Gwlad won votes on its own merits

AS LEADER of Gwlad – The Welsh Independence Party – I would like to respond to the comments made by your columnist Lefi Gruffydd in the magazine on Saturday.

Mr Gruffydd mentioned the fact Gwlad were pro-independence but had “stolen enough votes from Plaid Cymru” to prevent one further proindy candidate from taking a seat in the Senedd.

I presume that Mr Gruffydd is referring to the fact Carrie Harper fell 23 votes short from a seat on the list in north Wales, making a direct link between that and the 1,228 votes gained by Gwlad in that region.

At surface level, it sounds fairly plausible. But if you dig a little deeper, it once again reveals the entitlement mindset that besets Plaid Cymru.

What Mr Gruffydd is suggesting to all intents and purposes is that Gwlad – a new party officially registered with the Electoral Commission – shouldn’t have stood at all in the election.

It’s not a very democratic argument in the first place to say that voters should not be exposed to new views and opinions about Wales’ future, and once you start talking about “stealing votes” then it becomes even more alarming.

Rather than “stealing votes”, it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to make that Gwlad won those second votes on its own merits. And that many of those votes furthermore came from voters from other parties apart from Plaid Cymru.

The 10,000-plus votes Gwlad gained throughout Wales at the election further supports the idea that a range of voters decided to support us either at constituency or regional level at our first outing in a Welsh election.

Perhaps Mr Gruffydd would be better advised to consider why Plaid weren’t able to persuade more voters in general to give their second vote to Carrie Harper in north Wales.

Who knows, maybe that illadvised advert in Wrexham: “If you don’t want a Tory as a neighbour, vote Plaid” might have played a small part in that?

Not the best incentive for thousands of conservatively minded voters in north Wales to give their second vote to Plaid, that’s for sure. Gwyn Wigley Evans

Leader Gwlad – The Welsh Independence

Party