"All the Trappings of a Great State Occasion"

From Planet 179

Neil Evans and Paul O'Leary on processions and the opening of the Senedd

Ceremonies and ritual seek to embody social consensus. More particularly, state openings of parliament in mature democracies are designed to heal symbolically the party political rifts that inevitably occur during hard-fought elections. Their function is to re-assert the fundamental unity of the body politic: here ritual is intended to express the shared values of the national community. In Westminster terms, it is the crowned and bejewelled monarch who reads “Her” government’s programme for legislation, thus temporarily obscuring the fundamentally partisan nature of the occasion. Ritual, then, serves to express basic values and seeks to defuse conflict.

If this is true of the annual opening of the British parliament, it is even more the case when inaugurating new institutions. The official opening of the new National Assembly for Wales in 1999 illustrated this perfectly: the referendum had been won by a paper-thin majority but the inclusion of royalty in the opening ceremony asserted consensus. It also put the British establishment’s seal of approval on the fledgling institution, in spite of the Queen’s widely-leaked opposition to devolution, and speculation that as the Assembly was not a full parliament it would not be granted royal recognition. Similarly, the official opening on 1 March 2006 of the award-winning purpose-built home for the Assembly — the Senedd (meaning Senate or Parliament) — designed by the acclaimed architect Richard Rogers, followed a period of controversy about the building’s cost. Once again, ceremonial faced the challenge of creating consensus.

New organisations provide opportunities for creating novel ways of doing things, but sharp-eyed observers will note how newly-minted ceremonies frequently incorporate older practices under the guise of the new, and (confusingly) portray somewhat controversial new practices as “traditional”. The “invention of tradition”, as it is called, is one way that institutions create identities and renew themselves. Moreover, history is an active ingredient in that process, not a passive database from which “the past” is downloaded. The past provides a yardstick against which new ceremonial can be measured. There is a longer tradition of royal ceremonial in Wales (the Investitures of 1911 and 1969), as well as royal visits and a cornucopia of indigenous public, political and civic processions. When taken together, these events form the “cumulative texture” of processional culture and indicate a variety of ways of using public space, representing the people, and displaying the monarchy that form the backdrop for understanding the events of 2006.

Since Queen Victoria embraced Highlandism and tartanry, there has been a stronger link between the monarchy and Scotland than there has been with Wales. During her long reign Victoria famously spent only seven nights in Wales, compared with seven weeks in Ireland and seven years in Scotland. However, even though Gladstone’s visit to Swansea in 1887 completely eclipsed the celebrations of the Queen’s jubilee later that month, there was no serious Welsh opposition to the monarchy. The first royal visit to the country, in the modern sense, was that of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Swansea to open the Prince of Wales Dock in October 1881, and the press estimated the number of visitors to the town was double the district’s population of 100,000. In 1912 the King and Queen made the first royal visit to the south Wales coalfield, in recognition of its growing importance to the British economy and navy. In between there had been a number of other royal visits, including the Investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1911, which was an archetypal piece of invented tradition that played fast and loose with the toy box of history.

In the nineteenth century, ceremonies were witnessed in the streets and then reported in the press for those who were not present. Now such an event is essentially an electronic media one. At the opening of the Senedd, a reporter commented that the crowds were “not ten deep” and that some of those present had come to protest rather than celebrate. But the aim was clearly to “put Wales on the map”, as Rhodri Morgan put it, showing that Wales could deliver a building on time and on budget — a coded reference to the fiasco surrounding the architectural competition won by Zaha Hadid for a building that was never constructed. Paradoxically, therefore, branding Wales as efficient, innovative and modern necessitated importing the hereditary monarchy for its ceremonial dignity and its drawing power for the media. Even Plaid, ambivalent about monarchist symbols and the rooting of the Senedd in the Ruritanian frippery of the UK, had come to the conclusion that the event would help to make the Assembly credible across Wales. Pragmatism triumphed over ideology.

So what kind of event was it? The BBC described it as an historic “State Opening”, and almost all the analysis continued in this vein. John Davies — the country’s leading public historian — declared that Wales had been one of the founder nations of Europe and it was fitting that the most recent parliament in Europe should be opened with a display of pageantry. Laura McAllister, the BBC’s other major commentator on the event, pointed to the future to justify the pomp: it would become a parliament. Huw Edwards and others made the Owain Glyndwˆr connection, locating the event in a timescale of more than 600 years. Other historical figures were named as potential supporters of the Senedd, and Rhodri Morgan averred that it would be the most important St David’s Day for centuries. Yet it was not possible to present this as the unambiguous triumph of a nation struggling to be free. What quickly forced itself onto the agenda of this ceremonial event as media occasion was criticism of the cost of the building and the memory of the referendum.

The major grievance was cost. At £67 million, many could be found to criticise the lavish expenditure. A Holyhead businessman argued that they were only apprentice politicians but were not behaving as such; politicians had devolution but the people of Wales did not. An Aberystwyth student, Llinos Mai Thomas, had collected 10,200 signatures on a petition against the cost of the building and such sentiments were characterised as being indicative of feelings in north Wales. Indeed, the divisions were presented as being the popularly understood ones of north versus south. The belief in such a division has become a feature of the discourse of Welsh nationality and, in one sense, can be seen as affirming the national nature of the event. In reality, a BBC opinion poll found that 80 per cent of the population disapproved of the cost — clearly not merely north Walians.

The other manifestation of discontent occurred outside the building. When the Queen arrived the booing was louder than the cheering, at least at first. Huw Edwards’s commentary tried to play down the numbers involved, but the microphones contradicted him. This remained in the coverage in the Welsh news, but interestingly not in the London news bulletins. It appeared that Wales could understand itself as a nation with internal disagreements but in England it was presented more consensually. The dissenters were apparently a motley bunch — those opposed to the cost, Socialist Workers Party members and Welsh Republicans. Before the Queen arrived the Plaid AM, Leanne Wood, was given time on screen to explain her boycott of the event. Appropriating the language of modernity that surrounded the building to argue for the rejection of a hereditary monarchy, it was, she said, “an out-of-date pantomime”.

What was remarkable in live BBC TV coverage was the inclusion of dissent, even if clear efforts were made to marginalise it. Some of this relied on the considerable talents of Huw Edwards, who seems effortlessly to combine gravitas and popular appeal. His ability to deal with dissent in the context of what is supposed to be a unifying ritual makes him a valuable figure in the context of a devolved culture. Perhaps this shows a path to the future of broadcasting official ceremonial more generally in Britain, but at this stage it is difficult to imagine the BBC experimenting with an approach that accepts the possibility of dissent when dealing with similar events in London. The key to understanding a readiness to incorporate the existence of dissent in official broadcasting of public ceremonial in Wales is what had happened during the Investiture of 1969, when opposition to the event meshed with a wider sense of youth rebellion and irreverence to authority. Opposition in Welsh-language youth culture encompassed pop songs as well as politics, in a way that has never been seen in English (or in England, the Sex Pistols notwithstanding).

In this context Rhodri Morgan found the tone with a speech that was full of humour. Oddly perhaps, the “royal expert” Brian Hoey, who might have been expected to favour more formality, thought it was appropriate, and much was made of the claim that the Queen hadn’t been seen laughing in public before. Rhodri Morgan made little attempt to cover up the realities of politics, and his joke that he hoped Roman traditions of knifing leaders in the back would not be observed here was in line with the general media portrayal of events. Other conflicts took more decoding. Given that a controversy had arisen over the use of the name “Senedd” in the week or so before the ceremony, much attention was given as to whether the word would be used by the Queen. In the event, she did not utter it, despite the well-attested fact that it had been present in earlier drafts. Equally, there was an interest in whether the new Government of Wales Bill would be mentioned — something that Rhodri Morgan did briefly.