Welsh Journals

THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY AND WALES* The historians Kenneth O. Morgan in his Modern Wales, writing about Welsh political biography, observed that he would have nothing at all to say about Welsh Tory biography "for the very good reason that there is no such thing. Since the 1868 general election, Toryism or Conservatism has played only a marginal part, at best, in Welsh political consciousness, and as a result I am unable to think of any single biography which focuses on a Welsh Conservative. The literary tradition over the decades has just followed the election returns". It is not in fact true that the literary tradition, or indeed the interest of historians, has just followed the election returns. A great deal has been written about the supporters of Welsh Nationalism, despite the lack of support that they have received over much of the period from the electors of Wales. It is not to their credit that some of our most distinguished historians completely ignore the role of Conservative Governments and the substantial contributions that they have made to improving the condition of the Welsh people and the preservation of the Welsh language and Welsh culture, and that a number distort the record on the basis of their political prejudices. One of the most comprehensive accounts fails to name a single Conservative Secretary of State, Welsh Office junior minister or backbench Member of Parliament. Even John Davies in his impressive History of Wales, published in 1990, starts his post 1979 history with the inaccurate observation: "The consequences of the votes of March and May 1979 rapidly became apparent. On the morrow of the referendum it was announced that two thousand jobs would disappear in the Welsh steel industry". Later in this lecture I shall show that there was no connection whatsoever between those events, and that Dr Davies was also wrong to assert that the policy change on Welsh language broadcasting was due to the Home Secretary's belief that Welsh Nationalism was 'in a paralysis of helplessness'. Such falsities tend to become accepted as facts. David Melding, a Conservative Member of the National Assembly, in his essay Have we been anti Welsh?, accepts the Davies proposition as plausible, and adds the completely unfounded assertion that, "an immediate consequence of the referendum result was that the leverage of the Welsh office in Whitehall became much weaker". John Davies ignores the enormous contribution of Conservative Governments to the survival of the Welsh language. He also has little to say about the part that they have played in the transformation of the