UKIP and the Conservatives open up new front in the pro-Britain/anti-Wales constitutional debate.

So UKIP have finally shown their cards on Welsh devolution with Mark Reckless claiming that the Brexit vote will result in a decrease of support for the National Assembly in the future, followed quickly by the Conservative leader in Wales, Andrew R. T. Davies, who has claimed that the people of Wales would reject devolution if there was a new referendum “tomorrow”.

The argument is a logical absurdity of course; a popular protest against a ‘big’, ‘distant’, ‘unresponsive’, and ‘unaccountable’ polity (if you believe the anti-EU mantra) would more likely lead to a consequential disillusionment with the next ‘distant/unresponsive’ polity, namely ‘London’, rather than the ‘nearer’ and ‘more responsive’ Cardiff; at least initially. But of course in the minds of the British national right, the Brexit vote was a vote in favour of Westminster over and above all other forms and layers of sovereignty in the UK. It was the ‘silent majority’ reaffirming their oath of allegiance to the Queen (of England) and Country (Anglo-Britain) over pernicious Eurocrats and the traitorous nationalist crachach (of the soft and hard variety).

I’ve not seen any empirical evidence to back up that sort of behavioural profiling, and anecdotally I can confirm that (regrettably, in my opinion) many Plaid and Labour, pro-Welsh, supporters voted ‘leave’ in Ynys Môn, apparently as sceptical of the European political project as their pro-British bedfellows. No doubt ‘anti-devolutionism’ was a factor for the UKIP hard-core in Wales (perhaps 10% of the electorate?), but it is quite a leap of faith to suggest that it was a factor for the other 43% of ‘leave’ voters.  Indeed, as Ifan Morgan Jones has pointed out in his blog, the latest empirical evidence suggests, as it has done for many years, that committed anti-devolution sentiment in Wales is extremely rare nowadays.

But UKIP and the Tories haven’t kicked-off this line of argument, or, to look at it in a slightly different way, ‘deposited’ this combination of rhetorical statements in the pool of Welsh public discourse, because they genuinely believe in its accuracy. No, not in the slightest. What they are actually doing is launching a new discursive ‘front’ in the longer-term pro-Britain/anti-Wales constitutional debate.

You see, discourse works like that. In order to effect political change it matters not a jot what people ‘think’ (people largely think what they are told to think by the state apparatus and its agencies), it matters which lines of discursive argument are in the ascendancy at a moment of political ‘crystalisation’ (an election, a referendum, a vote in Parliament, etc.), or which ‘positions’ are hegemonic at any given time. In order for there to be a successful campaign (and perhaps a vote) to reduce, curtail or even end the Welsh political dimension in the future, there needs to be a preceding (and eventually dominant) discourse of dysfunction, irrelevance and discontentment. That discourse of a devolutionary ‘problem’ is mostly marginal at the moment in Wales, but UKIP and the Conservatives have clearly decided to promote it, and as it gains apparent ‘authority’ in the public domain, so too will their ‘solutions’ such ‘reform’, retrenchment or abolition. Be in no doubt, discourse proceeds ‘opinion’, and discourse can be designed and manufactured.

One thing I certainly agree with Mark Reckless and Andrew R. T. Davies about is that there is huge potential for this discourse to grow and to prevail. I don’t say this because I believe in the inherent ineptitude of Welsh Labour ministers or some inherent Welsh scepticism of Welsh institutions as some would argue, but because the range of agencies available to the British nationalist right to initiate and sustain such a discursive shift is enormous, the range of agencies available to the progressive pro-Welsh coalition to counter such an assault so small, and the ‘neutral’ gate-keepers of discursive confrontations so pitifully incompetent and disinterested.

Freed from their thirty-year war of attrition against the European Union, it can’t be long now before the British nationalist faction in Whitehall, Fleet Street and Sky Towers unleash their fighting dogs on the Scottish and Welsh institutions. They are clever, determined and patient, and they are many in number. Reckless and Davies have much to be optimistic about therefore. Whether there is fight in the old Welsh dog remains to be seen. Forewarned is forearmed however...

The ‘Racist Nationalist’ in Wales as Bogeyman, Simon Brooks (2006)

[Originally published on 'Ffawtliniau Disgyrsiol']

This morning I have been re-reading Simon Brooks 2006 article, ‘The Idioms of Race: The ‘Racist Nationalist’ in Wales as Bogeyman’ in The Idiom of Dissent: protest and propaganda in Wales (R. Chapman, ed.). In this extremely interesting article Brooks describes how the idiom ‘racist nationalist/language activist’ was created and sustained within Welsh political discourse in the period 1999-2003. There isn’t an awful lot of evidence that such a person ever existed in the language and national movements, according to Brooks, and the idiom was, ultimately, a political strategem of the Labour Party and a rhetorical ruse by the tabloid press. Furthermore, the roots of this phenomenon can be traced to the 1940s and Labour accusations that Plaid Cymru had Nazi sympathies and the anti-devolution campaigns by some Unionist Labour Party members in the 1970s. What we see here is a discursive invention, according to Brooks, an invention which can survive and flourish because of an anti-Welsh (language) and anti-nationalist press, together with an academy (particularly within the political sciences and sociology) which does not sufficiently consult original Welsh-language sources. The whole article is worth a read, but here’s the finale to be going with:

“It is more sensible to view the ‘racist-nationalist’ bogeyman as a preconceived idiom, constructed in response to a perceived political crisis in Unionist ranks – that of the nationalist breakthrough in the South Wales valleys in the 1999 first Assembly elections. In January 2001, Seimon Glyn strayed into the Labour Party’s field of vision, and became the dubious example on whom that party would build its case. Electorally, the Labour Party’s strategy was successful. The second Assembly elections of 2003 saw a significant fall off in support for Plaid Cymru. There was rancour within the national movement between those who wished to respond to the Seimon Glyn affair by passing by, and those, like Cymuned, who wished to challenge the ‘racist-nationalist’ narrative and expose it as myth.


To be branded as racist is to have one’s discourse delegitimized. It is to be silenced, indeed to be denied the right to speak. For any community such a situation is intolerable; for a minority community, it is particularly so. To leave the ‘racist-nationalist’ idiom intact and unchallenged is to handicap, perhaps fatally, language activism as a serious lobby in Welsh politics. If the advocates of a minority-language community are judged to be racist, their opinions will be removed from public discourse and their cause dismissed from the political agenda.


A preliminary task for those who wish to reverse the situation is to understand better how the ‘racist-nationalist’ bogeyman myth was constructed. This idiom has been with us since the 1930s, poisoning Welsh political and cultural life. It is hard to see how the future of the Welsh language can be constructively and openly debated until its bluff is called.”


Brooks, Simon, ‘The Idioms of Race: the ‘Racist Nationalist’ in Wales as Bogeyman’, yn Chapman, R. (gol.), The Idiom of Dissent: protest and propaganda in Wales (Llandysul: Gomer, 2006), 139-165

Protecting Welsh Place-Names: Discursive, Ethical and Regulatory Norms

National Assembly committees rarely get to consider questions of philosophical or theoretical interest while scrutinizing legislation, but the Communities, Equality and Local Government Committee had such an opportunity on Thursday last week.  

They were taking evidence on the Historic Environment (Wales) Bill currently going through the National Assembly under the sponsorship of Deputy Minister, Ken Skates. I am not particularly well acquainted with the finer details of the bill, but as far as I am aware it seeks to strengthen and reform the protection regime for historic buildings and monuments in Wales, and by all accounts it has broad support from the heritage sector and other interested parties: ‘fine insofar as it goes’ was the conclusion of the first witness, Dr Charles Mynors, a barrister specialising in the field.

But it was the second session which was of much greater interest to this saloon-bar philosopher as Dr Rhian Parry of Cymdeithas Enwau Lleoedd Cymru (the Welsh Place-Name Society) pressed the case for Welsh place-names (of farms, cottages, fields, landmarks, etc.) to be included within the provisions of the Bill and thereby gain the same protection as standing stones, medieval field systems or Victorian pitheads.

She carefully articulated the argument that place-names provide unique insights into our human and natural history, insights that are often not available in the archaeology or in manuscripts. She drew the committee’s attention to their intrinsic beauty, their ‘naturally’ derived communal and collective meaning, and their linguistic variety, citing examples of ancient Welsh, English, Scandinavian and Norman-French names. She also reminded the committee that place-names currently enjoy no protection in law and are under continued attack as an increasing number of new owners choose to give their properties new names.

Questioned by Alun Davies on the scale of the problem, she reeled off a litany of recent changes to farms and cottages in Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire:  ‘Happy Donkey Hill’ for ‘Faerdre’, ‘Stallion Valley’ for ‘Cwm March’ and ‘Emerald Valley’ for ‘Cefn Bryn Sarth’. She had hundreds of examples if the committee wanted them.

Committee members were largely sympathetic towards Dr Parry’s argument, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it would take a particularly insensitive kind of philistine not to be moved by the loss of a thousand year-old name referring to the demesne holding of the local lord’s ‘maer biswail’, or ‘dung bailiff’ (Faerdre < Maerdref) and its replacement by a name referring to a bunch of Shrek-like, grinning, asses.

But what to do about it in law they questioned? To what extent can the state intervene to protect not only the ‘physical’ artefacts of our history but also the ‘intangible’, cultural artefacts too? To what extent can the state intervene over the names of ‘public’ spaces such as housing developments, streets and shopping centres, but also over the name of an individual’s home or business?

“What right do we have?”, “How should we legislate?” beseeched member after member, rather forlornly, as they struggled with the age-old dilemma of whether to retreat into a deterministic view of society where the material world inevitably changes over time and the state has no place intervening, or taking an idealised notion of society where social, religious, linguistic or cultural constructs are ‘real’, can have intrinsic value, and the state can have a legitimate duty to preserve or protect them. But even if members had rejected a wholly deterministic view of the world (as most politicians do), should they privilege one cultural construct (the value of a living language for example) over another (the idea of ‘liberty’)?

I sympathised with our legislators as they tried to tackle these perennial questions as it is inevitable that as one ventures beyond the bounds of an empirically determined world-view and crosses into an idealised one, it becomes increasingly difficult  to ‘calculate’ an objectively ‘true’ answer every time. ‘In for an idealized penny, in for an idealized pound’, so to speak. Once you accept that the antiquity of an earthen mound is in itself sufficient grounds for the state to curtail the liberty of a farmer to bulldoze it, you have to at least recognize the intellectual argument that the antiquity of a name is equally deserving of protection. All is relative, all is cultural, in the difficult world of ideas.

But I would offer them one crumb of comfort if they cannot reconcile the apparent ‘weight’ of such entrenched ideas as ‘liberty’ with the apparent ‘lightness’ of others such as the protection of a Welsh place-name. The discursive framework within which they think and speak, and which regulates the importance of one category over another and which gives the ‘heavy/light’ differentiation above its apparent ‘authority’, is in itself a cultural construct. It happens to be the Brito-Welsh, English-language, liberal-utilitarian, largely secular political discourse of the Westminster tradition, but it is very definitely cultural (that is specific to a time and place) and a construct (achieving coherence only in the minds of the men and women who share it and is not prior to, or external to, the individual).  

Our instinctive nervousness about curtailing the liberty of a small group of people in the interests of an ‘intangible’ language is not, therefore, a nervousness about contravening some sacred universal right (‘everyone should be able to call their house anything they like, at any time, in any place’ – a right which can be disproved very quickly), it is a nervousness about contravening a long-established Brito-Welsh discursive norm (‘the Welsh language is not normally important enough to curtail the liberty of an individual in Wales – you better have a bloody good reason’).

In a different cultural context and under different discursive rules, it may be perfectly acceptable to say that a language is important enough to curtail the liberty of an individual of course. In Catalonia perhaps? In the Basque Country? In a school classroom in Bradford? In the Palace of Westminster maybe, where even now members are prohibited from speaking any other language except English and Norman French? The ‘you better have a bloody good reason’ Brito-Welsh norm is not intrinsically ‘right’ therefore, it is just the currently ‘authorised’ norm.

But of course, our Brito-Welsh discourse authorises the state to intervene in the affairs of an individual across a whole range of other matters from what we build on our properties and how we build it, how we look after our animals, how we manage our money, whether we choose to keep firearms or explosives or chemicals in our homes, what we can say on blogs about other people, what we can ‘think’ in relation to certain emerging theocracies in the Middle East, even when we can take our own lives or not. It is not a question of whether the state curtails liberty or not, it is a question of in whose or in what’s interest it is done. It is currently acceptable to curtail an individual’s liberty to protect a rare Welsh flower, for example, but not a rare Welsh place-name.

If our Assembly Members are at least tempted to explore some sort of protection regime they can take some comfort from the fact that the state usually curtails liberty in a proportionate and moderate way, with checks and balances to ensure that the ‘good’ which is being achieved is not at the expense of patent (or widespread) injustice or cruelty. And in any case, we normally internalise and normalize a curtailment of our freedoms very quickly and become largely complicit in our own ‘enslavement’ as Gramsci would argue. Indeed, a shift in the discursive norm is not actually that unusual (remember the golden years before seatbelt laws?), and what was yesterday’s freedom can very quickly become today’s social faux pas.

To that extent, if the members of the Communities, Equality and Local Government Committee are currently troubled by the prospect of introducing legislation that prohibits an individual changing the ancient Welsh name of their farm, cottage or field without consent, they might profit from considering the following simple questions:

Why preserve anything at all? Why not let the material world follow its deterministic path subject only to the natural law?

If we are to preserve things, why is a 1960s bus terminal in Merthyr worthy of more protection than an ancient Welsh place-name in Ceredigion?

If we are to protect place-names, why would a protection regime be any less proportionate, transparent and fair than a protection regime for buildings, wild flowers or endangered animals?

If we were to have a protection regime, why would Welsh citizens be less accepting of its rationale and provisions after the usual period of normalization?

If members still struggle after considering these questions, but are still keen to understand why they can’t take the final step, then I’m afraid they’ll have to look deeper into their own discursive make-up and think about which locus of authority constituted their political values and in whose interest. Most importantly of all, they need to ask if that authority is still relevant in a 21^st-century Wales capable of authorising its own discursive, ethical and regulatory norms.