MORNING SERIAL
EVEN at a popular level a widespread sense of Britishness remained.
The figures for those expressing a British identity might vary across Wales, with it being lower in the western rural areas where the Welsh language was strongest, but nowhere was there evidence of a widespread rejection.
This was because so much of daily life – the realm where people understood who they were – was no different in Wales than in England.
The Welsh and English spent the same money and shopped in the same chain stores.
Youth culture was a powerful shared experience where national distinctions were mere window dressing in a broader pattern of music, clubbing, drinking and partying.
Most importantly, Welsh people of all ages read the same newspapers and watched much the same television as the rest of Britain, despite the growth in Welsh programming.
English-medium television, like the press, assumed and developed a common identity, speaking to the audience as fellow Britons and situating them within a national calendar and culture.
As it had done since the 1950s, it generated shared hopes and fears, interests and outlooks.
If Wales was a colony, television was a far more active agent of this than any government.
The legal system and the welfare state were important too, although maybe less so than in the past, as their reputations were jaded by scandal on the one hand and familiarity on the other.
Finally, England remained very close, both physically and psychologically.
People moved back and forth over the border for entertainment, work and education.
At the 1991 census, a fifth of the Welsh population had been born in England.
In this light, just one in four of the Welsh electorate voting for devolution was hardly surprising.
Nor was the lack of support for independence.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com