Chapter Two

The Dragon in the Garage

We have recently seen Scotland vote against independence from the UK. However, a large number of Scots will remain disenchanted with the idea of being British. And the consequences of that disenchantment cannot be foreseen. We should now devote some space to considering that other non-English part of the UK - Wales. I believe that this examination will tell us something about Britain and its possible future.

The British general election campaign of 2010 will be remembered (if at all) for its cautiously buoyant sense that anything - or at least, a great deal more than usual - was possible. However, it would be more correct to say that this mood was strong in England and Scotland, while in Wales it became apparent that it was not likely that there would be very much that was new or different on the horizon. ITV 1 Wales screened Welsh versions of the political leaders’ debate, although they were only very pale imitations of the Brown-Cameron-Clegg event. During the second debate, Peter Hain, then New Labour’s Secretary of State for Wales - once a radical left-winger, but transformed into the most dutiful Blairite - justified the war in Afghanistan in words that might have been taken directly from the speeches of ex-President George W. Bush. This issue had already been called ‘a big, blood-spattered hole we are all supposed to ignore’ by the Independent journalist Johann Hari.[1] The other participants in the debate listened in bland silence and expressed no dissent, fitting themselves to a posture that has become entirely predictable, and which rather confirmed how right Hari had been. Clearly, English silence also extended into Wales. There was also complete silence on an issue that was more specific to Wales, namely, the possibility that the country might seek a separate destiny as a fully independent member state of the European Union. The issue was mentioned by no one, not even to dismiss or condemn it, and this must have made an odd impression on many of us who recall the 1970s and 1980s, when full independence was frequently declared to be the goal of the Welsh Nationalists. Two of Hain’s fellow participants, Cheryl Gillan, the Conservative Shadow Welsh Secretary, and the Welsh Liberal Democrat leader, Kirsty Williams, could hardly be expected to refer to the issue, but the third participant was the Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) leader Ieuan Wyn Jones. The existence of a devolved Welsh Assembly has obviously not promoted ideas of independence - quite the opposite.

The question of Welsh independence has been removed from mainstream political discourse and debate, although the nationalists presumably find this an unpalatable fact to face. This fact is amply demonstrated, however, by examining the Plaid Cymru 2010 Westminster Manifesto entitled Think Different. Think Plaid alongside Elect a local champion, the 2010 Manifesto of the Scottish National Party - the differences are glaring! (These documents were available in paper/printed form and could be downloaded from the internet throughout the election campaign.) The Plaid Cymru Manifesto states: ‘Plaid calls on any incoming Westminster government to agree a request for a referendum on law making powers by the National Assembly... Plaid Cymru also believes that, in time, further powers may be transferred to the National Assembly beginning with the police and criminal justice, and followed by energy and broadcasting’ (p. 4). There is a return to this theme on page 17: ‘We want our National Assembly to have the tools it needs to do the job - to make a real difference to people’s lives. To do this Wales needs proper powers.’ There is only one reference to independence, being the only use of the word ‘independence/independent’ in the entire document, occurring on page 32: ‘Plaid Cymru is committed to an independent Wales as a full member of the European Union.’ However, this document of thirty-five pages makes no mention of any strategy for attaining independence, calling only for increased powers for a devolved assembly within the United Kingdom.

The 2010 Manifesto of the Scottish National Party makes for very different reading. The word ‘independence/independent’ occurs three times on page 5 in the introduction by the SNP leader Alex Salmond. Pages 17 to 23 of the SNP Manifesto are devoted to independence, including the words, ‘Together we see ourselves as a nation and independence is the natural state for nations like ours... Independence runs like a golden thread through this manifesto...’ on page 22.

Why, then, after the same period during which both Wales and Scotland had devolved assemblies, was full independence regarded so differently by the nationalist parties of these two nations? The political, indeed the electoral, reasons for this difference are obvious at a glance. The political parties held the following number of seats in the National Assembly in Wales in April 2010: Labour 26, Plaid Cymru 14, Welsh Conservatives 13, Welsh Liberal Democrats 6, with one independent member. The Welsh Assembly Government was a coalition of Labour and Plaid Cymru, with Plaid’s Ieuan Wyn Jones as Deputy First Minister, and although the two coalition parties held a press conference on 20 April 2010 in which they did not even mention the UK General Election, a brutally candid statement by Professor Mark Drakeford (who would be a candidate for the Welsh Assembly) had already appeared, suggesting that Labour would do well to keep open the possibility of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats after the Assembly elections in 2011.[2]

In Scotland, the minority SNP government headed by Alex Salmond had no such worries, which presumably gave the SNP Manifesto its confident and ambitious tone. In comparison to the Welsh predicament, the situation in the Scottish Assembly stood out in sharp contrast, with the parties enjoying the following representation: Scottish National Party 47, Scottish Labour 46, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party 16, Scottish Liberal Democrats 16, Scottish Green Party 2, with one independent member and one member of no party affiliation. Nevertheless, a political and electoral explanation for the differing strength of aspirations to independence in Scotland and Wales only pushes the question a step away without answering it. Why do the Welsh vote so differently from the Scots?

Ultimately, the answer to the above question must lie in the sphere of national and cultural identity, intimately involving these nations’ respective perceptions of themselves, and in exploring such matters - in the case of Wales - it will be necessary to leave the relatively sure ground of electoral politics, or even economics, and move into the far more subjective and speculative area of cultural studies. This is the territory we shall need to traverse, however, in order to arrive at a tentative understanding of the dynamics of potential or actual change in Wales. But firstly, two other political facts (also unpalatable to many politicians in Wales today) need to be considered.

Firstly, Wales has never prospered by being part of the United Kingdom, and more disturbingly, there is very considerable evidence that the existence of the devolved Welsh Assembly has done little or nothing to improve matters fundamentally. The severe unemployment of the 1930s and the 1980s struck some areas of Britain cruelly and affected other areas very little, and Wales was one of the worst afflicted areas. Further, when the coalmining industry was largely dismantled in the 1980s as a matter of calculated government policy, Wales was once again particularly badly affected. The disadvantaged status of the Welsh became so widely known that a travel guide on Western Europe, part of a very non-political series of travel books originating in Australia, stated in 1999:

Wales has had the misfortune to be so close to England that it could not be allowed its independence, and yet far enough away to be conveniently forgotten. It sometimes feels like England’s unloved back yard - a suitable place for mines, pine plantations and nuclear power stations. Even the most enduring of its symbols - the grim mining towns and powerful castles - represent exploitation and colonialism... Huge swathes of the countryside have been vandalised by mining, grossly insensitive forestry operations and power lines...[3]

This is a description, produced partly by authors born outside the UK and therefore all the more objective, that is all too familiar to those of us who live in Wales or know it well, although, for political reasons, its accuracy would not always be acknowledged too loudly.

A far more intimate and damning survey was produced by Gareth H. Williams, Professor of Sociology at the University of Salford, and also published in 1999, at a time of high hopes attending the prospect of the Welsh Assembly becoming a reality. Professor Williams pointed out that:

Disease and premature death have been woven into the fabric of Welsh society during the twentieth century... In mining communities the routine burden of illness and death... was punctuated, as at Senghenydd in 1913 and Aberfan in 1966, by catastrophic loss of life... [H]ealth in Wales remains poor compared with most European neighbours... The death rate in Wales has increased relative to that in England over the last decade, and although the infant mortality rate has fallen by over a half in the last twenty years, it remains higher than most of the rest of Europe... [M]ajor determinants of ill-health [are] occupation and employment, the levels and distribution of income, education and housing conditions... [W]ithin Wales... areas with high levels of morbidity and mortality from cancer and coronary heart disease are [those] where unemployment rates are rising, where house prices are falling most dramatically, where a high proportion of the housing is unfit, and where more than a third of school children in primary school are entitled to free school meals.[4]

With Professor Williams we seem to be back in the late Victorian era! His article is powerful, however, in courageously stating connections between social conditions and health that are obvious, and also in applying generally accepted connections to Wales specifically-an application that was far from generally accepted in 1999, and is still not fully accepted now. One of the chief sources used by Professor Williams, who was the Deputy Director of the Public Health Research and Resource Centre at the University of Salford, might have come as a surprise to some politicians in Wales - it was the independent report by Sir Donald Acheson and his group published in London in 1998, which stressed that poor health in Wales was related to ‘the fact that the country has the lowest level of personal income in the UK - by a wide margin that is getting wider’.[5] The last sixteen years have overlaid a concluding remark by Professor Williams with a certain irony: ‘At this point in Welsh history the key opportunity structure is the National Assembly.’

If - to use a piece of current jargon - we ‘scroll forward’ eleven years to the 2010 General Election (and some sixteen years to the present), we find some rather depressing, but convincing, evidence of just what the devolved assembly made of its opportunities. On 19 April 2010, the UK Competitiveness Index (UKCI) released its current study of the twelve regions and nations of the UK about which it had been amassing data since 1997. Wales was conclusively found to be the least competitive of these areas by the UKCI, which relied on an array of facts including spending on research and development, business start-up rates, exports per head of the population, hourly productivity, gross weekly pay and unemployment rates. Some of the conclusions of Professor Robert Huggins, who wrote the report with Dr Piers Thompson, were bleak indeed:

This highlights the increasingly desperate state our economy [in Wales] has fallen into... Wales is becoming increasingly detached... There is little evidence that devolution and the establishment of the Welsh Assembly is contributing to improved competitiveness. In fact, the opposite appears to be largely true... Wales should look to nations such as Finland, where its economic development strategy is signed up to by all parties, and remains in place regardless of changes in power. This more mature and patient approach has helped Finland become one of the world’s most competitive nations... In Switzerland, for instance, politicians tend to be individuals who have already achieved significant international and national influence in other careers, and enter politics later as a form of civic responsibility. Perhaps this is a model the Assembly should be encouraged to emulate.[6]

Interestingly, the Scottish National Party looked with approval to the model of Norway, the near neighbour of both Finland and of Scotland itself, in the matter of energy products to generate national wealth and in military matters (the Norwegians have always kept all nuclear weapons off their soil), when they wrote their 2010 Manifesto (pp. 11 and 21).

Returning to the UKCI report, we see that the authors found that the least competitive localities in Britain were all in Wales. It is fair to assume that all mainstream politicians in Wales felt that it was as wise to avoid mentioning the report as it would have been to avoid touching a live hand grenade. (Those readers who have stayed with me to this point will have noticed that the effort to see Britain in the context of Europe and against the background of the mosaic of European culture is a connecting thread in this book. Orwell also wrote of British culture as part of the Western tradition. We live at a time when traditional British suspicion and contempt for Europe may once again determine our future. When we look at the countries just mentioned, it is useful to remember that strong cultural links exist between Norway and Scotland and northern England - quite apart from globalization, the European Economic Area and the European Union - and Norway has a common border with both Finland and Sweden. Methods used by Britain’s neighbours could be used by the British. Furthermore, those with a Marxist outlook do not always pay enough attention to the fact that capitalist political systems vary enormously - some of them are a great deal worse than others!)

A second political fact is uncomfortable for many people in Wales, both for politicians and for those outside politics, namely, that there is no rational or practical obstacle to the existence of an entirely independent Wales as a member state of the European Union. I have emphasized European membership because the recent history of Ireland provides such a close and suggestive parallel. Ireland became independent in 1922, but as the Irish Free State it was intensely conservative, socially and economically, and above all on sexual and religious issues, and these tendencies derived not just from the establishment of the Free State, but also from the assassination of Michael Collins (a consequence of that settlement), the leader who had embodied a more secular, humanist and modern strand in Irish national life, followed by the ascendancy of the authoritarian and conservative Eamon de Valera. Above all, Ireland was typically post-colonial in its economic backwardness and extensive dependence on trade with Britain. When the Republic became a member of the European Union (then the EEC) in 1973, ‘the engine that has driven all other components of change’, as Brian Arkins called it,[7] the way was irreversibly open to the spectacular prosperity of the 1990s.

That prosperity coincided with the incumbency of President Mary Robinson, who reflected a new image of themselves back to the Irish, making possible the development of a more liberal, progressive Ireland, a kind of sixth Scandinavian country. (Recalling the Swiss model referred to above, Robinson had certainly achieved influence - as a human rights lawyer and constitutional expert - before standing for election.) Putting prejudices aside, it is very difficult to conceive of any valid reason why Wales should not follow a similar path within Europe, except, of course, for one: that very same issue of national self-image, self-esteem and identity, which will lead us into the much more subjective realm of Welsh culture and self-expression.

At a literary event in Cardiff in 1986, a respected Marxist historian made the following remark to me, speaking of a very radical journal published in Welsh: ‘Of course, nobody actually reads it! The working class, even the militant trade unionists, don’t read it because it’s in Welsh. And the Welsh-speaking Welsh don’t read it because it’s left-wing and Marxist.’ This comment was not entirely attributable to the historian’s notoriously dry sense of humour, and if it was an exaggeration it was not a very great one. There is no doubt that we could partly trace the shape of Welsh culture and society back to the medieval world, but the developments of the last two hundred years are the most relevant and must concern us most.

Since industrialization, the force for political change in Wales has come mainly through the trade unions, the Labour Party and a left-wing outlook. (Engels found it significant to quote a speech by W. Bevan, President of the TUC, at a meeting in Swansea in 1887, when writing the preface to the 1888 English edition of The Communist Manifesto.) A huge psychological vacuum has been created by the retreat of heavy industry, the discrediting of party politics generally and the decline of any deep loyalty to the Labour Party.

The longing for some form of national independence has been largely-it is a matter of emphasis, but a very strong emphasis - a rural phenomenon among Welsh speakers or among academics, intellectuals and writers who usually (but not always) express themselves in Welsh. The most typically Welsh political leader to become famous in Britain as a whole was the left-wing Labour MP Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960), but when he spoke of the alien atmosphere in the House of Commons in which ‘his people... were shut out from all this; were forbidden to take part in the dramatic scenes depicted in these frescoes’, he was not referring to the Welsh, but instead to the working class.[8] And Bevan’s famously passionate vitriol, ‘No attempt... can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred... So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin’, was directed at the Tory Party, not at the English.[9]

By contrast, the poet Saunders Lewis (1893–1984) wrote in Welsh, converted to Roman Catholicism, longed for the hierarchic and traditionalist values of the Middle Ages, was one of the founders of Plaid Cymru, and committed a symbolic act of arson (for which he was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs) in order to protest against the presence of an RAF base in Wales. Lewis was also the president of Plaid Cymru from 1926 to 1939, standing as a (defeated) parliamentary candidate for the party in 1943.[10]

Those who represent the mainstream political parties in Wales today are not, of course, as dramatically different as Bevan and Lewis were, but the traditions were established early on and still retain some of their character and complexion. Widely supported, reforming, urban socialism and predominantly rural, Welsh-speaking nationalism have proved very difficult to draw together into a political movement with a common agenda and shared objectives.

Returning to culture, we find that the only Welsh writer with a truly international reputation, Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), wrote in English, was born in suburban Swansea, lived in London for long periods and was quite indifferent to Welsh nationalism and to politics in general. The most famous Welsh poet of recent decades is R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) - he was not related to Dylan Thomas - an Anglican cleric whose aggressive Welsh nationalism attracted attention, whereas his poetry - written in English - was not primarily concerned with nationalism. Unlike R.S. Thomas, who lived in rural Wales, and whose poems reflect philosophical and existential concerns more than political ones, John Tripp, coming to prominence in Wales in the 1960s, dealt with ‘unemployment, derelict industrial sites, TV, booze, ignorant hedonism and a merciless Nature’, while longing for an ‘almost inconceivable un-anglicized, de-industrialized Wales, for a country brought up on Dafydd ap Gwilym, Lowell, Saunders Lewis, Planet and Solzhenitsyn, and not The Sun and Emmerdale Farm’.[11] These longings, vaguely reminiscent of those of D.H. Lawrence or of Solzhenitsyn himself for their own societies, are somewhat self-indulgent and unrealistic in any culture. It is painful to point out that they are especially remote from the reality of life in Wales.

So much, we might say, for Wales expressing itself through literature or high culture, but what about work that enters the popular mainstream, such as the cinema, for instance? It is instructive here to consider two films, one Scottish and one Welsh, released within roughly a year of each other, just as devolution was about to come to both nations, and both of them enjoying some considerable box office success and publicity.

The Scottish film is Trainspotting (1996), directed by Danny Boyle, and the Welsh film is Twin Town (1997), directed by Kevin Allen, and both films reject national stereotypes and deal with national self-image. Trainspotting is considered to be a nihilistic film, and Renton, one of the main characters, utters the now famous words ‘there are no reasons’, but he also comments with angry eloquence on Scotland’s relationship with England. The film came at a pivotal moment in Scotland’s history, establishing artistic independence from the British cinema and a new kind of national self-image; as Emma Anne James observes in a recent study: ‘That is what makes Trainspotting so unique in national cinema studies, it came before the political changes, art influenced life, not the other way round... [T]he one factor the group [Renton and his friends] has in common is being Scottish... [T]hey have no real unifying factor outside their nationality.’[12]

Whether or not Twin Town succeeds as a comedy, whether or not it is funny, is something that must be left to individual taste, but more importantly, it must be said that if Trainspotting is ‘nihilistic’, then Twin Town is infinitely more nihilistic. It is set in Swansea and tells a story in which every one of the characters is either very stupid or completely corrupt, and sometimes both, seeming to be an exercise in depicting - but not satirizing, because it has no detached or outside view - England’s most derisive view of the Welsh and the most self-mutilating Welsh vision of Wales: dishonesty, corruption, stupidity and immature weakness. The characters have none of the intelligence, anger or vitality of Renton and his friends in Trainspotting, and there is no equivalent to Renton’s angry tirade about the relationship with England. The only reference to Welsh national identity is made by a character who is outwitting a corrupt police officer, and this is expressed in terms of rivalry with England on the rugby field. Considering the popularity of the film in Wales, it must be seen as reflecting an aspect of the Welsh self-image just as much as the recent manifesto of Plaid Cymru.

It is not so very far to move from the products of culture to the most fundamental element that underlies culture, language itself. This, I suggest, is a uniquely painful subject in Wales, when it is discussed objectively, because of the enormous iconic and sentimental status given to the Welsh language. There are, very roughly, 500,000 people who speak Welsh, but I further suggest that no precise figure is available, because the ability to speak or use Welsh cannot be clearly defined, particularly in the south of the country. There are, of course, people who can speak Welsh fluently and correctly and take pride in doing so. It is extremely common, however, for people who think of themselves as able to speak Welsh to be quite unable to utter a complex sentence without interjecting English words; while the use of signs in public places in Welsh brings home the shockingly corrupt state of the language. In libraries, the shelf on which Westerns are kept will be labelled cowbois, despite the fact that the Welsh word for ‘cow’ is buwch. ‘Golf course’ is cwrs golff and ‘lift’, as in between floors, is lifft; while even educated Welsh people will sometimes declare that Welsh is ‘the purest language in Europe’ or ‘the oldest language in Europe’, which is demonstrably absurd from the point of view of history and comparative linguistics.

It is interesting to compare this approach to language to that of Iceland. In Icelandic, ‘computer’ is tolva (number prophetess), ‘telephone’ is simi (the long thread) and ‘radio’ is utvarp. Far from reinforcing a distinct sense of identity, Welsh all too often functions as something that further dilutes that identity. It is not a question of there being a majority of Scots or Irish citizens fluently speaking the much purer Scottish Gaelic language or Irish Gaelic language, strengthening national identity or adherence to political independence - obviously there is no such linguistic majority in these countries. The problem for identity, self-image and self-esteem in Wales is that ‘Welsh’, for all practical purposes, is quite often a dialect of English with some Welsh words thrown in, creating a situation in which many people who confidently believe that they ‘speak Welsh’ cannot even find the original words for numbers greater than ten and resort to English instead, possessing, in fact, a not much greater grasp of Welsh than some enterprising British holidaymakers have of Spanish or French.

George Orwell, with characteristic bluntness, said in The English People: ‘In any circumstances that we can foresee, the proletariat of Hammersmith will not arise and massacre the bourgeoisie of Kensington: they are not different enough.’ We might adapt Orwell’s insight to the situation in Wales as follows. In any circumstances that we can foresee, the Welsh people are unlikely to develop enough enthusiasm for independence from England to make it a reality: they are not different enough.

I took the title of this chapter from a thought exercise used by the American scientist Carl Sagan (1934–1996) in his book The Demon-Haunted World (1996). How would we react, Sagan asked, to someone’s claim that a dragon lived in his/her garage? Perhaps we would ask to see the dragon, only to be told that it is invisible, that it floats in the air without leaving footprints, that it is heatless and cannot be detected by infrared sensors, and finally that it is incorporeal. We would begin to ask what difference there is between having a dragon of this kind in the garage and having no dragon at all. This chapter is devoted to the proposition that in the absence of a nationalist party with any credible strategy to create a sovereign state, and in the absence of popular enthusiasm for sovereignty or even a deeply held sense of separate identity, the Welsh dragon will remain securely locked in the garage.

A ‘new form of government’ was allegedly installed in Westminster by the 2010 General Election. One of the few reassuring aspects of that rather strange and unstable election was the fact that the parties of the extreme right (together with their unwitting or covert allies in the anti-European lobby) made little or no headway. The Conservatives enjoyed a modest revival in Wales, having been erased from the electoral map in recent elections; clearly Welsh voters moved somewhat away from Labour and the Liberal Democrats and somewhat nearer to the Conservatives. There remained the brutal fact that Wales elected only three Plaid Cymru MPs to Westminster. The wind of change may have seemed to blow through the 2010 General Election, but it did not blow in the direction of Welsh nationalism or breathe any new life into the Welsh dragon.

1 Johann Hari, ‘The shameful, bloody silence at the heart of the election’, The Independent, 16 April 2010.

2 Western Mail, 17 April 2010, quoting Agenda, journal of the Institute of Welsh Affairs.

3 Lonely Planet Western Europe, Victoria, Australia, fourth edition, 1999.

4 Gareth H. Williams, Iechyd Da? [Good Health?], Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Issue 133, February/March 1999.

5 Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health Report, Chairman: Sir Donald Acheson, London, HMSO, 1998.

6 Robert Huggins and Piers Thompson, UK Competitiveness Index 2010, Centre for International Competitiveness, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, 2010; also, Western Mail, 19 April 2010.

7 Brian Arkins, ‘Tiger-Talk, the transformation of Ireland’, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Issue 133, February/March 1999.

8 Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, London, 1952.

9 Aneurin Bevan, Speech at Manchester, 4 July 1949.

10 Joseph P. Clancy’s ‘Introduction and Notes’ to his translation of the Selected Poems of Saunders Lewis gives a particularly sensitive account of the poet’s turbulent career.

11 Robert Minhinnick, ‘Our Last Romantic: A Reading of John Tripp’, Poetry Wales, Volume 22, Number 1, 1986.

12 Emma Anne James, Reversing the ‘British Gaze’, Hugh Owen Library, University of Aberystwyth, 2010.