Price’s credo probes impact of colonisation on Wales’ psyche
New Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price launches a new book today, entitled Wales: The First and Final Colony. Chief reporter Martin Shipton took a look at it...
MOST political leaders write and publish books after they have left office. Adam Price is doing it the other way round.
Maybe one day he will write his memoirs, but Wales: The First and Final Colony is more of a manifesto than a retrospective look at his career so far.
It contains speeches, lectures, articles and chapters he has written since he was first elected as an MP in 2001.
Taken together, they represent both a credo and a prospectus.
The book is worth reading because it could plausibly be setting out the strategy of a future First Minister.
They won’t say so publicly, but some key Labour people believe Price could win the post after the next Senedd election in 2021.
His strategy is based on depriving Labour and its allies – currently Kirsty Williams and Dafydd ElisThomas – of a majority, getting Plaid Cymru back as the second-biggest party, and defeating Labour’s nominee for First Minister in the first vote of the new term.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that in 2016 the first vote for First Minister was tied between Carwyn Jones and Leanne Wood, who was then Plaid’s leader.
Jones only kept his post because of a deal he did with Kirsty Williams, who after his re-election was made Education Secretary.
Next time Adam Price could, if things go Plaid’s way, be elected First Minister, after which he would form a minority government and seek to govern for five years.
There are essentially three themes in Price’s book – an explanation of why Welsh independence has been so unpopular, how the Labour Party has let Wales down, and how he and his colleagues can reboot the nation and give it the prosperity it deserves to enjoy.
More than most politicians, Price articulates a clear historical view of why Wales is as it is. As you would expect from a Welsh nationalist – not to mention from the title of the book – the analysis hinges on the indisputable fact of England as a colonising power.
But – as the first and final colony – Wales is in a very different position to the colonies Britain acquired at the height of its imperial power. People’s minds, it is argued, have been colonised over the centuries.
In the essay after which the book is named, Price sets out the brutal facts of Wales’ political and cultural subjugation. He then turns to the impact on the national psyche: “We were a colony. And now we’re in a state of denial. The factual evidence for the reality of colonisation is all around us – indeed it can even be said to be within us.
“But to the extent that we acknowledge it, it might as well be invisible.
“Dilys Davies, a Welsh psychiatrist working at Guy’s Hospital [in London] who has conducted an exhaustive analysis of the Welsh psyche, has called this a form of cultural autism and drawn analogies with child sexual abuse, which for all its pervasiveness was once met by a wall of silence.
“Colonisation is our ‘dangerous idea’, a ‘dirty little secret’, a ‘painful memory’ that has to be repressed.”
In the political and business contexts, argues Price, this has often led to a lack of self-confidence.
When we spoke, he contrasted this with the brimming self-confidence often seen on the sporting field, in the theatre and – in past years – in the pulpit.
However, he concludes: “It is this deep insecurity that I believe lies at the heart of our still-tentative embrace of devolution and our rejection of what is, after all, the normal aspiration of any nation – political independence.
“It also, in the economic sphere, explains our overweening reliance on public subsidy and our failure so far to develop, in sufficient numbers at least, an indigenous entrepeneurial class.
“We are economically dependent because we are psychologically dependent, and vice versa. And we reject political independence because of both.”
While always a man of the left, Price regards Labour’s 100-year hegemony in Wales as profoundly damaging to the nation’s chances of advancement.
In 2005, he wrote: “The few policy innovations of the Welsh Assembly Government – free prescriptions, free breakfasts [for primary school children] and free swimming lessons [for pensioners] – are, at best, very modest in their scope.
“As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in the context of the Russian Revolution, ‘The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive cannot’.
“Kafka, I think, captured the same sense of dejection that many of us who campaigned for the Yes vote in 1997 now inevitably feel: ‘The revolution has evaporated and all that remains is the mud of a new bureaucracy’.”
Two years after being elected an MP, Price made an international name for himself by seeking to impeach Prime Minister Tony Blair over the invasion of Iraq. Admired by many for his daring, the unsuccessful attempt to remove Blair was derided by some in Labour as no more than a stunt. However, in the way he set out the case for impeachment during a House of Commons speech in 2005, Price demonstrated a strong commitment to ethical government. After proving how Blair distorted and traduced intelligence reports about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, he summed up in two sentences why pursuing Blair was the right thing to do: “Accountability is the lifeblood of democracy. Why should the public bother getting involved in politics if ministers can lead us into war on a false prospectus and not even utter a single word of apology?”.
Between now and May 2021, Price intends to get his party ready to run Wales. It will entail sharpening up its organisation from the grassroots to the centre, something he acknowledges in the book.
He’s giving advance warning to his opponents that he intends to occupy the First Minister’s office after the next election. To achieve that goal he wants Plaid Cymru activists to have many thousands of face-to-face conversations with the people of Wales over the next two and a half years.
While committed to spreading his message through all means at his disposal, including social media and – for the truly dedicated– this book, he’s about to embark on a nationwide speaking tour.
Can he break through the polarisation of politics between Labour and the Conservatives that has been apparent in this Brexit-obsessed era?
Or will Price fly too close to the sun and burn out like Icarus?
It will be fascinating to watch his project’s progress.
■ Wales: The First and Final Colony is published by Y Lolfa at £9.99.