Liz Saville Roberts: Cameron needs to keep his promises to Wales

“If there is a referendum in 2017, the votes of the separate nations of Britain should be considered separately,” said Liz Saville Roberts, Plaid Cymru’s first female MP, who won the seat of Dwyfor Meirionnydd with a majority of 5,000. “Wales’s standpoint on the European Union, although we would question aspects of how it is run—we don’t accept it with absolutely open arms—[is that] Wales is better off in the EU than without,” she said, adding: “It would bankrupt probably 80 per cent of our farms if we were to leave.”

Plaid Cymru won three Westminster seats at the election, and Saville Roberts conceded that the party was “disappointed” by the result. “It’s a fair question—that people are comparing us with the Scottish National Party,” she said, while also pointing out that the SNP enjoys the advantages of having been in government since 2007. This, she said, “played a part in returning the extraordinary number of MPs for the SNP who are now here in Westminster.”

She accepted that the economic arguments for independence deployed by the SNP—based on Scotland’s oil reserves—were not available to Plaid Cymru. But she said: “The economic advantages of oil have been questioned,” adding that this uncertainty “may have played a part in the referendum result,” when Scotland voted to remain part of the UK.

In the coming parliament: “We will be working for more funding and more powers.” She added that “I was talking with members of the SNP this morning—we will be working alongside the SNP,” in parliament. Details were yet to be confirmed but she said there was “no doubt that the parties would be working together.”

Plaid and the SNP are united in their opposition to fiscal austerity. The Labour party’s distraction of a leadership selection process offers an opportunity for the nationalist bloc—including Plaid Cymru—to attack the government’s economic policies. Saville Roberts, a former county councillor, is acutely aware of the unpopularity of government cuts in Wales, saying that councillors ended up “carrying the can for the cuts we had to make.”

Plaid Cymru is also watching the government’s promises to devolve more powers to Wales. “What we understand now to be in the Queen’s Speech in relation to the Wales measure is that the Tories are now actually taking a longer time than they initially promised,” said Saville Roberts.

The government had made a commitment that new powers “would be discussed and dealt within 100 days. And they are now backing off from that.” Before the election, David Cameron indicated that Wales would be given power over voting rights, including the ability to lower the voting age to 16, as well as recognition of the Welsh assembly as a permanent institution and structural changes to the way the Welsh government in Cardiff operates.

“We really are disappointed that the Tories now don’t seem to sense—in spite of their promises during the campaign—any sense of urgency to bring these [changes] into effect in Wales. We need to grow these structures of government and make them as effective as possible so people can see that having power for ourselves and being responsible for ourselves actually improves people’s lives.”

“The discrepancy between what has to be referred back to London and what can be carried out in Cardiff doesn’t make for effective government on the ground. The present piecemeal approach really just makes governance unnecessarily complicated,” she said.

The SNP’s new MPs arrived in England to be greeted by a wall of cameras at the airport. Plaid Cymru’s three members arrived to no such fanfare. Saville Roberts said dryly that her first impression of the Commons was of a “combination of pomp and ceremony and Victorian wallpaper.”

“I think we will be working as much in our home countries as we will be working here,” she said, and it will be crucial for both Plaid and the SNP that their Westminster MPs do not come to be seen by electorates at home as having become captured by the Westminster bubble.

“I am not going to be London’s voice in Wales for anybody,” she said. “No—we are going to fight our corner.”