Review:
The Communist Party of Great Britain and the National Question in Wales, 1920-1991
By Douglas Jones From Planet 232
Daryl Leeworthy reviews
The Communist Party of Great Britain and the National Question in Wales, 1920-1991
By Douglas Jones
University of Wales Press, £19.99
In 1969, the Welsh Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) launched Cyffro, a new bilingual discussion journal. Edited by Dr Alistair Wilson, an Aberdare GP and former councillor, this was an important platform in the 1970s for left-wing thinkers and activists ranging far beyond the CPGB itself. Contributors included Dai Francis, general secretary of the South Wales Area of the National Union of Mineworkers, the Plaid Cymru MP Dafydd Elis Thomas, and the Labour MP Neil Kinnock. Most contributors expressed some form of pro-devolutionist politics as well as anti-European views in the contemporary debate about British membership of the Common Market. The CPGB itself supported a no vote against Europe in 1975 but a yes vote for devolution four years later. By the time devolution was narrowly approved in the 1997 referendum, the CPGB had been dead for almost six years. There is little doubt it would have supported the yes campaign.
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