Reform should be the dominant message for any campaign for staying inside the EU, Plaid Cymru’s leader Adam Price declared in a passionate address to the European Policy Centre in Brussels last week.
The Remain campaign sent the wrong message, he argued. In 2016 the Leave vote had been powered by the longest period of declining real incomes in the “recorded economic history” of the UK – which means going back to the early nineteenth century. People did not wish to “Remain” with that.
The Leave vote had also been motivated by opposition to spending cuts to schools, hospitals and local services. People certainly didn’t want to “Remain” with that either, Price said.
Instead the rallying call for the forthcoming referendum should be to stay in and change the EU. The UK should push for a modern “Marshall Plan” to reinvigorate our poorer communities and drive the creation of quality jobs.
“This should be the centrepiece of EU economic and social strategy,” Price said. “That would give meaning to the shared solidarity that is expressed through the Delors principle of economic and social cohesion that is at the heart of the European Union Project.”
Reform also meant renewing democracy, which he argued was even more fundamental. The increasing alienation of people from the political class, across the whole of the EU was threatening its very existence.
“Following the Second World War the building blocks of the EU were the nation states. Today we need to take more account of the smaller European nations – Catalonia, Brittany, Flanders, Sardinia, Scotland, Wales, and many more.
“We are represented in the European Parliament through our grouping, the European Free Alliance.
“The reformed Europe that I am advocating will need to give much greater emphasis to this democratic base. If it does not it will increasingly be viewed as the tool of the political elite.
“After all, it was the great Breton nationalist Yann Fouéré who in the 1960s coined the term L’Europe aux cent drapeaux (Europe of a hundred flags). That still encapsulates for us the full meaning of the European Union’s catchphrase, our unity in diversity.”
‘Democracy is not static’
Price rejected claims that a People’s Vote would be undemocratic, undermining the outcome of the vote in 2016.
“You might as well say that a forthcoming general election would undermine the result of the last one,” he said. ‘Democracy is not static. It is not a one-off event. Rather it is a process, one of continual renewal.’
Some fear that the UK has solidified into two warring camps that can’t be reconciled. The response, Price said, should be to examine the evidence. The latest opinion polls in Wales showed there had been a 10% shift from Leave to staying in the EU.
“But more tangibly, the momentum of the debate has shifted. The campaigning organisation Wales for Europe now has groups in every local authority across the country. They are campaigning on the streets every week.
“There is a growing network of activists that simply did not exist during the referendum campaign in 2016. And let us not forget, in Wales, a country of three million people, the Leave majority in 2016 was only 82,000.”
