[A-List] Wales: the economic reality

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

A few weeks ago Peter Hain was using the economic success of Wales as a
reason for demonstrating the apparent perils of "too much" devolution, as
apparently exists in Scotland (incidentally, this shows how safe a pair of
hands Hain possesses, come the Tony succession struggle). This former
adviser to John Redwood (of all people) seems to think otherwise...


Heirs of Gwrtheyrn

We may still be proud to be Welsh, but to travel across Wales now is to see
a country united in deep distress

Hywel Williams
Tuesday February 10, 2004
The Guardian

The blitheness of the Welsh is one of their leading characteristics. Not for
us the angularities and the asperities of other Celtic traditions. Apart
from the odd second-home blaze on a remote hillside, Welsh politics avoids
the incendiary option and opts for celebration instead.

The survival, against such overwhelming odds, of a distinctive identity
nestling awkwardly by the side of the country which has spawned a global
Anglophone culture, has something of the miraculous about it. It all seems a
testimony to that native gift for accommodation with the invasive presence,
for achieving by stealth and charm what could never have been won by
outright battle. Ours is a consensual tradition, and traitor identification
is not a popular Welsh sport.

We do, however, make an example of Vortigern (or Gwrtheyrn), who, in the
Welsh annals, is fingered as the source of all our woe by yielding his
Kentish territories in the fifth century to the German mercenaries he
enrolled as allies in his fight against the Picts. It was a done deal, but
also a very bad one and Vortigern learned to count the cost. Having first
invited those Germanic tribes in, he soon found that they were at his
throat, driving him and his Cymry beyond the Severn. The pattern was set:
English cultural success is founded on that unyielding mental refusal to
assimilate on its own part, while expecting all others to bend the knee.

Some 1,600 years on, the publication of the Office of National Statistics'
Focus on Wales shows that Gwrtheyrn's heirs are still around. It took some
agitation to get the data, based on the 2001 census, published in this
separate Welsh form. But now we can start to count the cost of a
millennium-and-a-half's accommodation. We are still - by a surprisingly
large majority - proud to be what we are. Some 60% of those living in Wales
declare themselves to be Welsh - and Welsh alone. And another 7% call
themselves first Welsh and, second, British. But 25% of Wales's inhabitants
are now English-born - a statistic which has grown remorselessly over the
past 25 years.

It is mid and north Wales that has born the brunt of the invasion.
South-east Wales may be the area where industrial decline has been most
alarming, reducing every valley to a condition of utterly distressing
dereliction. But that is also the region where pride in Welshness is most
marked. Go to Conwy in the north - where Edward I's disgusting castle shows
the iron fist at its most blatant - and almost half the population are now
English-born. Travel further west into the ancient kingdoms of Gwynedd and
of Deheubarth and the desolation deepens. Farming has already died here.

It is not just a question of milk quotas and uneconomic hill farms: in
Carmarthenshire there are now dozens of cash-rich buyers from over the
border waiting to pounce on the next farm available in Tywi's broad acres.
Often the invader's ambition is to aggregate farms together to form the
larger economic unit, with the farm house itself sold off as yet another
second home.

We may be proud to be Welsh, but we also close our eyes to the fact of Welsh
linguistic decay, that Götterdäm merung of a whole culture, but one couched
in Welsh diminuendo. Listen to our fatuous Welsh cultural establishment, and
you might think that a great victory has been won. For the first time in
census history there is an apparent advance on previous decline. Over 21%
now claim to be Welsh-speaking. But look below the headline, and you will
find that only 16% can read and write the language. That other 5% just do
pidgin Welsh. This is simply the continuation of a century's story of steady
attrition.

To travel across Wales now is to see a country united in deep distress, with
a poverty which stabs at the heart. Cardiff, and a mile or two of territory
on either side of the M4 spreading into mid-Glamorgan, is the continuation
of Thames Valley prosperity. Elsewhere is death.

Some 23% of the Welsh in 2001 claimed to have limiting, long-term illness or
disability. Go to the top of the Rhondda Valley now, and look back at that
narrow strip of land that created radical Britain, and weep. Because for all
that hollow talk of regeneration as one acronymed quango-beast bumps into
another in the subsidy-based culture that is Wales today, there is no
possibility of rebuilding what has been lost. The winds of winter blow down
from the Brecon Beacons to the north and presage the return of nature
grassing over where once there was life and work.

Go into small-town Wales and the evidence of sickliness lies on every side.
In Milford Haven, in the far west, where once the mighty tankers docked, the
elderly gather over chips and beans in tobacco-stained cafes and look out at
sea with watery eyes. In any Welsh conurbation, the poverty is there in two
forms - thin-poor and fat-poor - both testimonials to a dreadful diet. The
effects of a century of free-trading capitalism have been compounded by a
half-century of deadbeat municipal socialism.

Gwrtheyrn - returned to his people - would recognise the Welsh phrase for
this terrible Welsh state: "Heb Iaith, Heb waith, Heb wlad" - language-less,
work-less, land-less.