The W-Word

Or is it, in the nicest possible way, the C-word?

It is suggested that I am against the Welsh language. I am not. I am against the supporters and beneficiaries of devolution (which received barely one quarter of the eligible vote when put to a referendum), who can and do speak Welsh, but who 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.

Those supporters and beneficiaries are people who 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 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 solidly Welsh-speaking Ceredigion, Flintshire, Denbighshire or Wrexham voted No to devolution. Long may the Welsh language remain a reserved matter.

Indeed, long may all the current reserved matters remain so. And long will they. Between them, the massive English-speaking majority in the South and the still largely God-fearing Welsh-speakers of the North - who see the increasing use of the distant and inaccessible Assembly to impose what is now the extremely secularised culture of South Wales on the Principality as a whole - could and would easily turn seventy-four per cent non-endorsement even of the present modest arrangements into more than fifty per cent rejection of anything further, in the wildly unlikely event that the legislation for any such plebiscite were ever passed by both Houses at Westminster.