One of Three

In the next day or two, nigh on eight thousand ballot papers for the Plaid Cymru leadership contest will be coming through our letterboxes. In itself, this huge increase in membership over the past few months has been one of the good things about this election and about our vitality as a party. Of course some will be lapsed members who only pay their subscription in years like this when there's something worth voting about; but many will be old members who left because they were disillusioned about the party, and many new people will have joined too. As I see it, they will have joined in the hope of being able to help transform a party which has languished in the polls since the days when we won seventeen seats in the National Assembly including the Rhondda and Islwyn in 1999.

One big question has stood over Plaid Cymru for the past decade. Why has a party that could make such a breakthrough in 1999 fallen back so far since then? Part of the reason has been our leadership. I don't mean in terms of personality, nor do I wish to single out our leaders alone; instead I believe that we have suffered as a party from a collective leadership that lacked the confidence to articulate our aims, and therefore spent too much time on the back foot. With the bitter taste of 1979 still very real, and only winning the referendum of 1997 by a wafer-thin margin, it was as if we were too scared to go further. We started to hide our aims behind convoluted words.

One thing I am convinced about is that the party as a whole—made up of its individual members and activists at branch and constituency level—has always been very clear about what Plaid Cymru is for. We joined because we wanted to see an independent Wales; a Wales in which we take responsibility for ourselves and our own prosperity rather than letting others make decisions on our behalf. But too many of those we chose as our AMs felt comfortable enough with a half-baked Assembly and lost sight of the final destination. Now, in this leadership election, we have a real chance of changing that and getting a leader and leadership team that is not afraid to speak about independence for Wales being the first and foremost aim of Plaid Cymru.

So I want to take a final look at what the three contenders have got to offer in the hope of helping any Plaid members who are undecided about which way to vote.
 

Dafydd Elis-Thomas

Let's start with something positive: if Dafydd is elected his first aim will be to get Plaid Cymru back into government with the Labour Party.

Being in government is a good thing, so that's a good priority to have, right? Well, my answer is no. Being in government should be the reward you get only as a result of winning enough seats in an election. Getting into government through some sort of back door is a very different thing. There are times when it will work, but it will only work when two conditions are met. First, when a coalition of some sort needs to be made because no one party can form a government on its own; and second, when a clear programme of government can be negotiated to include the things that matter to us as a party. One Wales was a perfect example of both conditions being met: Labour could not form a government on their own, and Plaid negotiated a commitment to hold a referendum on primary lawmaking powers, which we could only get with Labour support because it required a two-thirds majority to get it through the Senedd.

But this time round Labour have enough seats to form a government on their own. They don't need our votes to get any legislation through the Senedd—not that they have many ideas about what they want to legislate on anyway—and there is nothing that Labour could offer us in the way of constitutional advancement because Labour's MPs in Westminster are not in a position to deliver it.

So any attempt to get Plaid into the current Welsh Government will be nothing more than pointless vanity. Of course it will be nice for one or two Plaid AMs to be called ministers and I'm sure they'll run their departments competently. But it will come at the cost of us being able to criticize Labour, and in the election in 2016 we will be unable to present ourselves as an alternative to Labour. We paid a heavy price for the One Wales Agreement in terms of seats lost in May 2011, as is usual for junior partners in a coalition; but it was a price worth paying in order to get primary legislative powers for the Assembly. The referendum was held too late for us to effectively decouple ourselves from Labour as would have been possible if it had been held in autumn 2010. But what on earth is there to gain this time round? We will just give Labour an easy ride for the next four years. If Dafydd becomes leader, Labour will be the ones who benefit, and we will end up paying the electoral price for it in 2016.

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However, I probably need to make it clear that I do believe Dafydd is now in favour of independence for Wales and that my objections to him becoming leader of Plaid Cymru have nothing to do with that. It is his lack of honesty and integrity which disqualify him.

Dafydd's problem is that he very clearly wasn't in favour of independence before, and the first anyone knew about his closet conversion was when he told Martin Shipton about it, as I noted in this post. But rather than admit that he was wrong and had been forced to change his mind, he has tried to make out that this is what he has always believed; and trying to reconcile two irreconcilable positions simply results in him making statements that are little short of gobbledygook.

For all his experience in life we have to be clear that Dafydd is a raw novice about the issue of independence for Wales. He might well have all the enthusiasm of a new convert to the idea; but when it comes to working out a plan to achieve it he's still wet behind the ears.
 

Elin Jones

I think Elin would be a good leader for the party. She is competent, determined and ambitious for Wales. For me this was best illustrated not so much by her being the minister for agriculture and rural affairs—though I think she did that job well—but that over the years of the One Wales agreement she was one of the few AMs (Jocelyn Davies was another) who appeared to understand how the process of getting the referendum on primary lawmaking powers was playing out. There were many times when things looked as if they would go wrong, and the message coming from Ieuan was not as positive or confident as it should have been. In fact his caveats about it when interviewed actually fuelled the impression that the referendum might not have taken place as agreed.

The other positive is that Elin is unequivocally in favour of independence for Wales and has been one of the few AMs who was not afraid to say it. For this reason alone she would be far better than any of the leaders we have had in recent times.

I am in broad agreement with most of what she's said in her campaign, apart from two things. The first was the rather strange condition she set when she said that Plaid Cymru would have to win two Assembly elections before we would get a referendum on independence. My thoughts on that are here. It was a pointless thing to say because we may well not win the 2016 election. Let's say we did much better than ever before and got just over 20 out of 60 seats, but one or two fewer than Labour and still not enough to form a government. If we followed Elin's logic it would mean we couldn't hold a referendum even if we won an absolute majority in 2020.

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But more disturbing than that was what happened when Simon Thomas threw in the towel and she accepted his support on condition that he became her deputy leader. Put bluntly, it was a rather sordid deal. As I noted here, it was not only one that she was in no position to make but one that could pull her down with him.

Now I fully accept that if Elin were to become leader she might well get her choice of deputy leader, not because she has the right to make that decision (it is in fact decided by a vote of Plaid's AMs) but because after any internal election everybody is anxious to make a show of uniting behind the new leader so as to heal any wounds that might have been inflicted during the campaign. But it was an error of judgement to be presumptuous, and the worse presumption was that those AMs who have come out in support of Elin as leader will also want Simon to be her deputy. If Elin wanted to engineer that sort of "joint ticket" the time to do it was before the contest started rather than half way through it.

Now I don't have anything in particular against Simon ... well, except that he did made a complete mess of the manifesto for the last election. On his own merits he might make a half-decent deputy leader, but I certainly don't think he deserves that position just by making a private deal behind closed doors. I think Elin has tied a millstone round her own neck.

In one sense her calculation was good: before Simon jumped the bookies had her trailing behind Leanne, but the deal she made with Simon put her back in front, though only by the tiniest of margins. But let's imagine she does win and think about what the consequences would be for Plaid Cymru as a whole. It seems obvious to me that having both a leader and deputy leader from the same part of Wales would send completely the wrong signal to the electorate. It would do nothing to expand our appeal to the parts of Wales outside our natural heartlands, and indeed would reinforce the idea that we are a party that finds it difficult to reach out to other parts of Wales. There's no problem with Elin becoming leader, but if she does become leader the party will need a deputy leader that's not from her own back yard. Elin on her own is fine, but Elin and Simon are a terrible combination. It was a bad decision, but Elin has tied herself to it and now she can't get rid of him.
 

Leanne Wood

I wasn't at all sure that Leanne would put her hat into the ring for this election contest. She left it late, and it was a bit of a surprise to me that she did so, but certainly a very pleasant surprise.

For me, she is an ideal leader for the party because she has been in the forefront of developing ideas. For too long we have had leaders who have lagged several steps behind the party as a whole. But in Leanne we have someone who has a record of actively developing policy ideas, someone who is usually a few steps ahead ... which is, after all, what a leader is meant to be. During the course of this campaign we have heard a lot about her Greenprint for the Valleys, but her work on the Justice system in Making Our Communities Safer was impressive too.

Make no mistake, the future of Plaid Cymru depends on our ideas for Wales. Other parties are basically about working within the existing structures, and find it difficult to see beyond those boundaries. Our business is to transform Wales, and without that transformational agenda we are nothing. The challenge for us is to convince others that tinkering around the edges of our current constitutional settlement—maybe devolving a few more powers and responsibilities from Westminster every few years—will do nothing to reverse our continuous, slow economic decline over the last twenty or thirty years. We need more radical solutions.

Leanne has that vision, the ability to flesh out the detail and the ability to communicate it. If we're looking for an inspirational leader then she is by far the best choice available to us, and in particular our best chance of making the breakthroughs we need to become the government of Wales. In concrete terms, we must beat Labour in their heartlands to do it. We will not do it unless we can win in places like the Rhondda and Islwyn as we did in 1999, or unless we can also win places like Caerffili and Neath. So often this is portrayed as us having to out-Labour Labour, as if Labour would be fine if only it hadn't systematically abandoned most of the ideals of the people it was formed to represent. But it is much more simple than that, it is about having better ideas about how to make us a fairer and more prosperous society. As everybody can now see all too clearly, being in the One Wales Government lent Labour a sense of direction and purpose; but on their own and with a slow-moving, lack-lustre leader, Labour are struggling to come up with anything that will move Wales forward.
 

Vote wisely

In a nutshell, these are our choices as party members. If we elect Dafydd, we will ruin ourselves as a party. It will take many years to pick up the pieces again, if at all.

If we elect Elin, we will get a better party than we've had for some time. Better because we will have a leader that agrees with and supports Plaid Cymru's aims and policies. For all Ieuan's good qualities, it was often embarrassing to have a leader that didn't agree with some of our key policies and who could hardly bring himself to mention the word "independence". Elin will get my second preference for that reason. There is absolutely no point in putting Elin last because it will not help Leanne one way or the other.

But if we elect Leanne, we will get a party that is capable of reaching into Labour's heartlands, leading the next Welsh government and leading Wales to independence.