Cymru needs ‘vulnerable confidence’

Simon Hobson

Outside the window, the landscape rolled past: flat land, enormous skies and wind turbines rotating in the distance. I was travelling towards Flensburg, in northern Germany, where I had been invited to speak at the 16^th Summer School of the European Centre for Minority Issues.

Crossing borders

I have spent much of my life crossing borders.

As a professional cyclist, a mining engineer and a political campaigner, my life and work have taken me across countries and continents. One thing I have discovered is that the further I travel from Wales, the clearer my insight into our nation becomes.

I see other countries taking for granted that which we believe is unrealistic for Cymru. Small nations taking responsibility for their own futures, despite having problems, divisions and uncertainties of their own. And I wonder why Wales so often feels the requirement to prove itself to others before we even ask for these same powers.

Embrace vulnerable confidence

I looked down at my book. I was more than halfway through, which, for someone with dyslexia, ADD and autism, felt like an achievement worth recognising. Then two words in the book caught my attention — Vulnerable confidence.

By the time I arrived in Flensburg, I was thinking about how these two words apply to Cymru.

Non-kin states

As a co-founder of New Wales, my role at the Summer School was to speak about Cymru as a non-kin-state nation. I will be honest: before receiving the invitation, I was rather less familiar with the terminology than I probably ought to have been.

Being the only non-academic in the room, I spoke about what I knew: family history, the loss of my grandfather’s farm, lost opportunities, and the consequences of generations of political and economic decisions being made at a distance from the Welsh communities that must live with their consequences. The sapping of ambition.

Warned off being ambitious

Cymru knows something about being told where the limits of its ambitions should lie.

We have been warned that our language is a barrier to progress. That political power must remain elsewhere because we are incapable of exercising it responsibly. That our economy is too weak, our population too small and our resources too limited to survive in the world on our own. Over time, such opinions cease merely to be arguments made by others about Wales. They become assumptions made within Cymru.

Believing the s**t we tell ourselves

The greatest success of any system that limits a nation’s ambitions is not simply to deny that nation power. It is to persuade the nation that it does not want, need or deserve it. This is why Cymru needs vulnerable confidence.

No country is handed a guarantee before it takes responsibility for its future. Nations learn through governing themselves. Institutions improve by exercising responsibility. Democracy works because citizens and governments are allowed to make decisions, learn from them and change course.

Explain it to me

At the Summer School, I spent a day with master’s and PhD students from across Europe. Many spoke three or more languages. Most knew little about Cymru. That was not their failing. Why should they? Wales has often been remarkably ineffective at explaining itself to the world. But the students asked questions. Some were difficult. Some revealed gaps in their knowledge and in mine.

There is real confidence in saying: I do not understand this. Explain it to me. Cymru needs more of that confidence.

A country that refuses to examine its weaknesses cannot improve. A political system that refuses to confront its failures cannot reform. And a nation that waits for certainty before taking responsibility will wait forever.

Of course, Cymru has suffered losses. Our language has been suppressed and marginalised. Our culture has too often been treated as secondary. Political powers were removed, while economic decisions affecting Welsh communities have frequently been made beyond Wales. That history matters. But history cannot be an excuse for permanent political and economic caution. If we believe that Cymru is being denied control over its own affairs, then at some point, we must decide what we intend to do about it.

Who has all the answers?

The work of New Wales, building on the debate opened by the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales, is not about finding a group of people who claim to have discovered every answer. Nobody has. It is about rejecting the idea that uncertainty is a reason for inaction.

Cymru needs a serious and confident debate about its constitutional and economic future. Not one constrained by the assumption that present arrangements are eternal. Not one in which advocates of greater autonomy are required to prove perfection while defenders of the status quo are permitted to rely on habit.

Time to show vulnerable confidence  

I have crossed a great many borders in my life. Some were physical, marked by signs and changes of language. Others were less visible: between careers and different versions of myself. Perhaps Cymru is approaching one of those borders now.

Wales does not need all the answers before it begins to shape its own future. It needs the confidence to ask the questions, the honesty to recognise its weaknesses and the courage to take responsibility for solving them. That is the vulnerable confidence Cymru needs now.

And perhaps the most radical thing we can do is stop waiting for someone else to tell us that we are allowed to ask questions of ourselves. Questions which result in Cymru travelling towards a destination of its own choosing.

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