On Being a Writer in Wales: John Osmond

John Osmond

If I were to offer one piece of advice to an aspiring young writer it would be simply this: Keep a diary!

I’m about midway through the second volume of a documentary novel about the period between the 1970s and 1990s, trying to explain how the overwhelming defeat in the 1979 referendum turned into the Yes vote that established the National Assembly in 1997, less than twenty years later.

If I had kept a diary during that period my task would be a lot easier.

As it is I’m having to rely a good deal on memory which is notoriously unreliable. For instance, if you were around do you remember what you were doing during March 1984? That’s an especially important moment for my purposes since it was the month that the Miners’ Strike began.

Defeat

In searching for reasons that explain what happened between the two referendums I’m convinced that the Miners’ Strike played a critical part. It was, of course, another defeat.

But in Wales the defeat was experienced very differently to the way it occurred in England and Scotland. But more than that, I believe it shifted attitudes fundamentally.

To begin with there was strong opposition at most of the Welsh pitheads in a show of hands, and with good reason. Striking in the Spring with summer ahead and coal stocks piled high was, to say the least, an inopportune moment.

More fundamentally, a year earlier when all 31 pits across south Wales had struck to defend threatened Lewis Merthyr in the Rhondda, there had been no solidarity from the richer English coalfields which voted against support.

Militant

Yet when the strike was fully underway, the Welsh coalfield proved the most militant, sending pickets in military-style operations across Britain. Moreover, miners in Wales remained solid when elsewhere across Britain they drifted back to work.

And then, in early 1985, when the strike became untenable, it was the Welsh miners who put the survival of their union first, and led an orderly return to work.

In all of this the Welsh miners acted in unison, but at the end found themselves abandoned as mass closures ensued.

It was a bitter lesson. When it comes to the crunch we only have ourselves to rely on.

For me the sentiment was summed up by a miner at Cwm Colliery, near Llantrisant some four miles south of Pontypridd. At the time I was working with HTV’s Wales This Week current affairs programme which followed the fortunes of Cwm during the strike. When it was over one of the miners we featured told us he had started learning Welsh. Asked why he said, ‘The language is all we have left.’

Resonant

His response stayed with me as resonant of the strike’s impact, not only on the mining communities directly engaged, but on Wales as a whole. If I had kept a diary I would surely have recorded this, and my feelings about it. I recall sensing in a somewhat inchoate way that the strike was a momentous episode. But, of course, living in the moment you have no idea of what is to come and how a train of events links the past and present to the future.

Delving into memoirs and archives forty years later, one is left grasping at fragments to support the conviction that the strike was indeed a turning point, the hinge on which history turned in favour of devolution.

Hywel Francis, who chaired the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities in 1984-85, certainly thought so and makes the point in his account of the strike, History on our Side. But again his perspective is one of hindsight. Hywel died in 2021 so it is too late to explore his understanding in greater depth. If only I had kept that diary.

I did keep one much later for two short periods. The first was during 2006 in the period leading to the 2007 Assembly election. A small group of us in Plaid Cymru came together to propagate the argument that we should accept the need for cross-party collaboration if Labour’s seemingly perpetual dominance of Welsh politics was to end. If Welsh democracy was to be meaningful the electorate had to be presented with a realistic prospect of an alternative government.

It was, of course, controversial since it meant Plaid being willing to enter a coalition with the Welsh Conservatives, albeit that in those days they were a much more Welsh-aligned breed. And, for a fleeting moment in the wake of the 2007 Assembly election, it did seem that the so-called Rainbow Alliance between Plaid, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats might be possible.

In fact, a first edition of the London Times announced that Plaid’s Ieuan Wyn Jones was to be the new First Minister of Wales. In the event he turned out to be Deputy First Minister to Rhodri Morgan in a coalition with Labour.

Strategic

The second period when I began keeping a diary was in October 2018. I had just completed the first volume of my novel, Ten Million Stars are Burning, which took my story to 1979 when, totally unexpectedly, Adam Price asked me to become his Special Adviser following his election as leader of Plaid Cymru. I became immersed in a project Adam had to hand.

He convinced me that, given a fair wind and some strategic vision there was a chance that Plaid could lead a government following the 2021 Senedd election. This seemed important to inject a new energy into Welsh democracy, and was enough to entice me away from my novel.

The diary covers the six-month period of what Adam Price called our first hundred days. As they reached their end, it looked for a dizzying moment as if we were indeed on course to achieve our objective of leading a minority government. Adam’s leadership was established, and the party was doing well in the opinion polls, well enough it seemed to reach our goal.

Then the diary stops. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that subconsciously I realised that if it continued, I would be recording something completely different to the project we had started upon so optimistically six months earlier. Most immediately was the fall-out from Brexit, a maelstrom and calamity that sucked the lifeblood from forward planning.

Scarcely had that been settled, at least for the time being by the December 2019 ‘Get Brexit Done’ election, when we were overtaken by the Covid 19 pandemic. This was a further calamitous event, overwhelming in its impact. The combined effect was to throw the idea of a Plaid-led minority government completely off course. Somehow, we had to find an alternative, more realisable objective. Following the year-long production of our manifesto for the May 2021 Senedd election, this became the Co-operation Agreement.

This diary is a core component of my new book The Politics of Co-Opposition: The Inside Story of the 2021-24 Co-Operation Agreement Between Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour.

Beguiling

In its own way the Agreement turned out be as a beguiling project as a Plaid-led Government might have been. Certainly, it introduced a completely new form of political engagement in the British Isles, in which opposing politicians co-operate on mutually agreed policies while maintaining their positions as government and opposition. Termed by academics ‘Contract Parliamentarianism’, it drew on precedents in Sweden, New Zealand and Malaysia.

It resulted in significant measures being introduced across 46 policy areas. These included free school meals for all primary school pupils, expanding free childcare to all two-year-olds, action on the second homes crisis blighting rural Wales, and reforming the Senedd.

The latter involved an increase in its Members from 60 to 96 and a fully proportional electoral system which will be used in the 2026 Senedd election. I’m not sure how much of this might have been achieved by a Plaid minority government, with an angry Labour Opposition resisting every move. Certainly, Senedd reform – which required a two-thirds majority – would have been off limits.

Looking back the episode fully justifies that brief period following October 2018 when I kept a diary, which gives an insight into the circumstances which persuaded Plaid’s leadership that they needed a new trajectory to take Wales forward. It’s also confirmation, to me at least, that I should have kept a diary for much longer, in fact for the whole of my working life.

The Politics of Opposition is published by the Welsh Academic Press.

It is being launched at a Wales Governance Centre event at the Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University, Cathays Park, Cardiff, at 6pm for 6.30pm on Wednesday 6 November 2024, in which John Osmond will be in conversation with Professor Richard Wyn Jones, Director of the Wales Governance Centre. Free tickets to attend the event are available here.