The guilt about Wales.

A superb article by Hywel Williams in yesterday's Guardian. Nothing more needs to be said.

The guilt about Wales
Hywel Williams, Thursday September 22, 2005, The Guardian

The gap between Tony Blair's appearance and the reality, between all that squeaky-clean preachiness and the shoddy, self-serving reality of his quicksand mind, is now a well-established feature of British politics. Blairism as a body of thought never existed. But as Blair rose in the mid-1990s it was part of his adman genius to see that in an age of economic prosperity it was personality that mattered in politics, not thought. So he was marketed to make people feel good about themselves. The middle classes were gagging to roll over and be pleasured by "one of us". Labour's leader was a highly evolved specimen of English liberal virtue: that higher self that somehow, conveniently, always coincides with self-interest.

The distance between all of that and the bloke repeatedly shouting "fucking Welsh" at the TV late at night is not the journey between youngish idealism and disillusioned maturity. The incident recalled in the diary of his former press aide Lance Price took place in 1999 when there was still some bloom on those cheeks. Bill was still in the White House, Iraq remained a far-off country and Carole Caplin was not yet a problem.

It's a difficult experience when you're used to getting your way and start encountering resistance. The decision by the Welsh electorate not to give the Labour party a majority in the elections for the new assembly must have seemed quite unaccountable to big daddy - as well as an act of ingratitude. For decades the smiling, compliant songsters next door had always been well up for it: voting how they were told to and delivering cartload majorities for Labour. They didn't ask for much in return from English Labour or from England itself - just a few pious cliches about the glory of Keir and the grandiosity of Nye would do very nicely.

In those pre-1999 days in Labour Wales, the vast majorities demonstrated not vitality, energy and commitment but rather complacency, apathy and passivity. The local elites of the municipalities were submissive to the central authority and nothing ever really changed except the faces of the personnel. The Welsh body politic had become so used to being done over that it couldn't imagine any other kind of existence.

But the frustration of Blair - the Labour leader denied his electoral rights - is only one half of this story. There's also the anger of Blair the English liberal at the demonstration of cultural difference. After a millennium and a half of putting up with Wales, the English attitude towards the Welsh remains one of irritation interrupted by bouts of insult. Abuse of the national neighbours is a familiar story - the Germans do it to the Poles, Czechs think the Slovaks are dozy and the Greeks find the Bulgars dodgy.

The irritating thing about Wales - for the English - is the sheer persistence of the linguistic difference. We do, it is true, assimilate well, which is why, per capita, few countries have produced so many actors as Wales. English liberty is really the freedom to imitate the English - which then gives the English the right to mock the assimilated. But if the English initially think they have absorbed Wales, they do get very cross when they realise that in reality we've smiled and ignored, gone our own way and assimilated the English into our own alchemical way of being.

Even the English language, once it crosses the border, is subverted by the cadences and grammar of Welsh. That language has two forms of life: as a ghost within the English spoken in Wales and as its own authentic form, the descendant of the language spoken in southern England before the Angles and Saxons came. And it is surely a tribal memory of that first dislocation - with the uncomfortable recollection that the English in fact invaded the country they now call England - which lies behind the prime ministerial obscenity.