THEY finally got him. After months of bickering, Plaid Cecru’s Assembly group this week all rounded on ‘Nasty Neil’ McEvoy and expelled him from the Plaid benches in the Senedd.
A Plaid functionary announced that the group had taken the decision permanently to expel Nasty Neil, whose behaviour had left colleagues feeling ‘undermined and demoralised’.
McEvoy, he explained, was distracting Plaid Cymru AMs from getting on with their work of serving the people of Wales and holding the Labour government to account.
This is a bit rich. Neil McEvoy is just about the only Plaid Cymru AM who – in a rough and tumble, populist way – was doing anything whatsoever to hold Labour to account. As such, he was distracting Plaid AMs from acting in their usual capacity as the official collaboration and fearlessly going along with whatever Labour want to do in the Assembly.
McEvoy had been suspended from the Plaid Assembly group since March, purportedly ‘for breaching standing orders and the group’s code of conduct through unacceptable behaviour’. The suspension followed his conviction by a kangaroo court of the Adjudication Panel for Wales, for saying blood-curdling things to a Council employee about a possible restructuring of the local authority.
For the members of the Panel, who live in mortal dread of the prospect of their public-sector sinecures being restructured, this plainly amounted to bullying.
Bullying is taken very seriously in Plaid Cymru, who recently lost no opportunity to lambast Labour for their treatment of the late Carl Sergeant. It is obviously appropriate that they should take robust action against bullying by ganging up against the one AM in their party who has repeatedly tried to bully them into cracking down on lobbying, and dealing with the Welsh Government’s cronyism, corruption and waste.
Neil McEvoy’s defenestration points towards a wider problem for Plaid Cymru. What kind of a party is Plaid supposed to be?
Few, inside the party or out, have a clue. In rural areas, the yellowy-green Plaid of the countryside come across as a Welsh-language, don’t-scare-the-horses successor to the defunct Liberals. In the party’s Westminster constituencies, a vote for Plaid is a vote against Labour, rather than for anything you could easily identify as a policy platform.
Then there is the other Plaid. The greeny-red Plaid of the valleys, which has for years made a trademark of outflanking Labour to the left. With a full-on Lenin-capped loon now in charge of the Labour Party, this strategy no longer looks awfully viable.
Which leaves Plaid Cymru with a choice. Welsh voters’ unexpected enthusiasm for Brexit, and the flash-burn success of UKIP in the 2016 Assembly elections demonstrates that Wales certainly has an appetite for a new kind of politics. Decades of red-rosette-on-a-turd electoral complacency from Welsh Labour is reaping its whirlwind in working class disaffection with the Welsh political establishment.
Plaid Cymru’s headline policy of independence for Wales is a very bad one and the party has a bit of a hill to climb in attracting voters. That said, people have fallen hook, line and sinker for some equally stinking ideas recently –step forward, Brexit– and at a time of nihilistic cynicism about politics and politicians in general, there is always some appeal in novelty. But rather than making Welsh independence the party’s raison d’etre and then selling the idea hard to the public, manifesto after manifesto has made a faint cough of apology over independence, before droning on about some new measure to promote wattle-and-daub housebuilding in Machynlleth.
If you are embarrassed about your brand, your product is not going to fly off the shelves. Neil McEvoy’s vision for Plaid was of a party prouder of its USP, less tied to economic dogma and closer to the concerns of its working class target voters. At the root of his feud with the other Plaid AMs is his support for the right to buy; one of the most popular Conservative policies in history, which brought millions of working class voters over to the Tories.
In the same week that she disembarrassed herself of McEvoy, Leanne Wood on Monday published a pamphlet ‘The Change We Need’, offering her own solution to Plaid Cymru’s identity crisis.
The new direction, it appears, is very like the old one: higher taxes and hippyism. Wood’s vision is for ‘community socialism’, where running the Stasi is presumably devolved to your local community council. The pamphlet details Wood’s aspiration to rid Wales of big business –something, unusually, that she is well qualified to achieve– and replace it with locally run chutney making and basket weaving collectives. At the same time, Plaid would massively increase investment in public services; presumably asking the Sais to pay.
This is the same dismal formula that brought Plaid’s vote share down to 7% during their disastrous coupling to the Green Party, and Plaid’s latest economic strategy sounds every bit as bad. The kind of people in Cardiff who enthusiastically voted for Neil McEvoy don’t want to live in eco-hovels and aren’t going to be impressed by hippy economics.
Politicians who get things done can be abrasive and insensitive. Nasty Neil McEvoy clearly has as much of a talent for rubbing his colleagues up the wrong way as he does for sorting out his constituents’ problems. His former colleagues may well feel undermined and demoralised. It is because they know, deep down, that he understands how to make their party a success.
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