When you come to Wales, one of your first impressions is of how delighted people here are to be Welsh. Even those who have left feel a strong pride in their Welsh identity, according to a study of the Welsh diaspora published last week. It is a source of immense pride to them that they are from Wales. It should be. It is a miracle of history that Wales and Welshness even still exists.
In the floods that devastated much of south Wales last weekend, we saw the very best of our nation. Tight communities, coming together in the face of obstacles that would shatter the morale of all but the most resilient. But after more than 16 years of calling Wales home and covering it as a journalist, I am struck by a great paradox. Though the people of Wales will go 12 rounds with anyone who scorns their country, there is deep down a seeming acceptance among many that it is Wales’s lot to be perpetually treated as less of a nation than Scotland.
There are obvious symbolic issues. Wales is the only UK nation not to have any representation on the union flag. And why would it? For all intents and purposes, for much of the past half of a millennium Wales was simply part of England. In 1888, under the “Wales” section of the Encyclopaedia Britannica it simply read: “See England”. Even the very currency in our hands underlines our perceived lesser nationhood. The royal coat of arms (which is everywhere) is divided into four quadrants: one containing the harp of Ireland, one showing the lion of Scotland and the other two both containing the three lions of England. For Wales, See England indeed.
In addition to the symbols are the small insults that Welsh citizens ignore. We routinely get secretaries of state who aren’t Welsh (imagine how the Scots would react to that). There are repeated refusals to name St David’s Day a bank holiday (St Andrew’s has been one since 2006). While the Scots are allowed devolution of justice, policing and rail, the Welsh are deemed not quite grown up enough to control these areas.
In July, when our first minister, Vaughan Gething, was forced to resign, the coverage in the UK news took a back seat to the fact that Gareth Southgate had tendered his resignation to the English FA (whose patron is inexplicably the “Prince of Wales”). Imagine the coverage if it had been Nicola Sturgeon rather than Gething who had quit.
These issues are often pointed to by Welsh nationalists as emblematic of Wales’s place in the “United” Kingdom’s pecking order. But what concerns me far more is the way the system leaves Wales completely unable to meaningfully tackle its own problems.
Those floods, which are still causing misery in the valleys and Carmarthenshire, provide a good example. People in Cwmtillery, Blaenau Gwent had to leave their homes after a landslide from a coal tip. In Wales we have 2,573 disused coal tips and of these a terrifying 360 are deemed the highest risk and are regularly inspected. Many of these are directly above the homes of some of the UK’s poorest communities. Every time they hear rain on their roofs these people wonder what could come pouring down the side of the mountain. The memory of the Aberfan disaster in which 144 people (116 of them children) were killed does not dim in the valleys, it reverberates.
We would dearly like to tackle this problem. Estimates suggest it would take £600m and up to 15 years to deal with these tips. When the Tories were in Westminster, they refused to foot this bill, arguing that this was a devolved matter. But the coal tips long predate devolution. It is callous to argue that they are now simply “Wales’s problem”, when the wealth that the coal generated has long ago flowed beyond our borders.
Yet now Labour finally has control of the levers of power in Westminster, the amount set aside in the 2024 budget for Wales to tackle this issue is £25m. Not exactly a great reward for the unwavering loyalty of the most reliable brick in the “red wall”.
The budget itself sums up the insanity of our system. When the UK chancellor announces their budget, the Welsh government hears what’s in it at exactly the same time as every other person in the UK. It is impossible for the Senedd to plan long term in a meaningful way. The Barnett formula means that the money Wales receives is based entirely on the spending needs of England. No other country ties the spending allocations to its regions to its largest constituent state.
This is not even to mention that the Barnett formula is far more generous to Scotland than it is to Wales – after all, Scotland doesn’t care if it causes a fuss, whereas Wales is notoriously undemanding. In 1997, during the referendums for Scottish and Welsh devolution, 74% of voters in Scotland were in favour of Scotland having its own parliament; in Wales it got over the line with just 50.3% of the vote. As one of my favourite Welsh poets Alun Rees wrote, Taffy has “fought the wide world over, / He’s given blood and bone. / He’s fought for every bloody cause / except his bloody own.” In Wales we generally don’t fight our corner: we shrug and accept that this is the way it is.
The point isn’t that Wales is short-changed, but rather that in Wales we need to stop shrugging our shoulders that this is our inevitable lot. The turnout in our Senedd elections is derisory. Since 1999 it has been averaging 43.5%, but was as low as 38.2% in 2003. It peaked in 2021 at 47%. The Scots average 54.8% and saw 63.5% in 2021.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally get the apathy. Devolution was meant to mean change. But while the cuts the Welsh government has had to shoulder have been brutal, there is an eternally disappointing lack of ambition and talent among many of those elected to our Senedd. Wales has significantly longer NHS waiting lists than Scotland and England and the worst education results in the UK. Both areas have been controlled by the Welsh government for 25 years.
But if we are to tackle the challenges our nation faces we can’t just be apathetic, no matter how justified the apathy is. We don’t need to agitate for independence the way the Scots do, but there need to be consequences for repeated and often deliberate decisions (see HS2) that short-change the people of Wales. While Welsh passion and pride show no signs of diminishing, we need to discover that there is a responsibility that comes with Welshness to engage with our country and demand better. Even if that involves the least Welsh of all actions – causing a fuss.