MORNING SERIAL
AFTER Plaid Cymru leader Gwynfor Evans threatened to starve himself to death, the government agreed to create a Welsh-language television channel. It also increased the subsidies to Welsh-language services and gave the language a place on every schoolchild’s timetable. The powers of the Welsh Office were extended and a host of new Welsh quangos were set up to monitor and govern Thatcher’s free-market state.
With quangos being appointed rather than elected, and control of the Welsh Office being decided by how England voted, little of this was very democratic. But it did help modern Wales become a more defined and official nation than ever before and administrative devolution reached such proportions that it was not misleading to talk of the emergence of a Welsh state.
Such developments put Welsh devolution back on the agenda. There was little popular pressure for this but in academic and political circles it was seen as a way of ensuring democratic control over the new Welsh institutions and mitigating the effects of being governed from London by a party for which Wales had not voted. Such demands were far stronger in Scotland and that ensured that when the Labour Party returned to power in 1997 it enacted new referendums on the question of devolution. Wales this time voted by a margin of less than seven thousand votes to enact its first ever degree of democratic national self-government.
The imagined community was now something resembling a democratic state creating, in theory at least, a civic Wales based on residency and political citizenship. And yet only half of the electorate had voted in the 1997 referendum. Just one in four of the electorate had supported the most radical change in Welsh politics since the Acts of Union.
Nonetheless, it was a significant shift from the 1979 referendum. The highest levels of support came in Welsh-speaking districts but the key change from two decades before seemed to be amongst working-class voters in industrial areas.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com