Wales' new nationalists
Saturday, January 20, 2007
A vocal minority of Welsh nationalists want to talk about independence, and they want to talk about it now. The nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, doesn't want to talk about it for another ten years.
A new blog, Welsh Independence, has been set up to force the issue. They write:
The British Labour Party, the majority party and government of Wales, has for far too long used propaganda, scaremongering and British nationalism to persuade our people that Wales cannot make it on her own and that Britishness and the Union Jack is our redemption. This view has never been challenged. Until now.
Do they represent a broader sentiment in the nationalist community, or are they simply a couple of crackpots with a computer?
hat tip Seren
Labels: Plaid Cymru, Welsh independence, Welsh nationalism
posted by Blamerbell @ 4:00 pm,
10 Comments:
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At 7:48 pm,
said...
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Do they represent a broader sentiment in the nationalist community, or are they simply a couple of crackpots with a computer?
That's one more than the usual blog ;-) -
At 8:37 pm,
Blamerbell said...
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I don't know about yours, but mine is ghostwritten.
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At 9:05 pm,
Wynne Jones said...
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"Do they represent a broader sentiment in the nationalist community, or are they simply a couple of crackpots with a computer?"
Neither, probably. It probably only involves one person and it's certainly not crackpot. So there. -
At 10:11 pm,
bethan said...
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o don't talk about seren in that way!
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At 10:11 am,
Aran said...
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It definitely involves more than one person, although like most team efforts I expect it will rely on one or two key members to keep it going. What will be interesting will be how many other contributors it attracts, and what their quality will be like.
The various 'polls' that are getting airtime at the moment (lies, damned lies and etc) all do seem to point to one thing - a definite and quite significant increase in the number of people who would like to see an independent Wales - with the extrapolated numbers immensely higher than Plaid membership (so maybe hammering that USP a little harder could be a good thing!).
So perhaps the key question to ask is whether this represents a growing sentiment in the Welsh community, rather than the 'nationalist' community?
Personally, I hope so. If you don't subscribe to giant, centralist government, and if you turn the local/central pattern on its head and presume that decisions should be made locally unless they *have* to be made at a higher level, it's hard to see how many decisions would *need* to be made outside Wales - and easy to see how many of the decisions that are currently made outside Wales can be expected not to have our best interests at heart.
Personally, I can't think of any decisions that would deserve input from outside Wales that couldn't be handled by treaty. Am I missing something obvious? -
At 10:26 am,
said...
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I don't know about yours, but mine is ghostwritten.
I always thought of your writing as super and natural rather than supernatural... -
At 10:59 am,
said...
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The blog you refer to has just posted up a very thoughtful and considered post about the road to independence.
Whoever is behind it is no crackpot and I think it would be useful to avoid unnecessary abuse (I'm all in favour of the necessary variety!) when dealing with this subject.
I think the confidence of the Scots is starting to rub off on the Welsh national psyche. The fact that Scotland is heading along that road at some speed has given people here more faith that, with the UK crumbling, we have to look to the future as an independent state as well. -
At 4:02 pm,
Blamerbell said...
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aran: "a definite and quite significant increase in the number of people who would like to see an independent Wales"
not necessarily so. read today's post on the latest poll - could be seen as a 20% *drop* in support. -
At 7:25 pm,
said...
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Blamerbell. The issue isn't so much that support for independence has fallen by 20% - rather that no one really knows what the real level of support for independence is. There are so few polls in Wales, questions are asked in very different ways ... would you be pleased if Wales were to become independent; would you support the end of the Union and the Break Up of Britain?; if there was a referendum tomorrow on independence for wales would you vote yes or no. Depending on how the question is put you can get very different answers.
The challenge for those who support independence is to make a consistent and attractive case. The challenge for the media in Wales is to get their act together on polls! -
At 11:37 pm,
Blamerbell said...
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"The issue isn't so much that support for independence has fallen by 20% - rather that no one really knows what the real level of support for independence is."
I agree entirely.
