A book review recently appeared on the Daily Mail website which described the Welsh language as a “moribund monkey language”. The reviewer then took the whole country of Wales to task for, well, basically being Welsh.

Having been born and raised in Wales to a English father and a Welsh mother, and now having taken up learning the Welsh language while living in England with my English wife, I have somewhat understandably taken issue with the racist-rant-not-very-cunningly-disguised-as-a-book-review.

In a follow-up blog entry I’ll deal with the review itself, however in this entry I’ll deal with the negative English attitudes to Wales, the people and the language.

On balance there are the positive English attitudes toward the Welsh (and vice-versa) much as there have been for years, but the voices that find the most ears are usually the negative ones, on both sides of the border.

However in my experience from living in England for the last 20 years the general negative view from England of Wales and the Welsh goes a bit like this:

Welsh is a silly dead language that nobody speaks, except during the national anthem.

English taxes pay for Wales and the Welsh, who contribute nothing in return.

The Welsh are a bit thick, do unpleasant things to sheep, eat daffodils and leeks and… Oh dear I’ve come over all stereotypical, see, isn’t it?

If you’re reading this, indeed if you’ve found this blog, then you’ve demonstrated adequate online aptitude to go out and find for yourselves enough inconvenient truths to put colliery-sized holes in most of that previous paragraph. Some starters for ten may include:

Today, Wales is funded from the British Parliament in Westminster using exactly the same method as it has been since the late 1970s. There has been no extra funding from any source to account for the cost of the Assembly Government or any other Wales-only public expenditure.

Devolution is not independence. In a number of civilised countries what we in Britain call devolution is seen as a perfectly normal system of government. After all, California is “devolved” from Washington but it certainly isn’t independent of it.

Welsh has never died out in Wales, despite the effects of emigration, immigration and the efforts of British government legislation in the 19th Century which saw corporal punishment for children who spoke the language in school (a distasteful practice to say the least which continued until the 1960s). In much the same way as the majority of human beings who have ever lived are alive today, there is anecdotal evidence that there are more Welsh speakers today than there have ever been. And Welsh has never been forcibly resurrected as has happened in Cornwall with that county’s language and which now numbers it’s speakers in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands.

The equals sign = was first devised in Tenby. In 1563.

The National Eisteddfod may have only taken place annually since the 1880s, but that’s still a lot longer than the Hay Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe, the Cambridge Folk Festival or Glastonbury.

But none of that is really at the root of the issue. What is it about being Welsh and speaking Welsh that inflames our neighbours across the Severn (or Hafren if you prefer)? What drives a normally tolerant population into apoplexy at the mere mention of what is nationally a minority language?

The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.

Every publicly funded programme or initiative in Wales today has been initiated or approved by the British government in Westminster. The Welsh Language Act, S4C, the devolution referendums in 1979 and 1997, the Welsh Assembly itself all began life as lobbied bills presented to and voted on by the Houses of Commons and Lords. The Commons seats 650 MPs, 533 of which represent English constituencies. If the outcry over Welsh identity, politics and funding is representative, then why did the English MPs not oppose them? Indeed, were they even present when the bills were debated and voted on?

In the case of the referendums and devolution there was apparently widespread apathy among MPs in the face of fundamental constitutional and economic changes to the UK, and on which 85% of the population weren’t consulted. If you believe the hype.

And what of the English themselves? It is all too easy to pin the blame the politicians but government is intended to be ground-up not top-down, by the people for the people. So when these bills were proposed and debated on and voted on, how did the English populace respond? Did they lobby their MPs to vote against these changes to their country? Evidently not.

I suspect this is the real driver behind the vitriol our book reviewer and those who share his views spout, the frustration that with a little more engagement with the political system, flawed as it is, the rise of the conquered Welsh could have been avoid or delayed.

I wrote to my local MP earlier this year to oppose the sell-off of Forestry Commission land in England and I signed the petitions. Around 500,000 people did likewise, a portentous number maybe, as it turns out this was enough to cause the government to pause for thought on that particular policy.

So if you find yourself agreeing with another thinly veiled racist diatribe in form of a literary critique, why not make yourself stand in the corner and think about what you haven’t done.

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