MORNING SERIAL
THEREFORE, any assessment of the merits of independence has to be measured against its ability to tackle Wales’s most entrenched problem – indeed, would it perhaps even make it worse?
The stats really are damning. Just under one in four people in Wales live in poverty, according to Oxfam Cymru.
That is about 700,000 of Wales’s 3.1 million population, with the level of relative poverty remaining unchanged for a decade.
Wales has lower pay for people in every sector than the rest of the UK, and at the start of the pandemic more than a third of jobs were furloughed.
This was in part because we have a higher proportion of manufacturing jobs which are not conducive to home working (production lines tend not to run through living rooms).
Approximately 600,000 children live in Wales, and of those one in three, or 200,000, are in poverty, with 90,000 (14 per cent) living in severe poverty (in households at or below 50 per cent of median income).
It can be easy to view poverty in Wales as an issue mainly associated with the former coal fields of the South Wales Valleys, and though the issue is significant there, it is by no means the only affected area.
Rural parts of the country have large pockets of deprivation, with many North Walian coastal towns having populations facing real hardship.
The Welsh capital is by no means immune. If you stand on Bute Street in the Butetown ward of the city, you are in the most diverse part of Wales. The diversity here is not a recent phenomenon.
Due to the importance of Cardiff Docks for coal exports, from the mid-1800s it became one of the UK’s oldest multicultural communities, with over 50 nationalities, including Norwegian, Somali, Yemeni, Spanish, Italian, Caribbean and Irish.
To this day it remains hugely diverse. Indeed, the roughly 10,000 Somalis currently living there make it one of the largest Somali populations in the UK. Bute Street is straight and just under a mile long.
Independent Nation by Will Hayward is published by Biteback Publishing at £15 hardback and £9.99 ebook, https://www. bitebackpublishing.com/books/independent-nation
CONTINUES TOMORROW