MORNING SERIAL
THERE was thus clear support among many Welsh MPs for a Secretary of State for Wales, not because the post would be a symbol of Welsh nationhood but rather because it would help prioritise Welsh needs within government.
However, the Labour government was unwilling to consider it. Herbert Morrison, the Deputy Prime Minister, suggested that a Welsh Secretary of State would lead to overly complex government administration, negate efficient central planning and suffer from a lack of competent Welsh civil servants. With the war now over, there appeared to be little need for the government to take Welsh sentiment seriously.
Welsh demands were diluted by internal dissent. The Ebbw Vale MP Aneurin Bevan, in particular, was a formidable opponent to anyone who advocated any form of separate Welsh policy. At the 1944 ‘Welsh day’ at the House of Commons he had spoken against the idea that there were uniquely Welsh problems or solutions, and asked how the problem of rearing sheep on Welsh mountains differed from the problem of rearing them on Scottish mountains. Bevan’s antipathy was mixed up with a degree of unease about what role the Welsh language might play in government. In 1946, he told the Commons of a fear in some of the English-speaking parts of Wales of ‘a vast majority tyrannised over by a few Welsh speaking people in Cardiganshire’ and of ‘the vast majority of Welshmen’ being ‘denied participation in the government of their own country’.
Bevan and others also had a powerful sense of solidarity with the wider British labour movement, a sense that was epitomised by the South Wales Miners’ Federation voting in 1945 to dissolve itself and become part of the new National Union of Mineworkers.
It was Britain that had won the war and it was on a British scale that the majority of people felt that reconstruction needed to happen.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW