Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP's way of keeping happy the vocal minority of diehard Trots in their basically Tory party, had the effrontery, when addressing the Tartan Tory Conference, to invoke Aneurin Bevan, a ferocious Unionist who ridicule of the first parliamentary Welsh Day on the grounds that "Welsh coal is the same as English coal and Welsh sheep are the same as English sheep".
His own successors - people like Leo Abse and the young Neil Kinnock (as well as Scots like George Cunningham, Tam Dalyell and Brian Wilson)- accurately predicted, among much else, that trade union bargaining power would collapse on devolution. So it has done.
That was why Old Labour was basically and even virulently against it: Callaghan was heading a minority government and had to do things he didn't really want to do, including this; much of the Hard Left was all in favour of weakening the union great and good in those days, and indeed still is today; the SDP was never more than lukewarm about devolution, and Cunningham even joined it; and so on.
And that was why New Labour was all in favour of it.
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When did Nicola Sturgeon address the Tory Conference? And why?
ReplyDeleteSge addressed a much more right-wing party than that, the party until very recently calling for pretty much no regulation at all of the Scottish financial services sector.
ReplyDeleteIs this the Nye Bevan who publicly accused Michael Heseltine of being an "Englishman" at a public rally in the 1950's?
ReplyDeleteNever one to play the petty nationalist card eh?
Something else entirely, as you understand perfectly well.
ReplyDeleteBut it does illustrate an important point: you simply cannot be a Welsh or Scottish nationalist, including in the sense in which either term has been used for most of its history, and be in favour of separatism (including the weird ghettoisation that is devolution). Nothing could be more utterly contrary to either the Welsh or the Scottish national interest.
You certainly don't have to like the English. Even if your main aim in politics is to milk the English of every penny, then you still have to be a Unionist in order to do it.
Welshness is a strange thing. It is nowhere near as clear cut as Scottishness. There are lots of Wannabe Welsh and lots of Wish They Weren't Welsh. In that context, Bevan's remark about Heseltine makes sense. But you have to know Wales to understand it.
ReplyDeleteIf I may, consider the case of R S Thomas, bullied at school for his Englishness, a speaker of English (and presumably also of Welsh) without the slightest hint of a Welsh accent, self-taught Welsh out of an academic book when already well into his twenties, so bad at it that many decades later a farming parishioner asked him in all seriousness if he was a resettled German PoW, politely derided (if that is possible) on the Welsh verse scene for his occasional attempts to write in Welsh, and given to demanding that Anglicisms be purged from the shops of his native Welsh-speaking flock.
ReplyDeleteOn one notable occasion, he barged into the greengrocer's and informed him that, according to some etymological effort of his own, the correct term for peaches in Welsh was "hairy plums" (but in Welsh, of course), so that the use of the imported English word should be discontinued. "Er, yes, Vicar..."
I am not, however, so sure that Scottishness is all that much easier to identify or define. Of course it is in the case of, say, Gordon Brown. But Tony Blair was an entirely different matter. As is David Cameron.