MORNING SERIAL
Wales: England’s Colony? The Conquest, Assimilation and Re-creation of Wales by Martin Johnes
“KEEP Wales united with Britain”, declared a full-page advert from the ‘No’ campaign in most of the Welsh papers on the day of the vote. After the result, a cartoon on the front page of the South Wales Echo showed a woman sitting down with a map of Britain on her wall, saying: “There’s lovely – still in one piece.” Determining precisely why people vote in a certain way is impossible but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the 1979 referendum also marked the majority of the Welsh asserting their satisfaction with remaining within the United Kingdom.
Later in 1979, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, after a general election that saw the Conservatives win a third of the Welsh vote. In office, Thatcher became hated in Wales in a way that no previous prime minister had. Much of this centred on her perceived role in the huge decline in the manufacturing sector, the loss of thousands of jobs in the steel industry and the near ending of the Welsh coal industry.
In many ways, industrial decline dated back into the 1920s, with the growth of the 1950s being a blip in a long-term trend. More immediately, the collapse in manufacturing was rooted in a wider recession that predated 1979. So, too, was the winding-down of publiclyowned heavy industry. But, whereas the previous Labour administration had played down what it was doing, Thatcher seemed to revel in it. This helped create the idea that somehow her policies were deliberately targeting the Welsh, although she received similar reactions in deindustrialising areas of England too. Some of her policies and rhetoric about unions, public waste and private housing were actually quite popular but her period in office helped broaden the idea that the British state was broken and marginalising Welsh interests.
Partly to compensate for the scale of economic upheaval, Thatcher’s government enacted a number of changes that did much – indeed more than any previous government – to buttress the fortunes and status of the Welsh language.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com