Welsh Journals

Swings and Roundabout CAMPAIGN REPORT AND WHISPERS VALERIE PRICE 'MRS GWYNFOR EVANS buys her clothes in Paris.' This was an example of the muck that was being used in one of the dirtiest elections Wales has known. For one reason or another the big parties in Wales all feared the power of the Plaid, the little Nationalist Party and concentrated their efforts on trying to discredit them. Ironically the Plaid had very little effect on the electorate and the outcome of the election showed little change among the big parties who were too preoccupied to fight each other effectively. Whether the wife of the President of Plaid Cymru buys her clothes in some 'Paris House' in Dolgellau or Llangadog we do not know but certainly Alderman Gwynfor Evans, the popular tomato-growing lawyer from Llangadog does not own six farms-or in fact any farms, nor does he use only English workers as Mr T W Jones, his Labour opponent, continually asserted in the exclusively Welsh language campaign in Merioneth. Whatever the eccentricities of Plaid Cymru, it is certainly not bogus in its belief in Wales; and such charges as that the President's seven children were being educated in England were far from true. Equally unjustifiable were Big Jim Griffiths' attempts to show the Plaid candidate for Merioneth as a Tory sympathiser who always voted against Labour in Council meetings. Whispering Campaign The Liberals who only missed unseating the unpopular Socialist candidate in Merioneth by 976 votes concentrated their belated efforts on showing the Nationalists as pulpit politicians and killjoys whose unrealistic economics would put Wales in the unenviable position of the Southern Irish of whose plight there was plenty of evidence in the Festiniog area where they are employed in large numbers on the hydro-electric and atomic projects. Had the Irish had a vote it is difficult to say how they would have affected the election but certainly if their heckling of Mr T W Jones was anything to go by, they would not have voted Labour. Perhaps the most remarkable factor which emerged from the election in Wales was the position of the Liberals. Whereas in Great Britain as a whole the Liberals are regarded as a party of the left, in Wales they are still regarded as being to the right of centre.