Evans of Pembroke
Annabel Ferriman
If Labour is to have a hope of securing an overall majority in next week's general election, one of the key seats it will have to win is Pembroke, lying in the far south-west corner of Wales, where the Conservatives are defending a majority of 772. The candidate that the Labour Party has chosen for the fight is trade unionist Alan Evans, who has been nursing the constituency for the last three and a half years.
Pembroke has an unemployment rate of 11 per cent, a fishing industry which has declined from 60 trawlers to five and seven advance factories standing empty. It also has a £9 million debt on the Cleddau Bridge, which the old Pembrokeshire County Council decided to build in the late Sixties. It turned out to be far more expensive than planned, with the result that users now have to pay a 35p toll each way. The constituency was held in the last parliament by Mr Nicholas Edwards, the Conservative Party's Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, who first won it in 1970 when the Labour vote was split between Desmond Donnelly, standing as an Independent, and Mr Gordon Parry (now Lord Parry), standing as the official Labour Party nominee.
The main issues in Pembroke, in Mr Edwards's view, are public spending and borrowing, and interest rates. Farmers and small businessmen in the constituency have been adversely affected by the rise in interest rates and he thinks that he will have their solid support.
Mr Evans, aged 40 and head of the education department at the National Union of Teachers, has been concentrating his efforts on fighting unemployment in the country. Two catalytic crackers, which are used to increase the amount of petrol extracted from crude oil, are being built at Milford Haven and Mr Evans has been campaigning to ensure that the 2,000 jobs involved in building them go to local people. He persuaded the giant oil companies of Gulf and Texaco to promise. that " all labour used would be recruited through a local employment services agency on the site, and not brought in from the contractor's base at Teesside or from other parts of England. His campaign in this area has won him valuable publicity in the local press and some support from newspaper editorials. In fighting his campaign, Mr Evans does not have to face a serious challenge from the Welsh Nationalists, however, because over half the constituency is of Norman. Irish and Flemish rather than Welsh ancestry. Through the centre of the constituency runs the Landsker line, which divides the Welsh speakers in the north from the non-Welsh speakers in the south, and which has hardly moved in the last 400 years. It dates back to the conquest of the south-west tip of Wales by the Normans in the eleventh century, who brought with them men from Flanders as their foreman class and Irishmen as their labouring class.
They reached as far north as St Bride's Bay in the west and Narberth in the east, and got no further. The result has been a clear dividing line between the two cultures. Mr Evans, with a politician's diplomacy, has chosen to live a few miles from the line so that he is equally in touch with both communities. He is emotionally attracted by the Welsh hinterland but recognises that most of the constituency's worst problems, particularly unemployment, are in the coastal towns of Milford Haven, Pembroke Dock, Fishguard and Tenby.
Large numbers of skilled and unskilled workers have been needed to build the catalytic crackers and the new terminal at Pembroke Dock for the British and Irish ferry route to Rosslare, so the unemployment rate has been and still is falling. And Mr Evans can claim some of the credit for this. In 1977 it was 16.2 per cent for Milford Haven, 15.6 per cent for Pembroke Dock and 14 per cent for Fishguard. Now unemployment is below 12 per cent for every town in the constituency except Tenby, where it is 14.6 per cent.
The biggest boost for Mr Evans's campaign would have been for the Government to do something about the Cleddau Bridge toll, which is one of those issues that appear so small in London but generate such fury in the locality. Mr John Morris, Secretary of State for Wales, however, told the constituency last year that the Government would not buy its way to victory. It it were to step in and write off the £9 million debt, the money would have to be taken off the budget for the M4 motorway which was vital for the opening-up of West Wales to tourism, he said.
Mr Morris was just one out of a total of six ministers who visited Pembroke last year to woo the voters. This year, visiting ministers have included Lord Peart. Lord ElwynJones, Mr Denzil Davis and Mr Brynmor John.
The irony of Mr Evans's position, like that of other candidates in marginals, is that all the work he has put into the constituency can so easily be undone by events at national level. A winter of industrial unrest, although it affected Pembroke relatively little, may have done irreparable damage to: his position. Even after three years of courtship, the electorate can prove a fickle mis tress.
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