Wales’ size is its strength

Stephen Price

One of the most uncanny things I’ve found since joining Nation Cymru some two years ago is how interconnected every facet of Welsh life is.

Every day, a story of a river I’ve swum, a mountain I climb, a charity I support, a person I admire, and week after week, without fail, a story from a person I know.

Earlier this month, we shared a press release from NHS Wales about a beautiful and brave man I spent a year on a course with in Cardiff and Vale College. A few weeks prior, an ex-colleague sending sporting news, ‘anonymous’ tip-offs from people who aren’t actually anonymous to me, people I went to school with, friends of friends, ex-lovers of friends, relatives of friends… I could go on.

I remember first catching a clip of Elis James’ infamous Cymru Connections back in the spring and initially thinking, “Oh come on…”

But then the Cymru Connections in my own life kept proving my initial doubt wrong.

Elis’s one-minute exchanges have received hundreds of thousands of views across social media, with listeners from outside Wales often in amused disbelief.

One social media commenter wrote: “This is genuinely a superpower,” with another replying simply: “Nah, just genuinely Welsh.”

Katrin Bennhold, writing in the New York Times this very week shared: “You might know I live in Wales. It was an adjustment moving to Cardiff after Paris, London and Berlin. At first I missed the energy, the diversity, the sense of freedom that comes with the scale of those places.

“But what I’ve learned here is the power of community.

“The Welsh comedian Rob Brydon jokes that if you name someone from Wales to a Welsh person, he either knows someone related to them or who went to school with them. When I drop my son at the school gate, I don’t just bump into my sister-in-law, I see my hair dresser, the guy who runs our gym and half a dozen people who went to school with my husband.

“Last weekend, the actor Matthew Rhys was in town, to do a one-man show on the actor Richard Burton (Welsh!) on a local stage. Matthew grew up in Cardiff and, yes, went to school with my husband. It was part of a fund-raising tour for a new National Theater of Wales that Michael Sheen, another Welsh actor, is driving. At the reception afterward I spoke to Michael’s assistant (who went to school with my husband).

“With that sense of community comes an extraordinary sense of national pride, joyful and inclusive, which to me personally as a German has been a revelation.

“One of the most rousing expressions of this was the 2022 pep talk that Michael gave to the Welsh football team before it headed to the World Cup. Watch it here. It’s incredible.

“This week’s world-themed song is Welsh, of course: Super Furry Animals’ “It’s Not the End of the World?” The lead singer, Gruff Rhys, did not go to school with my husband (but his wife did!)”

Cymuned

Of course, there are folk even on my street whose names I don’t know (such is Abergavenny…), and a police station style line-up of all 3 million plus residents of Wales would bring me back to my first take on Cymru Connections, but the overriding sense of this nation that I still have, and that I refuse to give up hope in, is one of community.

Behind the cliche, we can all mostly agree that in our shared sense of what it means to be Welsh, community is something that is still of high importance.

From the ‘orite butts’ of young children in the valleys, to the stalwarts of our diminishing chapel congregations, Wales’ branding as a nation of sanctuary isn’t without its grounding.

We are, for the most part, kind, welcoming, curious, and empathetic, perhaps because, behind it all, so many of us have often had so little ourselves.

Looking back at old pictures from The Valleys exhibition in Cardiff last year, I was struck by just how little we did have but, in sheer contrast, how much we had in each other. A connectedness, a care for our brother and sister, a family and community.

A very fragile connectedness, however. And one at breaking point.

Annibyniaeth

Arguments against Welsh independence time and time again focus on Wales’ weaknesses.

Take Mike Hedges’ piece entitled ‘Welsh Independence – Paying the Price‘ from earlier this month, where, as Labour always do, he moved straight to cherry-picked economic arguments.

It’s always about the economy isn’t it. The same economy that is tanking, that we were told we must accept X, Y and Z for because it’s good for the economy… and yet, here we are today in quite the mess.

It’s ‘fiscal deficit’ this, ‘currency and security’ that, and then, just to make sure the silver-haired among us really know not to even entertain the idea of being a nation like pretty much every other out there, add a touch of pension scaremongering and leave to simmer.

Forget Wales’ lucrative resources that are being pillaged en-masse, or Wales’ mismanaged and questionably-owned land use, and forget the notion of Wales and the Welsh being responsible for Wales’ own solutions to Wales’ own problems. It’s straight to an argument which essentially says ‘Wales needs to be propped up by England’.

Never do we hear about community, about pride, about self-sufficiency and community-ownership. It’s not got spreadsheet shortcuts, you see.

It’s always a biased ‘economic case’ that Wales is asked to submit, but never a human case.

Against all odds, Wales is still here, but its future has never looked more precarious to me now that the colonial project started by the Saxons, Normans et al finds its most successful model through the simple download of the Rightmove app and new-builds for new-neighbours.

If Wales is to remain a land with community at its heart, the only option is for a human and environmental-focused case for Welsh independence.

A case for hope.

A case for community.

Gobaith

Unsurprisingly, the latest economic game of ping-pong was won by Yes Cymru in their response to Hedges – and one only need look at Iceland to see what might lie in store for an independent Wales.

As it stands, however, it’s the vile pantomime and musical chairs of Labour, Conservatives and Reform and more of the same until Wales and its language and people are indistinguishable from England, just as was planned.

Wales can, and should, do better than entertaining the idea that we aren’t good enough, strong enough, big enough to be an independent nation that can call its own shots. What have we got to lose?

Wales’ size is its absolute strength. Our population of 3 million dwarfs that of nations such as Iceland and Malta, and yet they can manage, and manage well.

And not only could we, a ‘small’ country, manage well, we can continue to value the individual, the friend, and not follow the US and UK-led drive to value ourselves only on spreadsheets and GDP which have absolutely no regard for those who fall by the wayside.

Relatively small countries care more about their citizens (see Russia’s current war death tolls), and are better equipped to face climate catastrophe and food scarcity. They know the value of negotiation, friendship and peace in contrast to the world’s dominant countries and their obsession with more, more, more.

We’ve seen what scaremongering can do with Brexit. And we’ve not seen anything close to Wales’ potential yet, but we keep being told we’re not good enough.

The absurdity of Westminster feigning altruism for our sake, like a pet leech, while they dare not even give us parity with Scotland should be making our blood boil over.

A hostile, angry and warmongering nation telling our ‘joyful and inclusive’ land of hope and cymuned to dance to their miserable tune.

As our lives play out more and more online, and our communities go global, our family, friends and relatives move away near and far in search of opportunities Wales can’t yet offer, and while new builds and old builds find new faces from England and elsewhere, it will be interesting to see how Wales’ delicate interconnectedness plays out.

But for now, I will delight in the uncanniness of former bit-players and main characters returning to the stage again and again in the most incredible ways.

From the starlings on Aberystwyth pier to the whistling sands of Porthor, and every person known and not-yet-met, we’ve got it good here. We really have.

And I just know it could be even better.