True Wales? … No Wales at all

They’ve called it “True Wales”. As George Orwell might have put it, “the truth has become the lie.” We’re talking about the birth of the second anti-Wales movement. The second, because the first was the ill-fated “No” campaign of 1997. But the forces of reaction couldn’t leave it there. Oh no. We all knew, of course, that this one had to happen. It was just a question of when, who and how. This time the Wets are on the march again and there are very few surprises.

It was either going to be a shadowy ‘Sons-of-Albion’ style organisation along the lines of Carson’s Ulster Volunteer Force – set up to oppose Home Rule for Ireland in the early years of the last century, or something more tame and lame, better suited to this anodyne Age of Spin – but with the same sort of malevolent leadership and the same shaven-headed no-necks as camp-followers and enforcers. The overall aim is the same: to deny a people (this time us) its right to self-determination. This is, after all, what Britishness means these days.

The new Wet movement has appeared in the form of a clutch of some very dubious and unlikely bedfellows. A coterie of political mavericks and misfits has clustered around arch-reactionary and British unionist fanatic, Monmouth MP David Davies. Davies, incidentally, recently made the bizarre boast that he is a descendant of the one Welshman who set his heart on the establishment of an independent Welsh state and on breaking up the ‘United Kingdom’ for good – Owain Glyndwr. Oh dear, oh dear. Continue reading »