S4C and Welsh Identity

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2014 Westminster Hall

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

The Conservatives deserve great credit for their work for the Welsh language—there is no question of that—but the summit of their achievements and the work of Wyn Roberts was in education rather than S4C.

I had a ringside seat at the genesis of S4C. In 1973, with a colleague, I wrote a document called “Television in Wales” that became Labour party policy. The hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) used the word “fragility”; when one looks at how the campaign for a Welsh channel could have gone wrong in many ways, one sees that it had great luck. The main way that the campaign got the support of almost the entire Welsh population was through a conference in Cardiff called by the lord mayor in 1973. Everyone was saying, “Yes, we want a fourth channel.” The monoglots wanted one not because of their love of the Welsh language but because they wanted an all-English channel. That was a coincidence.

John Davies’s marvellous record of the history of broadcasting contains details about the Broadcasting Council for Wales that I thought would always remain confidential. He records that in 1978 only two voices on the Broadcasting Council for Wales were fourth-channellers. The idea was dead, impractical and was not going to happen. Again, there was a coincidence: Margaret Thatcher happened to be reading about Irish history at the time and saw the audience in Sophia Gardens pavilion in Cardiff chanting “Gwynfor! Gwynfor!” because such a majestic figure in Welsh politics was going to starve himself to death if there was no fourth channel. She read about the effect on Irish nationalism of the deaths—the martyrs—in the Easter rising; about how Irish nationalism multiplied and grew strong. Although the great and the good came up from Wales to change her mind, that was the real reason, and to our great good luck we now have a Welsh language channel.

I think of why we bother to go on. There is a great poem by T. H. Parry-Williams that I recorded from S4C being read beautifully by John Ogwen, about Wales as an untidy part of the world for people who believe in order, a bit of a nuisance, and a tiny place where they speak in a strange way. It is difficult to get across the value of a wonderful, beautiful ancient language. The Hungarian litterateur István Széchenyi asked where he could find the Hungarian nation if he left it. He came up with the phrase, “The nation lives in her language”; not through a language, but in her language, as a place where all the wisdom of a nation—the proverbs, the humour—has come rolling down the centuries and is there enshrined as a living medium. That is the feeling we have for the language.

That lovely poem by T. H. Parry-Williams ends by saying:

“Duw a’m gwaredo, ni allaf ddianc rhag hon”.

We cannot escape from that; it is part of us. It is the great treasure of the language. It is marvellous that none of us who, in 1973, had such an impossible dream that we were told was hopelessly impractical would have believed that a day could come when there was universal approval in this House for the marvellous achievements—beyond our wildest dreams—of S4C.