MORNING SERIAL

Wales: England’s Colony?

The Conquest, Assimilation and Re-creation of Wales

INDEED, for all those not personally affected, the key issue was the fact that the flooding was being imposed on Wales and that awoke the normally unfocused sense of popular Welshness. One woman told a journalist that she would not have minded so much had the water stayed in Wales ‘but it’s all going to England, don’t you understand?’

But in Parliament few English politicians seemed to give much weight to arguments based on either the rights of individuals or Welsh culture. They preferred to look at what they thought was the collective British good.

At the Liverpool Corporation bill’s first reading, thirty-five of the thirty-six Welsh MPs voted against it. David Llewellyn, a Cardiff Conservative and the only Welsh MP in favour of the measure, argued that opponents did ‘an ill service to Welsh culture by suggesting that its survival depends on sub-standard houses, a dog-in-the-manger attitude to untapped resources, and a callous indifference to the prosperity of Merseyside, where there are far more Welshmen than in the whole of Merioneth.’

Yet opposition in Wales was neither as widespread nor as sustained as is often made out. Campaigners claimed that only three percent of people in the Bala area had refused to sign the petition. One English reporter wrote this was because Welsh politeness meant no one liked to say ‘no’ when asked to sign. He said he was told in private that many would be disappointed if the lake was not built because construction workers and then visitors would bring money to an area of high unemployment.

Plaid Cymru certainly worried that its campaign was meeting with apathy. Bala Town Council itself declined to support it, while Merioneth County Council did so only on a second vote and then it was a close decision.

As the legislation passed through Parliament, opposition petered out. Only twenty-seven Welsh MPs voted against its second reading. By the third reading just twenty voted in opposition. Denbighshire County Council and other organisations withdrew their objections, leaving Merioneth County Council and a parish council as the only formal objectors.

> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com

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