In time, those uprisings — the birth pangs of democracy — gave way to a wider culture of trade unions and socialism. Little wonder, then, that at every general election since 1922, Labour has triumphed in Wales. And little wonder, too, that when the party finally gained a majority in 1945, it was Nye Bevan, a Tredegar native and miner in his teenage years, who symbolized the nation’s progressive currents. Alongside Bevan was another ex-miner, Jim Griffiths, the Minister of National Insurance and responsible for introducing child benefit. Even the party’s bureaucrat-in-chief, general secretary Morgan Phillips, was a colliery surface worker from the age of 12.

The story of those three men, the triumph of Britain’s organized working class in microcosm, felt like the culmination of something: from the red flag flying in Merthyr to a workers’ government at Westminster, and all in little over a century. The arc of the moral universe was long, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, but it bent toward political power for the proletariat.

Or so we thought. Because since that moment, the apogee of British social democracy, things have curved rather differently. Within two decades of the Merthyr uprising, Wales had become the world’s first industrial country — employing more people in collieries and factories than farms. Today, though, the nation’s economy is centered on services in Cardiff, where you’re more likely to find an artisanal coffee roaster than virgin steel. Little wonder, then, that a century of being a one-party state, with the politics of organized labor at its heart, Welsh Labour is now collapsing, its red flag a source of indifference rather than popular fervor.

Remarkably, the most likely winner of this May’s Senedd elections is Plaid Cymru. Pollsters currently have Reform just behind. Regardless, a victory for either party would be extraordinary, especially when the old stalwarts of Labour and the Tories face annihilation. In their place: the electoral expression of Welsh nationalism, and a party led by a man so English he could be from a Flashman novel.

Haven’t we been here before, though? After all, in 2015 Labour collapsed in Scotland, home to the party’s founder, Keir Hardie, and birthplace of two recent Labour prime ministers. And, then, something similar happened in England’s “Red Wall” a few years later. Yet the party’s demise in Wales is different. In Scotland, it was the SNP that uniquely benefited from an electoral slump, with Boris Johnson’s Tories likewise gaining in England soon after. But in Wales the threat is from two very different directions. Even the Greens are starting to make inroads, standing to gain from the “D’Hondt” system that will be used in May.

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Last August, indeed, even before the party elected Zack Polanski, the Welsh Greens won their first councillor in Cardiff. And now, at the end of March, YouGov forecast Labour only just edging them out. Labour has been the largest party at the Senedd since its inception; it’s not entirely implausible that it’ll finish fourth next month.

Another difference is how quickly the ground has shifted. As recently as 2021, under the leadership of Mark Drakeford, Labour matched its best-ever result in Senedd elections. Plaid, for its part, slipped to third. And at the last general election, less than two years ago, Labour gained 27 of 32 Welsh seats. Electoral disintegration in Scotland and England’s North was far longer in coming.

What explains such an accelerated turn? The Labour Right, for one thing. Vaughan Gething, the favored candidate of the Labour First faction — whose politics consist in little more than opposition to the party’s Left — was elected as Drakeford’s successor in 2024. But after just four months as First Minister, he resigned over a scandal centering on a £200,000 donation from a convicted businessman.

Four cabinet resignations finally pushed Gething out. So besides tarnishing the party’s brand, the saga also introduced something new to the nation’s body politic, with Welsh Labour engaging in a public spat. Whatever its other sins, the party’s discipline had been legendary, often proving a source of frustration for rivals. Unlike their colleagues at Westminster, Welsh Labour retained a splash of the labor movement in its DNA, meaning there was a greater respect, bordering on veneration, for collective decision-making. This not only reinforced trust, allowing identity-based voting to endure, but also meant that parties to Labour’s Left struggled. While socialists and Greens were winning seats to the Scottish Parliament as early as 1999, and Ken Livingstone became Mayor of London a year later, Welsh politics saw nothing comparable.

Beyond the Gething episode, an error as self-inflicted as the Peter Mandelson farrago, there’s also the disappointment of Labour’s return to national government. Free tickets to see Taylor Swift and gratis silk ties cut through in Bridgend as much as Blackpool. Instead of signaling a decisive change with the past, meanwhile, the Government immediately defined itself by removing the Winter Fuel Allowance from 10 million people. In response, Eluned Morgan, Gething’s successor, sought to put clear water between her party and Starmer, outlining a distinctive “Red Welsh Way”. A few months later, speaking to the Financial Times, she reminded readers that Keir Starmer wasn’t on the ballot in Wales. While the party’s chief in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, called on the Prime Minister to resign, Morgan kept her counsel. That’s evidence, again, of the Welsh party’s relatively cohesive culture — something Gething did his best to destroy.

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A host of other issues are refracted through the prism of Welsh subordination. While England gets HS2, albeit with a reduced footprint, Wales gets nothing. Indeed the funding formula for the ultra-fast connection between London and Birmingham means Cardiff misses out on £4 billion. As Will Hayward has noted, despite comprising 5% of the UK’s population, Wales receives only 2% of rail enhancement funding. Besides a deficit of infrastructure spending, there is a wholesale lack of opportunity. A shocking 40% of Welsh children under five live in poverty: so perhaps it’s not surprising that, after being the largest party in the Senedd for more than a quarter of a century, Labour voters are going elsewhere.

But while Wales is set for a controlled demolition of the two legacy parties, most probably prefiguring the next general election, a strange sense of composure reigns. Watching Merthyr Town at home recently, as they lost 2-1 to in-form Macclesfield, I was struck by the calm with which punters disagreed. In a stadium of a few thousand spectators, I met Plaid, Green and Reform voters while making a documentary, and spoke to a Labour MS at full time. Although people were happy to criticize national figures, there was an underlying respect for those around them. Mark, editor of the club’s fanzine — the fabulously titled Dial M for Merthyr — will vote for Plaid, but he was only too happy to point me towards a group of Reform-inclined guys in their twenties. “That’s their point of view isn’t it?” he said cheerily. When I spoke to the group, two of whom said they intended to vote for Farage’s party, there was a similar pragmatism. They understood why others might plump for Plaid or Labour.

It hardly needs saying that such relative restraint felt a world away from England. In Runcorn, and Gorton and Denton, two earthquake byelections of recent times, such views were virtually impossible to find (I tried, recording documentaries in both). Perhaps that’s because, in places like Merthyr, you find that thing so extolled by Westminster: community. These are small places built on generations of adversity — against bosses, London, geology itself. Geographically remote, an instinctive culture of solidarity remains the default.

The data backs this up: after Northern Ireland and Scotland, Wales has the highest proportion of people who feel they belong to their neighborhood. Indeed it’s arguably the nation’s very culture of solidarity and community — which furnished Labour with such seemingly impregnable foundations — that also explains the party’s rapid demise. Ties are thicker here, particularly in the Valleys. And if everyone you know has turned away from Labour, it suddenly seems easier, and perhaps even destined, to do the same yourself. The party’s collapse in Wales, to quote Trotsky on revolution, was impossible until it became inevitable.

That would certainly explain what happened in the Caerphilly by-election. Last October, in a seat it’s held at Westminster for a century, Labour fell to just 11% of the vote, finishing behind Plaid and Reform in a race for the Senedd. The generational ties that previously sustained the party’s hegemony meant it collapsed all at once. Expect something similar, across the country, next month.

Another problem for Labour is the underwhelming record of devolution. On key indicators, the NHS in England performs better, while child poverty is lower and employment is higher across the Severn Bridge. Such inequalities date back decades, of course, but it’s worth recalling that, before the 1997 referendum, the then-Welsh Secretary Ron Davies argued an Assembly in Cardiff would address such issues. That has simply not happened.

Yet though the Senedd has failed to deliver, there has been a growth of Welsh identity, particularly among the young. More people in Wales now say they feel more Welsh than British. Politically, that’s critical, with the nation’s electorate increasingly liable to vote on the basis of whether they feel one way or the other — the center-right block composed of those who feel British, the center-left block based on those who feel Welsh. Labour could ride the horse of emerging national identity while the Tories governed in London. But that has now gone, and a burgeoning sense of national identity wants more than managed decline, platitudes and nostalgia. As the writer Dan Evans puts it to me, only half joking, 7 May “could be our independence day”.

Devolution was always less about a belief in Wales’ ability to govern itself, and more an electoral calculation by New Labour to shore up votes against Plaid. Thus the former was happy to devolve power to Cardiff while having no real interest in state-building, or curiosity as to how Wales might be different politically. It’s remarkable to think that local authorities in England, via Metro Mayors, have more oversight of policing than the Senedd. Presumably Starmer has not corrected such an oversight because he doesn’t care.

Maybe, then, a precondition for Wales to interrogate what it wants, and who it is, means ditching the organization which has defined its identity for so long. The red flag no longer flies high in Wales. In its place, the battle to define the political substance of the dragon is about to begin.

Emblematic here is Aberystwyth University, both a foothold of the Anglophone world and a bastion of Welsh culture and language. As an employer, only a handful of the academic staff will have been through the local schools. Yet it is the linchpin of the local economy, both for the many jobs it offers, and the custom it provides to countless local businesses. That matters, for the university’s survival is arguably a bulwark against the type of economic decline that Reform, that most radical expression of political Britishness, capitalizes on elsewhere in Wales. In this part of the country, where Labour has lacked a historical industrial base, and where Welsh identity translates into votes for Plaid Cymru, Rhun ap Iorwerth is surely right in assuming that Aberystwyth will take a strong lead in backing the party he lately positioned as “the main anti-Reform force in Wales”.

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In fact, there’s a strong argument to suggest that, without its university, Aberystwyth would have gone the way of other coastal conurbations on the trainline from the English Midlands: picturesque rural outposts, dependent on seasonal tourism, and thoroughly Anglicized. Established in 1872, the university was the first in Wales, and came four-and-a-half centuries after Owain Glyndŵr had promised one in the north and one in the south. Though Glyndŵr’s revolt for a free Wales would ultimately be crushed in 1415, his commitment reflects the centrality of education to any national culture. Initiated by the London Welsh, this 19th-century fight for the University of Wales soon went national. That, in turn, reflected a dynamic and changing Wales: industrialized, politically progressive, and driven to a large degree by nonconformist faith. Chapel, here, was a hegemonic cultural force opposed to the Church of England, and expressed politically through a soft liberal nationalism that had its own ambiguous relationship with broader British identity.

In 2022, a book celebrating the 150th anniversary of Aberystwyth University’s founding was entitled The People’s Pennies, in reference to the money working-class families across the country contributed to its founding. Over time, it came to define the nature of Aberystwyth, growing from around two dozen to 8,000 students, and now encompassing over half the town’s population. The National Library was established here in 1907, and in 2009 Welsh government offices were opened as part of an effort to distribute its bureaucracy across the country. Together with the Arts Centre and the hospital, this ensures Aberystwyth and its environs retain a comparatively cosmopolitan character, with its swarms of cafés and bars.

At the same time, the University helped establish the town’s reputation as a hotbed of Welsh nationalism. That’s clear enough in the founding of Cymdeithas yr Iaith — the Welsh Language Society — and prevails in the animated politics of a town enlivened by its Welsh-language halls of residence. In a broader sense, meanwhile, this town-and-gown dynamic has helped instill a particular civic pride among Aber’s population, one reflective of Wales’s historic self-respect in its educational aspirations. Rather than the tensions that can typify this dynamic elsewhere in Britain, students and staff in Aberystwyth often do — and crucially are felt to — enrich community life, from sports teams to the amateur music scene.

Yet amid the cultural buoyancy, the university’s future is far from settled. That’s clear enough in the numbers. In May 2024, Aberystwyth’s senior management announced the prospect of 200 job cuts, declaring an £8.1 million deficit in its latest annual report. Other Welsh universities are in a similarly precarious state. Trinity St David’s has announced the closure of its Lampeter campus, while at Cardiff University over 150 staff have left since the start of the year, with 69 posts still slated for the axe. No wonder there are rising warnings in the Senedd of several institutions collapsing altogether.

That, of course, begs the question of causes. And here, Welsh universities share much with their kin across Britain. With fees stagnant, and international students increasingly discouraged by government from coming, bursars nationwide are struggling. What you hear less often from vice-chancellors — primarily appointed to try and ensure the financial stability of Britain’s higher education — are the attendant issues: which together raise other questions about the long-term viability of the sector. Despite the emphasis on student satisfaction, for instance, student-staff ratios are rising. All the while, managers have pumped money into new buildings and marketing, even as academia becomes increasingly unattractive to the next generation of overworked and underpaid scholars.

These complaints — common, too, at Aberystwyth — are undoubtedly emblematic of the broad crisis in higher education, one which has its roots not only in the dramatic hike in fees in 2010, but also in the shifted costs from the state to students. Important, too, is New Labour’s expansion of higher education. Among other things, this encouraged entrepreneurial behaviors from universities, prompting the proliferation of financially unstable private colleges. Aberystwyth’s vulnerability reveals the wider truth of the local economic dependence on higher education, a state of affairs mirrored elsewhere across the UK. Theirs is a vital role in sustaining both the material and culture conditions of many towns and cities. In Aber, certainly, it would be difficult for its people to imagine life without that seminal town-and-gown dynamic. That’s particular true when other institutions, like the council, are dwarfed by it.

This picture naturally leads us to a more basic truth about the role of higher education: the dependency of modern society in general on our universities. Somehow, somewhere, we have lost sight of this. The entire education sector helps create the teachers, doctors and engineers of the future, but in the case of universities they have devolved into individualization and atomization, so emblematic of contemporary capitalism. Universities are perceived straightforwardly as places for people to gain a qualification for their career and personal advancement — completely ignoring their role as a public good and as the linchpin of civilized society.

In this regard, notable by its absence is the suggestion that government should offer greater support to the sector, and shift the cost back from students onto the state. There has not been a whisper in Westminster about such a change since Corbyn. But given the current crisis, and the importance of universities to the UK’s overall economic health, that appears perverse.

To be fair, not every corner of the UK is equal here. For example, the Scottish government has recognized the sector’s value in relation to state-building and equalizing access, ensuring student fees for local students are low if they attend one of their native universities. Despite the funding formula denying the Welsh Parliament a more equitable budget, a similar arrangement may nonetheless have been possible. Yet this has been hamstrung by the attitudes of Labourism, which kowtows to Westminster both in its obsession with individual choice and its ambivalence towards the Welsh national project.

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Eluned Morgan has now had a year as First Minister of Wales. My bet is that, as she reflects on her first 12 months in the job, universities will be far from her mind, despite education being one of the small number of key policy areas within her power. This partly reflects the reality of a Welsh political class that has, for a decade or more, been happy to pay mere lip service to the sector. The failure to embrace higher education as a key strategic sector, however, is a manifestation of Welsh Labour’s thorough embrace of neoliberalism, arguably reflected in the startling decline of Welsh-domiciled students applying to university.

At a more existential level, the Aber saga is the perfect example of how, in spite of its avowed Welshness, Labour in practice is an embodiment of the duality and paradoxes inherent in balancing its Britishness. Far more timid than its 19th-century precursors, and lacking anything close to their spiritual commitment, it has relinquished our universities to the forces of Anglo-American consumerism — rather than embracing them as potential powerhouses for the benefit of individual communities and the nation as a whole.

With polling for the Senedd indicating that Labour’s days at the helm are numbered, Welsh higher education may soon face some more stark choices. While Welsh Labour’s fall from grace reflects Starmer’s struggles, in Wales there is the added issue of negotiating the national question, with the contenders for next year’s election representing rather more defined responses to the conundrum of Welsh identity. Plaid Cymru’s nationalism at least acknowledges the importance of our universities, even if their exact approach needs further elaboration.

Reform’s blend of turbo-charged Britishness and neoliberalism is somewhat less ambiguous in its consequences: a continuing struggle on the margins of an ever-more competitive market. Either way, Aberystwyth and its sister universities will need a lot more than the people’s pennies to flourish.

I was here to hunt down one particular life: John Barnard Jenkins. “I think he works down Blackwood,” said one man, referring to a neighboring town. One woman was sure Jenkins lived at the far end of the village. A group of teenagers shouted “cachau bant!” when I asked them. I’ll leave you to translate. Most people had never heard of him. The fact is that John Barnard Jenkins died in 2020, aged 87, in Wrexham. But he grew up in Penybryn, where he moved with his family aged seven during the Second World War. It was a comfortable and “an idyllic childhood” he later wrote, with his “modern” home complete with back garden and indoor toilet.

That life would soon transform into something less savory. During his teenage years, Jenkins began reading books on Welsh history, concluding that his nation had been “downtrodden”. Within a few decades, he would become for a brief period the UK’s most wanted and well-organized terrorist, as leader of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Movement for the Defence of Wales). The flooding of Tryweryn Valley in 1965, to make way for a private reservoir in Liverpool, and the Aberfan disaster a year later both pushed him into action. In 1969, when the then Prince Charles came to Wales for his investiture, Jenkins tried to kill him with a homemade bomb.

As I discovered at Penybryn, all that is ancient history now, as is the fervency with which nationalist sentiment exploded in Wales in the last century. You won’t find many people willing to kill for Cymru today. But you will find a growing nationalism which is finding ever-greater resonance among young Welshmen and women. Together with a rise of Welsh political identity, it could yet burst out from behind the Severn and leave Westminster reeling.

Nationalism always begins with history. But before 2022, Welsh history wasn’t a mandatory subject in the nation’s schools. Instead, students learned about King Charles I and the Battle of Hastings, of The Canterbury Tales and Henry VIII (with only a murmur of his Welsh heritage). Many here say that’s a legacy of English colonialism, deployed to prevent the formation of Welsh identity outside the community. To explain what they mean, some mention the so-called “Welsh Not”. The wooden tokens hung around the necks of students who dared speak their native tongue in class remained common into the 20th century.

Today, generations of Welsh men and women have been left bereft of any stories onto which they can fix themselves. In the south of the country, especially, the most discerning embodiment of Welshness I found was rooted in the fact that people weren’t English. But now, social media is changing that. There has been an explosion of accounts promoting the splendors of Welsh culture: Roseanne Garcia explores the country’s natural hidden beauty; Doctor Cymraeg details the origins of the Welsh language; Diwydiant Bythynnod reimagines ancient Welsh tales through stunning paintings.

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Samuel Talbot, the 27-year-old creator of TheSilureAdventurer (“Silure” refers to an ancient Welsh tribe), only got thinking about the past after his teacher told him that Welsh and English history were identical. “I remember thinking: I don’t like that,” he tells me. Talbot combines photographs of natural and historic sites with myths, legends, and folklore to create a digital window into Wales’s forgotten past, emphasizing that his is indeed a country with its own identity.

“Wales is the forgotten nation of the British Isles,” Talbot says, his voice so urgent you feel his life depends on it. He speaks in sharp, fierce bursts. “We’ve been persecuted for the longest, but we’ve the widest history. I want to honor our people, the heroes in our history that people don’t know about. I want to change our country’s course.”

Much of what Talbot talks about happened centuries ago, but he’s not alone in looking back. Many here remember fondly Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last native prince of an independent Wales. Drive through many parts of Wales, meanwhile, and you’ll increasingly see the red and yellow coat of arms of Owain Glyndŵr’s, the 14th-century Welsh nobleman who defied English rule. Michael Sheen, for his part, will play Glyndŵr in the Welsh National Theatre’s first production in 2026, while the medieval soldier regularly comes out second only to Aneurin Bevan in polls on Wales’s national heroes.

Some suggest the long march of devolution has triggered this increased fervor about identity, and with it a meditation on the past. Others look to an awakening in pride through sport, particularly after Wales’s outsized performance at the 2016 European Football Championship, when The Dragons reached the semi-finals. Adam Price, the former leader of Plaid Cymru, believes this sense of feeling is bound in Wales’s tradition of storytelling. “These figures,” he says, “give people a way to make sense and meaning of their present-day situation.”

Yet whatever the truth, it’s also clear that, amid the romantic wallowing, social media allows an increasing number of Welshmen and women to see their history in far starker hues. Dale Hughes runs the King_chrxn Instagram page, which has almost 20,000 followers. The 29-year-old’s feed is mired in disgust at the nation’s recent past. From Tryweryn to Aberfan, Hughes creates close-to-the-bone videos of the events combined with unsettling archive footage. The strategy’s clearly popular. One look at King_chrxn’s comment section finds a deluge of supportive messages.

Hughes doesn’t speak Welsh, like 74% of people in Wales. Yet, like Talbot, he feels an urgency in spreading Wales’s history to the masses. “Before I knew it, I’d fallen into a rabbit hole,” he says, after learning about Tryweryn. “I couldn’t believe what I hadn’t been taught about. I just thought: how has this been hidden from us?” He’s not alone: Hughes receives messages every day from people furious with what they call “Westminster colonialism”. To his delight, he also says his videos have inspired many to take direct action in their own ways. “People send me photos of their nationalist graffiti all the time. Whereas before they would write, ‘David sucks dick’, now there’s cultural symbols. It hit me as, ‘Yes, this is working.’”

I wonder at what point these small acts might turn into bigger things. “Let’s just say, if Meibion Glwndŵr was recruiting, and I didn’t have kids, I’d probably take it into consideration,” Hughes tells me, referencing the paramilitary group that carried out arson attacks against English-owned second homes in the Eighties and Nineties.

Perhaps John Barnard Jenkins shared similar initial reservations before sliding into terrorism. He did, after all, join the British Army and later the Territorials to serve the UK abroad. But there’s a fine line between anger and action. Talking about his Welsh history books, Jenkins himself conceded: “As the years went by, my feelings intensified, leading me to believe, more and more, that it was up to me to do something about it.”

Still, despite the tub-thumping of people like Hughes, there’s little sign the Welsh are planning to reach for their longbows. In the long term, a more ominous development for the Westminster establishment is the rising popularity of Welsh culture. Music is undergoing something of a revolution here. Over the past decade, there’s been no end of singers, bands, and even rappers keen to pick Welsh over English in distilling meaning into their art. Welsh crime novels are thriving and TV shows such as Game of Thrones have drawn deeply on Celtic mythology.

And where culture leads, politics has followed. According to one recent poll, a full 72% of Welsh people aged 25-35 back independence. Soon enough, that could bring a political earthquake. For if Wales is still passionate about its working-class roots — it’s still the only UK nation to have voted Labour at every general election since 1922 — Plaid Cymru is waiting in the wings. It comfortably leads Labour in polls for next year’s Senedd vote, and Rhun ap Iorwerth, the party’s leader, is already talking about potential independence referendums.

But if Hughes’s flirtation with arson tells us anything, it’s that nationalism can easily tip from pride into violence — just ask John Barnard Jenkins. The likes of Iorwerth say the work of Jenkins and others in the 20th century didn’t reflect the Welsh nationalist mainstream, hence why their groups no longer exist. But people still look to them for inspiration, and still see Gruffydd and Glyndŵr as heroes.

The reality, of course, is that all these people did bad things. Jenkins blew things up and wasn’t afraid to kill. Gruffyd and Glyndŵr slaughtered their own, with the latter’s efforts leading to widespread famine. What’s indisputable, meanwhile, is that even peaceful nationalists such as Iorwerth are increasingly resentful about Wales’s place in the UK’s political pecking order. Wales, he says, isn’t working, pointing to the estimated £3.9 billion of Welsh money going on HS2 — a railway project that doesn’t have a single track west of the Severn. There are other things, too, from an NHS starved of central government funding to the recent defunding of Welsh language radio stations.

Then there’s the broader economic malaise, accelerated by Thatcherism and the dismantling of the country’s industrial economy. Today, one in five people in Wales lives in relative income poverty. The overall poverty rate is 23%, higher than anywhere else in the UK. While England boasts a GDP per capita of £34,241, the average Welshman brings home just £24,443. That’s even as Wales remains the hardest part of the UK for first-time buyers to get onto the property ladder.

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In other words, there are plenty of more abrasive causes Welsh nationalists could yet latch on to. But there’s another possibility too — one where Welsh emotions are fired not towards the red dragon but to the Union Jack. Wales has been tied to England and Britain for hundreds of years, and its people share many of the same grievances felt by their English, Scottish, and Northern Irish kin. In recent years, much of that anger has come because of immigration. And though Wales has largely escaped the sorts of numbers settling in England, annual arrivals did rise by almost 50,000 in the decade to 2022. It should come as no surprise, then, that Reform is on the rise here too — polling at 25% for next year’s Senedd elections. And if John Barnard Jenkins has now passed into history, imprisoned in 1970 for treason before dying in obscurity, the valleys have long hosted other forms of extremism too.

In 2001, sociologist Marie Gillespie undertook a fieldwork study in South Wales exploring the rise of racism in former industrial communities. Noting the presence of far-Right graffiti, she wrote: “A subtle racism bubbles in the dark underbelly of these communities. The strength of feeling is difficult to assess, unpredictable, but potentially explosive.”

Though there was an influx of English and Italian migrant workers in the early 20th century, Gillespie’s words arrived at a time when immigration into Wales was almost non-existent. Walk through somewhere like Ystrad Mynach today — a town just 10 minutes from John Barnard Jenkins’s old stomping-ground of Penybryn — and you’ll find Vietnamese nail bars, Kurdish barbers, Iraqi mini marts. All have appeared in just the last decade.

If there was a dark underbelly in 2001, what will become of these communities when they are faced with a tangible presence of immigrants? While Iorwerth is confident that “this kind of nationalism has never been Wales”, I can’t help but think back to Jenkins, and how his history books ultimately led to homemade bombs. Yes, it is a different kind of angst. But fed up with rising costs, and grappling with the highest unemployment rate in Britain, might some young Welshmen look to a radical form of British nationalism?

Just beyond Penybryn sits Gelligaer, another former mining town, and home to a sprawling council estate. As I approach its worn, green sign, I see graffiti scrawled across a nearby wall. The words become clearer as I get closer: “No dinghy divers!” It’s a stark, sour reference to migrants arriving here on small boats — and one that could foreshadow the kind of action that propelled John Barnard Jenkins to infamy.

Every football fan grew up watching the World Cup, but for most in Wales it was always someone else’s party. We’d come to expect disappointment. It wouldn’t have been so bad had we not had to watch the world’s biggest sporting competition through a UK-media that assumed every viewer was an England fan. To make things worse, we were always subject to a barrage of “Come on England” advertising in shops and on television. During the 1998 tournament, I wrote to my local supermarket in Cardiff to complain it was full of England flags. They replied, with more than a touch of sarcasm, that they’d get behind Wales if we ever qualified. Well, now we have — and tonight are taking on the English team we were tacitly expected to support.

The current buzz around football in Wales represents more than just matters on the field. Unlike other Welsh national institutions, the Football Association of Wales (FAW) has been unashamedly political in recent years. Players have received lessons on Welsh history and official social media has marked important anniversaries. The official Welsh World Cup song is “Yma o Hyd”, an Eighties anthem that proudly declares that the Welsh are still here, “despite everyone and everything”, despite Thatcher and her “crew”. It was written and sung by Dafydd Iwan, a former president of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, who was imprisoned several times during the Sixties and Seventies civil disobedience campaign for the Welsh-language rights. The FAW’s video for the song includes footage of those protests, and iconic moments from Welsh history such as the 1984-5 miners’ strike and the flooding of the Tryweryn valley in the Sixties to build a reservoir for Liverpool. And the interweaving of historical archive with contemporary scenes of flag-waving fans resembles a video by the campaign for Welsh independence. Whereas once this would have been controversial, it has been embraced by most fans regardless of their politics and language.

The Welsh language has been central to Welsh identity and the historic Welsh independence movement. Welsh has been used and respected by the FAW, not just in a symbolic way but in interviews and press conferences, showing the world and the Welsh people that it is a living language. For more than a century, parts of the Welsh population had a schizophrenic relationship with Welsh. They were proud that it existed but also prone to think that it had no practical use, that it was a language of the past, not the present or the future. The FAW have challenged that view, helping normalise the language by using it where English might have been easier and more widely understood. The last line of the national anthem translates as “May the old language endure”. In the FAW’s actions, there is hope this can become reality.

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But football can also give a misleading picture of modern Wales. The Welsh language is only spoken by around a fifth of the population. Its future in its rural heartlands is endangered as young Welsh speakers move away in search of jobs and affordable houses and their place is taken by older English migrants. In urban areas, the language is undergoing something of a revival as more and more parents choose to send their children to Welsh-medium schools, but that can make those children think of the language as something educational and consequently uncool. The playgrounds of those schools are dominated by the English language. Too often their pupils make little of Welsh after they leave.

The particularly assertive and self-confident sense of nationhood that is depicted around football is also misleading. Support for Welsh independence has risen dramatically since Brexit but it remains no higher than maybe a quarter of the electorate. The emotional Britishness that held the union together is fading with generational change, but the old ideas that Wales is too small and too poor to be independent remain very powerful. Migration from England has changed the dynamics of Welsh society. In the 2011 census only 66% of the population recorded their national identity as Welsh. In a recent YouGov poll, 17% of respondents in Wales said they would be supporting England at the World Cup. The proud Welshness so evident in football is not shared by the whole population.

Yet sport has been fundamental to why Welsh identity has survived in the modern period. Through the historical accident of the two sports being invented in the UK, Wales had its own national teams in football and rugby. In the face of internal political and linguistic divisions, these teams provided an emotional symbol to unite behind. It allowed both migrants and the different forms of Welshness to come together and reminded the Welsh, and the wider world, that Wales was a nation. In the face of the immense cultural and political shadow of England and the absence of any real political self-government before 1999 this mattered. The historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that the “imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people”. In Wales, there has been little else that has done this.

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Wales has never been a nation

By Polly Mackenzie

Since the advent of devolution, sport should matter less. The actual devolution referendum in 1997 was won with a majority of less than 7,000 and just a quarter of the total electorate voted in favour. But today it is only a fringe that wants rid of the Senedd (the Welsh Parliament). As political scientists say, devolution has become the settled will of the Welsh people. As is so clear in football, the Welsh have become more comfortable being Welsh. But devolution has in many ways been a disappointment. There are fine words about inclusivity, environmentalism and economic regeneration but little real action. A third of Welsh children grow up in poverty. Waiting times for NHS treatment are much longer in Wales than England.

Yet the Welsh Labour Government gets an easy ride. The Conservative opposition suffers from remarkably poor leadership and has yet to find the distinctive Welsh voice it needs if it is ever to make significant electoral gains. The nationalist opposition is not really an opposition at all. It has an agreement of cooperation with Labour and is often reluctant to criticise anything the Welsh government does, seemingly for fear of being seen to criticise the very concept of devolution. The London media is not interested in Welsh politics, while the Welsh media is too small to offer substantive criticism. The result is that, after 23 years in power, Welsh Labour are secure, complacent and perhaps even arrogant. They made a song and dance about managing Covid in their own way and yet they refuse to hold a Welsh inquiry into what happened.

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How Britain became an American colony

By Dominic Sandbrook

Wales’s smallness contributes to this. Everyone in Welsh public life seems to know each other. In the media, academia and the voluntary sector, the networks that give people access to funding and power are too small to risk rocking the boat. Rather than criticise, it is often easier to celebrate, and the Welsh media’s upbeat treatment of the World Cup is evidence of this. There has generally been less discussion of the politics of Qatar than in the London media. The Welsh Government has a presence at the tournament and put chasing investment and tourism opportunities before its stated principles of equality and diversity. Yet it has not had substantive criticism for this. Even complaints about the tactics and squad selection were responded to angrily by some fans, who seemed to think it was unpatriotic or ungrateful. In Wales, we too often just seem happy to have qualified. We have waited too long for this for politics to get in the way.

But we shouldn’t just be happy to be there. Our game has matured enough that we should be debating team selections and tactics. Likewise, we shouldn’t just be content that, after centuries of governance from Westminster, we now have our own Senedd. We need to be critical of our institutions and our government. We need to move beyond celebrating the fact that Wales and Welshness are still here and start asking where we are going next. Football shows how deeply many care about Wales, but that passion and patriotism has yet to be put to full use.