Tag: Meibion Glyndwr

Plaid Cymru, Going Nowhere, by Design

On By JacIn Plaid Cymru, Welsh Assembly, Welsh Labour, Welsh Nationalism140 Comments

In which I try to explain how Plaid Cymru became a serious political party in the 1960s, why it was derailed in the 1980 and 1990s, and how we’ve ended up with a self-emasculating party that sees no role for itself other than as Labour’s little helper.

BLOWN INTO THE LIMELIGHT

I can write about the 1960s with some authority because I was there, I was involved, and I knew many of the players. Most weekends would see a gang of us pile into a hired transit van to attend some rally or protest, and there were real issues for us to focus on; we had Tryweryn (plus the other drownings), Aberfan, the Investiture – how could anyone not believe that Wales would be better off if she was independent?

There was a widespread perception among those I mixed with of there being a broad nationalist front, with Plaid Cymru as the political wing. Many people I knew were members of both Plaid and Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (The Welsh Language Society), I even knew people who were members of Plaid, CyIG and the Free Wales Army. There was most definitely ‘overlap’.

Though Plaid’s leadership, Gwynfor Evans especially, attributed the bombing campaigns to MI5 and sought to distance the party from them. Whatever the response, the truth is that in the 1960s Plaid Cymru rode the coat-tails of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru and the FWA to became a serious political party, winning Carmarthen in the 1966 by-election and pushing Labour close in subsequent by-elections in the Valleys.

‘That Charles is a lovely boy, Mam . . . I think I’m in love!’

The lesson was clear, get the people to focus on Welsh issues, particularly exploitation and injustice, and Plaid Cymru would reap the electoral reward. Without the reaction to Tryweryn and the protests of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, it’s unlikely that Gwynfor Evans would have beaten Gwilym Prys-Davies in Carmarthen. And Gwynfor’s victory in July 1966 is often cited as the inspiration for Winnie Ewing winning the Hamilton by-election for the SNP in November 1967. Can we go so far as to attribute the impending independence of Scotland to the greed and insensitivity of Liverpool Corporation?

Plaid Cymru’s leaders don’t like being told that the party owes its boost in the 1960s to Owain Williams, John Jenkins and Cayo Evans, but the party certainly lost impetus when MAC and the FWA were broken up. With little to excite and involve the voters Plaid Cymru’s support in the 1970s fell back in the south, but the party entrenched itself in the west and the north, appealing primarily now to Welsh speakers, a trend that damaged its appeal outside the Fro Gymraeg.

Again, I speak from personal experience, having stood as a Plaid Cymru candidate for both Swansea city council and West Glamorgan county council in the mid 1970s. I’d knock on a door, introduce myself as one of the local Plaid Cymru candidates and often get the response, ‘Sorry, love, we don’t speak Welsh’. There was rarely hostility, more the feeling that whatever Plaid Cymru might be (and few knew, or cared), it was definitely a party for Welsh speakers only. Plaid Cymru in the 1970s and 1980s was a national party with a very narrow appeal just bumbling aimlessly along.

♦

PLAID GOES LEFT, AND GREEN, AND DISAPPEARS UP ITS OWN ARSE

Nineteen-seventy-nine was a significant year in Wales for three main reasons.

On March 1st, St David’s Day, Wales rejected the Labour Party’s devolution proposals, with just 20.26% in support. Despite it being a Labour initiative most Labour politicians, led by Neil Kinnock and George Thomas, campaigned vigorously and viciously against devolution.

Then on May 3rd Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives were elected to power in Westminster, with the party gaining 32.2% of the Welsh vote and eleven of the thirty-six Welsh seats. In the general election of 1983 – and despite the war in the south Atlantic and the losses suffered by the Welsh Guards on the Sir Galahad – the Tories still gained 32% of the Welsh vote. From a high point of 11.5% in the general election of 1970 Plaid Cymru’s share of the vote slipped to 8.1% in 1979 and 7.8% in 1983.

Finally, on December 11th, we saw the first holiday home arson attacks by Meibion Glyndŵr.

Plaid Cymru continued to bumble along, going nowhere. The party was so rudderless, so unattractive to voters outside of the rural west, that the MG campaign was unable to give the boost that MAC and the FWA had done in the 1960s, possibly because holiday homes were not an issue in the areas where Plaid needed to grow. Plaid Cymru was a weak party of dispirited members, ripe for change, or takeover . . . preferably not a takeover by nationalists.

Gwynfor Evans stepped down as president in 1981 and a new generation stepped into his shoes. First, Dafydd Wigley, who’d been elected MP for Caernarfon in 1974, and then, more significantly, from 1984, Dafydd Elis Thomas, who’d been elected in the same year for the neighbouring constituency of Meirionnydd.

Now things begin to get strange. Because although the obvious problem was that Plaid Cymru was not getting enough support from the anglophone Welsh, under Dafydd Elis Thomas the party started reaching out in other directions, primarily to the hairier fringes of the Left, and to even more hirsute elements of the environmental movement. It will be noted that none of these new ‘allies’ had a snowball’s chance in hell of increasing Plaid’s vote in Swansea East or Merthyr or Wrecsam.

Another in Plaid’s hierarchy keen on ‘reaching out’ was Cynog Dafis, who believed there was common ground between Plaid Cymru and the Greens. These Greens were of course overwhelmingly English and many of them were openly dismissive of Welsh identity. As far as they were concerned, they had moved to ‘the country’, not to someone else’s country.

The Plaid-Green Summer Solstice Conference, Pontrhydfendigaid, 1991

This contempt was returned in kind, for most Plaid Cymru supporters had no time for the Greens, and some, especially those involved in farming and other activities, thoroughly detested these arrogant interlopers who threatened their livelihoods. Yet to Cynog Dafis the hippies and the rest were “those who had moved here to live for progressive and enlightened purposes”.

This episode provides us with an example from thirty years ago of Plaid Cymru’s leadership being out of step with the party’s rank and file, and of course the wider population. Guilty of going off on tangents that did nothing to address Plaid Cymru’s fundamental problem. I wrote a few years ago about this rather silly flirtation with the Greens in Plaid Cymru and the Green Party of Englandandwales.

♦

AN AMERICAN FRIEND

When he was Plaid’s head honcho Dafydd El’s consort was an American named Marjorie Thompson. An interesting woman from an impeccably WASP-Republican background who, after a stint as assistant to a Republican Congressman, crossed the Pond and soon joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, rising to be chair of that body. More remarkably, perhaps, she also served as chair of Scottish CND, though this is not mentioned in her Linkedin profile.

I’m not sure when her relationship with DET began but it lasted some seven years and intrigued observers. Having served her time among the ‘progressives’ in CND and other groups Ms Thompson eventually joined Saatchi & Saatchi, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite ad agency, in 1997, and returned ‘home’, as it were, by joining the Conservative Party in 2009.

I seem to recall that there was interest at the time in a brother of Marjorie Ellis Thompson who, it was alleged, worked for a US intelligence agency. But I could be mistaken, it was all a long time ago. Maybe someone remembers?

By 1992, after all the changes, and all the ‘reaching out’, Plaid Cymru’s percentage of the vote in that year’s general election barely moved. Nevertheless, the party did hold its three seats in the north west and Cynog Dafis added Ceredigion and Pembroke North, almost certainly due to the thousands of bearded ones turning out to vote for him.

Though the only constituency that saw an official Plaid-Green alliance was Monmouth, where the candidate Mel Witherden got 0.8% of the vote, the lowest Plaid vote in the country. Witherden was quite open in stating that many Greens were anti-Welsh in a racist and colonialist way.

Plaid was now firmly located on the political left, it was a ‘welcoming’ party concerned with all manner of ishoos and -isms, and more interested in the opinions of Islington than with what people were thinking in Islwyn.

♦

DESIGNED TO FAIL

Plaid Cymru, the party I joined in the mid-’60s because it – and I – wanted to make Wales a better place for the Welsh people, had become a regional rainbow alliance for which nationhood and independence were dirty words. Wales no longer mattered except for the votes and seats it provided that then allowed the Plaid leadership to rub shoulders with other ‘progressives’.

This party had no chance of winning seats outside of the Welsh-speaking areas, where most of Plaid’s voters supported the party for cultural reasons, and didn’t really care about Plaid’s policies (even if they knew what they were). If this electorate had one concern it was the influx that was breaking up communities and slowly destroying a Welsh way of life.

Plaid Cymru had no intention of making a stand against colonisation; in fact, as we’ve seen, Plaid’s leadership was happy to co-operate with elements of this influx. Never was an electorate taken for granted and treated with such contempt as Plaid Cymru’s rural voters. It’s no exaggeration to say that Meibion Glyndŵr spoke for these people better than Plaid Cymru.

Courtesy of BBC

Plaid Cymru was successfully subverted in the late 1980s and early 1990s into a political party that would never get more than 10-12% of the vote in UK general elections and therefore pose no threat to the integrity of the UK state. It would have been easy to interpret this catastrophic re-alignment to foolishness, were it not for the removal of Dafydd Wigley in 2000.

In the first elections to the new Welsh Assembly in May 1999 Plaid Cymru gained 28.4% of the constituency vote (Labour 37.6%) and 30.5% of the second or regional vote (Labour 35.4%). In addition to predictably winning its western, rural seats the party also won Llanelli, Rhondda and Islwyn. This result sent shock waves way beyond Wales.

In June 2000 an internal plot removed Dafydd Wigley, persuading him to cite health grounds for ‘his’ decision. Seventeen years later he leads a full life travelling up to London regularly to sit in the House of Lords and is actively involved in many other, more worthwhile, activities.

♦

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

In my previous post I wrote of the strange case of Plaid Cymru councillor and AM Neil McEvoy, stitched up on a ludicrous ‘bullying’ charge by the Labour corruption machine and then, instead of being supported by his party, he found Plaid’s leadership siding with Labour and assorted organisations on Labour’s Third Sector payroll such as Welsh Women’s Aid.

In that post – and if you haven’t read it then I urge you to do so – I talked of the ‘consensus’, a delusion prevalent among Plaid Cymru’s hierarchy that they and ‘Welsh’ Labour are natural allies in the fight against the forces of darkness. This results in Plaid Cymru refusing to take Labour on in the way that the SNP has so successfully done in Scotland. But it goes deeper than that, and it’s more sinister.

Like all advanced states, the UK has a ‘permanent government’ which may or may not be made up of military brass, top businessmen, intelligence chiefs, senior civil servants and others. Whatever their attitude towards the Labour Party – and this will vary depending on who’s leading Labour – they understand full well that Labour is the bulwark against Welsh nationalism simply because it’s the largest party in Wales.

Equally, those I’m talking about understand that due to its corruption and incompetence, and the quality of its elected representatives, Labour in Wales is highly vulnerable, and must therefore be protected from any threat to its hegemony. The best way of doing this is from within. From within Plaid Cymru.

It’s no coincidence that Dafydd Wigley, Plaid Cymru’s most successful ever leader, was removed when the party he led threatened to dislodge Labour in the Valleys. And no coincidence that it was done with a palace coup.

Now Neil McEvoy, a politician from a different mould to most other Plaid MPs and AMs, is gaining popularity in working class Cardiff, so he is stitched up by Labour and hung out to dry by his own party.

To achieve this control over Plaid Cymru the permanent government doesn’t need many on the inside, just enough, in senior positions, to ensure that the right kind of left-liberal losers are recruited and promoted, and that nationalists, or anyone threatening Labour’s domination, is sidelined.

♦

THE DOG IN THE MANGER

Since the Neil McEvoy affair blew up I have spoken with people I know inside Plaid Cymru and they are surprised, annoyed or outraged by the actions of the party leadership. No one I have spoken to supports the party leadership. The confusion extended to surprising quarters, like Martin Shipton in the Wasting Mule. Plaid’s leadership must know that they’ve got this one badly wrong.

But then, this is exactly how Plaid Cymru has been programmed to react in a situation like this. As I said earlier, Plaid Cymru was “subverted in the late 1980s and early 1990s into a political party that would never get more than 10-12% of the vote in UK general elections”, achieved by the simple expedient of taking the party in directions that made it unattractive to the great majority of Welsh voters.

Update that figure for devolution and we are talking of less than 25% in Assembly elections. Anything higher sets the alarm bells ringing in the marbled corridors of the permanent government. And action is taken.

 

Plaid Cymru since the bright young things took control has been a party promising everything to everybody . . . and delivering nothing, apart from minor concessions allowed by our masters to delude the rank and file that their leaders can deliver, and that the long-heralded ‘breakthrough’ is just around the corner. The ‘breakthrough’ that never comes . . . and was scuppered from within when it threatened to happen.

But perhaps Plaid Cymru’s most useful role has been as a dog in the manger party, because for as long as Plaid is in place, gaining just enough votes, it blocks the emergence of an alternative that could confront and defeat ‘Welsh’ Labour.

♦

MY MESSAGE TO PLAID CYMRU MEMBERS

Whether you accept my theory or not, you know that your party is going nowhere. Which means that you are probably confused or disappointed by the treatment of Neil McEvoy, your party’s most effective politician.

You know that ‘Welsh’ Labour is there for the taking – so why is Plaid Cymru propping up this stumblebum party?

Or ask yourself why your party is so unattractive that Ukip got more votes in the last general election. And not just in Clwyd, but in Blaenau Gwent, Merthyr Tydfil, Rhymni, Swansea East, etc. Come on! wise up!

My belief remains that Plaid Cymru has been compromised. For appearances’ sake, and to block the emergence of a credible alternative, it is allowed a certain level of support, in return for which it must deal with anyone threatening to upset the status quo.

To make Plaid Cymru the party it should be, the party most of you want it to be, you need to give our people the message of hope they want to hear. But to achieve this you must remove the deadwood at the top of the party.

Plaid Cymru needs a new leadership prepared to put the interests of Wales and the Welsh people first, no matter what other parties, the commentariat, or the ‘progressives’ of Islington, may say.

♦ end ♦

The Chain That Binds

On By JacIn British Nationalism, Scotland20 Comments

In a sense, this post is a sequel to the previous one, so maybe the The British Propaganda Corporation should be read or re-read before starting here.

That done, let’s start with asking, what is the connection between the Queen of England and a fascist thug giving a Nazi salute in the George Square riot the day after the Scottish referendum? Answer: They’re both Unionists, both believe in preserving the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And that, monarchists and other apologists might suggest, is nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence, for there is a world of difference between Elizabeth II (I in Scotland) and those Nazi-Loyalist thugs.

Chain 1But that ‘world of difference’ is filled by many groups and agencies that overlap and interlink to make up a chain, and while many in this ‘chain’ would refuse to acknowledge having anything in common with some of the other ‘links’, or even that the chain exists, but they have and it does. I have tried to explain what I mean in the collage on the left (click to enlarge). The ‘links’ are, in clockwise order: the monarchy; government / political parties; the civil service; the City of London and the financial sector; academia (don’t kid yourself, higher education nowadays is all about lucre and influence); the media; big business; the military and intelligence communities; and finally, the assorted fringe political parties and groups making up the extreme Unionist Right that we saw in Glasgow on September 19th.

This chain has always existed but it has been brought into sharper focus of late. Partly – though indirectly – because the ideological politics of Left and Right that many of us grew up with is all but dead, as Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats fight over the centre ground. This ‘Rush to the Centre’ has been observable for many years now, since Blair and Mandelson blessed us with New Labour, but the fear of appearing too different became even more obvious during the referendum campaign, when we saw the London-based parties unite – almost coalesce – against Scottish independence. (Ukip may offer an alternative to this Centrist hegemony, but it doesn’t take us beyond the sovereignty and unity issue.)

Victory for the forces of the Union in the referendum should have been the end of the matter, and that is certainly what the ‘chain’ wants everyone to believe – ‘dead for a generation’, etc – but it’s not, and for two main reasons. First, the cause of Scottish independence attracted support from those outside of Scotland wishing to shake up or reform this corrupt, unequal and decadent state. Which in some ways made the debate over Scottish independence a surrogate Left / Right contest, with the Yes campaign offering optimism and hope, while the No campaign urged people to stick with the tried and failed. The George Square thugs (here’s one) gave a glimpse into a dark and primitive past that everyone but them is thankful to have left behind. Second, the Yes campaign gained almost 40 per cent of regular Labour voters, yet the Labour Party is London’s only real hope of holding on to Scotland.

For anyone in any doubt about the nature of the riot and the rioters, this MailOnline account will help explain how repulsive these people are. The headline reference to ‘Nazi-saluting thugs’ should not be dismissed lightly, for when it comes to Nazis the Daily Mail knows what it’s talking about!

*

Suggesting that shrewder and more devious elements might employ people like the Nazi-Unionists seen in George Square may be dismissed as silly speculation, but when I first saw the pictures and videos of what happened there and in the streets nearby on September 19th, two thoughts occurred to me. The first was, given the previously exhibited logistical skills of those involved, the violence seemed to be surprisingly well organised. Second, if these people feel so passionately about the issue (and obviously they do), where had they been during the referendum campaign? Because apart from a relatively peaceful Orange parade in Edinburgh on September 13th I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything of them. The first could be answered fairly easily if the rioters had help in orchestrating the trouble. And the second answered by arguing that these assumed ‘helpers’, realising what a boost the Nazi-Loyalists would have provided for the Yes camp, persuaded them to lie low until the referendum was over, with, perhaps, the promise that they could have their fun on the 19th, whatever the result.

Government agencies certainly do work with the most unsavoury allies to pursue certain objectives. As an extreme example, back in the 1970s the Italian secret service used the neo-fascist group Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei) to commit terrorist acts that were then blamed on the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), and used as justification to crack down on the Left. Perhaps inevitably, the fascists went too far, culminating in the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing that killed 85. ‘Ah, but that was Italy’, you might Griffin Fioresay. True, but when one of the prime suspects in the Bologna bombing, Roberto Fiore, came to London he seemed to enjoy a charmed life. The reluctance of UK authorities to extradite him is attributed by many, including anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, to the fact that Fiore was co-operating with MI6. Perhaps helping MI6 (and MI5) put together a reformed National Front, made up of a new cadre with university education and a bit more political nous than your average skinhead. Among these was a young Nick Griffin. (Fiore may still run a language school in London.)

After Griffin and his colleagues Derek Holland and Patrick Harrington became leading lights in the National Front in the early 1980s, and under Fiore’s tutelage, they began moving the NF in a different direction, such as trying to link with Gaddafi, and the US black nationalist Louis Farrakhan. This was – as you might imagine – resented by other NF members and so by 1983 Griffin and his allies had almost broken away from the NF with their Fiore-inspired Political Soldier faction. This new National Front began to take up curious positions on a number of issues.

For example, I recall the Green Party and other environmental groups demanding that the NF stop showing its ‘support’ for them with unauthorised ‘advertisements’ in NF News and other media. That was odd, but then came an episode even odder – NF News came out with a front page splash telling the world that the National Front now supported Meibion Glyndŵr! There were two ways of looking at this. Either the National Front had radically changed, and really did support environmentalists and Welsh nationalists or, its intelligence service handlers were using the NF to inflict reputational damage on those it viewed as threats to the established order. It soon became clear which was the correct interpretation.

In 1989 a major commemoration was planned for George Taylor and Alwyn Jones who died at Abergele in 1969, when a bomb they were carrying exploded prematurely on the eve of the Investiture. The National Front insisted they were coming – they’d been ‘invited’! Which of course was a lie, but the media lapped it up, giving uncritical coverage to anyone claiming to represent the NF; one spokesman I recall hearing used the name ‘Drax’. I can also remember travelling to Bangor the day before the event to give a Radio Wales interview in which I made it clear that no one had invited the National Front to Abergele, and if they did turn up there would almost certainly be trouble. In the event, and as might have been expected, the National Front did not appear. They never intended to turn up, it was a propaganda exercise to a) discredit the event and b) deter people from attending.

There were other instances of suspected fascists believed to be run by the intelligence services trying to infiltrate Welsh nationalist organisations. One curious incident involved Y Cyfamodwyr (The Covenanters) when two rather suspect individuals, claiming not to know each other, wrote to the secretary using the exact same envelopes; unmistakable due to being the type with a pre-paid ‘stamp’ embossed on the top-right corner of the envelope. Remember them? These were rare even then, perhaps unobtainable today. ‘Someone’ had obviously supplied both these characters with the same envelopes.

But it won’t just be infiltration you’ll need to worry about. For the security services will also seek to ‘turn’ trusted individuals within your organisation or movement. There will often be those with little ‘weaknesses’ vulnerable to such a tactic, which can be very effective. I have said it before and I will say it again, I believe that Plaid Cymru was compromised at a very high level decades ago. This accounts for the party’s lack of success and the bizarre and otherwise inexplicable action taken when the party threatened to be successful.

And of course, I haven’t ventured across the water, where murderous collaboration between police, army, intelligence services and Loyalist paramilitaries went on for over twenty years. Some of those in George Square on the 19th of September may have had knowledge of such collusion. (Though Ireland is not a valid comparison with Scotland due to the levels of violence and the deep-rooted communal divide encountered there.)

*

The behaviour exhibited in Glasgow told us a lot about those belonging to the extreme Unionist Right. On the one hand they swear loyalty to the monarch and profess their love of Britain . . . yet they sing God Save the Queen and Rule Britannia wCharles de Gaullehile giving Nazi salutes! (No wonder the MailOnline was outraged!) To me, these people are the ideological descendants of those who would have co-operated with Nazi invaders in 1940. Of course, the collaborators of 1940 would have justified their position by arguing that the ‘British’ (i.e. the English) had no quarrel with their German cousins; the real enemies were communist Russia, and England’s ‘natural enemy’, France, which provides another instructive example.

More specifically Algeria, and colonial France’s withdrawal from that country. To explain . . . the French settlers in Algeria felt betrayed by de Gaulle’s decision in 1961 to give Algeria independence and so they threw in their lot with extreme Right-wing politicians in France plus elements of the armed forces and the intelligence community to create the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète). This provides the background and context for Day of the Jackal.

The British Unionist Right is feeling betrayed today; in fact, it’s raison d’étre nowadays seems to be the fight against one betrayal after another. Northern Ireland will soon have a Catholic majority, Scotland is on its way to independence, while Mother England is being simultaneously swamped by immigrants and swallowed up by ‘Europe’, then there’s them kilometres and litres . . . To those Unionists who know their Wagner, we are approaching Götterdämmerung. Would it be stretching things too far to compare the position of Ulster Loyalists and their extreme BritNat allies today with that of the pieds-noirs and their supporters back in the 1960s?

What we can state with absolute certainty is that links between state security agencies and ‘patriotic’ groups is universal. The United Kingdom is no exception.

*

Despite what I’ve written I have no direct evidence that those responsible for what happened in Glasgow on September the 19th, not even those who travelled to the city to ‘celebrate victory’ by intimidating and attacking people, were directed or manipulated by any third-party agency. I am just a man who has been involved in both mainstream and ‘fringe’ politics for almost half a century and who has observed things along the way.

What I will repeat is that the ‘chain’ exists’, and it defends its collective interests. That should have been made clear to everyone by the behaviour of the media during the referendum campaign, and by the hysterical interventions from banks and big business. In addition, you know that MI5 has infiltrated the SNP in the past, for example, during the 1979 referendum campaign. And then there’s the long-running mystery of the death of Willie McRae. Scotland’s enemies will use every conceivable tactic to thwart independence, and they’ve got a whole box of tricks.

Given that the ongoing independence campaign is much more threatening to the ‘chain’ than anything that happened in 1979 MI5 would not be doing its job if it didn’t infiltrate the parties and groups that make up the campaign. The strongest weapons you have to fight them are truth, belief in your cause, and the trust of the awakened Scottish people. So build your own ‘chain’, and don’t restrict it to Scotland, for you have friends everywhere, among the silenced and the marginalised, those in need of hope and inspiration. These people are depending on you – go for it!

Taking A Break

On By JacIn Colonisation of Wales26 Comments

In recent months I have given much thought to my lifestyle. I’m spending far too much time at my computer, writing my blog and other things; reading, watching television, or just filling my head with information I’d be none the poorer for not knowing. Then there’s Twitter, Facebook, texts, e-mails. And so often I’m not even sure who I’m dealing with . . . I suspect many are socialists, or oafs in baseball caps. Even socialist oafs in baseball caps! People I wouldn’t bother with in the real world. It has become clear to me that this technology, promised to be the great servant of mankind, can, if we allow it, become our master, exerting an unhealthy influence over our lives.

Another issue encouraging my return to the real world is the new wave of US entrepreneurs and capitalists behind this revolution. They may look and sound like unworldly geeks, but when it comes to business, with their monopolistic ambitions and their tax-dodging, they are more ruthless than Ford, Rockefeller and J P Morgan ever were. Do I really want to use anything over which these amoral weirdoes have control? Do I want to use software or social networking that is all the while gathering information about me? Do I want to download a harmless ‘update’, only to find that I have, totally unwillingly and without warning, also installed a toolbar, a search engine, anti-virus software, tracking cookies and God knows what else? No, I do not.

Don’t run away with the idea that I am Thoreaurejecting new technology entirely and going live in a cave, but I will in future be drastically reducing the time I spend on my computer. My Twitter account will be closed soon, and so will my Facebook page (which I never could see the value of). As for my blog, I shall keep it open but resort to it less. Maybe a weekly or bi-weekly post, supplemented by ‘specials’ if I think I have something worth saying. For while I believe some of my postings have had an effect, particularly those dealing with the Third Sector and other obvious forms of mismanagement or corruption, at the end of the day, blogging could be viewed as a cheap form of vanity publishing.

‘Why now?’ you might ask. Well, there comes a point when you realise you’re repeating yourself. Largely because the stupidly of politicians, and the perfidy of those who manipulate them, is unchanging. As is the gullibility of  too many Welsh voters. Only the characters and the circumstances change. One Third Sector scandal is much like another. And when a blogger finds himself referring back to his own earlier posts then he should realise that he’s said it all before. Such is the situation with me.

In addition, my mother has just died, a milestone in any man’s life. So now seems the right time to make my return to the real world. Before finishing, I’d like to thank you all for reading my blog, both at its original home with Google Blogger, and more recently here, courtesy of Gwilym ab Ioan of S C Cambria. Thank you also for your support and comments over the years. What follows may be my last post for a while, in it I try to give my honest assessment of the situation in Wales today, and how we got here.

                                                                           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                                           

IN THE BEGINNING

When I joined the nationalist movement in the mid-ʼ60s I joined something vibrant and exciting, there was a ‘We’re not taking this shit any more!’ attitude, and a belief that change would be brought about by pressure from below, by activists like us. And for a while we had the system worried. But by 1975, the high-water mark had been reached, and Welsh nationalism was in retreat. For by now the British Establishment understood what it was dealing with. It knew how far Welsh nationalism was prepared to go, what barriers it wouldn’t cross; it had worked out who could be bought, or intimidated; and it understood that by guiding a nationalist movement without mass support into politics that that movement was never going to threaten the status quo.

And so it proved. After Plaid Cymru won Carmarthen in 1966, Meirionnydd and Caernarfon in 1974, after seventeen years of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, after the Free Wales Army (FWA), Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC) and countless other manifestations of Welsh nationalism, on St. David’s Day 1979 just 20.26% of us voted for a Welsh Assembly. That the devolution referendum of 1997 was won was due to Margaret Thatcher and eighteen years of Conservative rule. It had nothing to do with Plaid Cymru. Even then, many Labour voters argued that we didn’t need devolution – Labour was back in power! (A good example of the mentality of the ‘Donkey Labour’ voter; rejecting devolution because it’s only needed when the Tories are in power but unable to work out that the Tories will never give Wales devolution!)

DOWNHILL

By the early 1970s the English Establishment had worked out the following facts. Plaid Cymru was essentially a linguistic and cultural movement which, once the initial excitement had worn off, would have little appeal to the anglophone majority. Many of the language activists were simply after their own niche in the English system, some proving themselves to be ruthlessly ambitious. While the most sincere and selfless element of Welsh nationalism, those who resorted to direct action, were not prepared to take a human life. Just to be sure, the English Establishment put it place a colonisation strategy to encourage English settlers into Wales, using agencies as diverse as higher education and tourism, plus quangos such as the Development Board for Rural Wales.

It was downhill from there. Apart from the Meibion Glyndŵr campaign and groups such as the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement, Cofiwn, Cyfamodwyr, Wales was quiescent. Plaid Cymru went through various colour changes – red, green, pink – and Cymdeithas yr Iaith’s best days were behind it, its victories nearly all won in the first twenty years of its existence. Whatever came to us now would be gifted by our masters without them having to worry about pressure from below. Even the Meibion Glyndŵr campaign, which had widespread popular support, did nothing to remove the problem of holiday homes.

TODAY

Which brings me to a consideration of Wales today. Plaid Cymru can be discounted entirely. Exposed and discredited. Infiltrated and manipulated. A former leader openly talking about joining the Labour Party. More concerned with socialism and environmentalism than with nationalism. Its ambition limited to being junior partner in a Labour-led coalition. Quite happy to see the Welsh countryside covered with wind turbines and populated with English settlers. Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, or the wider language-cultural movement, stands exposed as a bunch of weak-kneed charlatans. Deluding themselves that another school in Cardiff is fair exchange for the loss of Ceredigion. Smug and complacent on the moral high ground, as the enemy takes over the land below. Direct action? There is none.

Ah! but we’ve got devolution, you reply. No. What we have is a system in which a bunch of second-rate politicians faff about in a leaky building down Cardiff docks while real power is increasingly exerted by English civil servants and organisations of which most of us have never heard – Planning Inspectorate, Housing Directorate, Wales Rural Observatory, countless Third Sector shyster-wagons, etc. – for which we never voted. So don’t kid yourself that this system fronted by Carwyn and his gang is devolved and democratic government, or that it’s doing anything for us. It is nothing but English colonialism with its repulsive features partly disguised with a Welsh veil.

TOMORROW?

The biggest issue facing the Welsh nation is its very survival. Partly due to ‘Wales’ becoming divorced from ‘the Welsh’. Allowing politicians and academics, journalists and others, to crow about something being ‘wonderful for Wales’ when it offers Welsh people nothing, or is even detrimental to their interests. Tourism, for example. To the point where people can even bang on about Wales being ‘a rainbow nation’, with we Welsh nothing more than another exotic component. Hand in hand with this divorce goes the trivialisation of Welsh identity, and a careful promotion of what are considered to be acceptable expressions of Welshness. So that some tart on a reality TV show would be an acceptable face of ‘Welshness’, but a dignified patriot rejecting an ‘honour’ from the English Queen would be a narrow bigot, an extremist.

EuphemismThese Orwellian interpretations dominate Welsh life. Exemplified by the approach to colonisation. Wales today has ‘incomers’ or ‘in-migrants’, and ‘people from other parts of Britain’, or even ‘from over the border’. These can be ‘retirees’, or people ‘looking for a better quality of life’ (even ‘good-lifers’ is acceptable). They can even be, in the memorable phrase of Wyn Roberts, “this beneficent influx”. You can use any bloody euphemism you choose, but they must never be called ‘English’. To do so would be ‘racist’. Exposing a pathetic self-censorship, perhaps even self-intimidation. This is the level of debate we have sunk to in Wales; one corrupted by political correctness and poisoned by a variant of socialism that would be ridiculed and rejected from Bilbao to Barcelona to Belfast.

From now on the only issue must be the fight against colonisation and the threat it poses to the survival of Welsh nationhood. Everything else is secondary or irrelevant. Whether it’s ‘saving the planet’ (as if Wales could make any bloody difference!) or the chimera of extra power for those clowns I mentioned earlier in the leaky building. Because no matter how many lies are told, how imaginative the euphemisms employed, or how many distractions promoted, WE know the truth: England is carrying out a colonisation programme in Wales that is excluding and marginalising the Welsh (apart from those needed to disguise the process) with the intention of destroying Welsh national identity. Fight this evil wherever you find it. It is the biggest threat the Welsh nation has ever faced.