It was in Cambria, interviewed as a rather earnest young-ish man-in-a-hurry by the then editor, Henry Jones-Davies, that I declared to all the world that I intended to limit myself to just two terms at Westminster. I was not a “House of Commons man”, I remember opining, a little self-importantly.
Wind the clock forward and I am indeed a fully decommissioned ex-MP after just two terms – shock horror, politician fulfils promise! – and the now ex-editor has himself planted his own flag among the massed ranks of would-be parliamentarians. That turn-around is surely what politics in a democracy is all about: a constant turnover of people and ideas. The weak are a long time in politics, too long: three cheers for two-term limits!
There are times, of course, when anyone must ask themselves, why bother at all? The lot of an MP was famously described by the late Julian Critchley as long hours, low pay and no sex. Of course, if Julian Critchley ever visited West Wales then he might have known what low pay really meant, but he was probably on safer ground when he said that the only safe pleasure for a politician was a bag of boiled sweets. To aspire to be a public representative is to expose yourself to ridicule, contempt, prurience, and worst of all, indifference.
So why do we do it? Each party has a different answer to that very searching question. In the case of Plaid which in any event as always seen itself as more than a mere party but a movement, we do it because we feel we must. In the words of T.H. Parry-Williams: Ni Allaf Ddianc Rhag Hon! Many of us who are Welsh Nationalists dream of what life might have been like if we hadn’t been born into a country that lacks the basic dignity that can only come through the freedom to make one’s own mistakes and, succeed by learning from them; whose economy hadn’t languished so long in the doldrums our people learn that it is normal to be poor;whose very language and culture hadn’t been under threat for so long that our collective consciousness has all the carefree vitality of the terminally ill. But we’re Welsh.

Denying the political implications of Being Welsh for us Welsh Nationalists is no more feasible than sloughing off our own skin. Here We Stand: We Can Do No Other.

Ordinary politics can be reduced to that mechanistic formula: who does what to whom. But in Wales this takes on a different meaning as we have always ended up on the sharp end of that particular equation: our country raped, our valleys drowned, our industries and railway lines closed, our people defeated and dispossessed.
In Westminster at best, it all too often seems, we are in the business of merely softening those blows. Did I do my bit during my time of “doing good and resisting evil” in that prodigal Irishman Burke’s well-worn phrase. I hope so. Three thousand Welsh steel workers and their families have at least the lion’s share of their robbed pensions – though certainly not the 100% they deserve – thanks to a long forgotten European directive that this insomniac found via Google in Ammanford at three in the morning. Important though they undoubtedly are in their own right, it is also through these little victories that we reawaken in our nation our belief in ourselves as a nation. For surely politics must be for us more than just a dented shield, but the sharpened sword that cuts a swathe through history. Our history. Our future, if we choose it.
One of my final ambitions I achieved only a few weeks ago and that was to get Brecht quoted in a paper I have known and loved since I began to read newspapers:the South Wales Guardian. Asked if I would like one day to lead my party then I quoted Galileo at the end of the play of the same name, when one once character bemoans: “pity the land without heroes”, and Galileo deftly replies, “no pity the land that needs them”. What we need is not a Mab Darogan, but three dozen maiden speeches that make a stand for Wales: David Jones – the poet not the politician – was right, it’s we-the-people that are the sleeping lord.

So draw Caledfwlch from its sheath, Like destiny itself, it lies in our hands.

By Adam Price

Article republished from Cambria Magazine with permission.