Wales: History, Politics, Culture

Dynamic Force, Trojan Horse The First World War and its impact on the Christian churches of Wales . . . . As the franchise was extended during the Nineteenth century Wales became increasingly opposed (at least electorally)to war. Henry Richard elected MP for Merthyr Boroughs in the 1868 general election was a notable member of the Peace Society which eschewed war, and despite being an anti-slavery activist was also opposed to the American Civil War. The 1900 election saw Wales vote for the generally anti-Imperialist Liberals such as Lloyd George, as opposed to England which voted heavily in favour of the Conservative under Lord Salisbury who promoted and waged the South African War. This echoed the attitude of the principality fifteen years earlier when Wales had overwhelmingly favoured the liberal Prime Minister Herbert Gladstone who lost a great deal of support due his reluctance to involve British forces in overseas ventures. Gladstone encountered particular political difficul...

  English Bible, English Revolution; Welsh Bible, no Welsh Revolution One of the big issues which triggered the Reformation was the question of the Bible. The Roman Catholic Church insisted that it be restricted to Latin, so as to preserve the monopoly of its knowledge to the priestly class and the educated sections of society. By way of contrast Protestant Reformers emphasised the priesthood of all believers and insisted on the need for every Christian to read the Scriptures in his own tongue. A s early as 1380 John Wycliffe began translating the Bible into English but suffered for this in the wake of the upheaval of the Peasants’ Revolt. However, he fared better than William Tyndale who translated the whole Bible and ended up being condemned for heresy in the Netherlands before being executed by strangulation and burning at the stake in 1536. In Wales the first translation of the New Testament into Welsh was completed in 1567, the first fruits of a 1563 statute requiring a We...

  Only Nixon could go to China . . . Prior to the Norman Conquest, Wales had managed to largely preserve its independence, albeit in a somewhat chaotic form. It had its own language, literature and legal system. The country’s weakness lay in its political fragmentation, a situation the Normans were quick to exploit. In the south, the invaders were held up for a time by the policies and military prowess of the Lord Rhys and his successors.   In the north, various attempts were made to create a unified Welsh state. Unfortunately, the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in 1282 marked the end of that venture and for Welsh independence in general. But not of Welshness. At first, the new regime appeared to work. The language continued in common usage and while the English criminal law was introduced, the Welsh civil law was not abolished. Nevertheless, the fourteenth century was a time of growing social and racial tension in Wales. The crisis had many contributory factors: a ...

  Second Fiddle Keir No, not Sir Keir Starmer . . .   Wales abounds in myths, and none are so pervasive as those related to the Labour party, of which Keir Hardie is just one instance. Hardie was elected as MP for Merthyr Boroughs in 1900 (after trying his luck at being elected elsewhere) But a few important points about the constituency at this time need to need to be borne in mind.     Firstly, Merthyr Boroughs was, by virtue of the various Reform Acts a very large constituency in terms of its electorate, and by the early 1870s, it had a much higher proportion of inhabitants entitled to vote than neighbouring parliamentary seats. And this led to the constituency returning two members to Parliament, a notion that may seem strange to the modern ear. Secondly, the constituency had a very long radical tradition dating back at least as far as   the 1831 uprising and which which persisted into the twentieth century. This radical tradition appears to have wor...

  Wales as East Germany   I have long thought that Wales’s party system resembles that of the old German Democratic Republic (popularly known as East Germany), which disappeared from the stage of history in 1990.   It was a totalitarian dictatorship, with Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin being its guiding lights, and yet it had a plurality of parties, each offering a choice in minor areas, but all underpinned by the same basic ideology of Communism. Wales has been looking increasingly like that since at least 2007, four parties which are the same store, but with differently coloured store fronts. Imagine my surprise then when I chanced upon an academic submission to by Professor Russell Deacon to the Independent Constitutional Commission to consider Wales’ future, chaired by Professor Laura McAllister and Dr Rowan Williams. Professor Deacon   may be somewhat less harsh than me on the Welsh political landscape, but his views point in the same direction. His submission...

The More Things Change . . . King Edward the First has had an almost universally bad press in Wales, especially among Welsh nationalists and those who teach in Welsh medium schools. Quite understandably so. The King, who went on to become “the Hammer of the Scots,” is blamed for the subjugation of Wales by the English and for the death of the last native-born Prince of Wales. Edward himself has had an often-mixed reception among an audience wider than the Welsh. Some have seen him as the first truly British King, seeking to forge a new nation, while others view him as an unhinged tyrant in the image of Patrick McGoohan’s portrayal of him in Mel Gibson’s movie Braveheart . In all this, Llywelyn is portrayed as the victim. However, history is seldom as clear cut as a cartoon with white hats and black hats, and some attention needs to be paid on Llywelyn and his squandering of a “good hand” after reaching the pinnacle of his triumphs and conquests in the mid-1260s. It’s reasonable to ...