Tuesday 15 July 2008

Welshing

There must be no devolution to the Welsh Assembly of power over the Welsh language. No one in Wales who wishes to use Welsh now experiences the slightest difficulty in doing so, and nor should they.

Rather, the discrimination is against those who wish to use English, in which all Welsh-speakers in Wales are absolutely fluent (just as all Welsh-speakers in Patagonia are absolutely fluent in Spanish - there is no monoglot Welsh-speaker anywhere in the world), and which is the language of eighty per cent of the Welsh, including practically the entire working class, black and white. Welsh is as good as entirely a white language, and is the cordon sanitaire of impenetrable upper-middle-classness in Wales.

Since devolution (although also by means of successive Tory pieces of legislation before that), Welshness has come to be defined strictly in terms of this minority, all-white, rather posh language, with those beyond its bounds rendered practically unemployable above the most menial levels, just as Leo Abse predicted during the devolution debates of the 1970s. Devolution of language matters is wanted precisely in order to make this situation even worse. It must not be allowed to happen.

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