Saisplaining: Let Welsh people speak

Stephen Price

Earlier this month, Nation Cymru published one of the most heartfelt, honest opinion pieces regarding the housing crisis facing people from Wales I’ve ever read.

The piece from June Slater was an update on her so-far-fruitless aim to buy a rural property in her homeland.

Reading it at 7am one weekday morning ahead of its publication, my blood ran cold, and for the rest of the morning June’s words stayed with me, along with a deep sadness.

Echoing my experiences of west Wales in particular, June shared: “I’ve been struck by the fact that in rural west- and mid-Wales I come across surprisingly few Welsh people—to the extent that I’ve sometimes found myself wondering where all the Welsh people have gone!”

She added: “A smallholding next to a friend—himself a recently-arrived Englishman—has just been acquired by someone from Hertfordshire, who bought it off people from Yorkshire, to add to the other people from Birmingham, Suffolk and London who’ve moved to the small valley in question.”

Her personal observations reflect recent data, showing that between 2020 and 2022, according to Compare My Move, there was an increase of 27.9% in people moving from England to Wales. Almost half (47.4%) of those who moved to Wales cited a lifestyle choice, and 26.3% did so for their retirement.

She wrote: “If these trends in Wales continue, it seems likely that in a couple of decades’ time those who identify only as Welsh will end up being a minority in their own country. I can’t see many other small countries thinking this is a good thing, but there’s precious little that can be done about it unless and until Wales gains independence, something that’s probably becoming less and less likely as the English population of Wales grows.”

A brave piece, littered with caveat after caveat to tread carefully, to not offend her English loved ones, primed for her very real, very common experience to be torn apart by the (135 and counting) wolves of Facebook alone.

Here are just some of the comments that befell what I thought was one of the most important pieces we’ve published this year, if ever:

“So all immigrants welcome in Wales except English ones ?? Comedy fking gold”

“My question is “Who sold these houses in the beginning?””

“What about the thousands of Welsh who have left Wales and are living abroad, including my son and four of my friends children who have now made their homes in other countries.”

And the obligatory, we were pushed out of Bristol by Londoners, it’s no different anywhere else in the UK…

Or my favourite: “We are not immigrants we live on the same land, BRITAIN, as such we can go anywhere in the UK to settle

“You fkin Welsh carry the biggest chip on a shoulder I’ve ever come across. 

“Let’s kick all the Welsh outa England back to no jobs, no money and no hope.”

Please, name me a country where Welsh migrants make up 50% of a county in another land.

And time and time again, the whataboutery of England’s population (some might say immigration) crisis forgets that Wales is not England. Moving to another country is not the same as moving elsewhere in your own land.

Any post such as this will also attract a lot of the ‘if they learn Welsh it’s fine’ arguments too, but doesn’t this overlook the fact that one can be and is, in fact, Welsh without speaking Welsh? We are a people with two, or more, tongues.

If a young couple from Blaenafon or Wrecsam who speak English, whose family have lived in the area going back centuries, lose out on a home in their square mile, is it better if an English person with Duolingo buys it instead?

The social media responses could have been written by an AI bot such is their predictability, but one thing each response overlooks time and time again is the root cause, the root problem: Wales not being an independent nation.

A nation at the whim of the land next door that has waged war upon its people for over 1,000 years. And our land and property, just as our resources have been for centuries, are there for England’s whim and taking.

With Wales facing immigration from another country (England), that relatively few English counties have seen percentage-wise, where do we go? Especially when so many of us really are quite happy where we are.

We suffocate slowly, in spirals of debt, paying inflated prices set for the Rightmove scroll of incomers, or accept that getting onto the ‘property ladder’ (ych!) is simply not for us. In our own villages, towns and cities.

Lloyd Warburton shared some *interesting* statistics on X earlier this week:

I’ve been looking at some 2021 census figures for Ceredigion lately.

Total born outside Wales: 45.6%
People aged 65+: 52.0%
People who consider themselves to be disabled under Equality Act: 55.7%
People in ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ health: 59.1%

This is under-discussed. There is much…

— Lloyd Warburton🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇺🇦 (@LloydCymru) December 8, 2025

He added: “This is under-discussed. There is much talk in parts of England about the impact of immigration on health services. In Ceredigion we’ve been living with it for years, yet much discussion of it is shut down as ‘anti-English racism’.

“If anything, the impact on Ceredigion is much more pronounced than in English cities. Much of the immigration into England is younger, working-age people. In Ceredigion, a much larger chunk of those incomers are elderly and in worse health. Our services are not designed for this.

“I’m not sure if anyone has misread this, but just for the avoidance of doubt, the percentages above are the percentage within each group who were born outside Wales, for example, 59.1% of the people in Ceredigion in bad or very bad health were born outside Wales, compared to 45.6% of the county’s population being born outside Wales.”

How anti-English to state facts.

From my own experience with articles such as June’s I’ve found that an English audience simply cannot handle just swallowing a fact. This is our experience. End of. It has to be argued with, we have to be called out and corrected, and we have to be told what for.

I’ve lived in my few square miles for most of my life, with detours to Swansea and Cardiff for studies, but lived in Ceredigion briefly, and my expectation of communities similar to my own, and Welsh speaking ones at that, were thwarted at the gate.

After a series of viewings with a Brummie agent, the terraced house I lived in (that went to sealed bids in a hot post-Covid market hell of buying in Wales back then) had countless empty homes nearby, and the two (very nice, might I add, just as June did) neighbours who took the time to chat were from England.

Like my first visit to Llangrannog as a school child, the media’s portrayal of the area as a Welsh-speaking heartland rang hollow.

Generally, it felt cold, isolated, unwelcoming, at odds with my first trip back ‘home’ to the valleys, and a walk around Bryn Bach Park where I chatted to more people, and received more warmth, in ten minutes than I did in months in Ceredigion.

And the situation is complex, of course – I’ve seen houses out west linger on the market for durations that would be unthinkable in the south east.

It’s not simply a case of ‘if it’s priced lower it will sell to locals’. These hollowed-out communities with diminishing facilities and job opportunities are no-go-zones for many of our younger people.

But why is that? And why is nothing being done about it?

Extractive economics defines Wales’ makeup at every level. Perhaps, just perhaps, if we were independent we might be able to address Wales’ problems with a Wales-led approach.

Perhaps, even, the people in control might care. Imagine that!

And it’s not just the farmhouse, detached or new-build either. It’s the council flats, the ex-council houses, the cheap-as-sglodion valleys terraces.

We just can’t win.

The sheltered accommodation where my dad lived in Abergavenny is now a home to more English-accented folk than Welsh. A nearby care home where I worked briefly the same: Elderly folk who retired to Wales ahead of their one-way trip to an overpriced care home, or the parents of recent English immigrants who want them close (but not too close!)…

And when we dare say, “hey, we’re losing out here…again”, the divide in the response is quite a clear one, with most people in or from England taking the “Who sold it to them in the first place?” stance. While the Welsh, unguarded and in private, meekly mention the new makeup of their own streets, and how things are changing.

Under the umbrella of ‘white’, Welsh people as an indigenous minority people or culture cease to exist, and all is fine. We can, and do, move to England. The English can, and do, move here.

But what is the solution? To keep building more and more so that, in some small token way, we at least get half a chance?

With the housing market anyone’s for the taking, if things continue this way, England’s white flight and Escape to the Country will mean Wales will only exist as a historical idea. A ‘not England’, but one shaped and led by (as many of our councils already look), you guessed it, folk from England.

To shut down conversation, too, is a privilege of the English who live here or don’t, and one the Welsh are either afraid to voice or, too-aware of the futility of complaining.

As England’s first colony, we must put up or shut up, as the reaction to June’s opinion piece demonstrated.

Welsh communities from Chepstow to Holyhead might be able to charge a little bit more for council tax on a second home, which is fantastic PR for councillors and the Senedd, but where it matters, where we are really losing, is in the simple exchange of contracts that begins on Rightmove.

The cards are held by the retired couple from Portsmouth, Manchester, Reading (it’s not always the London Bogeyman) in search of the good life, or the work-from-homer wannabe-hippy settling down in leafy Pontcanna or the Mumbles.

Hey, they might even download Duolingo or have a book on Welsh history. And then it’s fine. Like Film Cymru’s obsession with English actors in Welsh films (although strangely a Welsh lead in film about English gentry), we are most-indebted to those showing us how it should be done.

June’s piece ends with a sorrowful plea for something to be done, anything to be done. She writes: “Are such levels of English immigration into Wales—and into rural Wales in particular—sustainable if we want to see a viable Welsh culture, identity and language surviving into the future? I suspect not, but I’d be very glad indeed to be proved wrong.”

Our anthem pleads for the old language to survive, but the same rallying cry could perhaps be asked of Wales’ people.

What will it mean when we are outnumbered by a colonial superpower in our own country? Democratically, linguistically, culturally?

Can we really say we are Wales, without being by and for Wales’ people?

If Welsh people wish to vocalise their experiences of being Welsh and living in Wales, it’s for them to speak out loud without being Saisplained, without angry English folk telling us to be quiet, that they’re the victims, and that it’s all somehow our fault anyway.

As ever though, others know better than us. It’s why we can’t be an independent country, you see.

Wales has no future without independence. Not a meaningful one, anyway.

“O bydded i’r hen bobl barhau”

Oh shit, I can’t say that.

Read June Slater’s ‘The quest for a home in my homeland continued…’ here