Why it’s time to give people the choice of a New Wales
Adam Price AM is bidding to replace Leanne Wood as the leader of Plaid Cymru. Here, he lays out his vision to turn around the fortunes of a party languishing in the polls...
THE biggest political party in Wales, so goes the quip, are exmembers of Plaid Cymru. We also have the distinction of being the favourite second choice of supporters of other parties.
What these two facts tell us is that there is a latent reservoir of support out there waiting to be tapped. So where are we going wrong? Well, we’ve been here before. After another doldrum election of 2005 I approached the then party’s chief executive and Dafydd Iwan as president with a plan to turn the party’s fortunes around.
Its essential elements included the creation of a fully fledged National Campaigns Unit, a new message discipline designed to focus on a limited number of signature policies (which eventually became 7 for ‘07) and a new logo, the Welsh Poppy, which was deliberately designed to get people to see Plaid with new eyes.
As campaigns director I chaired weekly meetings of the directorate to which the NCU reported, using many of the simple techniques of good management that I’d learned as MD of a fledgling Welsh company, Newidiem.
We turned Plaid – an 80-year-old party – into an insurgent political start-up, and two years later we entered government for the very first time.
So how do we revive all over again?
The first step is to set ourselves an audacious goal.
Our aim should not just be to win in 2021, but to win again in 2026.
We should become the most effective election fighting machines in Western Europe, turning us into the natural party of the Government in the same way that the SNP has become and Fianna Fail became in Ireland from 1932 on.
All this will be the platform upon which we will fight and win an independence referendum by the end of the next decade.
The elements of electoral success are relatively clear – identifying the target audience, distil what matters to them into a clear message, repeat it over and over again, preferably in one-to-one conversations.
Like most political parties in recent years, faced with dwindling volunteers, Plaid has tended to target its core vote of Welsh-identifying, left-of-centre voters.
But globally a new axis has emerged as a key dividing line in modern politics, that between “the Establishment/status quo” and “ordinary people/radical change”.
Those who campaign only on issues that the political class cares about without capturing the imaginations of ordinary people can expect to be rebuffed at the ballot box.
But popular outsider movements with a simple message of change can mobilise a grassroots movement to defeat the Establishment, whether on the Left (Obama, Corbyn, Syriza, SNP), the Centre (Macron) or the Right (Trump, Brexit, Five Star).
We need to create a radical Welsh populism which turns the old Welsh story – a country mistreated, a people let down – into a new Welsh story of optimism and hope.
It’s this act of political alchemy that almost turned Blaenau Gwent, the least Welsh-speaking and most Leave-voting part of Wales, to Plaid in 2016.
The first step in winning the change voter over to our cause is listening to them, attempting to understand where they are coming from and trying to find the common ground in our view of Wales (and the world) and theirs.
Listening, not lecturing, is the key to political success.
The number of voters we speak with needs to increase tenfold.
We need to identify about a third of those who are a mixture of supporters and the persuadable.
We then need to conduct qualitative and quantitative research to understand what will motivate them to turn out to vote.
We then need to tailor our message on that basis (experimenting along the way to learn what works best) and build a relationship with these supporters over the two years to the election.
All the evidence – work by academics, for example, at Stanford and Yale – suggests that the only way to do this is face to face.
Social media are very good at confirming people’s existing beliefs (or prejudices, a feature ruthlessly exploited by the likes of Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit referendum).
But if you are trying to build hope rather than feeding resentment, then you have to do that the old-fashioned way and speak to them.
To motivate voters we first have to motivate volunteers.
We do that primarily by instilling in them a sense that we have a plausible path to victory.
Most people want to know that the time they are giving up will actually make a difference.
We have to show that we are much more serious and strategic in our activism.
In a sense Leanne in 2012 had the right ideas – “community champions” and “real independence” – but there has been a massive implementation gap.
So to avoid that happening again we need to create a National Organising Institute, Trefnewydd, that will run residential events, one-day conferences, digital webinars and online modules for members and volunteers on the methods of “community organising” that were key to the Obama victory in 2008 (taught by my former professor, the veteran civil rights leader Marshall Ganz at the Kennedy School in Harvard) and again to the Sanders campaign in 2016.
This should focus not just on persuasion techniques, “deep canvassing” and campaign organisation but also on community activism more widely.
And we’ll need to give this army of activists the most up-to-date tools for the job, moving from email to messaging as our principal way of organising eg Hustle is the worldleading peer-to-peer text-messaging service that helped the Bernie Sanders campaign go from just 151 volunteers to 1.5 million registered supporters in a matter of weeks.
We could learn from the CDU, who developed a very effective canvassing app for the 2017 Bundestag election.
In the US there’s also VoterCircle, a platform that enables supporters of any campaign to utilise their personal address books to connect with eligible voters, and Victor Guide, a smart phone app specifically designed for candidates. Qriously, a new smartphone-based survey company, meanwhile, boasts much more accurate and real-time opinion polling.
It successfully predicted Brexit, Trump, and was one of the few to predict the late Corbyn surge.
Success will not be built by the party alone, but by a wider movement of which we are part.
We should invest in that ecosystem, including a pro-independence think-tank and pro-indy media like Nation.Cymru.
Nor will any leader be able to achieve success alone.
We should do what most parties do and have an elected deputy leader to be the “leader within”, focusing on key internal challenges allowing the leader to concentrate on presenting our programme for government as the First Minister in waiting.
These, and other structural changes necessary for victory, for example, the creation of a smaller, more focused and agile Executive Board, should be put to a special Vision for Victory Members’ Conference in January, focused on getting in place everything we need to win in 2021.
That conference should look again at one of the recommendations from Eurfyl ap Gwilym’s review of the 2011 elections.
That looked at creating a new name in English to signal that we are a pan-Wales party.
But what about a new bilingual name to signal that we are the party of Wales’ future?
Dafydd Wigley, in the run-up to the 1999 campaign, said that our challenge was to turn Plaid into the “New Wales Party” which everyone in our country can identify with.
Looking at Labour, whether Corbyn or Drakeford, it sometimes feels as if it’s 1983 and the internet never happened.
If we want our people to choose a New Wales then perhaps it’s time, quite literally, to put it on the ballot.