While Caroline Lucas is commonly referred to as Britain’s first Green Member of Parliament, Cynog Dafis, who entered parliament as the Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire nearly twenty years earlier, could also claim this title. Alfie Steer explores Dafis’ political career, and the unusual electoral alliance between Plaid Cymru and the Green Party in the 1990s.

The 2024 general election saw the Green Party of England and Wales enjoy a historic breakthrough, winning four seats and 1.8 million votes. The election was also the end of an era, with Caroline Lucas standing down after fourteen years as the party’s sole representative in the Commons. Yet while Lucas is commonly described as the Green Party’s first Member of Parliament, one other former MP could plausibly claim this historic title: Cynog Dafis, Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire from 1992 to 2000. The reasons why reveal a unique, and largely forgotten moment in Welsh and British, political history.

A veteran of the Welsh nationalist movement, Dafis had played a leading role in the direct-action group Cymdeithas yr laith (the Welsh Language Society) in the 1960s and had stood as the Plaid Cymru candidate for the west Wales constituency of Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire in 1983 and 1987. Yet alongside his Welsh nationalism Dafis was also an ardent environmentalist, having been inspired by the influential green manifesto Blueprint for Survival (1971). While Plaid Cymru had championed environmental issues in its activism in mostly rural, Welsh-speaking parts of North Wales, and other nationalist or regionalist parties in Europe had already worked closely with Greens, Dafis’s demonstrated a unique degree of political commitment. He enthusiastically followed the rise of Green politics across Western Europe, and had come to identify a clear coalescence between environmentalism’s belief in ‘the decentralisation of power… to relatively self-sufficient communities’ and Plaid Cymru’s emphasis on ‘the small nation, the local community and the safeguarding of cultural and linguistic diversity’ [Dafis, 2005, p.1]. As a result, Dafis was able to act as an ‘ideological bridge’ [Fowler & Jones, 2006, p.320] between environmentalism and Welsh nationalism, which by the 1980s was taking on wider relevance.

In an effort to revive Plaid’s fortunes after the defeat of the 1979 devolution referendum, party leader Dafydd Elis Thomas had pursued a strategy known as the ‘politics of alliance’ [Lynch, 1995, p.202], based on forming connections with both trade unions, particularly the miners during the 1984-5 strike, as well as a variety of new social movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the feminist movement, and green politics. While based largely in the realm of extra-parliamentary campaigning, by the end of the 1980s this strategy had taken on a particular electoral relevance. The 1989 European Parliament elections in Britain had seen the Green Party win an astonishing 15 per cent of the vote (nearly 2.3 million votes), at that time the best performance by any Green Party anywhere in Europe. While the Greens were not able to win any seats, the result appeared to reveal the growing salience of environmental concerns to British voters, prompting all three of the major parties to release policy statements on the issue in the following years.

In Wales, the results appeared both an opportunity, and a threat to Plaid Cymru, with the Greens coming within a percentage point of supplanting them in terms of vote share. To the leaderships of both parties, the result revealed how ‘each party was standing in the way of the other’ [Lynch, 1995, p.204] and sparked a series of negotiations to formulate a Plaid-Green electoral alliance. Green members were invited to Plaid’s 1989 conference and by 1990, Plaid had pledged its commitment to creating a ‘sustainable economy’ [Dafis, 2005, p.2], demonstrating a clear shift toward a more environmentalist outlook. By 1991, both party’s annual conferences had endorsed a formal alliance, but due to the Greens’ decentralised internal structure, this was left largely to the initiative of local parties and activists. In the constituency of Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire, where Dafis was preparing to stand for parliament for a third time, a uniquely strong political and electoral alliance was established between the local Green and Plaid Cymru parties, later known as ‘Llandysul Accord’. Both parties were to work together in the election campaign, such as organising an event attended by 600 people and addressed by prominent Green politician Jonathon Porritt, while Dafis was to fight the seat on a Plaid-Green joint ticket.

The alliance’s high point came with Dafis’ election victory, rising from fourth place at the last election to beating the incumbent Liberal Democrat Geraint Howels on a ‘massive swing’ of 13.3 per cent [Carter, 1992, p.446]. When Dafis took his seat in the commons, he reportedly ‘took every opportunity to announce the fact of the election of the UK’s first Green Party MP’ [Fowler & Jones, 2006, p.319]. His maiden speech reflected the unique combination of environmentalism and nationalism that made up his political outlook, mentioning both devolution proposals for Wales and the Rio summit on the environment. In parliament, Dafis would employ an influential Green Party member, Victor Anderson, as his researcher, and would support a number of private members bills concerned with classic green issues, such as household energy conservation. Perhaps his most influential legislative contribution was a Road Traffic Reduction bill in March 1996 which, while being unsuccessful, significantly informed a Liberal Democrat bill that became law the next year. 

Ultimately, however, the alliance proved short-lived. While 1992 had finally arrested Plaid Cymru’s electoral decline since the 1970s, and grew its parliamentary representation to four seats, the election had been a bitter disappointment for the Green Party, sparking a new wave of internal conflict which both further sapped its effectiveness, and led to the resignation of several leading figures. Amid this internal division, the influence of Green activists opposed to an alliance with Plaid, and to the ideology of nationalism altogether, grew. Activist opposition, plus the recognition of some major policy differences between the two parties, eventually led to the end of the alliance in April 1995, which was announced with ‘deep regret’ [Fowler & Jones, 2006, p.327] by Ceredigion Green and Plaid Cymru members in a joint press conference. While maintaining good relations with some sections of the Green Party, Dafis would fight the 1997 election as a solely Plaid Cymru candidate, before stepping down from parliament in 2000 to take a seat in the newly formed Welsh Assembly. By that point, Plaid’s new leader Dafydd Wigley had sought to ‘disentangle the party’s political identity’ from the Greens, and to ‘project a more direct, nationalist image’ [Lynch, 1995, p.209].

After enjoying its first taste of election victory in 1992, the Green Party would be forced to wait until 2010, with Caroline Lucas’s dramatic victory in Brighton Pavilion, before it could boast another Member of Parliament, this time on a purely Green ticket. When asked about his historic status while attending the Greens’ 2011 conference, Dafis would describe himself as a ‘hybrid’ MP, and as such ‘didn’t really count’ as Britain’s first Green MP. Graciously, he would grant that title to Lucas [BBC News, 28 February 2011]. Nevertheless, as the Green Party enters a new era as a small, yet significant presence in the Commons, recovering Dafis’ unique political career, and the forgotten Plaid-Green alliance, may help historians place this otherwise novel political situation in the broader context of contemporary British history, an era in which constitutional reform, and ‘post-material’ issues such as climate change and the environment have taken on greater significance.

A.S.

Further reading

John Burchell, ‘Here come the Greens (again): The Green Party in Britain during the 1990s’ Environmental Politics 9:3 (2000), pp.145-150.

Neil Carter, ‘Whatever happened to the environment? The British general election of 1992’, Environmental Politics 1:3 (1992), pp.442-448.

Cynog Dafis, ‘Plaid Cymru and the Greens: A Flash in the Pan or a Lesson for the Future?’, 19^th Annual Lecture of the Welsh Political Archive, National Library of Wales, 4 November 2005 [translated].

Gavin Evans, ‘Hard times for the British Green Party’, Environmental Politics 2:2 (1993), pp.327-333.

Carwyn Fowler and Rhys Jones, ‘Can environmentalism and nationalism be reconciled? The Plaid Cymru/Green Party alliance 1991-95’, Regional & Federal Studies 16:3 (2006), pp.315-331.

Peter Lynch, ‘From red to green: The political strategy of Plaid Cymru in the 1980s and 1990s’, Regional & Federal Studies 5:2 (1995), pp.197-210.