Madam,

I have been entertained by the views expressed over the past few weeks on Wales.

From a vulgar marxist perspective we have been told, in terms, that nationalism cannot pre-date capitalism, and so... Owain Glyndwr cannot have been a nationalist! We have also been told, again in terms, that Plaid Lafur Dwyfor Meirionnydd members who write to you, madam, criticise Welsh culture!

Far from it, in my case. I am in awe of the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, of the early Welsh gnomic poems, of the extraordinary political struggles of the miners of slate and coal against their bosses, of the Welsh people’s heroic fight for independence and for the Welsh language.

For me, we English socialists are hampered by having to express our marxism in, what was surely, the language of world capitalist oppression.

I look forward to the day when Welsh speakers in Gwynedd can so trust Plaid Lafur Dwyfor Meirionnydd that they can join with us in campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister and, whether in Welsh or in what was, after all, the language in which Nye Bevan expressed himself, together with us, call for true equality of income and wealth and a genuine redistribution of the worst sorts of work from the wretched of the earth to the idle rich, whether they be Welsh or English.

We are on the side of the Welsh people and, from dealing with Brexit and protecting Welsh agriculture to taxing the rich properly, the cause of Welsh radicalism, indeed of Plaid Cymru’s radicalism, is in our hearts as we fight the Tories.

Join us. We will continue, of course, to criticise Tory tendencies in Welsh politics wherever we find them (we are Corbynites - and helped persuade Carwyn to our point of view!) and we’ll stand in Gwynedd Council elections where it it is right for us to do so and criticise them when they continue to make unnecessary cuts.

But our fight is your fight, for the many not the few.

Yours etc,

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

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