Book review: For Britain See Wales: A Possible Future? by Joe England
Jon Gower
The Wales presented in the sobering opening pages of this book is beset by problems.
It’s a country where one in four children live in poverty. It’s a place where the disparities between average household incomes are very substantial – the highest, Heath in Cardiff, is over £ 58,000, twice that of Caerau in the Llynfi valley, where a little over £29,000 comes into the home.
A fifth of the Welsh population faces hunger because they do not have enough money. The greatest economic inequality in Europe is between London and the South Wales Valleys, with Gross Domestic Product, the conventional way of measuring wealth being nine times greater in Inner London than in the valleys. It’s like a ticker-tape of miserable facts.
Lucid
Fortuitously, this lucid and level headed book also catalogues some of the things Wales is currently doing well, or which hold out hope for a better future. Joe England tells us about experimental food production on Anglesey, where hydrogen is fermented using bacteria, which, ‘if successful, could transform the future of the planet.’
Wales leads the way in repair cafes, with the largest network in the world and, by 2030 it is possible that all carbon emissions will be cut by two thirds, with 70 per cent of electricity in Wales produced by wind, sun and tidal power.
England also tells us how it all came to pass, taking us through years of boom and bust, from the heyday of coal, iron and steel up to to the advent of what he calls ‘Factory Wales’ and a period of extraordinary economic growth:
The Severn Bridge, the M4, the three-lane A465 leading to the M50, the massive steelworks at Port Talbot (‘Treasure Island’) and Llanwern (‘Eldorado’) drew – from a wide area including the Valleys – process workers, craftsmen, draughtsmen, metallurgists, office workers, accountants, managers and administrators.
The Trustee Savings Bank in Port Talbot was known as the Rowing Club. ‘The Company puts our money in there on the Thursday and by lunchtime we’ve taken it out. In, out. In, out. The huge working men’s clubs at Port Talbot were reputed to have bar takings of well over £100,000 a year.
Constitutional meltdown
For Britain See Wales: A Possible Future sets out to explore the impending constitutional meltdown of a divided UK, pondering what a reunited Ireland or an independent Scotland might signify for Wales, as the poorest nation in the UK. The political landscape it sets out to map has changed a great deal while the book was at the printers, with the general election giving the SNP much to ponder.
Meanwhile Sinn Féin is now the biggest party across Northern Ireland’s councils, assembly and Westminster, signalling not only path to re-unification but also to the whole island of Ireland being a part of Europe.
The augurs are not good. The UK Government’s 2021 Plan for Wales promised a slew of initiatives to help stimulate economic growth including the post-Brexit promise ‘that Wales would receive the same amount of funding as it would have received from the European Union’ though these assurances have not been met.
Bystander
Joe England views the plan itself as one in ‘which the Welsh government would be a bystander (shades of ‘Glamorgan County Council on stilts)’ though I suspect it should be on steroids, even if things are more than a little rickety. That same government was also side-lined in the talks with Tata steel over the future of Port Talbot steelworks, or the discussions leading up to the cancelling of the second leg of the HS2 rail link between Manchester and Birmingham.
There’s a lot of solid history and policy analysis in this book – especially when it explores such ideas as the Foundational Economy, in which communities are built from the bottom up, challenging globalism into the bargain. It has a real relevance when one reads that the NHS in Wales spends almost half of its £ 22 million food budget outside of Wales.
Bananas
In amongst the weightier matters, there’s also a neat and unexpected sprinkling of humour in the writing. I particularly liked the fact that when David Maxwell-Fyffe was appointed Home Secretary, with the additional title of Minister for Welsh Affairs that ‘inevitably in Wales he was known as “Dai Bananas.”’
All in all, this is an accessible, clearly written and timely book that ultimately sounds an optimistic note, or notes about a future Wales, whilst recognising that we live in uncertain times, where you can take absolutely nothing for granted.
For Britain See Wales: A Possible Future? by Joe England’s published by Parthian. It is available from all good bookshops.
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Jon Gower does some trojan heavy lifting when he says that Sinn Féin’s current position in Northern Ireland’s political pecking order signals a “path to re-unification”.
But surely his claim that it also signals “Ireland rejoining Europe” was just a typo!
I agree, some massive leaps of faith going on here about Sinn Fein and the SNP. Also it’s not entirely predictable about how Welsh national self determination will play out. The undercurrent of the Reform party in South Wales is cause for considerable concern, and I do fear that the issue could polarise around language. In Scotland the independence movement largely speaks English, but in Wales such things are much more closely bound to language. In Brynmawr I do see a definite backlash against the “imposition of Welsh” by some people. The real worry to me is that we splinter… Read more »
There is no imposition of Welsh, and in reality there is only a very small and shrinking group. Support for the language remains very high, at around 80% of the Welsh population, and most of the rest are more than likely indifferent. Those hostile to the language are really sad cases. In the past there have been hack Labour politicians who have said some scandalous things about the Welsh language and those who speak it for political gain, but they are now largely gone, or at least wise enough to realise that disssing the language is now the stuff of… Read more »
Pedantic point maybe, but there can be no path to ‘reunification’, because Ireland has never been united other than under the rule of an English or Scottish king. In the first millennium it was ruled over by various competing provincial kings, some of whom claimed the title ‘High King of Ireland’, but none of whom had control of all of Ireland. Then came Viking, Anglo-Norman, English and Scottish invasions, each taking control of some of Ireland. Only after the Tudor conquest was Ireland united. Hence ‘reunification’ can only be applied to the reunification of Ireland with the UK – but… Read more »