The road to independence

Tweet When I first joined Plaid Cymru, back in 1971, the plan seemed to be fairly clear.  ‘All’ that we needed to do was win a majority of votes and seats in a General Election and Wales would become a self-governing nation (the word ‘independence’ being taboo back then, although ‘self-government’ effectively meant the same thing).  How the one would lead to the other was rather less well-defined; the more revolutionary elements talked of withdrawing from Westminster and setting up a Welsh parliament, whilst the more level-headed talked of a mandate for opening negotiations.

It wasn’t the most brilliant or well thought-through of plans (and there was no plan B).  But given how far away from the elusive majority the party was, it was as good as it needed to be.  And the core of it was that independence would come about by majority will of the Welsh people expressed through the ballot box by voting for a party which proposed self-government.  As we’ve seen this year in Scotland, even winning all, or nearly all, of the seats does not, in itself, give a mandate for independence, unless independence is a core element of the proposition put to the electors by the winning party; but the idea that independence – in whatever words were chosen to describe it – wasn’t core to the election appeal would have been a very strange one to most of us back in the 1970s.

The establishment of the Assembly in 1999 opened the possibility of there being a plan B.  Having a democratically elected all-Wales body meant that a more gradualist approach was possible through the accretion over time of more powers to an existing institution.  It was what Kinnock and others referred to as the slippery slope to independence, of course.  I’m not sure that I ever really disagreed with the idea that the slope was a slippery one; my disagreement was more about where on the slope we were standing and which way we were trying to move.  For them, we were at the top facing an easy slide downwards; for me we were close to the bottom, trying to push a heavy load up.  The slope was still just as slippery.

The point is that adding power to an existing body is easier to do, in principle, than establishing that body in the first place, but it still requires the consent of the people.  And, if my memory of history is broadly correct, as a general rule the route to independence of former colonies (where it wasn’t a violent one) was usually by the assumption of more power by a pre-existing body – either with or without the prior consent of the colonial power.

In Scotland, the SNP has fought Scottish parliamentary elections on a very clear platform of calling a referendum on independence.  They couldn’t call the referendum after the 2007 election because they were a minority government and there was a parliamentary majority against holding a referendum of the sort.  But given a clear overall parliamentary majority for a referendum following the 2011 election, the road was open for the vote which was held last year.  And the result was better than many would have anticipated at the time of the 2007 election.

What happens next is yet to be seen.  Nicola Sturgeon has been quite clear that a further referendum will happen if, and only if, the Scottish people vote into power a majority in the Scottish parliament committed to holding one.  And at this stage, it’s far from certain that the SNP manifesto for 2016 will include such a commitment.  Even if it does, it is likely to be predicated on a condition that there has to be some significant change first (such as an English vote to leave the EU whilst the Scots vote to stay).  I think she’s right to be cautious – rushing into, and potentially losing, a second referendum in such short order would be a bigger setback than waiting a little longer and winning.  But I remain convinced that it is now only a matter of timing.

Where does that leave Wales?  Plaid has had no such commitment to a referendum in its Assembly manifestos to date.  Even if the party had won a majority and formed the government after any election to the Assembly, it would have had no mandate to call for a referendum.  And it seems unlikely to me that the party will be including such a commitment in its manifesto for next year’s election either; indeed, the party’s current position, as I understand it, is that Wales is too poor even to consider the question at this stage, and that it should remain a distant aspiration.

The process by which we become sufficiently unpoor for that to change is as unclear as the criteria which are to be used to judge whether our degree of poorness has been sufficiently reduced.  The judgement as to when we will become sufficiently unpoor looks as arbitrary as the decision to announce that we are currently too poor.  I find it hard to escape the conclusion that the argument for independence will not be put unless it has already been won; we won’t be offered an independence referendum by any party until we’ve already declared through the ballot box that we want it.  It’s a bit of a Catch 22.

Coupled with the wholly foreseeable reluctance of the most unionist party of all (which is celebrating an increase in support in Wales in last week’s election), we seem to be condemned to an even more gradualist approach.  I don’t doubt that we will hear loud complaints in the months to come about Wales only being given the crumbs when it comes to new powers, but if all we ask for is crumbs why should we expect more?