S4C

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me, Sir Alan. I apologise to my hon. Friend the Minister and to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), because I shall have to leave at approximately 2.50 pm. Indeed, if you had not been sufficiently generous to call me now, I probably would not have been able to be called at all, so I am most grateful to you.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) on the work that he has done, with the Backbench Business Committee, to bring about this very important debate. I look at it as a parliamentary extension of the birthday party that S4C will have enjoyed on its 30th anniversary. It is an opportunity for us to pay tribute to S4C. As everyone in this room will agree, it is a hugely important organisation for Wales, in terms of Welsh employment, the profile of Wales and the diversity of the economy of Wales. It is particularly important for the Welsh language. I agree with the comments made by the hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) in that respect: I do not think that there is any guarantee at all that the future of the language is secure. We have seen recent census figures that show threatening trends. That is an issue that we must concentrate on completely.

S4C has played a very major part in enabling me to learn to speak Welsh. When I was elected to the National Assembly in 1999, I was not able to speak Welsh at all. I would not have been able to appear on “Dau o’r Bae” tomorrow or “Pawb a’i Farn” next week.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

What a loss to the nation!

[Glyn Davies]

It would have been, indeed. Nor would I have been able to do a half-hour programme tomorrow with Dewi Llwyd, “Rhaglen Dewi Llwyd”, based really on my birthday. That is coinciding with the debate about the birthday of S4C.

S4C is hugely popular. We can tell that because the political parties in Wales compete with one another to claim credit for creating it. It was created, of course, at a time when Mrs Thatcher was the Prime Minister of the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan has paid tribute to the work of Lord Wyn Roberts and to Willie Whitelaw. We should also refer to the work of Lord Crickhowell at the time, because he played a very significant part in what happened. I, too, want to pay tribute to Mr Gwynfor Evans. He made a massive commitment, over a long time. All we remember is his threat to fast to death if this channel was not created. I do not know whether that threat was a help or a hindrance to what happened, but it certainly demonstrated a massive commitment to the Welsh language.

I still remember what happened very clearly. The most important thing that the Thatcher Government did was not only to create S4C, but to commit to a funding level tied to a mechanism to continue that, linked to inflation. That happened right the way through until two years ago, and this is where I enter what is perhaps more controversial territory. The love of the language, the feeling for the language, caused many people to pressurise me, as a member of the Public Bodies Bill Committee, which was considering the breaking of the link. I know just how much the people of Wales care about it. At the time, I thought that it was inevitable. I thought that it would be unrealistic to retain the position that we had, but without the link, we will occasionally refer again to the funding levels for S4C. It will crop up in the parliamentary timetable. Certainly I and, I hope, the successors to all of us will fight S4C’s corner to maintain a realistic budget, in the economy of the time, and to make certain that we have a strong S4C.

We have had a period when S4C has seemed to be in a bit of a bad place. I felt that there was almost a self-destruct button being pressed three or four years ago, but what do we have now? We have two bodies, two broadcasters in Wales, that are committed to the Welsh language—the BBC and S4C. They are working very closely together. We have seen the operating agreement. We have seen two chief executives who are working very well together. We have seen the two channels produce the “Mathias” or “Hinterland” programme. That is the sort of thing that I hope we will see happening again and again in the future. We are in a position from which we can celebrate S4C. It is in a wonderful place at the moment. Wales is a small country and is very lucky to have a channel that does such a wonderful job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

In 1973, the concept of a fourth channel seemed an impossible, impractical dream. That year’s report, “Television in Wales”, which became Labour party policy in Wales at the 1974 election, called for such a fourth channel. The writing of that report was fascinating, because it went into areas that were unknown—certainly, to me—at the time, including that so much was going on in minority languages throughout the world. As my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) has said, there was an inability to understand how it could be made to work.

One thing that I discovered in compiling the report was that the Inuit word for television is “the shaking tent”. Before Eskimos saw television for the first time, they had an ancient practice of going into a tent and starting an oil lamp burning so that, when the tent was shaken outside, they could interpret the shadows on the screen. Given the quality of television at the time—fog with knobs on—they thought it was another version of the shaking tent. It also came out that, for example in Canada, Ottawa had a station broadcasting in 30 languages, none of which were Canadian or Eskimo ones.

The point I want to make—we have to nail down the history that we can remember—is that, although Willie Whitelaw has been praised, he was not one of the heroes of the process. He was the one who turned the channel idea down. I had a minute, protozoan moment in that history, in that I was the acting chairman of the Broadcasting Council for Wales at that time. I served in that post for a record time that I am certain will never be equalled—15 minutes. I went into the first meeting and resigned after the minutes had been read, as a protest against the cancellation of a fourth channel, although that did not have a great effect on the history of the matter.

What did have an effect, and it was an almighty one, was, as we have heard, Dafydd Iwan and the young people who sacrificed so much and went to jail. I can remember a young man on “Disc a Dawn” called Huw Jones—I cannot think what has happened to him—but many people worked to build up the feeling that there was a great injustice.

The event that changed the situation, after the idea had been emphatically rejected by the Conservative party, was the lucky one that Margaret Thatcher had been reading about Irish history—she was deeply ignorant of it at the time—and was struck to find out that, following the Easter riots and the shooting of Irish nationalists, the interest in Irish nationalism had multiplied enormously. When Ireland had its martyrs, what was a tiny fringe group suddenly became the majority of the nation. She saw a film on television of Gwynfor Evans in the Sophia gardens in Cardiff with a crowd chanting, “Gwynfor, Gwynfor.” She calculated that if he carried out his fast and died, Wales would have a martyr around which a movement would develop. She rightly saw that that would happen—I am certain he was a man who would have stuck to his fast, if the channel had not arrived—but the Government had to find a pretext, because they could not possibly give into pressure or blackmail. There was therefore this little pantomime in which three of the great and the good in Wales visited Mrs Thatcher to persuade her that it was a good idea and that she was wrong to reject it. That was the naissance of the fourth channel, S4C.

That is a matter for great celebration. Looking back on those 40 years, we remember that on the Labour party’s approach—there were many others—there was unanimity in Wales. It meant a great deal to non-Welsh speakers, too, although for other reasons, to get a fourth channel. Great meetings were held, including one in the city hall in Cardiff, at which everyone agreed that the channel would be a great thing.

At the time, we did not envisage that it would be possible for the channel to create many of its own programmes. It was thought that, to fit with the amount of money that was likely to be available, the only way would be to dub or subtitle programmes and so on. With all the pessimism about people watching subtitled programmes, it is interesting to see the current fascination with “Borgen”. Subtitles do not matter. An audience can be got for a programme if the quality is there.

This is a moment of great celebration. The work of S4C was beyond anyone’s expectation then, and from decade to decade its glorious success has continued. If the Catholic Church saved the Breton language and the chapel saved the Welsh language in the past, it is S4C that has maintained and enriched the life of the Welsh-language world. Congratulations to all concerned. I think that the parties in this House will be united in ensuring that these 30 years will be followed by a glittering future for yr hen iaith.