Appalling exercise in social engineering

I have pointed out in this newspaper how the first language Welsh-speaking community is in demographic collapse.

No one has dared challenge those facts and indeed one other correspondent reluctantly had to agree with me.

Now we see the deck chair arrangers on the Titanic, aka Welsh Labour are going to enforce Welsh on the people of Wales over the next 30 years. Millions will be spent and wasted and English medium education inevitably will suffer.

All this rests on the racist false assumption that you cannot be authentically Welsh if you do not speak Cymraeg. A fact that the inner Welsh-speaking elite that governs Welsh Labour seem to concur with – nationalism. Thus 18 per cent (and that is a generous estimate, it’s more like less than 15 per cent) look down on those who can’t speak Welsh. This came across to me when I discovered how little respect the Welsh elite have for writers like Dylan Thomas. English is not an alien import. It has been spoken here since the 13th century and has its own unique, rich contribution to world-wide varieties of English.

One can see the backlash coming. If the core Welshspeaking population wants more speakers, let them throw away their contraceptives.

One has only to look at the pathetic failure of the Irish Government to revive their “native” language, and the millions that has been wasted there. Pupils refused university entrance if they didn’t pass in Irish.

There is a spin that bilingual education is very good, but there is also substantive evidence of children who have been let down by being educated in their non-Mother tongue. I personally know several sad cases.

A living language survives by a vigorous demographic, not by disproportionate subsidy and a Welsh language industry.

Plaid Cymru received 175,000 votes in 1970, and only 164,000 in 2017. So why Welsh Labour wants to promote that failure’s narrow and what seems to many of us a racist agenda is a total mystery.

The Labour party says it is committed to the Union. Let it encourage, then, a spirit that is genuinely modern British, which is thoroughly inclusive of diverse peoples. Let there be parity and proportionate funding for English medium education and full consultation with this appalling exercise in social engineering.

Carwyn Jones and co should realise democracy is about majorities as well as declining minorities. Robert Ian Williams Bangor