comment is free

Momentous day for nationalists

Not many people in England seem to care very much, but nationalist politics within the British (or is it Atlantic?) Isles take a significant step forward today when a politician called Ieuan Wyn Jones is appointed deputy first minister of Wales.

As the first minister of Wales, Labour's Rhodri Morgan, was rushed to hospital for a heart operation on Monday night, Mr Jones, leader of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, may have to become acting top man until Mr Morgan (a robust 67) completes his recovery.

It is all a bit sudden, but the tectonic plates of nationalist sentiment are slowly shifting. In Edinburgh a minority SNP executive is managing to keep the buses running on time, and in Belfast Sinn Féin now shares power with Ian Paisley's DUP. Labour's hegemony is eroding.

Alex Salmond has noticed and is drumming up support to revive moribund joint committees. So has that doughty British Unionist, Gordon Brown, who is proving friendlier than Tony Blair. Next week in Belfast he will meet them all (plus Dublin's Bertie Ahern) at the British-Irish council, the first such plenary session of what is also called, more romantically, the Council of the Isles, since 2002.

It was only last weekend that Plaid's national council voted by 92% to 8% to enter a historic coalition with its old enemy, Welsh Labour, which lost its dominant position in the Cardiff assembly in the May 3 elections. It was Labour's worst result in the principality since it ended Liberal domination in the 1920s - about the time Plaid was founded as the vehicle of the Welsh cultural revival.

Slightly less cheerfully, 78% of a special Welsh Labour conference also voted to create a "grand coalition" with the official opposition. Labour's 26 seats and Plaid's 15 give them 41 of the 60 assembly seats, just enough to trigger the legal threshold for another referendum which would seek powers equal to the Scottish parliament's.

That is one of three key concessions in the "One Wales" deal whereby Labour has also promised to review Welsh funding and to give the Welsh language official status that will require basic service information to be written bilingually in the private as well as public sector.

Most Welsh Labour MPs at Westminster, more influential string-pullers than the Scots, fear it is a suicidal move which will give Plaid three of 12 cabinet seats, plus the in-service training and credibility which goes with budgets and TV. "It's OK for Rhodri, he'll be retiring in two years," says one.

In May Mr Morgan tried for a renewed coalition with the Lib Dems, who turned him down, as they did Mr Salmond in Scotland. They also voted against a "rainbow coalition" with the Tories and PC, then changed their minds too late. Plaid's brainy leftwing MP, Adam Price, floated the "red-green" option on his blog and it took off.

Faced with the risk of being voted out at any time - Mr Salmond lost his first vote, on Edinburgh trams, last week - Mr Morgan and the Welsh secretary, Peter Hain, swallowed their disdain, hoping to dominate Plaid, which "couldn't run a cockle stall".

Labour critics say Rhodri should have called Plaid's bluff and governed on alone.


Most popular