This handsome village, nestled on the Pembrokeshire coast of West Wales, isn’t dead, exactly, more in a state of semi-hibernation. Nowhere is this more true than up a narrow hedgerow-lined road a short walk from the center. Here sit several stone cottages and bungalows, with names such as Sandalwood and Green Bank, their windows shut, their curtains drawn. Key safes, like limpet mines, cling to porch walls, while neatly assembled recycling bins stand undisturbed at the bottom of empty driveways.

All the telltale signs of holiday lets and second homes, before the summer surge. Some are for sale. Sure enough, it’ll be a different story come June, as Saundersfoot transforms into a bustling honeypot. Its shops, bars and restaurants will welcome these part-time residents with open arms, as a vital source of funds in a county short of cash. Yet even here in Pembrokeshire, long known as “Little England Beyond Wales”, these seasonal arrivals are resented too — their coming prompting fights over land and identity that could yet spark a political flashpoint.

All coasts and countryside, it’s easy to understand why anyone would want to own a home in Pembrokeshire. And, compared to British idylls such as Cornwall, it remains cheap. According to the latest data from the Office of National Statistics, the average price for a detached house here is £308,000; a similar-sized property in Falmouth or St Ives might set you back £100,000 more. No wonder Pembrokeshire has some 4,300 second homes. Only Gwynedd, home to Snowdonia, has more in Wales. In Saundersfoot and nearby Tenby, Pembrokeshire’s most popular tourist resort, one-in-four properties are reckoned to be second homes or holiday lets.

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But investors in getaway properties here are starting to question whether they really are welcome. Using discretionary powers allocated by the Welsh Labour government, Pembrokeshire County Council slapped a 200% council tax premium on second homes in 2024, effectively tripling their rate. Though the charge was subsequently lowered to 150%, and is due to fall even further this year, it has spooked second homeowners, who are now looking to sell up. That’s shadowed by changes elsewhere in Wales. In Gwynedd, for instance, the council proposed legislation that would require homeowners to apply for planning permission to convert residential properties into second homes — though it was later forced to backtrack after residents and businesses complained.

To be fair, the idea of a second home tax — mandating that owners of non-primary residences must contribute to the local economy beyond visiting their local fish shop in the summer — doesn’t appear wholly unreasonable. For hard-up Pembrokeshire County Council, whose latest budget revealed a funding gap of £27 million, that extra money could go some way to tackling real problems of housing and local services. “This isn’t an abstract policy debate,” says Josh Phillips, a Labour candidate for the Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire constituency in the looming Senedd elections, and who himself grew up in Solva, a picturesque Pembrokeshire fishing village with a high concentration of second homes. “It’s about whether people’s children will be able to live anywhere near where they grew up.”

Phillips, a former publican, understands the economic value second-homers bring. Yet he’s nonetheless tired of seeing the “hollowing out” of villages where houses lie empty for months at a time. Herein lies a crucial distinction between empty second homes on the one hand — and those with visible signs of occupancy on the other. Speak to people in Pembrokeshire and, without exception, they have no time for totally vacant properties, blaming them for everything from falling property prices to vandalism to vermin infestations. In January, the Pembrokeshire Council backed a last-ditch proposal that would force the sale of properties left empty for over a year back to the community.

From afar, the debate around Pembrokeshire’s second homes can seem framed in anti-English terms, given how many second homeowners come from across the border. Though plenty hail from Cardiff too, it’s an easy assumption to make. I speak to one English former second-homer outside Tenby who tells me his family ended up selling a few years ago, after being made to feel unwelcome in the village. As he puts it: “I don’t think it helped that we were from Kensington.”

That’s arguably echoed by a rise in nationalist activism, with second homes a predictable focus. Cymdeithas yr Iaith, a campaign group, claims Welsh speakers have effectively been priced out, turning their villages into “holiday parks”. It brings to mind a recent story about the coastal hamlet of Cwm-yr-Eglwys, which, reportedly overrun with second homes, had just one remaining Welsh speaker.

The truth, though, is that the origins of that moniker “Little England Beyond Wales” extend far beyond the modern age of tourism. The phrase first featured in a 16th-century text by the topographer and historian William Camden, who discovered a distinctly English-speaking culture upon his arrival in the region.

Camden was specifically referring to southern Pembrokeshire, whose Anglicization began with the Norman Conquest of the area in the 11th century, followed by the later arrival of Flemish settlers. Indigenous Welsh speakers were forced to move to the hilly country in the north, then kept in check by a boundary of castles built by the Normans and Flemish, known as the Landsker Line (deriving from the Norse for “divide”). This is why most place names in the south of the county, such as Saundersfoot, Haverfordwest and Milford Haven, are English sounding, a vivid contrast with the Maenclochogs, Crymychs and Trefdraeths further up the coast.

Hints of this history remain. Compared with neighboring Ceredigion, and Gwynedd to the north, Pembrokeshire is not a traditional voter base for Plaid Cymru. Nor is it synonymous with Labour like the former industrial valleys of South Wales, where “The Internationale” once rang out from miners’ welfare halls. Instead, the county swung between Labour and the Conservatives for decades before increasingly turning blue. The Tories prevailed in the last Westminster and Senedd elections here, buoyed substantially by the rural vote. (The county council, for its part, is made up of a hodge-podge of independents).

Now, though, rising frustrations with the national Conservative and Labour parties — and Westminster politics in general — are likely to impact the looming Sennedd election: potentially changing policy around second homes. Reform, which is standing candidates in Pembrokeshire, has pledged to increase Wales’ housing supply to tackle the issue. A party spokesperson tells me that it also intends to “take a wrecking ball to a number of anti-tourism measures” implemented by its rivals. Such is the frustration that even Plaid is in with a shot. After winning a council by-election seat in February, the party now also hopes to snatch a Pembrokeshire Senedd seat or two, its manifesto promising to “work with local authorities” on second homes.

Yet look past the politics of holiday homes — or even just politics generally — people here clearly have more humdrum worries too. In a back room of Pembroke Rugby Football Club, signed Wales shirts pride of place in a glistening glass cabinet, club chair Richard Jelley says the county’s biggest problem is a lack of jobs for young people, which has contributed to a brain drain. While the tourism industry is all well and good as a provider of seasonal employment, he says, it’s not enough to keep working-age people around, with many leaving to seek opportunities elsewhere, often in Cardiff or Bristol.

Jelley points to the closure of the Murco oil refinery in Milford Haven in 2014 as an inflection point for the county’s fortunes. The refinery had supported thousands of local jobs, which effectively went overnight. “We used to have two thriving senior sides here, but now we just have one,” says Jelley, a compact 60-something with a shock of fair hair. “That’s because the kids get to a certain age, there’s no work, and they move away.”

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This supports the argument that the proliferation of second homes and struggles of younger people might be more a case of correlation than causation. Wyn Harries, a school governor from Crymych, close to the Ceredigion border, makes a similar point, pinning the blame of depopulation of his rural part of the county firmly on “years of neglect” by a Welsh government stuck in the urban bubble of Cardiff Bay. “Their policy,” argues Harries, “is that people in the countryside shouldn’t be allowed to prosper,” adding that if there were decent rural jobs, the second-home issue would “resolve itself”.

In his 2019 book Wales: England’s Colony, the historian Martin Johnes argues that Wales’ identity has fundamentally been shaped by its relationship with its larger neighbor over the centuries, from its conquest in the 13th century by Edward I and subsequent annexation under Henry VIII, to parliamentary laws governing the use of the Welsh language in schools. This has led to a tendency, Johnes writes, to “blame England for everything that is wrong with Wales”.

Would it serve Wales better to turn the spotlight on itself instead? After all, devolution was meant to help the country steer its own path. Yet Cardiff Bay — or, more specifically, Welsh Labour, which has held a tight grip on the reins for the past 27 years — might well be accused of being as indifferent to the plight of the people in Pembrokeshire as their counterparts in London, contributing to the sense of alienation so clearly felt by locals. They’re frustrations sure to remain whoever triumphs in the Senedd next month, or whoever buys up the pretty cottage down the lane.

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.

My mind’s eye conjures up a bleak image of those days: not because of some life-changing event, or traumatic experience, but purely for a total absence of girls. At the age of 12, I went off to Wales’ last state boys’ school, indeed one of the last of its kind in Britain. My budding teenage mind could not comprehend why on God’s green earth some lords of antiquity would continue this desolate, barren, practice of separating the sexes in secondary school.

Well, now it’s gone. Lewis Boys’ School in Pengam, South Wales, has cast this old-fashioned system to one side and merged with its female sister school. This has ended not only a deep educational tradition across Wales, but a way of life that shaped myself and thousands of other boys across hundreds of years. In doing so, though, this scholastic revolution has sparked altogether different questions over the place of such boys in contemporary British life — a space that, for the increasingly marginalized working-class, seems to shrink every year.

Many local people saw the merger as a coup. How, they asked, could young boys grow into decent young men without the presence of girls around them? Parents, for their part, shared their joy on social media. “The right decision,” said one, “has been made to merge the schools based on what’s best for the children — really it should have happened years ago.”

There is some truth to this. In recent years, the danger of boys’ schools has loomed large: in 2021, reports of a systemic “rape culture” emerged from several of Britain’s leading single-sex private schools. A “moment of reckoning” came when a website, launched for current and former school pupils to submit claims, received more than 8,000 testimonies of sexual violence and abuse perpetrated by other boys. The schools were quickly condemned as breeding grounds of toxicity.

I could well be mistaken, but there was never any sense of the sinister at Lewis Boys’. Why might this be? The answer, perhaps, lies in its history, and the space it occupied in an impoverished and neglected corner of Britain. The school was founded in the wig-filled 18th century, in the village of Gelligaer, not far from where it sits now. Sir Edward Lewis, a squire, landowner, and captain of the industry who revolutionized the Welsh Valleys, observed the poverty around him and pledged to change it. Dying in 1728, he left a substantial sum of money to educate poor boys in the parish, and provide them with clothes fit for any young man. Founded the following year, Lewis Boys’ was always meant to be a school for local people, by local people, with “fagging” and other brutal upper-class habits utterly alien.

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Over the next century, the school would grow rapidly, with its catchment area expanding to cover much of the surrounding Rhymney Valley. It became a fee-paying establishment with the option for boarding, leaving sponsored spaces available for high-achievers from across Wales. Then, in 1848, it became a grammar school, and established itself as an elite center of learning; by the Seventies, it had transitioned to a state-owned comprehensive school. Its alumni became influential figures in British life, from Zephania Williams, the Chartist responsible for the Newport Rising, to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Such was its celebrity that David Lloyd George once described Lewis Boys’ as “the Eton College of the Valleys”.

Lewis Boys isn’t unique here. Right across the country, clever working-class children as varied as Harold Wilson and Michael Caine benefited from similar educations. Yet by the time I arrived at Lewis Boys’, as a 12-year-old in 2009, the school’s grand history felt very far away. There I was, in a damp-smelling hall on a sodden September morning with hundreds of other boys. Fights broke out, and rucksacks were turned inside out while their unsuspecting owners went to the toilet.

The Valleys’ poverty had, by then, superseded any whiff of Eton. Yet even as a child, I could sense that the school held some sort of lost glory, clear in the gilded frames above the great foyer, listing the names of boys who had escaped off to Oxbridge, as well as the dead from both world wars. This history had been somewhat lost after 2002, when the school’s new site was unveiled — £11 million spent on dragging its shabby buildings into the 21st century, in the form of a series of sickly silver and orange blocks.

Most of the teachers looked out of place in this educational UFO. The majority, after all, had been at the school for decades, some having started there as students. They were graduates of a time when the cane was still used, and wore ill-fitting suits and corduroy slacks, and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. One even kept a soft plimsoll in his desk drawer, ready to launch at any boy who disobeyed, as if Heath were still prime minister. Yet, for all their flaws, who we called the “Old Guard” carried deep within them the ethos of Lloyd George’s words.

“Now, boys,” Mr Butcher, the greying deputy head belted across the hallway in his resonant Valleys bass on that grim September morning. “You are today sat in a place of high learning, and high learners you will be. You will all one day be Old Ludovicans. And by then you will know: Ni Ddychwel Doe — Tomorrow Never Returns.”

Over the next five years, I experienced a form of learning unlike any other, one that proved, in retrospect, all the richer because the school remained single-sex. The relationships and bonds that came out of Lewis, the shared interests and lack of embarrassment that came from the absence of girls — all this would have been impossible in a mixed school. I am not alone in thinking this. One 2010 study, from the University of Virginia, found that the absence of girls allowed boys the chance to develop without pressure to conform to a masculine stereotype. Students in the study didn’t feel the need to conform to some “boy code” or hide their emotions to be a “real man”.

I experienced this first hand. Unlike most British schools, for example, Lewis Boys’ made drama a compulsory subject until GCSE. It may sound far-fetched, but I saw some of the toughest boys of the Valley get up on stage and rehearse lines, form dance routines, devour the chance to create imagined scenarios from short prompts. Yes, they’d get a ribbing from their classmates afterwards. But without any female peers to feel embarrassed by, they explored Macbeth and Bugsy Malone to their heart’s content. Some boys even managed to land roles in films, guided by former pupil and successful actor Craig Roberts.

The point, here, is that such opportunities would have been impossible beyond the school’s gates. As deindustrialization started in the Seventies, the virus of mass unemployment worked its way through each Valley and infected communities almost to a man. It was at this point that the region began its slow march to becoming one of the most deprived regions in Northwest Europe. By 2025, the End Child Poverty Coalition (ECPC) reported that 36% of children in the Rhymney Valley, the heart of Lewis Boys’ catchment area, were living in poverty.

In truth, though, these numbers don’t do the destitution justice. Imagine, instead, boys coming into school dripping wet because their parents couldn’t afford a raincoat, or playing football with shoes hanging on by an invisible thread. These are sights that’ll never leave me. Or there are the smells: the damp from the boys whose parents couldn’t afford to put the heating on and dry their uniforms. It was a subtle squalor, this white working-class poverty, but one that would occasionally smack you in the face before disappearing.

It’s also a nationwide trend. According to the ECPC report, just 53% of white British reception pupils eligible for free school meals met the developmental standards expected of them in 2018-9. Nor do things improve as they get older: only 16% of poor white British students start higher education at 19, the lowest rate of any ethnic group bar Romani Gypsies and Irish Travellers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, meanwhile, the ECPC was especially scathing of how Whitehall has ignored Britain’s former industrial heartlands, precisely those areas where most white working-class boys now live.

The economic status of these children is often tied up in their social condition. Though specific numbers aren’t available, a report by the Centre for Social Justice found that in the poorest fifth of white families, only 12% of parents were married, compared to 84% in the wealthiest fifth. This implies a higher likelihood of single-parent households — and certainly, many of the boys at Lewis Boys’ lacked father figures. It wasn’t much talked about, but whispers would make their way around the school about the boys who came from broken homes. No one would bat an eyelid when those same boys stumbled into meltdowns. Once, the police were called after a boy was caught roaming the rugby field with a corner flag pole, threatening anyone who approached. Elsewhere, a student smashed up a classroom after being asked to take off his jacket.

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They weren’t bad boys, but a confused rage festered deep within them, one that they couldn’t quite explain. And so, they looked to their colleagues as outlets, for conversations and banter to ease the reality of home. When this failed — and it often did — they looked again to the dependable Old Guard. Above all, I remember one teacher, Mr Oliver, who was an expert at taking troubled boys under his wing. He was a tall, lean man, with salt-and-pepper hair worked into a pair of short curtains. Everyday, he’d pace the corridors in a way that made it seem he was about to fall forwards, forever having everywhere to be yet without time to get there. He was most famous for his much-loved response to boys’ requests to watch a film. “If you don’t ask,” he’d bellow, “you don’t get!” And so the trolley with the TV and VHS player would be rolled out.

Through all this, Mr Oliver made it his mission to be a role model to these troubled boys, taking them out on trips or encouraging them to pick up hobbies and sports. I once remember feeling hard done by when a foul-mouthed group was taken to see boxing. “So I’m doing all of this studying and don’t get rewarded for it?” I said to Mr Oliver, quite brashly. He came close and lowered his voice. “Listen,” he said, “these boys need this more than you. Have a bit of patience and understanding, and come back to me in 15 years. You’ll understand by then.”

Almost exactly 15 years on, I do. Many of Mr Oliver’s boys left Lewis Boys’ as focused young men — and the point, again, is that I’m just not sure they’d ever have received the same attention if they’d been surrounded by girls. Forget the psychological arguments: with more students, the resources to focus on those most in need simply aren’t there. Well, we’ll soon find out if I’m right. Lewis Boys’, now The Lewis School, has been operating as a mixed institution since September 2025. And, so far, it seems to be a success. Its social media posts show smiling girls and boys learning side-by-side for the first time. The new cohort will know no difference, of course, and within four years, the idea of single-sex learning to them will be as foreign as the idea of being taught alongside girls was to me.

And, to be fair, there is a reason why all-boys’ and girls’ schools, both state and private, are in decline. It’s an archaic system, one that looks out of place in an age where as much as 91% of people in the West believe men and women are equals. Mixed schools are helping this progression, and studies show that boys and girls who share a classroom are better prepared for real-world mixed-gender environments.

Perhaps I am being stubborn, then, and the past surely becomes warped with the passage of time. And yes, individual experiences differ. But when I cast my mind back to my schooldays, I still can’t help but smile. I try to picture how my teenage years might have looked in a school with girls, and I find a place without the drama stage, a place without the chance to explore art and language without fear. More than that, I find a place without a history, a place without the sense of its grand past.

I picture this imagined world, and things are not brighter. Something, rather, is lost — the camaraderie, the brotherhood, the years of reflection now that my friends and I near 30. I think of the angst my teenage self felt, yet realize how lucky he was to experience what has now gone forever. I look back, now, and wish I could tell him to savor those moments, to dwell less on the absence of girls and more on a world that was already starting to change. I wish I could tell him to listen more closely to the words he heard that sodden September morning: Ni Ddychwel Doe — Tomorrow Never Returns.

The Sex Pistols brought with them all the tensions dividing the nation at the time. Britain was crumbling, its youth were dejected, it had lost its place in the world and local people were feeling the bite. The band’s rebellious music captured the mood of that moment, which was overwhelmingly nihilistic. “No Future” they yelled out to those they called “flowers in the dustbin”.

Nearly 50 years later, Caerphilly is back in the spotlight, this time as the backdrop for the forthcoming by-election. Yet the town feels even more forsaken. The young people and adults I speak with in these valleys tell me the future seems lost to them. Their towns are corroding and there’s nobody left to paint it red.

The Pistols shook the foundations of the music establishment. The same is politically happening today, as the old guard of the Labour and Conservative movements has lost its monopoly. Whether we like it or not, what is undeniable about this by-election is how the rise of Reform in traditional Labour heartlands can no longer be ignored, nor can it simply be reduced to a protest vote.

It is tempting to draw parallels between the appeal of the Pistols and the rise of Reform in the valleys today. The Pistols were unashamedly anti-establishment and made no apology for wanting to break apart the status quo. This is a position openly promoted by Reform, who like to see themselves as the edgy punks who believe the rules of the game are stacked against ordinary Britons. There’s some truth in this.

We might, however, want to temper this somewhat. The Pistols’ anti-establishment sentiments were a ruse that betrayed their own ambitions. They were, after all, manufactured and benefited from an extraordinarily gifted marketing machine. Reform have been learned students, scandalizing and occasioning moral mayhem to ensure airtime. Though at least John Lydon could claim to be a man of the people who knows what it means to live in poverty and conditions of neglect, which Nigel Farage doesn’t have any claim to.

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But who is authentically working class today anyway? Class consciousness, which was once the dominant identity in the valleys, has vanished. And it is hard to speak of belonging to a working class when the life-long guarantee of work no longer exists. This in fact brings into focus the crisis that is besetting the Labour Party. They still don’t know what they stand for in these post-industrial times.

Polling has revealed many familiar concerns in South Wales, from the poor state of the economy and the NHS to the terrible provision of local services, with libraries closing and public transport barely functioning. These issues resonate strongly with locals, though they are not new. Economic depression has been a continuum here; what has changed is how people are understanding and responding to it.

Much has already been made of the importance of immigration in this by-election, which was the most emotive issue during the recent BBC candidate standoff. Like the rest of the valleys of South Wales, there hasn’t been any vast influx of peoples for nearly a century. The opposite, in fact, is the case, as those who can leave tend to do so without any ambition of returning. So why are locals so concerned about immigration?

There are two obvious answers. Firstly, local people understand that the decisions affecting their lives are often made elsewhere, not only in the Senedd, but in Westminster where real power still resides. And given there is only so much money to go around, they rightly question their poverty. Seeking answers to this does not make them racist. After all, it is the government which continually tells them there is a trade-off to be made and that, due to a need to balance the books, there simply isn’t enough money to cover heating for the elderly and poor. Secondly, migration is being politicized by some to mask the devastating economic impact of Brexit; rather than focusing on this calamitous decision, they are looking for other scapegoats.

There is some truth in both these positions. It should, however, also be noted that being part of the European Union brought few direct benefits to communities such as these, even if the loss of its revenue streams is being sharply felt. In times of economic crisis, it’s always the poorest who pay the highest price.

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There is, however, a much deeper malaise at work here. Anti-immigration sentiments are just one issue that is now part of a volatile political environment marked by a genuine sense of insecurity, which anybody who walks around the streets of South Wales will undeniably feel. People are fearful about their jobs, the state of the nation and the state of the world. And they have no faith in the established political parties to offer any meaningful solutions that may change their fortunes.

Whether we appreciate their policies or not, the reason Reform have been connecting with people on these streets is that they offer clear and direct policies people can relate to. To their credit, Plaid Cymru also have more clarity to their policies. But this has certainly not been the case with Labour, which has become a party of no fixed principles that simply offers watered-down versions of everything as it reacts to the changing political tides. Who knows where they really stand on the economy, health, immigration, education, universities, and our role in the world? This tactic might have worked in the past when there was little opposition. That’s all changed.

To make better sense of this we could turn to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who maintained that nihilism is linked to a sense of hopelessness. It is about a people who feel reduced to nothing. But it is also linked to a repudiation of values and meaning in societies, which ended up creating resentments. This doesn’t just affect South Wales today. It’s a national problem. We have entire communities clamoring for value, meaning and purpose. And they want us to now recognize the humiliations and indignities they feel.

The Pistols were in some ways rather prophetic. Their anthems arrived before the Winter of Discontent. This week’s by-election is coming at this differently. Since at least 2011, it seems that not a summer passes when we don’t write about some kind of local unrest, which on occasion spills over into a national riot. What we used to once laugh at the French for being an annual summer preoccupation is now becoming in regular installments episodes of our own summers of discontent. That they are becoming more hostile and divisive should have us all wake up to the malaise consuming our society.

To end, I would like to introduce one of Caerphilly’s most cherished sons, the comedian Tommy Cooper, who tragically died on stage in 1984 in a live television broadcast in front of millions. Cooper captured the spirit of places like the valleys, which although being poor dealt with their condition with stoicism and humor. Each time I go back to the valleys I sense that humor being lost as the anger and rage takes over. I was born a decade before Cooper when an education minister proclaimed, “the valleys are dying”. It now feels like it’s the Labour Party that’s dying in front of millions, and what is happening here could prove to be revealing of a seismic shift in politics that will be felt across the nation.

But something else was troubling me, which wasn’t unrelated. A few months before, a Nazi flag had been hoisted onto an electrical cable at the very intersection where our generational paths collided, and left to fly in the mountain breeze. Many locals were horrified, and a local man was arrested. A swastika was being flown three minutes away from the home where I lived out my teenage years and my parents still dwell, in what was once one of Britain’s strongest bastions of anti-fascism? What would the miners who held these communities together have thought of such disrespect? How did it come to this?

Debates continue to rage about the meaning of flags, as indicators of identity and belonging. But they have never just been about nationalism. Back in 1831, in the Valleys town of Merthyr Tydfil, the red flag of socialism was raised for the first time in direct response to the working conditions at the Cyfarthfa Ironworks that was lorded over by Crawshay Bailey. That flag would become synonymous with this region, giving rise to the Labour Party, birthing the idea of the NHS and also becoming a key battleground in unionism and the fight for working-class rights.

Earlier this year, I co-hosted a two-part BBC radio series called From Despair to Where?. Named after the song from the Manic Street Preachers, it addressed the problem of the Valleys today. The producers wanted to show a balanced picture of the region and, to their credit, managed to find some inspiring local projects. But what I found only reaffirmed the general malaise, decline and dereliction that has come to define this place. The sense of hopelessness felt by a group of young girls I interviewed has stayed with me. As one of them tearily said to me off camera, “there is no hope for the young in these valleys. Is there any wonder that so many are taking their own lives? I sometimes wonder what the point of it all is. I want to believe in something. But it’s hard.”

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But something has also changed in the atmosphere. When I was growing up in the Valleys in the Eighties, we felt the sense of ruination and abandonment. This was captured by a BBC reporter who, in 2013, described the place as carrying an “unbearable sadness”. Yet in a political reversal of the stages of grief, that sadness turned to despair and that despair has now turned to anger that is barely contained within the valley. And who can deny these people that anger when the outside world continues to crush them?

The BBC series was inspired by a book I wrote about growing up in poverty. It also situated the history of the Valleys within the broad sweep of political and economic history to bring new attention to its struggles, and how people need to have their voices listened to by those in power but find it often denied. My hope was especially to reach out to disillusioned young people and remind them of the Valleys’ proud past of fighting injustice and inequality.

Miners from South Wales made up the largest contingent of volunteers from Britain in the fight against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. An encounter with striking Rhondda Valley miners in London inspired the American civil rights activist, Paul Robeson, to establish lifelong links with the region, finding common cause between the exploitation of Welsh labor and racist policies in America. That is not to mention the contribution these communities gave deep underground as their coal extractions literally fueled both of Britain’s war efforts, which included untold sacrifices against the Nazis.

Yet I have also come to the sobering realization that such history means absolutely nothing to young people in these towns, who are desperately scrambling to find their place in a world that doesn’t want or need them. The mining communities that once defined the Valleys belong to a different world entirely. It is not theirs. There is nothing remotely comparable, except the poverty and the familiar strips of precariously perched terraced houses, which are home to people who continue to know their lives don’t matter. There is no nostalgia for that past. Everything from that era has been lost or abandoned.

Just as the idea of university has been looked upon with suspicion by many in the Valleys for a number of generations, so the same suspicions apply to politicians, especially those seated in Westminster. Indeed, while there was a moment in history when the peoples of the Valleys did feel some kind of representation, through the voices of politicians such as Aneurin Bevan, the Aberfan disaster of 1966 extinguished whatever faith there may have been in the national political process. Aberfan was also a watershed moment for the Labour Party in South Wales, as the governing party was shown to be removed from the people whom it was meant to represent the most.

What replaced it was apathy. The apathy continued for generations, and the palpable feeling of despondency grew more assured each time the Labour Party came to power. Local people have known the Tories never cared for their plight, but that’s OK. It’s politics and at least you know where you stand. What’s worse is to be continually held down by those who claim to be saving you from drowning.

Keir Starmer’s government has been both a monumental let down and a cataclysmic failure for these people. Cuts to benefits have been acutely felt, especially by pensioners, which has then led to further disbelief as politicians such as Angela Rayner profit from second homes. Her potential replacement as deputy prime minister, Bridget Phillipson, killed off any hopes many poor young children could have of getting into university with her hike in tuition fees. Local people suspect the next Budget, and its inevitable round of cuts, is only going to make things worse.

As I walked back through the village of Ton-Pentre a few days ago, I met an elderly lady who used to work in the local library. That has now been closed down, like most other amenities and public services. An educated woman, she told me of her concerns, and how she marks each passing year by counting more boarded-up shops or the appearance of another vape store, fast-food eatery or tattoo parlor on the high street. Those streets used to be at the heart of local communities, and at least tempered poverty with a sense of belonging. She said she barely leaves her home any more.

We spoke of the flag incident, which she said was outrageous and caused a great deal of harm to the elderly. Then, to my surprise, she told me that as a life-long Labour supporter she would be voting Reform in the next election. It seems she won’t be alone. Polling data continually shows Reform leading in these towns, sometimes with margins greater than the 10-point leads frequently reflected nationally.

While some commentators will be quick to draw immediate connections between the Nazi flag and the rise of Reform, speaking to people here tells a different story. Yes — there is some concern with migration if people are asked. But that concern is really about local economic conditions, and a belief that the more money the Government spends elsewhere, the less there is for any chance of recovery here. And let’s be fair: the Labour government hasn’t presented the argument any other way.

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To understand the rise of Reform, then, it is crucial to understand the failures of Westminster and how people are now finding meaning in their message that claims to be working for the working classes. While I don’t like the politics of Reform and have stated on many occasions my suspicions of Nigel Farage, I do understand why local people in places like the Valleys would exercise their democratic right in that way. That does need to be respected, or else we just become another external voice denying poor people theirs.

Reform may be feeding off the anger poor communities like those in South Wales are feeling today, but they didn’t cause it. The Valleys of South Wales have been in a state of economic depression for nearly a century. And the people there have always belonged to a particular class — the disposable of history.

As we look across the political landscape today, we know it has been increasingly marked by intolerance and a simple inability to sit down with people we fundamentally disagree with and have an open and respectful conversation. Should we therefore be surprised to see a swastika in South Wales? We would hope there would be universal revulsion against Nazi regalia, given the horrors that symbol of fascist power undeniably evokes. Those who fly such flags should be condemned. But that doesn’t mean we should turn away from the anger that lies beneath. History teaches us that’s the most foolish and dangerous of all the paths to take.

Beneath the ground of the Valleys of South Wales, there remain many empty tunnels and discarded mining shafts, which are still full of coal, damp, seeping toxic chemicals and even traces of floating gases. But the people there are also sitting on a social and political bomb, which is just waiting for somebody to come along and light a match to prove it was there. If we are to prevent places like the Valleys from exploding, a serious change in attitudes is necessary, starting with those in Westminster.

A good place to start is to listen to local people, especially their struggles and concerns without condescending them. If not, all the current debates about the St George’s Cross may pale in comparison.

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.

Many there will have paid little attention to the confirmation last week of a new leader of the Senedd. Vaughan Gething has often pinned his allegiances to the trade union movement. But will his attention, like so many before him, shift away from these industrial regions? On a joint visit to North Wales yesterday, Gething and Keir Starmer vowed to “turbocharge jobs and growth”, but how many in Port Talbot were listening? The steelworks’ fate represents more than just the closure of another foreign-owned company, the latest in a long line to vacate these towns. It signifies the final nail in the coffin of South Wales Industry.

This story reads all too familiar to people from this part of the Isles. Since the birth of industrialisation, the Valleys have been continuously weathered by a collective system of manufactured depression, which has shaped and damaged the psychological condition of the Nation. Indeed, the very first signs of what is now commonly referred to as the Great Depression can be traced back to the economic collapse witnessed in the Valleys of South Wales in the spring-to-summer period of 1924. While only 2% of the population was unemployed at the start of that year, the impact was so profound that, by August 1925, it had risen to a staggering 28.5%. While numerous factors contributed to this, two stood out, both products of the raw realities of global economic and political conflict.

The first was the Treaty of Versailles, whose terms required a defeated Germany to supply cheap coal to Europe as part of its reparations. As the British representative on the Council of Four, the Welshman David Lloyd George was thus a signatory to a settlement that effectively pulled the rug of profitability from under the South Wales coalfields: the price of Welsh coal fell by nearly 50%. The second was a turn in the United States to more exploitable markets for energy in the Southern Hemisphere. By the time the Wall Street Crash had bankers and investors jumping from buildings in 1929, the Valleys of South Wales already had 45% of its workforce conscripted into the army of the unemployed.

The use of the military metaphor is not unintentional. As some 241 pits closed by 1936, resulting in the now familiar pattern of outward migration form the region of the fit and able, the only moment of reprieve would be the outbreak of the Second World War, resulting in the need once again for the region’s coal to help motor to machineries of warfare. What must it do to the psychology of a people knowing the survival of their own communities was tied to the continuation of a war as local boys and men continued to fight and dig for yards back home?

If the Valleys were subject to abandonment and social neglect in the decades that followed, by the end of the Eighties and the defeat of the miners, it was clear the industrious way of life which once sustained these communities had been largely destroyed. Port Talbot was in many ways an exception to this, though it should be added that many of its workers were descendants of miners from nearby collieries and still tried to carry the socialist spirit of defiance, which was somewhat captured in Michael Sheen’s The Way.

Abjection would soon become a defining term, which could be routinely applied across the entire coal-face region. The figure of the hardened miner was replaced by the steroid-using gym worker, a grim contrast to the emaciated bodies seeking quiet refuge as they administered heroin into their dejected veins. Stories started to become more commonplace about adults and even teenagers taking their own lives. Soon we all knew of somebody who could no longer face the reality of an abandoned world. Like most things in the Valleys, the more time passes, the greater the problem becomes. And the realisation these towns were facing a suicide epidemic captured international media attention in 2008, as the tragic loss of so many young teens in quick succession within a 10-mile radius of Bridgend led many to question the causes and possible solutions.

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Government statistics continue to document rising numbers of suicide, with Wales home to the highest percentage of any region in the United Kingdom. While the most convenient explanation for this often focuses upon the mental health of the afflicted, and invariably advocates more therapy and intervention at an individual level, less attention has been given to the idea that depression should first and foremost be seen as a social phenomenon — that is also inseparable from the lived conditions, the ecologies and atmospheres, into which a community is thrown.

Having said this, what is also peculiar about the Valleys is how the exponential rise in suicide corresponds to the regreening of the landscape, posing a direct challenge to those who primarily correlate wellbeing with environmental recovery. Recovery means nothing if people feel like they have no value or purpose to their existence, regardless of how many daffodils are growing.

While suicides among young girls (as in Bridgend) have become a growing problem — indeed I have lost two cousins this way — it is the vast rise in young male suicides that registers as the most pressing of concerns. Again, while there are many explanations offered for this, given how the figures compare to other social groups (notably black and Asian), surely such a phenomenon can only be properly explained by attending to the crisis of white male subjectivity.

Today, what we look upon are social systems in which young white men are struggling to find any meaning let alone political agency. As other groups are being encouraged to find a sense of purpose and belonging through a shared sense of historical outrage, such an identity has been denied them. The same men have also been thrown into a cultural milieu in which they are being asked to embrace their vulnerabilities, while stripping them of the very qualities of passion and fight that might allow them to deal with difficult times. Should they have the gall to question the status quo, often they are accused of exhibiting white male fragility, which is a rather peculiar way of defaulting back to a desired framing of brokenness.

Because people are not born vulnerable. Systems produce them that way. And if there is a violence to speak of today in places like the Valleys, it’s not one of masculine hardness — it’s a violence of the vulnerable.

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Young white men are continually being told they should aspire to whatever the new digital world has to offer, knowing full well to be born in the Valleys means the chances of escape are less with each rotation of the clock. This reminds of how static the empty time of social depression can truly be. Yet still some have the temerity to call them privileged. If such a word has any meaning, it should be linked to the luxury of time — or to properly separate those who inhabit a dead time that has no prospect versus those with the luxury of time to fire off social-media missives, day after day, without it having any impact on their material welfare.

Back in Port Talbot, meanwhile, as the spring rains fall and the furnaces that give life to the town are slowly doused, it’s hard not to be pessimistic. If a century of mass industrial closure has seen very little to replace it, the speeding up of automation and artificial intelligence promises to leave farther behind those who weren’t even at the starting line to begin with. Faced with these conditions of social depression, should we be surprised when desperate young men try to find a lasting way out? I know personally what it’s like to live through seasons marked by the weight of absence. It’s suffocating. It’s debilitating. And it’s soul-destroying.

***

Because these former mining valleys in the wilds of Glamorgan were the cradle of working-class politics in Britain. Revolutionary socialism is almost as old as the mining communities in these hills: the red flag of socialism was flown for the very first time in anger over the skies of Merthyr Tydfil in 1831. And, in time, this people and landscape gave rise to the British labour movement and the party that bears its name, a party that knew who it represented and what it wanted to change.

Keir Hardie, Labour’s founding father, was elected MP for the Merthyr and Aberdare constituency only a few years before he would oversee the transition from the Independent Labour Party to the more familiar abbreviated title in 1906. A former miner who first entered the darkness of the pits at just 10-years old, he knew first-hand the toils and struggles faced by these hardened communities, and never forgot them in Parliament, wearing a deerstalker and tweed jacket in place of the expected top hat and tails. But Hardie himself never lived to see the party he conceived in power. An idealist and a pacifist, he died a broken man in 1915, as his contentious objections to the First World War (on the basis of the working-class dead and war profiteering) went unheeded.

Just nine years later though, and 100 years ago this week, the Labour Party did form its first government. It was led, though, by a Scot, Ramsay Macdonald, later expelled as a traitor and a turncoat for his collaboration with the Conservatives. Throughout this fractious period, as the Labour Party split and reformed, mutated and reorganised, South Wales remained its natural home. It was here that institutions later synonymous with the party, such as the National Union of Miners, were first established. And the area produced the radical autodidactic streak that gave Labour’s second prime minister, Clement Atlee, his greatest lieutenant: Nye Bevan gained his education in the libraries and reading rooms of Tredegar’s Miners’ institutes, arguably the most impressive educational bodies promoting the socialist cause anywhere in Europe.

Nationwide, the party’s electoral fortunes waxed and waned after the war and into the Sixties. But, like working-class industrial regions across the United Kingdom, the party’s grip in South Wales was as firm as the iron smelted in the furnace-town of Hardie’s coronation. But now this relationship has been lost. A proud heritage has withered, and Labour means as little to these parts as “politics” itself. Understanding how such a bond could be neglected and dismantled is essential to understanding the story of Labour over the past century, and its origin can be traced to a single moment: the tragedy that stopped a school clock dead at 9.13am one Friday morning that became the moment of reckoning.

Some places are so synonymous with a tragedy that their very name becomes a byword for unimaginable suffering. Today, our own most baleful metonym is probably “Grenfell”, immediately evoking corruption, betrayal and the dereliction of state duty. But in the valleys of South Wales, a different tragedy bears a single name: Aberfan. That was the village where, on the morning of 21 October 1966, approximately 105,000 cubic metres of discarded coal waste slid into the community and engulfed the Pant Glas school and houses below. Half the town’s children were wiped out by the black avalanche that sped down the slopes, along with 28 adults.

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Aberfan had already been foretold through numerous warnings, and in previous slippages in both the village itself and nearby. But even as the slurry settled and the spoil began to be cleared, the story was only just beginning. Much as at Grenfell, those who should have been held responsible, the people this community had most faith in, were absolved of any responsibility. John Collins, whose entire family was taken by the black mountain, later said: “I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people — a Labour government, a Labour council, a Labour nationalised coal board.” This Establishment cover-up was fatal. As veteran BBC broadcaster Vincent Kane later added: “Half a dozen or so organisations or individuals should have brought help to those stricken people, but instead they betrayed them.”

The central figure in this episode was Lord Robens who, as Chairman of the National Coal Board, continually presented himself as a defender of coal, while overseeing widespread pit closures. His arrogance was matched only by the lack of compassion he showed towards the families of the bereaved. Insult piled upon injury as the official tribunal into the cause of the disaster was marred by misinformation, delays and attempts to obstruct the truth. And the victims could see it — as a father of one of the bereaved children cried out when giving evidence: “Buried alive by the National Coal Board. That is what I want to see on record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate”.

Worse was to follow: it was at the behest of the Labour Minister for Wales — the valleys-born George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy — that the villagers themselves were required pay to remove remaining slag heaps still towering over their homes from the disaster relief fund. But this tragedy was to become the epicentre of a far greater conjuncture, where Wales began to reckon with all the false promises of industrialisation and unionism. If there is no history of South Wales without Aberfan, there is no complete history of the Labour Party which does not chapter the devastation and fury it sowed in this heartland. And, while the latter part of the Sixties was marked by the beginnings of a turn away from Labour, the following decade saw nothing arrive to replace it. Voter turnout in elections started to decline, while industrial action by the miners threw the country into darkness, a faction of the working class seemingly at war with the country — and, after the 1974 election, at war with a Labour government too.

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Labour’s hold here wasn’t immediately severed. A son of the valleys, the Tredegar-born Neil Kinnock, would later assume the helm as Margaret Thatcher instigated a very different kind of revolution. An impressive intellect and pragmatist, Kinnock’s accent and bearing connected the party back to its past. He could speak with genuine feeling of the strength of those communities, “who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football”. But that would in part be his undoing: a conservative national press constantly mocked his “boyo” persona. And while he could give voice to South Wales through his own, it ultimately became the voice of political defeat, as the pits central to valley-life were shut and sealed, something the Labour Party proved powerless to stop.

The coming to power of Tony Blair offered a symbolic rupture from a party once grounded in working-class, Celtic regions. But he too had his ways of disrupting community life, for instance with his insistence that more children from deprived areas should be given the option to attend university. While many rightly welcomed the chance to escape, the continued lack of sustained investment in the South Wales valleys simply meant they had no reason to return. And, as Blair opened more of the country to the punishing writ of the free market, the last vestiges of industry petered out. The last of the pits closed, and some of the most prominent local employers such as Hoover in Merthyr and the Polikoff’s and Burberry factories in the Rhondda, dramatically cut their workforce, until their inevitable closure a decade or so later.

With the National Assembly for Wales established in 1997 following devolution in the Principality, the strength of support for Plaid Cymru, which had been gathering momentum since Aberfan, was now evident in the valley heartlands. By 1999 they would even manage to win seats in the once unimaginable ward of the Rhondda, where the old joke ran that even a Smurf would win should they be dressed in red. Blair’s appeal to Middle England was traded in Wales, and the party barely scrapes ahead of the Conservatives nationally now.

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Kinnock was probably the last leader of the Labour Party as it was originally conceived. But he was ultimately given the impossible task of trying to lead a party born in another age, a product of the dire need to have political representation to counter the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism. Now, it has lost its identity, just as much as the people it represented were losing theirs. As Thatcher transformed Britain and placed it at the forefront of the post-industrial neoliberal revolution, without the constancy of a manufacturing and industrial base, was there even any meaning to the term “labour”?

Today, as the party seeks to commemorate 100 years of its electable “progress”, it should turn is attention the places which gave the party its name and yet where poverty and abandonment persist. While you can be sure that disdain for the Conservative Party is still strongly felt, the Labour Party is regarded with something equally dangerous: an apathetic rolling of the eyes by a people whose rolling hills speaks to the layered memories of resigned weathering. Even as another Keir looks set to return the Labour Party to power, Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club won’t suddenly reopen. Suspended in neglect, its rooms will remain empty as another electoral season passes. And all the while, what passes for progress will continue arriving at these towns from elsewhere, just explanations that try and fail to make sense of the greatest dereliction — the dereliction of the mind and soul of a people.

This was particularly true in Wales. Here, the Leave vote was strongest in post-industrial communities that successive governments in London and Cardiff had failed. These areas had benefited from EU investment, but it had done little to alleviate the corrosive social, cultural and economic effects of the decline of the coal industry.

In the 19th century, coal made modern Wales. It created a modern economy and a population boom, transforming rural communities into vibrant, industrial towns, each with a fierce sense of pride in themselves, their class and Wales itself. They were British places too: proud of their King, Country and Empire, proud that so many Royal Navy ships ran on Welsh coal.

In 1920, the number of miners in Wales stood at 290,000. Lured by cheaper production abroad, however, the United Kingdom they helped build turned its back on the Welsh coalfields, and decades of decline followed. The depression of the interwar years was devastating and led to mass unemployment and migration. The nationalisation of the industry in 1947 gave the miners some respect back, but it could not stop the decline of an industry gradually being replaced by oil. Between 1948 and 1970, the number of Welsh miners fell from 128,000 to 50,000. In 1974, a memo from Mid Glamorgan County Council to the Secretary of State for Wales said bluntly: “The Valleys are dying.”

As colliery after colliery closed, a slow-burning sense of anger started to grip communities that rightly felt forgotten and neglected. And as the industry that created them disappeared, many places worried they had no future. When Thatcherism arrived and finished the coal industry off, this anger intensified. Whereas previous governments had at least tried to manage the change, Thatcher seemed to relish hammering communities already on their knees.

The Brexit vote in post-industrial Wales owed much to this history. Voters there were disillusioned and looking for the better future so long denied to them. And that is what they were promised. They were sold a vision of a world where Wales and Britain had dignity and self-respect again, a world where there was a better economy and more money for the NHS. They were sold scapegoats for their ills: red tape and bureaucrats, immigrants and foreigners.

Three years on, the promises have not come true. Across the UK, the NHS has got worse, public services are on the brink, and inflation is fuelling a cost-of-living crisis. But in Wales, equally important — but less obvious — has been the way Brexit has distracted voters from the problems of devolved government. Particularly when it comes to discussions around the nation’s failing NHS, Welsh Labour must surely be thankful that voters’ eyes have focused on Westminster and Europe. And when attention does turn to their record, Welsh Labour points, not entirely unreasonably, to the lack of funding it receives from the UK government. Indeed, because so many Welsh Labour voters supported leaving the EU, it suits Wales’s strongly pro-EU government to blame Westminster rather than Brexit for its litany problems.

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Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Brexit also failed because of its Anglo-centricity. In their arguments, its prime movers and shakers paid little attention to the parts of the UK that are not England. It does not seem to have occurred to most of them to consider what might happen to the UK’s land border with the EU and how Brexit would intersect with the Good Friday Agreement. Brexiteers outside England should have known better, but they too seemed too distracted by ideological dreams to think much about the practicalities. The result was political turmoil and the effective end of the UK’s own single market.

In Wales, this gave a shot in the arm to those who seek independence. This may remain a minority cause, but Brexit showed that radical political change can happen. For many Remainers, Brexit has destroyed the liberal European United Kingdom they felt attached to; for some, independence offers an appealing route back to more tolerant politics. Meanwhile, for many Leavers, the failures of Brexit is yet another case of London politicians letting them down. For those who haven’t given up on politicians entirely, independence can feel the only hope they have left. Some feel they have little to lose.

For a while, Yes Cymru, the focal point of the independence movement, rode on the coattails of the disillusionment of Leavers and Remainers. But it has ridden into its own problems. A group of socially-conservative members became alarmed at Yes Cymru’s adoption of what they saw as socialist causes and they staged something resembling a progressive coup. In doing so, they destroyed the group’s momentum. Like Brexit, the cause of Welsh independence has been undermined by lack of consensus over what it is actually for.

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Nonetheless, now Brexit has put independence on the table of mainstream debate, it is unlikely to go away. In these debates, the mistakes of Brexit ought to be a cautionary tale. Those who seek Welsh or Scottish independence must learn that people’s fears about the practicalities of major constitutional change should be addressed, not dismissed as nit-picking or a “Project Fear”. They should see that winning a referendum has to be a beginning, not an end. And they should understand that sovereignty alone achieves little unless the power of the state is harnessed to direct and temper the markets.

Away from the ideological and political games, many people’s lives in Wales continue to worsen, and the economic pain is deepest in the very same marginalised communities — particularly in the southern coalfields — whose support enabled Brexit in the first place. According to UnHerd’s polling, the majority there now seem to regret Brexit. In 2016, Blanau Gwent was the region’s capital of Brexit, with 62% voting to leave the EU. Today, only a third don’t think it was a mistake.

Yet this whole sorry affair is further fuelling what made them vote for it: a sense of anger at being let down by mainstream politics. And they are right to be angry. For decades, post-coal Wales has been let down by Left and Right. Successive governments have spoken warm words about regional policy and levelling up. At times, significant money followed those words. But it was never enough and far too often it was spent on things rather than people. It did nothing to address how free markets could not undo the damage free markets had done.

There are no easy answers to the problems of the UK’s post-industrial communities. Some Brexiteers did at least recognise that the UK needs radical change, but that change is yet to appear. In Wales, it is little wonder that people regret; there is much to regret.

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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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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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.

Their significance is highlighted in David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America and Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America. Fischer shows how the factions and coalitions in colonial America played out in the early Republic, sowing the seeds of the the Civil War, while continuing to haunt American politics to this day. Phillips, meanwhile, flags up the differences between the English settlers of North America and the English of the metropole.

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Fischer’s early America is framed around four dominant folkways. There are the New England Yankees in the northeast; gentry planters in the lowland South along with their retainers; inhabitants of the upland South, originally from Ulster and the Scottish-English border; and the diverse business-oriented groups in the Mid-Atlantic, from Dutch burghers to Quakers. For both authors, the Yankees and the Southern planters have direct genealogical connections to the Roundhead Whigs and the Royalist Tories. The Borderers and the more mercantile folk of the Mid-Atlantic play a less prominent role in Phillip’s narrative, but  eventually amalgamated into the broader Northern and Southern cultural and political alliances.

These groupings would eventually struggle against each other in the American Civil War. When House member Preston Brooks nearly beat Senator Charles Sumner to death on the floor of the Senate in 1856 — a foreshadowing of the conflict to come — it reflected the anxious, daggers-drawn national mood. But it was also the culmination of centuries of tumultuous history between those disparate strands in British culture which had put down deep roots into North America.

Brooks was a scion of the South Carolina upcountry and exemplar of a nascent fused Southern identity, a vociferous defender of slavery as a right and proper institution. In contrast, Sumner was a New England Yankee through and through. Brooks’s focus on family honour (he believed Sumner had insulted his cousin) reflects both the values of the English gentry and of the Scots-Irish Borderers. Sumner espoused the anti-slavery cause at a time when compromise between South and North was seen as prudent politics. This reflected a Yankee’s commitment to humanitarian justice, descended from the utopianism that gripped the Roundhead forebears of his New England ancestors.

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Where the ultimate basis of this American factionalism (Puritan New England Yankee against Southern planter Cavalier) can be found in England (Roundhead East Anglia against the Royalist glens of Devonshire), The Cousin’s Wars observes that the migration to North America of dissenters simultaneously enabled the creation of Britain as a cohesive 19th-century power. After the false dawn of the English Republic in the 1650s, Puritan-minded Protestantism only flourished as the dominant force in New England. The existence of North America as a release valve for radical Protestantism stabilised the middle path that the Anglican Church occupied. Meanwhile, the Irish potato famine and the mass migration to the US of Roman Catholic peasants meant that the Protestant proportion of the United Kingdom was far higher in 1900 than in 1800. There are victors in The Cousin’s Wars — just different ones in different places.

The Englishmen, Scots or Welshmen who migrated to America were not “normal” Britons. Perhaps they sought more freedom of worship outside the established Church or more economic opportunities outside of the class system, or perhaps they were fleeing debt and the hand of the law. The “cowboy” is a cliché, but these cowboys came from somewhere, many even genealogically descended from herders on the Scottish border that engaged in as much theft as productive labor. The inverse of the American cowboy were the English who were left behind: the aristocrats, peasants and gentry who came together to create a British Empire with a much more united cultural identity in the 19th century than it had in the 17th century.

Albion’s Seed and The Cousins’ Wars have as much to do with the present and future as the past. Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 saw the emergence of a belt of “Red” Republican counties dominated by Borderers, attracted to the aggressive pugilistic style of their candidate. Though Barack Obama was perceived by America and the world as the first black president, he was raised by a mother whose paternal grandfather was named Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, a nod to her ancestral Yankee lineage. Obama presented a moralistic, even utopian, vision for America in keeping with this ancestry.

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Vikings need to be tamed

By Razib Khan

In contrast, Trump, the German-Scottish son of New York’s outer boroughs, reflects a persona that is in tension with the dominant Yankee tradition of the North. It is not well remembered, but during the Civil War, New York City was a hotbed of pro-Southern sentiment, and the mayor, Fernando Wood, even proposed the city’s secession from the Union. To the west, much of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were pro-Confederate during the conflict because the local population were “butternuts”, descended from settlers who had moved north in the first half of the 19th century, like Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln. The Great Emancipator was, though, a direct descendent of Samuel Lincoln of Norfolk, East Anglia, who was to settle in Massachusetts in 1638.

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By Malcom Kyeyune

Though the old ethnicities are in decline today, their shadow still haunts the present as the US fractures along cultural and regional lines again. The progressive cultural Left has rekindled the flame of enthusiastic abolitionism, attempting to attain cosmic justice in their utopia. “MAGA America”, in contrast, channels the irascible and pessimistic vision of the Borders, and their tribune is a fighter focused more on winning than policy. In the 19th century, the switch of the populace of the lower North, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana to an alliance with New England Yankees signalled the rise of a new Republican ascendancy that would persist down to FDR’s day. Now we are witnessing Americans of Latin American heritage frustrated with the moralism and cultural politics of the progressive Left, eyeing perhaps a realignment with the Borderers with whom they might share a cultural ethos, if not history.

Once you read Fischer and Phillips’s narrative, the past becomes illuminated. You can see shadows of the future already being cast.

I was reminded of this curious ritual when I read recently of the “flame purification” ceremony conducted by the board in charge of elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario. Almost 5,000 books judged to contain outdated racial stereotypes were removed from school libraries to be burnt or recycled. Some of the incinerated remains were used as a fertiliser to plant a tree — an uplifting, progressive and environmentally conscious gesture, if one ignores the overtones of Fahrenheit 451.

Yet perhaps it is unsurprising that activists who are convinced that language causes real-world “harm” should be troubled by the reading habits of children. After all, it’s hardly a fringe view: the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Cambridge this month suggested that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series ought to come with “content notes” (a substitute phrase for “trigger warnings” given that the word “trigger” connotes violence and might therefore induce trauma).

This fear that children might be morally corrupted by “problematic” literature might explain the sudden deluge of progressive children’s books on the market: just as children are deemed so malleable that they might transform into bigots if they read outdated work, it is assumed that they can be indoctrinated in the “correct” way if their reading materials are layered with messaging that reinforces the creed of social justice. As Schopenhauer put it, “there is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five”.

The rise of progressive children’s books arguably began in 2016, with Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. The idea was a charming one; it contained profiles of exceptional women throughout history offered up as role models for young readers. Examples included Michelle Obama, Maya Angelou, Yoko Ono, and even Coco Chanel, whose collaboration with the Nazis was tactfully omitted.

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Thereafter, the tone of such books became more strident. There was Feminist Baby by Loryn Brantz, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi, and The Little Girl Who Gave Zero Fucks by Amy Kean. All of a sudden, highly dubious ideological positions were being represented as uncontested truth to very young children. Nor was this confined to America. Last summer, the National Education Union — the largest teaching union in the United Kingdom — claimed there was an “urgent” need to decolonise every subject and every stage of the school curricula and called for “activist training for teachers”.

But it’s not simply a matter of race; books aimed at toddlers which advance the idea that they each have a gendered soul are also being promoted by activist teachers and authors. For instance, Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide To Gender Identity by Brook Pessin-Whedbee is marketed for children as young as three, and introduces them to identity categories well beyond the comprehension of most adults, including “genderqueer, non-binary, bigender and two-spirit”.

Or consider the following claim from It Feels Good To Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity by Theresa Thorn, next to an illustration of a newborn baby: “See, when you were born, you couldn’t tell people who you were or how you felt. They looked at you and made a guess. Maybe they got it right, maybe they got it wrong.” Thorn, it seems, wants children to believe that for years midwives and obstetricians have simply been flipping a coin and randomly assigning male or female on birth certificates.

That is, of course, palpably absurd. And yet it would be wrongheaded to call for such books to be censored or banned. The vast majority of educators understand how ridiculous it is to teach infants that they have a gendered soul, or that they are guilty of white privilege. Last year, the Arizona Department of Education released an “equity” toolkit which claimed that even babies as young as three-months old are capable of racial prejudice. I remain unconvinced that any of this has much of an effect. As one teacher recently said to me: “Teachers are more prone to fashionable nonsense than pupils. Trust the kids. They know bullshit when they see it.”

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But what of the younger ones, those who tend to to accept and repeat the mantras of their elders? It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the emergence of such activism in the classroom has brought with it a sudden rise of young people identifying as non-binary or transgender. Some of these children will doubtless be suffering from a form of gender dysphoria, but most will find such confusions resolved through the natural process of puberty. When children as young as three and four are “coming out” as trans, are we not right to be suspicious that adult influence has played a role? As trans YouTuber Blaire White said: “A transgender three-year-old is like a vegan cat.  We all know who’s making the lifestyle choices.”

Few parents have grasped the significance of these developments, largely because these attempts at indoctrination have been couched in progressive terminology. One exception is in Wales, where the government is currently being sued by more than 5,000 parents and grandparents over their decision to make compulsory the teaching of gender identity and sexual attraction to children as young as three. The government has apparently adopted Stonewall’s misinterpretation of the Equality Act, and have accordingly substituted “gender identity” for “gender reassignment” in its Equality and Diversity Policy.

It may be that the Welsh government is breaking the law. Section 406 of the Education Act 1996 prohibits “the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject”. This applies not only to political belief systems such as Marxism, but also ideological frameworks such as Critical Race Theory. In October 2020, the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch addressed Parliament to clarify the Government’s position. “We do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,” she said. “And let me be clear, any school which teaches these elements of Critical Race Theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.” If she is right, it is difficult to see how the teaching of gender identity ideology as undisputed truth could be exempt from these legal requirements.

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It remains to be seen whether current and future legal challenges make any difference. In the meantime, criticism and mockery are by far our best defence. Take the recent controversy surrounding the success of Matt Walsh’s new book Johnny the Walrus. It tells the story of Johnny, a boy who enjoys pretending to be a walrus by using spoons as tusks. The online community mobilises and tells him that he must either choose between being a walrus or being a human, and that he cannot be both. In response, hysterical staff at Amazon held a meeting to discuss the “trauma” the book had caused. Executives are even heard strategising about how to demote the title on their website to limit potential sales.

No books were burnt, but the underlying rationale was the same: namely, that indoctrination of the young is always a temptation for those whose ideas would not withstand adult scrutiny. But as Walsh’s book proves, the idea that small children are in any way interested in intersectional activism is inherently funny, and mockery is always the best way to expose the falsehoods of powerful elites. If there’s one thing that the high priests of this new religion cannot bear, it’s the sound of laughter.

We’ve stolen your land, they say, and we’re very sorry about this terrible injustice — but we’ll keep it all the same. Similarly, when purveyors of political discourse claim that America is now a white supremacist or even Nazi state — as in this response to the Rittenhouse verdict — you wonder why they aren’t urgently fleeing to some safer location, or at the very least organising some kind of underground armed resistance movement. People say all kinds of wild things, but if they don’t follow through on the logic of their claims, then it’s very hard to actually believe them.

A similar dynamic is observable in terms of climate change discourse, particularly with the Extinction Rebellion movement and its offshoot, Insulate Britain. Both their activists and spokespeople make the most alarming claims about the imminent end of civilisation, perhaps within the next couple of decades. But their revealed preferences don’t seem to match the intensity of their predictions. 

Personally, if I genuinely believed that Britain was going to become a post-apocalyptic wasteland within the next twenty years, I wouldn’t be campaigning for the Government to retrofit British houses with insulation: I’d be selling everything and fleeing to the hills in a desperate effort to keep my family alive. And yet they don’t. I have friends who go on XR demonstrations, and repeat their most apocalyptic prophecies, yet show no inclination of altering their middle-class lives in London: their revealed preferences therefore cast great doubt on their stated beliefs.

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This is how civilisations collapse

By Aris Roussinos

It seems that, with climate change in particular, there are only two modes of thought for most people: either nothing will change at all, or everything is about to collapse in horrible and world-destroying ways. There is a more obvious conclusion that people seem resistant to thinking about: that things will change, in many ways for the worse, but life will go on. As the Green philosopher Rupert Read asks: “why do we find it so hard to think about a world where the climate has changed massively, veering between ‘it won’t make much difference, everything is going to be fine’ to ‘it’s the apocalypse, the end of the world, there’s nothing we can do’, but refusing to think about the awful, but more middling realities?” 

It would seem more productive, then, instead of continuing with the path of climate change mitigation — which is probably now too late to succeed — or of giving everything up for lost, to instead focus popular attention on adaptation: on making the best of a situation we cannot change, but which is far from an apocalypse, at least for the UK. 

The issue at hand is that Britain is responsible for a mere 1% of global carbon emissions, so that even if we achieved Net Zero tomorrow, nothing will change in terms of arresting climate change. China’s increase in coal production this autumn alone is already greater than Britain’s total carbon emissions: halting this process is, in the real world, almost entirely out of our hands. 

But if we can’t change what is about to happen, we can at least prepare for it. If you read the Climate Change Commission’s risk assessment for the rest of the century, it assumes that Britain’s temperature will rise by two degrees by 2100, in the worst scenario as much as four degrees. Such an outcome will be disastrous for much of the world’s population, and I am not dismissing the gravity of the situation for billions of guiltless people.

But I live in Britain, and for Britain having a similar climate to central France will not be the end of the world — but we should start planning for it now. Just as no-one now starves their families in solidarity with the hungry of the Global South, it is absurd and irresponsible to not plan a resilient and comfortable near future for our own country out of fatalism or an inchoate sense of global solidarity.

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Inside Insulate Britain

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A rise of two degrees will return Britain to its climate during the Roman Warm Period, when an admittedly lower level of civilisation functioned perfectly well. The risk assessment highlights the risk of flooding in low-lying areas, the risk of drought in summer, and the risks of disruption to international trade. But its observations are all, with sufficient planning and adaptation, perfectly manageable. It even observes that there are opportunities as well as risks, and promotes a vast expansion of vineyards on British soil, which with appropriate planning could become a £50 million annual industry. In just such a way, if the British government cannot change what is about to happen, it can at least start shaping the inevitable near future in ways that are beneficial for this country. And by doing so, and by being seen to act as if they believe what they claim to believe, the Government is far more likely to convince people about the inevitability of climate change.

To understand why, consider the early days of the Covid crisis. When governments and newspapers were dismissing the severity of the coming pandemic, I was convinced to take it seriously by witnessing friends stockpiling masks (while we were being assured they were useless and even harmful) and laying in stores of food and other essential goods in case of trade disruption. Seeing people whose opinions you respect take a potential crisis seriously, and planning how to navigate the changed world that comes with it, is a convincing signal that you should take action yourself. It means far more than hearing the government warn about doom on the horizon and then doing absolutely nothing — like closing the borders — to mitigate against it. Deeds are convincing in a way words are not.

In the same way, I personally take climate change seriously. I believe in the predictions of the vast majority of the world’s scientists, and thinking through the potential outcomes of such a world-changing process, I am planning how to adapt my lifestyle to best manage what is seemingly inevitable. In the New Year, barring some unforeseen eventuality, I will sell my house and buy a smallholding somewhere hilly (and so at less risk of flooding than the coastal town where I currently live) and with enough land that I can ensure my family’s food supply in case of trade disruption or rising prices. Already, in suburban Kent, we produce our own eggs and grow our own vegetables, but I want to be self-sufficient in meat and milk, beer and cider, clean drinking water and bread. (I intend to document our progress in this column.) 

It’s a way of living some are calling Doomer Optimism: I don’t believe that society will collapse within my lifetime, or that starvation will soon stalk the land. But I do think there’s a strong possibility that the cost of living will become significantly higher within the next two decades or so, just as the after effects of Covid are now manifesting, to such a degree that it makes sense to rethink my family’s way of living now to ensure a decent future quality of life in the years ahead. 

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I can't escape my eco-anxiety

By Henry Wismayer

The question here isn’t one of survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but of ensuring an atmosphere of comfort and plenty in a likely world of consumption taxes and restrictions brought in through poorly-thought out climate change mitigation efforts, the intervention of corporate interests, and occasional disruptions to international trade. The current discourse around radically limiting food consumption presents such a dystopian and wildly unattractive future that it is no wonder people reject it, especially when it does nothing to address the over-consumption of the world’s richest. I will not, as they say, live in the pod, and I will not eat bugs, and neither should you. We should demand better, and there are alternative futures. 

But first we need to show that we’re tackling the problem seriously. As Rupert Read remarks in the recent book Deep Adaptation, “every time we are seen to be preparing for possible/likely hard times ahead… we are making it possible for people and politics to start to really face climate reality.” As he observes, if you act as if you mean what you say you believe, people will believe you. If you don’t, they won’t. In this way, Read argues, “it is a political act to act as if collapse is possible”, even if you don’t believe it is likely, just as you still install fire alarms even if you don’t believe your house will imminently burn down.

As with individuals, so with government. The Government’s push for Net Zero is expending a great deal of political capital on a mitigation effort that, whatever its moral worth, will do nothing to alter the risk of climate change one way or another. In doing so, it is alienating many people who appreciate, even if only subliminally, the vast disjunct between what the Government claims is about to happen, and its broader actions. If the threat is so real, people naturally think, why isn’t the nation mobilising to deal with the coming effects? The narrow focus on Net Zero, along with the attempt to prioritise individual, essentially meaningless mitigation efforts like eating less meat, is at this stage wildly counterproductive. 

Instead, the Government should, like my family, say that they can’t change what is coming, but that we can at least adapt to it now so that the wrench is less painful when it comes. What would that mean on a national level? If we accept that flooding is likely on Britain’s most productive agricultural land in East Anglia, we should be planning to open up currently marginal hill pasture for crops to ensure a more stable food supply. What would that look like? It would probably be less mechanised, and smaller scale, simply due to the topography: so we should be relearning how to manage such a mid-20th century form of agriculture at sufficient cumulative scale, which we are currently not doing.

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If the Thames floodplain is at risk of occasional but devastating flooding, not from the sea but from built-over inland rivers, we should discourage building in flat estuarine land — as insurers are already warning — and instead rezone hilly land in London’s outer suburbs for housebuilding, as well as improving London’s overwhelmed Victorian drainage infrastructure. 

If the Government is incapable of building HS2 properly, it is surely poorly-equipped to deal with the amount of adjustment that will be necessary to maintain currently functional levels of infrastructure. We should be making railtracks more resilient to flooding, building viaducts where necessary and digging new water features and marshlands to absorb sudden deposits of water. We should be overhauling our water supply to minimise the risk of drought and prevent avoidable water losses through leaky pipes. We should be pedestrianising and planting trees in cities now to make them cool and shady in twenty or thirty years time, and building clean new transport infrastructure to take the place of cars. We should be building more houses, relaxing planning restrictions for family homes in the countryside so that more people are affordably able to take control of their personal family food supply. If we claim that disasters are on the horizon, yet do not build up the infrastructure now to cope with them, why should anyone take these claims seriously?

There is a great deal of ingenuity in this country only now being focussed on technologies such as nuclear fusion, which may soon provide clean sources of almost limitless energy, or on fast electric aeroplanes and capacious electric airships, which may be better used for freight than for human transport. The medium term may be uncomfortable, but the long-term future may be very good indeed, if only for Britain. 

To manage this will take a certain frontier spirit, a willingness to make the best of and thrive in a harder situation than we are accustomed to. Instead of prophesying doom and then doing nothing about it, we should be imagining a positive vision of what a Britain adapted to climate change would look like: a country of high-speed trains hurtling across tall viaducts between new hill towns, with lush vineyards overlooking the broad new wetlands on what was once farmland. It is not too late to make the Britain of the near future not just liveable, but an improvement on what we have now. Life will go on: it is our duty to make it as comfortable and prosperous as possible, not just as individuals, but as a nation.

Williams was born in the Monmouthshire village of Pandy, north of Abergavenny,  a hundred years ago tomorrow, 31 August 1921. Widely revered at his death (aged just 66) as a leader of radical thought and a pioneer of cultural studies in the education system, he later suffered a partial, but never total, eclipse. Moulded as he was by the seismic, class-driven upheavals of the mid-20th century, Williams adjusted clumsily to the “new social movements” of the Eighties.

Feminism, for instance, hardly features in his best-known work. Fathers and sons dominate his fiction. He tends to speak from, and for, the postwar generations of “upwardly mobile” (a phrase he would have detested) boys left emotionally orphaned amid the chilly, opaque institutions of England. As his 1960 novel, Border Country, laments, “We have, you might say, a personal father but no social father.” A pattern of discipleship, rupture and reconciliation marked his bonds with younger, male devotees. For this, as times and attitudes changed, he paid a posthumous price in waning fame and clout. Terry Eagleton – first a devoted student, briefly a parricidal rebel, then a fervent admirer once again – reports in a centenary tribute that when he offered a piece on Williams to The Guardian not long ago, “the highly literate young journalist on the other end of the phone said ‘Er – remind me’”.

OK: let’s do that. A railway signalman (and market gardener’s) son, Williams won state scholarships and went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1939. He joined, but soon left, the Communist Party, served as a tank officer in the Guards Armoured Division after D-Day, helped liberate a concentration camp, returned to finish his degree in English, then spent 15 years as an adult-education tutor on the South Coast. After Culture and Society appeared in 1958, and The Long Revolution in 1961, Cambridge appointed him to a lectureship (contrary to myth, they did ask him first). Later literary studies – on drama, the title of his eventual Cambridge professorship, and the English novel – alternated with works that mainstreamed the study of media, gave a cutting social edge to historical linguistics, and sought to elaborate a non-sectarian radical politics, Left of Labour. Meanwhile, three key novels — Border Country, Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for Manod (1979) — showed how history’s transformations feel in the pulse and flow of individual lives. He retired from teaching in 1983, pivoted back to Wales (though living most of the time in Essex), and dipped his pen in a deeper shade of eco-green.

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Williams mapped the changing landscapes of class, culture and democracy in Britain with both panoramic, and microscopic, skill and care. Books such as Culture and Society, The Country and the City, Television: Technology and Cultural Form and his historical lexicon of Keywords became teaching staples in many lands. From Argentina via Spain to India, and around the British Isles, conferences and lectures will remind audiences of why Williams matters over the coming weeks. The problem, as their subject knew only too well, is that (save, perhaps, in Wales) these memorial rituals will preach mainly to the choir. As a working-class kid transported, but never alienated, by an elite schooling, Williams both serviced the postwar boom in higher education and the “culture industries”, and lamented its long-term results. Radical dissent marched en masse into the institutions, but those institutions — above all, universities – packaged it into a suite of careerist codes and tricks designed to repel civilians.

For decades he pursued the elusive unicorn of a “common culture” beyond the manipulated splits of consumer-capitalist society (the ideal is sketched in his groundbreaking Culture and Society). He wanted his voice to carry into communities far beyond the common room – or the newsroom. He also cherished a self-image as a writer, not just a critic or theorist. Hence the quixotic farewell fresco of the Black Mountains stories: two volumes appeared after his death. As epic blockbusters, they only sporadically work (in his wise, affectionate but caustic critical biography of Williams, Fred Inglis shakes his head over “characters with names like detergents or computer grammars”). But the sagas’ aeon-spanning sweep and vision does have a craggy awesomeness. These people from the ragged edge of history become the heroic bearers of deep time and epochal change. In the much more successful Border Country, Williams has a clergyman tell his protagonist that “a life lasts longer than the actual body though which it moves”. That goes, supremely, for the author as well.

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Williams always taught students and readers to look beyond the flame and froth of transient events and recognise the giant shapes of class, power and history behind them. To this day I find that a dose of his perspective is enough to bestow a degree of serenity about who’s being slaughtered, or sanctified, on social media this week, as the puppet-slaves of Silicon Valley billionaires perform unpaid pirouettes of outrage for extra clicks. Whenever I hear about “culture wars”, I reach mentally for Williams. “Whose culture?”, he would ask, and who declared that war? Who decided to re-frame normal, even profound, democratic disagreements about policy and politics as trump cards of personal identity? Whose interests does that serve? And why should reasoning citizens who want to live well with their neighbours, near and far, sign up for the psychic suicide missions this “war” demands?

Williams, in my view, ceded too much ground to the salon theorists who tried to outflank him from the Left as they sneered at his “socialist humanism” in the canting jargon of the Seventies and Eighties. Indeed, he sat down for weeks to be grilled by the junior Robespierres of New Left Review in the book-length conversations of Politics and Letters (1979). About a work such as the indigestible Marxism and Literature (1977), you have to sigh that — in the deepest sense — his heart wasn’t in it. But his early challenges both to mind-bending commercial media (purely capitalist, not “mass”) and to the ruling-class capture of “high” culture as the cloak of privilege have kept all their moral, and political, bite. “We lack a genuinely common experience,” he thundered in Culture and Society, “save in certain rare and dangerous moments of crisis.” Say that again, in pandemic times. “What we are paying for this lack, in every kind of currency, is now sufficiently evident. We need a common culture, not for the sake of an abstraction, but because we shall not survive without it.” Well, we might survive, huddled in our tribal silos and daily maddened by twittering rage. But will we thrive?

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The paradox, as many followers attest, is that this apostle of long views and deep structures won his renown thanks to a strictly personal authority. That owed everything to character, and nothing to the abstract forces of cultural theory. Once Terry Eagleton had got over his Marxier-than-thou phase, he saluted his teacher’s “deep inward ease of being, the sense of a man somehow centred and rooted and secure in himself at a level far beyond simple egoism”. What strikes me as remarkable about Williams’s twin descents on Cambridge — as a working-class teenager laden with grammar-school plaudits in 1939, and a star extra-mural tutor summoned to High Table in 1961 — is not any sense of marginality, but the serene confidence he carried with him at both stages.

I can recall him dismissing George Steiner’s argument that the lowly human ants of modern society could never attain truly tragic status, so what did it matter if you or I were run down by a bus tomorrow? “Speak for yourself” came the riposte. Exactly. Kindly, but granitic and reserved, he seemed as solid as the bulk of Ysgyryd Fawr looming above Pandy. At a time before folk on the Left found themselves vilified as “nowhere” people whose flighty cosmopolitanism humiliated rooted “somewheres”, here was a thoroughly radical writer-thinker who not only came from somewhere very specific — indeed, peculiar — but built his sense of being around it.

The mountain-shadowed village communities of the Welsh borders gave Williams his lifelong template for an authentic existence planted in shared values. Nowhere in his writing does this heartland glow in such a golden light as in the highly autobiographical Border Country. It still serves, for non-academic readers, as the best first stop on a journey through his work. “The real life, for these people, is each other,” says the lonely Anglican priest to Border Country’s hero Matthew Price, who later returns home – as Williams did – for his father Harry’s final days.

Yet Williams, like his left-wing peers, could never quite devise the formula to scale up the blend of solidarity and individuality he cherished in Pandy onto a larger social map. Hence the sad aridity of his efforts to model a practical politics of national, and supra-national, renewal when he had achieved his guru status by the Seventies. His big-picture blueprints and manifestoes lay stillborn on the page. The signal-box and smallholding still cast their semi-pastoral spell. Yes, he always warned against nostalgia – The Country and the City sounds its withering blast against golden-age fantasies in poetry and society alike – but the lost idyll of those hazy borderlands pulls him back as much as forward. As Fred Inglis shrewdly put it, Williams’s “version of socialism” stumbled when it tried, and failed, to turn “losers’ values into winners’ values”. So have many others since.

Pandy made for an odd sort of Utopia, and hardly a standard working-class childhood. Harry Williams, Raymond’s father, not only sharpened his political awareness with comrades in the Great Western signal-boxes up and down the line. He kept bees and grew vegetables as a serious sideline. Green strands mingled with the red in this paradisal place (but not an “organic community” – another fraudulent notion Williams liked to attack). Half-proletarians, half-peasants, these railway children enjoyed a large degree of self-sufficient freedom.

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In Border Country, the General Strike of 1926 ends in the failure that exposes the fragility of their way of life and ushers in “a slow and shocking cancellation of the future”. Harry Price’s comrade Morgan Rosser sticks with his Labour ideals but starts to market local produce to the towns. He becomes “a kind of capitalist”. The novel does not condemn him. Matthew follows his creator’s path through scholarships into middle-class academia (though as an economic historian). “You’re asking what change does to people, change from outside them, the big movements,” Morgan says when he and Matthew meet for Harry’s leave-taking. In fiction and criticism, Williams never ceased to ask that question himself. Always, he shows us how to connect inside and outside, experience and history. The “structures of feeling” that shape minds and communities shift slowly: not like inert strata of rock under the hills but in response to the public action that, if we don’t undertake it, those with more money and fewer scruples will.

Perhaps Williams never found the means to make the levers of power work in a fully human way not just at signal-box level but for the metropolitan — and multi-national — junctions where most of us now live. As for so many others, it enriched my understanding hugely that he tried. “I can’t just come back, as if the change was water,” says Matthew to his dying father in Border Country. The change, rather, is history. Neither could anyone revive the special configurations of class, culture and education that made Williams not just an agenda-setter but a bestseller five decades ago. Our social geology has shifted, and our “structures of feeling” with it. Who can map those mountains now?

Boyd Tonkin was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature

The Owl Service is what I think of as a Burning Book — as opposed to book-burning, which has always been popular at certain stages of civilisational breakdown. When I think of re-reading it — as with Brighton Rock or Ladder To the Sky — I feel something which is almost fear. This, for me, is the sign not of a good book, but of a great book which will never become familiar, giving the reader both the thrill of revelation and the comfort of recognition — surely one of the most peculiar combinations of emotions.

When I first saw the 1969 Granada television adaptation at the age of ten — class war and sexual awakening played out over a long hot summer in a remote Welsh valley — I had never been involved in a love triangle. I was not yet aware that my working-class background would put me at a disadvantage, or that I would soon become obsessed with making paper owls by tracing the pattern on some manky old teacups.

But a part of me realised that the incidents in the book would somehow pertain to the adult life which I was already impatient to begin. I was obsessed with Wales; growing up in Bristol, just across the Severn Bridge, we often went there and I developed a crush on the whole country.

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Full of castles and mountains, as opposed to palaces and hills, everything seemed bigger and better in Wales — despite its shocking subjugation by England, despite all the valleys flooded to make reservoirs for the English. In an age of nations jostling for victim status, Wales remains a country that does not seek to be understood too quickly, if at all. And at a time when countries clamour for historical apologies, it’s easy to imagine Wales viewing one from England with disdain. Too much has been done. As the quote from the poet R.S Thomas says at the start of the book:

“The owls are restless. People have died here. Good men for bad reasons, better forgotten.”

When I saw the TV show, I was stimulated — probably in a not altogether wholesome manner, due to the extreme beauty of the 19-year-old actor Michael Holden, brought up in a shepherd’s cottage in Snowdonia — but when I read the book I was spellbound. Alan Garner, now 86, is a character as fascinating as any of his creations. From a working-class Cheshire family he survived several life-threatening illnesses as a child; at the age of six, he was punished for speaking in his native accent when a teacher washed his mouth out with soap. The first member of his family to go to university, Oxford led him to the familiar situation of working-class children removed from their culture: “My family could not cope with me, and I could not cope with them… I soon learned that it was not a good idea to come home excited over irregular verbs.”

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Would the Spice Girls survive today?

By Julie Burchill

The Owl Service was his fourth novel, published in 1967, influenced by a legend from The Mabinogion — the earliest prose stories in the literature of the British Isles, compiled in Welsh in the 12th century. The theme of a woman torn — literally, towards the end, as owls and flowers compete to take over her body — between two men was as relevant in the Swinging Sixties as it is now in the Tremulous Twenties.

But it’s striking that our culture has in some ways moved back towards the Medieval origin of the book’s inspiration compared to when it was published. In some ways, this is good. There is the emergence of Wales as a proudly independent nation once more, setting an example of how it is perfectly possible for a people to vote both for Labour and for Brexit.

Then there is the revival of the Welsh language; with the Act of Union in 1536, Welsh was all but banned, with a parliamentary report describing it as “a manifold barrier to the moral progress of the people”. Yet in 2008 Welsh was used at a meeting of the European Union’s Council of Ministers for the first time; in 2018 it was debuted in Parliament.

But other reversals are not so pleasing. The Owl Service is, at heart, a book about how even the most ordinary middle-class youngsters will likely lead far more interesting and rewarding lives than the most exceptional working-class kids. The savagery of class divisions, helpfully obscured these days by the liberal establishment’s obsession with race, has led to the grotesque situation where social mobility is reversing rather than improving, as it appeared to be in the Sixties.

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Mental health is a lucrative business

By Julie Burchill

Garner spent four years on the book, learning Welsh “in order not to use it” — now that’s a writer. The writing is as plain as only a genius dares; the very first exchange between the housekeeper’s son Gwyn and the house’s heiress Alison — “How’s the bellyache?” “A bore” — tells us exactly which social class they are from.

In the local shop, two ordinary women discuss quite matter-of-factly how the ancient myth of the love triangle which saw two men dead and a woman turned into an owl is about to happen again. “There’s no escaping, is there? I’ll have a packet of snow flakes.”

Re-reading it, I thought most of all of the awful plight of today’s teenagers under the pandemic — grounded for what should be the most exciting time of discovery in their lives. Already having less sex than my generation, the plague (and pornography) has made the sexes even more foreign to each other, echoing the simmering chastity which torments the trio of teenagers whose trials make up the plot of this book.

Penelope Farmer wrote: “I doubt if you could find any piece of realistic fiction for adolescents that says a quarter as much about adolescence as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.” Over the past year, we have all been Alison, Gwyn and Roger, hog-tied by history, mired in hysteria and caught up in a blindfolded paranoia which makes us see our fellow citizens as harbingers of death. We are all trapped in the valley now, wondering where all the flowers have gone and whether we will be the next prey of the parliament of owls.

“He was pinned to the grass face down, with his arms behind his back, by a young male teacher wearing blue latex gloves while a small group of other staff looked on,” she tells me. “Olly later said that he’d been carried through the school by four staff, one to each limb and thrown.”

Olly, who has Down’s syndrome, was fortunate enough to be able to move to a school more sensitive to his needs. But his disturbing treatment remains a frequent occurrence in educational institutions across the United Kingdom — and it is overwhelmingly disabled children who are being left both mentally and physically scarred by it.

Previously, the abuse of children in schools was thought to be a disturbing product of a bygone era; something that took place in Victorian Britain rather than the 21^st century. That is, of course, partly due to the shameful lack of media interest in this area. Indeed, it’s rather telling that in the past year, the only time it has been significantly covered in the national press was last month, when Paris Hilton spoke out about her own experience of restraint and seclusion in a Utah boarding school for so-called “troubled teens”. She tells me: “That small room, covered in scratch marks and smeared blood, with no bathroom, is one of the most vivid and traumatising memories I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”

It was a grim, honest account of abuse in school — and one shared by countless children here in Britain. Restraint forms part of a sanctioned group of so-called “restrictive practices” used in education, health and social care settings, as well as, unsurprisingly, in prisons. In the UK, these practices are regulated with a duty “to record and report” in all settings except education. Methods include physical restraint (with a number of different holds taught), mechanical restraint (such as being tied to a chair), chemical restraint (using drugs) and the use of seclusion, with children being sent to rooms or even tents and confined within them.

Add to this the emerging practice of imposing “blanket restrictions”, whereby children are not allowed to walk, run or play with their peers, or must visit the toilet at a set time (which is often not appropriate for some disabled children), and it’s no wonder that so many parents of disabled children are terrified for their well-being.

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How my daughter disrupted my politics

By Ian Birrell

For most parents, the zero-tolerance behaviour policies enforced in so many schools are to blame for this hidden crisis. As one campaigner, Beth Morrison, tells me: “We banned the belt in the eighties; now we are bringing physical punishment back for disabled kids by the back door.”

Beth’s son, Calum, who has epilepsy and support needs, was restrained on a number of occasions at a school in Dundee between 2010 and 2013. On one occasion, after he failed to follow a prescribed route when riding a bike designed for children with disabilities, he was restrained by four people and left with sixty bruises on his body. Dundee City Council say that they have fully engaged with police and prosecutors, and have taken on recommendations from the subsequent report. But Calum’s experience inspired Beth to set up the charity Positive and Active Behaviour Support Scotland (PABSS) in 2017, and has since collected more than 1,200 testimonies from families whose children — the youngest of whom was just aged two — have been restrained or secluded. In one recent case, a child who was held face down in the playground now needs a skin graft.

Yet when Morrison attends school meetings at the request of anxious parents, she says it’s a common refrain for senior teachers to dismiss their concerns by saying: “We have no records, so you have no evidence.” Indeed, a recent survey by the Children’s and Young People’s Commissioner for Scotland revealed that one third of Scotland’s local authorities did not expect schools to keep a record. (The shocking findings have since forced the Scottish government to agree to produce guidance on the use and monitoring of restraint and seclusion.)

The Northern Ireland assembly is also starting to wake up to the trauma and injuries endured by disabled children every day. Last month, Deirdre Shakespeare gave harrowing testimony about the experience of her son, Harry, now nine, to the assembly’s education committee. She tells me that Harry, then aged five, had been happy and placid. But after attending a “special school”, he started to have panic attacks and night terrors, and cowered in fear whenever his parents approached him.

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Why doesn't my son matter?

By Lucy Parr

The family later discovered that he had been strapped to a chair for different activities, including learning, feeding and playing, even though he has no mobility issues. Colin McMenamin, from KRW, a leading Irish human rights law practice, said: “We have issued proceedings on this important matter and are seeking judicial oversight on what remains a very sensitive issue.”

When I approached Education Authority Northern Ireland for comment, a spokesperson said that the authority does not comment on “matters relating to individual children”. It is worth noting, though, that Morrison and Shakespeare told the Assembly that 22 Northern Irish families with disabled children aged between four and eleven had reported similar cases to PABSS, including physical injuries such as scratches, bruising and abrasions from being dragged. Moreover, the Northern Irish children’s commissioner, in a submission to the UN Committee Against Torture, has called for tougher laws, saying that schools should be required to report and record cases and that the law around when restraint can be used needs to be clarified.

The Welsh government is also currently consulting on guidance to better monitor restraint and seclusion across all age groups. In England, however, the Department for Education (DfE) is lagging behind, despite overwhelming evidence of harm in English schools.

In February last year, campaigners and advocates gathered at the House of Lords for the launch of the Reducing Restrictive Interventions and Safeguarding Children report. It included the testimony of one family whose child, referred to as Annie, was restrained 158 times in the space of eighteen months. “Many of these restraints spanned considerable time periods and involved multiple staff members,” it said. Annie “started self-harming and making suicidal threats” and “is now having trauma therapy”.

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Our scandalous disregard for disability

By Ian Birrell

On the same day, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced that it would hold an inquiry into the practices in English and Welsh schools, and should report within the next few weeks. Yet campaigners and experts fear that nothing will change in England.

And if history provides a guide, they may well be correct. Even back in 2011, a review of restraint and seclusion in English and Welsh schools by Charlie Taylor, then the government’s behaviour advisor, looked at the recording and reporting of use of force. His conclusion? That schools should not be forced to record such incidents because it would add to “their bureaucratic burden”. Eight years later, the DfE eventually produced non-statutory guidance on the use of the practices for disabled young people — but only in specialist settings. It did not cover mainstream schools and did not require schools to inform parents, many of whom want their disabled child educated alongside their non-disabled peers.

So many are left looking, albeit with a hint of cynicism, to the DfE’s current behaviour tsar, Tom Bennett, who is set to launch a Behaviour Hubs programme, which he says will encourage schools to be “low tolerance” regarding behaviour, rather than zero tolerance. The DfE were approached for comment about parental concerns but did not respond. Bennett, however, has said that restraint is “incredibly rare in mainstream schools” and that the rules about restraint are adequate because it is rare and defends the use of “removal rooms and parking students separately from their classes…a common and useful part of many mainstream schools”.

James Betts, a solicitor at Irwin Mitchell, who acts for families representing a group of children who were restrained across the UK, disagrees. “Our most vulnerable children are being failed on account of the lack of adequate legal safeguards, and the families I act for believe that current restraint practices in the UK leave children with learning disabilities or autism at a very real risk of serious injury or even death,” he says. “Until robust action is taken, the children and families I act for will not rest. They deserve answers, accountability and real change to protect others in the future.”

There has been no general election in which Labour won fewer than 50% of Wales’s seats. The party’s post-war average is an impressive 71%, compared to the Conservatives’ 17%. And the picture is the same in the Senedd, the Welsh Assembly: since devolution, Labour has won the most votes and seats. Four years ago, in the 2017 general election, the party won nearly half the vote, taking 70% of the seats. And yet, just two years later, in 2019, it won 40.9% of the vote and just 55% of the seats — its second-worst performance since the “National Government” election in 1931 (1983 was Labour’s nadir in Wales, as in the rest of the country).

And recent signs suggest Labour has made no headway in regaining its grip on Wales. A poll by YouGov for ITV Cymru Wales/Cardiff University has put the party on 36%. That approval rating is roughly the same as in 2015 and 2010, but this time the Conservatives are breathing down Labour’s neck: they are just 3 percentage points behind. The Tories are still riding high on their 2019 success, which left Labour with a solitary single seat north of the coalfields.

Things are no rosier in the Welsh Assembly, where Labour is down 1.5% on their 2016 performance; Plaid Cymru is up 3% and the Conservatives up 6%. And with elections just three months away, the Tories are gearing up to convert their 2019 wins into Senedd seats.

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How the Left lost Wales

By James Bloodworth

Labour, understandably, is desperate to work out what’s going wrong. And given the recent intensification of Scottish nationalism, it’s easy to assume Wales is feeling the same way. While support for Plaid Cymru, the only party committed to Welsh independence, has not really shifted, support for independence has — in 2014 only 12% of respondents said they were in favour, compared to 74% against. Now the figure is 23% in favour, 52% against.

This rise coincides with the arrival of a new pressure group for independence — YesCymru. Launched in 2016, it really hit its stride in Spring 2020 when membership doubled from 2,500 to 5,000. When the Westminster government refused to furlough Welsh businesses during Wales’ 17-day firebreak lockdown, membership of YesCymru increased by a further 3,000. Now, it claims to have 17,000 members. YesCymru’s own polling with YouGov suggested 33% of Welsh people with a view would support independence.

Eyeing the threat of Plaid Cymru riding the waves of Welsh independence, Welsh Labour have become much more Union-sceptic. Alun Davies MS claimed: “This union fails Wales every day. And until there is an acceptance of that, then the campaign for independence will only continue to grow.” Mick Antoniw MS called the Union “an increasingly Anglocentric, London-based institution with which [the Welsh] struggle to identify.”

But would a panicky pivot to a more Union-sceptic position actually help Labour win back its old voters?

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The by-election that spells a general election

By Polly Mackenzie

To find out, I used various waves of the British Election Study to compare two camps of 2017 Labour voters: those who are still intending to vote for the party and those who are not.

The latter, Labour defectors, have scattered: 16% to Plaid, 15% to the Liberal Democrats, and 14% to the Conservatives. But the biggest grouping are the ‘don’t knows’, at 34%. Perhaps unsurprisingly, defectors tend to be less Left-wing — on a scale of 0 to 10, Labour voters are placed at 1.9, and Labour defectors at 2.6. Labour voters are also more libertarian, at 5.2, while Labour defectors more authoritarian at 6.1.

So this defection could easily be a part of a broader UK realignment of political values and voting behaviour, with Labour’s electoral coalition coming from Left-wing social libertarians, and the Conservatives doing better among a less Left-wing and more socially authoritarian voter coalition. Defectors are more likely to think that attempts to give equal opportunities to ethnic minorities, women, gay people and lesbians have all gone too far, compared to Labour voters — so probably thought little of Starmer’s pandering to the Black Lives Matter protestors over the summer. Defectors are also less likely to think immigration brings cultural or economic benefits, compared to Labour voters.

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How we bend the knee to our HR overlords

By Aris Roussinos

What about the pull of nationalism? Are defectors abandoning Labour in search of a party that will explicitly support independence? It doesn’t seem so. When asked how happy or sad they would be if Wales left the United Kingdom (with 0 being extremely sad and 10 being extremely happy) there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Both Labour voters and defectors would be sad, with a score of 3.6. And who wants a policy that makes people sad?

Defectors don’t even want more devolution. If we construct a scale of how Wales should be governed — with 1 equalling abolishing the Assembly, 2 giving the body fewer powers, 3 representing the status quo, 4 more powers, and 5 full independence — we find no significant difference between the two groups. And the icing on the cake is that Labour defectors actually trust Westminster more than Labour voters do — on a scale of 1 to 4, Labour voters place at 1.5, and Labour defectors place at 1.9 — and there is no significant difference when it comes to trusting the Welsh government.

So it is fair to conclude that Labour is not losing support to other parties because of their stance (or lack thereof) on the devolution settlement, no matter how angrily YesCymru tweet.

If this isn’t about devolution, is it about identity? No, not really. There’s no significant difference between how Labour voters and Labour defectors see themselves in terms of either Welshness — both place themselves at 5, on a scale of 1 (not at all Welsh) to 7 (very strongly Welsh) — or Britishness (5.2 for Labour defectors versus 5 for Labour voters). In fact, the identity which seems to make a difference is Europeanness — Labour defectors feel less European (3.6) than Labour voters (4.5), again suggesting that Labour’s troubles in Wales are not due to Welsh-specific factors, but rather UK-wide developments.

What about good old-fashioned party politics? Leadership evaluations do seem to matter. Those who remain Labour voters are more likely to rate Starmer highly (8.4, on a scale of 1 to 11) than Labour defectors (6.1). The same is true for Corbyn (7.2 versus 4.6). And those who have defected from Labour rate Johnson higher than those who remain Labour voters (4.2 versus 2.3).

Other party-political factors come into play here too — Labour defectors are more positive about how the UK government has handled Covid; Labour voters, unsurprisingly, think the opposition would have done a better job. Similarly, Labour defectors give the Westminster government more credit, and the Welsh government less, for their handling of lockdown than Labour voters do (although both groups rate the Welsh government’s attempts higher than Westminster’s). Wherever we look, there is little support for the idea that Labour needs to become more anti-Westminster or pro-Welsh independence.

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Why nationalism matters

By Ed West

Overall, the data shows Welsh Labour shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to out-bid nationalists when it comes to devolution, nor should they flirt with independence. They might not like the Conservative government in Westminster, but constant attacks on the Union in a misguided attempt to win votes back. It risks undermining both the nation-state itself and the party’s own voter coalition. As Henry Hill notes, polling shows more Welsh voters back abolishing the Senedd than back independence. By fanning the flames of independence, Labour risks polarising the nation’s electorate. Welsh Labour should take a hard look at their colleagues in Scotland to see the consequences of playing with nationalist fire.

Instead, the party desperately needs to do three things. Firstly, it needs to separate its critique of the Conservative Westminster government from a critique of the Union, and remember that it’s only a ‘Tory Westminster government’ because of Labour’s numerous failings since the great financial crash.

Secondly, Welsh Labour needs to articulate a narrative which can unite those who feel Welsh and those who feel British (equally sized groups), and explain why both groups are better off within the United Kingdom.

Finally, it needs to appeal to the type of voters they are losing: those who are more centrist, who are socially conservative, and who don’t think the economy is working for them. These voters aren’t really bothered about constitutional reform, but if Welsh Labour keep blaming Westminster or England for every problem they face then the party risks radicalising them into the arms of YesCymru.

Welsh Labour is still the dominant force in Welsh politics, and the political dynamics of the Wales are not yet like those of Scotland. But if Welsh Labour really are a unionist party, then they need to defend the Union themselves instead of using it as a scapegoat to distract from their own failings. Their current tack won’t protect their vote come 2024.

Everyone is looking at Scotland. The coronavirus crisis has given Nicola Sturgeon’s government renewed purpose, increased visibility, new chances to differentiate from England and the opportunity to boast about its supposed superiority. Scotland likes nothing more than to complain about mistreatment by its English overlords. It’s no surprise that the polls now show a remarkable majority for an independent future for Scotland.

But all this excitement about England’s northern border is distracting us from what is happening on its western one. Exactly the same political forces are conspiring to boost the Welsh government and with it the legitimacy of the campaign for Wales’ freedom. Don’t get me wrong: Welsh nationalism is still a minority sport. But polls in the last month or two suggest now a third of voters would choose independence in a referendum tomorrow. 46% of under-25s say they want Wales to be an independent country.

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Wales has never been a nation

By Francis Young

Perhaps you need to know more about Welsh history to understand how truly astonishing this is. In particular, you need to understand that Wales has never actually been an independent country. Coronavirus is conjuring a modern nation state from the mists of myth and fantasy.

The Welsh are a people, no question: a people with a language, a culture and a heritage. But what are their lands? The Welsh (and the Cornish) are, in fact, the original British, driven west by the Anglo Saxon invasions that followed the departure of the Roman Empire from these shores. The Welsh word Cymru, used from the seventh century, means the land of the Cymry — it refers not just to the residents of the western part of the British Isles but also to the men of the North of England. And the English word Wales, similarly, was originally used to mean simply foreigner — a reference to any of the non-Anglo Saxon peoples of these islands.

The area now governed by the Welsh Senedd was, in medieval times, a set of warring principalities. The ruler of the strongest of those was known as Tywysog Cymru: ruler, or prince, of the Welsh. But that didn’t give him power or hegemony over the other principalities. The closest a Tywysog — cognate of the Irish word Taoiseach — ever came to ruling the whole of modern Wales was Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, who secured the rule of Gwynedd from his uncle Owain and brother Dafydd in 1255. By 1267, he dominated modern-day Clwyd, Powys and Ceredigion.

But Pembrokeshire, Glamorgan and Monmouthshire — the whole of south and south-west Wales — remained under the rule of the Marcher Barons. And that was the peak of his power. In 1276, Edward I declared Llywelyn a rebel and marched a huge army against him. Llywelyn lost control of everything but Gwynedd, and after a brief resurgence of power in 1282, he was killed at Builth Wells. Llywelyn was, at best, the Temporary Prince of Part of Wales.

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Who do the English think they are?

By Razib Khan

Owain Glyndŵr was another great hero of Wales and the leader of a 15th-century rebellion against the English. He was immortalised as Glendower in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. No one knows when or how he died because he simply disappeared, possibly living out his final years in disguise at his daughter’s house. So he has a place in Welsh myth as a kind of Arthurian-style once and future king. Yet even this great leader was not a Prince of Wales as we might imagine it.

Partly that’s because Wales in the 1400s was so integrated with England. The Tudor dynasty itself proclaimed its Welsh origins. There were hundreds of Welsh archers who served at Agincourt. Glyndŵr himself was a Welsh-born nobleman, but he operated as part of an Anglo-Welsh elite that operated seamlessly across the modern border. He was apprenticed in London as a lawyer, and served extensively in the English army. It’s possible he served as a squire to Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV.

Glyndŵr went home to declare himself Prince of Powys in 1400 over a border dispute with a neighbour, Baron Grey de Ruthin, who had seized territory in the north of Powys. The English king had not intervened to settle the dispute. So Glyndŵr set about a rebellion, known in Wales as the Last War of Independence.

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Magna Carta proves the English aren't exceptional

By Polly Mackenzie

My interpretation is that independence wasn’t quite what Glyndŵr had in mind. In 1405, he negotiated the “Tripartite Indenture” with Edmund Mortimer and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland against Henry IV. The Indenture agreed to divide England and Wales among the three of them. Wales would extend as far as the rivers Severn and Mersey, including great swathes of modern England: Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire. Mortimer would take southern England, and Percy the North. The implication is that Glyndŵr sought to maximise his territory, and to eliminate the threat of a powerful, united England. That’s not quite the same as wanting independence for a romanticised Welsh people in their native homeland.

Glyndŵr was defeated and disappeared. His plans for an uber-Wales that was united, extensive, and self-governing faded into history. That’s why I’ve never before imagined that this never-quite-a-country could ever become an independent, modern nation state. What would hold it together? As the global West becomes ever more diverse, and international migration grows exponentially, the era of self-determination on the basis of an ethnic identity is over. I believed that the logic of a federal structure would hold Wales permanently in the union: local freedom within the protective embrace of a larger country.

Only now, as Cardiff’s leadership effectively erects a land border down Offa’s dyke, and bans the English from entering, does it seem a possibility. Perhaps the deepest irony is that among the highest support for Welsh independence is in the south west of the country: Pembrokeshire. But it is also one of the parts of Wales that never even fell to Llywelyn: it has never been part of a sovereign “Wales”.

Wales may be a generation behind Scotland in its journey toward independence. But if the union starts to crumble; if the logic of Brexit drives us toward a united Ireland; if Scotland paves the way with an exit out of our union and into the European one; then Welsh independence will become an inevitability. Perhaps a thousand years later than expected, the nation of Wales will finally come into existence.

If, like the ap Harris and their descendants, you appreciate a ruck then — despite its genteel, beside-the-languid-Wye ambience — Monmouth is your kind of town. As well as the castle ruins, there is the Nelson Museum — the victor of the Nile and Trafalgar performed quite a lot of trysting with Emma Hamilton hereabouts. But my own personal place of “have-a-go” pilgrimage is the Wetherspoons situated (of course) on Agincourt Square.

I am an expert on that watering hole, The King’s Head, a rambling coaching inn dating from the 17th century, since I spent multitudinous hours under its stuccoed ceilings during the interval between collecting one child from Extra-Curricular Activity A at 5pm and waiting for the other to finish Extra-Curricular Activity B at 9pm. (We sometimes even spent the night in the pub, rather than do the 50-mile round trip home and back again to school in the morning. Country life, eh?) There are advantages to Wetherspoons, I find: their reputation as déclassé keeps out sanctimonious snobs. You are pretty safe from Emily Thornberry in a Wetherspoons.

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I have digressed. The truest reason I love The King’s Head is that William Cobbett once gave a lecture there: an event commemorated by a nice print on the wall of the man — in red jacket, white britches and black boots, all properly Georgian — and a bit of accompanying biographical text.

Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue plaque on every place he ever visited. In his long life — he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 — Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, MP, agony uncle (his books include Advice to Young Men), and the founder of Hansard.

His obituary in The Times, after categorising him as a “self-taught peasant”, declared Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: when some town council somewhere banned his anti-Malthusian play Surplus Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.

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A compassionate carnivore's manifesto

By John Lewis-Stempel

Above all, though, Cobbett was the champion of the rural poor, the village labourer and the small farmer. He was their one true tribune. He spoke at The King’s Head in 1820 because country folk were suffering a triple wham from agricultural depression, enclosure and the rise of agri-business. Or, to precis, “Hodge” (his name for the generic farm worker) was low-waged or unwaged and deprived of the bits of land he had once enjoyed under commoner’s rights.

Cobbett railed against “The Thing” (the capitalist, manufactory system) and the centrifugal, corrupting force of smoky London (“The Wen”, in Cobbettian). But he was no bloviator: he was a farm boy, and hence entirely empirical and properly pragmatic. He spent a decade travelling around the English sticks to discover the true state of affairs. His descriptions of his horseback journeys were published in 1830 as Rural Rides, the first sociological study of the English countryside.

No dry-as-dust tome by the way, the Rides: it brims with pinned-to-the-specimen-board descriptions of people and places, nature, wit. Cobbett knew beauty and, the proper Englishman that he was, he loved horses:

The finest sight in England is a stage coach ready to start. A great sheep or cattle fair is a beautiful sight; but in the stage coach you see more of what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself, the harness, all so complete and so neatly arranged; so strong and clean and good. The beautiful horses, impatient to be off. The inside full and the outside covered, in every part with men, women, children, boxes, bags, bundles. The coachman taking his reins in hand and his whip in the other, gives a signal with his foot, and away go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.

One of these coaches coming in, after a long journey is a sight not less interesting. The horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole equipage is covered perhaps with dust and dirt. But still, on it comes as steady as the hands on a clock.

Speaking at The King’s Head coaching inn in Monmouth must have been the dream gig for Cobbett the horseman.

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Where England sinks into the sea

By niall gooch

When you go to that Wetherspoons yourself, take a copy of Rural Rides with you, sit under Cobbett’s portrait, and ask yourself the following question. Given all the Westminster-overlooked problems of British country people in 2020 — from the absence of public transport to abundance of second-homers — who speaks for us now? Where is our champion, our Cobbett? The one of us who can speak for us? Where?

Cobbett’s solution to the woes of the Regency rural poor was a return to a barter-based Medieval economy under gent paternalists with a sense of noblesse oblige, plus Parliamentary voting reform, creating a Britain where there would be “room for us all, and  plenty for us to eat and to drink”. In the bon mot of his biographer Richard Ingrams, Cobbett sought a “Brave Old World”.

Even in the 19^thcentury, the call to go “back to the land” — vacating the towns and dismantling the factory system — was unrealisable nostalgia. But that is not to say that Cobbett’s proposals were meritless. One in particular needs dusting down today: self-sufficiency, as promoted in his manual and manifesto, Cottage Economy.

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So you want to quit the rat race

By mary harrington

Of course — and I hear your sniggers — self-sufficiency has become a Tom-and-Barbara Good Life laugh, if a slightly strangled one now that, due to Covid “collapsology”, your neighbours are fleeing the Wen for a house with a large garden in Norfolk. If you truly believe self-sufficiency too quaint, ponder this: in France some 20% of the fresh produce consumed is still raised in the kitchen garden, the potager. Then ponder this also: during Covid, France’s newspapers declared “Potagers et jardins, les stars du confinement”. Well, obviously. Soul, stomach, sense of self-reliance, re-connection to healing nature all satisfied by a quarter of an acre. Every one of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” ticked. Voila!

Actually, self-sufficiency, autarchy, backyard farming — call it what you like — is a venerable British tradition. Once upon a time governments even sponsored self-sufficiency via Smallholdings Acts authorising acquisition of land for those wanting to grow their own. Between 1908 and 1914 alone, 205,103 acres were purchased in England and Wales for smallholders and allotmenteers. In return for service in the Great War, 24,000 soldiers were settled on plots in our green and pleasant land. The allotment movement was boosted by Round 2 with militaristic Germany, 1939-45, and the “Dig for Victory” campaign. By 1943 there were 1,400,000 allotments in the UK, producing a gob-smacking 1.3 million tonnes of food.

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Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By james rebanks

Then came the outbreak of peace, the population doubling to 60 million, and an expansion of housing which caused hard-pressed local authorities to sell land to developers. Currently, there are a niggardly 250,000 allotments in the UK, and the waiting lists are as long as rake handles. But now that BoJo has decided that money does, after all, grow on trees, why not spend a casual couple of billion purchasing land around Britain to be divided up into plots for village people and townspeople alike? (I propose this be called “The Cobbett Scheme”.)

So, when you are in Monmouth, do visit The King’s Head. Cobbett, the man who dined alike with Pitt and farmworker, who hated cruelty to animals, and appreciated a good pint, would have been entirely at home in a Wetherspoons —with their CAMRA ale, RSPCA Freedom Food eggs, Marine Stewardship Council fish (I have eaten in Michelin starred restaurants with less ethical food and drinks policies) and its merciful absence of stuffed shirts.And, alongside Rural Rides, have Cottage Economy with you, and ask yourself this ultimate question: do we not need more self-sufficiency in this country?

I say we do. As the Sex Pistols should have sung: “Autarchy for the UK!”

The Liberal Democrats took the seat from the Conservatives after sitting MP Chris Davies was convicted of expenses fraud. They overturned a majority of about 8,000, with new MP Jane Dodds securing about 1,400 more votes than Davies, who decided to stand again. Labour did badly, barely holding their deposit. The Brexit Party took 10% of the vote.

These are the facts.

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How the Left lost Wales

By James Bloodworth

They are, variously, proof of the following:

1. The Brexit Party is successfully putting pressure on Boris Johnson, denying him wiggle room and helping guarantee we leave on October 31.

2. The Brexit Party is making it harder for Boris Johnson to get us out of the EU, by replacing a Brexiteer MP with an ardent Remainer.

3. The Conservative vote held up well considering the MP had been convicted of expenses fraud.

4. The Conservatives only squeezed the Brexit Party down to 10% because the sitting MP was so popular locally.

5. The Liberal Democrats are the strongest Remain party and as head of a Remain alliance can become the new main party of opposition.

6. Remain parties got substantially fewer votes than Leave parties, so being the “party of Remain” is never going to work for the Lib Dems.

7. Labour’s collapsing in Wales.

8. Labour needs to adopt a clear policy to remain.

9. Labour needs to adopt a clear policy to leave.

10. Labour needs to ditch Jeremy Corbyn.

The only topic on which there appears to be consensus is that Brecon and Radnorshire is a particularly beautiful part of the country, even if some of its towns and villages remain entirely unpronounceable to the travelling activists who turned up over the last months. The best moment of the night was when the High Sheriff of Powys decided to read out the results exclusively in Welsh, leaving the scores of English speakers in a state of pale-faced panic about who had really won.

But among all this arguing, there’s a lot of clarity. Liberal Democrats are joyful and optimistic. They know what to do next: double down as the party of Remain, stake their claim as the leader of the Remain alliance, and try to get other parties and other MPs to join them. Full steam ahead.

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By James Kirkup

The Conservatives have plenty to console themselves with. I don’t think their strategy was up for debate, but even if it were, the result gives them a clear rationale for pursuing it. Squeeze the Brexit vote, put the Leave coalition back together, and let the Remainers and the moderates go. Full steam ahead.

The only party that deserves to be confused this morning is Labour. Labour used to own Wales: they have topped the poll in seats and votes in every general election in my lifetime, and beyond it. Perhaps Brecon and Radnorshire isn’t a particular stronghold for the party, but to clock in only 5.3% of the vote is truly abysmal.

Brexit is the defining issue of the decade, and it is a binary one. In or out. Leave or Remain. The two camps are getting more and more entrenched in their positions, and Labour’s attempt to straddle both is killing them. They have managed to contort themselves in a way that makes almost everyone who cares about Brexit angry, hoping perhaps that Brexit would no longer be a big deal by the time of the General Election.

But Brecon and Radnorshire makes it harder than ever to avoid a General Election this autumn, before Brexit has happened. In a Brexit election, I struggle to see how Labour avoids tearing itself apart. Too Leave-ish for the Remainers, and too Remain-ish for the Leavers. In politics, you have to take a side. Labour needs to make its choice, before it is too late.

While Brecon and Radnorshire voters are today expected to hand a victory to the Liberal Democrats, the governing party will most likely only lose because of the strong showing of the Brexit Party, with Labour way behind in fourth. Across the country the Tories sit on 24%, two points ahead of Labour, with Nigel Farage’s outfit following close behind in third. This means that in one of the EU’s most deprived regions – and historically Britain’s socialist heartland – more than four in ten voters opt for Right-wing parties.

We are accustomed to hearing that politicians are out of touch with public opinion, but then activists often are too, which accounts for the stark contrast between those who turned out to jeer the new PM and public opinion in Wales more generally.

It’s true that many still harbour a great deal of resentment towards the Conservative Party. Some areas of South Wales have never recovered from the crash-deindustrialisation programme enacted by the Thatcher government, and the unemployment rate remains one of the highest in Britain. According to NHS data collected in 2013, one in six residents of Blaenau Gwent was collecting a prescription for antidepressants. Life expectancy in the region is among the lowest in England and Wales.

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The dark side of rural England

By James Bloodworth

I spent time in South Wales in 2016 conducting research for my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. I spoke with hundreds of people in the region and the anger was palpable. Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t particularly popular in the pubs and social clubs I visited, but nor were the New Labour politicians who had moved the party into the centre ground. As a former Blaenavon collier called Ron phrased it, establishment politicians in Westminster were the “shiny men” who “turned up once every five years and then you don’t see them again”.

The residual anger felt by many in Britain’s former mining areas is often dismissed by outsiders as nostalgia, yet few of the people I spent time with wanted to go back underground and dig coal in the pits. They just missed the sense of community, fraternity and solidarity engendered by the shuttered industries.

Wayne Hodgins, an independent councillor for Brynmawr, told me the pits, steelworks and factories were like “an extension of your family”. In towns such as Cwm, Ebbw Vale and Merthyr Tydfil, streets named after local heroes of the labour movement were lined with rent-to-own stores, bookies and arcades.

In this context, Labour’s failure to carve out a sustainable poll lead in Wales seems remarkable, especially as it has been the biggest party in every national election there since 1922. In this May’s European Elections the party finished third.

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Warehouse work needn't be worthless

By Polly Mackenzie

Brexit is a big part of the story. As I drove around the roads that hug the Brecon Beacons I would occasionally see signs proclaiming “this project was funded by the European Union”, and Wales has indeed received £5.3 billion in EU structural funds since 2000. And yet, venturing down to the towns and villages below I encountered strong anti-EU sentiment, the issue having become a crude lightening rod for industrial decline.

Yet it would be wrong to assume that Wales is a hotbed of anti-EU sentiment. It voted narrowly – 52% – to leave the European Union, but support for a so-called “People’s Vote” has grown in recent months. A YouGov poll conducted at the end of 2018 found that majorities in every Welsh constituency support a final say on the outcome of Brexit negotiations.

Unfortunately, however, Jeremy Corbyn has pursued an all-things-to-all-people Brexit strategy and in Wales this appears to have backfired spectacularly. Those who back leaving have gravitated toward either Boris Johnson or the Brexit Party, while Remainers have peeled off to Jo Swinson’s reinvigorated Liberal Democrats. As Peter Kellner recently wrote for the Guardian, Labour’s strategy right across Britain has been “haemorrhaging remain votes without enhancing its appeal to leave voters”.

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By James Kirkup

Corbyn supporters will undoubtedly point to the party’s impressive 49% showing in Wales at the 2017 General Election as evidence that this latest poll is a mere blip in the party’s fortunes. Yet “creative ambiguity” over Brexit was credible in 2017 in a way that it no longer is. As pro and anti-Brexit positions have hardened, Labour’s neither-here-nor-there strategy has effectively run out of road.

Labour’s Welsh decline cannot entirely be pinned on Corbyn. Support here has been ebbing for some time and during the New Labour years the party’s share of the vote fell faster in Wales than in either England or Scotland. In fact Labour’s historical dominance of Welsh politics is arguably a factor in its declining fortunes. As Dan Evans wrote in a perceptive piece for Jacobin, one-partyism has encouraged complacency and nepotism in many traditional strongholds. Here “people advance and achieve positions of power not through their political competence or vision, but through party loyalty”.

Unlike in Scotland, in Wales the party has faced no challenge on its Left, largely because there is no comparable thirst for independence. Yet Plaid Cymru have seen their support climbing since Adam Price replaced Leanne Wood as leader last year, and have now overtaken Labour in the most recent polling for the Welsh Assembly. This is arguably more significant for Labour than a single poll showing the Tories leading, a lead likely to dissipate once the impact of Brexit is felt and Boris Johnson’s honeymoon period comes to an end.

Labour has also been losing the battle of values, which in part explains the shift to the Conservatives. The coastal regions have long flirted with the Tories, but the Valleys – the traditional bastions of socialist politics – are also home to a small-c conservatism that sits uneasily with some of the liberal shibboleths that dominate contemporary Left-wing thought. Moreover, this anti-Conservative sentiment found in South Wales is partly a legacy of Margaret Thatcher, herself a liberal free marketeer rather than a traditional conservative.

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By David Kogan

The importance of values when it comes to voting – as opposed to purely economic motivations – is evident in the rise in Welsh support for first UKIP and now the Brexit Party. At the 2015 election the Eurosceptic party performed strongest here in Valley seats such as Merthyr Tydfil and Caerphilly, finishing third in Wales in the popular vote and second place to Labour in six constituencies. As in the United States, voters in many struggling small towns feel more comfortable with the values of Right-wing parties, even if this seems to go against their economic interests.

So while the decline of Welsh Labour is by no means entirely the fault of Corbyn, after ten years in opposition it is untenable to still be trailing in the polls to the governing party. Were current polling figures replicated at a general election, Labour would register its worst result in Wales in a century. Corbyn, like his predecessor Ed Miliband, is an inept leader whose personal unpopularity is undoubtedly dragging Labour down. Yet hopes that he would win back Wales and Scotland by moving the party leftward have proven forlorn when political debate is less about Left versus Right than Remain versus Leave.

And the Brexit muddle is a feature of Corbynism rather than a bug. Corbyn is a lifelong Eurosceptic who has surrounded himself with “Lexiteers” such as Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray. Yet his power base is an overwhelmingly pro-Remain Labour membership, leaving the leader effectively a prisoner of two competing tendencies within his own party. On one side stand his decades-long ideological bedfellows, and on the other the party membership whose support his leadership requires if it is to retain any legitimacy.

This circle was always going to be hard for Corbyn to square and the resulting jumble has politely been called ambiguity – although incoherence would be a more fitting description. It was invariably going to catch up with Labour eventually, on both sides of Offa’s Dyke. On the doorstep in Wales – just as in England – it is Brexit that people are talking about, not the renationalisation of Royal Mail or other vote-winning Labour issues. After a century of dominance in Wales, the party has been left behind by events.

At the time, these two men were widely thought of as the era’s most exciting poets, alongside the modernist-in-chief, T. S. Eliot. Since then, the canon has been significantly kinder to Auden, whom the literary establishment finds more palatable than the famously bawdy Thomas.

Type ‘Auden’ into the search bar of the London Review of Books, and you’ll find 660 results; ‘Dylan Thomas’ by contrast yields just 182. The equivalent figures on the Paris Review website are 181 and 98. Yet a general internet search tells a very different story: there are 6.76 million Google hits for ‘Auden’; but a massive 121 million for ‘Dylan Thomas’.

These stats support a now recognised fact: the literary elites has neglected Dylan Thomas, despite overwhelming popular interest in his work. Why is that? Partly, and ironically, because of that popular interest.

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At first, it was Auden’s reputation that suffered. On the eve of WWII, he abandoned the UK and sailed for America, accusations of cowardice ringing in his ears. Thomas, meanwhile, moved from Wales to London and fashioned himself as a poet doing essential war work. By the end of the decade, recordings of him reading his own work were being broadcast on the BBC, laying the groundwork for his ascent to cult status. By the 1950s, he was doing lengthy reading tours of America, where he died in 1953 aged 39.

“He died at the height of his fame,” wrote Seamus Heaney – one of the most commercially successful poets of the 21st century – in 1993. “Print culture and the electronic media were perfecting their alliance in the promotion of culture heroes,” meaning that even after his death, Thomas’s voice continued to spread, feeding his fame. Heaney continues:

“The records of Dylan Thomas reading his own poems, records which were lined up on the shelves of undergraduate flats all over the world, were important cultural events. They opened a thrilling line between the centre and the edges of the English language collective. For all of us young provincials, from Belfast to Brisbane, the impact of Thomas’s performance meant that we had a gratifying sense of access to something that was acknowledged to be altogether modern, difficult and poetry.”

Heaney, who grew up in a small village in Northern Ireland, is emphasising Thomas’s appeal to the ordinary people who lived beyond the metropolis, where “the English language collective” was centred.

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Up-and-coming “young provincials” were perceived by the metropolitan elite as unfashionable, simple and prosaic. But Thomas forged ahead anyway, proving that “provincials” could succeed despite this snobbery.

But when his cult started to die down in the 1970s, most academics dismissed him as a populist trend. The literary establishment focused their energies not on unpicking his poetry, but on magnifying the persona of the bawdy bard from the backend of Wales who drank too much and spoke nonsense. Implicit was the assumption that any poet so beloved by the young, so stubbornly regional, so interested in sex and so often transmitted by the new-fangled media, couldn’t possibly be good.

This is ironic, because in the Seventies, English faculties around the world were enthusiastically cleaving the personalities of authors from their works. In 1967, Roland Barthes had published the influential essay ‘The Death of the Author’, which encourages readers to disregard the biography, personality or intentions of an author when reading a text, and to instead judge that text based on its intrinsic merits. Perhaps Thomas’s texts were too difficult to judge – they’re known for mockingly evading all kinds of authority.

Besides, the literary authorities were altogether more focused on the death of an author: “after W. H. Auden’s death in 1973, Thomas was the main casualty of a critical urge to make the 1930s solely the ‘age of Auden’,” points out Dylan’s most staunch defender, Swansea-based Professor John Goodby.

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At first it didn’t matter. Each December, the BBC still broadcast a recording of Thomas reading his micro-memoir, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’; his rousing poem, ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ was still read at funerals up and down the UK.

But then the students of the academics who denigrated Thomas became our English teachers, and before long they were writing exam papers and curricula. By the turn of the millennium, the current state of affairs, described in the FT, had consolidated itself: “although the poet is widely celebrated on TV and radio, his poems themselves are frequently left off the academic curriculum.”

This matters. In the Internet age, it’s easy to forget how much control university faculties have over what corners of culture get noticed. With Google at our fingertips, it feels like we have access to every miniscule piece of information, and we have free reign to decide what’s important. But there’s a place where, during our formative years, we spend even more time: school. And the dictates of academia trickle down to decide what voices are included and excluded in our education.

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By James Bloodworth

Maybe it’s not such a tragedy. Thomas is a dead white man, after all – the demographic best represented in our lessons, lectures and literature. But he’s also a case study in how an author can get overlooked not despite but because of qualities we ought to celebrate: mass appeal, resistance to authority and a marginal perspective.

As a master’s student, I wanted to write my dissertation about Dylan Thomas. When I outlined my proposal, my tutor made a face: “There’s not really anyone who’s interested in him in the department” – a department that is, by some measures, the best place to study English Literature in the UK. Stubbornly, I stuck to my topic.

In the course of my research, I discovered that Dylan Thomas has been credited with kickstarting the audiobook industry. His early poems were lauded by T. S. Eliot (unlike Auden’s: Eliot told him to go away and try again). The young Sylvia Plath adored him – and was profoundly influenced by his verse. His words appear in multiple mediums, from blockbusters like Interstellar (2014) to the lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Yet despite his huge cultural impact, universities so often treat Thomas as a minor poet.

Perhaps this is a reflection on academia’s determination to retain its influence, rather than a reflection on Thomas’s actual influence. Ignoring a poet adored by the masses contributes to a general attitude that the elite knows best while hoi polloi are misguided, tasteless, or just plain stupid.

Sound familiar? The gulf between Thomas’s reputation in pop culture and his reputation in academia is a microcosm of our times – times in which teams of well-educated experts continuously underestimate the masses.

The rejection of the EU by so-called ‘left behind’ communities feels at times like a rejection of the paternalism which has come to define the liberal Left in the twenty-first century. This is particularly true in Wales.

Driving through the undulating roads that sweep across the Brecon Beacons, billboards regularly declare that ‘this road was funded by the EU’, or ‘this project was funded by the EU’. Wales has long been a net beneficiary of the EU budget.

Yet venture down the mountainside to towns like Cwm, Ebbw Vale and Brynmawr, and anti-EU sentiment is ubiquitous. The Valleys supported Brexit, often by a significant margin, and according to a major piece of research carried a year after the referendum, attitudes do not appear to have shifted.

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For many on the liberal Left, this was incomprehensible – support for Brexit ran counter to the economic interests of the Welsh towns. It was recently reported, for example, that the Leave-supporting town of Llanelli was set to lose one of its manufacturing plants due to the level of economic uncertainty generated by Brexit. Schaeffler, a German manufacturer of automotive, aerospace and industrial parts, announced last month that it would close its Llanelli plant with the loss of up to 220 jobs.

Subsequent headlines appeared to revel in the misfortune of the town. ‘Leave-supporting Llanelli left reeling as manufacturing industry moves out due to Brexit’, was one headline, shared over 40,000 times on social media. The message was clear: the town had been conned, its working classes duped – the turkeys had voted for Christmas.

Why then, did a town like Llanelli vote Leave back in 2016, with all the potential risks such a decision brought with it? Taking a longer view, Llanelli’s rejection of the status quo is perhaps more understandable. Lee Waters, a Welsh Labour and Co-operative Assembly member for Llanelli, tells me that since 1990 around 30,000 jobs have been lost in the area, putting the – albeit tragic – potential loss of 220 jobs at Schaeffler in perspective.

“When I was knocking doors during the referendum campaign in Llanelli people would often say that they didn’t see how leaving Europe would make things any worse, and they liked the idea of shaking things up,” Waters says. “Orthodox economic policies have done too little to give hope to those that are struggling.”

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Indeed, when I visited Llanelli a few weeks after the announcement by Schaeffler, the people of the town I spoke with were, for the most part, resilient. Some didn’t believe the redundancies would happen, whereas others blamed the company for putting profits ahead of local people.

Janice Tanner, a 54-year-old woman who works in a local cash and carry, captured the prevailing mood when she told me that Schaeffler, together with the EU and Westminster – “the whole lot of them” – “don’t give a stuff about South Wales”. The decision by Schaeffler was viewed as merely the latest in a long line of capricious moves taken far away in stuffy offices by those who took little interest in the local community.

In this sense the EU has often been a lightning rod for a more widespread sense of economic malaise. Conversations about Europe very often bleed into more long-standing narratives of industrial decline. “My own personal view,” said Brian, a former miner at Bryn Colliery who now volunteers in the South Wales Miners’ Museum in Port Talbot, “is that it all started [to go downhill] as soon as we joined the EU”. Brian told me doleful stories about the closure of local pits, the disappearance of industry, and the general sense of malaise that loomed over the Valleys.

The Valleys have never recovered from the deindustrialisation policies of the 1980s and ‘90s, enacted by successive Conservative governments after Margaret Thatcher’s comprehensive victory in 1984 over Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers. Today the Valleys remain trapped between an industrial past and a future which has yet to arrive.

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The most shocking impact of the sudden economic transformation is discernible in the health of people living in the Valleys. In 2013 it was reported that 10,000 residents of Blaenau Gwent were on some kind of anti-depressant medication, out of a total population of 60,000 – that’s one in every six adults collecting a prescription for drugs like Doxepin, Prozac and Trazodone. Life expectancy in the former constituency of Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s National Health Service, is among the lowest in England and Wales.

Trish Richards, who runs the Phoenix Project, a drop-in-mental health clinic in Brynmawr, told me that depression rates among the people she saw were closely related to a lack of regular work. “I’ve had people come to me on zero-hours contracts. They don’t know where they are from one week to the next. Can’t plan. Can’t even plan to go to the dentist in case they get called in to work.”

Yet the sense of malaise in the Valleys cannot be reduced entirely to economics, even if the Left finds it easier to interpret events in this way. Stephen Kinnock, the MP for Aberavon, tells me that while the economic narrative is “really important”, “many years ago [it] spilled over into an issue of what kind of country do you want to live in from a cultural and values point of view”.

Power, he says, has shifted away from small towns, away from the “communitarians”, and towards the big cities and the “cosmopolitans”. “If you’re looking for a classic example of communitarian communities, well that is the South Wales Valleys,” Kinnock tells me. “These are people deeply rooted in their communities with a strong sense of identity and cultural heritage, so they feel that sense of loss even more strongly.”

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By James Bloodworth

Speaking to people in the Welsh Valleys, there is a keen local awareness that communities have been in precipitous economic decline for some time. The European Union is not responsible for this decline, but despite the modest injection of EU subsidies in recent years, it hasn’t reversed it.

The Valleys have enjoyed little of the prosperity and stability that Remainers attempted to summon in 2016 when they sought to rally voters to the cause of the European Union. Voters instead wanted something to kick against, and in this sense the EU provided a convenient whipping boy.

During my travels around south Wales – in 2016 and more recently – I heard little of the malevolent conspiratorial talk that has come to characterise grassroots politics in England, with its fixation on an ‘elite’ and an ‘establishment’ that are said to control events behind the scenes. Indeed, across south Wales there have for many years been definite material reasons to want to ‘take back control’, as the punchy anti-EU slogan had it. And you would have had to have had your eyes closed not to see it.

But then, prior to the shock of the Brexit vote, shutting one’s eyes to the conditions in which many outside of Britain’s big cities lived was precisely what many on the liberal Left had become good at.