WHAT WALES WANTS
By PROFESSOR W. J. GRUFFYDD, M.P.
Now what does Wales want ? Does she want a Minister for Welsh affairs as promised by the Conservatives and refused by Labour ? Does she want Home Rule, and, if so, of what kind ? These ques- tions have been asked over and over again during the last eighty years, but the answer is by no means obvious, unless we realise that these changes in governmeht are not regarded as an end in them- selves, but as a means to secure what English politicians have never understood. Means and ends are different things ; that may appear to be a truism hardly deserving mention, but the inability to make this elementary distinction has, in the past, made the problem look much more formidable than it is. The majority of Welshmen want a Secretary of State, and a considerable portion of the nation wants Home Rule ; but by stating these bare facts we do not touch the matter which is at the root of our discontent. Welsh demands are not primarily political.
The Conservative Policy for Wales and Monmouthshire. (London. 6d.)
What Wales wants is the full development of all her own resources, material and cultural, and she desires it all the more passionately because she sees that, with the drift of the years, those resources of both kinds are diminishing. She has given a more than fair trial to one means to this end, a parliamentary government common to England and Wales, which goes back to the time of Henry VIII. This was combined, in the last few years, with an unparalleled degree of dependence on local government, which was inevitably consequent on the inability of the British Parliament to deal with purely Welsh issues. Having tried and found wanting this means of securing the full development of her natural resources, and in particular their full correlation with the rest of her national life, she now asks to be allowed to try other means. She wants to develop her social services and her education in her own way, which, rightly or wrongly, she considers superior to the English way ; she wants to be able to give official recognition and patronage to the Welsh language and its living literature and to all Welsh intellectual activities in the same degree as the English language and literature are recognised in England.
Many Englishmen will allow us our concern about our language and our institutions, but fail to see that in material matters we have equal, if not greater, reason for discontent. It will be sufficient to give a couple of examples which ought to convince the most sceptical. First, there are our railways, which are all without exception designed to serve England ; they all lead to London, with the result that com- munications in Wales are so chaotic as to make impossible anything like an integrated national life. All our. representative Welsh bodies, the Council of the National Eisteddfod, the Central Welsh Board and the religious conferences, are compelled to hold their meetings, not in Wales, but in Shrewsbury and often in London. The same mentality which planned our railways planned also such roads as we have, with the result that when I go from Cardiff to visit my native place in Caernarvonshire, I have to travel through England. And even today when we are all road-conscious, the millions to be spent " for the benefit of Wales " are not to be paid for a north-south road to serve Wales itself but to finance a vast Severn Bridge scheme to make more complete the dependence of South Wales on London and its separation from the rest of Wales.
The same sorry tale must be told of the Welsh water reserves. In a country which has one of the heaviest rainfalls in Europe, most of the villages and farms have to depend on any fluctuating volume of well water which happens to be the least inconvenient, and our waterworks, which have flooded two countrysides and dispossessed their dwellers, were built to supply Birmingham and Liverpool. These are a few of the many instances which Welshmen habitually quote to prove that the material resources of Wales have been ruth- lessly diverted from her own use. Sic nos non nobis.
Welshmen during the last two centuries have laid particular stress on the other life, that of the mind and spirit, and, rightly or wrongly, they think that if they were given the means of determining their own destiny, they could produce an example of national culture un- paralleled in the world, and anyone disposed to ridicule such a claim as an instance of national megalomania should spend some time among the quarrymen and farmers of North Wales or the coalminers of Aberdare and the anthracite districts. In some respects the cultural position, due largely to the enlightened policy of the Minis- try of Education during the last years, gives less reason for complaint than the material position, but it remains a fact that all interests which are specifically Welsh are still officially regarded as of little importance.
It seems to a Welshman that the attitude of English politicians towards Wales is conveyed by : " What does Wales want ? Whatever it is, she can't have it." We can make allowance for this bewildered intransigence in Englishmen, because by this time we are conditioned to accept it, and we admit that many leading Englishmen, within the limits of what seems to us an imperial Herrenvolk mentality, do genuinely try their best to understand not only what we want but why we want it ; but what shocks us is the deadly effect which political success in England has on Welshmen. It is no exaggeration to say that every Welsh politician (except some of those who repre- sent a completely anglicised constituency) first came into prominence by professing adherence to the idea of devolution for Wales or at least to the project of a Welsh Secretary of State, but as soon as they become members of the Government, they exhibit complete unconcern on matters on which they once professed complete con- viction. Even Lloyd George started his career, as his biographers show, as an extreme nationalist, but the limitations of office made it inconvenient for him to further the projects of his youth—with the notable exception of Welsh Disestablishment, which was made prac- tical politics by the fact that a great number of the Liberals of those days were Nonconformists. The Cabinet backed Disestablishment not because Wales wanted it, but because English Nonconformity wanted it.
That, then, is the real reason why Wales despairs of salvation as long as her political life is bound together with that of England. She has understood that an increase of Welsh influence in the Govern- ment is no guarantee of a more sympathetic attitude towards Welsh aspirations ; anyone who doubts my presentation should read the ministerial replies to the last two Welsh debates. I have already described the ends for which we strive ; parliamentary representation as a means to gain those ends has been an obvious failure, and now Wales is increasingly inclined to the only alternative, a Welsh Parlia- ment, roughly on the model of the North of Ireland Parliament, to
have absolute control of all purely Welsh concerns. As a stepping- stone towards that end, she would accept the creation of a Secretary
of State, or even of a Minister specially charged with Welsh affairs as proposed by the Conservatives. The Labour Government will give us neither ; instead, it has created a nebulous Advisory Council which will be representative not of the Welsh people but of the local authorities. Those same local authorities have already induced in Wales a bad attack of claustrophobia, and the only cure, in my opinion, is the open air of a national polity.
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