#1: Plaid had fascist leanings

The claim

I’m going to start this blog off with perhaps one of the most contentious and controversial claims in modern Welsh political history: that Plaid Cymru, and specifically its founding members, once exhibited fascistic and anti-Semitic tendencies.

It’s a claim that Plaid is keen to rebut, and its opponents are keen to propagate. The former AM for Preseli Pembrokeshire, Richard Edwards, once used a Plenary debate to brand former Plaid President Saunders Lewis a “Mussolini fancier”, while ex-Labour MP Llew Smith even dedicated a 2002 Westminster Hall debate in Parliament to the topic of “Racism (Welsh politics)” in which these and other similar allegations were recorded in Hansard.

Despite these claims having largely vanished from formal political discourse in recent years, they continue to surface in the blogosphere. In September 2008 someone styling themselves “G Lewis, Bridgend Lib Dems” left a comment on Peter Black’s blog exhorting readers:

Lest we forget: Saunders Lewis was a Nazi Sympathiser.

Most recently, a debate on the Welsh Ramblings blog contained the claim that:

I never cease to be amazed by all this guff from the likes of Jenkins, Wood and Price et al who now bleat on about what cool socialists they claim to be. Of course, its all new to them, Only a generation ago, their leaders supported the very ideology they now claim to be campaigning against…If we rewound 65 years, you lot would be backing Franco all the way. So stop trying to re-write history - your past is there for all to read about.

The evidence

Almost needless to say, the historical evidence points to a rather more complex and ambiguous situation than those quoted above would have you believe. In part, we have our professional historians to blame for this. Kenneth (K O) Morgan, John Davies and Gwyn Alf (G A) Williams have all at various times given a significant amount of credence to the Plaid-founders-as-fascist-sympathisers argument. Gwyn Alf, a fomer Plaid Vice President, left little room for doubt in his 1985 book When Was Wales? (Penguin) when he argued: “During the 1930s Plaid became even more of a right wing force. It’s journal refused to resist Hitler or Mussolini, ignored or tolerated anti-Semitism and, in effect, came out in support of Franco. In 1941 Saunders Lewis’ pamphlet “The Church and the World” explicitly rejected the war against Nazi Germany while in 1944 Ambrose Bebb condemned the plot to assassinate Hitler.”

Similarly, K O Morgan claimed that “Plaid’s early politics were complicated and compromised by the apparent neo-fascism of its charismatic first President, the poet and dramatist Saunders Lewis, and the sympathy for fascist-style corporatism shown by him and other Roman Catholic leaders of the party.”¹

There is undoubtedly some weight to the claim. J E Daniel, the party’s third President, argued for a post-Rhineland deal with Hitler, suggesting for good measure that Europe’s democracies and her fascist regimes shared a common cause in opposing communism.²

Famously, Lewis also appeared to support Hitler, writing that “at once he fulfilled his promise - a promise which was greatly mocked by the London papers months before that—to completely abolish the financial strength of the Jews in the economic life of Germany.”³

However, as disquieting as this sentiment appears to modern eyes, the crucial and overlooked part of the quote is Lewis’s criticism of the English media. Throughout the 1930s the party’s paper Y Ddraig Goch devoted much time to rebutting what its authors saw as the pro-war, pro-imperialist press, an impulse to which some senior members still sometimes succumb today. The party’s almost unanimous⁴ pacifism drove its polemicists – which included nearly all Plaid’s founders – into some curious and uncomfortable forms of realpolitik. It would be going to far to suggest that the frequently sympathetic views of Lewis et al towards Europe’s fascist dictators stemmed only from a desire to take issue with the English media’s jingoism, but it was certainly a significant component. Equally, a fulsome opposition to Wales becoming embroiled in England’s imperial conflict – regardless of the causes – acted as a powerful stimulant, leading Lewis in August 1939 to compare Hitler’s broken treaty promises to the broken word of the English “to the Arab, to the Jew, to India”.⁵ Opposing war, imperialism, and the English was almost certainly more important to Plaid’s early leaders than remaining free of the taint of being seen to endorse far more militaristic regimes.⁶ This was never clearer than when the party backed Welsh neutrality at the outbreak of hostilities in 1939.

A different defence of the leaders’ views is often that they were not alone in the 1930s in voicing some support for Hitler. Indeed, both Lloyd George and Bevan are cited as Welsh political heroes whose early⁷ stance on the dictators was compromised. It is true that a number of prominent British politicians were enamoured of the strong leadership initially offered by Mussolini in particular, in common with some Plaid leaders. But the similarities stop here. British politicians, by and large, saw the error of their ways soon enough, and none bracketed the morality of Britain’s imperial status with that of Hitler’s aggressive expansionism, as Plaid were wont to do. Ironically, given that Plaid supporters most often offer this defence, it is perhaps the weakest.

The conclusion: Debunked

Plaid’s early leadership did indeed give sustained succour to Europe’s dictators, including Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. But their reasons for doing so were more complicated that some innate sympathy to fascism, and were largely motivated by a desire to contest what they saw as English imperialsm.

***

A NOTE ON SOURCES

The primary sources used in this article were written in Welsh. Where this is the case, I have relied on the translations contained within D Hywel Davies’s The Welsh Nationalist Party 1925-1945 (1983), St Martin’s Press

1. Morgan, K O, Welsh Devolution: the Past and the Future in Scotland and Wales: Nations Again? (Ed. Taylor, B and Thomson, K), (1999), University of Wales Press. [↩]
2. Y Ddraig Goch, August 1936 [↩]
3. ibid, July 1937 [↩]
4. Ambrose Bebb, alone among the party’s leaders, was a trenchant critic of Hitler from the early 1930s onwards, even coming out in favour of the destruction of Nazi Germany in 1939. However, by also appearing to admire the type of strong leadership being offered by Lenin and Mussolini (whom he commended in 1935 as an influence to “every well-read and thinking man”) even Bebb’s stance was arguably tainted [↩]
5. Y Ddraig Goch, August 1939 [↩]
6. Lewis addressed this accusation directly in 1938 when, in response to internal party critics, arguing “our accusers claim that we favour the success of Franco and Mussolini…the truth is that we seek to obstruct the creation of enthusiasm in Wales for an English war in Spain”, Y Ddraig Goch, April 1938 [↩]
7. Or perhaps even late in Lloyd George’s case, with the old man voicing support for a peace accord in 1942 [↩]

Tags: