SIR,—Professor Gruffydd, in his article in the Spectator of March
11th, lists the wrongs suffered by one little country, Wales. I, Sir, beg leave to list some of the wrongs of another little country, England.
The Professor considers it a grievance that, when travelling by train from Cardiff (six miles from the border) to Caernarvon, he is taken along the old travel route Hereford—Shrewsbury—Chester, instead of the railway ignoring traffic requirements and pursuing a tortuous, expen- sive and traffic-barren route through the Welsh mountains. This is hardship enough in all conscience, but consider the horror an Englishman must feel at having to travel through Wales in order to reach another part of the United Kingdom, Ulster. One must sympathise with him, too, over the question of roads, which are apparently being improved with the idea of facilitating carriage of goods from the new trading estates in S. Wales to London and, the Midlands, instead of to areas which would be served by his North-South road through Wales. It is, of course, a pity that through most of its course such a road would serve a population with a density of (at a guess) about two persons to the square mile ; but it is the principle of the thing that counts.
To return to our own grievances as Englishmen ; we want the full development of all our own resources, and do not wish to see them frittered away on a neighbouring country. Wales takes our locomotives, cars, buses, radios, tractors, textiles, &c., and 7s. per ton for all the coal she produces. Her social services are subsidised by English money, Welshmen have infiltrated into the Ministries of Health and of Pensions, and it is high time that Englishmen called a halt to this aggression.
St. George for the English.—Yours faithfully, H. HUMPHREY. Swansea.
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