A perennial unanswered question

Tweet

Some questions never really go away, although they can be framed in different terms as the context changes.  The statement by Cynog Dafis this week draws attention to a case in point.

I cannot remember a time when there was not an ongoing debate within Plaid about whether the party existed primarily to bring about change by gaining support, and ultimately power, itself, or whether its main purpose was to act as an effective lobby, and a sufficiently strong political threat, so that others would implement the constitutional change it sought.  (And there was also, of course, a complementary debate about the best way of achieving whichever of those aims was the most appropriate.)

In practice, up until 1999 at least, lack of electoral success meant that it was only actually capable of following the second of those two paths.  Whether it did so successfully is a moot point.  I believe that it was successful; the existence of a small and intermittently well-organised party, which had the intellectual clout and political courage to make the arguments consistently over a lengthy period was, in my view, a key factor in the journey Wales took up to the 1997 referendum.

Others might argue that Labour would have taken the same path anyway, or that having to deal with a nationalist challenge actually strengthened the hand of the anti-devolutionists within Labour, or even that Labour might have got there more quickly had Plaid disbanded itself and encouraged its members to join the Labour Party and fight from within. 

Regardless of what Marx said, we only get to live history once; we don’t have the luxury of trying it again in two different ways to see which worked best.  All of us will bring our own perspective and judgement to our interpretation of what happened and why.  But I'm convinced that it was a successful approach.

Whatever, the establishment of a national legislature in 1999, even if it didn’t look like a legislature at the time, had to be a turning point.  The context, and the way the question was framed, inevitably changed. 

Gaining power in London was never an option for Plaid; the best that could be hoped for was to gain all, or at least a majority, of the Welsh seats in the UK Parliament, in the way that Irish Nationalists had done decades earlier.  But gaining power in the National Assembly was, at least theoretically, a possibility, and the stunning and, to be honest, unexpected electoral success in the first Assembly elections in 1999 made it look a realistic possibility within the foreseeable future.

But still the party never really answered the question about what it was for.  Indeed, at one level, the possibility of forming a government within the new institution even made the question harder for the party.  A party of government needs a consistent policy platform; it needs to decide what sort of ideology it espouses, and although Plaid had adopted a broadly ‘left’ policy platform over many years, it still retained a number of members who were naturally averse to adopting any detailed policies beyond the simple demand for independence.

The deposing of one leader and the election of a new one in 2000 complicated the question further.  The members elected a leader who was clearly, shall we say, ‘uncomfortable’ with the aim of independence, whilst still themselves clinging to the notion that independence was the party’s main goal.  The only possible outcome from that was to fudge the question.

In the sense of keeping the party united, fudging worked, after a fashion, until the next turning point in 2007.  (It clearly didn’t work electorally, however.  It left people – including at times many of the party’s own members – confused as to what the party was for, and encouraged the criticism that the party was being dishonest about its own aims, or even hiding them from the public.)

Part of the problem with the decision to enter government in 2007 was the failure to discuss, let alone answer, that perennial question about what the party was for.  The members supported going into coalition on a wave of optimism (and would have done exactly the same for the so-called ‘rainbow’ had it not been for the fortunate and timely incompetence of the Lib Dems.)

I suspected at the time, however, that the fact that the party had so enthusiastically agreed to it would be interpreted by some as being an answer, of sorts, to the question.  And who can blame them?  The party had overwhelmingly decided to become a ‘party of government’ after all, even if the implications of that decision were neither spelled out nor discussed.  The managerial agenda for 2011 can be seen as almost inevitable from that perspective.

In 2007, the framing of the question had effectively been changed again, so much so that I’m not sure that it was even recognised by all as being the same question.  Supporters of coalition turned the question into “do you want to be in government or do you want to be in opposition?”.  Posed like that, which politician would not choose government?  It’s a no brainer; one can always achieve more within the term of an Assembly by being part of the government than by being part of the opposition.

It was, and is, however, an over-simplification of the question.  ‘Choosing opposition’ is not the same thing as ‘choosing not to join this government at this point in time’, and it was misleading to paint it as such, which is what proponents of both coalition options did.  And ‘within the term of an Assembly’ is a massive constraint on political horizons.  But having managed to frame the question in a way which helped to get the answer that they wanted, I repeat, who can blame them for assuming that they’d been given a rather more general answer?

Those who see Plaid as a natural coalition partner for Labour are merely following the logic of that apparent decision in 2007 to its conclusion, and are being entirely consistent in so doing.  But that leads in turn to another reframing of the question.  If Plaid’s main purpose is to influence the Labour Party on the detail of policy in the short to medium term, then isn’t the best way to do that from within the Labour Party itself?