Celebrating stunning wins for Plaid... and remembering a man worthy of high office
THE county council elections last week produced a stunning win for Plaid Cymru in Gwynedd, and in three other Welsh councils where we now also have a majority. I am particularly pleased at the election of so many new, young, and enthusiastic people. And that now so many more councillors are women. So, congratulations to all of those who were elected last week. Now the real work starts!
I’ve been listening in the car to Robin Cook’s memoirs of the 2001 parliament.
For those who don’t remember him, Cook was the Labour government’s Foreign Secretary. He it was who announced in 1997 that Labour would follow an “ethical foreign policy”.
At the time, naively, I took this to mean, no more lies, no more dirty tricks, no more foreign wars. How wrong I was, as Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for lies, dirty tricks and foreign wars soon proved.
Cook managed to hang on at the Foreign Office for four years. Blair then shunted him off to the less exalted post of Leader of the House, usually taken to be one small step from the exit. But he lasted for a further two years.
Jacob Rees Mogg was Leader of the House until recently, when Boris Johnson shifted him abruptly to the impossible nonjob of Minister for Brexit Opportunities. Mogg is already failing to deliver the goods. I doubt that he’ll last the summer, and there will be no tears shed when he goes.
What is surprising about the memoirs though is how straight and true Cook was, or at least, how straight, and true he was allowed to be by Blair and his cronies.
But as Leader of the House he describes his almost painful respect for democracy, for Parliament (not the same thing as democracy of course), for the Opposition and for the views of backbench MPs, as I well remember.
Robin Cook died at the young age of 59 having made his mark yet again by resigning over the Iraq war. Actually, straight and true, as I said. Obviously, these days he wouldn’t have lasted in government for five minutes, let alone six years.
However, a former Foreign Secretary who has prospered is a certain B. Johnson, currently of Number 10 Downing Street. Prospered until recently at least.
I think that it won’t be the drinks parties, the continual lying, the dirty tricks, or his foreign adventures which will do for him. Not even his contempt for the law.
As I have said in the years since Brexit, Ireland will be his downfall.
At the most basic level, if you leave the EU and restrict entry and exit at Dover, you must also control the route between Ireland and Great Britain.
You must complete the border, either on the island of Ireland itself, or, as Johnson has chosen, establish a border in the Irish Sea. He’s lied about doing that as well of course.
But the Democratic Unionists know full well when they have been stabbed in the back, the side and the front, and now, too late, they are shrieking ‘No Surrender!’.
The people, faced with rising prices, rising taxes, falling real term incomes, benefits and pensions have failed to be distracted by this.
And in last week’s election they booted the Unionists out of their historic unbroken place as the biggest party in the north, enthroning the republican Sinn Fein instead. This makes a border poll and ultimate Irish unity much more likely.
I tend to think that MPs of the “Conservative and Unionist Party” will hardly forgive this dismal and disastrous failure by their leader to sustain and guarantee the 100-year-old partition of Ireland.
Some Brexiteers had hoped that the Irish would obligingly follow the UK and also leave the EU, thus solving the border problem for them.
I’m writing this on Europe Day, when the Irish seem as delighted as ever to remain in the EU. They are doing very nicely inside, thank you very much. And although in some ways it’s a small thing, this year Irish has become a ‘working language’ of the EU. That is real status and not the partial official tolerance from Westminster that we have for Welsh.