The 1979 and 1997 revolutionary referendums in Wales

By John Osmond,

The dislocation and disruption that accompanied May’s Senedd election, when Plaid Cymru won seats in all corners of Wales and became by a margin the largest party, was a throwback to the 1997 devolution referendum. Despite its wafer-thin majority – at 6,721 it was less than one per cent of more than a million votes cast – the referendum was transformational, overturning the four-to-one negative vote in the previous 1979 referendum. The proportion of voters supporting the Assembly grew from 20.3 per cent in 1979 to 50.3 per cent in 1997. The swing to the Yes side was greater than occurred in Scotland.

This was an astonishing shift over such a short period. Indeed, the word transformational is barely adequate. A revolution would more accurately capture the impact. For in the process Wales discovered itself to be a political nation. And as such it paved the way for what occurred in the 2026 Senedd election.

Why and how did all this happen? These are questions I address in my two-volume documentary novel Wales 1979 and 1997 that has just been published. Set in the 1970s the first volume Ten Million Stars are Burning explores the background to the first referendum in 1979. The second volume Soul on Fire takes the story through the 1980s and 1990s to the referendum in 1997.

At a superficial level there is a quite straightforward explanation for what happened during this period. Ron Davies who, as Secretary of State for Wales oversaw the 1997 referendum, summed it up when he quoted graffiti that appeared on a railway bridge in his Caerphilly constituency following the 1987 general election – We voted Labour. We got Thatcher! And there is no doubt that the 18 years of Conservative rule did a great deal to concentrate Labour-supporting minds in Wales.

This is further underlined when the statistics are examined. For the greatest shift in support of the Assembly came from within the Labour’s heartland, the mining communities across the south Wales Valleys. In 1979 they were among the least enthusiastic supporters of the Assembly, all of them polling fewer than 20 per cent in favour. But by 1997 they were the most ardent, with Neath Port Talbot, for instance, polling an extraordinary 66.5 per cent support, the highest percentage of all the 22 Welsh districts. And Rhondda Cynon Taf, Merthyr, Caerphilly, and Blaenau Gwent were not far behind. Moreover, whereas Welsh-speaking heartland districts such as Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Gwynedd had similar levels of support, their populations were smaller. It was the Welsh Valleys that determined the outcome in 1997.

The core reason for their shifting allegiance was the impact of Thatcherism in the 1980s, and specifically the 1984-85 miners’ strike. This was experienced quite differently in the south Wales coalfield compared with other coalfields across England and Scotland. To begin with the south Wales miners initially opposed the strike, voting against at pithead ballots across the coalfield. The Welsh miners judged, accurately, that it was ill advised to call a strike in the spring when coal stocks remained high and when demand would fall in the coming summer months. But more to the point, a year earlier they had struck in support of the threatened closure to Lewis Merthyr colliery in the Rhondda, but had received little support from other coalfields. And as the strike progressed, they learnt rapidly why this was the case. It was because of the individual pit bonus scheme that had been introduced at the end of the 1970s, meaning there were widely differing pay rates across the coalfields. Although south Wales produced good quality coal, especially in the western anthracite seams, mining conditions were difficult and productivity inevitably low, certainly compared with the high producing pits of the English Midlands and Yorkshire. When Welsh pickets toured these coalfields in the early weeks of the dispute, they were amazed to see the relatively fine houses and expensive cars their miners enjoyed.

Yet, when the strike drew to a close after nearly a year the south Wales miners remained solid in stopping out, while large numbers of miners in other coalfields were drifting back to work. Overall, it was a bitter experience which taught the Welsh miners and their communities that all they had to fall back on was themselves. An exception was the rest of Wales. A national support organisation, the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities, mobilised people in towns and villages across the country, raising money and sending food to the struggling miners’ families, developing in effect an alternative welfare state. In part this was a response to the South Wales Miners’ slogan, The NUM fights for Wales. It was a movement that prefigured the cross-party campaign that developed in the 1990s ahead of the 1997 devolution referendum.

This is a key theme in my book since its central purpose is to unpick such explanations for the way a Welsh political consciousness developed and was expressed in this period. So why did I choose the format of a documentary novel? The book started life as a conventional historical account. However, in the course of the writing, it became clear that getting across the full meaning of this crucial period would be better achieved if treated imaginatively. At the same time, it is often the case that real life events can be more vivid than fiction. What I’ve set out to do is combine the two. So, in the book two fictional characters drive the narrative, a journalist and a young female student who becomes an activist with Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society, and later a television researcher. Alongside them are a multitude of historical, real-life characters. Their actual words, arguments, and their activities are central to the book. Readers will recognise characters such as Leo Abse and Gwynfor Evans, as well as many others including Neil Kinnock and Dafydd Wigley. Everything that happens in the novel actually took place, including in the lives of the fictional characters who, in reality, are an amalgam of people who lived through the period.

The titles of the two volumes come from the poetry of Idris Davies, in his 1930s collections Gwalia Deserta and Out of Gwalia. They contain for me the idea that Wales has survived against the odds thanks to the determination of individual personalities. The continued existence of a Welsh identity, the relationship of land with language, and our sense of nationhood depends upon the will of a small minority of people.

Soul on Fire ends with the declaration of the results on the melodramatic September night of the 1997 referendum. However, an Epilogue looks ahead to the year 2027, and the thirtieth anniversary of 1997. One of the fictional characters, the journalist, is being interviewed for an S4C documentary that is examining the 1997 referendum, the decades that led up to it, and explanations for what took place during the period. Of course, from the point of view of the book, this is set in the future. However, the interview has actually already occurred in real life. It was with myself in October last year, with a film company commissioned by S4C to produce a two-part documentary account of the referendum, to be broadcast on its thirtieth anniversary in 2027.

The interview took place in Insole Court, originally the home of a late 19th Century colliery owner and shipper and now a community arts centre in Llandaff, a northern suburb of Cardiff. I was presented with more than thirty questions in advance. Here are my responses to two of the later ones, with the first added by myself after the event.

What was your response to the Senedd election in May 2026?

It was a transformational moment, akin to the referendum victory in 1997, though much more assertive. It was extraordinary that Plaid Cymru was able to break out of its heartlands and establish such a strong presence in every part of the country. The party won 35 per cent of the vote and 43 of the 96 seats. The result broke down the old divisions between north and western Wales, the Valleys, and the rest, what used to be called British Wales. The best definition of a nation that I’ve come across is by the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd who said, ‘A nation is a people which has become conscious of its internal political solidarity.’ After the 2026 election it was the first time we could justifiably say that about Wales.

Do you think Wales has lived up to the hopes of 1997?

Inevitably no, but what has happened is quite remarkable all the same. You just have to ask yourself what would have happened if those 6,721 votes in the referendum had gone the other way. I think we would be much worse off. As it is, we’re still in the game. A friend of mine said at the time that devolution was like a game of tennis. You need a bat and ball to play. But just because you have a bat and ball doesn’t mean that you’ll play well. For that you need skill, practice, determination and vision. But all the same, without the bat and ball you can’t take part in the game at all. The Assembly, now the Senedd, means that Wales can at last take part in the world. It means we can contribute. We just have to learn to play better.

Do you believe full independence is now a realistic goal for Wales, or should the focus stay on strengthening devolution? 

It depends how the term independence is interpreted. Whatever constitutional status Wales eventually achieves, it has to face up to the realities that it shares an island with a much larger neighbour, and that it needs to have continued close collaboration across the British Isles as a whole. In turn this will demand new institutional frameworks to be effective. I believe that the optimum arrangement would be a confederal relationship between Wales, England and Scotland. I think before that happens the north of Ireland will unite with the Republic. And for all this to work harmoniously we must develop a much closer relationship with the European Union. Brexit was a disaster, particularly for Wales, but for the whole of the UK as well. It is in Britain’s economic interest, and certainly Wales’s, to re-join the single market and the customs union. When that happens, as I am sure it will within a decade, I think it will become common sense for Britain to evolve into the kind of confederation I’ve suggested. Indeed, it will be similar to arrangements that exist between the Benelux countries within the EU. So I envisage Wales becoming independent in the same way that we can say Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are independent. In the 21st Century sovereignty is extended by sharing power in this way.

John Osmond is a writer and journalist, having worked for newspapers and broadcasters in Wales over the past five decades. During the 1990s he was chairman of the Parliament for Wales campaign. In 1996 he became the inaugural director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs. The two volumes of Wales 1979 and 1997, Ten Million Stars Are Burning and Soul on Fire can be ordered from www.gwales.com