Explain these four numbers: 18; 9; 97; 6,721. That was a question in the pub quiz in my local, the Star in Talybont, not long ago. The good folks, hunched over their pints and answer-papers, scratched their heads. The funny thing is, although a fair few of us could say where Owain Glyndwr set up his 15th-century parliament, this one caught most of us out.
The answer is that on 18 September 1997, the Welsh people voted to establish the new Assembly by a majority of 6,721 votes.
Which leads me to think that tourist trails and our heritage industry, God help us, have been better at impressing themselves on the popular imagination than recent seismic events. Not so for everybody. Some jubilant referendum bibbers had T-shirts made with that magical skin-of-our-teeth majority printed on them. “Yes” campaigners with hangovers the size of the century got a bill from the Park Hotel in Cardiff for the damage their celebrations caused.
And me? I found referendum night, via television, vastly more fun than the last general election, and that is saying something. We all remember the Portillo Moment, and Rifkind’s crazed rictus. But if you laid all the humiliated Tories end to end (something they’ve probably already done themselves in private), I’d still prefer to see that last referendum result coming in from Carmarthen to turn “No” into “Yes” at the very death. It was – and here comes the inevitable simile which I promise I won’t repeat – like kicking the conversion to turn the game by one point during injury time.
No, it was more important than that. The historian Gwyn Williams said that Wales is a place the Welsh invent. If they want to. The morning after the referendum, I wandered around Brecon market in a blissful daze, accidentally bought a new guitar, then went home and gave my kids a tenner each before discovering I was broke. No, this isn’t a game. History, like geology, comprises small accretions and erosions, huge pressures shifting in slow motion. Then occasionally there are moments of immediately apprehended change, like this one. On that 18 September, something definitely happened, an Event.
But what? That depends. At the very least the Welsh Office will in some measure be democratised. Its non-democratic nature didn’t really matter in the sixties and seventies when the balance of power shifted between only marginally distinct Labour and Conservative governments. But when England voted in a far-right government in 1979 and dragged us and the Scots with it, things changed. Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister to appoint a Welsh secretary who didn’t represent a Welsh constituency – a proposition some of us had naively supposed unthinkable. At first it was Peter Walker, who schmoozed after investment and toddled through the carnage of early Thatcherism, cutting tapes and unveiling plaques, and avoiding awkward press interviews. Then we had David Hunt (who became a notable example of rhyming slang). Then the nadir of John Redwood. The last refused to sign the Welsh parts of bilingual documents and redrafted planning policy without taking any account of distinctive Welsh conditions, making it even more laissez-faire than the English and Scottish set-up. The video clip in which he attempts to mouth the words of “Hen Wlad fy Nhadau” is hilarious and horrifying. One lip-reader claims he was reciting a passage from Milton Friedman in Vulcan. It was the best party political broadcast Plaid Cymru ever had.
Under Thatcher it became clear that the secretary of state for Wales was a kind of governor-general with rather a lot of power and no accountability to the people he governed.
At the very least, the assembly will make it harder for London to impose its viceroys in this way. There will have to be more open consideration of such matters as William Hague’s securing of Korean investment in Newport just before the Korean economy crashed. The Arts Council of Wales’s current attempt to slash community and educational theatre funding would also stand a chance of getting proper scrutiny. It is widely supposed among people in the business that the council is scurrying to gets its drama changes through now, with only token consultation, in order to avoid answering to the assembly.
But Tony Blair’s use of union block votes to help Alun Michael to the leadership, over the left’s favourite, Rhodri Morgan, drops the hint that the viceroy syndrome could return. And the tension between London Labour and Welsh Labour is just a muted version of the drama that has been played out on many levels and over many years in Wales: the impulse to develop national institutions and modes of being struggles against an assimilative Anglocentric inertia or indifference or hostility. When bands such as the Stereophonics or Catatonia fly a Red Dragon and sing about thanking the Lord for being Welsh, it isn’t some postmodern joke. They are defying those persistent (though admittedly few) quasi-racist, anti-Welsh comments in the press, in which allegedly alternative comedians who affect to sneer at Bernard Manning expect you to guffaw with them when they tell you that you shag sheep and that you haven’t learnt how to use toilet paper.
And some of this inertia and indifference – if not the hostility – exists inside Wales. For instance, the English-born art historian Peter Lord, by dint of pamphleteering and persistent and brilliant academic research, has virtually embarrassed the National Museum of Wales into making some real attempt to reflect and display Welsh visual culture. Pressure groups and language campaigners are very familiar with the struggle to get some local authorities – usually Labour authorities – to make adequate provision for bilingual education.
Labour itself remains in two minds about devolution. Many of the doubters are keeping their traps shut. The only serious opposition to Labour in Wales is Plaid Cymru. In the assembly elections, where we each have two votes, a lot of us may cast one for Labour and the other for Plaid, and Labour knows it.
The result has been an attempt to portray the nationalists as rabid separatists. The sophisticated theoretical positions taken up by various Plaid patriarchs on ideas like independence and self- government have been coarsened. Plaid’s long-held and widely understood policy of constitutional gradualism for developing greater autonomy is portrayed as if it were some hidden agenda. In Keywords, Raymond Williams points out that “internationalism” isn’t the opposite of “nationalism in the context of a subordinate political group seeking its own distinct identity”. Some of the attacks on Plaid, wittingly or unwittingly, draw on that false opposition.
To me, it’s the Tory idea of “saving the Union” that hints at the darker kind of nationalism, or rather nation-statism, which is becoming redundant in this part of Europe, leaning on that metaphysical entity beloved of right-wing Eurosceptics, “sovereignty” – a concept Plaid eschewed long ago.
Yet some Labour figures are radical enough and nationalist enough to sit quite comfortably inside Plaid – Paul Flynn springs to mind, though he’s not an assembly candidate, and Rhodri Morgan and Ron Davies, viewed from a suitable, quite small distance, could fit the bill. Davies’s picture of an inclusive politics and his representing devolution as a process just starting rather than an event quickly finished sounds strangely similar to the kind of future Plaid has been trying to construct for years. Even the language question no longer divides the two parties – officially, at least – and it’s left to the Tory rump to play that card as an attempt at divisiveness in its efforts to reconstruct.
For me, the referendum was about whether we wanted to reinvent ourselves in the arena of real politics. On reflection, a “no” vote wouldn’t have been the end of it all – perhaps I should have given my sons only a fiver – but it would have pointed another spectral finger down the road towards our becoming nothing more than an outpost on a tourist trail, a heritage park with a few broken castles and tapes of old songs. The actual result has been accepted surprisingly swiftly and become the stuff of pub-quiz trivia.
In spite of the usual expressions of cynicism and apathy, I’d say people are at least as clued in about this business as they would be in a general election. The tiny, inadequate press have made an impressive effort to cover the campaigns. The level of debate I’ve heard among voters, if not always among candidates, has been high – the ticket-splitting possibilities of the two-vote system seems to invite political sophistication. There’s just a chance that once the election posturing is over, we’ll get some grown-up, consensual policy-making. The assembly, for all its limitations, will be about how we reinvent ourselves as “a subordinate political group”. It can also be about how we renegotiate that word “subordinate”. If we want it to be.
Christopher Meredith’s novels include “Shifts”, “Griffri” and “Sidereal Time”. He teaches at the University of Glamorgan
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