No Eyes Should Be Smiling

By means of whatever horrendous deal between themselves, a fully armed and highly active Marxist terrorist organisation (which believes its own Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, and which acts in full on that belief) is about to reactivate its carve-up of the government of Northern Ireland with a bizarre fundamentalist sect unconnected to mainstream Ulster Protestantism.

Such have proved the eventual fruits of Stormont, and of the failure of Labour, in particular, to field candidates in Northern Ireland.

Those calling for yet further powers for the devolved body in Scotland (although the mind boggles as to what exactly, and it never received fifty per cent support even as it is), those calling for further powers for the devolved body in Wales (only ever supported by about a quarter of the electorate anyway, a quarter which did not include the majority even of those who voted in solidly Welsh-speaking Ceredigion, Flintshire, Denbighshire or Wrexham), those seriously calling for the national political parties in Scotland to declare UDI (thus disenfranchising Scottish voters at General Elections), and those who will soon enough make such serious calls in Wales, think on.

Incidentally, I have been asked about this business of devolution and the Welsh language (a reserved matter, and rightly so). Its supporters and beneficiaries are not people who wish to do their shopping in Welsh. If they were, then they would simply move to a Welsh-speaking area, several of which, as set out above, very understandably voted No.

Very understandably, because those supporters and beneficiaries are people who wish to be able to switch into Welsh secure in the knowledge that the likes of shop assistants cannot then understand what they are saying, and who have a long history of securing (not least from the Tories) the legislative exclusion of Wales's English-speaking eighty per cent (all of the other twenty per cent are completely bilingual - no one speaks only Welsh) from the best jobs, amenities and opportunities.

Such is now Wales's ruling class, exactly as predicted by Leo Abse in the devolution debates of the Seventies.