Personally, I
agree with Elfyn and think Leanne is wrong on this one. A party like Plaid has to choose between
engaging with the institutions of the state and keeping them at arm’s length. There are sound arguments for abstentionism,
which was long a popular position amongst Irish nationalists. However, there is little history of
abstentionism in Wales, and it seems to me that if you’re going to engage with
some institutions of the state you may as well engage with all of them and
exercise as much influence as you possibly can.
On the substance
of the critique of the existence and nature of the House of Lords itself however, it would
be hard to find any difference between Leanne and myself. The fear is that appointing members serves to
legitimise the institution, but a party which claims only to enter the House of
Commons in order to secure Wales’ withdrawal from it can surely apply exactly
the same argument to any other institution.
Whatever, the
real question which I wish to address here is the mysterious way in which the
institutions of the British establishment work when it comes to the appointment
of peers of the realm.
When Plaid
chose three nominees for peerages (Dafydd Wigley, Eurfyl ap Gwilym, and Janet
Davies), their details were passed through the murky “usual channels” to number
10 - and the then prime minister studiously ignored them. That was, for a while, the end of the
story. I – and I think many others –
believed that we had made our nominations, and that Brown was simply blocking
them.
It turned out
that we hadn’t actually “nominated” anyone at all; the PM was not ignoring our nominations
because there were no nominations to ignore.
This only became clear after the election of Cameron as Prime
Minister.
Shortly after Cameron
came to power, Ieuan Wyn Jones had an opportunity to lobby him for the
appointment of Dafydd Wigley to the House of Lords. (Although of course Dafydd had by then
withdrawn his name, and was no longer one of Plaid’s nominees – but that’s
another story). Nods were nodded, winks were
winked, it was made clear that the party would be allowed to submit one nomination, and in June 2010 I found myself presented with a nomination paper to
complete and sign (political nominations have to be completed by party chairs - a revelation to me).
I really hadn’t realised that there was a formal channel available for submitting
nominations to an allegedly independent panel.
Perhaps I should have known that – it would be a fair criticism of me
that I hadn’t even made the effort to identify whether there was a formal
process – but I’ll admit that I didn’t.
Anyway, after a brief hiatus while the NEC agreed to reinstate Dafydd Wigley as a party nominee - a precondition to my signing any nomination - the form
was duly completed and submitted and, hey presto, three months later Dafydd’s
peerage was duly confirmed after the said “independent panel” had given it
their careful consideration. In essence,
despite the lengthy period which appeared to be passing from a public
perspective, the actual period between formal nomination and appointment was a
very short one.
It neatly
illustrates the difference between the written-down formal process - which is
the submission of a form, consideration by an independent panel, and
appointment or rejection; and the actual process – which depends on a series of
nods and winks from the right people before you even get to the starting
block.
Perhaps we
should have challenged that more strongly at the time. With the benefit of hindsight – and hindsight
is always a wonderful thing – I think we should have accepted the nod
and the wink, but pushed the boundaries by making three nominations at that
point rather than just the one. That
would really have forced the establishment to either accept or else formally
reject our nominations, rather than two of them remaining in a strange and
continuing sort of limbo.
However we did
not do that, and unless the other two nominations have been formally submitted
since I stood down as Plaid’s chair in July 2010 (completing Wigley’s
nomination was one of my final acts), I suspect that the party has only ever
nominated one candidate. So whilst I
agree with the substance of what Elfyn says, in that Plaid should be more
strongly represented in the second chamber, I’m not convinced that Plaid itself
could not do more to achieve that if it really wanted to. But that probably takes us right back to the
question of whether Elfyn was speaking for his leader or not…
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