A real success of this independence thing

Plaid Wrecsam beat me to it with the video, but it's worth showing again.

     

You seem to have made a real success of this independence thing. Well done,
and thanks ...

... thanks for showing us how to do it.

Well, that was a slightly paraphrased ending. I was going to say, thanks for giving us the idea, but I think it was probably the other way round.

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As we can read in this article from the Harvard Gazette, Adam was chosen to give this year's Graduate Oration. Perhaps he, and we, should be grateful that he wasn't chosen to give the Latin Oration.

Adam Price, Graduate Oration

   

Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) student Adam Price is a seasoned public speaker. But one thing will be different when he stands to give this year’s graduate oration: He’ll have receptive listeners.

“I’m very used to being heckled,” said Price, a former British member of Parliament who served two terms with the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru. “I was a member of a party of three, so I didn’t have many friends in the audience.”

He’ll talk about the importance of independent thinking, something Price, 42, values highly. The son of a coal miner, he went into politics to fight for his homeland of Wales, which never recovered economically from the decline of the steel and coal industries.

“It’s a rare and cherished thing in politics to be able to represent the people you went to school with,” he said.

Price made bigger waves in 2004 when he led the charge to impeach then-Prime Minister Tony Blair for leading Britain into the Iraq War under false pretenses. He surprised observers by announcing he wouldn’t run again in 2010, choosing to leave his almost-guaranteed seat in Parliament for HKS’s Mid-Career Master in Public Administration program.

“We [in Wales] would like to take a leaf out of America’s book and assert our own right to self-determination,” he said. “Half the reason I came here was to learn how you did it.”

Price plans to stay in Cambridge for another year to complete a fellowship at HKS’s Center for International Development, where he will study the economic plight of small nations. He hopes to apply that knowledge when he returns to Wales.

“I’d like to be a bridge between these incredible, exciting new ideas being generated here and the world,” he said.

Harvard Gazette

For those who were speculating about his early return, it looks like he'll be staying in Harvard for another year.