Madam,

Matthew Cooling (Cambrian News Letters, 20 June) rightly observes that members of Plaid Lafur, Dwyfor Meirionnydd, like me, offer purely personal opinions in letters we write to you, madam, unless we are specifically empowered to speak on behalf of the party by our executive - and we’ll say so if we are.

So please allow me to point out that all of my recent letters to you have been expressions of my own political views, not of official party policy.

Where I have strayed from ‘I’ to ‘we’ in matters of opinion rather than party policy please take the latter as ‘I, and any others who might agree’!

Such a protocol is of course especially important for all parties in these times of rapid political change. For example, I write in the week after Michael Gove announced that agricultural subsidies, post Brexit, “can only be argued for against other competing public goods if the environmental benefits of that spending are clear”. This sounds like a policy that, for small Welsh hill farmers, will drive them from their land because only huge land holdings will be rich enough to find viable the probable level of subsidy offered to re-afforested land. I think we should value hill farmers’ welfare more highly than Gove does.

Is that the opinion of Lord Elis-Thomas for example, I wonder, he whose political positions are fluid, to say the least?

And will Liz Saville-Roberts explain whether it is just hers or her party’s policy, or only Plaid Cymru’s Gwynedd Council’s, unreasonably to criticise the Welsh Labour government for spending too little on health and education in Wales, whilst failing to point out that lack of funding in Wales is always and everywhere due to the penny-pinching, mean, austerity-driven, punitive settlements that the Tory government imposes on us here in Wales.

What then of the spats about nationalism that these pages have seen recently? Hedd Wyn, in all our hearts on the very day I write, his 100th anniversary, symbolised opposition to a cruel war that threw the poor and exploited of two opposing imperialisms against each other and they died in their millions, killing each other. When the poor and oppressed of one nation are persuaded to see the poor and oppressed of another as the cause of their woes, the already worst off suffer even more. For me, nationalism that forgets the common cause of the under-paid and under-provided for, does deep disservice to those it purports to serve - and the per head national income, i.e. averaged for every man, woman and child, in the UK, is about £32,000 a year. No-one in these islands should be suffering a standard of living lower than that per capita national income allows for all.

Absolute equality of income, wealth and the redistribution of arduous work are aims any ideology must embrace in order to be able truly to proclaim that it fights for economic and social justice.

Yours etc,

Ian MacIntyre, Shelbourne Court, St John’s Hill, Barmouth.

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