Welsh Journals

Opposltion Ptanning in Wale* PIERRE CLAVEL Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University. Introduction After 1966, Wales became the location of one of the major nationalist movements within any Western country. Numerous Welsh institut- ions took on new life. Electoral gains by Plaid Cymru caused great concern in the major parties, and one English M.P. told me that at one point "there wasn't a safe seat in Wales." Nationalist sentiment generally, by no means limited to Plaid Cymru, forced major changes in economic policy and administrative arrangements. All these devel- opments are important, not only for what they promise or fail to promise for Wales, but for what they reveal about the politics and economics of the modern state. Planning played a significant role in Welsh nationalism in this period, both official planning in the hands of the Welsh Office and central government, and opposition planning by Plaid Cymru and other groups. Foremost among the latter was the Plaid Cymru Economic Plan for Wales of 1969, but subsequent efforts by regional groups and local authorities, particularly in South Wales, contributed to a kind of coherence to opposition that would not have occurred without planning. This interaction of official and opposition planning is worth examining now. The terms of interaction and conflict bet- ween central government and oppositions in Wales have entered a new phase, and it will be important to be prepared for the next period, to assess what role planning might play then. Beginning in the middle 1960s, official planning and an opposit- ion response to planning co-existed in Wales. Under the Wilson government of 1964, regional plans were mandated for all of Britain as part of the national planning effort under George Brown and the Department of Economic Affairs. The Welsh part of this, to be done within the Welsh Office, was an official Government White Paper entitled'Wales: The Way Aheadrpublished in 1967. This plan set the stage for an opposition response, for several reasons. High expect- ations had developed for it based on the needs of local planners and the new prominence of planning generally, augmented by secrecy of its preparation and delay in its publication. There was controversy surrounding its publication arising from employment predictions which seemed to have been tailored to Government employment programs rather than worked out by more sober methodologies. It was widely criticised for being too general and preliminary. Sub- stantively, it seemed, if only in a general way, to support concentrat- ed development in Mid-Wales and the coastal plain near Cardiff.