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From
“Racism” in Welsh Politics
by Patrick McGuinness, Planet 159
When the lexicographers of twenty-first century newspeak
get to work on Britain, they’ll have to compile a special
supplement for Wales. Certainly we in Wales share much of
our newspeak with the rest of the UK: choice: buying power;
silent majority: loud minority (possibly also innumerate —
as in “the silent majority who support this war”);
red tape: employment rights, and so on. This newspeak, a mix
of clichés and initially audacious sophistries that
have hardened into givens, constitutes a ready-made discourse
without whose deadening locutions no column, ministerial speech
or white paper is complete. But what Wales brings to this
inert mix is the volatile newspeak of race, racism, and their
cognates.
This article seeks to highlight the dangerous devaluation
of the language of racism in contemporary Welsh media and
politics. It attempts two things: first, to lay out some examples
(from a vast and daily-renewed living archive) of the way
in which the language of racism is being rendered meaningless;
second, to suggest that this takes place against an increasing
background of genuine — let’s say “traditional”
— forms of racism which remain insufficiently addressed.
This article was gestating when, in the Welsh Grand Committee
(21 November 2002), the new Welsh Secretary Peter Hain furnished
an example of exactly what I sought to examine:
As a Pretoria boy turned Neath man, I have no truck with
nationalism. The doctrine of nationalism is anathema to any
true socialist and in any case redundant in the modern age...
Nationalism is inherently narrow, parochial and backward-looking…
Hain terminates this string of clichés by invoking
the “tyranny of racism” inherent in Welsh nationalism.
How someone who fought against apartheid can use his honourable
past for cheap political expediency (never mind keep silent
in New Labour and the Tories’ orgy of refugee-bashing)
is a matter of private conscience. A matter of public politics
is the extent to which these are now routine accusations in
Welsh public life. In the same debate, Paul Flynn, after rightfully
considering Hain’s distinguished activism, notes “it
is a cheap journalistic trick — one used frequently
by certain newspapers — to confound language with race”,
and expresses disappointment at Hain’s “ritual
political rants”. (This is the same Paul Flynn attacked
by the Welsh Mirror’s Paul Starling in a column of exceptional
personal nastiness in October 2002.) What worries other socialists
about the way the language of racism is used to smear nationalist
opponents is not the just the devaluation of language, but
the self-righteous lecture in socialism from the enforcer
of a government which looks about as socialist as John Major.
For clarification of the complexities of both socialism and
nationalism, Peter Hain could read Raymond Williams:
I think the point about nationalism really is this, that
we’re dealing with an entirely different phenomenon
when it is a case of the marginal or absorbed or oppressed
nationality, the sense of difference from some particular
dominant large nation-state or of course empire… I don’t
see how any serious socialist in the Marxist tradition could
be other than with them.
Williams distinguishes between being oppressed and having
one’s nationality oppressed — a distinction worth
exploring, since it bears on all minorities or stateless nations
in the developed or democratic world. By Williams’s
definition, the “nationalist” projects of small
nations might be antidotes to, positive examples for, the
nationalisms of larger nations. British politicians would
rather have us waving flags on touchlines (even if that means
the occasional bout of — largely uncondemned —
“I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk” from
England fans) than actually thinking about what “nation”
really means. In Wales, they’d simply rather brand any
intellectual activity that bears on this question and doesn’t
come up with pious clichés “racist”.
The best example of the devaluation of the language of race
and racism is found in the St David’s Day “debate”
of 2002. Entitled “Racism in Welsh Politics”,
it was an extraordinary Punch and Judy of rant and smear.
Llew Smith kicks off by attacking Plaid’s opposition
to holding the Bath and West Southern Counties Show in Neath
in 1934 (no one can say they’re not up-to-the-minute
at Westminster!) followed by a silly caricature of pre-World
War Two nationalist policy; he then attacks the BBC for discrimination,
the Arts Council for subsidising Barn, and descends into something
that never rises above the level of “my father was better
than John Elfed Jones’s father”. As rhetoric,
it is of staggering puerility; as a Hansard-recorded Welsh
debate it is a national embarrassment (as The Western Mail
noted). Smith is congratulated by Wayne David, opening with
“the strong strand of racism and xenophobia in Plaid
Cymru’s history”, and describing Saunders Lewis
as an anti-Semite from “start to finish” (historically
inaccurate anyway). David continues: “On one occasion
in the 1930s... etc.”, while Don Touhig alleges: “at
the core of Plaid Cymru is a right-wing hard-core group of
language extremists”. It goes on like this for some
time, until Simon Thomas, Plaid Cymru MP, asks why there is
not a single mention of ethnic minorities. Everyone ignores
him. Thomas has another go: “Will it be in order to
apply for such a debate [on racism against black and ethnic
minority people in Wales]?”, only to be told by Win
Griffths in the chair: “That is a matter for backbenchers,
not me.”
This would be comical but for the fact that it takes place
against a background of increasing racism — white on
black crime, refugee-bashing, anti-asylum-seeker propaganda
— about which Welsh media and politicians are conspicuously
silent…
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