The Wrexham Connection

Ian Lucas, Labour MP for Wrexham, tried twice to get an answer out of David Cameron as to whether or not he would support further devolution to the Welsh Assembly. In the end, Cameron was reduced to claiming that since "neither of [his] two houses" (in fact, he has three) was in Wales, he would have no vote in the referendum on the matter which for some reason he wishes to hold next year. So, there we are, then. Further devolution to the Welsh Assembly is apparently of no interest to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

No one should be at all surprised, least of all the quarter of Welsh voters who opposed even the present level of devolution and the half who, since they could not bring themselves to turn out and vote for it, seem decidedly unlikely to wish to vote for anything further. All of the Conservative Party's Members of the Welsh Assembly voted for the motion calling for this referendum. Their party recently welcomed, with some fanfare, Lucas's predecessor, John Marek, who was fiercely anti-monarchist and anti-hunting while Labour MP for Wrexham, and who went on to become the founder and only ever Leader of Forward Wales, a Welsh separatist, Welsh-speaking supremacist, economically Hard Left, unyieldingly Politically Correct, Tommy Sheridan-endorsed, RMT-funded party which was only dissolved in January of this year.

There is no inherent connection between separatism and the Welsh language. In 1979, North Wales voted No in the same overwhelming numbers as did South Wales. In 1997, the split on devolution was east-west, whereas the language-based division of Wales in north-south. Those supporters and beneficiaries of devolution who can and do speak Welsh are certainly not people who wish to do their shopping in Welsh. If they were, then they would simply move to a Welsh-speaking area. But instead, they live in English-speaking areas, there to use the language as their upper-middle-class cordon sanitaire.

They wish to be able to switch into Welsh secure in the knowledge that the likes of waiters, shop assistants and taxi drivers cannot then understand what they are saying. They would hate to live in "Welsh Wales", where that is not the case. And they 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. It is no wonder that, even of those who voted, the majority in Ceredigion, Flintshire, Denbighshire or, for that matter, Wrexham voted No to devolution. Long may the Welsh language remain a reserved matter. But don't bet on it under Cameron.

Will Cameron also recruit, if he has not already done so, Marek's fellow founder-members of Forward Wales: Ron Davies, one of the very few former Cabinet Ministers without a seat in either House, and a noted campaigner both against shooting and for the abolition of the monarchy, recalling Marek's own parliamentary question to Tony Blair requesting that the Oath of Allegiance be replaced with something acceptable to anti-monarchists; Graeme Beard, a former Plaid Cymru councillor in Caerphilly; and Klaus Armstrong-Braun, who in his time on Flintshire County Council was the only Green Party member ever elected at county level in Wales? Cameron has already signed up Mohammad Asghar, a Member of the Welsh Assembly who has moved seamlessly from Plaid Cymru to the Cameroons.