Bethan Jenkins: Just don’t call her a sell out

Bethan Jenkins: 'I don’t like the word pragmatic. I won’t use it.' (Photograph by Duncan Higgitt)

So, what does Bethan Jenkins, Wales’s youngest Assembly Member, have to say about the most pressing issue of the moment? ‘Did you not hear the laugh from this side of Offa’s Dyke?’ is her response.

She is, of course, answering a question about the bit of trouble England goalkeeper Robert Green had last Saturday night. ‘There were plenty of text jokes about it’ she goes on, ‘most of them from England fans I know’. It is a typically clever response really, one that points out that no matter how much schadenfreude the Welsh fans might engage in; English fans can’t help having a pop at their own.

On the vitally important question of whether or not Welsh football fans should support England, it is also hard to detect any of the rampant anti-English sentiment often associated with Welsh nationalists,

‘I think Welsh fans should support whoever they feel like if Wales are not playing. I don’t feel obliged to support England just because they’re on our doorstep.’

The answer points to a political maturity beyond her 28 years and a developing savvy that all Welsh politicians need when asked questions about England. On matters of Welsh identity, the English and football there are no easy questions in Wales. Get this one wrong and you’re in bother.

In person Bethan Jenkins doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with the interview situation. In the tea-room at Ty Hywel in Cardiff Bay she seems initially unsettled; perhaps nervous about slipping up. After all, despite often being depicted as a more serene and co-operative place than Westminster (they’ve had a coalition government for years you know), the Senedd still suffers from the modern complaint of over-adversarial politics, along with that unpleasant desire to pounce on any misplaced word. Spoken or tweeted.

Being Wales’s youngest politician doesn’t help either, of course. Being patronised by one’s elders at the Assembly must be a regular complaint surely? ‘Some people are quite patronising, people who are older than you, who’ve been around a lot longer. They have a sort of, ‘what does she know, what does she have to say’ attitude.’ But Assembly members are not the worst culprits apparently; ‘Quite often council officials can be quite derogatory in their manner. They think, ‘we’ll tell her how this all came about. We’ll take her back to zero and then all the way up to ten so she knows where we are.’ They don’t give me credit for knowing what’s happening.’

Not great for the confidence perhaps? But if Jenkins is initially nervous it soon fades away when real political discussion begins. She is a campaigning politician, an argument maker. Whether on the issue of the Visteon pensions, eating disorders, child poverty or asylum seekers she has consistently taken firm positions and argued for them. Across the political spectrum she holds views that are straightforward and often unpopular. For instance, asylum seekers should be allowed to work because ‘…then their contribution to society isn’t questionable. So many of them want to contribute. They don’t want to be in Wales doing nothing.’ On class, ‘it needs to be more at the forefront of the political agenda. So we can go about addressing some of the key issues of the day that are currently being ignored.’

Her main profile work has been on an issue that, though perhaps not unpopular, has been neglected in Wales: namely, eating disorders. ‘I had lots of constituents come to me as soon as I was elected. These were people who had to go to England for treatment. They were people who were dying basically. They were skeletons of people. I had only been elected for a week and I thought I can’t let this fall behind me and ignore it.’ Jenkins claims that up until that point eating disorders had been ignored in Wales. She formed a cross-party group, lobbied the relevant minister, helped secure funding and developed a framework. This was all progress that Jenkins describes as ‘massive’, though not without its problems, ‘There is still no dedicated eating disorder treatment centre in Wales, and as yet no way of monitoring the new framework’, she admits.

Jenkins was elected as the Plaid Cymru regional Assembly Member for South Wales West in May 2007, after years of being involved in student politics. She campaigned for CND, was involved in the peace movement and was President of Aberystwyth’s Guild of Students. She also, of course, was campaigning as a member of Plaid for further powers for the Assembly, and ultimately an independent Wales. In many ways, however, this part of her political education seems less important than her upbringing in shaping her as a campaigning, socialist, nationalist politician.

Raised in Merthyr by politically active parents she was involved in a range of campaigns before she’d even hit double figures, ‘I was wheeled around on anti-apartheid demonstrations, anti-open cast mining, CND, peace campaigns.’ She even played a role in taking direct action against Tesco’s in Merthyr at the age of seven, ‘We would push the trolleys around the supermarket fill it up and go to the checkout full of South Africa goods and they’d put them through the check-out and we’d say sorry, these are South Africa goods and we wouldn’t pay for them. And we’d get away with it because we were young and cute. We used to love that sort of campaigning. It was fun.’

Her father, a socialist, seems to have played a particularly big part in building a political identity that is far further left than you might expect to find in a nationalist party. Jenkins recalls first noticing how different this upbringing was from the norm during rehearsals for a school play about human rights. No one knew the words to the South African national anthem needed for the play so, as Jenkins tells it, ‘I was teaching everyone in my class the anthem because I’d been singing it with the red choir outside Tesco in Merthyr every Saturday.

If Iraq was the issue that defined her student years, it was South Africa and apartheid that defined those early political adventures in Merthyr, and she seems to have fond memories of the campaigns, ‘Nelson Mandela had a birthday whilst he was in jail so we had a birthday cake for him outside the local library.’

It is this sort of background in political campaigning that has made compromise or pragmatism almost a dirty word for Jenkins, ‘I don’t like the word pragmatic. I won’t use it.’ Despite this Jenkins has rarely clashed with her own party, remaining loyal and maintaining a diplomatic silence where she disagrees.

There is, perhaps, only one exception. Vociferous in her opposition to the bringing in of tuition fees in Wales, particularly after her student campaigning, she spoke out against the decision. ‘There wouldn’t have been much worth in me being an AM if I sold out on that’. She continues, ‘I couldn’t forget five years of campaigning. I thought if I forgot that I might as well turn into one of those machines. You know? One of those politicians who just says yes to everything.’

Given Jenkins’s form so far there doesn’t seem much chance of that.

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