History’s Actors

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

The article carried this piece by me on 1 June.

We’re not an Empire now

If you listen to the 2017 album from the American indie band The National, Sleep Well Beast, on the third track, Walk it Back, you will hear the following spoken in sombre tones:

People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. 

 The quote comes, allegedly, from an interview with the former Republican and Bush strategist, Karl Rove (rhymes with Gove). Although Rove subsequently disputed it, the journalist who interviewed him for the New York Times in 2002, Ron Suskind, subsequently set down the quote in full in an article on Bush’s ‘faith-based presidency’ in 2004. It goes on:

while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

History’s Actors versus the Reality-based Community. It’s a good summary of how the Cummings-Johnson premiership sees the world. Inspire rage in your opponents, let them rationally deconstruct your actions while you tilt the playing-field again, keeping them guessing and never able to land a knock-out blow. ‘I’ve learned over the years that ‘rational discussion’ accomplishes almost nothing in politics’ said Cummings in 2017.

It’s a handicap of the liberal-left often to assume our opponents on the right are stupid and don’t know what they are doing. Johnson may appear increasingly inarticulate and out of his depth as Prime Minister, but Cummings isn’t stupid. He is intelligent, clever and dangerous. Unlike his boss, he is strategic and thinks several steps ahead. As the historian Stefan Collini wrote after studying Cummings’ blogs and Odyssean Education essay:

His writing displays an alarming ability to focus on a goal to the exclusion of noticing, or caring about, any amount of collateral damage. Emotions mostly figure as forms of irrational distraction. Toes, after all, were put in the world largely to be trodden on.

His intellectual arrogance and lack of emotional intelligence may be what loses him his job in the end.

Cummings understands state power and the potential of a modernised state machinery. I wrote in January, before Coronavirus hit, that Cummings had ‘a focus on the need for a more efficient and modernised state machinery: and a profound fury at the inefficiencies of existing state procedures (which many who have served in governments will share).’

Tony Blair’s political secretary John McTernan calls Cummings ‘a man with a plan’    . It is an agenda for state modernisation, in which advanced technologies – driven by a strong dose of utopian technocracy – will be at the forefront.

Several of Cummings’ ambitions for government, and what Collini calls his ‘dismissive impatience’, might actually be shared across the political spectrum. The demand for a British DARPA, for example, was endorsed by the 2019 report on a Mission-led approach to the UK economy authored by Mariana Mazzucato and David Willetts. This argued strongly for systematic support for science and technology as part of engaging the state in co-creating public value. It was an approach which involved and engaged several UK government departments.

Underpinning the Cummings-Johnson strategy, and its campaigning, has been a form of English exceptionalism. When Seymour Martin Lipset’s American Exceptionalism book came out in 1996 I recall a frisson of excitement amongst the Conservative Party policy wonks who used to attend the receptions and dinners and visits to the Proms that my team at the BBC used to organise. Was there not, I heard some of them say, a kind of English exceptionalism that underpinned the conservatism of England – the kind of individualist, mercantile philosophy which differentiated English from continental history? It’s the end-of-Empire philosophy that drove the Brexit campaign.

For Johnson, that English exceptionalism reinforces his ‘great man’ theory of history, spelt out in his biography of Churchill. Cummings’ understanding of history is a lot more intelligent and a lot more nuanced. Johnson’s heroic leadership model, and its associated imagery, has been actively constructed through management of the government’s narrative, assisted by Conservative-supporting newspapers. Following his welcome recovery from the virus, the Johnson soap opera has developed into a narrative of individual personal responsibility, in which British common sense and ‘doing our duty’ will carry the day.

Cummings’ flit to Durham threatens of course to undermine this narrative, as the public sees a prominent government figure flouting the rules.

In general, rules don’t matter to ‘History’s Actors’. Johnson’s political career is littered with norm-breaking to the extent that it is impossible any longer to believe in the Nolan consensus established twenty-five years ago. While we in the reality-based community are judiciously analysing their behaviour, they are moving on to the latest outrage, acting again, creating a new reality.

Sometimes, because of this, the liberal-left focuses on a legitimate target – law-breaking in the Brexit referendum, Russian disinformation in the U.S. election – while missing an obvious truth. In the Brexit referendum, Cummings understood the need to reach beyond the existing electorate, and that Facebook advertising would be key. An additional 3 million people voted in 2016, in part reached by social media advertising and the sharing of material which engaged them. Roger Mcnamee, long-time Facebook investor turned recent Facebook critic, says in his book Zucked, that the Brexit side’s message ‘was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t’.

Russian disinformation certainly played a role in the 2016 US election,says Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson   , but more important was Fox News and the network of conservative and alt-right media outlets operating on Facebook and other platforms, as Yochai Benkler and his colleagues have identified. Trump’s campaign poured $70 million into Facebook advertising: they knew how to exploit the algorithms.

Social media offers the opportunity for direct communication with the electorate by demographic and interest, bypassing mediated commentary and edited outlets. We used to see the Obama campaign as the exemplar of this. Today, we see the blurring of boundaries between the orthodox conservative right and the extreme-right as emotions are triggered with polarizing and xenophobic material. Facebook has known since early 2016 that its algorithms promote extremism , although it took Mark Zuckerberg until late 2018 to acknowledge this   . We have moved from the dog-whistle tactics of Michael Howard’s Are you thinking what we’re thinking campaign in the 2005 General Election   to the overt exploitation of xenophobia in the 2016 referendum with the objective of creating a new coalition.

In his flailing attempts to defend Cummings over the past week, Johnson has come to look more like Trump than Churchill. Lying has been part of Johnson’s stock in trade since he was a journalist. Academic research says that for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate. Crises of legitimacy, such as the post-referendum crisis, create space for such figures to cast themselves as authentic speakers of truth to power, giving their supporters cover to forgive breaches of norms that formerly would have been condemned.

Johnson has wasted a lot of political capital to defend Cummings, but with the Durham police’s decision not to take further action, he may have got away with it. Cummings’ behaviour, however, such as his refusal to admit wrongdoing, and his truculent and petulant attitude towards journalists outside his home, all captured on camera, have not endeared him to the British public. Opinion polling shows that most people feel what he did was wrong, and he should have resigned. It’s one rule for him and another for the rest of us. The Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland was probably the first to note, though others have said it since, that far from being the crusader against the Westminster élite that he has liked to pretend, Cummings now stands exposed as the ultimate insider, representative of the view that rules don’t apply to him.

In the short-term, Cummings may have got away with it. But in this crisis, unlike others, the government actually needs the ‘reality-based community’ as it ‘follows the science’. And the scientists are clear that the Cummings episode has, in the words of Professor Steve Reicher, ‘trashed’ the core public health messages necessary to build public trust and control the virus:

If the numbers infected with Coronavirus rise again, if the deaths from the virus mount again, if we head into a second wave, Johnson and Cummings will be blamed.

Johnson may increasingly resemble not Churchill but a different Empire character found in fiction: Billy Bunter. Lazy, dishonest, convinced of his own rectitude and heroism, bumbling from one calamity to another, contemptuous of rules and above all of a ‘girly swot’, unwilling to put the work in, unable to rise at the moment of deepest national crisis above the level of the clown image he has so carefully cultivated.

Behind him, meanwhile, lurks the man with a plan, determined that history’s actors will triumph over the reality-based community. And yet, at this time, they need the reality-based community to deliver, or we will all be in lockdown again.

If lockdown happens again, there will be a search for scapegoats. Matt Hancock already looks like someone who knows his political career is on the rocks. Do not, in the end, underestimate Johnson’s own ruthlessness. Guto Harri, who worked for Johnson when he was London mayor, has already forecast that Cummings will not last beyond the summer. In a revealing phrase, Johnson gave his view of advisers away to Harri: ‘“All glory,” as Boris used to playfully put it, “goes to the fuhrer.”’

All glory to the leader. All blame, ultimately, to the adviser. Ultimately, Johnson wants to be one of History’s Actors.

But he’d do well to remember: we’re not an Empire now.

 

The forward march of devolution halted

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

The forward march of devolution halted? Wales after the lockdown.

(This was published in the Institute of Welsh Affairs magazine Agenda in May)

COVID-19 doesn’t respect borders. And nor does UK Government messaging. On 10 April, the ‘UK Government in Wales’ tweeted that the first drive-in testing centre in Wales had been opened, at the Cardiff City stadium. We had known this was happening for some time, of course, as it had featured in Welsh Government press briefings, and it was obvious to anyone cycling past. But for those of us who thought that health was devolved, this was a signal that we are in new territory: a UK government stepping on the Welsh Government’s toes.

I was told subsequently that Deloitte’s had landed a contract across the UK for 50 drive-in test centres, though Public Health Wales is now operating the one at Cardiff City and it was the Welsh Government which was blamed when the centre was shut on Easter Monday. It makes sense of course for the Welsh Government to join in on UK-wide procurements, not least to avoid price-gouging as has been seen in respect of PPE. But the subsequent propaganda from the department formerly known as the Wales Office suggests a deeper agenda. The COVID-19 crisis is intensifying a process already visible in the period following the December UK General Election: a post-Brexit activist unionism, intended to redraw the evolving constitutional settlement of the previous 20 years.

May 2020 marks the point at which Wales has been living with what the French call cohabitation for a decade: one party in power in Cardiff Bay, another at Westminster. The next period is likely to test the resilience of devolution. We could be heading towards what I call ‘Devolution In Name Only’ – or DINO for short. And the DINO-saurs have a strategy.

This strategy is based on proposals that the think-tank Policy Exchange has been developing for a radical constitutional re-ordering: re-branding the Supreme Court as an Upper Court of Appeal, essentially nullifying its role as a constitutional court, strengthening ministerial oversight of judicial appointments and limiting judicial review,  the re-establishment of Parliamentary sovereignty but with the executive’s powers reinforced, limits on the Human Rights Act and on the application of the European Convention on Human Rights. Welsh appointments to bodies under the control of the UK government have already been politicised.

The agenda isn’t limited to constitutional matters: there is an emphasis on UK government investment, particularly in infrastructure. Central government funded initiatives such as the City Deal have been used to build stronger relationships directly between the UK Government and Welsh institutions including local authorities. A ‘Western powerhouse’ model, bringing together Cardiff, Newport and Bristol, was launched to undermine Welsh Government economic plans.

In the General Election, the Conservatives promised to deliver the M4 Relief Road, without the power to do so. The stage is set for a new War on Wales, but perhaps through a more subtle approach than the Cameron years. Michael Gove recently penned an article in the Western Mail stressing what he said was the UK Government’s additional £2 billion investment in Wales to help address the COVID-19 threat, the role played by the army in coordination, cooperation between the UK and Welsh governments, and reiterating the five UK Government tests rather than the seven questions outlined by the First Minister, Mark Drakeford.

This is an activist infrastructure-driven and clientelism-based Unionism designed to undermine and minimise the role of the devolved governments. COVID-19 offers further opportunities effectively to dilute the already inadequate inter-governmental arrangements. The devolved administrations may attend COBR meetings but are observers only on SAGE, while the PM’s chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, is a participant. England’s chief medical officer has, apparently, the role of chief medical adviser to the UK government.

This agenda is aided of course by Wales’s fragmented public sphere. Paradoxically, Welsh journalists have been doing a better job of holding the Welsh Government to account than UK journalists have been doing with the UK Government. The dominant UK narrative has become neither the excess and preventable deaths nor the failures in planning and logistics but the Boris Johnson personal soap opera. It is possible to be pleased that the Prime Minister recovered from a dangerous virus and has a new-born son without succumbing to journalistic sycophancy. Meanwhile far more people in Wales read the Daily Mail than the Western Mail, and the Daily Mail’s own gung-ho story of flying in PPE to aid the NHS sets the ‘we can beat this’ tone.

The wider UK narrative – first Brexit, now COVID-19 – has drowned our national public sphere in Wales for the last four years. Welsh Government initiatives will get UK media attention when they differ from or are seen to pre-empt decisions of the UK government, such as announcements on closing schools, ruling out an early exit from the lockdown, or setting out the key questions governing the decision on whether the lock-down should be eased. Occasionally stories will surface on programmes like You and Yours about how Wales is being more generous in investing in support for homeless people than is England. But the narrative of difference cuts both ways: so if England is testing more care-home residents or staff, then that becomes a stick to beat the Welsh Government, whatever its efficacy.

The lockdown has seen the emergence of popular responses such as the weekly ‘clap for the carers’, originally for NHS workers but intended now to capture all those in caring roles. It has become very clear that when people speak of ‘the NHS’ they are applauding the efforts of the NHS across the UK, no matter that academics write these days about four NHSs with different operating structures. This ‘natural patriotism’ is a UK phenomenon, an expression of solidarity. In the period of Brexit I once wondered if Unionism was capable of producing an emotional response in its support. We have seen that emotional response in the backing for the NHS as a symbol of the best of us – and that doesn’t stop at the Welsh border. Though emotion for the BBC may be a long time coming, its necessity as a public service has become ever more evident, with record television audiences for the Prime Minister and the Queen. The attacks on it from the Tory right, have largely been confined to occasional outbursts focused on specific programmes like the Panorama exposé on PPE.

The UK narrative has of course dominated our news coverage of the COVID-19 crisis, with the statements from the UK Government press conferences, however inane many of those have been, providing the broadcast news lead. Facilitated by a centralised media, bolstered by a slavishly loyal tabloid press, this renewed activist unionism and its possible endurance after the lockdown should not be underestimated. Unless, of course, the inevitable public inquiry, potentially so different with evidence from the devolved administrations certain to be heard, actually cuts through with direct and sharp criticisms of the failures in planning and delivery and the U.K.’s excess death exceptionalism.

New Statesman article

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

The New Statesman has published this article from me on the Tories’ new ‘activist unionism’. Below I republish it with links.

 There is a new orthodoxy on the left – the notion that Brexit will inevitably mean the break-up of the Union. Scotland will secede. Northern Ireland will vote to reunite with Ireland.  These things are indeed possible. But equally possible is that we end up in a post-Brexit creaking UK able still to cling together through a new state overhaul driven from the centre.

Some attention has been given post-election to the Conservative plans for a constitutional commission. But less focus has been given to the significant plans being put together for a re-servicing of the Union. The Policy Exchange think-tank has called for ‘a Grand Strategy to modernise the United Kingdom.’ This is an activist Unionism of a kind only glimpsed before.

Since the 1970s, there have been two significant modernisations of the UK state. The first, the neoliberal Thatcherite agenda based on a hollowing out of the central state, with new central agencies, restrictions on local government’s freedom of manoeuvre, privatisation and deregulation. The second, the New Labour modernisation of 1997-2010, including devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London, the Good Friday Agreement, the Human Rights Act, Freedom of Information and the Supreme Court, with centrally-driven targets for service delivery in England. We are now on the cusp of a third modernisation, outlined in the Conservative manifesto, reinforced in the background notes to the December Queen’s Speech, and fleshed out in a series of policy papers.

Some of this pre-dates the Johnson government. The Dunlop Review of UK Union Capability was established under Theresa May with the objective ‘as the United Kingdom leaves the European Union….to consider how through its institutional arrangements it meets the challenge of strengthening and sustaining the Union in the future’ . But the Conservative Manifesto and Queen’s Speech make it clear that this is now part of a strategic programme.

The Conservative Party has usually had a strong focus on the possible uses of state power, even when deregulating and privatising. Alastair Campbell’s second volume of diaries record an observation of the late Alan Clark that Conservatives were fascinated with him and the Blair project because they recognised a real enthusiasm for power and its uses. The Conservatives now have at the helm someone who understands the uses of state power. Dominic Cummings has, says Rachel Wolf, one of the authors of the Conservative manifesto, been thinking about the UK state for twenty years. Cumminsology, as Alain de Botton called it recently in the New Statesman, involves a focus on the need for a more efficient and modernised state machinery: and a profound fury at the inefficiencies of existing state procedures (which many who have served in governments will share).

Cummings, and his former boss Michael Gove, are often under-estimated by some on the left who prefer caricature to analysis. As I wrote about Gove in 2014, ‘he is a deeply serious, and deeply ideological politician, whose objective is shifting the political agenda strategically’. Ditto Cummings. He is, as Tony Blair’s former political secretary John McTernan wrote in July, ‘a man with a plan’.

The Conservative state modernisation agenda is extensive. If the range of Policy Exchange papers on the Constitution, the Judiciary and Whitehall is accurate, its possibilities range from limiting the powers of the Supreme Court – possibly even re-branding it as simply an Upper Court of Appeal, to remove the sense that it is a constitutional court – to an infrastructure modernisation programme for the UK, a re-casting of central institutions to oversee the Union, with the engagement of devolved authorities such as Mayors within England to address the UK/English delivery confusion, to a series of Whitehall reforms (some of which are pretty uncontroversial) and the creation of a UK form of the American defence-linked research agency DARPA, one of Dominic Cummings’ long-held ambitions .

Some of the approach to an activist unionism has already been rolled out in Wales, where the Wales Office has essentially been re-branded as the UK Government in Wales, central government funded initiatives such as the City Deal have been used to build stronger relationships directly between the UK Government and Welsh institutions including local authorities. A ‘Western powerhouse’ model, bringing together Cardiff, Newport and Bristol, was launched to undermine Welsh Government economic plans. Welsh appointments to bodies under the control of the UK government have been politicised, as Policy Exchange suggests should happen across the UK. In the General Election, the Conservatives even promised to deliver the M4 Relief Road, without the power to do so. The Queens Speech promises a cross-border Marches deal, and many other actions.

This activist unionism may not be enough. The latest state modernisation programme may well do nothing fundamental to resolve the post-Brexit challenges of the UK. It may simply leave us with the latest modernised version of what Tom Nairn three decades ago called Ukania. But no-one should assume that the break-up of the UK is inevitable, or that Gove-Cummings haven’t thought about these things. They have, and their previous experience in respect of English schools shows that they understand the uses of state power and are capable of fast and far-reaching action.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve loaned my vote to the Greens.

Posted on by Leighton Andrews
My membership of the Labour Party lapsed in March. I’d decided months before that I wasn’t going to be caught out by an automatic renewal and cancelled my direct debit.

I might still have voted Labour, and the choice not to would have been harder in Wales if Derek Vaughan had stood for re-election or one or two of the other Labour candidates like Mary Wimbury, whom I’ve known for years, had been top of the Labour list.

But ultimately I decided not to vote for the pro-Brexit anti-Semitic shambles that the Labour leadership has allowed the party to become. In 2017 I voted Labour, and my vote has been waved around with that of millions of others as an endorsement of the leadership’s plans for a better Brexit. Well, stuff that. We won’t get fooled again.

When my postal ballot arrived two weeks ago, I returned it immediately with a cross against the Greens. Caroline Lucas has been the outstanding Parliamentary leader for a People’s Vote that I’ve now marched for several times in London. Green MEP Molly Scott Cato has done great work on the regulation of Facebook in the European Parliament, and I’ve just finished writing a book on this subject.*

There’s a bigger reason for voting Green of course, and that’s to do with the ceaseless drive of capitalist consumption that threatens our planet and human and other life on it. I’m voting for my grand-daughters and their future.

I know others will have made different choices, and there are good people standing for a number of the other anti-Brexit parties. I’m not saying the Greens are perfect, but strategically I’d like to see them to do well in these elections and in 2021 see them sitting in our National Assembly.

I’d like to come home, Labour friends, but hey, have you got work to do. If Labour enables Brexit I won’t be back.  If Brexit happens, and we end up in Ukania, then I’m not sure what future the unionist parties have in any case. The Leavers don’t care for the Union, after all. If we have to face life after Brexit, then other political choices may have to be made.

There’s no joy in this, by the way. Only sadness.

Ukania beckons, and the far-right is on the march. Labour leadership could have pointed the way to a progressive alternative. Instead, it ducks the key decision of our time.

*For Labour, both Jo Stevens and Ian Lucas have also done brilliant work on this subject in the U.K. Parliament, let me say, in the most exceptional Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry I have ever seen. But that’s another story. 

Review of Adrian Masters’ Nothing has changed.

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

I reviewed Adrian Masters’ book Nothing has Changed for Wales Arts Review. Here’s a longer version of the review:

I’ve known Adrian Masters since he worked for BBC Radio Wales and came to interview me in my Tonypandy home prior to my election to the National Assembly in 2003. I’ve forgotten now what the item was about, but I think Adrian had been interviewing people in the Rhondda on the issues that mattered to them and then come to candidates for their views.

Adrian has always been one of the most thorough of interviewers in Welsh broadcasting – fair, but firm. His infamous red notebooks contain many secrets, some of which he shares – without revealing sources where they didn’t want to be named – in this volume of his 2017 election diaries. His title of course comes from the statement by the Prime Minister after she reversed her disastrous manifesto pledge on social care during the election campaign. By the early hours of 10 June, however, as Adrian says, ‘Everything has changed’.

This was an election where, as Adrian reminded us, the Conservatives started well-ahead of Labour in the polls and senior Labour figures thought that the party would do well to hold 200 seats. ITV Wales’s own Yougov poll had the Tories well ahead of Labour at the beginning of the campaign, poised to win 21 seats. I remember this well from a Twitter spat at the time between my friend the late Carl Sargeant and my Cardiff University colleague Roger Scully.

Though the substantive election inquests have yet to be published, this election seemed to one of two halves, reflected in the cross-over in the opinion polls and the dramatic final outcome. For the third General Election in a row I watched an exit poll come in and said ‘I don’t believe it’. Only unlike the previous two general elections I wasn’t sitting in a BBC Wales studio at the time.

Adrian’s book takes us back to the days before the election, which genuinely seem like a different electoral world. As he says ‘certainties have been lost, rules bent or broken and leaders have risen and fallen.’ His account starts with the terrorist incident in Westminster, moves through the death of Rhodri Morgan and the further terrorist outrage in Manchester, and concludes with Labour picking up Welsh seats like Vale of Clwyd, Gower and Cardiff North.

Adrian is in no doubt that the Labour surge can be put down to changing and more positive reactions to Jeremy Corbyn’s performance, a strong showing by Welsh Labour under Carwyn Jones’ leadership, and argues that ‘the tributes to Rhodri Morgan also cemented the view of Welsh Labour being different.’

Where Adrian scores most heavily in these diaries is on background colour. Messages come in from different party representatives, both elected and backroom, which may have surfaced on Adrian’s Twitter feed at the time but may not have made it into broadcast reports. Things that Adrian was told then on background now surface – unattributed – in their mistaken glory.

What is written from a Labour perspective reflects conversations I was having with people at the time, but it is interesting to get an all-round view of how Conservative, Plaid and other party insiders were feeling. I can make guesses at some of the sources on the Labour side in particular, but while Adrian quotes them here to give a sense of the contemporary mood, he doesn’t embarrass them with personal unmasking. Nor would you expect him to do so.

Where people were willing to be quoted, Adrian makes good use of the material he gathered. ‘By any sensible consideration, I’m toast’ says Paul Flynn at one point. Later in the campaign he tells Adrian ‘More optimistic now. There is a favourable Welsh dimension because of Carwyn and memories of Rhodri.’ As late as the last week of the campaign a Conservative AM tells Adrian that they (he doesn’t specify gender) now think they will elect ‘a rugby team and a few reserves’. They went down to eight.

Adrian’s personal account of the ITV Wales debate is fascinating, and gives a good sense of the challenges facing a broadcast journalist trying to both maintain balance and keep the flow of the debate. His account of the behind-the-scenes row within the Conservative Party as to whether Andrew RT Davies or Alun Cairns was to appear for them is entertaining and becomes a sub-plot within the text, as does Adrian’s battle to get an interview with the PM. Campaign insider accounts of the use of Facebook and social, media to mobilise young people are interesting and valuable.

Throughout this book, Adrian demonstrates what a good print journalist he could have been. His account has pace, is well-written and thoughtful, with contemplative passages added to the contemporary diary and reconstructed notes. Reading it in the aftermath of Carl Sargeant’s tragic death made me reflect on how long ago it all now feels. Yes,  everything has changed.

Twenty years ago today, Wales voted for a National Assembly.

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

Twenty years ago today, Wales voted to create a National Assembly  the only political institution the people of Wales have ever voted to have.

I wrote this in February about the campaign. I have posted some pictures from 1997 on my Tumblr site. My book on the campaign can be bought from Seren. Today we are holding a conference on the anniversary, with the Wales Governance Centre and the Institute for Welsh Affairs.

Metropolitan provincialism and the Welsh Language

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

I wrote an article for the Welsh language magazine Barn on some of the recent London-based media items on the Welsh Language. The article follows in both Welsh and English.

Barn

 

Taleithgarwch Dinesig a’r Iaith Gymraeg

 

 

Leighton Andrews

 

Dros yr haf cafwyd erthyglau neu eitemau anwybodus yn y Guardian, The Times a Newsnight ynghylch yr iaith Gymraeg. Oherwydd y cyflymder ymateb a ganiateir gan gyfryngau cymdeithasol heddiw, gorfu iddynt oll amddifyn eu hunain rhag beirniadaeth sylweddol cefnogwyr yr iaith Gymraeg, boed rheini yn siarad yr iaith ai peidio. Dywedodd fy nghysylltiadau i yn y ddau bapur newydd yn ddioed y bu’r ddadansoddi golygyddol mewnol yr un mor hallt. O ganlyniad cyhoeddodd y ddau bapur yn fuan wedyn erthyglau ystyriol a oedd yn fwy cefnogol i’r iaith.

 

Roedd ymateb staff yn y BBC a gynddeiriogwyd gan Newsnight yn gyhoeddus a buan, er i ffynonellau swyddogol dewi tan ar ôl darlledu ymddiheuriad llugoer braidd Newsnight. Wedi hyn oll, cyfaddefodd y BBC y gallasai’r item fod wedi bod yn drafodaeth well pe bai siaradwr Cymraeg yn bresennol.

 

Mae’r traethiadau ysbeidiol hyn yn amlygu problem ehangach pan ddaw hi’n fater o drafod yr iaith Gymraeg a Chymru. Mae gan y Deyrnas Gyfunol un o’r sectorau papur newydd mwyaf canoledig yn Ewrop. Roedd gan y BBC, ysgrifennodd ei chyn-olygydd gwleidyddol Andrew Marr unwaith, duedd diwylliannol ddinesig ryddfrydol. Bu agwedd Newsnight tuag at rannau eraill o’r BBC, hyd yn oed oddi fun i’r uned newyddion a materion cyfoes yn Llundain, yn drahaus erioed. Bu i Marr a Martin Kettle y Guardian, bitïo methiant cyfryngau Llundain i drafod y Deyrnas Gyfunol a’i dadlennu hi iddi hi ei hun, gan fethu i helaethu dealltwriaeth pobl mewn gwahanol ardaloedd, dinasoedd, rhanbarthau ac o wahanol genhedloedd o lefydd a diwylliannau eraill. Galwodd Kenneth O. Morgan a Raymond Williams ill dau yn unigol yr agwedd hon yn ‘daleithgarwch dinesig’ (‘metropolitan provincialism’).

 

Ar ôl bron ugain maligned o ddatganoli, dylem allu disgwyl gwell, ond nid wyf yn disgwyl i hynny ddigwydd. Dyna pam y bu i’n Tasglu diweddar ar newyddion digidol ac anghenion gwybodaeth y Cynulliad godi’r posibilrwydd o blatfform newyddion digidol i’r Cynulliad.

 

Mae ystafelloedd newyddion Llundain yn darganfod y Gymraeg yn unig pan maent am wneud hwyl ar ben beth sydd iddyn nhw yn rhyfedd, neu yn egsotig neu yn wyrdroad o’r norm iaith Saesneg. Y storïau na chȃnt eu hadrodd yw’r rhai am amrywiaeth siaradwyr y Gymraeg; am lwyddiant addysg ddwyieithog; taw dwyieithogrwydd yw’r norm yn Ewrop a thu hwnt; a’r llwyddiant gwleidyddol a ddangosir trwy’r polisïau i feithrin y Gymraeg dros y 60 mlynedd diwethaf.

 

Ges i fy magu yn ddi-Gymraeg: er fod fy mamgu o Ddinas Cross yn Sir Benfro, a symudodd i’r Barri ar droad yr ugeinfed ganrif, yn medru’r iaith, ni throsglwyddodd yr iaith i fy nhad. Nawr gallaf gynnal sgyrsiau yn Gymraeg, wneud areithiau yn Gymraeg, gynnal cyfweliadau yn Gymraeg, ac yn bwysicaf oll gallaf siarad Cymraeg fel tadcu i’m wyres hynaf. Mae hanes y Gymraeg yn hanes llwyddiant Prydeinig a gresyn na all golygyddion Llundain weld hynny.

 

 

 

 

Metropolitan provincialism and the Welsh Language

 

Leighton Andrews

 

This summer the Guardian, The Times and BBC Newsnight all ran ill-informed articles or items about the Welsh Language. With the speed of response allowed by social media today, each was immediately placed on the defensive by the concentrated criticism from supporters of the Welsh Language, whether they spoke Welsh or not. My own contacts at the two newspapers very swiftly told me that the internal editorial post-mortem was also fierce. Both publications subsequently published critical pieces more supportive of the language.

 

The reaction from BBC staff appalled by Newsnight was public and prompt, although official sources were silent until after Newsnight broadcast something of a half-hearted apology. Subsequently, the BBC has admitted that the item would have been better debated with the presence of a Welsh-speaker.

 

These spasmodic commentaries demonstrate a wider problem when it comes to UK coverage of the Welsh Language and Wales. The UK has one of the most centralized newspaper sectors in Europe. The BBC, its presenter and former political editor Andrew Marr once wrote, had an urban cultural liberal bias. Newsnight has always demonstrated an arrogance to other parts of the BBC, even within its London news and current affairs operation. Both Marr and the Guardian’s Martin Kettle have lamented the failure of London media to report the UK to itself, helping a widening understanding by people in different districts, towns, cities, regions and nations of other places and their cultures. Kenneth O. Morgan and Raymond Williams separately called this attitude ‘metropolitan provincialism’.

 

After almost 20 years of devolution, we should expect better, but I do not expect that to happen. That’s why our recent Task Force report on the Assembly’s digital news and information requirements raised the possibility of an Assembly digital content platform.

 

Newsrooms in London only discover Welsh when they want to poke fun at its perceived quaintness or exoticism or deviation from the English-speaking norm. The unreported stories are about the diversity of Welsh-speakers in Wales; the growth of Welsh-medium education; the fact that bilingualism is the norm in Europe and beyond; and the political success that Welsh language policy demonstrates over the last 60 years.

 

I grew up not speaking Welsh: though my grandmother from Dinas Cross in Pembrokeshire who moved to Barry sometime before the turn of the twentieth century had the language, it was never passed to my father. Now I can hold conversations in Welsh, makes speeches in Welsh, do interviews in Welsh, and more importantly speak Welsh as Tadcu to my elder grand-daughter. The story of Welsh is a British success story, and it’s a shame that London editors can’t see it.