The Fascist Party in Wales? Plaid Cymru, Welsh Nationalism and the Accusation of Fascism by Richard Wyn Jones

Author:Richard Wyn Jones [Jones, Richard Wyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fascism & Totalitarianism, Political Ideologies, Political Parties, Political Science, Nationalism & Patriotism, Political Process
ISBN: 9781783160570
Google: j2OuBwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 23098895
Publisher: Not Avail
Published: 2014-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

5

Welsh Political Culture

‘No party can throw a stone at another. No party comes clean.’1 These are the words of the great Labour leader, Ernest Bevin, reflecting on the attitudes of the British political parties towards international affairs during the interwar years. His was a fair and accurate verdict. What is interesting in the present context is the fact that the sins of Plaid Cymru (actual or alleged) during the 1930s have received and continue to receive a disproportionate amount of attention in comparison to the behaviour of other political parties. Who, after all, reproaches contemporary Liberal Democrats for the policies and positions of a party icon such as Lloyd George? Is Labour criticised for its naivety regarding Nazi Germany, or for its votes against rearmament, or for its actual stance on the Spanish Civil War, or, indeed, for the sympathy that existed among some of its supporters for the Soviet Union? And so on. There are multiple examples of behaviour from the period which one might use to castigate the main parties should one wish to do so. The point to note is that Plaid Cymru seems consistently to have been judged according to very different criteria from these political opponents. Plaid Cymru has been condemned in a manner that is either entirely unfair – on the basis of accusations that are utterly unfounded – or for errors that were common across the political spectrum.2 Put simply, double standards are being applied. How might this be explained?

How, indeed, do we account for the fact that the alleged ‘Fascism’ of Plaid Cymru has received far more attention than the interwar electoral success of actual Fascists in Wales? At the 1931 general election, the New Party candidate Sellick Davies won over 10,000 votes in Merthyr Tydfil. The New Party had been founded by Oswald Mosley after he had left the Labour Party, and it was on a clearly Fascist trajectory by 1931.3 The party enjoyed its biggest success in Merthyr. It succeeded in harvesting more votes in that single constituency than the total number of votes cast for Plaid Cymru in every parliamentary election it contested before 1945. Jeffrey Hamm from Ebbw Vale was an active member of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and became one of Mosley’s most trusted lieutenants in the years following the Second World War.4 It seems probable that Glyn Williams was also a Welshman. It was Williams who introduced military uniforms, salutes, flags and badges to the New Party youth movement that would go on to form the core of the BUF’s Blackshirts. One might expect that any serious reckoning with Fascism in Wales would give due attention to that remarkable result in Merthyr or to the likes of Davies, Hamm and Williams. The fact is, however, that almost nothing has been written about them.5 Indeed, it is hard not to conclude that there has been an almost wilful reluctance to engage with the historical facts about Fascism in Wales.6 Instead it seems that commentators have

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