Welsh nationalism on the rise – or is it?

This article is written by a fraud. A Welshman who left Wales 45 years ago and has lived and worked in England ever since. Because that then was what you did, especially if you were born in Newport – liminal, England-facing, resolutely non-Welsh-speaking. We lived on that then heavily industrialised coastal strip that includes Cardiff and Swansea as well as Newport, and a trip into the Welsh Valleys was like a journey to the moon. All lunar landscapes, cattle grids and people lost to modernity.

When I left Wales to go to university in England at 18 I had never been further west than Tenby and had never been to north Wales. Mountains divided north from south; and before the coming of the M4, which was still being extended when I was a teenager, trips to west Wales were epic undertakings. This was a country hopelessly divided: between north and south; urban and rural; English-speaking and Welsh-speaking.

The creation of a national assembly for Wales in 1999, following a referendum which backed the idea by 50.3% to 49.7% (underlining just how divided Wales was), at first did little to mend the schism. There were still two competing Wales: declining industrial communities in English-speaking Wales (my Wales!) that in the Thatcher years had lost the very meaning for their existence, their means of articulating their identity; and a Welsh-speaking Wales that, with a TV station and an increasing number of well-paid jobs in the media and government that required bilingualism, felt its moment had come.

I sided with the old industrial, English-speaking Wales, not least because the growth and relative wealth of Cardiff had sucked the life out of Newport, leaving a combination of left-behinds on grim estates and a new breed of young commuters who use it as a cheap dormitory from which to travel to Cardiff and Bristol. Ironically, undesirable Newport had become a property hotspot.

A few weeks ago, just before the lockdown, I made another trip to Wales – to visit my ailing mother in Newport but also to take the political temperature in Cardiff, where something that would have been impossible 20 years ago seemed to be stirring. There has always been a pro-self-government movement, spearheaded by Plaid Cymru and focused on its largely rural, Welsh-speaking heartlands in west Wales and particularly north-west Wales, where Welsh is the community language and has given the area a strong sense of otherness. Here England has always been a foreign power and English a foreign tongue. But now, judging from a series of pro-independence marches last year in Cardiff, Caernarfon and Merthyr and the emergence of a cross-party group called Yes Cymru, it looked to this insidery outsider, this long-ago Welshman, as if the desire to carve out a truly independent nation might be growing, seeping into areas where it would once have been unthinkable. But is it real, or will it always remain a bardic dream?

At Caban, a friendly, intimate Welsh-language bookshop in Cardiff, I meet a woman called Beti Davies, who had returned to Wales after living and working as a teacher in Manchester for 40 years. She had been born to a Welsh-speaking family in west Wales, but then left. “Like most people in the 1960s,” she tells me, “I went to London, then got married and went to Manchester. We have a lost generation of people, especially in south Wales. More people have faith in nationalism now.” It struck me that I was one of that Welsh lost generation: passionately Welsh when Wales played English at rugby but in all other respects irredeemably, exaggeratedly English; suspicious of narrow nationalism and still clinging to an increasingly outmoded ideal of Britishness.

A middle-aged married couple are also in Caban: two people who never left, both teachers in Welsh-medium schools where every subject is taught in Welsh, both committed to the cause of Welsh independence. “I didn’t think an independent Wales would happen in my lifetime,” says Lusa Glyn Thomas, who tells me that a decade ago Plaid Cymru were scared to talk about the I-word because it was seen as an electoral liability. “But now it’s back on the agenda. People have woken up to a new political reality. They say ‘Things don’t have to be like this. We can change things.’ “

Thomas and her husband Ion are passionate about the Welsh language, which is spoken fluently by about 20% of Welsh people, with a further 10% having some ability to speak and understand it. “Language is the heart of a nation,” says Ion. But both accept that in the past it has been a drag on the independence movement, creating a bitter divide between the two Wales, with the Welsh-speaking minority often appearing to be dictating to the English-speaking majority in the old industrial areas. Ion believes that divide is now being overcome.

“The language is not a barrier any more,” he says. With one in six children being educated in Welsh-medium schools all across Wales, the Welsh government aiming to reach a million Welsh speakers by 2050 and a younger generation that doesn’t feel the same attachment to Britishness or the old obsession with linguistic divisions, there are far fewer blocks to the formation of a broad-based independence movement.

“Is that the Welsh Language Society?”, I say when I phone its communications officer. It is, but he would never actually let those words pass his lips. The organisation he represents is Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, thank you very much. When we meet in person, Colin Nosworthy is less confrontational than I expect; he is, in fact, a gentle, serious person with a bushy beard and mild anarchist principles. Cymdeithas’s aim is to restore Welsh as the principal language of Wales, but Nosworthy doesn’t intend to beat me over the head for my monolingualism.

“Support for the Welsh language has been strong for a long period,” he tells me, “and there’s a significant element of the population that would back extreme measures to support it. What is potentially new is the growth in support for independence. Brexit has played a part in that; the Scottish situation has played a part in that. Welsh national consciousness has been expressed in very different ways over the centuries. The language has always been crucial, but the constitutional question is a fairly new phenomenon.”

Are linguistic independence and political independence in competition? The history of Cymdeithas, which was formed in 1962 when a direct-action group split away from Plaid Cymru, suggests they are. “Cymdeithas stands for national freedom for Wales,” says Nosworthy, “which is a different concept from independence.” Nosworthy – and this is true of many on the left of the independence movement – is not interested in creating an independent Wales that is a miniature version of the capitalist state which it would be leaving. He seeks a decisive break with capitalism and even with the idea of the all-powerful state. “Cymdeithas has always seen the fight for the language as a wider fight for freedom and social justice across the world,” he says. “We don’t divide those questions.”

Much of the energy behind the new call for Welsh independence has come from Yes Cymru, a non-party political organisation that seeks to unite the Plaid Cymru and Labour, Welsh-speaking and English-speaking traditions into a coherent movement. Yes Cymru was founded in 2016 by academic and writer Siôn Jobbins and a group of other nationalists who had been inspired by the campaign for Scottish independence. Jobbins is now chair and his organisation has local groups across Wales.

“Someone had to take the maximalist position,” he says, “even if it doesn’t happen. No one had ever taken that position before. Plaid Cymru obviously felt independence wasn’t a vote-winner. But it also had a philosophical problem with it. The founders of the party back in the 1920s and 30s, especially Saunders Lewis, said there was no such thing as independence. No country is independent, they all trade with each other, and he felt it was a good thing for a country to have something above it” – then the United Kingdom, later the European Union.

Jobbins is attempting to broaden the political culture in Wales. “The Welsh national movement has always been dominated by the intelligentsia,” he says, “and I want to break away from that. If you look at the people advocating home rule in Wales a century ago, they are all [church] ministers and sons of ministers. Even the fight for devolution was never a mass thing. We are trying to engage people who aren’t particularly political, who don’t go in to party politics, who don’t read manifestos or go to conferences, but they do feel something’s not right, they feel Wales could do better or that it is a nation, it’s as simple as that.”

The striking fact about the independence movement in Wales is the youth of many of its supporters. Take Joe Williams, the 23-year-old general secretary of Valleys Underground, which is attempting to galvanise the old mining communities of south Wales into supporting independence. He says the change of mood is palpable. “Previously, if ever Welsh independence was mentioned, it was mentioned in the same vein as someone mentioning a scientologist,” he says. “It was seen as the preserve of Celtic diehards up north. It was seen as completely opposite to the political culture in the south. But over the past three or four years it has moved from a fringe that could be laughed off to something people have to engage with. The march in Merthyr [Williams’ home town] last year saw thousands descend on the town square. That would never have happened here before.”

Yes Cymru have been good at drawing in celebrities. Kizzy Crawford, a 24-year-old singer-songwriter of Welsh-Bajan heritage, performed at the Merthyr march. She didn’t want to be interviewed for this article, but did send me a long, very personal explanation of why she has aligned herself with the cause of independence. “For me,” she writes, “singing and marching was an opportunity to show my support for a new way forward. By working towards an independent Wales, we are taking a stand about the identity of Wales within the UK and walking away from the far-right capitalism which has led to the desperate state our NHS and social welfare system is in. Devolution will give Wales the opportunity to establish fair systems, to return to our socialist roots, and to raise our self-esteem and identity as Welsh citizens.”

Crawford epitomises the image Yes Cymru wants to reflect: youthful, diverse, free from the baggage of the past. She was educated in Welsh-medium schools but lives in the Valleys rather than the old nationalist heartlands, and encapsulates the nationalist/socialist/green vision that the new supporters of independence want to embrace. “Wales is not yet a truly diverse, inclusive society,” she writes, “but I believe it can be, and that education and a return to compassionate socialist politics is the way to achieve this.”

Yes is More, an alliance of musicians and other artists, is doing its bit for the cause by organising gigs and festivals – or it was before the lockdown. “I was brought up bilingually and the idea of an independent Wales has been ever present for me,” says Cian Ciarán, keyboard player with Super Furry Animals and one of the prime movers in starting Yes is More in 2018. “It’s not about flag-waving. It’s about making people’s lives better – what can we do differently? An independent Wales would be a better place to make decisions.”

Ciarán admits that striking the balance between entertainment and politics at the gigs is tricky. “It’s a fine line,” he says. “People don’t like being preached to. We are trying to encourage an open discussion. But we also want to sell the idea of independence – the idea that there’s a better way. It can’t get much worse as far as Wales is concerned. We are one of the poorest regions in Europe.”

The Welsh-language music scene has been strong since the 1990s, demonstrating to true believers that Welsh is anything but a dead language. The independence movement is trying something similar in sport, with a group called Welsh Football Fans for Independence now marching to the stadium before every Wales home game. “We started in 2018,” says organiser Andrew Benjamin. “Yes Cymru was getting going and I could see something was starting to happen. It’s grown every time we’ve done it. We’ve done six now and got about a thousand people marching on the last one.” Rugby is the national sport in Wales, but Benjamin says it is much more “top down” than football, and that the latter can reach parts of the working class that rugby can’t.

Does Plaid Cymru feel threatened by an extra-parliamentary, grassroots movement for independence, especially one that has an explicitly leftwing, green agenda and is suspicious of conventional statehood? When Adam Price successfully challenged Leanne Wood for the leadership of the party in 2018, some attributed her defeat to the fact that members in the old rural heartlands saw her as too leftwing and too close to the Corbynite project. How does he feel about no longer having a monopoly over nationalist sentiment?

“We are part of the firmament, not the firmament itself,” he tells me. “Any nation that wins its independence has always done so through an alliance of various different forces. Not just political either: the Irish Free Stat wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for W B Yeats and the GAA [Gaelic Athletic Association]. Culture is an important part of it, and what’s really interesting about the independence movement here is its vibrancy and diversity. We have an important role, but it’s not the exclusive one.”

Price likes to quote 25-30% support for independence in Wales, though the figures don’t really bear this out. On the most generous reading, polls suggest 20% support. But even that is only with a question containing a prompt: “If there was a referendum tomorrow on Wales becoming an independent country, how would you vote?” A less loaded recent poll put the figure at just 11%: double what it was five years ago but still well behind the 43% who want the powers of the assembly to be extended.

The young and the disappointed, disaffected Corbynites looking for a new cause may back independence, but there are still many unwilling to countenance it and a substantial block of voters – 14% of the electorate, according to ICM – who would happily scrap devolution altogether. The Abolish the Welsh Assembly party is, by one of those delicious ironies, likely to win seats in the election due next May.

By then, though, the Scrap the Assembly party will have had to change its name because in May this year the assembly gets an upgrade, and becomes Senedd Cymru or the Welsh Parliament. What to call the enhanced institution and whether it should have an exclusively Welsh name caused a political furore last year and was papered over with one of those compromises – either the Welsh or the English name can be used – that resolved nothing.

Whether the independence movement makes real progress in Wales will depend to a large extent on how the Labour party plays it. In Wales, Labour is unlikely to collapse in the way it did in Scotland in the face of the nationalist surge. It is too deeply rooted in the south, has been more tactically astute than Scottish Labour and can draw on a residual suspicion among older voters in English-speaking areas of Plaid Cymru and the “Taffia”.

Labour currently governs in Wales with the support of a LibDem assembly member and an independent, but next year’s election is likely to be difficult for them, especially with the coronavirus crisis now brutally exposing the limitations of devolution amid arguments over which aspects of policy Cardiff and Westminster control. Labour, the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru are predicted to win similar numbers of seats in 2021, with each well short of a majority. Forming a stable government in those circumstances will be tricky. A Labour-Plaid coalition is the most probable outcome, but it is questionable whether Price would be willing to play second fiddle to a Labour party that had lost seats in the election. An almighty mess is virtually guaranteed.

The Labour party, which used to be viscerally anti-independence, is now moderating its position. Even the former first minister Carwyn Jones admits to being “Indy-curious”, the group Labour for an Independent Wales is becoming more vocal, and 40% of Labour members are said to back independence, though that figure comes from Labour for Indy Wales itself and is hard to verify.

“We have support across the party,” says Ben Gwalchmai, a 35-year-old writer who co-founded Labour for Indy Wales in 2017. “We are completely across the right to left spectrum within the party and have supporters in all parts of Wales. We agree with Carwyn Jones that as it stands the UK system is not only unfair, it’s unsustainable.” Gwalchmai says support for independence among Labour members has doubled in the past two years, and believes the independence movement is now reaching out beyond its Welsh-language heartlands. “It’s no longer just about the Welsh language,” he says. “It’s about changing the country for the better for everyone. Welsh as a political lever is important, but for the Yes Cymru movement every language is welcome, and that’s really great because many people who previously would have said ‘That’s for west Wales’ will now come on board.”

Where is all this really leading? Even proponents of independence such as Jobbins recognise that unless the UK suddenly implodes, perhaps following Scottish secession, Welsh independence is unlikely any time soon. There is growing enthusiasm among the young, but the numbers are still far short of a viable base from which to tilt for full independence. And even Price of Plaid Cymru, who says that his party is now explicitly pro-independence, recognises that it would be independence of a very special sort.

“The first thing we would have to do after independence is to reinvent Britain,” he says. “We’re not here to break Britain. In some ways Britain is already broken in terms of the asymmetries of power and opportunity. We’re here to remake Britain. There will absolutely be a need to cooperate closely in many areas. We share an island. We share a common history as nations. We share so many common interests. But it would be far easier and more effective to organise that as independent nations, then deciding to pool our sovereignty but doing so on the basis of equality rather than this kind of unitary state which has devolved certain powers but where Westminster retains parliamentary supremacy and is therefore always an unbalanced union.”

One of Wales’s traditional problems is the absence of institutions and media that were separate from England. Scotland, because it was joined to England by voluntary union rather than conquest, had retained its distinctive civic space, which is perhaps why its independence movement is so much more deeply entrenched than in Wales. The devolution settlement has given Wales some degree of institutional separation, and the media is now striving to escape the stranglehold of the predominantly English press, with internet start-ups such as Nation Cymru and Voice Wales.

“We are trying to provide a platform for a national conversation about Wales and Welsh politics,” says Ifan Morgan Jones, editor of Nation Cymru. “We’ve got a Welsh assembly, soon to be called the Welsh parliament; we’ve got a number of Welsh institutions; but we don’t really have much in the way of national media. There was no real national discussion about where we doing with these national institutions and where we were going as a nation.”

Jones welcomes the increase in support for independence. “It’s the most interesting thing to happen in Welsh politics since devolution,” he says. “It’s fired up a conversation about where we’re going and what we’re doing, and that’s very healthy. A lot of good ideas, both pro- and anti-independence, are coming out of it. Not only has it spurred an interesting conversation on the pro-independence side, but it’s also spurred an interesting conversation on the more pro-keeping-things-as-they-are devolution side. The pro-independence movement is forcing them to re-examine devolution and what can be done with it.”

He says the vigour and visibility of the campaign for independence are challenging politicians of all stripes. “Welsh politics had become rather stagnant over the past 20 years; the parties all supported devolution and politicians were largely interchangeable. Brexit and the Welsh independence movement have changed that, and there’s a lot more variety of views within Welsh politics now. You’d have to go back to the end of the 19th century to see a time when there was quite as much going on in Welsh politics.”

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