Adam Price: No coalition with the Tories, and no Plaid Cymru name change

Adam Price has quashed suggestions in a BBC story that the party was thinking of entering a coalition with the Conservatives after the next Welsh elections.

He said that Jonathan Edwards MP “did not say” that a Plaid Cymru and Conservative coalition could not be ruled out after the next election.

Plaid Cymru delegates are meeting at their Spring Conference this year in Bangor’s Pontio – one of Wales’ newest arts centres.

“I’m not impugning the integrity of BBC journalism but he did not say that,” he told Good Morning Wales.

“What he said was that Labour are as bad as the Conservatives, in terms of their negative impact on people’s lives in Wales.

“I know Jonathan Edwards pretty well, and if you think that a shop steward’s son from Capel Hendre would ever advocate a coalition with the Tories, that’s as unlikely as a miner’s son from the village next door ever advocating a coalition with the Tories, and by the way that’s me.

“I said clearly in the leadership campaign, I don’t want and would never ask for people’s support for a coalition with the Conservatives. How could I with my life history, you know?

“The devastation that was wrought in Wales under Thatcher are still at the heart of the economic policies of the Conservatives.

“But here’s the difference and here’s the new thing, which is that I’m not prepared to accept a coalition with Labour either.

“The Labour party have left a legacy over the last twenty years of broken lives.”

He also suggested that Plaid Cymru would not be adopting an English name to New Wales Party as suggested in Angus Robertson’s recent report.

“We’re not going to change the name of Plaid Cymru – what we need to do is change the conversation we’re having with the Welsh people,” he said.

“Plaid Cymru’s name is Plaid Cymru and has been since time immemorial. How we describe ourselves – that’s about how we present our ideas.

“We can do that in 15,000 words in a manifesto and we can do it in three words in a slogan.

“We’re in the persuasion business. We need to persuade people that a different Wales is possible. But at the core is the different vision of the Wales we want to create.”

A spokesperson for Plaid Cymru said: “As Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price made unequivocally clear live on BBC Radio Wales this morning, Plaid Cymru is ruling out a coalition in 2021 with Labour or the Conservatives. As Jonathan Edwards MP said, both Labour and the Tories are as bad as each other.”

‘New Wales’

Speaking before his first Spring Conference as party leader, Adam Price said that he would put forward a vision of the ‘New Wales’ he would want to deliver as the new Welsh Government in 2021.

“The Westminster Government continues to lose its grip on power, with the Prime Minister unable to govern,” he said.

“Meanwhile, opinion polls show the people of Wales have changed their mind on Brexit.  One of the heaviest support Leave votes across the UK would now support Remain.

“While Westminster looks through its rose-tinted monocle and yearns for the return of the British Empire, the people of Wales are looking to the future, a new future – a new Wales – with Plaid Cymru.

“At the heart of our vision for Wales is a country transformed.  We are offering an alternative to Labour’s suffocating hegemony by embracing a new Welsh wave of change.

“We need to scour the world for radical thinking, and embrace a new pioneering spirit, entrepreneurial and experimental, at the heart of government.

“Innovative government should not be a contradiction in terms, the exception that proves the rule of bureaucratic inertia. If we are to leapfrog from where we are now, to where we want to be then we have to be the Innovation Nation.

“Where Labour has subcontracted its conscious to a Future Generations Commissioner with no power, Plaid Cymru will create a Minister for the Future, with a place in the Welsh Government Cabinet, to ensure we are not bystanders in our own history, but we in Wales and the Government of Wales can shape our own future.

“The Westminster parties are broken. It’s time we forged a new way of doing politics in Wales to stop division in its tracks.”

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