"My Rhondda constituents don’t need reminding that Rhondda miners were fighting for democracy in Spain when Plaid Cymru’s leadership was supporting Franco and his fascists."
Welsh Political History has done a very thorough investigation of the background to this claim of whether or not the early leaders of Plaid Cymru had fascist leanings and sympathy not only towards Franco, but also Mussolini and Hitler.
4 comments:
Thanks very much for the plug.
Best.
Adam
And concluded that the claim was debunked (you forgot to mention that ;-) )
Yes I did:
"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"
I don't know, that sustained succour to fascist dictators is not exactly the "debunking" I'd be looking for really....;)
It finishes with the word "debunked" ;-)
Don't think there's any doubt that some of the early Plaid leaders gave succour to people and regimes the world learnt to despise. But others within the leadership did not feel the same and that's why the party itself did not have a position on the matter. The ones who did give succour lost the argument within the party eventually and that's why it has little relevance to the politics of today other than a historical sidenote.
What you haven't mentione din the post is that Leighton made his "facist supporters" comment in a reply to a cross party request for support for a memorial for Welsh people who died opposing Franco. Making a cheap poloitical jibe out of such thing is unfortunate.
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