Adam Price apologises for seeking reparations for Wales

PLAID Cymru leader Adam Price has said he is “profoundly, deeply, genuinely sorry” for saying Wales should be paid reparations for being “ground down” into poverty.

Mr Price had faced criticism that his comments in an article last October ignored Wales’ own role in exploiting BAME communities and wrongly likened Wales’ experience to that of the 19th- and 20th-century victims of colonialism and slavery.

He had made the comments at the Plaid party conference and repeated them in article headlined “Westminster owes Wales reparations” and an interview.

Welsh Labour’s Health Minister Vaughan Gething had said the language was “deliberately offensive” and that the experience of Wales simply could not be compared to “the emancipation campaign from slavery, or indeed the state-backed racism that was visited on African-Americans”.

Mr Price has now written an article saying he recognised it was a mistake not to draw a distinction between the experience of Wales and the victims of slavery.

He wrote: “I would express myself differently today. If my poor choice of words caused anyone pain then I am profoundly, deeply, genuinely sorry.

“Today I would also want to give much greater emphasis than I did to Wales’ own guilt and complicity in Britain’s crimes against humanity.

“The fact that Wales has itself suffered historic injustice at the hands of the British state should not blind us to our own role in one of the most murderous enterprises in human history, the British Empire.”

There are several stately homes and buildings in Wales that were funded by the slave trade and many industries in Wales were boosted by income from selling products into the slave economy.

Speaking on BBC

Radio Wales’ Sunday Supplement programme, Mr Price said he accepted that the experience of Wales was different to that of the victims of 19thcentury colonialism.

Presenter Vaughan Roderick put to him that the experience of the Penrhyn quarrymen who endured terrible conditions working for the slaveowning Pennant family but were ultimately able to strike and were free to quit their jobs was significantly different to the people trafficked as slaves to the family’s Caribbean sugar plantations, who had no such liberty.

“Yes, I don’t think you should ever equate suffering and injustice from one place to another,” said Mr Price.

“The scale of suffering from the transatlantic slave trade is a unique moment in world history in the same way that the Holocaust was.

“If I have caused pain by my words, I’m profoundly, deeply, genuinely sorry for that.

“We have not sufficiently accepted our guilt and complicity in one of the most murderous human enterprises in history, which is the British Empire, and the fact that we have in Wales, as a Western country, have also benefited from the wider European colonial project,” he added.

“We have to honest about our own past and our own complicity and the fact that we have suffered injustice as well.

“It’s important that we don’t erase that because that is part of our history too, but we must also recognise and reckon with our own contribution to suffering and injustice in the past and by the way recognise the realities of injustice and oppression within Wales today – the fact that we have structural racism at the heart of

our society.”