Wales and Scotland

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not as united as once it was. The cessions of Scotland in 1707, of Wales in 1536, and of Ireland in 1800 were accompanied by legal words of union and the power of the English sword. They were not, it is true, exemplary matches of first-sight love. But the Empire grew, the kingdom prospered, and claims upon ancient prerogatives wilted. Good health is a fine panacea.

Some honeymoons were better than others; the Irish one was the worst. And then the offer of union to Ireland was made too late to affect the feeling of total oppression the Irish had. Nineteen nineteen saw a bitter divorce: the Irish revolution. The English system of assimilation — if you can’t beat them, make them join you — was firmly and proudly rejected. The Irish were hardly destined to win, not least of all because their economy was in a parlous state, but they were damned if they would lose. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act was passed too late to refer to Ireland; only six Irish counties were left within Britain. These were allowed to manage themselves in everything but the largest issues — foreign affairs, defense — and to send twelve men to Westminster. This they are doing still, one of them a republican.

Since then the kingdom has stayed united more or less through thick and thin. But now, again, there are sounds of dissent. Some parts of the kingdom want out.

Celtic clout

The two most rapidly growing nationalist parties are the Plaid Cymru, for the Welsh (an estimated 8 percent of their national vote), and the Scottish Nationalist Party (15 percent of their national vote). Each has elected a member to Parliament in the last year. Both came in through by-elections, and both had comfortable majorities. And both, it is probably fair to say, won their seats as much through carelessness on the part of their competitors as through their own good efforts. The votes for both parties in recent elections had certainly grown appreciably, but few people thought they’d get in. They had grown, it was said, between elections, as fractious, dissident groups will do, and were best ignored. They were ignored and they won. And having won, they attracted the respect that success is bound to attract. No longer fractious dissidents, their political views were courted. Suddenly, they were a threat to other parties.

If, as is possible, a general election is held this autumn, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) will fight for each of the 71 Scottish seats, and the Plaid Cymru for the 31 available in Wales. The SNP is confident of winning 36 in Scotland, the Plaid Cymru could win 10. This could imperil the Labor Party’s majority — Labor has 44 Scottish seats. And it could seriously harm the established third party, the Liberals —5 of their 12 seats are in Scotland. The Conservatives could suffer as well, so much so that the swing to the right generally expected in the next election could eventually be slight, and the nationalists could hold the balance, a grasp on the English they’d much enjoy.

To the English, of course, this is all absurd. England is Britain is England to them. There have always been these archaic groups of Celts with weird parochial rites — the Druids in Wales, the clans in Scotland — and England does have a strong tradition of suffering eccentricity. Besides, they’re good for a laugh.

The Celts themselves have noticed this. Winifred Ewing, the SNP’s vigorous new member of Parliament, who was ferried to London in a train full of bagpipes, fiddles, and shrinking supplies of whiskey, said, “The English, you know, are the greatest nationalists in the world, but they’re also the subtlest. They do it by convincing everyone that any other kind of nationalism is in bad taste, and they’ve somehow put it across. Oh, they’re charming and dear, the English, but they’re nothing to do with us.”

National interests are catered for in the government’s traditional manner, of course. The latest New Year Honors List included a British Empire Medal for Carmarthen native William Elias, for ninety-two years of dedication to catching fish from coracles — an ancient Celtic circular boat run up from sticks and tar; very good for the British Empire, of course. How many tongues in cheeks decided that, and what was their intention? Was it just to humor the Celts?

Drain

The English admit to a lack of sympathy when they’re really forced to talk it out. Isn’t most of the British civil service run by expatriate Scotsmen? they ask. Isn’t every engineer a Scot, half the teachers, most of the journalists? Hasn’t Britain had two Scottish Prime Ministers in the space of the past five years? And aren’t 88 of the 630 members of Parliament Welsh or with Welsh connections? How can either the Welsh or the Scottish claim to be an oppressed minority?

That is what they most certainly do claim. For the very necessity forced on a Celt who wants to make his mark in the world is the one that hurts his country. He has to leave it and go to London, the only capital city. Wales has Cardiff, Scotland has Edinburgh, but neither is more than a country town alongside London’s riches. And London’s riches, the Celts suspect, are largely paid for by them. The mammoth museums, the miles of roads, the concert halls, the public transport, the best of the universities; all of this is in or near London, in the prosperous southeast.

The Scots claim that £150 million drain out of Scotland every year, not to return in any form. Yet look at their unemployment: 83,000 out of work, well above the British average, and they’re losing manpower every year as more move to the south for work. So some want their independence.

And the Welsh say that their natural resources are three times larger than the rest of Britain’s, and that, all other things being equal, they should be the second richest country in the world per head of population. And their unemployment is twice the British average, and they’re losing men to the south of England, and some of them want their independence.

Both point to other countries of similar or much smaller size. Edinburgh has twice as many people as Luxembourg; there are thirty-five countries with United Nations seats which have fewer people than Wales; Norway is poorer than Wales or Scotland but manages very well. And do not the Ukraine and Byelorussia have seats at the UN?

Talk of regions

The Labor government is not unaware of the administrative difficulties. One of its numerous Royal Commissions is presently considering local government for Scotland, England, and Wales. It is expected to recommend a system of either thirty to forty city regions or federal government for Scotland and Wales and eight other, English, regions. The nationalists already are unsympathetic. It’s the talk of regions that irks the Welsh and the Scots, for as far as they are concerned, Scotland and Wales are separate countries, always have been, always will be.

The seriously threatened Liberal Party, which usually enjoys an enviable position of moral perfection free of responsibility, has in principle favored a form of home rule for Scotland and Wales. Lately it has been rushing to align itself with the separatists. But not before a spell of indifference, during which the Liberals suffered a drubbing within their ranks by opposing the Plaid Cymru at the Welsh by-election which sent Gwynfor Evans to the House. Party member Northcote Parkinson, of Parkinson’s Law and other fame, resigned, saying, “The essence of Liberalism is that people should govern themselves and that power should be distributed, rather than concentrated. It is therefore part of Liberal policy to encourage Scottish Nationalists and to pursue a parallel policy in Wales.”

Professor Parkinson lives in Guernsey, so is seen to observe what he preaches. The islands of Guernsey, Jersey, and Alderney have as often been French as British, and are now in a state of independence similar to that of Northern Ireland, but without any men at Westminster. And so is the Isle of Man.

The other similarity is a parallel move against Britain’s entering the Common Market. All these islands are largely agricultural, and in this field there is likelihood of Britain’s greatest possible concessions to the Market. So that in these islands also there is pressure to leave the Kingdom, should Britain be accepted at long last.

Add to this a large group in the Duchy of Cornwall — an outlying county with sizable unemployment — who want their own terms for joining Europe: the Mebyon Kernew, Sons of Cornwall.

But why all this dissent? And can it be called important? And why is it happening now?

The Dragon’s Tongue

Obviously, as a political movement, its importance is debatable, at least until the autumn. Its relevance lies in what it represents socially. It is easy to pass it off as interelection discontent, as the major parties do, and equally easy to say that no matter what its causes, any further attempts to decimate government will make it exactly that much harder to exercise world control. Every extra speaker at the United Nations will slow down progress just that much. Easy to say, but is it fair?

The movement’s political representatives, Winifred Ewing and Gwynfor Evans, will say that their rapidly growing support springs as much from a naturally strong reaction to Britain’s dismal economic condition as from anything they can offer. But when Evans was elected, last summer, the condition did not seem so imperiled. The major movement then in the air was Britain’s new effort to join the Common Market. Was this the decisive reason then — protective reaction against a future when all Welsh culture, the language, traditions would be threatened with absorption, not only into England, but into a strange, amorphous Europe with traditions of its own?

It would also be easy to confuse an affection for pedantry with plain old-fashioned reaction, but Welsh complaints seem real. For instance, the Dragon’s Tongue issue has haunted Wales since 1536, when Henry VIII oppressively decreed that “henceforth no person or persons that use the Welsh speech or language shall have or enjoy any manner of office or fees within the realm of England, Wales, or other of the King’s Dominions.” So when, on January I this year, the Welsh Language Act reversed that decree, there should have been jubilation. Parents who had refused to complete birth certificates, rejecting for their children any legal recognition in preference to completing any foreign (English) forms, now flocked to the registration offices and were shocked to find that most of the registrars were as ignorant of the Dragon’s Tongue as the Prince of Wales himself; the Prince of Wales to be, that is, in 1969. The latter is another big nationalistic bone of contention.

The plan to send Prince Charles to Aberystwyth for one term at the University College of Wales to master a difficult Celtic language is considered no more than a token gesture, and a gesture that will not do. When the last Prince of Wales, the present Duke of Windsor, was invested as Prince in 1911, it cost the taxpayers £18,000, and the Prince was more than a little embarrassed. “You must not take a mere ceremony so seriously,” his mother, Queen Mary, instructed him. “Your friends will understand that, as a Prince, you are obliged to do certain things that seem a little silly.” Gwynfor Evans, the Welsh nationalist representative, has declined to sit on the investiture committee. As far as he and his are concerned, the last acceptable Prince of Wales was Owain Glyn Dwr, crowned in 1404.

Not that either Wales or Scotland is fighting to lose a sovereign rule. Their rejection is not of crown but country. Their protest is not against regal protection, but against national exploitation; against nationalized coal mines being closed, nationalized railways being closed because of comparatively falling profits — and all of these in Scotland and Wales and the outer reaches of Cornwall. Why should they pay for national services unavailable in their own countries?

Nor are the Celtic nationalists really opposed to the English race as such. Much as the Canadian separatists are quoted—“We are not against Canada, we are for Quebec” — the Scots are simply insistent that they cannot continue in any way to be “a vassal state of England.”

There is also the case for withdrawal from an England now at the peak of its reputation as a socially frivolous, immoral race, under a reign of pop stars and five-minute fashions, awash with law’s to ease divorce and legalize homosexual practices, and the very reverse of the examples set by Presbyterian schooling.

But in the end, the important question may be whether the nationalist movement represents anything more coherent in policy and program terms than protest against Whitehall’s neglect.

Nark

At least as far as the Scots are concerned, youth is heavily on their side. Of over 60,000 party members thirty times as many as five years ago — one third are under twentythree and one fifth under voting age. The well-dressed Mrs. Ewing, who drives a Rolls-Royce, was not brought in on a pensioners’ platform. Her maiden speech in the House of Commons was in support of the reduction of the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Her supporters’ interests are close to her heart, and the Nationalists’ members are busy.

Gwynfor Evans, after five months in the House, has tabled a total of seven hundred questions on matters principally Welsh — at a cost, urgently leaked to the press, of £7.2.6d each. Gwynfor Evans was unrepentant. He published the answers as admitted evidence of the economic bleeding of Wales.

Evidence otherwise is hard to get. The SNP was insulted last autumn by the Secretary of State for Scotland when he dubbed it the “Scottish Nark Party.” (“Nark” is slang for spy.) Winifred Ewing accepted the ammunition and said, “A nark is exactly what I am going to be when the electorate send me to Parliament.”

“The only hope”

That is the limit of her power. The long-established Scottish administrative way of life encompasses its own legal system on the Continental pattern, and its own education and issuance of bank notes. Two committees within the House of Commons are assigned to deal with specifically Scottish matters: the Standing Committee, to formulate policy, and the Grand Committee, to approve it. The Standing Committee has 30 seats, allotted in proportion to the size of the parties, and the Grand includes all Scottish members. Winifred Ewing has little hope of any other party sacrificing a seat on the Standing Committee for the sake of her special interests, and she doesn’t really care, for she doesn’t attend the Grand. Her only aim in attending the House is to gain Scots independence. When she’s done that, she says, she’s back to her barrister’s practice in Glasgow.

Gwynfor Evans is wise in the ways of the House; Mrs. Ewing is more forthright. She attributed her electoral success last November to honesty in the face of hypocrisy and described Gwynfor Evans as “a saintly man.” A month later, knowing him better, she said of Evans, “Very clever, he knows how to get what he wants.” One ambition he had and succeeded in fulfilling was to gain an allotment of political broadcasting time on the state-run broadcasting service of five minutes simultaneously on radio and television. Not much, but victory for a parliamentary party of one.

Should he win the ultimate victory of national independence for Wales, Gwynfor Evans has a clear idea of the probable form of constitution — a two-house parliament, both houses elected — and of the military establishment — a small army on the Irish lines, for United Nations service: “the only hope we small nations have.” Winifred Ewing thinks the Scottish plan would be very much the same: Scotland would sign a peace treaty with England and send the U.S. Polaris missiles submarines away.

As irrational as New Zealand

The Welsh are pacifist more than extremist. Not that extremists are unknown. The announced intention of the Free Welsh Army, a group of a dozen disappointed fascists who constantly embarrass the Plaid Cymru, is to hold an alternative ceremony on the day of Prince Charles’ investiture, when they’ll glorify a goat, a gambit borrowed from the republican Irish who held exactly such a ceremony when Queen Victoria was crowned.

The Scots have their extremists, too, in the apolitical, militant Patriots, with 7000 members. It would take very little to raise an army if “pacific means” fail, they say.

But the general feeling, if very strong, is far from being desperate. And the English reaction still seems to be that there’s very little in it. Independence for Scotland or Wales or Cornwall or any other dissatisfied region still seems, to the average Englishman, comparable in its eccentricity with independence for, say, Rhode Island. But the answer to that could be this, from SNP economist Dr. James Lee: “Patriotism is the most dominating of all political emotions in all countries, and we are simply asking for independence for the same irrational reasons as the people of Ireland and New Zealand and Zambia have asked for independence. Basically we are saying that every people has the right to govern itself, whether it’s of benefit to the people or not. The decision is for the people to make.”

It will be interesting to see what they decide.

—Kevin D’Arcy

REPORT CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Reston is Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles TIMES.Don O. Noel, Jr., on the staff of the Hartford TIMES,has been in Eastern Europe on an Alicia Patterson Fellowship. Kevin D’Arcy is a free-lance English writer.