FORUM: Illtyd Harrington: ‘As I Please’

Published: 30 June, 2011
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

WALES, that green emerald with a population that shouts rather than speaks, but in melody and, to anyone passing, in embracing tones; rugby, male choirs, gossip, ardent youth, embarrassed sheep and nervous lambs.

And, in spite of a new national conscience with a newly elected assembly, South Wales is no longer a radical or revolutionary place, the five large standing stones commemorating Nye Bevan above his constituency in Ebbw Vale rarely visited.

Yet it was here that he hammered out his ideas for the National Health Service. In an event arranged by Jill Craigie, Michael Foot’s wife, he spoke his message to the three urban areas of his constituency, the country and the world. This messianic man is now a remote figure, and is remembered only by the Nye Bevan historic trail. 

The only unpleasant politics I witnessed there were a gang of boneheaded youth intimidating an Asian shopkeeper. 

A shameful thing in Bevan’s territory. 

My original intention was to get into a pair of ruby slippers and go down the yellow brick road to Oz.

The leader of the Labour Party went by train to set alight a bushfire to revitalise Labour in its most secure territory.

He ambled shyly from an inexpensive car into a meeting of Labour workers. 

The greeter-in-chief was the ubiquitous MP for Neath Peter Hain.

He patted Miliband firmly in the middle of his back causing an ancient miner in our family to give voice to: “He’s only looking for a place to put the knife in.”

Miliband had been told to take an aggressive public stance. 

It was all go forth and multiply. 

It was more the kindly headmaster addressing the sixth-form as they departed the comprehensive.

This was theatre and high-spun rhetoric. Conversation is no call to advance against the aggressive government.

History was not just repeating itself it was bellowing: “Remember the Taff Vale judgment” of 1901. 

As the Welsh met, their traditional enemies were preparing the way for more restrictive laws. 

Francis Maude, Vince Cable and the squeamish Michael Gove – a trio of poisonous assassins – waiting to place even more restrictions on the right to strike. Any lawyer will dust out a copy of the Coercion Act 1819 and there you will read the same philosophy.

Hain and Ed Balls are not just ambiguous, they’re ambivalent about the trade unions. We’ll send a wreath but we can’t join the cortège.

We nipped down to Swansea and the idiosyncratic Mumbles. 

When I was a student Swansea defied chapel intolerance. Sadly in 1950 Swansea remained sinless territory to me. 

This was a republic of free thought – a mini-Florence. 

Here I persuaded Dylan Thomas to come  and read – shocking most of the Baptist ministers throughout Carmarthen.

Not even peaceful political graffiti or a notice for a political meeting on an evangelistic crusade. 

Of course, the last demonstration here was in 1961 against German troops training in Wales. The late Leo Abse led it.

In Merthyr, my home town, the political somnambulance reminded me of an overgrown cemetery. 

In 1848 nearly 11,000 semi-literate people signed the People’s Charter a manifesto for democracy with six points.

That plaster saint of Labour Keir Hardie MP for Merthyr 1901 to 1915 and the original leader of their parliamentary group was sanctified by the Labour Party. 

It took me some time to find a bust of him tucked away in the civic centre. In 1936 I sat on my grandfather’s shoulders to see the start of the hunger march to London.

I heard a man shout “Hear, hear” and I was bewildered by what he meant. 

Modern Labour, to be kind, suffers from a very selective amnesia. Blair carefully avoided the successes of the Attlee government (1945-51) after they introduced a 14-day holiday for workers.

In 1849 they gathered here demanding a 40-hour week. 

The first Red Flag was carried here – a worker carried a white sheet dipped in sheep’s blood.

Now the screws are being reapplied. Longer working hours, delayed retirement, less pension, fewer benefits and social support.

In nearby Brecon I looked in at the barracks where the regimental museum of the South Wales Borderers commemorates the slaughter at Rorkes Drift (1879) as a victory rather than the incredible defeat that it was.

In the mid-1930s a wild left-winger, one Arthur Eyles, walked from Merthyr to Brecon, entered the barracks and moved among the assembled soldiers issuing leaflets urging them to turn their rifles on the boss class.

After a summary eviction by the Sergeant Major he licked his wounds and, like Napoleon, returned to the fray.

This one-eyed former wrestler ended up in the Swansea Assizes charged with high treason. He escaped the rope but the judge, a dyspeptic man, irritated by Welsh unpredictability, gave him three years hard labour. 

Later he joined the British Union of Fascists and my mother knocked him off his platform in our street. It was a turbulent time.

A phenomenon occurred in Merthyr in 1947. 

The Conservative Party was to hold a public meeting. A Tory in the citadel of Labour? At first there was incredulity, then rage, followed by indignation and bewilderment. 

But this did not prevent RA Butler, later Prime Minister’s deputy, from developing the new creed –morphed 10 years later into Butskellism. Labour’s high middle-class leader Hugh Gaitskell was the suffix.

Now I am left in a melancholy state looking at the dusty banners assuring everyone that there would be a new society. 

A country I loved is now politically sterile. Not even the signs of a religious revival which periodically seizes the people in remote parts of Wales and spreads like rabies to sweep them up into the high mountains of vision and the brotherhood of man. 

Not to be.

Now it’s more Prozac than proclamation.