Read on Twitter
In the 70s, people within the Labour Party were happy to say that devolution would be rife with anti-Englishness and 'English haters'. It's never been about Scotland, nor has it been about Wales. They've always seen our self-governance as a personal attack. https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1341061004415922178
I'm doing some reading and have just stumbled upon some quotes through time from Labour (or those representing them) about Plaid and the SNP. Short thread to follow.
Labour's response to the SNP's electoral successes in the 1974 election in securing MPs in former Conservative constituencies was to call them 'Tartan Tories'... Scottish Labour, I should add.
It turned out that the SNP found their success not from defecting Tory voters, but instead former Labour voters seeing SNP as the only hopeful progressive party to overturn them.
Labour of the 1930s called the still young Plaid Cymru 'pro-fascist rabble'. At this point of time, calling Plaid a party was debatable and they had no formal policy to speak of other than for there to be space for a Welsh language society managing its own affairs.
This was coming at a time where the Welsh language was not long seeing itself become a minority language in its native country.
They treated them as a 'fringe movement of extremists' up to 1966, when a shock by-election win for Plaid was the start of the party winning seats at general elections.
By the 70s the more moderated but still dismissive view of Plaid being the 'party of academic dreamers' was put out by Labour party members. This was also the decade of the attacks on devolution prior to the 1979 referendum - Labour were fiercely against it.
When negotiating the coalition government of the National Assembly of 2007, a leaked Labour document described Plaid as âleaderless, rudderless and hopelessâ and âa shambles which could not run a cockle stall, let
alone a countryâ- more leaning on national stereotypes negatively.
alone a countryâ- more leaning on national stereotypes negatively.
In May of this year FM Mark Drakeford said that Welsh nationalism is an âinherently right-wing creedâ and that people must choose between it and socialism. This despite the major party of Welsh nationalism being Plaid, a party consistently offering more socialist manifestos.
In other words, Labour are still spitting out the same rubbish about parties that believe nations can govern themselves now as they did nearly a century ago - that they're incompetent right-wing lunatics that live up to childish self-hating national stereotypes.
When that's been the level of discourse offered for generations, I don't know why anyone would ever wish to hear what Labour have to say about independence.
