St David's Day

March 1st - St David's Day.

A good day to reflect on Wales and the Welsh.

Today, HM the Queen (of England) opens our new national assembly building, called the Senedd - the Welsh word for a parliament with the same Latin root as the word Senate. There was a flurry of objection (from within Wales - who else would give a damn) to the use of this particular word, because it suggests a level of sovereignty that Wales has not yet achieved. The Welsh Assembly doesn't (yet) have law-making or tax-raising powers, and is limited to setting the policy for and administering its own public health, education and transport services. But it will soon be able to draft laws specific to Wales for ratification by the Westminster parliament, and this constitutional arrangement has the capacity to evolve into full formal legislative power or (just as effective and rather more British) into a situation where Westminster would no more deny that ratification than Queen Elizabeth can fail to sign duly passed acts of the UK parliament. But is Wales a separate enough nation to require its own legislature?

Full national independence for Wales would until recently have been quite difficult to countenance. The country isn't big or rich enough to support the full trappings of a nation state, particularly a welfare state, while maintaining the same standard of living for its citizens. But Wales could surely survive as a sovereign member of the European Union, particularly a Union which took over responsibility for many of the more expensive aspects of large nation state government, as many of its member states seem happy for it to do. It is much easier to yield to Europe a sovereignty that you haven't, in practice, ever had.

And that might be the best future for Wales as a separate nation, assuming that's what it really wants to be. Unlike Scotland, Wales hasn't really been a politically separate nation state since the middle ages, when the defining characteristics of a nation state were rather cruder. The mediaeval Welsh, for a variety of reasons, never had the opportunity to evolve from a feuding collection of princedoms into a larger political unit with a common legal framework and the administrative machinery to go with it. They were effectively absorbed into an English state which had already been annexed by a Norman aristocracy.

Culturally, however, Wales has retained many of the differences it had at the time it was finally subdued by the English king. The most obvious cultural survivor is the language - the Welsh spoken in the 13th and 14th centuries is broadly intelligible to modern Welsh speakers, just as the French spoken by the Kings of England at that time would be to modern French speakers.

The 12th century commentator Giraldus Cambrensis, himself of mixed Norman and Welsh origin, wrote a book listing his countrymen's good and bad points, and many of these are recognisable today. Writing c. 1191, he applauded the Welsh for their religous fervour, individual military prowess, frugality, universal hospitality, lack of deference to authority, poetic and musical skill (especially their talent for multi-part harmony). He castigated them for their inconstancy and a tendency to internal strife and betrayal of their fellow countrymen rather than uniting against outside threat, rendering the Welsh too easy to subdue. But he also pointed out that while the Welsh might appear easy to subdue at a superficial level, eradicating or assimilating them would be very difficult. And as they welcome Elizabeth II to open their assembly building in Cardiff today, you'd have to say he got that bit right.