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Five Fallacies of Devolution

Five Fallacies of Devolution

+ Jane Aaron Words come alive in the downturn Five fallacies Labour’s referendum ground war of devolution Terrific twins of the constitution Deian Hopkin Student fees challenge universities Geraint Talfan Davies Forced marriage between and the BBC Dai Smith and our collective memory Tom Nairn Globalisation and national identity Trevor Fishlock Elaine Morgan’s flavour of Jan Morris Catastrophe turned into art Helena Braithwaite In defence of music

www.iwa.org.uk | Winter 2010 | No. 42 | £5 The Institute of Welsh Affairs gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Waterloo Foundation. The following organisations are corporate members:

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It Cardiff and Valleys Secretariat c/o Llio Ellis get elected to Labour’s would be a great opportunity for him to 3 De Clare Drive, this Autumn. transform himself into the national figure , Cardiff CF15 8FY The referendum in early March he deserves to be. It would also be a great Tel: 07971 246116 will not be held in the most propitious opportunity for his party to demonstrate IWA Women circumstances. February is not a good that it is comfortable with devolution c/o Kirsty Davies month for campaigning. Dark nights and united in making it work for Wales. [email protected] and bad weather lead to poor turnouts. Carwyn and Labour should seize the Tel: 07900 692898 By then, too, the chance with both hands. Wales in London c/o Robert John First Base, 22 Ganton Street, London W1F 7BY Tel: 020 7851 5521 agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 1 Contents a 2 3 Agenda 42 | Winter 2010 Politics Law

4. Essay 24. Five fallacies 38. The emerging When anger breaks into of devolution need for a Welsh metaphorical music Gerald Holtham calls for jurisdiction Jane Aaron on how words a sensible debate on tax John Williams argues that can come alive at times of varying powers for the as the body of distinctive stress in a community National Assembly grows so too will tensions within the 10. IWA News 29. Terrific twins of Welsh unitary system constitutional thought 12. Outlook David Melding reflects on 41. Reforming Welsh law Comprehensive the impact of the Holtham Richard Percival reviews Spending Review and Richard Commissions the Law Commission’s Cover photograph: from the book written by Trevor Fishlock, –Eurfyl ap Gwilym engagement with Wales photographed by Andrew Molyneux, –Steve Thomas 30. Labour’s referendum since devolution published by Graffeg (see page 33). –Phil Cooper ground war –Mike German Mark Drakeford argues for a new level of sophistication in the design of the Yes campaign for the referendum next March 4 5 Education Social Policy 1 32. ’s Cambrian Mountains accommodation 44. Going it alone 50. Gift economy rolls to gradualism by default out across Wales 18. Blotting out the mid John Dixon asks how long Philip Dixon says the Welsh Ben Dineen explains how Wales landscape his party can combine a Government education a timebanking initiative Ann West says the Cambrian pragmatist present with an department’s ‘made in is transforming some of Mountains should become idealistic future Wales’ solutions need to be Wales’s most deprived an Area of Outstanding a good deal better than they communities Natural Beauty 34. An ill-considered have been outcome of early 52. Overcoming the 20. A beacon for morning horse- 46. University challenge complexities of the our times trading Deian Hopkin says the global marketplace David Austin describes a John Cox finds that AV student fees increase in Eva Trier looks at some heritage project to restore for Westminster elections England gives Wales an examples of firms which are Strata Florida’s place at would have devastating opportunity to create a challenging conventional the cultural heart of the consequences in Wales more distinctive higher ways of doing business Cambrian Mountains education system 54. Schooling outside 22. Cambrian 48. Opening their mouths the mainstream Mountains brand to prove they’re Welsh Rhys David reports on an Peter Davies outlines an Rhian Siân Hodges and alternative to the classroom initiative to develop one of Delyth Morris discover why for excluded children that is Wales’ most cherished but parents are choosing Welsh- proving a success neglected heartlands medium education for their children in the Rhymney Valley

2 | www.iwa.org.uk www.clickonwales.org Newsflash 6 7 Coming Up Media Culture Opportunities for a Confederal University in South West Wales Future of s4c 70. Fishlock’s File Friday 3 December 2010, 10.00am – 3.30pm A writer who brings Halliwell Centre, University of Wales Trinity St David, 58. Forced marriage out the flavour Carmarthen between S4C and of Wales Keynote speakers: AM, Education BBC should open a Trevor Fishlock celebrates Minister, ; Sir Deian Hopkin, former Vice Chancellor, London South Bank University; Dr wider debate the career of Elaine Morgan Medwin Hughes, Vice-Chancellor and Dr Meri Huws, Geraint Talfan Davies Pro Vice Chancellor Innovation, Skills and Community, accuses Culture Minister 72. Retaining our University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Jeremy Hunt of acting public memory £65 (£52 IWA members) like a Tudor Monarch Dai Smith explores the in dispatching S4C’s culturally fragmented Coffee Shop Debate: autonomy and materially insecure What Wales can learn from Ethiopia with Hywel Meredydd Davies, Director, Tearfund Wales collective biography of Tuesday 11 January 2011, 6.30pm – 7.30pm, 60. We need a new Welsh south Wales  Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff story once more Peter Edwards warns 75. Why we need to North Wales Branch Annual Dinner against ourselves defend music in with First Minister Carwyn Jones into a self-regarding the land of song Thursday 13 January 2011, St George’s Hotel, introverted place Helena Braithwaite explains Llandudno, Reception 7.30pm Dinner 8.00pm how access to music is £37.50 (£30 IWA members) Table for 10: £300 63. More has meant less becoming a lottery in in S4C’s expansion today’s Wales Launch of IWA Inspire Wales Awards 2011 Roger Williams says the Tuesday 25 January 2011, 11.00am, City Hall, Cardiff channel should reinvent Official launch of the 2011 competition(Entry free) itself as mainstream service 81. Reviews after the 7pm watershed National identities School Innovation in the Middle Years Conference to launch the IWA’s study on school after globalisation attainment at Key Stage 3 67. Maybe the next Tom Nairn Tuesday 1 March 2011, 10.00am – 4.00pm cultural revolution Catastrophe turned WJEC, , Cardiff will not be televised into a work of art Keynote speakers: Steve Upton, IWA Research Mari Beynon Owen argues Jan Morris Officer and Professor David Egan, UWIC, plus case that loyalty to a brand A dragon at war studies from six secondary schools across Wales that overrides the remote John Osmond £65 (£52 IWA members) is no longer valid for any Mirages in a broadcaster Scottish landscape IWA National Economy Conference Chris Harvie in association with PricewaterhouseCoopers Interface between the public and private sectors 68. When the time is right Magical story reveals Friday 11 March 2010, 10.00am – 5.00pm As Planet marks its two a coming force Parc Hotel, Cardiff hundredth number Ned Ifor Thomas Keynote speakers: Gerald Holtham, Chair, Thomas looks back at the Welsh Government’s Commission on Funding and magazine’s earliest days Finance for Wales and Professor Kevin Morgan, 88. Last Word Cardiff University Peter Stead £90 (£72 IWA members)

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Essay a —Essay When anger breaks into metaphorical music Jane Aaron on how words can come alive at times of stress in a community

Articles Some of the most notable writings ever composed in English in Wales were conceived under apparently very inauspicious circumstances. Here is Dylan Essay: Thomas’s sister’s account of how he spent his days during the period in which he wrote And death shall have no dominion, The force that through the green fuse drives When anger the flower and about forty more of the pieces preserved in his Collected Poems. It’s breaks into January 1933, Dylan is nineteen, out of work, and living at home in Swansea with metaphorical his parents and irate sister who writes in her diary: music “Dylan has just risen (11.30) … He stays in bed most mornings & then gets IWA News up and writes. In the evening he visits Danny. Unless he gets any sum of money – then he goes and drinks. What will become of him Heaven Outlook: knows… I must stop; ink is wanted by raving brother… Mother has just Comprehensive been in & given me a bloody row over the ink question. ‘Dylan has got Spending to work & now no ink, etc. ‘Not fair for the child,’ etc.” Review What are the conditions of composition here? Firstly there’s plenty of free time Euryl ap Gwilym – time to muse long in bed in the mornings over lines and images which have Steve Thomas surfaced overnight, and all the time in the world to write them down after getting Phil Cooper up. The poet evidently feels no distracting guilt about the fact that he’s jobless – why should he, given that half of the south Wales labour force was jobless in 1933? Mike German Secondly he has at least one receptive and well-informed friend with whom he can fully share his work and discuss it – in this case, Danny, that is Daniel Jones, later himself to gain fame as a composer. Thirdly, his material needs (including the ink) are being supplied by a staunch patron who believes devoutly in the value of his ‘work’ – in this case, Mother.

In fact these are ideal conditions for creativity. What the Welsh Academi, the Arts Council of Wales and other bodies which wish to support the present generation of writers need to do is to fulfil the roles taken by Danny and Mother in this extract, and supply the creative stimulus of receptive involvement with the work along with the material needs – the ink – of likely achievers. The free time and guiltless freedom from other responsibilities and commitments we are currently expecting the present Coalition Government to supply through its policy of severe job cuts.

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This may seem a ludicrously simplified Dafydd is rooted in a working-class account of the relation between community which does not expect creativity and economic crisis. But to nourish artists. But the closure of —Essay there are numerous literary examples the only works left in the area turns like it, examples relating both to writers’ the situation on its head, and he can When anger breaks into lives and the lives of their fictional flourish at home as an artist without characters. In his 1982 novel Rumours having to feel irresponsible. of Fulfilment, for example, Robert metaphorical music Watson gives us a straightforward In terms of Welsh writers’ lives, as account of the transition from worker to opposed to those of their fictional artist in the case of one lucky inhabitant creations, many examples of this of a fictional industrial village above type of transition could be provided, Swansea during the early years of the particularly dating from that long Thatcher regime. Born in 1947 in the period of economic depression in the then Gwent mining town of Newbridge, late 1920s and 1930s. To take one Watson himself went through periods example, there seems to have been no of sporadic employment before taking parental expectation that Rhys Davies a degree and ending up as a college would do anything other than spend lecturer and novelist. In his novel his days helping to man his family’s we’re introduced to Dafydd who ‘was grocery shop in Blaenclydach just potentially gifted, but had no desire to above Tonypandy. After leaving school develop his gifts by moving away’ from at fourteen, he was trained for no other his natal village. Although the local occupation. But during the industrial tinplate works has already closed down blight which hit the mining villages after by the time Dafydd leaves school, the First World War, the Blaenclydach there are still some opportunities for shop was not flourishing, there were employment in the area, and he feels other sibling mouths to feed, and in bound to take up the workers’ role his 1920 Rhys Davies was released from society expects of him: the family business to make what he could of himself. He subsequently “These days you’ve got to think wrote of his career as a shop assistant in Dylan Thomas at nineteen. of earning a living, haven’t you? Photo: Jeff Towns/Dylans Bookstore, with thanks to Print of a Hare’s Foot (1969): Can’t live on dreams. You’ve got the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea. to be realistic these days, with “I always think of this period as a inflation and house prices going sister-in-law: ‘ “I’ve been doing a spot of burial, with myself lying somnolent up.” So it’s the local works for painting... real painting, art.” When he in a coffin, but visually aware of him. He would start full-time at first mentioned painting his sister-in-law the life going on around me, and Amalgamated Chemicals. had assumed he meant house-painting, content to wait until the time came but now she realises that for me to rise and be myself.” But it’s the 1980s, and Amalgamated Chemicals closes down abruptly. “Far from diminishing Dafydd, In many of the nineteen novels and Dafydd was given ten days notice unemployment seemed to have thirteen short story collections he and then found himself without any enabled him to grow again... He published after his emergence from this prospect of work in the area. It was should have been desperately coffin, the idea of work as a living death like the closure of the tinplate works all miserable, kicking his heels, wasting - particularly the type of work on offer over again. Released from the nine-to- time down the Club with the other to most of the young men of his locality five job and from the social expectation abandoned men, growing old - is a dominant theme. In The Withered that he should work, Dafydd promptly and weak. Instead [...] he not only Root, for example, the Rhys Davies returns to his first love – art. He tells his survived, he developed.” novel which has just been republished

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in the Library of Wales series, he describes his Who writes of love and pride. young collier protagonist, Reuben Daniels, as having a poet’s imagination which but increases ‘O why do you waste your time, young man, the bitterness of his employment: Alone on the mountain side?’ I want to go down to the valley some day “He saw the days march down upon him with To sing of love and pride. monotonous certainty, an endless succession of tramps in the dawn to the pit, the descent However, in a subsequent 1945 poem Come in the cage with the thought of annihilation Down he is hailed by a summons to give up always insistent in his mind, the grovelling and dreaming. His stricken community needs his the picking by the pale gleam of his lamp, the contribution again, not as a manual worker now, weary tramp back and up into the grey world, but as a creative artist who will give expression to evenings that would become desolate and to their politicised sense of outrage at what the barren too, and forever, forever a silent torture manipulations of the capitalist system has made Rhys Davies in his vanquished soul.” of their lives:

Another frustrated collier poet, Jude (his name Come down, young mountain dreamer, no doubt a reference to Thomas Hardy’s novel to the crowded public square on working-class frustrations, Jude the Obscure) Where anger breaks into music and thrills features in Idris Davies’s 1938 poetry sequence through the common air, Gwalia Deserta: And leave to fade behind you the fantasies you fed He is digging in the dark, From the sentimental sluices of a culture Jude who would the poet be, dying and dead. And dreaming of the distant isles And the summer on the sea. Come down from the mindless mountain and let your day dreams die Not for always shall he grope On the aimless wind that wanders across the In the galleries of grime – friendless sky, ’Tis sure he shall be shouldered, And come with your senses quickened and And need nor pick nor rhyme. give of the best you can To speed the day that knows anew the dignity But the year in which Gwalia Deserta is set is of man. 1926, and Jude is likely soon to be released from the mine, not in fact by death (that is, An economic crisis and resultant employment being ‘shouldered’), but by the Miners’ Strike here incites creativity in a way that differs from and subsequent unemployment, just as Idris the earlier examples. The crisis has politicised a Davies himself was. Idris Davies started work community and given it an ideological awareness as a collier in his local Rhymney pit at eleven, of its oppression. Its members are now alive was unemployed in 1926 and never returned to the manner in which their human potential to work in the mines, but by 1929 had become has been denied and distorted, not only by the a schoolteacher and burgeoning poet. In his numbing aspects of their employment but also second poetry sequence on the strike months, The by wage cuts, job shortages, lock-outs and the Angry Summer, the dreaming miner is out on the sudden closure of their workplaces in the ailing mountainside, in the sun, and reading poetry, still coal industry. Aroused to anger, the community rather dreamily: is calling upon its artists to give permanent expression to that anger, so that others may ‘What are you doing, young man, alone empathise with them. In the grass on the mountain side?’ I’m reading a bit of Shakespeare A scene from Gwyn Thomas’s novel about the

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‘Watching this is like listening to great music, only greater, much greater… I’ll never forget this moment… Fifty thousand of the oppressed banding together against a common injury... I feel… I feel like an eagle…’

Idris Davies (top) Gwyn Thomas

Depression years in south Wales, Sorrow for thy feels himself summoned to give permanent Sons (written 1936-7) effectively fictionalises this expression in art to the ‘music’ of their anger. moment of anger breaking into metaphorical music. By the mid 1930s, Hugh Evans, the Another ex-miner who was quite literally central protagonist of the novel, is unemployed summoned to express in art the struggles of his (like Gwyn Thomas himself at the time of its community was Lewis Jones. In 1909, like Idris composition), facing increased cuts in his meagre Davies, Lewis Jones had become an eleven-year income through the newly-introduced Means old collier. After 1926 he, too, never worked down Test, and becoming embittered at the thought the pits again, but became an organiser for the that his life is being wasted, like the many lives National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. In around him in the Gwent and Glamorgan mining the mid 1930s his creative energies were directed villages. He has lost hope in the possibility of his down an alternative path by the then President community’s effective resistance and tells his of the South Wales Miners Federation, Arthur brother Alf: Horner, who, as Lewis Jones explains in the foreword to his first novelCwmardy , suggested “Ten years of unemployment for half the to him: population and worsened conditions of labour for the other half, have proved that intelligence, “…that the full meaning of life in the Welsh energy and vision, are destructible, even if mining areas could be expressed for the matter isn’t.’ Alf replies, ‘This Means Test insults general reader more truthfully and vividly if them. That might make a difference.’ And treated imaginatively, than by any amount of indeed it does. The shock of this further assault statistical and historical research. What I have brings the population out onto the roads in set out to do, therefore, is to ‘novelise’ (if I one of the huge anti-Means Test protests of may use the term) a phase of working-class the period, ‘thousands of men, women and history… The work is really collective, in the children… marching eight deep.” sense that my fellow workers had to fight the battles I try to picture… It was written during Hugh is intensely exhilarated as he witnesses the odd moments stolen from mass meetings, march, and tells his brother: committees, demonstrations, marches, and other activities.” “Watching this is like listening to great music, only greater, much greater… I’ll never forget It is the sense of collective experience created this moment… Fifty thousand of the oppressed by the conditions under which his community banding together against a common injury... laboured, and the impossibility of sustaining any I feel… I feel like an eagle…” worthwhile existence under those conditions, that Lewis Jones wishes to stress in his fiction. The Awakened by insult the crowd manifests anew strength of his work lies in his ability to convey that ‘the dignity of man’ in their protest against the mass experience. The ‘mass’ in most English novels degradations of the Means Test and the writer is represented as a threat, but in Cwmardy and

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in its sequel We Live it is a living force addressed to him, though without will emerge in response to today’s which embodies all that is best in the actually naming him. hard times is also very likely to express aspirations of its individual members. In itself in newly popular genres. Perhaps this instance the economic crisis is not The poem to which she refers is this will become the moment when serving as an incentive to art because called Bonanza, published in her 1983 blogging, for example, is recognised as unemployment has freed the writer’s collection Looking Inland, and it reads: an art form. time - Lewis Jones has very few leisure hours. However, the newly politicised ‘Words,’ he told me, trying to At any rate, according to their own consciousness of the people he’s now be helpful, testimony, it was their experience of working for demands from him this ‘Respond through craft and the 1984-5 Miners Strike, and of local permanent literary record of their concentrated effort. pit closures, which first politicised the communal experience and ideological A recluse alone can have the time Manic Street Preachers and inspired awakening. For the ceaseless innovation their compositions. Twelve pits were And the hours of contemplation.’ closed in their home town, Blackwood, A sense of outrage at an insult to one’s in 1984, leaving it suddenly a mining human capacities can prove a potent So that was the end of that. town without mines. “We got into wake-up call to creative potential, music when the Miners’ Strike was particularly when it is experienced Then, in between happening, and that had a massive politically as well as personally, as an Washing some nappies, preparing a bearing on us,’ Nicky Wire is quoted insult to a whole group of which one lesson, kneeding the bread in Simon White’s 1999 book about is a member. During the second half And lambing a speckled-face ewe, the group, Everything. The lyrics they of the 1970s and the 1980s, the long- I stumbled over a poem; and now composed during those years speak term consciousness-raising effects they spring up ironically of the likely destiny of their of the second wave of the Women’s Haphazard as mushrooms after generation, such as these from the 1985 Liberation Movement began to August rain. album Black Holes for the Young: energise a new wave of women poets Glistening, and jostling to be picked. in Wales. The processes by which Lots of sun for you, young boy, they were incited to creativity are She, like Lewis Jones during the Lots of sun for you today. relevant in this context, not because Depression years, would not appear to Subsidise the opera, forget coal... unemployment as such provided have had the time in which to write, You’ve got some black holes for the incitement, but because it was but writing was provoked out of her by the young. similarly the result of an awakening insult operating as a challenge. That to an ideological awareness that is a very likely and potent response to The black hole of the pits may have one’s potential had been denied. For widespread unemployment. And, of closed, but another black hole – example, Christine Evans apparently course, by today unemployment as an unemployment – is yawning wide began writing very much in response insult affects women as much as men, in front of those who had expected to such an insult , thoughit would not given the changed nature of the labour continued employment in Wales’s appear to have been an intentional force since the early 1980s. heavy industries. And yet since 1985 one. As she puts it, in her 2006 book the Manics themselves have lived much Island Poet: During the 1980s, a number of writers in the sun in another more positive were similarly challenged to creativity sense, their creativity has won them “I met the poet R. S. Thomas, our in part by the insult of unemployment, world-wide fame. vicar in ... we talked either their own or that of their about poetry. He told me that I’d communities. We might instance Chris In one of his later lyrics, the song 1985 never be able to write because I Meredith and his 1988 novel Shifts, from the 2004 album Lifeblood, Nicky wouldn’t have the time and that for example, or the early plays of Ed Wire connects the awakening of this young women tended to write Thomas, like House of America, also creativity with the Miners’ Strike crisis. about the same sort of things, not published in 1988. But I’ll close with The strike is presented as the last stand very original. He may have said this some pop lyrics from the 1980s, in part of the Welsh industrial communities, deliberately, but it challenged me as an acknowledgement of the fact that which group defensively together in the – so the first poem I published was the new wave of creativity we hope face of their potential destruction:

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Manic Street Preachers, pictured here for their latest album Postcards from a Young Man released earlier this year, derived much of their musical creativity from the 1984-5 miner’s strike.

Circle the wagons, But though 1985 is a time fraught so many redundant, and thrown on we’re under attack, with destructive crisis, it proves the scrap-heap. Their anger is thus not we’ve realised there’s curiously potent: only personal but political. It voices no going back’. the experience of a generation and a In 1985, my words they came alive. community. Their sense of speaking They’re fighting against a government for their community gives their words whose authority they refuse to What energised their words in that power and authenticity. They are ‘4 recognise – it’s a ‘Civil War’. But particular time and place when one Real’, as were the other poets, novelists the ‘Civil War’ fails, and they’re left might have expected nothing but and dramatists whose words also ‘came mourning the ‘walking dead’ of their desolation? In part it was the shake- alive’ during the economic crises of community, whom the lyrics associate up that widespread unemployment 20th Century Wales. with the ‘walking dead’ of other Welsh gave to their whole sense of who they communities now facing redundancy were and what they could become. such as the chapel culture: It was their guilt-free release from Jane Aaron is Professor of English traditional work identities and from at the University of Glamorgan. This See all the tears for the walking dead... social expectations related to those article is taken from her presentation to redundant as a sad Welsh chapel, work identities. At the same time the the IWA’s conference Creativity in Hard in 1985, in 1985... energy also comes from their sense of Times, held in the Millennium Centre, outrage at a situation which has made Cardiff Bay in October.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 9 News

• Growing a more civil economy –with the democracy work. As former First the Wales Co-operative Centre. Minister has put it: • Transition to a low carbon economy – News with Cynnal Cymru – Sustain Wales. “As well as horizontal devolution – • Democratising media ownership and spreading power and responsibility content – with NUJ Wales. more widely – we have to have vertical • Growing participatory and devolution as well. I have sometimes Growing Welsh deliberative democracy – with tried to sum up this dimension by Civil society Cymru Yfory- Tomorrow’s Wales. describing our devolution settlement as a shift from crachach to gwerin, from The proceedings of the seminars will government by a self-replicating élite The IWA is generating a debate about form the basis of a report to be published to a new engagement with a far wider how a Carnegie UK Trust report Making by the IWA, with the support of the and more representative group of Good Society relates to the emergence Carnegie Trust, in the New Year. Wales people, women and men, people from of a Welsh civil society during a decade is a testing ground for the messages north and south Wales, Welsh speakers of devolution. The project has involved contained in the Trust’s report. Prior and not, black people as well as white, four seminars held at the Pierhead to devolution it could be argued that and so on.” Building in Cardiff Bay during October there was a civil society in Wales but and November, each engaging with a not a Welsh civil society. The coming A little over a decade into the Welsh specific dimension of the Carnegie report of the National Assembly was about devolution experiment, this project and each organised in partnership with the creation of a new democracy in will assess how far this aspiration has another Welsh organisation as follows: Wales and a new civil society to make been achieved.

Engaging Wales’ disengaged youth

A new report on the education, employment or of the Valleys Programme. In problem of young people training (NEET) has remained addition Teresa Foster Evans who are ‘not in education, at a consistent level of around who runs Cyfle, a employment or training’, 12,000, between 10 and 12 County Council pupil referral just published by the IWA, per cent, for the past decade. unit which takes care of echoes recommendations There are young people in disaffected female students, put forward by the National this category up to their mid- and Charlotte Blackwell a Assembly’s Enterprise and twenties, but 16 to 18-year- former student at the unit, Learning Committee in olds are especially vulnerable explain how it operates. October. These called for because they lie between the Welsh Government the period of compulsory One issue underlined in the to appoint a Minister with education and eligibility for report is what is called the responsibility for the problem welfare interventions. revolving door syndrome, be available to them, and nationally and to identify a in which young people get so an important part of lead agency to co-ordinate The report contains chapters moved from one programme to encouraging young people’s work at the local level. by Howard Williamson, another without experiencing voice will be to engage in Professor of European Youth any real benefit. As the IWA’s a dialogue about realistic The report Engaging Wales’ Policy at the University of Research Officer, Stevie Upton, options. But if we are to be disengaged youth is based Glamorgan, Richard Newton, who edited the report, asks in successful in reducing the on the proceedings of a Director of Rathbone Cymru, her Introduction: number of young people conference organised by Mark Provis, Chief Education who are NEET there will, of the IWA’s Gwent Branch in Officer with Torfaen County “What are we preparing course, have to be options.” Pontypool in October 2009. Borough Council, and Frank these young people for? The proportion of young Callus, Strategic Manager for Certainly some of them will • Engaging Wales’ disengaged people in Wales aged between Education, Training and Skills have an inflated sense of youth is available from the 16 and 18 not engaged in Development with the Heads what opportunities might IWA at £5.

10 | www.iwa.org.uk www.clickonwales.org News

Awards continue to inspire

Following on from the success engagement, education. arts, of the inaugural IWA Inspire science, business, sport and Wales Awards in June, which the promotion of the Welsh attracted an audience of language. Sponsors so far more than 300 to Cardiff’s lined up for 2011 include City Hall, the event will be Leadership and Management repeated in 2011. Wales, Wales and West Utilities, With the backing of the Cardiff County Council and clickonwales.org to be , the IWA Western Power Distribution. established the scheme If you are interested in getting archived by British Library to recognise excellence, involved with the awards on As a result of an agreement stopped maintaining the to encourage the active either a corporate or individual with the National Library, site and, more importantly, involvement of citizens in level contact Emma Brennan the IWA’s online news if we stopped paying for it Welsh civil society, and to on 029 2066 0820 or email magazine Clickonwales.org to be hosted. While Google underline the importance [email protected]. is to be preserved for future archives ‘cached’ versions of innovation in the Welsh generations by the UK Web of websites, they cannot be economy. We are currently Archive Consortium. This is relied upon as an accurate looking for sponsors for the a partnership between the archive or backup. 2011 competition prior to the British Library, the National launch of the 2011 awards Library of Wales, the The sites which are most at in January. Wellcome Library, and the risk, and which the Archive The awards cover the fields Joint Information Systems aims to rescue from the void, of enhancing democratic Committee of the Higher and are so-called ‘grey literature’, Further Education Councils. which are not usually More women voices needed archived by Google. These The Consortium selects include Government-run sites The IWA’s Women Branch has against journalists seeking sites that publish research, that carry briefings, reports, launched a Database of 130 new contacts, as exacerbating demonstrate innovative use policy statements and other experts for use by journalists the imbalance. The Expert of the internet, or reflect the ‘ephemeral but significant seeking specialists who are Database addresses both of diversity of lives, interests and forms of information’, which willing to be interviewed. It these issues, by presenting activities throughout the UK. sometimes only exist online. has been created following the fields of expertise of over While it is open to everyone, When governments change, a study which showed that 130 women together with the UK Web Archive is pages put up by the previous women are under-represented comprehensive contact and designed to be of particular government are usually in both print and broadcast availability details for weekdays, use to teachers, journalists, deleted, and the information media in Wales. News stories evenings and weekends. academics and policy makers. lost. Google do not archive this on sport, business and politics Already it covers a diverse type of page. Both the Welsh in particular were found to be knowledge base, from The National Library is hoping Government and the National dominated by male experts. Yet entrepreneurship to asbestos to create a Special Collection Assembly Commission have even where a more balanced legislation, and from beauty for Wales within the archive. If given permission for their sites use of men and women is therapy to the tolls. this is achieved, Clickonwales. to be archived. achieved, the female experts The Database will continue org will be located there, as tended to be in less senior to developed and updated as well as in it’s present location Since its launch in April positions than the men. an important source of expert under Government, Law ClickonWales, which is At the IWA Women’s Making contacts. Journalists wishing and Politics, and Devolved updated daily with a widening a Mark in the Media Conference to receive a copy of the Government, helping to range of contributors, in March, journalists identified database, or women wishing extend our reach and visibility has steadily increased its women’s failure to put to have their details added, beyond Wales and the UK. audience. It is currently themselves forward for should contact Kirsty Davies, receiving more than 2,000 interview, compounded by the IWA’s Deputy Director, at Clickonwales.org would visits each week, with the tight deadlines that militate [email protected] vanish from the web if we number rising steadily.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 11 Outlook

Comprehensive Spending Review Analysis

Cuts should produce more than four years is unprecedented. cuts of some £500 million a year. changes in Welsh Historically sharp reductions have only According to the Welsh Government’s Government priorities lasted twelve to eighteen months. own estimate the cut in real terms over Eurfyl ap Gwilym The Review set out departmental the four years is 12 per cent. spending plans for the next four years and The sharp reduction in capital in the coming weeks each department is investment of 41 per cent is slightly lower due to publish a more detailed business than Labour’s planned 45 per cent plan. The Welsh Government’s overall reduction in real terms announced in their budget for each of the next four years is 2009 UK budget. Thus Labour’s attack on set out in Table 1. How this will impact the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s plans on each of the departments – health, so far as the Welsh budget is concerned education, economic development and ring a little hollow. In terms of ‘fairness’ it so on – will be made clear by the detailed would be naïve to expect Wales to get a Welsh budget for 2011-12 published in fair deal given that the changes to funding The strategy underlying the £81 billion late November. of the Welsh Government are determined cuts over next four years, announced in In practice the these figures are by the Barnett formula which is a simple the UK Government’s Comprehensive broadly in line with spending implied in and crude arithmetic exercise. The Welsh Spending Review in October, is Labour’s 2009 and 2010 UK budgets. Liberal Democrats are in the difficult to hope that it will lead to a rapid Labour planned to cut the Welsh position of defending the cuts for Wales revival in economic growth powered Government’s budget by £500 million a as ‘fair’ whilst condemning the Barnett by a revitalised private sector and a year for each of the coming three years formula as ‘unfair’. diminished public sector. (they did not forecast a fourth year). The While attention in Wales The burden of fiscal consolidation plans as announced this October call is concentrated on the Welsh is to be borne by spending cuts rather for a deeper cut in the first year of £860 Government’s budget, nearly 40 per than by increases in taxation. For million in real terms, offset by a smaller cent of identifiable public expenditure example, there were additional cuts to reduction of £325 million in the second is made through direct payments to the welfare budget which increased to year. By 2014-15 the Welsh budget will people in Wales by the UK Government. £18 billion compared with the £11 billion have been cut by £1.8 billion which Most of this spending is on welfare indicated in the June budget. Because reflects a continuation of Labour’s plans payments. These include state pensions, of our relatively high dependence on over the first three years of successive invalidity benefit, support for the welfare spending this will hit Wales disproportionately hard – rising to an Table 1: extra £963 million a year taken out of the Welsh Government’s budget 2010-15 - Welsh economy by the end of the period. £million real terms after correcting for inflation The Government has forecast that 490,000 jobs will be lost in the public 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15 sector, and hopes the private sector Revenue 13,445 13,015 12,795 12,602 12,311 will take up the slack. Most critics of Capital 1,674 1,244 1,139 994 1,007 this strategy accept the need for fiscal Total 15,119 14,259 13,934 13,597 13,318 consolidation but say spending should Source: Welsh Government be cut more slowly in order to avoid the risk of a double dip recession or, as is more likely, sustained slow economic Table 2: growth over the coming years. That UK Government spending in Wales - £ million would lead to continuing high levels of unemployment with the attendant Public order and safety 627 drop in tax take and increase in welfare Economic affairs, including transport 613 spending. Such an outcome could Recreation, culture and religion 146 undermine the planned reduction in Other 132 the fiscal deficit. Cutting spending over Total 1,518

12 | www.iwa.org.uk www.clickonwales.org Outlook unemployed, housing allowances and Wales has already lagged behind the Cuts will force mergers of tax credits. Given the planned cuts of rest of the UK in this area over the last functions if not boundaries £18 billion in the UK welfare budget, decade. Will the Welsh Government Steve Thomas significantly higher that planned in the cut capital spending this much or will it June 2010 budget, this will mean a cut boost capital investment at the expense of almost £1 billion a year in the case of of current spending? Whilst being Wales, when fully implemented. politically difficult this would be the While the removal of child tax right thing to do if Wales is to renew and credits for higher rate taxpayers will, by modernise its infrastructure. Another definition, hit the better off (about £90 possibility is for the Welsh Government million in Wales), the other welfare cuts to raise money in the private capital of £873 million will be borne by many of markets for investment in infrastructure the most vulnerable in our society. The such as roads and broadband. impact of these cuts will of course be felt Another concern has to be the impact more widely because those on the lowest of the Spending Review on employment. incomes cannot save but spend most of Wales’s share of the 490,000 jobs the UK the money locally on food, clothing and Government forecasts will be lost in the When the Chancellor George other essential items. public sector could be between 25,000 Osborne sat down after delivering his Approximately £1.5 billion a year is and 35,000. Is there scope for Welsh Comprehensive Spending Review it spent by the UK Government in Wales government at national and local levels was greeted with a mix of incredulity in other areas such as public order and to work with the trades unions to reduce in parts of the UK and with a resigned economic affairs, shown in Table 2. the impact of the cuts on employment sigh of some relief in others. On the It is not clear how much of this by trading off pay levels against staffing surface the headlines were nowhere spending will be cut. However, in levels? Wales responded well to the near the carnage for the devolved England police and culture budgets immediate aftermath of the banking crisis nations that was inflicted on English in England are suffering higher than with its ProAct and ReAct programmes. local government which suffered cuts average cuts and this will be reflected in Can it do the same now? of 33 per cent in real terms. As I toured the monies spent in Wales. If the strategy of the Spending the Welsh media after the event one It was noteworthy in the Chancellor’s Review works, job losses in the public journalist crystallized this with the statement and in the Spending Review sector will be off-set by growth in the question “Not too bad then?” documentation that little was said private sector. But even if this works The headline figures seem to confirm regarding Wales. A number of specific at a UK level will it work in Wales? this. True, the Welsh budget takes a commitments were made for , Will the skills of former public sector bigger hit than the other devolved including an additional £250 million workers match the needs of the private nations. However, according to Treasury through the Green Investment Bank for sector? Will the new jobs be created figures the Welsh Government will see infrastructure investment. In the case in Wales which has a relatively weak a 7.5 per cent real terms reduction in of Wales the and St private sector or will they continue to be revenue and another 41% reduction Athan defence establishment projects concentrated in south east England? in capital funds. Ironically it seems were both dropped in the run-up to the Over the past decade most of the that everyone’s favourite financial Spending Review. A couple of small, growth in private sector employment accounting ‘hate figure’, the Barnett local rail improvements were announced has been in financial services and formula, which received a ‘knock-out but the Review was silent on the construction whilst manufacturing blow’ with Gerry Holtham’s review, had proposed electrification of the London has continued to decline. Wales somehow got back on its feet and come to Swansea line. Meanwhile, there has traditionally been strong in out fighting. The protection of the NHS were commitments to a high speed link manufacturing but weak in financial in England and more limited protection from London to Birmingham, Crossrail services. These are some of the issues of schools were largely the services in London and major improvements that the Welsh Government has to face which delivered this outcome for Wales. to the London underground. Major as it decides its spending priorities. Any document marked with the commitments were to spending on words Treasury emblazoned on the science projects in London, Oxford and front requires time to analyse and but none in Wales. Eurfyl ap Gwilym is Plaid Cymru’s digest. All UK Budget statements are A major Welsh concern has to be economic adviser and sits on the boards complex documents full of more dark the 41 per cent cut capital spending. of a number of listed companies. arts than the collected works of J. K.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 13 Outlook

Rowling. Approach with care should services like social care are straining a repeat of what has been a golden age be the warning. Objectively it is the under the weight of growing numbers of of public expenditure over the past ten case that the outcome is at the better looked after children, particularly post years. Welsh local government awaits end of Welsh Government assumptions Baby Peter, and a potential adult social with a real measure of trepidation the in revenue terms. Yet the 3 per cent care bill which has already headed off Assembly draft budget and the local revenue and 10 per cent capital annual the graph towards the stratosphere. government provisional settlement in cuts formula put forward by Finance Is it surprising that there are huge late November. Minister were precisely fears of a visibly creaking social care Welsh Ministers have worryingly that, planning assumptions. They also system shunting huge costs to a indicated a desire to protect acute served to challenge the public sector protected NHS? In education the gap health care at a time when everyone and begin the process of galvanising between spending per pupil in England agrees that there should be a resource new thinking about different ways of and Wales could potentially grow larger shift to primary and social care (those delivering services under the auspices than the current £527 per annum, while NHS consultants don’t ever give up). of the Government’s Efficiency and the level of repairs required to depilated Skills and schools are also in the frame Innovation Board. In local government Welsh schools is estimated at £2.2 billion for protection plus the controversial these assumptions also allowed by the Wales Audit Office at a time when universal services. Yet when Assembly councillors and officers to start to think capital spending is decimated. I could politicians tramp the roads next April the unthinkable and begin what will be also highlight other massive service what the Welsh public will tell them very difficult ongoing negotiations with pressures such as municipal waste costs is that the services they care most the trade unions. but a Prozac would be required. about are within one hundred yards of Undoubtedly we are in for a torrid Then there is the assumption that their front doors. They include refuse time in local government as is the the private sector will arrive just in time collection, street lighting, the dreaded wider public sector in Wales. Others like the proverbial Seventh cavalry potholes in local roads, that pesky dog can argue about the smoke and mirrors coming over the Beacons to save us. mess, and those leisure services which of Treasury accounting, but the fact The public sector in Wales spends over provide much more than a game of remains that taken together the Welsh £4.3 billion a year on goods and services squash. Protecting these services will be Government’s budget will see a revenue with the private and voluntary sectors. impossible if the cuts are too deep. and capital reduction next year alone Discussions are underway on how new The scale of challenges ahead for the of nearly £582 million. Similarly, while service models might be developed with Welsh local authorities is enormous and this accounts for over half of public these sectors to maintain provision. That the pace of change will be relentless. expenditure in Wales (£15 billion) said, jobs that would have been largely Some will undoubtedly merge. Others will there are other huge budgets within private sector based in terms of large shift service provision to regional or even the welfare system, in non-devolved capital projects like the Severn Barrage national levels. The use of other providers departments like Environment, Food and the St Athan Training Academy will in the third sector or business will be a key and Rural Affairs and in not materialise. The groan of Welsh town factor. If the truth be told the long sought Services which take the totality of public planners, architects and construction after reorganisation is occurring, but in expenditure to some £28 billion. Indeed workers looking to these projects as the functions and not structures. across the four forces the Welsh police salvation for their jobs was audible. Finally what happens if the UK are working on a real terms cut of some The relative structural weakness of Government’s hugely ambitious 20 per cent. This is equivalent to £80 the Welsh private sector is at the heart assumptions about private sector million, a figure which not far short of this. Despite the spend per head on job creation and cost benefit savings of Dyfed Powys Police entire revenue economic development being higher simply don’t materialise? John Kenneth budget of £93 million. It is hardly a great in Wales than in any other part of the Galbraith once colourfully stated that shock therefore that the idea of Elected UK (equivalent to £80 for every Welsh “the only function of economic Police Commissioners has been greeted person), our gross value added per forecasting is to make astrology look in Wales with the same enthusiasm as head has fallen further behind the UK respectable”. While no one can know heavy rain at the Ryder Cup. average, from 80 per cent in 2002 to 74 whether the Chancellors strategy will Welsh local government will be per cent in 2008. work, what we do know is that it will hurt tasked with delivering huge cuts to It is imperative for the Government in Wales. housing and council tax benefit in to tackle the huge structural deficit. It communities which are some of the is also time to fully come to terms with Steve Thomas is Chief Executive of the poorest in the UK. This is at a time when the fact that we will wait decades to see Welsh Local Government Association.

14 | www.iwa.org.uk www.clickonwales.org Outlook

More Welsh-based or higher taxes will become inevitable Growth firms need to access skills procurement provides and consumer confidence could stall. and have a healthy appetite for cash. a way forward The only way to solve the problem Both are in short supply. Innovation Phil Cooper of rising unemployment is to induce the is critical for the future development economy to grow again. Yet the greater and competitiveness of growth firms. reliance on the public sector in Wales, But our innovation policy has focused together with the fragility of our business more on landmark buildings to house climate, heightens the responsibility to innovating firms than helping them with get our public policy right. The recovery their research and development costs. is all about jobs. Creating more jobs Productivity also requires investment. means faster economic growth and Yet the repayable grant system to greater income for the Government with support research and capital investment less outlay through the benefits system. simply does not work on pre-revenue The crucial questions revolve innovative projects. The closure of around whether the Coalition the Welsh Government’s international One wry commentator on the government can create the right division is also a worrying sign when Comprehensive Review remarked that conditions for growth and whether growth firms need to look outside the the Chancellor was inspired by Jean- the Welsh Government’s economic UK market for expansion, a fact which Baptise Colbert, Louis XIV’s treasury renewal programme is appropriate to our new polices seem to overlook. minister, who said that the art of taxation drive the private sector growth needed However, there is hope. was “to pluck the maximum amount of to compensate for the cuts. Procurement is an excellent way to feathers from the goose with the least Drivers for generating private create jobs although the £4.5 billion amount of hissing”. The private sector sector employment are: start ups, spent by the public sector in Wales was quietly supportive but the hissing the expansion of existing firms and could get smaller as a result of the from the public sector has been loud and encouraging companies to move into Comprehensive Spending Review. continuous given the 500,000 jobs to be Wales. However, the creation of jobs is Around half of this spend is procured cut over the next four years. Wales will hampered by a profusion of regulations outside Wales. It should be a Welsh be hit particularly hard, with an expected and legislation which have multiplied Government mantra that for every 50,000 job losses given our economy is so in recent years, especially for SMEs 1 per cent retained in our country, dominated by the public sector. which dominate the Welsh economy. approximately 2,000 jobs are created. However, since the amount of Current employment law is a minefield Despite this there are many barriers duplication and inefficiencies in parts of which places a disproportionate burden facing the SME sector. Many companies the public sector are so high these losses on SMEs and is a barrier to their feel the public sector is biased towards could take place without any decline of employment growth potential. larger firms, often based outside Wales, services as many will come from natural The specific focus in the Welsh which have a superior brand image wastage or efficiency drives. Our leaders Government’s Economic Recovery and professional tendering teams. As a will have an opportunity to break away Plan on only supporting growth firms result they are perceived to offer lower from conventional approaches and in six sectors penalizes excellent firms exposure to risk. think about how public services can in other sectors of the economy which Welsh firms must be more proactive be delivered by fewer people for less have proven job creation capabilities. and invest more time and effort in the money. It also gives the private sector Recent studies by NESTA and McKinsey tendering process and not ignore the an opportunity to introduce innovative show that few growth firms came from potential for collaboration with the solutions which focus on outcomes Government-supported sectors. Warren larger firms to obtain sub-contract work. rather than process. Buffet confirms this as his portfolio SMEs are being made fully aware of A plan for tackling the deficit was invests in growth firms in traditional the public sector procurement processes announced but it is not clear how sectors which are overlooked by in order to overcome real or perceived the Chancellor can create the right Governments. In abandoning its support barriers. For example, the Supplier conditions to put the UK back on a path for growth firms outside the chosen Development Service provides guidance to growth. The gamble he has taken sectors, the Welsh Government could to SMEs on all aspects of engaging with depends on whether he can bring down be risking the employment-creating the public sector and in particular the the deficit without killing off growth. For prospects of many firms, particularly Pre-Qualification Questionnaire process without economic growth deeper cuts those in the poorest areas of Wales. through which potential providers are

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 15 Outlook

short-listed. The public sector must We should look to private No one in their right mind would support and engage with this supplier sources for capital spending keep piling debt and interest charges on education agenda to maximise the Mike German to the country’s credit card, sacrificing economic impact. the future prosperity of our country and Wales also has EU structural funding placing a weight of debt to be repaid by to help reshape its economy and create our children. Faced with £120m a day the new jobs but the Wales European of interest – money going to no good Funding Office should engage more public use – the government was right with the private sector rather than focus to act swiftly. on the Welsh Government’s pet projects By way of comparison, the UK ratio which have failed to provide a return. of debt to wealth, is similar to that of The Spending Review poses many Spain, a country which is struggling to challenges to our fragile economy. At the escape recession. Even with the tough same time it provides an opportunity for times ahead for our deficit reduction the public and private sectors to work programme, Spain is intending to bring closer together to capture the enormous its deficit below the 3 per cent ratio a goodwill of those who want Wales to Wales, like the rest of the UK and year earlier than the UK. succeed in developing a more robust much of Europe, has had to face up It is to the credit of the UK economy with a stronger indigenous to the challenge of deficit reduction. government that Wales, Scotland and base. The private sector will rise to the The pain for Wales will be less than Northern Ireland have received a challenge if given the opportunity. for the UK as a whole in terms of its lesser burden to bear than England as revenue spending. But there are difficult a whole. In particular, the protection Phil Cooper is the Chief executive of decisions to be made in how capital of health and education budgets in Venture Wales that provides business expenditure will be dealt with over the England has meant some respite for the support for SMEs. coming 3-4 years. Welsh Government. The almost audible Outlook

sighs of relief from officials in Cardiff and the Government must ensure that new skills very difficult because of the Bay meant that their original budget they get maximum value from the two funding regime, where payment of reduction plans could be rethought. thirds of Wales which qualifies for the up-front costs are the rule. Wales needs No-one is denying all this is difficult, additional expenditure. to be at the forefront of new ideas and and no-one in the Liberal Democrats relishes the prospect of the tough times Labour left the Coalition government with the ahead. But we have to share the pain in order to maintain our competitive largest peacetime deficit in our history, a terrible edge in the world. This means keeping economic legacy. interest rates low so that companies can invest, and our exports grow. Nothing would be worse than reducing spending The real engine for growth in industrial processes. Recent evidence over a longer time frame than our Wales will be by establishing a business shows that manufacturing is already principal markets, thereby placing a environment which encourages new making the difference. Our skills base growing interest rate burden on the very business and helps existing business to is crucial to providing Welsh business companies which alone can help us fight expand and develop. Export growth is with the engine needed to make growth our way back to prosperity. one area where more can and should possible. Both of these areas lie within Labour left the Coalition be done by the Welsh Government. the responsibility of Welsh Government government with the largest peacetime Recent activity has not provided the Ministers. I look forward to seeing deficit in our history, a terrible economic return we should expect from public the ambitions set for England being legacy. The consequences of not acting investment. Now is the time for a matched or exceeded by the actions of now are very serious – higher interest complete re-appraisal of how links are government in Wales. rates, business failures, and rising built with new markets. Joint ventures The new Universal Benefit reforms unemployment. That’s why the Coalition are a particularly appropriate way of will have a profound impact on poverty, government has acted as it did to reducing business risk yet maximising with very positive projections for the bring the country back to prosperity. It the development opportunities. This is impact these will have in the medium is making the tough choices now, and particularly relevant for bringing new term in Wales. This is an important not being deluded by some kind of ideas and processes to new markets, matter, as many political commentators future nirvana but without the means to and can work within Wales as well as in have focused solely on the impact of achieve it. That’s what the opposition other countries. savings to the welfare bill rather than the parties offer. Welsh Ministers now have the overall impact of policy on poverty. The So where are the tough decisions for consequential from the £60 million expectation is that by the next general Wales. Clearly there are some difficult renewable energy growth fund to invest election more families in Wales will choices to make in respect of capital as they see fit. This is a real opportunity have been lifted out of poverty than was expenditure. Our schools and hospitals to grab part of the new business achieved during the whole period from will need refreshing, development and development potential and invest in the 1997 – 2010. new equipment. The absolute reliance infrastructure to meet our immediate Taken as whole, with measures on by the Welsh government on using their needs in offshore wind energy and expenditure and spending looked at own resources and never engaging with newer forms of renewable development. together, the plans for the future impact private finance must surely come to an The big Severn barrage project was more on those who are able to afford it. end. New financial mechanisms are opposed by Liberal Democrats not just The poorest will take a smaller hit than available and an ideological approach because it was too costly in economic the rich. After a successful referendum will mean fewer new buildings, and less and environmental terms, but also next March, the Coalition will turn its of the vital new treatments which are because it would have been 2030 before attention to the way in which Wales is available to a modern health service. it provided any energy! We need to funded. Expect a real step forward in Delays in new renal dialysis centres and invest now to enable companies to meet the way in which Wales can have an GP practices not being allowed to locate our 2020 international obligations. effective fiscal influence over its destiny. in private sector premises are just two An often missed feature of the examples of current Welsh Government Coalition’s plans is an emphasis on Mike German is a Liberal Democrat practices which must end. part-time study and also expansion in peer in the House of Lords and former The benefits of the additional the Further Education sector. Many Economic Development Minster in the funding from Europe are maintained, people have found the acquisition of National Assembly.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 17 1 Cambrian Mountains

Above: Today’s view of Nant-y- Moch on the slopes Blotting out of Pumlumon near Ponterwyd, east of Aberystwyth.

Below: Artists impression of the Articles same view with the proposed the mid Wales turbines superimposed. Blotting out the mid Wales landscape landscape A beacon for our time Ann West says the If the National Park that was proposed for the Cambrian The Cambrian Cambrian Mountains Mountains had been designated in 1979 it would Mountains should become an have brought a special planning authority, centrally brand supported funding, and a high tourism profile. However, Area of Outstanding designation was unpopular amongst farmers and other Natural Beauty land owners who worried about planning interference. Local authorities, too, were opposed because they felt a National Park might encroach on their functions. A compromise today would be to make the Cambrian Mountains an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). This would integrate the needs of the land users, mainly farmers and foresters, with the landscape, biodiversity, culture and the economy. It would reflect the interests of local people and help meet the objectives of the local authorities and the Welsh Government. It would provide a framework for long term co-operation with minimal disruption to existing local authority structures. It is now accepted that the Cambrian Mountains cover an area which includes the of Pumlumon, Elenydd and Mynydd Mallaen, largely the moorland over 300 metres shown on the accompany map. However, the Cambrian Mountains have an identity problem. Without designation as an AONB they have no clear, recognisable boundaries, no signs announcing you are entering or leaving them. The people who live in and around them, let alone visitors and tourists, have no clear idea where they are. The primary purpose of an AONB designation is to conserve and enhance natural beauty as defined by the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. This

18 | 1/Cambrian Mountains stresses that account should be taken of Where off-roading is unchecked, vast advertisements, gaunt and rural industries and the economic and where motor bikes and 4 x 4s romp distinctive symbols of the new age, social needs of local communities, and through bogs and drive on to areas cast their whirling shadows… To promoting sustainable forms of social without tracks, immense damage is the east and south the great circular and economic development that in done to fragile surfaces which are then shapes of complaining wind- themselves conserve and enhance the seen as no longer worthy of protection. wheels blotted out the heavens.” environment. Monitoring and policing these activities The natural beauty of the plateaux are slowly improving but there are not The establishment of an AONB would and gorges of the Cambrian Mountains is enough rangers to contain the large be an important step towards achieving equal to and often greater than many of numbers of bikers arriving from the our vision of self-reliant communities our national parks. Although distributed Midlands. making critical decisions about their among the three counties of Powys, Regardless of your views on wind own futures, and maintaining themselves Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire, power, erecting 64 wind turbines 475 through their own sustainable economic geographically they are one area. The feet high at Nant-y-Moch, the latest activities, rooted in the beauty of their rivers Severn, Wye, Elan, Irfon, Tywi, area to be targeted, near Ponterwyd landscape. Cothi, Teifi, Ystwyth, Rheidol and east of Aberystwyth, cannot be justified. Members of the National Assembly Twymyn all have their sources here. Wide hard roads would also be needed who decide our future seem a long From the high ground endless vistas to access each of the turbines. If this way away when you are walking the can be seen across the plateaux, sprinkled proposal is accepted the precious hills surrounding the field of the Battle with small lakes and streams. Here one isolation and wilderness will be lost. The of Hyddgen in 1401, site of Owain can experience the sense of wilderness and utter solitude that is becoming so rare in the . The living landscape and its beauty are maintained by the local communities, the landowners, farmers, and estate managers who look after them. They contribute to the essence that brings visitors and their bank balances to the ring of villages and towns surrounding the Cambrian uplands. Walkers stay in the hotels, bed and breakfast houses, and Youth Hostels, eating in the ever improving restaurants, stopping in campsites where farmers have decided to diversify into tourism. Pony trekkers ride across Wales staying Nant-y-Moch reservoir viewed from Mynydd Hyddgen, where Owain Glyndwˆr claimed his iconic victory in 1401. on farms. Together they generate millions of pounds for the economy of view from Pumlumon will be even more Glyndwˆr’s first iconic victory, or resting mid-Wales. But everything depends cluttered with industrial giants and the by the lakes and streams. We are exposed upon the tranquillity and peace of the jewel in the crown of the Elenydd gone to consultants working in offices with incomparable landscape. for ever. The fevered imagination of little or no feel for the magic of Nant y The mountains provide rare examples H.G. Wells in his dystophian 1899 novel Moch. We need protection from hungry of largely intact prehistoric cairns, When the Sleeper Wakes would come to developers or the motor industry who megaliths, stone rows and circles dating pass in 21st Century upland Wales: care nothing for the quiet skies where from the Bronze Age, unchanged since kites and skylarks are the only sounds their creation. Peat bogs are an important “And all over the countryside he heard. Could an AONB achieve this? archive documenting human activity knew, on every crest and hill where We hope so. but they are a diminishing resource once the hedges had interlaced, with many hectares having been lost and cottages, churches, inns, and recently during the construction of Cefn farmhouses had nestled amongst Croes windpower station to the east of their trees, wind wheels similar Ann West is Chair of the Aberystwyth, near Devil’s Bridge. to those he saw and bearing like Cambrian Mountains Society.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 19 The foreground of this 1/Cambrian Mountains aerial view of the western edge of the Cambrian Mountains reveals the outline of the church and cloister of Strata. Florida, now known to be a small part of the monastery which was once spread over 100 acres or more. Photo: Toby Driver.

A beacon for our times

David Austin Although little survives for the visitor to see, the my direction the University of Wales Trinity St David Strata Florida Cistercian Abbey at the north end has developed a major research and heritage describes of the Teifi Valley in the Cambrian Mountains, project aimed at understanding what we can learn a heritage is perhaps the most famous and iconic of all the from the long traditions of sustainability and culture project to medieval monuments of Wales. initiated by the monastery. It is still early days in our restore Strata Strata Florida (Ystrad Fflur) was founded as research at Strata Florida, but already there is a Florida’s place a daughter house of Whitland in 1164 on land powerful story to tell of an institution which over first granted by an Anglo-Norman knight, Robert 350 years shaped so much of the future of the at the cultural FitzStephen. The very next year, the great Welsh Cambrian Mountains and their surrounding valleys. heart of the prince, the Lord Rhys of , removed We are still living their inheritance. Cambrian Robert from his lands and became the patron of The Cistercians were an enclosed order which Mountains the monks and their foundation. Then, in 1184, gained great prominence from the 11th to 13th at the height of his powers, the Lord Rhys made Centuries right across Europe. There were two a massively extended grant of land, much of it in main elements to their activities. The monachi or the Cambrian Mountains, to the Abbey and the choir monks were the contemplative members, monks re-located to another site just two miles ordained as priests, scholars, administrators, to the north of the original foundation. The re- thinkers and men of spiritual contemplation. Then founded monastery very quickly became a centre there were monks who were workers in the fields, for an ideology of Welshness built around history, the men who converted the land they had been art, literature and the language. It also became the granted, often in remote terrains, into productive burial place of the Deheubarth royal family, native and fertile estates. As well as supporting the abbeys princes of a large part of south-west Wales. themselves, these also nurtured their regional What the Cistercian monks created at Strata societies and dependants. Gerald of Wales who had Florida has many resonances with today’s concerns no great love of Cistercians grudgingly conceded, for the environment and for the economic and “Give them a wilderness or a forest and in a few social well-being of our rural communities. Under years you will find a dignified abbey in the midst of

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shining plenty”. The abbey church and part of its cloister were excavated in the 19th Century. We now know that this outline plan, preserved by Cadw, sat at the heart of a large precinct. We still have to determine its full extent but it may be as large as 120 acres of enclosed space. If it is this size, then it is certainly the largest abbey precinct in Wales and among the largest in Britain and western Europe. Within its walls were a number of massive masonry buildings, one of which, the Great Gatehouse between the inner and outer precincts, we are excavating. Other major structures include a guesthouse, Abbot’s house, refectory and infirmary much as we might expect of a monastery. But there Map showing the estates or granges of Strata Florida in the Cambrian Mountains and central Wales. is also a massive iron forge and clear Drawn by Adrian Turgel. signs of extensive metal working not 200 metres from the church itself. them, they created an inner core of bogs and subsistence farming into a The truth is that the Cistercians made specialist farms each concentrating on sustainable and fertile landscape which no distinction between a spiritual and a a single agrarian production - dairying, still today carries many archaeological physical life as we might today, as their ox and horse breeding, pig rearing, traces of its distinguished past. famous dictum ‘ora et labor’ (prayer and provision of hay and fodder, and wheat After the abbey was closed in work) made clear. Prayer was work and growing. They planted an 80-acre 1539 as part of Henry VIII’s protestant work was prayer. The labours of the soul managed mixed woodland to provide Dissolution, gentry families, most were contained within the labours of the all their needs, from major structural descended from native prince lines, body and both were a gift to God and the timbers to fuel for the ovens. This wood came to own its enormous estates. The only sure hope of grace. In the process is still there today with traces still of refectory of the Abbey was transformed not only did they build great places of pollarded oaks and coppiced hazel. into a plas or mansion and in the 18th prayer and learning, but also sanctuaries On the flanks of the Cambrian Century it became a tenant farmhouse. of well-being and security, of healing and Mountains immediately behind the Working in partnership with a hospitality, not just for themselves, but all precinct they built three, maybe four, range of organisations, in particular who came to their door. specialist sheep-handling centres, each the Cambrian Mountains Initiative, The Cistercians at Strata Florida with a massive shed to shear, breed the Strata Florida Trust is creating an not only employed the native skills and and count their huge flocks. It was the access point to the western Cambrian craft traditions of those who had dwelt Cistercians, in fact, who introduced Mountains out of the farm buildings. The for millennia among the Cambrian the monoculture of sheep and almost aim is to re-establish this iconic place of Mountains, but also introduced new certainly new breeds to the Welsh spirit and knowledge in a modern guise techniques and technologies drawn uplands. This was the great foundation for the benefit of local communities and from a wider European experience. stone of their wealth as they controlled the nation as a whole. Strata Florida’s They were consummate hydraulic not only production but trade to ancient practices of sustainable engineers, diverting a river into an international markets. endeavour through a close relationship artificial channel to drain a valley for the Another source of their wealth with the natural environment remain a new buildings, power at least two mills was undoubtedly the enormously rich beacon for our times. and a forge, provide clean water for deposits of metal ores in the Cambrian all the occupants and a sewage system Mountains to which they brought new unsurpassed until the 20th Century in technologies of mining, smelting ad Professor David Austin is Chair of rural Wales. forging. Thus it was the Cistercians who Archaeology at University of Wales For nearly two square miles around transformed a landscape of woods, Trinity St David.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 21 1/Cambrian Mountains

Cambrian Mountains brand

Peter Davies The Cambrian Mountains rural heartland of this as a platform to deliver economic, social and outlines an Wales is an area of exceptional unspoilt landscape environmental goals. The Cambrian Mountains that supports valued habitats, species and ways Initiative recognises that the future depends on initiative to of farming that have roots stretching back to strengthening the economy through increasing develop one the Middle Ages. Yet while lying at the heart of income from local produce, ecosystem services and of Wales’ most the nation and dominating maps of Wales, the tourism, each underpinned by a strong common cherished but Cambrian Mountains enjoy little recognition either brand and the enterprise of local communities. neglected as a tourism destination or as a distinct landscape. The Cambrian Mountains brand encompasses This is despite attempts dating back to 1965 to the characteristics of the area it represents. The heartlands recognise them as a National Park. brand itself is based on the watercolour of Cwm The IWA’s Cherished Heartlands report produced Berwyn in the heart of the Cambrian Mountains with the Brecknockshire Agricultural Society in that was painted by the Prince of Wales, with sales 2005 highlighted the critical nature of the economic of the limited edition lithograph providing valuable challenges facing this rural heartland, with income for the project. The brand is dedicated to implications for our cultural and environmental sustaining a unique living environment through heritage. The report provided the stimulus for providing customers with a guarantee of quality, collaboration between the local authorities of taste and welcome. All the products and services Ceredigion, Powys and Carmarthenshire, the using the brand are based on the strengths and Countryside Council for Wales and The Prince’s qualities of the Cambrian Mountains and are Charities to establish the Cambrian Mountains committed to supporting the aims of Cambrian Initiative. The Prince of Wales who is President of Mountain Initiative. the Initiative, has been a vital champion for the The starting point for the initiative has been to project which forms the flagship of his Trust’s rural work with the farming community where the central action programme in Wales. challenge is that upland farming in Wales is a marginal The challenge has been to do something which activity financially. Farming is dominated by sheep is firmly rooted in the values of the area and uses and a key objective for the initiative was to develop a premium Cambrian Mountain lamb range, that ensures the best, sweetest upland lamb produced to Cwm Berwyn, a watercolour painted the highest welfare and environmental standards. by Prince Charles, Cambrian Mountain Lamb has been sold under provides the brand image for the the Cooperative’s Truly Irresistible range for the Cambrian Mountains. past three years, delivering a premium to farmers and also a return to communities, with 10p from each pack sold contributing to the Cambrian Mountains Initiative sustainable development fund for community projects. It was a finalist in the 2010 Taste of Wales awards. Cambrian Mountain lamb forms the basis for a growing food produce range that brings together local food producers to create a high quality selection of Cambrian mountains products including beer, chocolates, cheeses, chutneys and jams. The farming community has also worked with

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Original members of the Cambrian Mountains Lamb Co-operative. the initiative to be the first area in the the group are particularly pleased network of tourism ambassadors. These UK where farmers have collaborated to see how their own individual offer the highest quality product or service to discover the carbon footprints of farms contributed to the carbon and subscribe to the best principles of their farms. The project, focusing on 20 sequestration effect and I was very sustainability in the management of beef and lamb production farms, was pleased with the results of my own their business, whether in their use of undertaken to discover how reductions carbon footprint.” locally sourced produce or the reducing in greenhouse gas emissions could be of the impact of their activity on the achieved. Bangor University analysed Compared with other parts of Wales the environment. The ambassadors operate information provided by each farm and Cambrian Mountains have had simply under the Cambrian Mountain brand. calculated a comprehensive carbon no tourism profile despite the undoubted They will be the first to introduce the footprint based on each individual qualities of the area. It is almost certainly Cariad Cambrian scheme which aims farming system. Factors measured the most tranquil area in southern to encourage visitors to donate a small include emissions from agricultural Britain, devoid of light pollution and amount of money to help fund sustainable management, land and fuel use. the noise of traffic, with only a few development work in the region. Contrary to previous press statements roads intruding into the mountains. So far the main focus for the initiative made by importers of lamb, the results It is immensely important for wildlife, has been to work with farmers and have highlighted that Cambrian especially the remaining habitats and tourism providers. However, support from Mountain lamb and beef has lower associated species of blanket bog, upland the Countryside Council for Wales is now carbon footprints than its competitors, , native western woodland and enabling a programme of meetings and when applying the local data related to the freshwater habitats of the numerous workshops to develop a shared sense of natural processes in the uplands. The upland lakes. The cultural associations place amongst the necklace of settlements information gained through this process of the Cambrian Mountains reflect all that surround the Cambrian Mountains. is being used to further reduce the periods from pre-history to the present Our aim is to promote innovation in carbon footprint of Cambrian Mountain day, with 259 Scheduled Monuments the development of the local economy farms and to reinforce the benefits of receiving national protection and five and provide a stimulus for investment in purchasing the lamb in the minds of Landscapes of Outstanding or Special the ‘necklace’ of settlements that nestle consumers. As James Raw, chairman of Historic Interest around the uplands. the Cambrian Mountains Lamb Producer Working with the Tourism Partnership Group, said: for Mid Wales the initiative has begun to develop an approach to sustainable “The outcome of this work puts red tourism based on the special qualities of Peter Davies is Chairman of the meat produced in the Cambrian the area, linked to the quality food range Cambrian Mountains Initiative Mountains as being some of the and high quality accommodation. One www.cambrianmountains.co.uk greenest in the UK. Members of of the first steps has been to establish a He is a Trustee of the IWA.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 23 Senedd, with the merchant seamen’s war memorial in the foreground.

2 Politics

Articles Five fallacies of devolution Five fallicies of devolution Terrific twins Gerald Holtham calls for a sensible debate on of Welsh tax varying powers for the National Assembly constitutional There are strong arguments for the Welsh National Assembly to get taxation powers. thought But the discussion about such powers is so tangled up in a thicket of misunderstanding Vote Yes vote that there is a real danger that they will never be acquired. We need to slash away Labour the clinging misconceptions and prickly misrepresentations surrounding the issues Plaid Cymru’s in order to get a sensible debate. Here are five widely-held beliefs: accommodation to gradualism 1. Legislative powers are more important than taxation powers and should, at any rate, come first. An ill-considered 2. Devolution of taxation powers would be a step towards more autonomy outcome of early for the National Assembly and therefore a further move towards separatism. morning horse- 3. Devolution of taxation powers would mean higher taxes in Wales. trading 4. Any discussion of tax powers would jeopardise a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum on legislative powers. 5. The UK government would never willingly give Wales taxation powers.

All five may seem plausible to the Welsh ear, but all are wrong. They are the five fallacies of devolution. Let’s deal with them in turn.

1. Legislation is seldom more effective than tax incentives or penalties in influencing behaviour and, particularly, in fostering economic development. A number of economists have pointed out that a reduction in taxes on business would probably have been more effective in Wales than the numerous schemes to promote business development via the expenditure of public money. Moreover, legislation that cannot be supported by financial measures is likely to be less effective.

The notion that legislative powers must precede fiscal or tax powers is a peculiar one that goes against UK and international experience. The world is full of bodies, including all UK local authorities, that have the ability to levy a tax or taxes but

24 | 2/Politics

have no powers of primary legislation. On the too, it recentralised a lot of currently devolved areas other hand, there are very few legislating bodies in and shrank the National Assembly budget from £15 the world that cannot levy taxes. There is a good billion to £5 billion. On any reckoning that would reason for that. It is a principle of public finance be a diminution of devolution. Yet you could (and that bodies spending public money should, as far should) still ask the question: how should that £5 as possible, have the responsibility for raising it. If billion be financed? And the answer is still: not by a they do not, responsibility is split between bodies or block grant. For careful public spending, economy governments, one raising the money and another and accountability, the Assembly should still have spending it. Accountability to the electorate the responsibility of raising at least some of that is muddied. Moreover, at the margin public money itself, just as a local council does when expenditure is likely to be less carefully considered setting council tax or even a parish council when if it has no tax consequences. Rationally, taxation setting a precept. Whatever level of devolution should come with spending and before legislation. you favour, whether you are in Cymru Yfory or in True Wales, while it exists at all you should want to The peculiar ordering in Wales stems from one see the Assembly responsible for raising some of its historical event, namely the Scottish referendum own revenue. of 1997 when the Scots were asked two questions: should their Parliament have legislative powers and 3. Wales is poorer than most other parts of the UK should it have taxation powers. The Scots answered and its politicians tend to be more to the political yes to both but with a bigger majority for legislation. Left than those from other parts of the UK. That That fixed in the minds of Welsh politicians the idea has led many, especially among business people, that taxation powers would be least popular. Given to suppose that devolved taxes would mean that Welsh devolution has been an incremental higher taxes. That political leaning certainly exists process with a referendum at each stage, tax powers but it could be trumped by a stronger force. Tax went to the back of the queue. That is politically devolution means the possibility of tax competition understandable but does not make for grown-up and that has the tendency to push taxes down – as discussion of policy or good governance. international experience has shown.

2. Taxation powers have nothing necessarily to The Holtham Commission found that raising the do with extending devolution. Suppose the UK basic rate of income tax by one penny in Wales would government opposed all talk of legislative powers raise about £150 million for the Welsh Government. for Wales and cancelled the referendum. Suppose, But cutting the higher rates of income tax by a penny

Senedd debating chamber

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 25 2/Politics

could quite possibly raise just as much or more! Why? between the Scottish and UK Parliaments. There is Because the Welsh economy is so closely integrated little doubt that the UK Treasury and HM Revenue with the English one and 90 per cent of the Welsh and Customs were horrified at this development population lives within 50 miles or an hour’s travel and the complications it will entail. But they have of the English border. Moreover, there are about 13 accepted it is a political commitment and they are million people in the same position on the other side getting on with understanding how to make it work. of the border. A proportionately small relocation for While that is hard enough the marginal cost in time tax purposes could swell or drain Welsh coffers. or effort of extending the changes to Wales is very Ultimately tax policy is a matter for elected politicians low. One Treasury official, off the record, has said, and will be driven by many considerations including “Calman is a pain but adding in Wales costs nothing ideas of fairness. But the most promising strategy for and if we are ever going to have to do it, we might Wales from the viewpoint of economic development as well get it over with and do it all at once.” and perhaps even revenue-raising looks to be a tax- cutting one. There is no reason to think the governing politicians would think differently if the political 4. Statements in the UK coalition agreement, demand from Wales was there. They could well recently repeated by Nick Clegg, have linked a yes be prepared to add enabling clauses, extending vote in the referendum with the possibility of a new Calman-type powers over income tax to Wales, fiscal settlement for Wales. As far as one can tell to be activated when requested by the Assembly these statements are born of pure ignorance rather following another referendum. But the political than anything more calculating and show how low demand has to be there. The limitation, as usual, is Wales ranks in the concerns of UK politicians; they not English intransigence, but Wales’ own division cannot find time to get briefed properly and to and ambivalence. understand the actual position. However, opponents of legislative devolution will naturally use any scare Currently Welsh politicians are more focused on story they can to make their case. They are almost trying to get the UK government to reform the sure to hold out the spectre of future tax powers and Barnett formula in the reasonable expectation that the threat of higher taxes as a consequence of a yes would give Wales more money. Meanwhile, the UK vote in the coming referendum – even though tax government has no appetite to tackle that issue for powers are not on the table. It is unlikely that the fear of encouraging Scottish separatism, since any ‘yes’ camp can neutralise this attack by ignoring it. plausible reform would cost the Scots a lot of money. There are only two possible responses. One is to fold and say, ‘ If you vote yes for legislative powers we However, there is an argument that fiscal promise never to seek taxation powers’. The other devolution would only work if the block grant were is to use the argument under 2 above and say, ‘Tax seen to be on a fair and robust basis. Otherwise the and legislation have nothing to do with each other; devolved government will always be frightened to there is a strong argument for tax powers whether use taxation powers to deviate from English rates we have legislative powers or not. So we are going in case it calls the grant into question. And even to have another referendum on taxation powers – devolving half of income tax to Wales or Scotland however you vote in this one.’ The electorate would will only pay 15-20 per cent of the devolved budget. know in advance it could vote ‘yes, yes’, ‘no, no’, or The block grant will account for the vast bulk of the ‘no, yes’. If it had taken leave of its senses it could rest. The battle to reform the block grant is another even vote ‘yes, no’! story. Meanwhile that 20 per cent of own-revenue would make a big difference to the accountability 5. The UK government has already committed and responsibility of Welsh politicians. itself – as did its predecessor – to legislating to give more fiscal powers to Scotland, following the Calman report which recommended that. London Gerald Holtham chaired the Commission will give the Scots more power over income tax, on the Funding and Finance of the National in effect sharing the income tax base in Scotland Assembly. He is a Trustee of the IWA.

26 | www.iwa.org.uk www.clickonwales.org IWA Legacy If the IWA and what it represents are important to you, please consider remembering the IWA in your will. For nearly quarter of Your generosity will allow us to continue promoting a century the Institute the economic, social, environmental and cultural well- of Welsh Affairs has being of Wales for our future generations. helped raise the level Whether large or small, a gift of this kind can have of public debate on an important practical impact on our work as well as motivating others. It is also a way of extending your own issues affecting Wales, generosity beyond your lifetime. If, therefore, you decide by placing quality to remember a charity in your will, please consider us.

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2/Politics

facing Wales. But it goes much further and Terrific twins of Welsh constitutional thought argues for tax varying powers (presumably David Melding reflects on the impact downwards) to spark profound economic of the Holtham and Richard Commissions regeneration in Wales. But Holtham has not taken this It was a great compliment to Wales especially in the Parliamentary Party position recklessly. He is also critical of when Professor James Mitchell wrote where Huw Irranca-Davies was typical the Calman Report on fiscal devolution in the Herald following the in saying that the time was not right for to Scotland. Here he is a firm Unionist. publication of the Holtham Report: further devolution. Yet further devolution Although his recommendations would soon came along, albeit in the guise of give considerable tax varying powers “The original Encyclopaedia Britannica a constitutional Frankenstein called the to Wales (and implicitly Scotland and used to carry the legendary line Legislative Competence Order. Where Northern Ireland), he warns against the For Wales, see under England. That Richard was clear that Wales needed a consequences of the slippery process certainly could not be said since settlement with legislative and executive loosely termed “fiscal devolution”. devolution. For Wales, see under powers closely matched, Labour’s 2006 Calman, Holtham clearly fears, might Scotland… might be more accurate Government of Wales Act contained loosen up the UK, not unite it with a for now, though maybe it will be For more convolutions than an elaborate settlement that is fair and flexible. It is Scotland, see Wales in time”. love spoon. instructive that Canada comes closest to the model followed by Calman, and In light of the publication of the Holtham Australia to Holtham’s approach. Report, it is right to go back to the Both the Richard and Holtham Richard Commission and reflect on the reports reflect the underlying strength level of constructive thought that has of the Welsh body politic. Those who grappled with, and sought to improve, question the maturity of Welsh civic the deeply flawed devolution settlement life should look to these reports for that followed the 1997 referendum. Gerald Holtham (left) and Lord Richard an indication of Wales’ real political While the Richard Commission’s As we approach the March 2011 potential. And there are indications of Report received a generally cool referendum, the Richard Report is back in robust health elsewhere. This is the third response from the political parties in the news as the benchmark, just as Barry time that I have supervised the manifesto Wales (only the Liberal Democrats Morgan anticipated. And no wonder, process for the Welsh Conservative Party. endorsed its main recommendations) it given its elegance and coherence. One We have already received nearly 100 soon became the “benchmark for what can argue that it is the most authoritative written responses from NGO’s and other devolution for Wales should look like” to constitutional report ever commissioned organisations, and held 44 follow up quote Dr. Barry Morgan, the Archbishop by a government in the UK. Compared to meetings. I have been impressed by the of Wales. The central recommendation the prolix disaster that was the Kilbrandon focus that most consultees have brought that Wales should adopt the Scottish Report on devolution, published in 1973, to the process. Submissions are clearer, model and become a proper Parliament it is succinct and practical. more realistic and yet also more exacting by 2011 or sooner has defined the debate Gerry Holtham matched Richard’s than ever before. Expectations are higher ever since. This is an alpha outcome as exacting standards. Alan Trench, one and there is a fuller understanding of most official reports end up as dust traps, of the UK’s most perceptive experts on how civic society can most effectively not well thumbed guide books. Each devolution, wrote that Holtham has influence the political process. political party has been drawn back to “done much of the heavy lifting” on While some might still doubt the value the Richard Report over the years. the financial aspects and potential of of an Assembly with law-making powers, The Welsh Conservative Party devolution. He added this is “work that it is increasingly difficult to justify such a changed the most in response to the UK government appears never to position on the basis that we Welsh are Richard. Initially, the Party said, “We have done at all”. Like Richard, Holtham somehow constitutionally inept and oppose any suggestion that the Assembly has produced a report considerably not up to the challenge of forming and should be given law making and tax above the standards routinely set passing our own laws. The Richard and raising powers”. By 2005 this position by Westminster. Holtham Reports could have only been had completely changed to a broad Again what marks out the Holtham produced by a confident political nation. endorsement of legislative powers Report is its boldness and clarity. In dealing subject to a referendum. with the Barnett conundrum it produced Labour damned Richard with faint some clear and practical answers to the David Melding is Conservative AM for praise. Some members went further, current and unfair funding anomalies South Wales Central.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 29 2/Politics Vote Yes vote Labour

Mark To make the most obvious point first: obtaining a and made possible, during our years in office at Drakeford Yes vote in the referendum on 3 March and the Westminster, after 1997. And, to make the electoral argues for a interests of the Labour Party in Wales are identical. arithmetic point clear as well, a Yes vote cannot be The referendum is the culmination of Labour’s won without the support of large numbers of Welsh new level of great devolutionary heave. Others may not always voters whose instinctive affiliation lies with Labour. sophistication like it, but the plain political fact is that devolution in the design has been Labour’s project from first to last. At this stage, I’d like to enter a cautionary note. The of the Yes opinion polls continue to show a clear majority in campaign The Lib Dems are (or were) federalists, which is not favour of a Yes vote. The Jones-Parry Convention the same thing. The Conservatives were (and are) concluded that a Yes vote could be won. The old for the instinctive Unionists. reactionary coalition of and referendum Welsh business will not repeat their mistake of 1997 next March Meanwhile, Plaid Cymru’s relationship with the in turning out voters on the No side. And yet, I ‘independence’ issue gets curiouser and curiouser. believe that any ‘shoo-in’ tendency in relation to There have been phases when it has been the referendum to be profoundly mistaken. convenient for Plaid to deny ambitions of independence. The only genuinely distinctive History teaches us, as does a close reading of the political purpose of Plaid Cymru is to achieve the Jones-Parry research, that the Yes vote is crumbly, break-up of the United Kingdom into its constituent and capable of being detached by a No campaign nations. If they did not have such a fundamental which concentrates on the fear-factors which are aim there would be no purpose to their existence. never far below the surface in the Welsh political This is despite the fact that they do not always lexicon. Fears of north against south, east against actually ‘sell’ their Unique Selling Proposition. west, Welsh speakers against non-Welsh speakers and so on. Only Labour stands directly on the devolution ground, determined that Wales should take The date of the referendum, fixed out of political control of, and measure up to, the responsibility necessity, nevertheless represents a considerable for our own domestic agenda, while retaining the gamble in itself. Let us all hope that Thursday 3 advantages which go with remaining a part of a March turns out to be an early spring day, warm, wider political entity. sunny and inviting a walk to the polling station. But it is at least as likely, if not more so, to be a Therefore a Yes vote on 3 March will represent a late winter day, cold, wet, dark, and off-putting fulfilment of the purpose which Labour pursued, to all but the most determined elector. Of course,

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this is entirely beyond the control of any political campaign, but in a close-run thing, it could turn out to be decisive.

All this means, in my view, that a new level of sophistication has to be applied to the design of the Yes campaign effort. It means that a distinction will have to be drawn between the ‘air war’ on the one hand, and the ‘ground war’, on the other. Let me explain the distinction in a bit more detail.

By ‘air war’ I mean the national campaign which necessarily must be broadly based, a pan-political party effort in which anyone who wishes to make a contribution will be welcome, a model already very well exhibited in Cymru Yfori:Tomorrow’s Wales. At the national level, the message has to be twin-track. A Yes vote will simplify and streamline the current complicated process by which legislative authority is transferred to the Assembly. A Yes vote will save money by making the system more efficient and cost-effective. the fears of those voters who possess an underlying Members of the All- Wales Convention, susceptibility to the claim that devolution means with chairman Sir Emyr At the same time, the national argument most go the thin edge of the wedge to separation. Jones-Parry at the centre, concluded that beyond an appeal to administrative efficacy. It must On the ground, then, in those parts of Wales where the referendum could also draw out the democratic dividend which a Yes the bulk of the population is to be found and be won. vote will bring. To deploy a much over-used word, where, in the end, a Yes vote will be secured or lost, it will make the system more transparent. It will be the fight must be led by Labour. On the ground, simpler to understand and thus easier to influence. Labour’s campaign needs to echo those national But, most of all, it will ensure that the democratic themes set out earlier, but must do so in ways authority to determine policy over the domestic which makes most sense to Labour voters. With agenda of Wales rests where it belongs – with the the referendum date fixed for 3 March, Labour’s National Assembly. aim must be to mount a single, seamless campaign, running through the referendum and straight onto The ‘ground war’, however, needs to be organised the Assembly election, a few short weeks later. very differently. The reason for Labour supporters to vote Yes in To be blunt, the chances of motivating Labour March, is to give the Labour Assembly Government voters diminishes each time the advocacy of a Yes we hope to see elected in May, the tools it will need vote is associated with the Conservatives or Plaid to do the job it faces over the next four year term. Cymu. The Tory brand was never detoxified in Wales ‘Vote Yes-Vote Labour’ is my ground-war slogan, and and whatever diminution in its toxicity which might best designed to maximise the contribution which have occurred has been sharply reversed since the Labour can make to getting the referendum won. 6 May. ‘Vote ’ will do very well as a message at a national level. ‘Vote Yes Because Your Local Big Wig Tory Tells You To Do So’ will work Mark Drakeford was special advisor to former very badly, if such a taint were to be perceptible to First Minister Rhodri Morgan from 1999 to Labour voters. Equally, prominent vocal leadership December 2009 and is Labour’s Assembly by Plaid Cymru in south east Wales will surely play to candidate in Cardiff West.

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Gwynfor Evans: ‘told every conference that independence was only 15 years away’.

Plaid Cymru’s accommodation to gradualism

John Dixon I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but at constitutional objectives, there would be a number asks how long some point in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Plaid of members who would no longer consider either his party can Cymru formally adopted as policy the idea that, their membership or the party to be relevant. The after achieving self-government, it would continue number may be larger than some assume. combine a to exist as a party and seek to form the government pragmatist of an independent Wales. There was another underlying assumption as well, present with which has also been displaced with time. This was an idealistic Of course, it wasn’t an idea that came from about the nature of the path to self-government. In future nowhere. The decision was more a case of my early years in the party, used to formalising something which many had long taken tell every conference that independence was only for granted. Yet it did signify a turning point in our 15 years away. It was always 15 years, even 15 years approach to policy. From that point on we formally after the first time that I heard him say it. Since then recognised that we weren’t just calling on other we have come to terms with the idea that the path people to do things. We were proposing to take will be rather more gradual – and considerably power and implement policy ourselves. more long term – than that.

Some painted it as a lurch to the left, given the The advent of devolution, and the upsurge in nature of some of the policies adopted. However, support for Plaid which the existence of a National I think it was more about an acceptance that a Assembly facilitated, created a new and different party seeking to form a government had to have dynamic. In the context of a gradualist approach a programme which was more ideologically and with a democratically elected legislature in being, intellectually coherent than simply a series of taking power is now something which has happened demands for action by others. whilst we are continuing to strive to achieve the objectives, rather than after the event as it were. What that decision replaced was the, generally unstated, assumption that, once Wales had In addition to that, whilst devolution decidedly does achieved self-government, Plaid Cymru would not lead in any automatic sense to independence, simply disappear - job done. But that formal the half-baked settlement implemented to keep the replacement of one assumption by another was Labour Party (almost) united has itself become ‘a never quite as simple as that. One reason was the process rather than an event’, with further change party retained members who were adherents to inevitable. Only the timetable is in doubt. There is the former position and who never fully signed up now no serious body of opinion in favour of turning to the policy implications of the latter. In practice, the clock back. How rapidly things have changed. that means that, were Plaid Cymru to achieve its

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I am far from convinced that we’ve really thought through the implications of all The advent of devolution, and the upsurge of this. It seems to me that the direction in support for Plaid which the existence of a in which the party is increasingly being led is one which emphasises what can National Assembly facilitated, created a new be done within the existing settlement at any point in time, and leaves the issue and different dynamic. of further constitutional to the ‘forces of history’. of timescales, and others relate to the Plaid Cymru conclude that the party That’s an entirely valid perspective to ideological outlook of some of the party’s which did so much to get us to that adopt, and it can certainly be seen as leading members. point is not offering a sufficiently radical the logical outcome of the changes programme. Equally, there will be others which I talked about at the beginning, Once we reach the point at which the who conclude that the programme on and in which I had a hand at the time. debate concentrates almost entirely on offer is simply too radical. In turn, that However, it leaves unanswered the what sort of Wales we want to see, the could easily lead to the realignment of question of what happens to those who context changes completely. In short, Welsh politics which some within Plaid were never entirely convinced. Welsh politics will then be more about the have been talking about for years - different ideological viewpoints within although it’s almost certainly not exactly On top of that, it also places pressures on Wales than about the constitutional the realignment that they had in mind. those of us who were entirely supportive position of the country. of the changes, but who are concerned at The big question, though, is how we the degree of compromise to that policy In my view, at the right time that would decide when we’ve got to that point. platform which is being introduced for a be an entirely helpful and necessary More specifically, are we there yet? variety of reasons. Some of these relate development. to the limitations of the settlement, some relate to being in a coalition with another However, when we reach that point John Dixon is a former Chair of party, some relate to the constraints there will inevitably be those within Plaid Cymru. 2/Politics

An ill-considered outcome of early morning horse-trading

John Cox Next May’s referendum on a new voting politicians elected by AV to the House of finds that system for Westminster elections will package Representatives since 1919 naturally prefer it three proposals into a single yes or no to the more proportional STV system used for AV for decision: fewer MPs, more equal electorates, the Senate elections. Westminster and AV, the Alternative Vote described in the elections panel on the facing page. Although elements All forecasts agree that AV will exclude would have of this package have some merit, taken as a minority parties with less than 20 per cent of devastating whole it will diminish democracy and have the popular vote, and prevent newcomers devastating consequences in Wales. gaining a foothold at Westminster. So the consequences in-built unfairness of the current system in Wales Whatever its merits, AV is not proportional – as would remain. was shown in the Australian election in August 2010, when both the leading parties won far The precise outcomes of each constituency more seats in the House of Representatives than election under AV is hard to predict as each justified by their share of the vote (see panel). is, ultimately, determined by second, third and even lower preference votes. Although a right- On the same day, the elections to the Australian wing voter may cast right-wing preference Senate, which used a version of STV, did give votes and a left-wing voter left-wing preference, the three leading parties a reasonably fair many voters are as much influenced by style share of seats. If the UK government wanted as by substance. In practice, attitudes of mind to introduce a fairer voting system, it would also influence voter preferences: have proposed STV, not AV. • Those whose first choice is Conservative Moreover, unlike STV, AV fails to reduce voter or LibDem might well give their alienation and actually increases the power of preference vote to the other. In this party elites and the hegemony of the leading situation Labour could be reduced to a parties. Despite these well attested defects rump at Westminster even it won the of AV, a few supporters of STV (notably most first preference votes. This would the Electoral Reform Society) propose to be bad for democracy. campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum, apparently in the hope that AV will be a first • Those opposed to an incumbent may step towards genuine reform. give their preference votes to ‘anyone but…’ to keep a leading candidate out. To the contrary, however, AV will entrench This attitude favours the ‘least-disliked’ the present two party dominance and will candidates over the ‘most-liked’ - and is put a stop on further change. Certainly equally bad for democracy. this is what has happened in Australia. The

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Although pundits often assume that Whilst there is merit in equalising the elections to the National Assembly. preference votes follow a similar pattern voter to MP ratios and reducing the Unless the timetables are altered this to first choices, there is no hard evidence number of MPs, it could be achieved means that the May 2015 elections to support this assumption. Consequently, without destroying historic community could descend into farce. May 2015 is it is very difficult to predict outcomes. boundaries. Sadly, STV is not an option when the Westminster and the National for the referendum. Whether we vote Yes Assembly elections next coincide. The package is to include unspecified or No we still will have the unfairness of It could mean that Welsh voters but systematic changes to constituency a winner-takes-all system. We are not to will have the challenge of grappling boundaries to ensure that all MPs are be allowed to voice an opinion in favour with three distinct voting systems and elected by similar numbers of voters. of a genuinely fair proportional system. constituencies on the same day. While there is much to be said for parity, The proposed legislation ‘freezes’ all there are better and simpler ways of existing constituency boundaries for In this scenario, Welsh voters will have achieving this end.

In Wales the current 40 constituencies will be reduced to 30 with only Cardiff The Alternative Vote system South and likely to survive Rather than simply marking one solitary ‘X’ on the ballot paper, the voter unaltered. Everywhere else, the ranks the candidates on offer by preference. Voters thus puts a ‘1’ by their historic community and administrative first-preference candidate, and can continue, if they wish, to put a ‘2’ by boundaries will have to be redrawn. their second-preference, and so on, In some AV elections, such as most Whereas the Electoral Commission Australian elections, electors are required to rank all candidates. normally may take a decade to consult, put forward changes and consult again If a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes (more people put before finalising its proposals, the new them as number one than all the rest combined), then boundaries will have to be ready in they are elected. time for the next Westminster election expected in 2015. If no candidate gains a majority on first preferences, then the second- preference votes of the candidate who finished last on the first count are If voter to MP parity is really vital, redistributed. This process is repeated until someone gets over we could use the five existing Welsh 50 per cent. electoral regions as 5-7 member STV constituencies. The merit of multi- member constituencies with STV is that it ensures all major parties in Wales will be Australian August 2010 election results represented in proportion to their votes. In contrast, using AV for new 75,000+ House of Senate constituencies, it is possible that neither Representatives (elected by STV) Plaid Cymru nor the LibDems will win a (elected by AV) single seat. Parties % vote % seats % vote % seats It could be argued that these regions Liberal/National parties 44.2 48.7 43.4 45 would be rather large. The option that Australian Labor 37.9 48 38.3 37.5 I prefer would be to group the current Australian Greens 11.5 0.7 11.4 15 parliamentary constituencies into ten Others 6.4 2.7 6.9 2.5 3-member STV constituencies. This very simple change would deliver the desired voter to MP parity without the hassle of hasty boundary changes.

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Suppose, in the UK context, an AV winner Whereas the Electoral Commission depended on the preference votes of those whose first choice was, say, the BNP. Would the winner be normally may take a decade to consult, comfortable about this? Would the loser, if he or she might otherwise have been the winner, accept put forward changes and consult again the legitimacy of such a result? before finalising its proposals, the new Far from bestowing legitimacy on those elected, boundaries will have to be ready in AV creates even more post-election angst than does first-past-the-post. This is an inevitable time for the next Westminster election consequence of the elimination of other political expected in 2015. parties, even those with 20-30 per cent of the first choice votes, to bestow a false legitimacy to the eventual ‘winner’.

As became evident after the election of Ed Milliband as leader of the Labour Party by AV – and to choose 30 MPs by AV from new hastily created which occurs after every Australian election – the constituencies. Meanwhile, on the same day, they transparency of AV leads to endless post-election will have to vote for 40 AMs by first-past-the-post recriminations if the leading candidate in the first from the old constituencies, and simultaneously 20 round is defeated by the transference of votes from regional AMs from party lists in the obsolete regions the least popular candidates. created over a decade ago for Euro elections. Currently five political parties represent Wales in But spare a thought for Scotland. Their local Westminster and Europe. All should be represented elections employ STV so they could be using four in proportion to their voting support. The use of different election systems on the same day. AV in significantly larger constituencies will reduce the limited plurality that currently exists (even with Mention of Scotland reminds me that Wales has first-past-the-post) and could re-establish a two- relatively fewer AMs in our National Assembly party hegemony. than Scotland has MSPs. Parity would have given us 15 more than the 60 currently elected. If, as the The proposition in the AV referendum is an ill- government claims, Wales needs to have 10 fewer considered outcome of early morning horse- MPs to achieve parity with the rest of Britain, at trading to establish the UK coalition government. the very least they might let us have 10 additional It is not the product of an in depth discussion and AMs – 20 extra were recommended by the debate, merely an excuse for Liberal Democrats Richard Commission. to support a minority Conservative government. As we are not to be allowed the option of voting AV will ensure that every MP has to win at least half for a fairer voting system, the best way to keep the votes. In May 2010 only 12 Welsh MPs polled 50 genuine electoral reform alive will be to bury the per cent of the votes, while 14 obtained less than AV distraction with a resounding No vote . 40 per cent. At first glance it may seem that this will enhance MP’s legitimacy. However, even a cursory glance at Australia’s post-election traumas shows that election by AV is not the same as winning the support of half the voters. The most common John Cox is an engineer, a former Torfaen gripe is that many who were elected secured very independent councillor, and Vice President of few first choice votes but were promoted by the CND. He submitted persuasive evidence to the preference votes of minor parties, some with racist Richard Commission that advocated STV elections or other dubious policies. for the National Assembly.

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www.clickonwales.org The emerging 3 Law need for a Welsh jurisdiction

Articles John Williams argues that as the body of distinctive Welsh law The emerging grows so too will tensions within the unitary system need for a Welsh jurisdiction Although often regarded as the poor relation compared with Scotland, the powers devolved to Wales include important areas including health, social welfare and Reforming agriculture. Law made for Wales is not new - the Welsh Church Act 1914, the Welsh Welsh law Language Acts of 1967 and 1993, and the Commissioner for Older People (Wales) Act 2006 are examples of Westminster legislating on matters directly affecting Wales.

The creation of the in 1964 allowed Wales to adapt Westminster law for use in Wales. The 1967 Act, which included repeal of the Wales and Berwick Act 1746, recognised that Wales does not automatically follow England’s legislative lead. The 1746 Act had decreed that laws applying to England applied to Wales unless otherwise stated. The Government of Wales Acts of 1998 and 2006 allowed democratic scrutiny of law made within Wales. The current arrangements are not elegant or easily understood, but they create ‘Welsh law’.

So, there is a body of Welsh law, some of it made in Wales and some in Westminster. In the event of a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum on primary legislative powers next March, Welsh law will increase. Even a ‘No’ vote would leave in place current arrangements and the potential for developing Welsh law. What are the implications of these developments for the administration of justice within Wales?

A jurisdiction requires a population, though it does not have to be a large population. Northern Ireland (1.8 million) and the Isle of Man (80,543) are both jurisdictions. With a population of nearly three million, Wales comfortably meets this requirement. A distinctive or separate jurisdiction requires three common characteristics: (i) a defined territory; (ii) a distinct body of law; and (iii) a structure of courts and legal institutions.

Since the Local Government Act 1972, Wales has a defined territory. Wales has a distinct body of law. In his 2010 Lord Callaghan lecture Sir Roderick Evans identified their judicial structures as an important feature of the Scottish and Northern Irish jurisdictions. However, Wales remains part of the unitary jurisdiction of England and Wales.

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There is potential for Wales to become a Chester Circuit was disbanded and Wales became jurisdiction, although in the absence of complete a separate circuit. Her Majesty’s Courts Service separation it cannot become completely divorced (HMCS), which is responsible for managing the from England. The decision is ultimately a political administration of the courts across England and matter. In part, the debate is driven by the need Wales, is now organised into English regions, to decide whether a separate Welsh jurisdiction the Royal Courts of Justice, and Wales. This is a is a precondition of greater legislative powers for significant development as court administration in the Assembly (for example, the reserved powers Wales now reflects legal and political boundaries. model in Scotland), or whether it is a product of enhanced powers. One of the reasons given in the Her Majesty’s Courts Service in Wales has an 1973 Royal Commission on the Constitutions for independent identity, albeit remaining part of not recommending for Wales the same powers as the unitary system. An important component of Scotland was that Scotland was a jurisdiction and its work is promoting the use of Welsh in judicial Wales was not. proceedings. In its 2007 Annual Report, the service stated as one of its objectives ensuring that its In its paper Developing a Welsh Legal Jurisdiction provision in Wales is available through the medium published in February, Plaid Cymru suggests that of Welsh or English, according to personal choice. “focus should be given to establishing the minimum The eventual introduction of a bilingual LIBRA amount of distinctive Welsh jurisdiction compatible system (enabling the production of documents in with transferring powers on the Scottish model”. As the magistrates’ courts in the language of choice) is part of what it refers to as the ‘minimum model’, the an example of such a development. Government of Wales Act 2006 should be amended to include the administration of justice as a field When he was Lord Chief Justice between 1996 devolved to the National Assembly. This would and 2000 Lord Bingham broke tradition by adding include an independent prosecution service for ‘Wales’ to his title. There is now a Lord Chief Wales, further devolving the court administration to Justice of England and Wales. Other developments Wales, a Welsh Judicial Appointments Commission, have taken place within the courts recognising the and a Welsh legal aid system. changing status of Wales within the unitary system. Both divisions of the Court of Appeal (Criminal and The emphasised that the Civil) sit in Cardiff, although it is still administered legal structures in Wales should keep pace with from London. The Administrative Court also sits political devolution. It concluded that: in Cardiff and most proceedings can be issued at the District Registry in Cardiff. Importantly, these “... a separate Welsh jurisdiction is not a include challenging the National Assembly. precondition for the development of increased legislative competence for the National These initiatives have strengthened the legal Assembly for Wales, even if the National identity of Wales, although they are part of a Assembly for Wales has the substantial powers wider programme of decentralisation throughout of the Scottish model.” England and Wales. Other courts in Wales (Crown Court, County Court and magistrates courts) are Sir Roderick Evans stated that the ultimate decision administered through Her Majesty’s Courts Service on a Welsh jurisdiction, or an amended Wales and in Wales and have their own judges. England jurisdiction, “may be heavily influenced by how responsive the present jurisdiction proves The organisation of administrative tribunals in to be to the legitimate expectations of Wales”. How Wales is complicated. It involves Welsh tribunals responsive has it been? administered by the sponsoring department in the Welsh Government, cross-border tribunals The unitary model of administration of justice has administered by the UK Tribunals Service or by evolved since devolution. In 2007 the Wales and sponsoring UK government departments. For

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the Welsh tribunals, the Welsh Committee of the The law schools and the profession must build up the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council capacity within the profession to meet the needs of noted that they are insufficiently independent from Legal Wales, but also to accommodate the ongoing the department whose decision they consider. relationship with England. In its submission to the It recommended the transfer of policy and Richard Commission, the Standing Committee on administrative responsibility for Welsh tribunals Legal Wales concluded: to a focal point for administrative justice in the Department of the First Minister and Cabinet. This “... further research needs to be undertaken is an interesting development in the administration on what is an appropriate balance between of administrative justice in Wales. the need to establish a distinctly Welsh dimension to the administration of justice, At the 2009 Legal Wales Conference Sir Malcolm and the need to retain the mutual benefits Pill said, of the links with England.”

“As central government recognises the Devolving the administration of justice must match legitimacy of the Assembly and devolved the pace of devolution and the growth of the administration, it is important, in my view, that corpus of Welsh law. It cannot lead the way, but it the unitary system gives equivalent recognition is essential that it does not fall behind. The unitary in the judicial structure suitable for Wales.” model works and will do so for the foreseeable future. Cross border law will remain, particularly in The unitary model enables Wales and England to criminal law, contract and tort. benefit from a strong unified legal profession and judiciary. This is important and builds on many years However, as the body of distinct Welsh law grows of experience. Since devolution, the administration in devolved areas, so too will the tensions within of courts and tribunals in Wales has responded the unitary system. Primary law making powers will to the emergence of Legal Wales. It has been a lead to a more identifiable body of Welsh law and cautious approach and linked in part to the pace strengthen the argument for further devolving the of development within the law making capacity in administration of justice and the courts in Wales. Wales and the size of the body of Welsh law. The parameters of a Welsh jurisdiction working alongside rather than completely absorbed within As law-making capacity increases, and as the body the English jurisdiction will become apparent. of Welsh law grows, the unitary model needs to adapt further. Thus far, it has proved to be sufficiently At some stage in the future, (maybe in the distant flexible to accommodate developments. However, future) a clearly defined Welsh jurisdiction may be as devolution progresses, the challenges will increase necessary. Meanwhile, the process of devolving the and tensions may arise. The following are some of administration of justice should continue within the the questions that will need to be addressed: unitary model at a pace reflecting greater legislative powers and the growth in Welsh law. • How should appointment procedures for the judiciary reflect the needs of a more dualistic body of law? • What are the implications of more Welsh Law and greater devolution of the administration of justice for the Welsh Law Schools? • Should there be a Wales only law degree and professional qualification? • What does the legal profession in Wales need to do to respond to the demands of Legal Wales? John Williams is Professor of Law in Aberystwyth • What are the implications for cross border University’s Department of Law and Criminology practitioners? and is a member its Centre for Welsh Legal Affairs.

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Reforming Welsh law Richard Percival reviews the Law Commission’s engagement with Wales since devolution

Articles in recent issues of Agenda have called that it should add “housing tenure” to the matters for Wales to be given its own Law Commission. under the legislative competence of the National Professor John Williams of Aberystwyth University Assembly. Further, we said that, if Whitehall was not made the case in the Spring 2009 issue, as did interested in implementing the proposals, then the Joseph Carter, of the MS Society Cymru, in his article Welsh Government should seek a legislative consent about the need to reform paying for social care in order (LCO) to do so on a Wales-only basis. the most recent Summer 2010 issue. An account of In our 2007-2008 annual report we contrasted the experience of the existing England and Wales the “imaginative and positive policy reaction” from Commission’s engagement with Welsh law reform Welsh Ministers and officials with the position in should put these calls into a clearer perspective. England. In truth, much of the reform felt more Much of the work of the Commission is not in conducive to what was, by then, the direction of devolved areas, such as criminal, commercial or policy in Wales than it was in England. In the end, the family law, although it will often have indirect effects proposals have been accepted by Welsh Ministers on devolved areas. However, the Commission’s but rejected in England. An LCO has now been Public Law Team has undertaken two large scale passed which would allow the Assembly to legislate projects in devolved areas. to implement the bulk of our recommendations. So The first was a major review of housing tenure we remain hopeful that tenants and landlords in law, which lasted from 2001 to 2006. At the start Wales, if not England, will eventually benefit from of this process, we didn’t properly appreciate the these broadly-supported reforms. significance of devolution under the 1998 Act. Our second major project is the current one We were brought up sharp by some fairly pithy dealing with adult social care. Although at the comments by the Minister then in charge of housing, outset, the Welsh Government decided not to . After that, I think most Welsh housing make it a joint project (that is, one jointly sponsored stakeholders would agree that we made real (and by the Department of Health and the Welsh I think successful) efforts to fully reflect both the Government), we have striven to ensure that that differences in approach to housing policy in Wales makes no difference in practice. We have had a and the possibilities of devolution. full and stimulating consultation process in Wales. The end result was that when we made our Indeed, the biggest event we had anywhere was recommendations, in the summer of 2006, our a conference in Cardiff put on for us by the Older draft Bill provided that the single most important People’s Commissioner and Age Cymru. About 15 rule in our proposed new system – the rule that per cent of all of our consultation events have been gave council and housing associations tenants in Wales. the same high security tenancy – should be in One of the questions in this project is whether primary legislation but subject to a power for the there should be a single (Westminster) statute, or National Assembly to amend it in future (with no two. Joseph Carter takes us to task on this in the corresponding power for Miisters in relation to last edition of Agenda, but in doing so confuses England). As it happened, we published at the same different issues. Under the current system (Part 3 of time that the Bill for the Government of Wales Act the 2006 Act), there are two questions. The first is: 2006 was going through Parliament. Our Bill had to should you use a Westminster statute or an LCO? reflect the law as it was, but this timing allowed us to If there is any real prospect of a Bill, then anyone make recommendations on how our system should familiar with the Byzantine procedures necessary be implemented under the new Act. We proposed for an LCO would plump for a Westminster Bill. that there should be a single Westminster Act, but Once you have decided that question, the next –

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one Bill (with different parts) or two? – becomes an between the two countries. But, in fact, there essentially technical one. But I should emphasise are already significant differences between the that this is the case under the current law. If Part 4 effective law in Wales and that in England. These of the 2006 Act is brought in as result of a yes vote are going to increase. As the differences become in the referendum next March, the considerations accentuated Welsh institutions may well want to would be different. In that case separate legislation think about whether there should be a separate in the National Assembly and the UK Parliament Law Commission for Wales, regardless of whether would become a much more likely outcome. or not there is a separate jurisdiction. The existing A new concordat is currently under discussion Law Commission may or may not decide to take between the Welsh Government and the a view on the issue when it comes up. But what Commission. This should help where we need matters to us now is that when that decision comes some Welsh Government input on Welsh issues in to be made, one of the arguments for a Welsh law reform projects which deal with non-devolved Commission shouldn’t be that the existing Law law, an area that has sometimes caused problems Commission has failed law reform in Wales. in the past. Calls for a separate Welsh Law Commission can be put in the context of an argument for a Richard Percival is Team Manager with the Public Welsh jurisdiction. A separate jurisdiction is at one Law Team at the Law Commission for England end of the spectrum in terms of legal difference and Wales.

Forthcoming Conferences

Opportunities for a Confederal School Innovation IWA National Economy University in South West Wales in the Middle Years Conference Interface between the public Friday 3 December 10am-3.30pm Tuesday 1 March 2011, 10am – 4pm and private sectors Halliwell Centre, University of Wales WJEC, Llandaff, Cardiff

Trinity St David, Carmarthen Conference in association with This conference sees the launch of an PricewaterhouseCoopers The emergence of the new University 18-month IWA study into innovation Friday 11 March 2011, 10am-5pm of Wales Trinity Saint David and and excellence in teaching children in Parc Hotel, Cardiff its developing links with Swansea their 11 to 14 middle years in Welsh Metropolitan University, Pembrokeshire secondary schools. This is a critical This conference focuses on the business College, Coleg Sir Gâr, Colege Ceredigion period in children’s education, marking as it takes the strain of and other colleges and schools the transitions from primary into economic development in the wake of throughout south west Wales, provide secondary school and then into learning the Comprehensive Spending Review and many opportunities for knowledge-led pathways from 14 to 19. However, a how we can enhance the opportunities economic development. The creation key policy challenge facing Wales is the occurring at the interface of the private of Wales’s first ‘dual sector’ university low educational performance of a large and public sectors. While the private within a confederal framework will allow proportion of our young people aged 11 sector relies on the public realm mediated, seamless student movement within to 14 compared with relatively higher for example, by local government and tertiary education and foster integrated levels of attainment elsewhere in the UK. NHS Wales, the public relies on the private research programmes across the region. sector in outsourcing many of its functions. It will bring together more than 170,000 Keynote speakers: Stevie Upton, IWA Two key interfaces are explored in this students making it the fourth largest Research Officer and Professor David conference: (i) the Welsh Government’s higher education institution in Wales. Egan, UWIC, plus case studies from six new Economic Renewal Strategy and its secondary schools across Wales. emphasis on six key business sectors for Keynote speakers: Leighton Andrews AM, growing the economy; and (ii) the role Education Minister, Welsh Government; £65 (£52 IWA members) of public sector procurement policies in Sir Deian Hopkin, former Vice Chancellor, driving forward the business economy. London South Bank University; Dr Medwin Hughes, Vice-Chancellor and Dr Meri Keynote speakers: Gerald Holtham, Huws, Pro Vice Chancellor Innovation, Chair of the Welsh Government’s Skills and Community, University of Wales Commission on Funding and Finance Trinity Saint David. for Wales and Professor Kevin Morgan,

Cardiff University £65 (£60 IWA members)

£90 (£72 IWA members)

4 Education Going it alone by default

Philip Dixon says the Welsh Government education department’s ‘made in Wales’ solutions need to be a good deal Articles better than they have been Going it alone by default It has become something of a truism that the real test for devolution would be University when governments of differing colours occupy the corridors of power in Cardiff challenge Bay and Westminster. Indeed, despite warm words about ‘mutual respect’, the Opening their coalitions in the Bay and Westminster have already been at loggerheads over mouths to prove funding, the timing of the referendum on further powers, and the date of the they’re Welsh Assembly election. Such public spats are easy to observe but other more oblique challenges should not be ignored.

For a start the Government in the Bay will find it increasingly difficult to play ‘over my shoulder’ in policy development. Hitherto, looking across the border to England has been a useful backdrop for deliberation and discussion. Some developments, such as the skills agenda, have been adopted and ‘Welshified’. Others, such as the abolition of SATs and school League Tables, have given ample opportunity for a display of Welsh socialist credentials. Whatever the decision it’s been relatively simple to decide whether to tweak or reject the English agenda. However, the radical departure of the Westminster coalition in areas such as Academies and Free Schools, to name but two, makes such an ‘over the shoulder’ attitude increasingly problematic.

The school curriculum in both countries could also start to look radically different. Despite the rhetoric of freedom and localism many of the Westminster coalition’s plans for education actually enhance the power of the Secretary of State. In one of his first public statements after being made Secretary of State, give clear indications of what he’d like to see in the school curriculum. The narrative and content of history teaching seemed to be a particular obsession.

Such traditionalism plays well with the reactionaries of the Daily Mail but is scorned by educational experts. What will Wales do when confronted by a curriculum over the border that is hot on Kings and Queens and rivers? We can’t just substitute the Taff for the Thames and a list of Llewellyns for Henrys. If Wales, rightly, continues to develop a skills-based curriculum suited for the 21st Century then the English model will not be adaptable. As time goes on changes to the curriculum will also impact on the qualifications regime. Gove’s dislike of modular A levels cannot

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be allowed to undermine our more enlightened structure and personnel. No one could claim that approach in Wales. all the right people are in all the right jobs. There are serious lacunae in knowledge and skills. We are Even the teaching profession could start to look still not attracting and retaining enough of the best and feel very different. Gove’s announcement of brains in the business. The departure of the second the abolition of the General Teaching Council in Director of DCELLS in less than two years is a cause England has raised questions about the Council for concern. Overall a more strategic approach to here in Wales. Many commentators think that policy is necessary. Gove has acted in haste and will now have to repent at leisure as the chickens of regulation and DCELLs has not really settled down since the registration come home to roost. Leighton Andrews ‘bonfire of the quangos’ and the upheaval of its obviously checked any propensity he may have merger in 2006 with four other education bodies, had for following suit and it seems that the General including the training organisation ELWa and the Teaching Council for Wales is here to stay. But it curriculum authority ACCAC . cannot be pickled in aspic. Questions about its role and remit will need careful consideration. The But it can be done, and the department can point Welsh Government will not be able to look over its to some successes. The Baccalaureate and the shoulder to decide what to do because there will Foundation Phase represent new and innovative be nothing there to see. The Teaching Council in policies. Both have achieved international England will simply no longer exist. recognition. But the path of both has not been plain sailing. In particular, the Foundation Phase In one area the ‘over the shoulder’ view may almost ran aground on the rocks of funding and become a great deal clearer, perhaps painfully only a change of Minister saved the day. Both took so. The biggest challenge will be to show that our considerable expertise, time and money to develop 3Cs deliver better than the English 3 Cs. That is to and those are now in short supply. say our collaboration, cooperation and consensus should deliver a more effective schooling system The task of the new Director of DCELLS, Emyr than their competition, contestation and coercion. Roberts, formerly Head of Public Services and Local Government and now fourth education chief That judgment might seem a little more nuanced if in five years, will not be easy. It was revealing that it weren’t for the spectre of the PISA results which his appointment was announced in early October will shortly lay bare the Welsh and English models a few days ahead of the advertised closing date in an internationally respected League Table. This for applications for the job. The speediness of the is the Programme for International Asseasment co- appointment must surely reflect the regard that ordinated by the OECD that focuses on 15-year- colleagues have, and also their assessment of olds’ capabilities in reading, mathematics, and his ability to work alongside Education Minister science literacy. The dip in Welsh A level results this Leighton Andrews. summer may have been something of a warning, as was the gap between the nations over A* grades at The department’s energies need to be much more GCSEs. The Welsh Government has to show that the focused, the lessons from PISA learnt, and a broad comprehensive system’s communal, collaborative consensus on reform developed. If the present set approach can deliver more effectively. Warm up is not delivering, and the emerging English set up rhetoric has to be translated into hard results. There is not politically acceptable, then ‘made in Wales’ can be no return to league tables and SATs, but solutions need to be a good deal better than they levers of accountability, and more effective policies have been. The real test for devolution won’t be in and practices will need to be developed. the open tussles with Westminster, but in showing that it can deliver the educational goods. And there in lies one of the root problems, the capacity of the Department for Children, Education and Lifelong Learning (DCELLs), which has 690 staff Philip Dixon is Director of ATL Cymru, the and a budget of £2 billion. This is a question both of Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

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£21,000, the majority will be paying off University challenge their loans as soon as they start work. Deian Hopkin says the student fees increase in England gives What about the well-publicised Wales an opportunity to create a more distinctive higher ‘graduate premium’, one of the key education system planks for defending tuition fees in the first place? The Government argument One of the notable features of the present Review for 2012-15. Both of these relate that graduates earn an extra £100,000 round of expenditure cuts, arguably primarily to England although there are over a lifetime compared with non- the greatest in the past century, is a clear implications for Wales and the graduates will not be quite so enticing fundamental shift in the role of the State other devolved administrations. The key when tuition fees and the ensuing loan in so many different fields, from housing feature of both is the principle of money have more than doubled. Students will to health. Nowhere is this more marked following the student. The Department surely look even more closely at the than in higher education. for Business, Education and Skills wants earnings prospects of different degree Since 1945, and especially since the to cut the higher education budget by 40 subjects, and this may not help the arts Robbins Report of 1962, the State has per cent. Browne becomes a means of or humanities. played a key role in the development replacing it by higher student fees. More For most universities the world has and support of higher education specifically, it is proposed to end direct suddenly become a lot tougher. The provision, financing a huge expansion funding altogether for most non-science withdrawal of direct teaching grants will in student numbers, creating a raft of courses and this makes the fee level even create a huge financial gap. One Vice new universities and funding a range more significant. Chancellor estimates that his teaching of programmes aimed at increasing For students the implications are grant will be reduced by over 80 per cent. participation and improving retention. clear, certainly for anyone studying in University managers will have to look very As a result the proportion of young England, and this includes the large carefully at the range of provision and people attending university has grown number of Welsh students who cross construct a portfolio which will attract the from around 4 per cent in the 1950s to the border. The Government intends right level of fees rather than one which the current 40 per cent plus. to allow universities to increase tuition offers a wide range of choice. Moreover, However, the government has fees to at least £6,000 and up to £9,500, budget cuts across Whitehall will reduce retained a significant measure of control subject to certain conditions. However, the contract income universities earn through limiting undergraduate fees since universities will lose around £4,000 from government departments. Other and tightly managing student numbers. of direct funding for their non-science potential clients, such as charities and Research has also been directly supported courses, doubling fees to £7,000 will trusts, are also under increasing pressure. by central government through a dual simply maintain steady-state. Some The escape routes which were developed support system of guaranteed allocations universities, notably Oxbridge, will after the last severe cuts in the 1980s have based on quality assessment and a system increase fees even higher and this, in become fewer. of competitive grants. Even so, the turn, will create a differentiated higher There is a further sting in the tail. proportion of funding directly provided education system, far more than we have Browne recommends lifting the current by the government has declined over seen in the past. restriction on student numbers, and the years as universities have grown It is true that students will not be this opens the door for much greater their contract business, developed a required to pay their fees up front, and competition between universities. For range of services such as hospitality the income threshold before repayments many this is the greatest threat of all since and conferences, and expanded their start will rise to £21,000. However, the current controls gave some guarantee overseas student numbers where there the application of real interest rates of stability. After all, student choice is are no controls on either fees or numbers. to the student loan, another Browne often determined by perceptions rather Nonetheless, home undergraduates recommendation, would make the whole than evidence. Many universities struggle still represent the main business for package very much more expensive than to overcome a residual prejudice against most universities. The recent Browne now. Indeed, English tuition fees would non-traditional institutions. All too often Review on university fees and funding, not only be the highest in the world for the phrase ‘top’ or ‘good’ university established by the former government to public higher education but over twice implies that there are a number of find a way of sustaining higher education, as expensive as, say, in the United States. ‘bottom’ or ‘bad’ universities, not exactly must now be seen side-by-side with Moreover, since the average starting a recipe for raising fees. this year’s Comprehensive Spending salary for graduates is already nearly Of course, it may be argued that

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Students at the new University of Wales Trinity St David Wales, through a combination of modest fee rises but continued direct support, to create a distinctive higher education system rather than go with the flow. The chances are, however, that Wales will simply follow England, in order to avoid all the complications of distinctiveness. Does all of this mean the end of the Robbins era? Is this the end of expansion, at a time when other countries are continuing to invest in their higher education system? How will competition between institutions affect the geography of provision? After all, mergers do not, in themselves, ensure an equitable distribution of provision. Will this be the moment, indeed, when devolution really begins to impact on higher education policy and the higher skills agenda? Decisions in Scotland, in particular, will be very interesting in these respects. universities need not increase their fees, to change for ever. What is clear is that, fully implemented, and compete instead on price. However, How will Wales react? While the the Browne Report together with the this would be the final nail in the coffin of current discussion has focused on Comprehensive Spending Review a national system of pay and conditions. the English situation, the implications represents the biggest change in several Cheaper fees may not be the best way to for Wales are very clear. Reductions generations in the prospects both for ensure a high quality of staff or resources in research spending will impact on higher education institutions and for and the break-up of the relatively Welsh institutions, but where teaching is students and their families. No one cohesive UK higher education system concerned the Welsh Government does really knows whether a more market- would be that much closer. not necessarily have to follow the English led system will maintain or improve the The Browne Review does offer one route by cutting direct support for courses. quality and range of provision, as its glimmer of hope for some institutions. As a result Welsh universities might not advocates argue, or whether the steady Extending financial support to part-time have to increase fees to the same extent progress towards widening participation students, for too long the Cinderella of as their English counterparts. will shudder to a halt. The fear is that the sector, is to be welcomed. Many post- Of course, the Welsh Government we will return to a narrow and less 92 universities have been particularly has limited room for manoeuvre given egalitarian system of higher education successful developing part-time provision its own budget cuts and, in any case, with even more uncertain prospects for and this may be, for some, a get-out-of- many Welsh students studying in England those who do not enter it. The challenge jail card. are given extra support from the Welsh for Wales is, somehow, to construct a Meanwhile the private sector is budget. Education Minister Leighton better alternative. hovering around the sector. Until now, Andrews has warned that as things public fee levels of £3,000 made their stand, English fee increases will be a own offer uncompetitive, which is why heavy burden, perhaps as much as £50 Professor Sir Deian Hopkin retired most private sector providers opted for million, on the Assembly. So whatever as Vice-Chancellor of London South postgraduate courses. At £7,000 and more, happens, the present mechanism for Bank University in 2009, after 44 years the economics become very different and Welsh students will have to be reviewed. in higher education including 24 years one can expect a flurry of activity as new Meanwhile, lower Welsh fees might at Aberystwyth where he was Head players enter the undergraduate market, well encourage large number of English of the History Department. He will be not to mention the overseas universities students to seek a refuge from high fees giving a keynote address at the IWA’s whose fees are so much lower and who and how would that be managed without Opportunities for a Confederal University are already beginning to advertise their displacing Welsh students? Nonetheless, in South West Wales conference in wares in the UK. The landscape is about there are some opportunities here for Carmarthen on 3 December.

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Opening their mouths to prove they’re Welsh

Rhian Siân Hodges and Delyth Morris discover why parents are choosing Welsh-medium education for their children in the Rhymney Valley

A majority of English speaking parents 5-15 years, which demonstrates the smattering of Welsh in an English-medium in the Rhymney Valley choose Welsh impact of Welsh medium schools. school”. They wanted their children to medium education for their children speak Welsh as a first language, which because of their sense of belonging to Half the participants in our study they regarded as the essence of being Wales. This finding, from a research pointed to cultural reasons linked to Welsh. As one parent said, “My children project carried out over the past year, their national identity as the reason for don’t have to wear a tall black hat to contravenes a similar study carried out their choice. “We are proud to be Welsh prove they are Welsh. All they have to do in the 1970s. This found the main reason and have our own language,” was how is to open their mouths.” why parents chose Welsh medium one respondent put it. Many parents said education at that time was economic. their children were “turning into little Many interviewees spoke of a ‘lost Americans” due to an Americanization generation’ and were eager that their This suggests that Welsh identity is of Welsh society. The significance of children should not miss out on learning strengthening in the Valleys, which traditional elements of Welsh culture, Welsh as had happened to themselves. bodes well for the future of the language. such as the National , were Some of the parents felt their identity Figure 1 gives the main reasons why the seen as bulwarks against such trends. was “incomplete” or “inadequate” parents in our study chose Welsh-medium Welsh-medium education was also seen because the language had not been education, while Figure 2 traces the as encouraging equality between the passed on to them. growth of Welsh-medium schools in the Welsh and English languages. Rhymney Valley since 1955. Over a third of the respondents thought Fifty in-depth interviews were conducted Welsh-medium education simply has a greater number of Welsh- with parents from Welsh-medium nursery, provided a “better quality education” medium schools than any other local primary and secondary schools in locations compared to English-medium schools. education authority in Wales. According spanning the entire Rhymney Valley. The Parents believed that the greater range to the 2001 census 13,916 (8.5 per cent) of parents were mainly non-Welsh-speaking, of extra-curricular activities, pastoral the people of the county can speak, read although some were from mixed language care and discipline of Welsh-medium and write in Welsh, with a further 8,526 or Welsh language households. The schools were all selling points as well. (5.9 per cent) having a lesser grasp of the interviewees were selected randomly from language. This makes Caerphilly one of 400 who had completed a questionnaire A smaller group of parents, 8 per cent the counties with the highest number of distributed by the schools. of the sample, chose Welsh-medium Welsh speakers in south east Wales. Since education for economic reasons. They the 1991 Census there was an increase Some parents said did they not want their hoped their children would have of 20.8 per cent of Welsh-speakers aged children to have “a second language “better occupations and extended opportunities”. These parents were aware that fluency in the language was Figure 1: often an advantage in the workplace, Reasons for choice of Welsh-medium education especially within the public sector, and

chose Welsh-medium education for Reason Percentage Number their children accordingly. A significant Cultural 50 25 number were conscious of the Welsh Educational 34 17 Government’s vision of creating a Economic 8 4 bilingual Wales and simply thought their Personal 8 4 children would have better opportunities to “do well” for themselves in a bilingual country if they could speak Welsh.

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Some of the parents chose Welsh-medium education for other reasons, such as the individual needs of the child. A few stated their friends’ children attended Welsh-medium schools and they had simply followed their choices. Some parents referred to the influence of Welsh- speaking extended families and partners in encouraging them to choose Welsh- medium education for their children.

A small number of parents chose Welsh-medium education because they believed it similar in ethos to private education. As one put it, “It is like having a public school education within the national system - the structure, discipline Then Education Minister Jane Hutt cuts the ribbon at the official opening of the latest £3 million Welsh-medium primary school in the Rhymney Valley, at Penalltau in September 2009. Holding the ribbon on the left is Labour’s and teachers’ expectations within Welsh- Caerphilly AM Jeff Cuthbert, and on the right Plaid Cymru’s Phil Bevan, the council’s cabinet member for medium schools are all similar.” Education. The school will eventually have 240 pupils

What comes across from all these views is that Welsh-medium education is a Figure 2: Development of Welsh-medium schools in the Rhymney Valley respected and a successful means of Welsh language production in the Rhymney School Opening Number Number at Number at Valley and, by implication, across the Date of children Jan 1997 Jan 2008 whole of the south Wales Valleys. Ysgol y Lawnt 1955 15 148 150 From the point of view of the future Ysgol Ifor Bach 1961 11 291 166 development of the language it is encouraging that the majority of parents Ysgol Gilfach Fargod 1963 62 170 158 chose Welsh medium education for Ysgol Gymraeg broadly cultural rather than economic Caerffili 1970 97 324 276 reasons. It suggests that parents have a heightened awareness of the implications of their educational choices on the Ysgol Gyfun Cwm future of the Welsh language itself. Rhymni (Secondary) 1981 156 884 1195

At the same time schools by themselves Ysgol Gymraeg Trelyn 1991 112 164 188 cannot sustain the Welsh language, Further Welsh Government measures Ysgol Gymraeg are needed. Only when the language Cwm Gwyddon 1992 112 146 157 has a higher profile in all the places and Ysgol Gymraeg spaces where there is potential for it to Bro Allta 1993 150 210 284 be used will its future be more secure. Ysgol y Castell 1995 120 134 281 Ysgol Bro Sannan 2004 18 - 103 Rhian Siân Hodges is a Sociology Ysgol Gymraeg Cwm Sept and Social Policy Welsh-medium Derwen 2008 34 - - lecturer, and Delyth Morris a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy Ysgol Gymraeg Sept at Bangor University. Penalltau 2009 20

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 49 Carnival time at Blaengarw, with the costumes produced as part of the village’s timebanking initiative.

5 Social Policy

Articles Gift economy Gift economy rolls out across Wales rolls out across Wales Overcoming Ben Dineen explains how a timebanking initiative is the complexities of the global transforming some of Wales’s most deprived communities marketplace In Blaengarw, seamstresses and craft groups and help in integrating themselves into Schooling outside gather at the working men’s hall, creating hostel life. Such participation helps residents the mainstream costumes for the village carnival. This tradition advance towards some of has only been revived recently and is widely living targets that are agreed as a key aspect seen as a symbol of a revitalised village. It is an of their residency. It takes the pressure off outstanding example of a ‘timebanking’ initiative frontline staff, and creates a culture of joint that is spreading across Wales and helping revive responsibility within the hostel. Residents are some of our most deprived communities. no longer defined by their needs but by what they can do to contribute. This helps to break More than twenty street ambassadors in an assumption and culture of dependency that Blaengarw also act as intermediaries between often defines modern public services. their ‘patch’, the local authority and other statutory and third sector agencies. By quickly The single factor that unifies these projects reporting crime, littering, illegal tipping and is the use of agency time credits. The driving dog fouling they enable public sector agencies force behind this renewal is Spice, a young, to target resources more effectively to bring vibrant social enterprise, whose interest is in about solutions. Anti-social behaviour rates developing credit systems that engage and have dropped year-on-year in Blaengarw empower the many rather than the few. Spice while, at the same time, the numbers of designs and develops agency time credits individuals actively contributing their time as a means of tackling social exclusion and to their community has risen from 25 to over building active, engaged communities. 700, out of a total population of 2000. Agency time credits have evolved from In Cardiff, long term residents of a United Welsh the original timebanking model devised by Housing hostel for vulnerable adults help to run American civil rights lawyer Edgar Cahn a fruit and veg co-op. Residents also mentor in the 1980s, in which time brokered new arrivals by providing support, orientation exchanges of services between individual

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members in order to strengthen organisations and businesses networks within communities. with a shared commitment to Agency time credits build on sustainable development. Cahn’s pioneering model by underpinning a time bank In the current climate of austerity with a small amount of public and budgetary tightening there money and credibility. is no doubt that time credits are an idea whose time has Agency time credits provide a come. The model has the new way for public services, potential to transform the way third sector organisations and in which public services work private businesses to value with communities, while at the and grow civic action. They same time engaging those with work on a simple hour-for- no history of participation as an-hour formula in which an agents of change. individual gains an hour credit – a tangible, paper currency - Agency time credits have by giving an hour of time to an activity that benefits a multiplier effect that adds value to increasingly local people, institutions or the environment. This pressured budgets. By creating a two-way street credit can then be used to access an hour of other that allows beneficiaries to input meaningfully events, training or activities. In Cardiff, for example, into the services they receive, and by using these the model relies on a broad and diverse network of reinvigorated connections to intervene upstream ‘time out’ partners, who are willing to underwrite before problems accumulate downstream they and underpin individual participation. allow for effective, targeted interventions, while at the same time mobilising and including the many Time bank rewards can often be provided at little or in that process. no additional cost to the public, through intelligent use of existing spare capacity. This allows companies It is the two-way conversation that agency time and agencies to give back to the communities in credits engender that has led Geoff Mulgan, which they work easily. Cardiff time bank members Director of the Young Foundation, to conclude, can use the credits they have gained to, among other “Time credits are where self-interest and shared things, attend a Cardiff Blues rugby match, swim or interest overlap, and they’re one of the best and work out in any of Cardiff’s leisure centres, watch a most practical expressions of the Big Society.” performance at Chapter Arts Centre, The Gate or St. Davids Hall, or use the climbing wall at Boulders. The potential for the use of agency time credits as a catalyst for social change, and their unique application New ways of extending and challenging the forged in the crucible of the Welsh Valleys has led methodology are emerging in Wales through the Public Service Management Wales to describe them design and development of a number of innovative as “a modern language for active citizenship” and projects. Cardiff-based Time Schools aims to engage “money for the civil society”. This not just another pupils, parents and the wider community both in the incentive scheme, it is a radical new language. running and growth of the school, and in the bending of school resources and capacity for community benefit. Meanwhile, Time for Action, a project run in partnership with the Welsh Government’s Climate Ben Dineen has managed community and Change team focuses on the use of time credits to sustainable development projects in the UK encourage behaviour change resulting in personal and abroad. He is currently seconded to the and collective carbon reduction. Time for Action Welsh Government’s Climate Change team is also developing a Wales-wide agency-to-agency tasked with using timebanking as an agent of network that will facilitate the exchange of skills, change in the transition to a low carbon future knowledge and competencies between groups, [email protected].

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Chairs produced by furniture manufacturer Organgebox are 98 per cent recyclable. Overcoming the complexities of the global marketplace

Eva Trier Who needs brand new carpets? Cleanstream creating sustainable prosperity, current corporate looks at some Carpets, a -based Community Interest structures which are unsustainable in the long run Company, is harnessing the potential of ‘waste’ as will remain unchallenged. examples a valuable local resource. Refashioned carpet tiles of firms offer value for money, save carbon and reduce Creation of shareholder value still reigns supreme which are landfill. At the same time the company supports in the way our economy is structured. Deep down, challenging the local economy by providing recruitment however, most of us know that growing a business, conventional and training. inventing new gadgets and winning market share cannot be the only goals of economic activity. ways of doing Cleanstream is at the leading edge of creating Shareholder value does not necessarily equate business a new business model. By combining local to real value. There is a need to step back and resilience, innovation and recycling it is doing reconsider the role of business in contributing to good business. It is young and still has to prove sustainable prosperity and well-being. itself in commercial terms. However, without such bold attempts at redefining the role of business in Many businesses are removed from any common

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Left: Members of Porth’s Cleanstream community interest company demonstrate their refashioned carpet tiles. Above: Riversimple’s carbon friendly hydrogen-powered vehicle. sense notion of what their purpose justice and community engagement, As investors we should care for how the might be in these terms. Many have a and recognise the environmental limits returns on investment are generated. As tenuous link to place. We need some of production, especially on the security producers we should take responsibility social innovation in the way we operate of our energy and food supplies. for the ecosystem seriously. And as our businesses to make them more consumers we need to understand the sustainable. Cleanstream provides Riversimple, a London-based car social and environmental implications of an example of how the competitive company, is developing a carbon how the things we consume are made. environment of the global economy friendly vehicle which uses hydrogen can be confronted by tapping into fuel cells to power electric motors in the We need to experiment with running local resources. wheels. It plans to operate through small more sustainable businesses that draw scale decentralised local manufacturing on strong personal relationships. We So does Orangebox, a Hengoed- operations which will also serve as local can create facts on the ground by taking based office furniture manufacturer service centres – a form of ‘micro- the initiative in the way Cleanstream, which deploys sustainable production factory retailing’. The business model Orangebox and Riversimple have done, techniques to supply its global involves leasing the technology to in the process sharing responsibility for market. Orangebox has designed and whoever wishes to set up a small-scale decisions about the way we produce and manufactures a chair that is 98 per manufacturing operation. Part of the consume. Such initiatives are crucial in cent recyclable. The firm’s refurbishing condition will be shared responsibility helping us break away from the paralysis and recycling processes ensure that among investors, employees, suppliers, we can feel when facing the complexities they retain the value of the materials and the local community. of the global marketplace. they use. Working with its supply chain partners Orangebox publishes detailed Rather than waiting for big business information about its consumption of or government to offer solutions, it resources on its website. is up to us in all our various roles as Eva Trier is a senior consultant with investors, consumers and producers to CM International UK and is a Director Cleanstream and Orangebox are support the development of such for of several social enterprises working exemplars of what can be understood as purpose businesses and experiment with at the interface between economic for-purpose businesses. As well as making different approaches. development and sustainability. things they are concerned with social

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Schooling outside the mainstream

Rhys David reports on an alternative to the classroom for excluded children that is proving a success in Caerphilly

It is nine o’clock and the workshops are school-leaving age the local education beyond. His jobs have included a springing into life on a small industrial authority must try to arrange 25 hours long spell with the Rank Organisation, estate on the edge of Caerphilly as a week educational provision in one commercial manager with Oakwood, staff turn up to the small engineering form or another, either through one- the leisure park in Pembrokeshire and companies, trade depots, and offices to-one home tuition or in some form of owner of his own pubs and restaurants. that make up the site. But in one of the placement. After that responsibility has He also enjoyed a period of success units it is also the start of the school day. been discharged, other agencies will in the UK pop charts in the late 1990s For the small number of mainly 15-16 pick up the cost of probably a lifetime when he managed his daughter’s band year olds who arrive by car and taxi it of benefits for those that fail to cope Dragonheart. will be English and Maths but also web with life in a society where skills are at Music Wales worked with young design, video making or possibly event a premium. people to put on shows and make music management in a real commercial videos. Six years ago it was transformed setting. There may also be visits outside into Young Wales, a social enterprise to film a conference or set up a stage offering a wider range of services to young show. people. With this approach struggling This is Young Wales, a new and after a year or so to make enough successful approach to working with money to survive after earlier funding children who have been excluded from the Coalfieds Regeneration Trust, from mainstream education. Every the Welsh Council for Voluntary Action year in Britain some 7,000 children and the Wales Co-operative Centre had (overwhelmingly boys) are excluded come to an end, a decision was taken and for the vast majority that means to focus more on training. Bill himself the end of effective education. Though retrained to be able to offer work-based Wales has a good record in this respect, qualifications, provided by the awards with exclusions at five per ten thousand firm ASDAN. “Their courses offered school pupils – just under half the UK unconventional ways of accrediting average – it still represents hundreds of activities better suited to the type of lives potentially being wasted. And in youngster Young Wales was seeking some parts of Wales, including the south Bill Fitzgerald, inspiration behind Young Wales. to help, allowing a range of personal Wales valleys, the figures are higher. qualities, abilities and achievements to The cost to these individuals of Young Wales has been operating be recorded,” Bill explains. making their way through life probably for just under six years and has evolved Among the first recruits were two without any qualifications is enormous, from an earlier organisation, Music youths referred by the Youth Offending almost certainly a life without work or Wales, started by Bill Fitzgerald, after Service in Caerphilly who were at best in very low paid jobs. The cost a long career in leisure, music and introduced to pop video making. The to society is also huge. Until they reach entertainment in south Wales and local education authority subsequently

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negotiated contracts for Bill and his small team, which includes two trained teachers, to take up to 12 young people excluded from school. In most cases they were the victims of bullying who had just stopped turning up, rather than the seriously disruptive whose own behaviour had made them unwelcome. Some of the children have been picked on because of physical characteristics, or had moved from place to place and were cast as outsiders. Others have been carers at home who had stopped attending school or attended only when they could. Many of the children had become virtual captives not just at home but in their bedrooms where they would hide from society and their families, communicating with their only friend – the computer – all hours of the day and night. Some who have been persuaded to attend Young Wales have been virtually mute on arrival, shying away from all contact with the outside. As Sian Sheppard, one of the teachers on site, explained, “We were finding that there was support for children exhibiting difficult behaviours but much less for young people outside the mainstream through no fault of their own. We needed to get them out of the home environment into a small, family style set-up such as this that looks nothing like a school where we could be more free with our curriculum. It helps too that it is quite a male environment, which some of the boys in particular need.” The children are referred to Young Wales through Caerphilly education Instruction in the creative industries is the real attraction at Young Wales. department’s exclusion service panel. They are interviewed at home with their by thinking they will go through the the creative industries. However, the parents and then encouraged to come motions and leave straightaway but end emphasis is on flexibility, avoiding the and see the site and be shown around by up asking to stay for half a day, a day and necessarily prescriptive approach schools other students. They first join for a day’s then a few more days. have to apply to timetables, attendance, trial and then a week’s trial after which The curriculum is built around lessons and qualifications. Other courses a decision will be made by Bill and his each individual who are given a mix of are now offered, including ASDAN’s team as to whether they are suited to statutory lessons - English and Maths – more advanced Certificate of Personal one of the courses offered. Most start and the real attraction, instruction in Effectiveness award, and the Examination

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Board OCR’s qualification which offers a route into a records of assignments they have worked on to variety of job roles within the media industry. GCSEs in Maths or English. Just as importantly, Bill Fitzgerald says that while other however, they will be able to demonstrate an complementary education providers offer building, awareness of and ability to work in the outside environmental and other skills, Young Wales is world, a life experience skill many of their school unique in offering creative industries as an option. contemporaries may not have acquired. “This suits many of the young people we see who All last year’s intake have now gone on to are technically clever but find school is just not college or a job, though not in every case in IT right for them,” he says. or the creative industries. Some have gone into construction, others into hair and beauty, or health The really unique element in Young and social care. The skills they have learnt in Young Wales and in particular the emotional as well as Wales is its commercial underpinning. intellectual steps they have been able to take will serve them just as well in other careers, and they Though it does not work for everyone, and also have a competence in key IT skills. some still fail to turn up when they should, the Until now Young Wales has only taken on transformation achieved in many of the young children in their early teens, from years 9 and 10. people is remarkable. Two of Bill’s current intake This year for the first time a 16-year-old is staying are now embracing web design and video editing on – effectively past the statutory school age and and acting as event support assistants, helping out therefore no longer eligible for local education with lighting, sound and other technical jobs. They authority support. The move is intended to reduce were both quiet and withdrawn 15-year-olds when Young Wales’s dependence on one local authority, they joined. But last summer they volunteered to tapping into Welsh Government finance for those spend seven weeks working on another regular attending colleges. Another development could Young Wales scheme, its Action Camp. This takes be the recruitment of young graduates, making hundreds of Valleys young people, some of whom it possible for Young Wales to take on more have never previously seen the sea, for short fun difficult creative industry assignments and to stay stays at a caravan site in Tenby. Both now have fully abreast of the more significant technical ambitions to attend college and find work in the developments in the field, something the pressures creative sector, and have hopes of good GCSEs in of running the organisation has made it difficult for English and Maths. the existing small team to manage. The really unique element in Young Wales is its A more significant move could be the franchising commercial underpinning. The jobs done by the of the approach to other parts of Wales. Work is students are real world projects won in competition now being done to draw up a package whereby with other suppliers and from a range of customers different providers could be offered different levels mainly in the third sector across south Wales. “We of support depending on the services they could provide end-to-end solutions for our clients in fields offer. Thus, those with a full capability could be such as video production, web design, print design, given a large degree of autonomy, contributing photography, event management and equipment a fee that would cover central services such as hire,” explains Bill. These clients include some of marketing. Those only developing their capability the main south Wales housing associations - RCT would draw more heavily on the centre for Homes, United Welsh, and Wales & West. Young curriculum and other support. Wales has become their first point of call if they need a corporate video or if there is a requirement to deal with a problem such as drugs where it is thought a film involving the local community might help. When they move on the young people will have been able to acquire an all-important qualification and as a result have something to show potential employers. These qualifications will have been Rhys David is a journalist matched to their abilities and will range from and a Trustee of the IWA.

56 | www.iwa.org.uk www.clickonwales.org “The IWA occupies a unique “In a time of transition for “The IWA is a quite place in welsh public life. Its wales, politically, the Institute extraordinarily valuable analysis of current issues of Welsh Affairs provides a body, and I am very proud is always professional and vital forum for all sides to to be a member of it.” extremely helpful.” come together over both Lord (Kenneth) Morgan Lord Richard of Ammanford strategically important and One of Wales’s leading historians Chairman of the Richard Commission contentious issues.” Baroness Ilora Finlay of Llandaff Professor of Palliative Medicine, Join the IWA and Cardiff University support our work.

The work of the IWA depends I wish to become a member Please send me details about on the support and contribution and enclose a cheque for £40. becoming an IWA Fellow. of individual members across Wales and beyond who share I wish to become a member Name: and pay by credit/debit card our determination to mobilise Title: the sum of £ the nation’s human and social Address: resources in order to face the Account Number challenges ahead. By bringing _ _ _ _ /_ _ _ _ /_ _ _ _ /_ _ _ _ Post Code: together partners in business, Tel: Fax: academia, and the public and Expiry date _ _ /_ _ voluntary sectors, the IWA is E-mail: helping to shape economic, social, I wish to pay by Direct Debit educational, environmental and (This will help us keep our costs down) Return to: Freepost cultural policy across Wales. INSTITUTE OF WELSH AFFAIRS Please send me a Direct Debit Institute of Welsh Affairs, 4 Cathedral application form. Road, Cardiff CF11 9LJ Future of S4C Forced marriage 6 Media between S4C and BBC should open a wider debate Geraint Talfan Davies accuses Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt of Articles acting like a Tudor Monarch in dispatching S4C’s autonomy

Future of S4C There was no shortage of astonishment in Welsh broadcasting circles at the fate of S4C in the comprehensive spending review. Not only did the rumoured cut of 6 per Forced marriage cent a year for four years prove to be a marginal underestimate – S4C will lose 26 between S4C per cent of its budget over the period – the very existence of the organisation is now and BBC should hanging by a thread as a result of a forced marriage with the BBC. The BBC will pay open a wider the first dowry in 2013 before full consummation in 2015. debate We need a new But before the ensuing debate descends into mayhem it is worth trying to keep Welsh story the issue of political process separate from the substance of what is proposed, once more even if the deficiencies of the process may in the end point us towards even more More has meant radical change. less in S4C’s expansion The process is surely indefensible. Parts of a series of Broadcasting Acts from 1980 onwards, together with parts of the Communications Act 2003 have, in effect, been Maybe the repealed without a single minute of Parliamentary debate, without any consultation next cultural with the S4C Authority itself – an erstwhile autonomous statutory organisation that revolution will is obliged now to admit the BBC into a full partnership in running its channel – or not be televised with Welsh Ministers. Rushed ministerial meetings during a boozy golf tournament hardly count as consultation. When the time is right. The Culture Minister, Jeremy Hunt, has acted like a Tudor monarch, whetting his appetite for swift executions with the dispatch of the UK Film Council, before attending to the trouble beyond March in like fashion. The Tudors, for good reason, probably understood Wales better. The S4C Authority intends to challenge the decision through judicial review. It could prove an interesting case, but it will not deter the Government from pushing on. It has more than enough time to regularise its decisions in Parliament, and to finesse points of detail. There is no Gwynfor Evans waiting in the wings. Times have changed.

In its report to the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) S4C argued that its funding should be considered on the same timescale as the BBC licence fee, due for the usual leisurely review over the next 18 months. Both broadcasters should be treated equally, it said. The DCMS telescoped the licence fee review into

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three days, thus meeting S4C’s wishes, at least in this regard. Moral: be careful what you wish for.

But what of the substance? There are big issues for the BBC. Having been strong- armed into funding S4C, the BBC World Service, the roll out of broadband and a contribution to local television, it can hardly claim any more that the principle of not top-slicing the licence fee is intact. The freezing of the licence fee also means that it will have to save another £140m a year on top of the savings programmes that are already in place and hurting services in Wales badly. We Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt understands Wales less well than the Tudors. must beware that Wales does not suffer even more pain on top of the 44 per cent Alba, the Scottish digital television of S4C is retained. reduction in spend on English language channel that has broadcast Gaelic services (BBC+ITV) that we have seen programmes daily since 2008. BBC Alba It may be too early to chase detail, but in the last five years. is jointly managed by the BBC and the whatever else Jeremy Hunt has done, Gaelic Media Service, but there are he has, whether inadvertently or not, Bigger questions face S4C, and here we crucial differences. In Scotland the bulk opened up an opportunity for urgent come to the substance. First, and most of the funding for BBC Alba comes not debate in Wales. We should seize it, and crucially, how does it deal with a cut of from the BBC but from the Gaelic Media extend it. Many of the issues canvassed 26 per cent over the next four years? It is Service that is funded by the Scottish in S4C’s report to the DCMS remain difficult to see how the service can survive Parliament. It broadcasts for a limited relevant. But the Hunt proposals have in its current form. The financial pressure number of hours a day with the BBC Radio also raised questions about the structure will surely force some new thinking on nan Gaidheal service providing a sound of the BBC. It cannot be right that the nature of the linear channel and sustaining service in its downtime. But the quantum and balance of spend the balance between linear and online BBC Alba, unlike S4C, is a BBC branded on both Welsh language and English investment. It needs to recover its channel. The Gaelic Media Service, on language services should be decided creativity and some of its audience. the other hand, is not a brand. within the BBC’s closed and centralised management structures. There is a But what of the institution? When There is clearly some financial logic in the proper place for public policy in those the first leaks appeared a days before BBC and S4C seeking all the synergies that decisions, and a place for devolved the announcement, the DCMS was, they can, and if there are substantial gains government. We could emerge with an apparently emphasising that S4C would to be made they could accrue to both S4C Authority with a wider multi-media retain ‘operational independence’. At the Welsh language and `English television brief, as some of us have urged. same time, it was being slowly revealed, services in Wales. Indeed, the recent not only that the channel would be S4C-BBC agreement to explore further We have less than 12 months to find predominantly funded by the BBC, but collaboration was careful to say that the right answers for the whole of that in future it would be run by a Joint any benefits should accrue to each side Welsh broadcasting. Parliament’s Welsh Board composed of representatives of equally. But what of the other stipulation Affairs Committee could make a start by the BBC and the S4C Authority. The that any proposals “should not undermine enlarging its proposed inquiry into S4C service would be licensed by the BBC media plurality, distinctiveness, or to encompass the wider brief. Trust. What price S4C’s independence? the editorial independence of either In search of power it is always a good broadcaster.” It is not yet clear whether rule to follow the money. editorial independence will survive, Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of but media plurality is hardly enhanced, the IWA and a former Controller of Journalists were pointed towards BBC unless the commissioning independence BBC Wales.

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We need a new Welsh story once more

Peter I want to dig deeper into a question that is crucial enough for the generation growing up now. Edwards to us all as we embark upon the journey which warns against devolution has allowed us to begin. Now that The question we need to ask is what is the position we have taken those first baby steps, we need of the Welsh language in our society. This will help boxing to question what our place is in the world. We define ‘our story’, who we are and our role in the ourselves need to answer Anne Robinson’s question, “What world. If we cling to ‘What we have we hold’, into a self- are the Welsh for?” Are we willing to accept that an antiquarian approach to purity of expression regarding our role is provincial, with a slightly different and exclusion of all those who don’t come up to introverted accent both literally and metaphorically from the these standards, the language will not develop majority, or do we have something to give to the and change. It will simply be limited to an ever place world? Do we have something to say? Has our diminishing number of people picking over that experience as developed a national cultural carcase. and international story which will mean something to other people around the world, or is this as good Unfortunately, we have let ourselves down. We as it gets? have failed to be vigilant and self critical. We have failed to demand the highest standards. More than When Gwynfor Evans threatened to starve himself to anything we have failed to have the confidence of death after the Conservative government went back our own imagination. We have failed to imagine on its word to allow the establishment of a Welsh the highest aspirations for our re-emerging nation. language fourth channel, he believed it was the That was our responsibility as artists and we settled only means of communication which could save the for an old fashioned model of a little provincial language and give it a place in the modern world. television station. In a small, poor country like Wales where there is so much dependence on the state, it If Gwynfor was here now, post devolution, how is very difficult to maintain plurality of voice, vision would he react to an internet/twitter/face book and creativity and very difficult to make sure that world where the Welsh language is confronting the there is open debate. In the future open debate and emergence of Globish speak? Might he ask “Where challenge must be a central governing principle of do we fit in?”, and query, “What is our story?” Can artstic and journalistic endeavour. we only be concerned with what is happening in our metaphorical village, without reference to the With some £100 million annually to spend (before rest of the world? If we continue to define ourselves the forthcoming cuts), S4C has been the most as only having our being within the confines of important Welsh language institution. As a Welsh Wales, then we are lost. This wasn’t good enough language monopoly, the transparent operation of for me back in the sixties when I was a part of the S4C and constant debate and vigilance concerning defining generation. And it certainly isn’t good its role should have been the daily bread of our

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being. In recent years S4C has narrowed the voice which S4C is only a part of the picture, perhaps of plurality by its editorial policy, by encouraging the looking after the ‘legacy’ technology of broadcast consolidation of companies, and by the emphasis television whilst allowing more dynamic and those companies place upon business rather than youthful companies and agencies to compete for creative excellence, variety and challenge. finance, airtime and the audience via on-line, dvd, cinema and all manner of digital communication. Now as the wolves gather we have an opportunity to take a leap forward. As Stephen Carter points In its ‘Document’ the channel says a comprehensive out in his Digital Britain report, the model of the old review is needed to define its service anew, “to public service broadcaster is terminally damaged. reshape the organisation, its supply chain and Technology and this century’s cultural and social partnerships”. That’s all well and good but the change have overtaken Gwynfor’s vision. We must changes that are needed should not necessarily take advantage of the crisis and radically restructure be channelled through a set up which has failed the delivery and the content whilst putting in place to deliver plurality of vision, opinion and culture a structure that guarantees competition. The public in the past. service, publicly funded corporation is inevitably self-serving and protective of its own continued What is clear is that the present political process is existence above all. But this is not necessarily what deeply unsatisfactory. The idea that all of these issues best serves the people. can be sorted out in a month is ludicrous and forcing S4C into a race against time whilst its competition in the BBC have years to prepare. The new UK government has certainly kick-started a debate, but these issues are difficult, complex and subtle and if we don’t get them right then the future of the original language of Britain is once again threatened.

The argument for wise and timely consideration is well made in S4C’s submission and the announcement that the Committee for Welsh Affairs will also hold an investigation of S4C and hopefully all the options Duffy (right) stars in Marc Evans’s Patagonia, an example of a modern for the future, is to be welcomed. film that gives purpose and meaning. On a regular basis, I have had conversations with S4C’s Document to the Department of Culture, writers and artists who felt that S4C offered no Media and Sport, made public in mid-October, is an opportunities for them to produce challenging, interesting starting point but is essentially based upon argumentative and disruptive work. We have been only one primary option. It proposes to prepare for producing a dull culture. For the next generation to the new Communications Act by establishing a take ownership of the Welsh language it needs to strategic review that will consider “all options”. be experienced as exciting, argumentative, playful, Hopefully, this will not include the continuation of disruptive and relevant. funding and power in just one place. All is not lost. Many of us have stories to tell and an I am fully supportive of public funding for elements understanding that by communicating with the rest of content creation of high quality and the widest of the world we add to our understanding of our delivery on all forms of communication. However, place in it. Marc Evans’ 2010 film Patagonia is an by doing it through a monopolistic hierarchical example of a modern film which gives us purpose structure we would be setting up the same dangers and meaning. Art is about metaphor and Marc’s from which we are now trying to extricate ourselves. film tells a metaphorical story of endings and We need to imagine the possibilities of the future in renewal. It makes our history relevant to ourselves

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and communicates our experience to that we are boxed in to a provincial others. Our history is particular but in its world-view which limits our humanity. particularity it discovers a universality. Could we ever imagine that the BBC Financed by S4C and the Film Agency, centrally would say to English producers this film is currently the exception and artists that they can only tell stories which proves the rule. It is the only film about England? Of course, they will which S4C has co-funded for years and say that we have every right to speak there is not another on its books at the through the BBC centrally, but then that moment. would be the world seen through the curvature of their distorting mirror. This situation is symptomatic of how our culture sees itself. We are boxed in, The urgency for reform is now in both languages, to a self-regarding paramount. Without it we will further introverted culture. We have two undermine our cultural confidence and monopolies – one in each language, both consequently create a dull culture for publicly funded – which naturally feel ourselves. As Ian Hargreaves pointed they have a responsibility to guide the out in his review of the creative culture. However, we must be vigilant industries for the Welsh Government and ensure that these monoliths do not earlier this year, The Heart of Digital deny creativity and freedom, particularly Wales, we have £300 million available as the S4C document suggests bringing annually in broadcasting and the the BBC and S4C together on one site. arts. We have an opportunity to change direction from insularity to an expansive, outward looking and confident culture which takes on the Can we not artistically and world in both languages. But to do this we will need our broadcasters to engage culturally express an opinion on in partnerships with artists, producers and other agencies. We will then need our politicians and people to debate anything anywhere in the world? the purpose of the Welsh and English languages in our society and the role that both S4C and the BBC play. In the English language BBC Wales has a proud record of innovative programming Ultimately, we must bring broadcasting with Coal House, Snowdonia 1890, and within the remit of the National Assembly Third Star (co-funded by Film Agency and as the present situation infantilises us all. BBC Wales). But culturally we are limited Without this we will stunt the growth of to stories in and about Wales. This is individual voices in both a national and surely a provincial view of ourselves. Can world-wide context. Without reform we we not artistically and culturally express are endangering the future of not only an opinion on anything anywhere in the the film and broadcasting media, but the world? I believe that our experience as Welsh language itself and our growth as Welsh people is unique and we must have a nation. the opportunity to express our opinions and views about anything wherever they happen to be located. Peter Edwards is a film and television producer and director, and Chair of If we don’t demand this then we accept Film Agency Wales.

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More has meant less in S4C’s expansion

Roger Williams says the channel should reinvent itself as mainstream service after the 7pm watershed

In the 28 years since S4C was launched the to ensure it was still making creative and relevant landscape in which the channel finds itself has been programmes. transformed. S4C was born at a time when there were only three other television channels. In 1982 The decision not to have individual commissioning video recorders were starting to appear in people’s editors developing and commissioning programming homes and the internet was an abstract concept. was undoubtedly an error of judgement on the part Today digital television has given rise to hundreds of the S4C Authority. Without specialists in different of channels catering to a wide range of tastes, genres the failure rate of new shows was always while the advent of broadband and 3G technology going to be higher. After all, how could somebody enables viewers to download programming on with no track record in drama be confident that a demand. There are now not only many more new drama series would hit the mark? channels to watch but more ways to watch them. It’s sad to admit that a hunger for great programming Like all broadcasters S4C needed to respond to has been absent for some time at S4C’s headquarters the inevitable changes. The explosion of digital in . It seems as though decisions on platforms meant viewers in Wales could for programmes have largely been influenced by the S4C has lost its way since it was led by Owen the first time receive Channel 4’s service in its need to fill an extensive post-digital schedule and Edwards in the golden entirety. So S4C redefined itself as an exclusively the tighter budgets this larger schedule demands. era of the 1980s. Welsh language service existing in an increasingly crowded television market.

The channel attempted to create a service that stands shoulder to shoulder with other ex-terrestrial stations by broadcasting from the early morning through until late at night. It went on to develop branded children’s services (Cyw and Stwnsh), a website to enable access to programming online (Clic) and a high definition platform Clirlun( ).

However, these initiatives have been achieved against falling advertising revenue and with no extra money from the Department of Culture Media and Sport. To many it seems that while S4C ploughed its energy into developing a wide range of services comparable to other channels, it forgot

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The time has undoubtedly come for S4C to reinvent It should also without doubt focus attention on the itself. And reinvention in the current climate can online service it offers as on-demand services such only be a good thing. S4C should demand the as See Saw and Project Canvas take to the stage. time and space to decide how best it can serve the It’s highly likely that the way we watch television needs of its audience. It should focus its resources will change again in the next few years and S4C on making vital programming that reflects Wales needs to make sure it has a presence. culturally, socially and politically. Since 1982 ITV has abandoned its role as a regional broadcaster It was S4C’s choice to radically expand its service for and BBC Wales makes fewer programmes that the post-analogue age. When the channel started represent Wales and its people in the authentic way broadcasting in 1982 it made 22 hours of original that used to be the case. programming a week with an extra 10 hours of programming made by the BBC. The expansion S4C should therefore seize the day and unashamedly that took place was bold, but without additional occupy this territory as the only broadcaster that funding standards were always going to slip. There can seriously and properly make programmes that would be more repeats to fill the empty hours and reflect Wales and Welsh life. It should produce work audiences would slump as they experimented with that asks important questions about our nation and the new channels that had arrived. be a shop window for our distinct culture. It should focus on creating well-made and relevant television A streamlined and rejuvenated S4C would also that entertains and stimulates. Quality should be enable it to reach the audiences it knows aren’t the calling card of the channel. currently watching. I know from experience that my teenage nephews and nieces - fluent Welsh If S4C has to cut programmes in order to do this speakers from Carmarthenshire - don’t tune into then so be it. By losing the programming that the channel from choice. These are people born arguably replicates content made in English it could into a digital age and they are the future audience. free up resources and plough them into television It seems obvious to me that S4C needs to work hard programmes that get people talking because of the to create a product that will be must-see television work’s distinctiveness. For example, the lifestyle for this raft of young people. They will only watch shows could be lost, the dramas that mimic generic programmes that reflect their lives as young formats, and some of the sport. Of course, this would bilingual adults and are as good as the English run against the grain of the common argument that language programmes they currently watch. S4C - as the only Welsh language television service - should cater for everyone and offer every time of Change is always uncomfortable, especially when programme under the sun. talked about in the context of an important Welsh language institution like S4C. Nevertheless, I am I would agree that Welsh speakers deserve a confident that if it asks searching questions about substantial and extensive television service. However, the television service it should be providing, I don’t think the current model at current funding S4C can become a creative pioneer with a real levels is sustainable. S4C chose to make itself ITV- relevance to people’s lives. light in the post-analogue era. Yet with the limited resources that are currently under attack in the public spending review it might be wiser for the channel to become CBeebies during the morning, CBBC in Roger Williams is a screenwriter, the lead writer the afternoon, and only a mainstream broadcasting on S4C’s drama series Caerdydd, and is deputy service after 7pm - like BBC3 and BBC4. chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.

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6/Media/The future of S4C

Maybe the next cultural revolution will not be televised Mari Beynon Owen argues that loyalty to a brand that overrides the remote is no longer valid for any broadcaster

The establishment of S4C gave credence The active user demands interactive In the cut-throat business environment to a momentous combination of political, pleasure from several different sources. of television programme sales, where economic and cultural aspirations. It I began my career, the indicators for signified a new credibility for Welsh If we were creating a new media and technological innovation were to be language culture The Popeth yn Gymraeg cultural agenda today what would be found in the pornography industry. (Everything in Welsh) campaign seemed required? The new media service would To survive, it had to be always one to have been won for the time being. in all probability provide a platform on step ahead in terms of legislation An energetic generation of independent which several different content providers and media consumption trends. It’s producers and creative talents emerged. could be positioned, supplying content an interesting lesson. Not, of course, New business start-ups companies blocks which would be programmed that I would suggest the future of the developed outside the main media by genre. These would include lifestyle, Welsh media industry lies in providing centres. Politically, Wales had proved drama, arts, sports, but also social new opportunities for providers it could do things differently and with networks, online communities, access, of pornography! great assertion. support and streaming services, as well as national and local news channels. There is a sense of entrenchment at It now seems such a simple solution, This is what I mean by multi-vision. S4C as the corporate protector of its only functioned well in the public political legacy. The historic fight for service broadcasting, four-channel Many of these potential content block its existence was a simpler one with an world for which it was created. This providers are already active within their easily identifiable goal. All broadcasting media environment has since been online communities. An interesting model services in Wales are again under threat. totally transformed. If we were setting in the visual arts is Culture Colony/ Wladfa Indeed, and as happened thirty years out today to create and define a new Newydd, www.culturecolony.com which ago, new solutions, new ways of working cultural and media agenda, would we go has been developed specifically within together need to be found. Developing about establishing a television channel? the arts community to stimulate a the new platforms that will enable a I suggest we wouldn’t. creative network whilst also providing an multiple media environment in Wales to important research and archive resource. flourish will be a massive challenge. In recent ruminations over the channel’s This is currently only available online, so future, there has emerged a revisionist to paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron, “the arts As I write, significant financial, political view that S4C needs to re-connect with revolution will not be televised”. and corporate changes are being its core audience and regain its lost effected in the media landscape. With viewers. An appeal has been made to The current television channel model these high stakes in mind, the survival Welsh speakers to show their true loyalty represents a centralist, monopolist game may play out rather differently. and return to the channel. However, it approach. It seems outmoded, ignoring Nonetheless the need for dynamic re- is not disregard for the Welsh language the plurality of contemporary media invention still remains. which has lost S4C its viewers. One could culture. More importantly, the new argue that the concept of a core audience generation of creative developers who whose loyalty to the ‘brand’ overrides are committed to the promotion of a Mari Beynon Owen is a Consultant the remote is no longer valid for any vibrant Welsh language culture are in the Visual Arts and former broadcaster. Laptops, mobile phones, developing new and perhaps more International Sales Executive and i-apps now deliver to us a multiplicity of relevant platforms for their creativity later Commissioning Editor for Youth information, entertainment and realities. and media identity in Wales. Programmes with S4C.

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When the time is right

As Planet August 1970, when the first number of Planet and edited Poetry Wales. Without devolution of marks its two appeared 200 issues ago, seems a very long way the arts, it is unlikely that Planet would have come hundredth off, not only in decades but in terms of the very into existence. It would be megalomania to say that different Wales we then inhabited. No devolution, without Planet political devolution would not have number Ned of course, but many powers vested in one man, the come about, but the magazine certainly played its Thomas looks Secretary of State for Wales. Most things that went part in the process, testimony to the way cultural back at the wrong could be blamed on him and on London. change often precedes political change. magazine’s There was no Welsh on the road signs, the Western As happened in other fields, early developments in the Welsh language stimulated and legitimised earliest days Mail would not publish letters by Dafydd Iwan (then Chairman of the Welsh Language Society), parallel developments in English. The Welsh- and very little was translated from Welsh. language monthly Barn was already being supported Until 1968, public sponsorship of the arts had with public money. Following this example, Planet been channeled through the Welsh Committee was able to portray itself from the start as a cultural of the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1969 the magazine, interpreting that word generously in the newly-devolved Welsh Arts Council was keen to Raymond Williams fashion. make its mark and had appointed its first Literature I had returned to Wales in the Spring of 1969 Officer, Meic Stephens, a man with a strong after a varied early career as a London journalist interest in magazines, having previously founded and academic at universities abroad. I wrote to a dozen Welsh literary and cultural figures asking them to lend their names in support of a new English-language magazine, and to send me a cheque for £25 as an earnest of that support. They agreed and we then made an application to the Welsh Arts Council which was successful. The title Planet was an attempt to assert a universalism grounded in Wales. I wanted initially to avoid another magazine with ‘Welsh’ in the title - the sub- title ‘the Welsh Internationalist’ came much later on, as a response to the constant attacks on us as ‘narrow nationalists’ by provincial Labourites. For nearly ten years, Sara Erskine (my wife at that time) and I published and edited the first series of the magazine from Llwynpiod near Tregaron in Cardiganshire. All new editors start with a number of new ideas and contacts. Sara brought a family background and an interest in Scotland which, as a result, figured prominently in the early Planet. I had been influenced as a student by Richard Hoggart and the early Raymond Williams, so that I came back to Wales with ideas that were left-wing, but critical of the Labour Party – a New Left background which saw self-management, and therefore devolution, as a necessary exit route from a pattern of cultural dependency. We were both interested in language and languages. Editors exert some influence, but it is the times

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which decide what comes in the post, editorial deploring the servility and lack great advantage: we had very little to lose and what gives a magazine its character. of ambition of the George Thomas era. if our grant was withdrawn. In retrospect, perhaps we were the right The Daily Mirror attacked us rather half- Planet was fortunate in finding friends people at the right time, since language heartedly and Meic Stephens wrote to me and supporters in unexpected places, for protest drove much of the news agenda expressing concern at the poor standard instance Tom Ellis among the generally in the 1970s, and not only in Wales. When of our cartoonist. Fortunately a Guardian hostile group of Welsh Labour MPs, and John Barnie took over the re-launched columnist had got hold of a copy of Planet Sir Anthony Meyer among the Welsh magazine in 1990, and Helle Michelsen and wrote an enthusiastic piece actually Conservatives. At one stage, following a more recently, Planet was fortunate to praising the same cartoonist. I had only special number dealing with the courts have found editors who pioneered green issues before they became mainstream. Today’s magazine has a much more complex political Once more, they were the right people and cultural scene to reflect and analyze, but within an at the right time. impoverished and unresponsive wider media landscape. The year leading up to the launch of Planet was turbulent. It was the time of the Investiture of Prince Charles, a year to enclose the cutting with my reply. and the police, the Chief Constable of of language demonstrations and protest What strikes me now is how much Dyfed Powys wrote to the Welsh Arts songs, of pipeline explosions and the Free resonance (compared to today) the early Council requesting that Planet’s grant Wales Army Trial (which I witnessed from Planet had in the London press, and be discontinued. Sir William Crawshay, the Press Gallery). Police helicopters flew therefore indirectly in Wales. In those days an old-style Tory, was Chairman of the over the march to Llywelyn’s memorial almost all the serious dailies had full-time Arts Council at the time, and somehow at Cilmeri, and on the morning of the staff reporters in Wales who were looking or other I got to see his reply. The Investiture two members of Mudiad for stories. Planet was a useful source for Council, he said, was concerned with Amddiffyn Cymru blew themselves up them, particularly since it translated from the general quality of the magazine. If near Abergele while laying explosives the Welsh and made accessible what the Chief Constable felt that some part on the line over which the Royal Train was going on in that language. Today’s of the content was libellous, he had his was to pass. Before the end of the year magazine has a much more complex remedy in the courts. John Barnard Jenkins, the leader of the political and cultural scene to reflect and I am not sure that any subsidised movement, had been arrested. Planet analyse, but within an impoverished and magazine can today count on the published his letters from prison. unresponsive wider media landscape. same robust support from grant-giving I was determined to see Planet on Times have changed, but they are now institutions themselves dependent on sale more widely than was usual for little changing again, as is the editor. Jasmine the Welsh Government. Devolution, we magazines. Some six weeks before the Donahaye is taking over with my best say, brings power closer to home, but launch in August 1970 I had finally got wishes and the encouraging thought that where the arm’s length principle applies an appointment with the head office of a bad time is perhaps a good time to be this means that the arm is that much W.H.Smith. The date fixed turned out a new editor of a magazine that deals shorter. In my recent experience the to be the day after the General Election in ideas. Welsh Language Board and the Welsh of May 1970 when Edward Heath won In the 1970s the editors received Books Council have found it difficult to an unexpected Conservative victory. a small honorarium only and lived by resist ministerial pressure, while the W.H.Smith’s head office was one huge other means. Today’s improved funding Arts Council of Wales had to fight for party. “You’re not one of these chaps for magazines allows the employment its own survival as a body independent blowing up pipelines are you?” asked of staff (though very inadequately from the Welsh Government. These, the Distribution Manager jovially, filling paid), and this, together with money let us hope, are the growing pains of a up my glass. I must have said the right for design and marketing has led to a young Welsh democracy. thing, since Planet duly appeared on the greater professionalism, which is to be shelves of Smiths branches in Wales. welcomed. However, this inevitably The change of Government in brings a feeling of added responsibility for London meant that George Thomas maintaining those jobs, as I found when Ned Thomas is the founder of the was replaced at the Welsh Office, we re-launched Planet in 1985 with one Mercator Institute in Aberystwyth. and Planet 1 carried a cartoon of the full-time and one part-time employee. His memoirs Bydoedd (Worlds) have outgoing Secretary of State and my own Our situation back in the 1970s had one just been published by Y Lolfa.

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7 Fishlock’s File Culture A writer who brings out the flavour of Wales

Trevor Fishlock celebrates the career of Elaine Morgan

Articles Every Friday Elaine Morgan opens the She has lived almost all her life in south Fishlock’s File: A writer who Western Mail and notes her latest column in Wales. Born in Hopkinstown in the , brings out the news section. “It’s nice to turn the page,” daughter of a colliery pumpsman, she grew the flavour she says, “and see that I’m still in the land of up in the bitter years of the depression. She of Wales the living.” She started this weekly stint when won a scholarship to read English at Oxford she was 83. “I always dreamed of being a and her father died at the end of her first Retaining our journalist and even if it’s late in the day I’m term there. Neighbours told her mother that public memory pleased to have made it.” The column caps Elaine would have to leave the university. Her Why we need to a distinguished career of more than 50 years mother was notably determined. “Over my defend music in as a pioneer television scriptwriter, playwright dead body,” she retorted. the land of song and controversial science author. Given her literary achievement and the fact that she Elaine was a teacher during the war, lecturing Book reviews: turns 90 during November we can certainly for the Workers’ Educational Association in think of her, in the modern fashion, as a Norfolk. In 1945 she married Morien Morgan, Against the Odds: national treasure. who had fought in Spain against the Franco The survival of dictatorship. They had three sons. For a while Welsh identity Lord Northcliffe said that every good reporter they lived cheaply in a remote Radnorshire West: A Journey should be able to take a trip on a bus and farmhouse that lacked running water and through the return with a readable piece of observation. electricity – “An early Good Life thing,” Elaine landscapes of loss Elaine Morgan hatches her ideas during her says wryly. daily morning walks and on Tuesdays she The Unusual polishes them into a thoughtful entertainment. She started writing to eke out the family’s Suspect She has ten inches of space to fill as she likes, meagre income. “I wasn’t very successful. I And the Land a pocket-sized column of 480 words, a job spent three years at Oxford learning literary Lay Still that’s not as easy as she makes it look. Her criticism and I found it difficult to learn to Uncharted neatly-shorn sentences are deceptively simple, write creatively.” Then she won a third prize engaging and conversational. Their distinctive in an Observer essay competition. “It was a liveliness belies the rather ponderous title the beginning because it meant letters from agents. newspaper gives her column: The Pensioner. Do you want to make money?” they asked. “Do you have anything else in the drawer?” “When I started I was afraid I might run out of material, but I’ve no fear now that there In the mid-1950s the writing trail led to the will nothing to write about; so I enjoy it all the BBC in Wales and the black and white infancy more, and it keeps my fingers from itching.” of television drama. “I was there at the beginning, the best time. I sold three plays

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before I had a television set. I used to watch at between 1963-70, six of Maigret and drama someone else’s house. Plays went out live and if documentaries about Marie Curie, Gwen John, an actor forgot his lines the whole country saw it. It Anne Frank and Lloyd George. Her adaptation was a time when quality and reception were poor. of Testament of Youth in 1979 won her the Royal There was no pre-filming in drama and there was Television Society Writer of the Year award. only one set, two at the most, and much less camera work. We wrote full dialogue because nothing else “Television changed quickly and in many ways. was happening. It is amazing how much less you Some of those who wrote for the stage, like Emlyn need to write in a television drama today.” Wiilliams, could not make the switch to television. He was asked to adapt How Green Was My Valley but the script could not be used and I was brought in at short notice to do it. But in time my stuff, too, looked old-fashioned, too wordy and out of touch with the mores of a new generation. Television became less adventurous. In the end I chucked it in. But I’d had a long run.”

She says she was always an arguer. In the 1970s she published The Descent of Woman, her feminist view of evolution to counter what she saw as the male-oriented opinion. “I wrote from indignation. I made my point and in the end it stuck.” The feminist eruption was a bigger deal in America Elaine Morgan – “amazing how much less you need to write in a television drama today”. than in Britain and she had two book tours there with appearances on numerous chat shows – “not She had an edge, she says, because many authors 15 minutes but 15 weeks of fame”. were writing for West End theatre audiences whereas television was spreading to a much broader In her writing about Wales, she says, she described audience that few were writing for at that time. “We a people characterised by a kind of independence were doing kitchen sink drama long before Osborne and self-esteem. “We were, as Kingsley Amis said, and Wesker.” Audience researchers in London were classless. We didn’t react for or against the nobs astonished to discover that ordinary people enjoyed because we never saw them.” watching drama about people like themselves, seeing their own backgrounds mirrored. She is disappointed in what she feels is a growing divide between burgeoning Cardiff and the Valleys There was another reason, she says, why she and hinterland. “I can see what is wrong with capitalism writers like her were able to prosper. “When drama but I cannot see what you put in its place. It is part started in London producers lacked the studio of the difficulty we are all in, a groundswell of anger, space to keep up with demand. They asked other a politics not of envy but of outrage.” sources, like Wales, Manchester and Scotland, to produce plays and feed them into the network Since 1966 she has lived in Mountain Ash in a large once a month so that London could cope. London Victorian hillside house with a prospect of the town depended on this. And it gave opportunities to and the Cynon valley and, as you might imagine, a writers and directors to project a non-London view. comforting abundance of books. “There’s a lot of It was a golden time and produced a lot of good good here, enough of the community spirit in which writers. I wrote for the market and about what I I grew up. So I’m relaxed. I’m not a despondent knew. I just wanted to convey the flavour of Wales, sort of person anyway. I’m in touch with people all of people whose lives were just as dramatic and full over the world online, conducting arguments and of moral problems as any other lives.” debates. I don’t know today what will be in my next column. But I’ll know next Tuesday, when I start She wrote nine episodes of Dr Finlay’s Casebook writing it.”

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week of November it had escalated into the complete stoppage of all the pits in the vast Cambrian Combine, Retaining our with twelve thousand men out on the streets of Mid- Rhondda. Dai Owen was 22 at the time. Before he public memory died in 1965 I had heard his account many times. But only when the Academi’s magnificentEncyclopaedia of Wales appeared in 2008 did I spot his face, one amongst many, in a photograph taken that very Dai Smith One hundred years ago this month, on the nights of week of a mass meeting of the strikers who would 7 and 8 November to be precise, an irresistible force shortly become those infamous rioters. explores the some considered alien burst through the puffed- culturally up chest of Edwardian Wales and announced the In 1980 I had wrote an article for the Oxford Journal fragmented presence of conflict, class and community. These Past and Present which dissected the motivation of and materially three were the conjoined Trinity which would mark the wreckers in a fresh light. But now, seeing his face insecure out the Culture and Society of the past century in I began a new enquiry. It occurred to me that thirty Wales, from Tonypandy in 1910 through the great years on I, too, was firmly in the frame. After all, I collective strikes of the 1920s and on down to 1984 and the had lived out two thirds of the past century myself. biography of aftermath of fragmentation it left us to inhabit. I began to remember, not just personally but as a south Wales witness to collective memories, Tonypandy after I believe we still flinch from this uncomfortable 1945. I had written across a professional lifetime historical reality, much as many contemporaries a great deal about the making and breaking of did in the aftermath of the riots in mid-Rhondda south Wales as a distinctive society. I now set out to in 1910 when the social fabric was torn apart and consider how it had fired my own endeavours and new definitions of community and the issue of self- how meaning had been expressed in the words of empowerment were openly contested. And what we historians and novelists and in the images of painters flinch from is the burden of a history that demonstrates and photographers. Their efforts intersected with a that the genesis of community is collective purpose popular culture of sport and performance to create not corporate altruism. The former is always about the consciousness which is the underlying theme of the generation of fresh energies, while the latter is the book which started to bubble up a year ago. The about keeping the social thermostat steady. chapters formed around individuals - the Dowlais historians, Glanmor and Gwyn Alf Williams, the In 1910 Wales was a society set to blow a gasket. socialist novelists, Gwyn Thomas and Raymond The intolerable economic demands of the grossly Wiliiams, the boxers from American Wales, Freddie inegalitarian Behemoth that was Coal Capitalism, Welsh and . Yet as they did so, I had to explicitly allied to the smug self-serving social register the shock of recognition which I felt from consensus that was Liberal and Nonconformist each tap on the shoulder. All these lives, places Cymru, were confronted directly and unexpectedly. and events, touched on mine to the extent that my The immediate pressure point would be the beginning career as writer and historian had all along been of a struggle for the Minimum Wage. But the riots channelled, knowingly and otherwise, by it all, and which wrecked the commercial life of Tonypandy and by my being born in Tonypandy in 1945. brought in Churchill’s troops and police to reinforce local law-and-order were more than the by-product Nor was I alone in this. The echo in those words is of the year-long strike. They were the deeper and back to Nye Bevan. But it could be said, as he meant longer heraldic note of a new Wales being born. it to be, of anyone who has testified to the collective biography of south Wales. It had often been at the Now some of this happens to be personal. My root of conversations I had had with the man whom maternal grandfather, Dafydd Humphrey Owen, had The Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Wales moved to Williamstown from Blaenau Ffestiniog to rightly identifies as “the supreme chronicler” of the work as a collier in the Ely pit of the Naval colliery post 1945 south Wales Valleys, my good friend Alun where the lock-out started. It began as a dispute over Richards. He had half-suggested to me shortly before payment for working ‘Abnormal Places’. By the first he died in 2004 that the letters he had exchanged since

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Mass meeting of striking miners in Tonypandy in November 1910. The author’s grandfather, Dai Owen, is circled. the 1960s with fellow no-bullshit writer society we remain today. and economic divisiveness. We need to Ron Berry, who had died in 1997, might hear more, up front and in detail, about have some unbuttoned, and memorable, And there’s the rub. Decidedly there, what exactly are the common purposes insights into the world they both strove and an irritant, because we are so of a society like ours, one still riven by to depict without sentiment or romance. culturally fragmented and materially inequality of aspiration, opportunity and I had my own letters from both of them insecure. There, because the actually outcome. We do not need yet more since the 1970s. The central coping stone experienced history weighs so heavily managerial wallpaper to cover over the of the book, trimmed and edited but still on our being that some would wish it cracks and fissures whose origins and dangerously freighted with sharp-toothed away. A moment’s reflection will show repair we must examine instead. In all truths, is this correspondence, letters that that trick cannot be done. Of this, the past is our only known reality. from Dai Country. course, the meaningfulness of a lived It is not a guide to the future but it is a history can be circumvented or packed given that it alone has brought us to the By the time the final draft was completed, out of sight and mind. It can be avoided, our present and disorientated state. How each chapter, each epiphanic event except when celebrated as a succession did we get here is an essential question or person, had become prefaced by a of factoids and artefacts on television or, for the time-traveller who wishes to personal confession as to how and why I worse, screwed into an anthropological move on. was in this particular frame. Sometimes bubble-existence for ‘real’ people to these mini-narratives, factual as they play-act the past. It can be hidden within This is why, pace Peter Stead in his are, have taken on a fictive form. My an academicism that prefers to play eloquent essay in the summer number of intent has been, in a hybrid mix of footsie with itself than to connect to a Agenda, we cannot truly envisage 2010 cultural history and memoir, to assert past it limply annotates. It can be lost in Wales as any kind of Year Zero. You the vital need for memory to work when politicians seek the illusory unity might just stretch the point to imagine like a life-giving yeast in our amnesiac of PR slogans like Team Wales, Brand 1910 as such a year. At that time, and, society. I argue that beyond eulogy and Wales, or God help us, Wales plc to cheer for the most part, Wales was a dynamic elegy, though I confess here and now lead the crowd whose backs are turned and immigrant country, thrustful and to both sins. The alternative history I on such intellectual vacuity. A mature socially fluid, its communities not yet present indicates contemporary values and sophisticated society, as ours is at formed into what became the rapidly which retain their validity for us. its best, needs to be encouraged in its familiar, and whose loss he laments. Indeed, without such public memory pluralism. We need debate and dissent in In 2010, and indeed with the malign we could mis-place the very DNA that honest disagreement not a re-run of that disasters of the a-historical 1980s in has made us, more even than language Edwardian hegemony which smashed mind, we should not imagine that any or landscape, the distinctive (just about) up on the unforeseen rocks of social kind of zero-sum approach would do

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The catalyst for more engagement in political and civil and community life will be a culture rooted in historical consciousness and readily valued since it is of ourselves we will become aware.

Perhaps then Wales’ Next Step, in the best tradition called forth by the events of 1910, will be as our foremost thinker, Raymond Williams, urged fifty years ago, “To limit a society to its systems of decision and maintenance is in fact ridiculous… the alternative society… must be in wider terms if it is to generate the full energies necessary for its creation… The integration of work and life, and the inclusion of the activities Tonypandy’s Ely Street, as seen in this postcard from 1910. we call cultural in the ordinary social organisation, are the basic terms of an anything other than cut even more of artistic, educational, architectural, spatial alternative form of society.” our people adrift. Peter Stead is right --down which fresh citizen energies to warn us of unwarranted nostalgia for can flow. This remains to my mind the What my book shows is that, here what was once palpable and what has most powerful case we can put to help and there and against all the odds, we now, structurally anyway, vanished. Alas, the National Assembly win hearts and once glimpsed such possibilities and however, he has no recourse to fall back minds. It must lead with visionary zeal sometimes made them happen in our on to counter his well-meaning despair and clear priorities. But it cannot do this alternative history. Without that memory at our often ruinous condition, other if we do not subscribe to the fulfilment in our society today, we may consume than to urge, in the spirit of voluntarism, of its potential. as customers and live as the favoured that somehow we should “re-activate clients of others, and we may even sip our communities” and relinquish the For, if we can readily agree that the narcotic nectar of globalisation, “bosom of the nanny state”. major touchstones of Welsh identity but we will not participate or create as disappeared or shrivelled in the course citizens in our daily lives, and we will not It would be better, and more pertinent, of the 20th Century, and that it is to our survive in all of the particularity that has to say that we should, like our forbears in new civic and governmental pan-Wales signalled Wales to the world. their best civic tradition and even in the institutions that we must needs turn to hideous maw of the Great Depression, develop a changing sense of a national I can, at age 65, think of no more “activate our State” (and all its community, then it follows, too, that to important an underpinning of civic branches) to “invigorate communities” do this purposefully we have constantly purposefulness to pass onto my (to be different and effective because to recall the Brechtian dictum which grandchildren than a commitment to democratically self-empowered). The tells of how you cannot dissolve a public memory. It is to them -- Jack, Evan Wales which so often held its aspirations people and elect another if you do not and Isabelle -- that I have dedicated my in common, and created a variegated like or approve of the only real one latest book, in the hope that they too, culture for their expression, knew full you’ve got. We are all of us in the frame will one day consent to be well that it was only the State which they together. The frame, both materially and framed by all that has gone sought to control and utilise through culturally constructed, is our history. before them. their Unions and political parties which Constitutionalists might wish they could could possibly hold the collective ring in whisk it away and knock up another Dai Smith is Raymond Williams order to allow for individual liberation. one with a more pleasing symmetrical Research Chair in Cultural History We must have more and more, not fit, and some social planners might of Wales at Swansea University and fewer and fewer, but stronger and prefer a sharper set of images than the Chair of Arts Council Wales. His In the better agencies in place to allow for the blur-in-motion we stubbornly present. Frame 1910-2010: Memory in Society is creation of conduits -- cultural, physical, Preference, however, is not an option. published this month by Parthian Books.

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Why we need to defend music in the land of song

Only Boys Aloud, Helena Braithwaite explains how access to performing at the Millennium Centre. music is becoming a lottery in today’s Wales

Creativity in music is more than the composition of through the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s. In new material. It also means the interpretation and 1946 there were enough players of a high standard expression of music though active participation, as to form the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, the opposed to passive listening, pleasurable as that first National Youth Orchestra in the world. might be. From the 1950s to the 1980s school and extra In the past the Welsh education system has placed curricula music grew and developed apace. an emphasis on providing children and young Schools provided free instrumental tuition and people with opportunities to interact with music. counties developed free out of school music centres, Wales has been a pioneering nation in the field hosting Junior and Youth orchestras, Choirs, and of performance which has flourished here in Brass bands. By the 1980s some counties could also good times and bad, both in schools and in the boast Wind bands, Jazz ensembles and even World community. However, there is a question mark over Music ensembles. whether today’s Wales will continue this tradition. Adequate funding was provided to support these Free instrumental tuition was provided in Welsh activities by the County Education Authorities. schools from 1924. As well as community choirs Indeed, at this time the proportion of pupils learning and brass bands many areas of Wales boasted youth to play an instrument in Wales was more than and adult orchestras. These school and amateur double the UK average, while musical standards groups helped to bring communities together and were as good if not better than the rest of Britain. As provided companionship, entertainment, education well as the National Youth Orchestra other national and hope in very difficult times. Progress continued ensembles were formed including the National

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Youth Choir, Brass Band and later the National Wind to this work. Other organisations such as Cardiff- Band and Jazz orchestra. The Youth orchestra was based Community Music Wales encouraged organised and supported financially by the WJEC, disaffected youngsters to become involved in music while the other National ensembles were organised making outside school. by Tyˆ Cerdd, the Music Centre for Wales. In 2000 Emyr and Mair Afan of Avanti TV Production In the 1980s the National Curriculum for music Company bought a factory in Porth in the Rhondda was introduced and children up to 14 now had and turned it into the Pop Factory. Here youngsters a statutory entitlement to study composition, could hone their skills in pop music and develop their performance and appraisal or creative and future careers. Many of the top Welsh Pop bands informed listening. New teaching and learning started here and as Emyr Afan says “It’s all about strategies were implemented. Abstract concepts empowerment – the talent is here, we’ve proven were grasped through practical activities, while that. We just need to keep believing in ourselves.” the content of music lessons broadened to include, jazz, folk, pop, and music from other cultures, as The ‘Land of Song’ has always been proud of well as classical music. Electric keyboards were its singing heritage, and the chapel and the introduced into the classrooms so that all children Eisteddfod were part of that heritage. However, could perform their compositions. Young people this has been gradually eroded by the decrease of got together to form pop bands and began to be chapel attendances and the difficulties faced by recognised outside Wales. many Singing Festivals or Gymanfa Ganu and their associated Singing Schools or Ysgolion Gan. Whether you approve of competition or not, The number of mass Assemblies where the whole innumerable numbers of children and young school sang together has also decreased. However, people, including very many of our greatest it is comforting to know that organisations such as the Urdd still encourage singing. Whether you approve singers, have had their first experience of of competition or not, innumerable numbers of performing on a large stage in the Urdd and children and young people, including very many of our greatest singers, have had their first experience National Eisteddfod, and on smaller stages in of performing on a large stage in the Urdd and village eisteddfoddau and festivals. National Eisteddfod, and on smaller stages in village eisteddfodau and festivals. It is also encouraging that many new excellent youth and young adult choirs In the 1980s, too, arts organisations began to reach have been formed in the last few years. outside the concert hall into schools. was the first opera company in Britain to In the late 1980s and into the early 1990s a be involved in education work. The initial project combination of factors placed severe strains on involved the two Ely Comprehensive schools and this rich mix of music provision for young people. also the community in Ely. The pupils composed The reorganisation of local government meant the music with the help of a composer and then that the eight Welsh counties were reorganised performed the piece with players and singers from into 22 unitary authorities. These smaller counties WNO in the Ely Festival. found it difficult to sustain the previous level of music provision. At the same time local financial In the 1990s other companies, arts venues, and management of schools was introduced. The orchestras appointed education officers. Today central budgets for music were delegated to schools and communities throughout Wales schools. Most schools and LEAs did not ring fence benefit from this outreach work, which includes the original music budgets, as they were now composition, performance and listening. The allowed to use that money for what they judged to increasing number of Arts Festivals also contributed be more important priorities.

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By the end of the 1990s the whole edifice of extra for lessons, while instruments are deteriorating and Cardiff County and Youth curricula music in Wales seemed to be threatened. In there is no money to replace them. Orchestra’ performing at 1999 we found an ally in the then Secretary of State for Stanwell School, Penarth, in January 2010. Wales, . Through his initiative the Music There are also worries about primary school music. Development Fund was established with funding Although there is still excellent music in many from the Welsh Government and the Arts Council. primary schools the time allocated for music on £8 million was distributed to the Local Authority Teacher Training Courses has been gradually cut. Music Services over four years. Crucially the fund was In the last four years there has been no requirement ring fenced for music from 1999 to 2003. from the government for specialism in music on these courses. Many primary teachers today lack This relatively modest funding had a significant the confidence to teach music and it is becoming impact. Music tuition was offered to over 30,000 difficult to see where the next generation of primary children who had never had the opportunity before music co-ordinators or leaders will come from and 12,500 musical instruments were purchased. Work was found for 250 musicians as peripatetic From 2005 to 2009 music educators and musicians teachers. More than 200 new ensembles including tried to persuade the Welsh Government to redress three new National ensembles were formed. the decline in financial support for music with no success. However, there has been some progress Although the fund was extended to 2004, it was in the last year. The Welsh Government has recently then cut by 40 per cent and in 2005 the money announced a National Strategy for Singing. A pilot was transferred to the local authorities. Once again programme called CânSing has started which will the ring fencing for music was withdrawn. Many provide training for teachers in singing and also authorities used the money for what they saw as materials for singing. What will happen after the more pressing priorities. More and more LEAs pilot is completed and whether there will be funds started to charge for extra curricula music lessons for continuing support is of course a worry, and activities. Music provision became and still remains an economic and geographical lottery. If we are to develop a robust system of music Access to musical tuition in Wales now depends on provision in Wales we need to be clear about what where you live and whether you can or cannot pay is happening in schools and in extra curricula music

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provision across the whole of Wales. Finally there has health and well being of the individual but also been a National Music Review which was submitted prepare young people for the world of work. to the Welsh Government at the beginning of June this year. It offers the potential for a National Music Research supports the fact that music is the only Strategy which we hope will give all the children outside stimulus which inherently synchronises in Wales an equal opportunity to make music. We both hemispheres of the brain naturally. While the await the Government’s response. linear sequential aspects of music, such as beats rhythm, lyrics, and notation are being processed When we faced the last crisis in music provision by the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is in the late 1980s and early 1990s we had processing the holistic aspects, such as harmony, emerged from a period of well funded expansion. intonation, phrasing, creativity and imagination. Unfortunately this time we start at a low level. There is no sign that funding to replace the Music Music is a private and public art. Self discipline is Development Fund will emerge. Funding is also a needed to practise in private. First the mathematical serious concern for other arts organisations which and logical systems of pitch and rhythm must be work with young people and communities. For mastered and, as music is complicated, multi layered instance, although Tyˆ Cerdd now supports over and transient, memory too must be developed. 400 community generated music organisations Performance involves attentive and detailed listening with 22,000 performers, it seems in danger of and this develops concentration span. having its funding cut. There is no doubt that we must continue to draw policy makers’ attention In her book Endangered Minds Jane Healy writes to the advantages of music, not only the joy of making music, but also the development of “The present generation is more impulsive, easily transferable life skills. These are beneficial for the distracted and spontaneous. Rapid switches in

Whitchurch High School’s Orchestra pictured in 2004 outside London’s Royal Festival Hall where they were winners of the Outstanding Performance Award at the National Festival of Music for Youth.

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stimuli from the electronic media If performance is often a group activity, depend on where you live or whether lead them to expect constant composition is usually an individual and you can pay. We should strive to make stimulation. The brain’s software private activity. However, children start sure that music is available to all pupils has been rewired by mass media composing in school in groups creating who wish to participate. Instruments bombardment. Music can help pupils patterns and structures using sounds as are essential tools for making music to focus, concentrate, anchor and the raw material. They discuss freely, and therefore there must be funding to retain essential information for often hotly, but finally compromises are buy new and replace old instruments. other subjects.” reached. Nothing is right or wrong in Professional arts organisations and composition and thus pupils have to venues should be encouraged to Instrumental playing needs highly solve their own musical problems. They continue their excellent outreach work. developed mental and physical take risks and finally analyse each others We should seek out and encourage coordination, including hand eye efforts, developing the skills of debate entrepreneurs such as Emyr Afan of the coordination often under stress in public and informed criticism. Gradually they Pop Factory and inspirational motivators performances. Performance of any kind move to composing individually. such as Tim Rhys Evans who work of music also involves all members of the outside the school system. ensemble following instructions exactly, on the page and from the conductor and The Music Development Fund showed this demands self discipline. However, what a relatively small amount of in the ensemble the individual must funding can do to help young people perform as part of the team. No other realise their creative musical potential. art form or group activity needs quite Both England and Scotland have made the same corporate discipline, and a great deal of progress in the last ten yet (each member) by bringing their years supported by very generous imagination to bear on the instructions funding from their governments. They recreates something new and unique. are therefore in a far better position to

Tim Rhys Evans, responsible for Only Boys Aloud. survive any cuts in funding. Pupils in ensembles or choirs perform in public and therefore must be In the last few years the development In the past, we have been leaders in accountable, putting the rehearsals of electronics and computer technology this field in Wales. It would be tragic if and performances first and in so doing, has given a new dimension to classroom in the future we did not give the same gaining self confidence and satisfaction composition. Keyboard labs, recording opportunities to our young people from completing the task. We have studios, multi tracking recording as they have in other parts of Britain, seen recently the positive effect that machines and computer software have or indeed as we have given past music can have on youngsters in the allowed pupils, whether they play generations. There is no doubt that development of Only Boys Aloud led by instruments or not, to develop their music develops creativity, imagination, Tim Rhys Evans. musical imagination. A recent report spontaneity and adaptability, as well showed that music was one of, if not the as teamwork, dependability and self- In Venezuela a music system called El main user of IT in the curriculum. This confidence. Surely these are the qualities Sistema allowed disaffected children generation of pupils is very confident in that Wales requires of its young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to learn their handling of new technologies, but and future work force if our small nation instruments from a very young age. Some they use them creatively. is to flourish in the 21st Century. 200 orchestras were formed including the amazing Simon Boliver Youth Orchestra, We need to trumpet these transferable the apex of the system, which was skills when we fight for funding. Music Helena Braithwaite is founder and such a sensation in the London Proms. is not always valued in all schools music director of the South Glamorgan Interestingly the system was called a social and if there are redundancies in the Youth Choir and director of the Cardiff project as the effect on the children’s future, music teachers and especially Ardwyn Singers. This article is taken behaviour and health was amazing. peripatetic teachers will be in the from her presentation to the IWA’s England and Scotland have set up similar firing line. The provision of music extra conference Creativity in Hard Times, systems funded very generously. So far curricula lessons and the opportunities held at the Millennium Centre nothing similar has been set up in Wales. to sing and play with others must not in October.

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come to an end! I wonder how many Two-partyism seems to have joined Reviews miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said the Dodo and the ‘caucus race’ in aloud. “I must be getting somewhere near Dodgson’s famous portrait of Englishness. the centre of the earth.” She worries about As Iain Macwhirter concluded his ‘State arriving among the ‘Antipathies’ on the of the Nation’ survey in Scotland’s Sunday National identities other side, but the White Rabbit keeps Herald (9 May): after globalisation reappearing and, in between nervous Tom Nairn glances at his watch, reassures her things “This election was a kind of will soon be sorted out. punishment for the UK political Today the White Rabbit is Nick Clegg, leadership, for the expenses scandal Leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, and the banking crisis. The people summoned by ‘the Duchess’ (the wanted a change — well, now they Conservative Party’s David Cameron) for have it. The political system is broken, grotesquely unlikely talks about common but we don’t yet know if anyone has policy over staging the Mad Tea Party. the tools to fix it.” Dealing with Britain’s gigantic deficit without turning the into That’s the job of the incoming coalition funny-money, being simultaneously for government, and we’re still finding out day and against the European Union, and so by day just what the tools are, and how on. Though uncomfortably like an accord likely or unlikely will be the restoration of between Albert Schweitzer and Gengis the historic United Kingdom. Khan, the deal does appear inevitable So far one thing has to be taken for for the moment. The Conservative Party granted, the absence of an English polity won most votes, and the Lib Dems have capable of asserting itself democratically, Against the Odds: advanced sufficiently to claim a place at on behalf of its eighty-five per cent UK The survival of Welsh identity the power-table — or at least, for as long majority. No non-democratic or dictatorial Harold Carter as Labourism continues to sink in the alternative is yet presenting itself. Yet IWA, £9.99 choppy wake of the departing Gordon it should be more clearly recognised Brown. Most recent reports indicate that what’s happening is an odd sort water-level rising near deck-level, and of dictatorial solution, a power-system And what the dead had no speech for, threatening the Bridge. However, what imposed by absence. Scottish, Welsh, when living, choice have the living but to seek an exit Northern Irish and other peripheral opinion They can tell you, being dead, from zombiedom, however difficult? (for example, the Isle of Man) are bound to the communication In most countries, another election react, but with no real option except one or Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond would be the answer. But this is other version of actual nationalism. In that the language of the living. Wonderland. A second contest might push sense, the latter turns out to be founded Here, the intersection of the timeless everything still closer to the centre of the less on swelling separatist tides than on the moment earth. Isn’t the ancestor of democracy hopeless breakdown of the centre, Old- Is England and nowhere. Never succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and capable Westminster Britishness. and always. of results even worse than 7 May? Hence, Straightforward political reform, the urgent task (‘national interest’ etc) boils like proportional representation and T.S.Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, down to getting rid of a millenary tradition federalism, has been put off too long. And Four Quartets,1944 in a few days, time to at least consider today no time is left. That is, no time for disposing of the Mother of Parliaments anything but panic and hasty makeshifts, and ‘first-past-the-post’. Reared to worship as manifested in this notion of a gambling- The Great-British General Election took such timeless icons, today’s Royal Subjects table deal between Deep-South Toryism place, on 6 May, 2010. And On 7 May the find themselves placed under brisk orders and ‘civic’ Liberal Democracy, meant voters woke up in Alice’s Wonderland: to bin the lot, and re-equip themselves in to stave off catastrophe. This is break- “Down, down, down. Would the fall never record time for boring modernity. up, nor are ye out of it. ,

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1997-2010, was the last chance saloon, to the people’s future”. global process. As we can see now, the and towards the end of it six-gun Brown Carter’s emphasis is on the story of Welsh dilemma (especially) emphasises couldn’t even draw his shooter. Today the language, but his solution is “a truly a sui generis nature to which neither we find him retired, but still leaning on bilingual Wales... a country where people European Union nor globality provide a the old bar without so much as a decent can choose to live their lives through the ready answer. wise-crack to amuse the remaining soaks medium of either or both Welsh or English England can’t be forced backwards to and newshounds. Out on Main Street, and where the presence of the language is the 16th Century, to undo ‘incorporation’. the contest is on for a British equivalent a source of pride” (p.145). This is because However, it can (and now very probably to Australian Labor’s Kevin Rudd, or his the “institutional basis of identity seems to will) be forced back to the early-modern successor Julia Gillard. be exhibiting increased tenacity” following moment of its Treaty of Union with Couldn’t Labourism vote in another devolution and the creation of the Welsh the Scots. Queen Anne’s 1707 was a less Party-bound leader, and set up a Assembly (p.143). profoundly different kind of deal from different bar-room deal with Lib-Dems and A sense of coherence has been forced that of Henry VIIIth. It was an ambiguous the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists on all- on the periphery by its downfall at the arrangement between states, rather than round constitutional change — in effect, centre. The English needed ‘Britain’ a conquest and core-shattering repression. move towards some kind of confederal and had become too used to it — the The ‘end of the UK’ will then be a matter- replacement for the United Kingdom? appropriate ‘bigger than’, extending identity of-fact reconstitution, posing unfamiliar Possibly, but how many years could that bequeathed by the odd history so well but quite resolvable questions of external take? The Britannic ancien regime is recounted in Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: relations, both within the European Union founded on the unthinkability of such stuff. Five Roads to Modernity (1993) and Ernest and at United Nations (and Security So it will have to emerge in fits and starts, Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983, Council) levels. spasms like the one we are in — over the wreckage of ’s Britishness The question has turned from whether or not to and David Cameron’s smart PR to keep old Union on its feet. be ‘radical’, into just which version of radicalism Open Democracy and like-minded organs have been arguing in that general will best fit the new times. Against the grain direction for decades already, preaching of Britishness and most of the secular odds it to the largely unconverted. Now suddenly everybody has experienced a five-minute imposed, a stalled evolutionism has ended by conversion, forced on them by the simple failure and incapacity of the traditional setting the stage for political revolution. regime. The question has turned from whether or not to be ‘radical’, into just Kindle edition, Amazon Whispernet, 1010). At the time of writing this, the which version of radicalism will best fit the The English figure there as the prime Flemish part of the Belgian multi-national new times. Against the grain of Britishness movers of nation-state modernity: it was state is moving towards an analogous and most of the secular odds it imposed, a threat and promise from the archipelago reconstitution, one whose basis was laid stalled evolutionism has ended by setting that forced France towards its Revolution, down in 1713, just six years after the the stage for political revolution. and then the rest of Europe into a staged parliamentary merger of 1707 Union. This is the context into which IWA’s adoption of nationalism. These are ‘re-modernizations’, and their book Against the Odds appears. Harold But of course, the motor of that change slogan should be something like the old Carter looks back on the history of Welsh could never itself become just another French one, reculer pour mieux sauter — national identity, over the long period example. It moved on into overreach: the returns to a perfectly accessible period, in from the 1536 Act of Union down to the ceaseless extension of colonialism and order to adapt to newer circumstances. present. The former ordained that “the said empire, bringing, as Carter puts it: “vital Carter recognises the possibilities country or dominion of Wales shall stand myths and memories of the English people here: “It is an over-simplification to argue and continue for ever from henceforth predominantly related to its imperial past” that Scotland retained its institutions incorporated united and annexed to and (p.23), rather than to a national past in the but lost its language while Wales lost its with the King’s realm of England” (p.50); usual 19th and 20th Century sense. Hence, institutions but retained its language.” but the present situation is one where the he goes on, “the problem of being ‘English’ However, the simplification meant there ‘shattered cultural core’ of Wales is being and of being at the same time politically was no centre of power in Wales, so that reintegrated through a “sense of coherence correct and ‘liberal’ ”. The first could never “one thing, and one only, affirmed and which would give so much more strength become either typical or even last in the sustained Welsh identity and that was the

82 | www.iwa.org.uk www.clickonwales.org 7/Culture / reviews language” (p.55). Today, a power element Catastrophe turned considered purely as a work of art, even a has been returned by devolution and the into a work of art work of semi-fiction. Assembly. Against The Odds argues that Jan Morris Countless authors have shaped works the false antagonism between ethno- around the impact of grief, and it is all too linguistic identification and ‘mere politics’ easy for any of us to imagine the loss of a is now in course of resolution. beloved wife, the death of a son (by suicide, Earlier on the book declares that in his twenties), or that dread moment of “globalisation has undermined what once diagnosis. What makes West unique is the could be called ‘ethnic’ ”(p.26), rendering range of its reactions to the inevitable – the a culture-alone growth more difficult. I metaphors Perrin employs to express his doubt both the assertion and (still more) emotions, the idioms he uses to intepret its supposed implications. There is an them, and at the end the reluctant serenity alternative position: ‘globalisation’ is with which he contemplates them. He having the effect of reinforcing ethno- calls his book a happy one because its linguistic identities, and making these turn very sadness is a measure of the joy that to ‘culture-plus’ answers. After all, the went before, an insight introduced to him, most basic trait of globalisation is surely its Perrin tells us, by the Gaelic-language poet finality. The ‘industrialisation’ of the globe Aonghas MacNeacail. has been a once-off (if still unconcluded) And, indeed, the power of the book process — and so is its terminus, the lies not in its melancholy, but in its elements of uniformity entailed by actual ecstasies. Perrin’s belief in the regenerative globality and the sense of one homo power of nature is fortunate, because there sapiens ‘tribe’, or nation. This is it: the West: A Journey Through is nothing in the natural world that he does Welsh (like thousands of others) have to the Landscapes of Loss not notice, absorb and take delight in, and be, or not be, for all time foreseeable. The Jim Perrin the natural world seems always to oblige. alternatives are a global mode forged via Atlantic Books, £18.99 Wherever he goes, swifts fly by, badgers the house of many colours, not blighting or snuffle, foxes or weasels or inquisitive dimming the inheritance. Transcendence sheep-dogs watch his passing, seals sing through what we have and are or else, loss The author of this book is, by common and blackbirds awake the brilliant morn. beyond words, the possible erosion of too consent, one of the most remarkable, gifted It is as though all the resources of creation much ‘human nature’. and enigmatic people in Wales. In his youth are combined to encourage him. The nationalisms of 20th Century a celebrated rock-climber, Jim Perrin (born If he is sometimes repetitive in his modernity have not constituted this world 1947) is the master of a lyrical English prose enthusiasms, perhaps just a little too in order to fade away. Of course they style, a much admired practitioner of the generous in his memories of those singing have to change, and develop farther. The Thoreau-esque school of nature writing, seals, it is only because of his marvellous emergent new horizon of globalisation and the leading mountaineering author of conviction about the wholeness of all life, discloses new vistas. The value of Against our time. After a life full of riddle, fuelled by to which death itself is only incidental. The Odds is its acknowledgement of constant travel, fertile invention, diligence, This inspires the exuberance of his this, and of how late-comers in nation- drugs, sex, climbing, wide reading, and writing, which shows itself too in lavish formation (or re-formation) like the Welsh, nature-worship, in his late middle age quotations, a plethora of place names, and the Flemings and Walloons, the Scots, catastrophe fell upon him. Within a few a virtuoso vocabulary (what is a gubbel, the Northern Irish, the West Papuans, months a son committed suicide, a wife how do you dreich, is it good or bad to be the Catalans (and so many others) may died, and he himself was diagnosed with proprioceptive?). Irresistibly he sweeps us enjoy novel opportunities. It is an age terminal cancer. across moorland or beach, up heathery of efflorescence rather than of mere These are the tragic events that give mountains where the brown hares watch, resurrection, a globalisation of human him the sub-title of his book, A Journey with such dream-like enjoyment that we geography and, in the longer run, of Through the Landscapes of Loss. In form might almost burst into song ourselves, human nature itself. it is partly memoir, partly travel book, the were it not that we might disturb the owls, ‘West’ of the title referring to the western the polecats or the seals. coasts of Britain where the sun goes So he is right – at a fundamental level, Tom Nairn is Research Professor down. Given the imaginative genius of its it is a happy book! in the Department of Politics at author, though, and the somewhat elusive But it is an obsessed book, too – Durham University. substance of his recollections, it is best obsessed not simply with Perrin’s sorrows,

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but I suspect with his own self too. His Perrin who speaks to us thus. Who is in his mid 70s, remains constantly at war, tangled spirit finds itself in its almost the real Perrin? What is the truth about whether it be with , the conflicts hallucinatory identification with nature this fascinating, confused and confusing in Iraq and Afghanistan, his party, the and, particularly, in the challenges of writer? I prefer to think that it is expressed Parliamentary whips, the Tories, betrayals rock-climbing. “Do you know how it best in this book not in his heady flights of of his nation, the monarchy, nuclear smells?”, he asks of the Old Man of Hoy, as evocation, or his relentless self-analysis, power, the refusal to legalise drugs, he prepares to climb that iconic stack. “It but in a few simple words with which he foxhunting, bull bars on 4X4 vehicles, the reeks of sex. That salt, piquant musk when describes a group of friends sitting on a Common Agricultural Policy, the manifold you slipped detumescent from inside your grass verge in Derbyshire: “the lovely girl stupidities of bureaucracy, banal political love lingers on its every ledge.” on the brink of womanhood, the beautiful ambition, or, and most poignantly of all, So his love of the rocks is not mystic woman approaching death, the quiet horse the trials of his personal life, including or spiritual, as it has been for many of the stooping to the long grass between them…” his longstanding arthritis affliction, the more cereberal climbers, but is something That “quiet horse stooping” does it. In brave struggle of his wife Sam against more elemental and introspective. For my sadness as in joy, in sickness or in health, cancer, and the inexplicable suicide of his mind the best writing in this book is not to you can’t do better than that. daughter Rachel aged just fifteen. be found in its celestial passages of fancy, As his memoirs reveal, to all these but in its exact nerve-tangling accounts of struggles and torments Flynn brings rock-climbing. Perrin knows a lot about the Jan Morris is an author, historian and the same combination of irreverence, effects of LSD – he considers it “one of the travel writer. candour, humour, sheer bloody- most valuable and educative influences mindedness and raw guts. Certainly, of my life” - and he believes the flow of Flynn has an uncertain eye for political adrenalin that rock-climbing produces is advancement which, undoubtedly, is akin to the powers of acid. “The colours A dragon at war why it has never happened to him in any suddenly coruscate”, as he wrote long John Osmond conventional sense. Naturally, too, he is ago, “shadows gape, weak rays of the sun never one to pull a punch. flare violently, explode…The black dog, He first came to widespread attention Melancholy, stalks my heel and the sun in January 1995 when he fell out with goes out with a plop”. one of the earliest expressions of the New Yet just as LSD could act as consolation Labour project. This was Tony Blair’s too, so a day on the rocks seems to leave decision to send his son to London’s Perrin the calmer for its perils. He knows Oratory school, a in all well enough how real those perils are but name. As Flynn told him at a meeting – dozens of his friends have died in the of the Parliamentary Labour Party: practice of their passion. But as the Gaelic poet taught him, there can be joy within “You have betrayed the ideals of sorrow. Or, as the comedian said when our party and undermined the asked why he kept hitting himself, “it’s so struggle that our party is having in the nice when you leave off”. country. We cannot preach against But there is no room for music- privilege and then insist on it for our hall humour in this book. It is too thick own families.” with psychological theory and learned references. Here we consult a medieval “Tony Blair looked shocked”, Flynn Finnish epic, here the work of Lama The Unusual Suspect records. “That was the end of the friendly Angarika Govinda is cited as a source. relations that I had enjoyed with him since Sebald and Homer, Thomas Hood and Biteback, £19.99 1987 when we were both junior shadow Krishnamurta all get their footnotes. Freud ministers”. Henceforth, “The role of is big, of course, and poor old C. S. Lewis, conscience of the party had been bestowed who once wrote about the “loathsome Paul Flynn’s life and political career have on me. It was to be mine for a long time.” sticky-sweet pleasure of self-pity”, is been carried on amidst so much turmoil Flynn’s acerbic judgements are not foreseeably given his come-uppance. and at such a frenetic pace the main confined to the Labour leadership. Yet to me there feels to all this erudition impression is of a perpetual battlefield. The Lembit Opik is dubbed “a clown and a an element of persiflage. It is not the real (still) Labour MP for Newport West, now turkey whose specialty is valuing mindless

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political populism over intelligence”. of southern Cardiff, described with fond was twenty-two not sixty-two.” Tory Nigel Evans is “a tabloid newspaper attention in his memoirs. “My mother For the last ten years he has sustained made flesh”. Nicholas Soames is “a serious defined Welshness in three grades,” he one of the most visited political websites, politician struggling to emerge from his recalls. “We the Cardiff Irish-Spanish-Italian and since 2007 a daily blog – with more globular mountainous shape”. Labour MPs mongrels were Welsh, because we had than 1,000 posts, 10,000 comments, and Richard Caborn and Ian McCartney, who all been born in Wales. Those from the 270,000 hits. As he admits, it has become were given donations from the nuclear Valleys who had sing-song accents which addictive but believes in future the industry, received “cash for comrades”. bore the imprint of the cadences of the blogosphere will be the main platform for is compared with Shapeshifter, Welsh language were the ‘Real Welsh’. political debate: a Star Trek character “who liquefies at the The mysterious Welsh speakers from the end of each day and sleeps in a bucket to far north were the ‘Proper Welsh’ – deeply “Blogging was like learning to swim emerge in any chosen shape the following Protestant, and not only strangers but or ride a bike at an advanced age. morning”. Former Defence Secretary probably extra-terrestrial”. A delicious thrill. I hesitated before John Hutton trained himself to be a Blair He learned Welsh because by “a starting. Blog pope Iain Dale, clone: “He dressed like Blair and abided by hairbreadth” he gained a scholarship to St speaking ex cathedra, opined that the commandments of . He even Illtyd’s College in . There he came most MPs think that their colleagues started to imitate the way that Blair speaks, into contact with teacher Glyn Ashton who blog are ‘clinically insane’. Those starting every other sentence with ‘Look’!” who inspired his interest in the language MPs will be the average timid career- Apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, which became “a lifelong delight”. He hungry boring MPs who are terrified Flynn’s main ire is reserved for betrayals devotes a chapter to why a nation lives of saying anything interesting”. over devolution. As he puts it, describing through her language, declaring, “To truly his feelings when Blair unilaterally love a language, it’s vital to know more Famously, his account of the stitch-up of announced in 1996 that there was to be than one. The monoglot usually accepts the election of Alun Michael as Labour’s a referendum before the Welsh Assembly language as little more than a means leader in 1998 ahead of the first National could be established: of communication. Bilingual speakers Assembly elections, entitled Dragons Led constantly compare the endless delights by Poodles, was first published online, “For more than a century the hopes of in the unique personalities of languages with readers invited to help write the final Wales had been sabotaged by English they know.” After he gave the Llywydd y printed version. On the first day 15,000 hits politicians, by our own Welsh quislings Dydd (President of the Day) address at the on the site were recorded. Within three seduced by Westminster, or by internal 1988 Eisteddfod in Newport he received days the total passed 33,000. jealousies. Who had betrayed “sulphuric letter” from Carmarthen Why is it that, despite everything, this time? Was it the voices of anti- Labour MP Alan Williams denouncing him Flynn has remained in the Labour Party? devolutionist MPs who were close to because “you have given your blessing to It is difficult not to conclude that it is Blair? Whatever the truth, the lesson all the illegal activities of Cymdeithas yr simply because it provides him with a was that Blair had contempt for the Iaith and the Welsh Nationalists”. platform to pursue his various vendettas. mass of Welsh and Scottish MPs In many ways Paul Flynn is more a Foremost amongst these today is his and our shadow secretary of state, journalist than a politician. What success unrelenting opposition to the Afghan Ron Davies. There had to be some he has had in his many campaigns has war. He was the lone opposition voice protest. John McAllion, the best of the often been down to his talent in coining in a 2006 Parliamentary debate on Scottish frontbench team resigned. a phrase, manipulating the press, and troop deployment there, when Defence Had Ron Davies resigned, whoever grabbing a headline. When a Newport Secretary John Reid foolishly claimed replaced him would not have been and Gwent councillor in the 1970s he that the mission would last three years an improvement. So disturbed was wrote a column for a local paper under “without a shot being fired”. As Flynn Blair’s judgement it could have been the pseudonym Penderyn, designed to himself said about Afghanistan, writing in the candidate from hell, the anti- get up the nose of his colleagues. For the run-up to the 2010 general election, devolutionist Kim Howells.” several years in the mid-1980s he was “My solitary campaign convinces me I Euro MP Llew Smith’s press officer and have a continuing individual role to play Paul Flynn is that rarest of creatures, if not penned a monthly Euro Diary for weekly in Parliament. It drives me on to a new an endangered species, a Welsh nationalist newspapers that reached 200,000 readers. election a decade after retirement age”. inside the Labour Party. To understand As he puts it at the opening of The Unusual him you have to explore his roots in the Suspect, “If I had known what fun it was I Catholic Irish Grangetown community would have written my first book when I John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 85 7/Culture / reviews

Mirages in a I and Peter Jones (of ) evidently Scottish landscape. Scottish landscape had a role in it. Our Road to Home Rule Against him Robertson sets the MI5 Chris Harvie (2000) was a visual record of Europe’s agent Peter Bond, not Ian Fleming’s man, best-behaved national movement, and the more Conrad’s Verloc, and as chaotic last book to be reviewed by , as the last phase of Angus Calder’s life. devolution’s author. Robertson’s frame is Covering something really frightening? the retrospective of a Scots photographer, No Ukanian plan, no conspiracy, just Angus Pendreich, and one haunting image: Stendhal-like manoeuvre and expediency a huge painting ‘The Signing of the Deeds within a sclerotic state. Organised enmity of Demission’ marking the split in the encourages organised response. Dementia Scots Kirk in 1843. D. O. Hill and Robert is unpredictable, its cumulative results Adamson composed this from calotypes of implacable and destructive. those involved, ‘sun pictures’ of individual The Victorian Irish, in awe of their brilliance pasted together. The result hadn’t English conquerors, produced a formidable the tragic unease of Rembrandt’s ‘Night English-style resistance, from Shaw to Watch’: more history as porridge. De Valera. The romantic battle was won, Morgan, Jenkins, Jones: this but Free State economics, first impossibly Welsh thread will recur. The value of Gladstonian, became in the 1990s a sort of Robertson’s writing already figures in Emyr Keynes-on-speed and collapsed in a racket Humphreys’ self-appraisal in Land of the called the Anglo-Irish Bank. Robertson Living: “Novelists will never lose their captures this disorder with his pathological taste for unimportant local people. They agents, but ‘the land’s imagination’ tends And the Land lay Still are the priceless raw material of fiction.” to succumb to the glum bureaucracy James Robertson Indeed, there could have been four books, Harvie and Jones really recorded despite Hamish Hamilton, £18.99 with the fricative lure of Humphreys themselves, a mass of repetitive rencontres, and Anthony Powell. That obsessive history’s Groundhog Day. genealogist died before David Cameron This dismay could stem from Robertson’s The title of James Robertson’s epic is taken and led the Commons, honest analysis of a 1940s Scotland from an Edwin Morgan’s Sonnet from both connected by his own marriage, detached from its national history by its Scotland. The poet’s 2005 benediction for a Welsh preoccupation echoing Louis own obsessive industrial life, maimed by its the new Holyrood Parliament wormed its Namier’s political cousinhoods, researched efforts in the World Wars (first orchestrated way through the history of the nation in by one of two Poles – the other being by Lloyd George in 1915). Nonetheless, it is the city, ending grandly: Conrad – whose unquiet Britishness did, still alive, making even after 1999 the future for a time, put a vertebrae in the jellyfish. seem a fata morgana. Roads to freedom may “We give you this great building. Don’t And the Land lay Still raises be there, but obscured by Tom Johnston’s let your thoughts be other than great, fundamental issues about political fiction. dark vision: Parliament as unemployment when you enter and begin. So now Its ‘retrospective-present’ tone resembles bureau and emigration office. begin. Open the doors and begin!” Humphreys’ problematic beginning, Robertson bookends the hardback National Winner, born of a brief violent edition with two photographs from about Playful, not at all terrible, and gay in every interlude in in the 1950. The first is Dundee seen from Law sense, Morgan’s genius informs this baggiest 1960s. It is also shadowed in Raymond Hill by a very small man on a park bench. of monster novels. It won’t displace Robin Williams’ Loyalties, and the less well- The second sweeps across the faces at Jenkins’ Fergus Lamont (1979) as the comprehended feminisation of politics, a football match, variously focussed on ‘national tale’ of the Compton Mackenzie- woman moving from symbolic stasis to camera and game, dignified, interested, Hugh MacDiarmid generation, daft and leadership. Humphreys, Williams, Sartre’s alive. What the Scottish future ought to inspirational, but it’s still compulsive. Roads to Freedom are somewhere here, have been, the picture Hill ought to Robertson’s book fails to fulfil its initial aims and Walter Allen’s English midlands have produced. (indeed the author tells us as much) but the masterpiece All in a Lifetime, whose failing Iain Crichton Smith’s ‘dear friendly reader will never regret starting. The sense narrator William Ewart Simmonds mirrors ghosts’ live in Robertson’s book, V. S. of ‘Couldn’t I be doing something better Robertson’s Don Lennie, incorporating Pritchett’s ‘determined stupor’ that unites with my time?’ that invades the reader of the decencies of the autodidact left; a a nation and writes a classic doesn’t. It’s Harry Potter or Scots football fan is replaced winner of wars, however traumatised as if Lampedusa in The Leopard, his great with a determination to read – and re-read by them. Equally afflicted, his friend concentration of history – Sicilian and – then have it out with the author, and Jack Gordon loses, takes to the road universal, had omitted the final scene through him with the history. like Wagner’s Wotan, yet leaks into the at the Palermo ball. Prince Fabrizio is

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confronted with his empty marriage, his interviews writers in depth, but always there Cardiff. Always, however, the paper boat order’s decay, the failure of the Italian was that glint in the interviewee’s eye the brings its redemptive powers. future. In Visconti’s film he walks out into knowledge that sets the practioner apart Sometimes Gower’s prose is as smart- the dawn, to drop to his knees as the new from the commentator – you talk as much arsed and annoying as Martin Amiss. In state shoots the Garibaldini. The Scots as you want but I have produced the work. other passages he lets the story unravel tragedy is not to be aware of, or ennobled Now Gower has produced the work and with the nightmarish qualities of a William by, tragedy. a fine novel it is too. Reworked from the Burroughs. His wit and mischievousness original Welsh-language Dala’r Llanw, this is is never far away. I remember on one his debut English language novel. occasion he halted a public presentation Christopher Harvie is Professor of British For a man whose mouth is never far I was making to query my pronunciation Studies at the University of Tubingen and a from having something to say, it starts of the word pronunciation. Sharp, Member of the . appropriately in La Boca, the mouth, of clever, flippant. But flippancy is not the the River Plate. He lavishes attention on trademark of this book. His description the river as a visual feast. The description of the elderly couple, Horacio and Flavia Magical story reveals is vivid and memorable: “mud on the and their dealing with the inevitability coming force banks can look like freshly cut liver, gigantic of her terminal illness is extraordinarily Ifor Thomas butchery”. So we begin with water and moving. Their speech borrows from the it is never far away during the rest of the high passion and steeped sadness of the story. The narrative is carried literary and words of a traditional tango song, and figuratively by the sea. Birds too populate they dance, too, their response to the this book, as fitting for a man who has spent inevitability of death is to dance with a large part of his life studying them, and “heads held high like Andalusian royalty.” Sharp, clever, flippant. But flippancy is not the trademark of this book.

significantly the first to get a mention is the Gower describes the breakdown of albatross, doomed to carry more than its fair the Oakland couple’s marriage due to her share of myth and imagining on its broad inability to have children as if he’s posting wing span. So we are in South America, bulletins from a war zone – not since Lorca and if Mathew Strecher’s definition of has infertility been dissected so cruelly and magic realism is anywhere near the mark, dare I say it, so poetically. “what happens when a highly detailed, Not only does he construct a novel realistic setting is invaded by something too which moves effortlessly between Buenos Uncharted strange to believe”, is correct, then this is a Aires, Oakland and Cardiff but endeavours Jon Gower significant contribution to that genre. and, to a great extent succeeds, in creating Gomer, £8.99 For it is indeed a magic story, one in a new religion to boot. The structure is a which a paper boat sails with its unique satisfying triptych, the violence is beautiful There is something very annoying about cargo from Argentina to the major West and the beautiful is often violent. this book. It confirms that Jon Gower can Coast port of Oakland, San Francisco. The Perhaps we have heard of bronchitic write fiction. What ever the opposite of poverty and violence of South America is breath sounding like caged budgerigars literary schadenfruede is, this is it. Gower swapped for the North American version. before. However, this is an exception and is one of those prodigiously talented The doomed elderly Argentinean couple generally the prose is fresh and exciting. polymaths, yet of whom previously it could become the warring young American This is an original work which establishes be said, his c.v. was incomplete, he hadn’t marrieds, David and Elsbetha, whose Gower as a coming force. The questions written a novel. relationship is being painfully torn apart he’s posing now are in the mind of the I have seen him interview ten writers by their inability to have children. From reader not the mouth of the interviewer at a single sitting without using any notes. there the narrative moves to home where and long may it continue. I asked him how he did it. Just read the Wales is described almost in Dickensian books, he replied, rather surprised at the terms with some stomach churning action question. He compeers literary events, he taking place in the subterranean sewers of Ifor Thomas is an architect and poet.

agenda winter 2010—issue 42 | 87 Last word Can we change our DNA?

Peter Stead Smith for his recommending the unaware of the thousands of Welsh men Merthyr Bus Station as the first port of and women who leave their country call for job seekers. A leak subsequently to serve in the Armed Forces, to work revealed that in a first draft he had in the oil industry or just to pursue recommended that the unemployed in careers abroad in places requiring Merthyr should consider taking taxis to their professional and technical skills. find jobs in Cardiff and Bristol. We all need to remind ourselves that It is precisely this kind of shop-worn Wales has that international dimension. We are well and truly cursed to be living and predictable indignation that earns Presumably some of those ex-pats have through interesting times. Already I’ve Wales a bad name. It locks us into a chosen to be something other than, seen references to ‘Resistance’, ‘Protest’ sterile narrative. It helps explain why or as well as Welsh. As someone who and ‘the Welfare State’ as being part of our Labour MPs did so spectacularly has chosen to live about 95 per cent our national DNA. All doubtlessly true, badly in the Shadow Cabinet elections. of my life in Wales, I must admit that at but perhaps we need to look far more It is also perhaps why, as recent letters times I have played the game of wishing intensely into the mirror which is still the to the Press have pointed out, there is a that my DNA had been determined in best and most scientific method I know noticeable lack of Welsh born and bred another country. of determining identity. All these qualities leaders in prominent positions, not only I was once asked by students at a are not going to be enough. The times in politics but in public life generally. Gregynog conference what I would are going to require a little more. In the days ahead we will need have chosen to be if I were not Welsh. We are in for a rough and our politicians to fight forensically They were quite shaken with my humiliating ride. We may yet see our for increased Welsh funding and to answer, “a New Yorker and Jewish”. people living in caves, becoming highlight particular injustices as the They were less surprised when a close hunters and gatherers again, looking Welfare State is rolled back. But we colleague of mine said the same for he out eagerly for food parcels and finding will also want to hear about plans and could easily have been mistaken for that not one of their 75 TV channels ideas that will ensure that Wales ceases a New York novelist. I am differently is in Welsh. There will be strikes and to be the economic backwater it is blessed. Wherever I have gone in the demonstrations. At the very least one becoming. The great challenge is to world people have looked at me and hopes that, as with those effective ensure that as a culture Wales offers assumed that I was German. Then at an protests against the unemployment individuals opportunities of fulfilment. ice-hockey match in Boston I found that benefit cuts in 1935, any protests will The only political justification for Wales every one of the 25,000 crowd looked reflect a popular and united front rather is that it promotes success. There is exactly like me. My DNA then would than any sectional cause. But protest will no satisfaction in being different and suggest that I was born to be a Boston not be enough. second-rate. Irish cop. There are times after watching Protest and indignation are our As we complain we need all the while a full week of and reading national default mode: They come to us to be creating a more dynamic country Wales on Sunday when I would willingly as naturally as song, insubordination and in which the emphasis is on quality have settled for that. irony. At their best they can be heartfelt and style. Wales is undoubtedly a freer, There is, however, no escaping the and constructive. At their worst they more fun-loving, more caring, more 75 per cent of my genes that are Welsh. lapse into tired stereotyping. Now, as democratic, and tolerant society than And during this glorious autumn, when we attempt to articulate a new credo, it has ever been. But quite apart from the Welsh countryside and hills have we cannot believe our luck that our being poor by European standards, it is looked magnificent, I would not have current punishment for being feckless also shoddy, poorly dressed and badly wanted it any other way. In the past, bilingual socialists is being handed out spoken. Its towns are dominated by an people were proud to be Welsh because by a ‘bastard coalition’ (I still maintain indulgent and confused youth culture. they were associated with and defined that in May we should have had a Many of its schools have lost their way. by success stories, whether it was National Government) led by two It is entirely lacking any mass media language, religion, music, rugby, or the public schoolboys. Already one of our vehicles for intellectual debate, scientific running of railways, the mining of coal leading columnists has taken Samantha and technological analysis, or meaningful and the manufacture of steel. We are at Cameron to task for wearing a £750 cultural expression. All the while we are a stage when the transcending of victim dress to the Party Conference. Naturally, ‘entertaining ourselves to death’. status will be the first step towards a new we all poured scorn on Iain Duncan Mr Duncan Smith is probably pride and a new maturity.

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new publication

Engaging Wales’ Engaging Wales’ Disengaged Youth Disengaged Youth Edited by Stevie Upton £5.00 ISBN 978 1 904773 54 2

This new report on the problem of young people who are ‘not in education, employment or training’ is based on the proceedings of a conference organised by the IWA’s Gwent Branch in Pontypool in October 2009. It highlights the problem of young people becoming subject to what it calls a ‘revolving door syndrome’, moving from one support programme to another but benefiting from none. As public sector cuts begin to impact it is vital there should be more co-ordination between the various services addressing the issue. The report says that developing the necessary partnerships will require strong leadership, Edited by Stevie Upton shared protocols, and the certainty that no financial penalties will arise from collaboration or referral.

Contributors:

Howard Williamson, Richard Newton, Mark Provis, Frank Callus, Teresa Foster Evans, Professor of European Director of Rathbone Chief Education Strategic Manager director of Cyfle, Youth Policy at Cymru. Officer with Torfaen for Education, a Wrexham County the University of County Borough Training and Skills Council pupil referral Glamorgan. Council. Development with unit which takes the Heads of the care of disaffected Valleys Programme. female students, with Charlotte Blackwell a former student at the unit.

To order a copy, contact: IWA, 4 Cathedral Road, Cardiff CF11 97J 029 2066 0820 or buy online at www.iwa.org.uk IWA Members can purchase publications at a 25 per cent discount

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