Fanfares and vol-au-vents

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I attended my first ever Plaid Cymru annual conference in 1971, at Porthcawl.  The event was exciting, if more than a little disorganised.  I met many people who have influenced my politics for the first time at the event, including Dr Phil - who needed to borrow my comb as he rushed past on the way from the street to the podium where he was due to speak.  That was in the days when he had hair – not that any comb ever made any difference to the appearance of his hair!

One of the others whom I met for the first time was Harri Webb.  Nationalist, socialist, republican – and, of course, poet.  I was not the only nationalist in the class of ’71 who found him an inspiring figure, even if much of what he said was not exactly to the taste of the party establishment of the day.

He was one of those characters who were larger than life.  Indeed, he was large in more ways than one – ferrying him home to Aberpennar after a ‘Poems and Pints’ evening in Dinas Powys a few years later was when I discovered that the seat belts on an Austin 1100 had never been designed with the not insubstantial girth of someone like Harri in mind.

He wasn’t what anyone would ever have called a ‘moderate’ by any means; his talk, like that of others in that era, was of revolution rather than evolution.  He was one of those who provided a hard edge to nationalist thinking, but he was never destined to play much of a practical part in building a movement.

Some of the excitement died in 1979 – indeed, many of the class of ’71 departed in the lean years which followed. Those of us who did not sought instead to build an effective, organised party which could engage more positively with electoral politics.  Much time and energy within Plaid over the years was expended on that task in one way or another, and the result of the efforts of many people over many years has been to create a much more effective political arm for the national movement than ever existed previously.

The aim, though, was never to lose that passion which Harri displayed, albeit sometimes to excess.  It was, rather, to combine idealism with pragmatism in order to be able to better present the message, not change it.  We wanted to be effective, yet remain a democratic party, owned and controlled by the members; to complement rather than replace what had gone before.  In seeking to professionalise that party’s activities, it was never any part of my objectives to use ‘professional’ in its tighter meaning, and to put the control of party largely into the hands of the ‘professional’ politicians.

Yet somehow that is largely what has happened.  Yesterday’s opening of the Assembly stirred more than a few memories, and there are some interesting comparisons which struck me.

The class of ’71 regularly railed at the way in which the Government could afford military bands but could not afford to meet more down-to-earth needs.  The class of ’11 watches the military bands performing outside the Senedd.

The class of ’71 campaigned against low-flying jets disrupting the peace of Wales.  The class of ’11 admires them flying past the Senedd.

The class of ’71 ridiculed and scorned the ruritanian anachronisms of heraldry, fanfares and pomp.  The class of ’11 watches in awe as the Herald of Wales leads the monarch out of the Senedd, and listens to a new fanfare especially commissioned for the event.

I could go on.  Harri wrote a poem called “Merlin’s Prophecy 1969”, which reads:

One day, when Wales is free and prosperous

And dull, they’ll all be wishing they were us.

We’re a long way off prosperity (other than in the relative sense so clumsily referred to by Peter Hain a few years ago); and we’re not exactly free yet; but nationalist politics has become a great deal duller since then.  It’s not quite as it was foreseen.  But then, somehow, I don’t think that many in the class of ’71 ever expected that the road to independence would be paved with fanfares and vol-au-vents either.  Unless, of course, we’ve somehow taken a wrong turning somewhere along the way.