is down to a mutation), but more accurately ‘You remember Tryweryn’, the graffiti– whose author remained a mystery until well-known Welsh writer Meic Stephens confessed his part in it a few years back – has been faithfully restored on a number of occasions. There is a current campaign to buy the land it is on, and there was outrage earlier this year when it was daubed over. A number of Plaid Cymru members who travelled to the party’s annual conference in Aberystwyth recently also made the pilgrimage to this spot, and proud pictures subsequently appeared on Facebook.
Tryweryn is the name of the valley near Bala flooded in the early 1960s to provide water for Liverpool. In the face of almost total opposition from Wales and its MPs, the Welsh-only-speaking community of Capel Celyn was nevertheless lost under the waves, its inhabitants – some of whom had never left the village – scattered by Compulsory Purchase Orders.
The Welsh have a special word for what happens to such people. Hiraeth doesn’t translate directly, but it is generally taken to mean an aching longing for the land. However, away from such personal heartbreak, the creation of Llyn Celyn reservoir – which led to an apology from Liverpool City Council in 2005 – provided a lightning rod for Plaid Cymru, a big surge in popularity as people left powerless by what was ultimately a senseless act of unhearing English authoritarianism flocked to its ranks. It led ultimately to the return to Parliament of the party’s first MP, Gwynfor Evans, in 1966 in Carmarthen – like Capel Celyn a part of the Bro, the Welsh-speaking heartland that stretches from Gwynedd in the north to Llanelli on the south coast.
The language, and the ongoing struggle to retain and propagate its use, remains central to Welsh nationalism. This became much more obvious even to this English born-and-raised Plaid member a couple of months ago when, as with the administrator of this site, my own found itself at daggers drawn with the English Democrats.
Believing it to be a nationalist movement with an approach similar to those found in Scotland, or perhaps Cornwall, myself and the other editors invited its leader, Robin Tilbrook, to contribute a piece. What followed was a poorly constructed rant against Plaid Cymru that tried and failed to call the party’s nationalist credentials into question. I kicked off what would be our most commented-upon piece by taking Tilbrook’s argument to task. I immediately found myself under attack by ED trolls. Much of it was personal, but some of it was quite funny, like the clown who argued that Wales was supported by England and paid not a single penny to the Exchequer, not in income tax, VAT or petrol duty.
But one of those funny comments, from Alan England, along with Tilbrook’s argument, also cut to the heart of what truly incensed me about the EDs. England pompously tried to lecture our readers, many of whom spoke their first words in Welsh, that Abergavenny meant “gateway to Wales” in Cymraeg. In fact, it actually means ‘mouth of the Fenni river’, and the gateway slogan found on signs entering that part of Wales, Monmouthshire, is just that – a marketing slogan.
It wasn’t even that the EDs are only a decade or so old while Plaid was formed in 1925 (and organised Welsh nationalism goes back to the 19th Century) that irked. Rather, it was the assumption that the English Democrats have developed a model of nationalism which it now expects all other self-determination movements across the British Isles to fall in step with.
It certainly took no account of the moments that have shaped Plaid. Since completing my journey to Plaid, coming initially as an economic nationalist, I have really begun to cherish the party’s rich history. The EDs, conversely, took no time to read up on Plaid, to discern what makes it tick, what it is looking for, what it believes is important to achieve, or preserve. Instead, it clicked its fingers and then accused Plaid Cymru of fighting shy of nationalism.
This isn’t the case. We just don’t want their nationalism. And, in failing to realise that we might have different ambitions - that Wales is a different country that has managed to maintain its language and culture while leaving cheek-by-jowl with a nation that has been one of the most powerful on earth for the best part of past 300 years – and that we should unquestioningly follow, the English Democrats demonstrate that theirs is not a nationalist movement. It is imperialist.
If Tryweryn is Welsh nationalism’s lament, there is the romance of Gwynfor’s hunger strike in 1980 (he is always Gwynfor, never Gwynfor Evans), after the Thatcher government attempted to renege on its electoral promise of a Welsh language television station. He won, and Wales got S4C. There are the high intellectual arguments of Saunders Lewis, whose Tynged yr Iaith (fate of the language) radio speech of 1962 led to the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh language society which, with its Greenpeace-like use of non-violent direct action, has helped to slow the language’s decline. There is also the economist DJ Davies – my personal political hero – and, in recent times, Adam Price, the former Carmarthen East and Dinefwr MP.
But even if these events are the moments we remember, that form the basis of the songs of Dafydd Iwan, Plaid’s immediate past president, I believe that the events of the past four years, of Plaid participating in Welsh government, as the executive arm of the National Assembly, that will provide perhaps its greatest achievement – and I hope it will allow the party to ultimately become one of sole power here in Wales.
That so much has changed in that time was brought home to me recently when I was asked to provide my views on the coming political year to an audience of public affairs consultants. I found myself between two heavyweights – one of our foremost political academics and greatest authorities on Welsh nationalism, and one of Wales’ best-known journalists. Both of them confidently predicted that the Labour-Plaid coalition government in Cardiff Bay was about to fall because Labour was unable to deliver on a key promise of One Wales (the document that enables them to govern together) and deliver a referendum on further powers.
Chancing my arm, and hedging my bets by insisting I had never got a political prediction right, I argued against. Later that evening, I joined a group of Pleidwyr (party faithful) for dinner, including a couple of Welsh Assembly Government ministers. I related the event, and they promptly pooh-poohed it. We were right.
There was a simple reason for this. Plaid had grown up while in government. It knew how much it had to lose by walking out and slamming the door, and how it well might be able to persuade if it stayed. It understands power by increment.
Similarly, in the time that the party has sat in government, we have witnessed the ‘Plaidification’ of the other three main parties – and particularly in Labour since it lost power in Westminster in May, and rushes to recast itself as a bulwark against ConDem hegemony, taking on board policies which months ago its ministers, both in London and in the Bay had refused to countenance. Now those same ex-ministers have gone to fetch them from the long grass into which they themselves kicked them.
This was perceived as presenting a problem for Plaid, because, while it and Labour are the two biggest parties in Wales (Labour by some way, admittedly), they also fish in similar leftist policy waters and Plaid has demonstrated an abiding preponderance towards left wing politics in recent times – indeed, its model of governance is based upon ‘decentralised socialism’. The worry, said pundits, was that Plaid could be obscured by Labour. It didn’t help that Labour had taken to George Bush-like tactics, arguing that if Plaid wasn’t with it, it was with the Tories.
However, come this weekend – conference weekend – and John Dixon, the outgoing party chairman, had put a different view forward, arguing that Plaid was more than a party of only North Walian language supremacists and disillusioned former Labour-supporting, English monoglot speakers from what was once the great industrial Valleys of the south. He outlined three main strands of thought and, rather than an internal and impending dogfight to establish which school of thought came out on top, he could foresee an immediate future where these different approaches lived happily side-by-side and informed one another.
It set the tone for an incredibly upbeat weekend. There was some grumbling (predominantly from the media) that much of what was coming through was broad brushstrokes, approaches rather than policy. But, given the impending Comprehensive Spending Review and oft-stated budget intents of the Chancellor, it would be a brave fool indeed to announce anything costed at this stage. However, much of it served to confirm that, in the words of one of our newest members, former Labour Welsh Secretary Ron Davies, “devolution is a process, not an event”, while many of the private, off-camera discussions between members, many of them rank-and-filers like myself, were shot through with a more evidence-based rather than emotive approach to achieving independence.
And that is where Plaid finds itself today. In government, at perhaps the worst time possible since the Second World War, with an economy that is doing nothing at present other than going backwards, its lowest paid at the mercy of public sector cuts forced upon the country by the folly of a financial industry it hardly benefits from, its GVA and GDP below the UK average, its education standards slipping slightly, and its health service creaking more than its English counterpart.
Yet, in a strange way, this is a good time to be in politics, because there really are lots of good ideas in the air – not least the Holtham Commission’s report on reforming the Barnett formula and proposals for tax variation, and consequently grater fiscal responsibility. I think four years of government brings a different approach, something rarely appreciated by those in permanent opposition. It appears to have done Welsh nationalism a power of good.
So that’s Plaid today, perhaps 40 years ahead of English nationalism which, like those days of the Prince of Wales’ investiture in 1969, tends to focus on the affront caused by a cherished culture ignored, with campaigns for St George’s Day and so on. But it is important to remember that the circumstances that have given rise to English nationalism are going to be totally different to those that brought about the movement for Welsh self-determination, which is different from what happened in Scotland again. This Plaid and the SNP knows. We’ll work together, but there won’t be any lecturing one another on approach.
Welsh nationalists welcome a rise in English nationalism. I believe that more mature organisations than the English Democrats will emerge. Perhaps it will take a long time to achieve prominence; perhaps it may be one moment. Let us just hope it is not another Tryweryn. Remember that.
Duncan Higgitt is the Co-Editor of waleshome.org