Wales and the break-up of Britain

The ‘breakup of Britain’ is a question which comes and goes, impelled to a large extent by the prospect of IndyRef2 producing Scottish independence and the corollary, Wales being trapped in a rump ‘England-and-Wales’. The likelihood of a Yes vote in Scotland increased as No voters changed their minds, reacting to the EU referendum and the aggressively anti-devolutionary behaviour of the governments of Johnson, Truss and Sunak. In Wales, albeit remaining a minority view, talk of independence has become normalised. Pro-independence marches held throughout Wales have been large, boisterous and above-all, young.

This normalisation and the possibility of independence has been up to now a reaction to events in England and Scotland. It is arguable, at least, that had Labour won in 2017 or 2019, things would have been different. The idea of independence as a last resort reaction to outside events, an escape from a burning building rather than the culmination of a long national struggle is not without precedent; some of the successor states to the USSR achieved their independence in this way.

A Labour government, it was assumed, would treat Wales better, but we cannot expect to get much change from the right-wing clique which currently has Labour in its grip. The scandalous refusal to devolve control of the Crown Estate to the Welsh government and Westminster’s refusal to countenance the devolution of justice and policing should tell us something. Wales effectively paying £4 billion for the white elephant that is HS2, although not an inch of track has been laid in Wales, merely adds insult to injury. Starmer, in particular, seems to have a tin ear for any issues concerning the devolved governments. Therefore, a stalemate is likely in the short to medium term, with independence a growing cause and unionists, in London and Wales, resorting to a combination of muscular unionism and argument, overriding and undermining the Welsh government while asserting that Wales is too poor, too small and too stupid to cope by itself. Westminster should get an easier ride with the pliant Eluned Morgan. Mark Drakeford, although at heart a unionist, was always prepared to push the devolutionary boundaries.

The fact that the ‘too small, too poor, too stupid’ arguments are as widely accepted in Wales as they are supports the notion, aired in a context of independence struggles in the global south, that dominance is exerted psychologically as well as militarily and economically. Challenging these arguments raises the need to establish not only that the United Kingdom is an unequal relationship, rather than some benevolent partnership of equals, but to establish the nature of that relationship: is Wales England’s first and last colony, as has been argued, or is the relationship more complex and subtle?

While the medieval subjection of Wales by England had an undoubtedly colonial character, Henry VIII’s Acts of Union gave the Welsh supposed equal status (and, to encourage Welsh support for the new state church, the bible was, in 1588, translated into Welsh). Assimilation was followed by re-creation as the industrial revolution transformed the  geography, economy, politics and society of Wales, creating its working class. Thus, it is argued, Wales, including its working class, benefitted from the industrial revolution in the context of the United Kingdom, and that if the relationship was oppressive, that oppression was class oppression, not national oppression.  

However, that relationship was, and still is, profoundly extractive and therefore, fundamentally unequal. The roads, railway lines, ports and pipes took the fruits of Welsh labour: coal, steel, slate, as well as Welsh water (having first drowned a village) out of Wales to satisfy an economy ultimately not controlled by Wales or operating in Wales’ interests. Today, those lines of communication still run between Wales and England more than within Wales itself.

At Plaid Cymru’s 2019 conference party leader Adam Price called for  reparations for Wales, compensation for a ‘century of being ground down in poverty’. However, and this is where it gets complicated, he was obliged to backtrack after criticism that he was suggesting an equivalence between Wales and the slave trade, something which some Welsh people were involved in and profited from. However, the second part of what he said was correct: ’deprived of our inheritance we were left without the tools to prise ourselves out of poverty’. Wales has never, either before or after devolution, had any of the necessary macro-economic tools, including control of benefits or full control of taxes, to tackle the chronic problems of uneven economic  development, poverty, and poor public health. As rapid and uneven industrialisation was principally something done to Wales, so too was the  calamitous de-industrialisation: the depression of the 1930s and then Thatcher’s slash and burn destruction of the 1980s.

In the 1960s and 70s parts of the public sector in Wales were located in Wales, most notably the Royal Mint and the DVLA, providing employment but a continuation of the ‘branch office economy’ for Wales. After 1999 the Welsh government, with limited powers at its disposal, had little alternative to the previous economic policy, making Wales attractive to foreign investment, sometimes with generous grants, and with decidedly mixed results.

Everyone in Wales (apart from Tories, of course!) agrees that Tory rule is bad for Wales. It is more difficult to persuade people that the United Kingdom is bad for Wales. A Welsh Labour unionist will agree that Wales suffers from Tory rule in Westminster, as does the north-east of England, for example, and that the answer to Wales’ difficulties is a Labour government in Westminster, benefitting the entire United Kingdom, and bringing it together. The inconvenient truth is that notwithstanding the ameliorating measures of the Wilson and Callaghan governments and of the Blair and Brown years (the minimum wage, for example), Wales remained poor. The only answer offered is that Wales is too small and too poor to contemplate life out of the United Kingdom so it is stuck there for better or worse, like an unhappy marriage,

The argument that Wales is ‘too small’ need not detain us. It did not detain such giants as Cyprus, Malta and the Baltic states, all smaller in population than Wales. Using the ‘too small’ argument for a country of  3.2 million is no more than Westminster gaslighting.

Is Wales ‘too poor’ to be independent? Or is it poor because it is not independent? Many indicators make Wales one the poorest areas in Western Europe but Wales’ position in the UK makes the position more complex.

Gross disposable household incomes in Wales were in 2022 81.8% of the UK average. An alternative figure for 2018 of 90% once London and south-east England is discounted does not alter the overall position, it merely demonstrates the distorting effect of the UK’s unbalanced economy. In terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per person, Wales scores £27,274 per person, 74% of the UK average and second lowest of the 12 UK countries and English regions (only the north-east of England is lower).

Although Wales generates twice as much electricity as it uses and is a net exporter of electricity to England and Ireland, not a single major energy supplier serving Welsh customers is based in Wales, so revenues and profits leave the country while Wales experiences fuel poverty. Wales has no control over the national  grid, nuclear power or energy projects bigger than 350MW. An attempt to generate renewable energy, with potential community benefits, by harnessing tidal power in the form of a tidal lagoon in Swansea bay was knocked back by Westminster, leaving Wales stuck in the dysfunctional UK energy market.

Wales’ transport network has been savaged by Westminster, cuts to the rail network in the 1960s and the destruction of  bus services in the 1980s  threaten the very viability of some communities. Under the infamous Chris ‘failing’ Grayling, Westminster decided Wales wasn’t important enough to electrify the rail network as far as Swansea while diesel trains trundled around the Valleys pulling 30-year-old rolling stock. This should not be a fact of life; there are small countries with mountains that have a transport system fit for purpose, if the political will is there to deliver it. But if Wales is poor because of inadequate infrastructure and connectivity, on top of de-industrialisation, that is because it is kept poor as a result of political choices made by Westminster.

Wales suffers a serious housing shortage and in many rural Welsh-speaking areas young people, if they are not leaving altogether, are living in caravans while being priced out of the available housing by second-home-owners from England, termed by language activist Ffred Ffrancis as ‘cultural genocide by bank transfer’. Welsh councils have the means, via council tax and planning policy, to ameliorate this situation, and the right-to-buy no longer exists, fortunately. Nevertheless, Wales can still be treated as a quaint rural recreational adjunct of the unequal, unbalanced London-centric economy, councils having neither the resources to build council houses on the scale that is needed nor the legal means to effectively ensure affordable housing for their own communities.

Wales received only £632 million from 2020 to 2023 from Westminster’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund to make up for annual EU structural funding of £367 million, lost as a result of Brexit. Was this Wales’ ‘reward’ for voting Leave, or its punishment? This swindle only shows that if Wales is poor, it is only because it is kept poor and that having voted Leave in the hope that their lives might improve, the people of Wales were once again held in contempt by Westminster.

It is often asserted that without a strong financial sector Wales does not have the economic heft that Scotland has, but that’s a circular argument: keep a country poor, and then say that it’s too poor to leave. Similarly, the small tax base is cited, but of course there’s a catch, VAT on goods bought in Wales in stores headquartered in England is counted as English, not Welsh revenue.

Independence is normal, as the 50 plus countries which have achieved independence from London will attest. That Wales puts up with its present plight is an indictment of the long hegemony of Welsh unionism, particularly in the politically dominant Labour Party.

Independence is, or should be a democratic choice, not a principle. States can deal with economic disparities, regional inequality and national questions without that state splitting up. There are, of course, other possibilities short of full independence: a looser, more democratic federation. A long and porous border with a much bigger and richer country makes England not so much the elephant in the room as the elephant next door. The ‘hows’ of independence need to be thought through, of course, but they have existed, in some form of another, in every independence issue around the world, and they have been resolved if there is a political will so to do. The minutiae of independence are beyond the scope of this short article which seeks only to support the growing normalisation of independence in Welsh political discourse. 

Independence carries risks; and bigger countries than Wales, bullied into austerity measures by the ‘troika’ or the IMF are acutely aware of the limits, in the present economic context, of independence. But then Wales is not exactly in a comfort zone right now, up against a corrupt and cynical Westminster establishment, whichever party is actually in power, an economy that only works for the South-east of England and an over-centralised and decadent body politic. It’s in that context that Wales must make its choice.