The state of welsh democracy

I’m very critical of the welsh media on this blog, but I always try to give praise when it’s due and Cambria Politico has two hard hitting articles on the state of welsh democracy in this month's magazine that are timely.

The first is from fellow blogger and chief agitator Royston Jones  (Jac o' the North) on the death of welsh democracy, but it’s the second article I want to focus on from Matthew Ford entitled ‘Are the Welsh enlightened?’

I suspect it will be a  difficult piece for many to read. He rightly calls us welsh unenlightened, immature, lacking self respect and confidence and says our politics is defined by cowardice and laziness, but he also offers a road map out of this incredible gloomy state of affairs.

He writes ‘After the referendum in March 2011 delivered a resounding yes vote for full law-making powers in Wales the First Minister declared that “today an old nation came of age”. He also argued that “to demand respect, you must first display self-respect”.

But all of that was before the SNP had won a landslide victory in the Scottish elections and set a referendum date for autumn 2014; a date when the Scots will vote for the chance to become the world’s 194th recognised independent country, assuming the Catalans don’t beat them to it.

Since that time we have been told by the First Minister that we mustn’t “pretend” that it would be a good thing for Wales to be independent too, essentially because it would mean an end to all that lovely money from the Treasury in London that he and his Labour colleagues have grown to know and love.

This state of mind is what Immanuel Kant describes as “immaturity” in his essay on enlightenment in 1784. This he defines not as a lack of understanding, ‘but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another’. He goes further to argue that this state of being is so convenient for many that they will gladly remain this way for their entire life.

Why do things for yourself, when others can do things for you?

Of course for others to ostensibly do all these things for you, you have to pay them – and make no mistake we are paying a high price in Wales. As we fuelled the industrial revolution we made a lot of people outside Wales very rich but we now find ourselves one of the poorest, unhealthiest and worst educated nations in Europe. Things haven’t changed, as any wealth from our natural resources is directed straight out of the country. The lethargy of the current Welsh Government suggests that rather than getting better things are set to get worse.

There is no self-respect in being wholly reliant on subsidies from someone else but this is the Labour economic “plan”. This is unsurprising given that, as Kant further observes, ‘the guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind… should consider the step forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous’. Most people if told the danger is not actually that great will soon learn to walk for themselves. Those same people on being told of the danger of doing so unaided would for the most part be frightened of trying. “We couldn’t survive on our own”. 

Sound familiar?

Laziness and cowardice are the two reasons Kant believes many will gladly remain immature for life. Could these be the two defining characteristics of politics in Wales? This is unfortunate because energy and confidence are the two things that will set Wales on the path to prosperity.

We need the confidence to make decisions for ourselves, based on what our country needs. This is the Welsh national interest. Loth as I am to admit it, laziness and cowardice do not seem to stop with the Welsh Government. Low turnouts in Wales. like that of 2011, suggest a combination of apathy, distrust of politicians and laziness, whilst the now seemingly conditioned disposition to just hang on to what we’ve got rather than demand something better is less than heroic. But this is the outcome of being a colonised people, and let’s make it clear, there is no debate about us having been colonised. Any person claiming otherwise cannot have even a basic understanding of Welsh history or is rewriting our history for political purposes. We were conquered and then we were suppressed. Fact.'

Any source