Wales needs conviction from Plaid and power from Labour
In his final Martin Shipton Meets podcast of the current series, our chief reporter speaks to Wales’ oldest living Parliamentarian, Lord Elystan Morgan, who in 1966 became a Labour MP after leaving Plaid Cymru
WALES needs both Plaid Cymru and Labour to progress as a nation, according to a peer who in his time has been a member of both parties.
Elystan Morgan was once a protégé of long-term Plaid Cymru President Gwynfor Evans, and when he defected to Labour Evans thought there had been some trickery.
He was MP for Cardiganshire for eight years before losing his seat in 1974, and since 1981 has sat in the House of Lords. Strictly speaking he left Labour when he became a judge, but he remains a crossbench peer who votes with the party.
He said: “I was left-wing and nationalist from birth, I believe. I can’t imagine having another concept of life than one that was broadly in that direction. I had for many, many years been a member of Plaid Cymru. The concept of Wales as a nation, and the necessity of gaining some outward shell – protection for that organic thing we call nationhood – seemed to me to be absolute. I still think that. But whereas I thought at one time the only way to achieve that was through Plaid Cymru, I realised pretty soon that what you needed really was the conviction coming from Plaid Cymru and the power coming some day from the Labour Party when it is in a position to do something about it. It has to be a combination between both. Idealism alone is not enough.”
He said that even when he was a member of Plaid Cymru, he had a lot of respect for Labour as a force for change and a force for justice: “To me,” he said, “there is no possibility of building anything worthwhile in Wales unless you manage to fuse those two things: first the concept of Wales as a land and a nation, and secondly the immense power of the Labour Party as THE party of Wales still. One without the other will not do.”
Asked whether during his time in Plaid Cymru, he had been on good terms with Gwynfor Evans, he said: “Very much so. I still have great admiration for him. We remained friends, although we disagreed on many things, and I have absolute respect for his memory.”
Asked what Evans had thought about his leaving Plaid and joining Labour, Elystan Morgan said: “He thought that I had been nobbled. He had, I am afraid, a very low opinion of the Labour Party – a contempt for the Labour Party, and thought that only by some subterfuge and by some utterly disorderly process could one gravitate to the Labour Party.
“He never accommodated the Labour Party at all. I remember asking him once, ‘Is there nothing in the Labour Party that you can respect?’ ‘No my dear fellow – nothing.’ Gwynfor was the epitome of the old Welsh Liberal, who regarded the Labour Party as the work of Satan almost.”
Considering today’s political scene, Elystan Morgan said: “We have a situation at the moment where it does not seem to me we have credible leadership in either party – Tory or Labour. It’s such a momentous occasion that no dramatist could have over-emphasised, writing 20 or so years ago. There’s no leadership, no vision – and as the Book puts it, where there’s no vision the people perish.”
Giving his view of the future constitutional needs of Wales, he said: “I am, of course, very conscious of Wales as a land and a nation – very conscious of the need for Wales to have a definite distinctiveness. Otherwise she will disappear altogether.
“I don’t see it as just devolution. Devolution is very much a case of reducing the area of decision to the very lowest level possible. It’s more than that when you deal with nations: it’s something very different.
“When you deal with devolution, the question you ask is how much has been transferred, how much has been conveyed. When you’re dealing with nations, you ask a different question: how much has been withheld. That’s the way I see it. You can say that’s a bloody-minded Welsh attitude, but that’s my view.”
On Brexit, he said: “It’s two years now since we voted. Nothing has happened. No thought process has been described. No public debates have taken place at all. We’ve just drifted. It’s unbelievable. Two years on we’re no nearer understanding what Brexit is about, or what the possibilities are. Brexit will be at the end what the 27 want it to be, not what we want it to be. And how exactly that will affect Wales and the other nations, I’m not sure.”
He agreed that the UK was totally at the mercy of the EU: “How could it be otherwise?” he said. “You don’t expect the one unit to dominate the 27. No.
“One can never over-emphasise the insularity of Britain. You don’t live as an island unconquered for 1,000 years without having built some carapace of independence, of confidence about you. We still live with the cobwebs of Empire – and from time to time you’re reminded of it, especially when England plays in the football World Cup and people say ‘we taught them football’. You can feel the Kipling thing about the ‘lesser breeds without the law’.
“There’s that feeling somehow that our imperial past hasn’t totally disappeared. I as a Welshman am very conscious of this. I believe that in a very decent sort of way, the English really believe they are the master race, because at one time they ruled the whole world – and that’s within living memory, in a sense.
“There is a memory that runs for several generations of what people have heard others say, and what they heard say in turn. It will take a long time, I think, for Britain to work out its imperial past.”
He said there was definitely a need to reform the institution of which he has been a member for 37 years: the House of Lords.
“At the moment it’s a wholly ridiculous situation,” he said. “But if you read the Parliament Act 1911, the preamble supposes that quite soon, any day now, there will be changes. 1911!
“When I came here, many of the old hereditary peers were bonkers, bats, utterly bonkers. There was an old boy who had a double title. His people had had estates in the West Indies, and all the time he would say how these chaps were all right until they got on the ganga. Everything ended up with the ganga. He was totally mad. He would speak for hours and hours.
“I can remember a marvellous occasion of an old boy who was speaking on the form of the British North American Act of 1867 which set up the Canadian constitution. We were debating that and this old boy was 100 years old and he was bonkers. He was quoting huge chunks of the Bible and cookery recipes and everything else. You’d never heard such rubbish.”
Eventually former Welsh Secretary Cledwyn Hughes got the peer to stop by asking him if he would like a cup of tea. “He said: ‘capital idea, my dear friend’ and they walked out arm in arm. That’s the House of Lords at its best.”
Asked what he had achieved in his 37 years there, Elystan Morgan said: “Nothing. I can’t think of any campaign that I’ve waged, or anything that I’ve stood for that’s been successful. No. What I’ve achieved in a personal sense is somehow or other having that worm’s eye view of lifting the carpet. It gives you some idea of what British society is about and has been.”