Coalition means 'suicide' for Labour

Labour is committing "suicide" if it decides to share power in Wales with Plaid Cymru, says one of the party's senior MPs.

Former Wales Office minister Don Touhig, who says the parliamentary Labour party is set against a coalition with the nationalists, told ePolitix.com that his party is walking into a "trap".

He was speaking as a Welsh Labour special conference is set to decide whether to back the party's assembly leadership and form a coalition government with Plaid Cymru.

"I am totally opposed to sharing power with Plaid in the assembly. We have nothing in common with a nationalist separatist party and I think it would be wholly wrong," Touhig said.

"Our supporters will not understand it at all. The people of Wales voted for Labour, nationalist, Tory and Liberal in the election they did not vote for some woolly consensus with the nationalists."

Referring to a draft agreement between the two parties to form the basis of power-sharing, he said: "The document that has been agreed is pushing a nationalist agenda, not a Labour agenda.

"Most of it does not touch on the bread and butter issues I am interested in like jobs, the economy and tackling crime. It's all constitutional stuff that does not affect or interest my constituents.

"This is wholly wrong and it is suicide for Labour. The party is walking into a trap.

"The nationalists want independence and all the things in this document accelerate that. Plaid gets more in this document than they have managed to secure in the last 50 years."

Asked what should happen instead, Touhig said: "We are the largest party in the assembly and Rhodri Morgan should put his programme to the assembly.

"If they vote him down then they will have to take responsibility for the administration and I do not believe it would succeed."

However Morgan urged delegates to "vote with their heads and not with their hearts" at Friday's conference in Cardiff.

"I understand the very strong emotions involved - I hope they will see this as a historic opportunity to deliver Labour's manifesto," he told BBC Radio Wales.

"In order to deliver 100 per cent of Labour's manifesto, what part of another party's manifesto do we have to swallow - that's really the proposition that we are putting to the party conference.

"I think most people on the Labour side realise that if Labour is the senior partner in a coalition and Plaid is the junior partner, that is very much better for Wales and for the delivery of Labour's manifesto than having Plaid as the head of the coalition with Tory ministers in the middle of it and Liberal Democrats supporting it as well, which is the alternative."