Archive for January 30th, 2008
30th January 2008
The now-time of Welsh history
The beauty of being-in-government is that ideas can become reality, and that reality in turn reshapes our ideas. A few weeks ago I wrote in Golwg about the need for Wales to nation to honour its ‘living greats’ in the same way as Japan has done since the 1950s with its national ‘living treasures’ programme. So it was a joy to read in today’s released minutes for the One Wales Government Cabinet meetings that this is one idea about to make it from wish-list to check-list. Of course, its impact is purely symbolic. But symbols inspire. And inspiration does change lives, and, collectively, can change a nation.
I look forward in the near future to shredding unused application forms for MBE (Minion of the British Empire?). And not just out of some petty sense of nationalist pique. The most pressing task we face as a movement is building up the self-confidence of a nation that has been bred on the mythology of its own inadequacy. The eagerly anticipated Welsh Encyclopedia will show this to have been counter-factual in the case of our past; but role models have to live and breathe among us if we are to undo the poverty of aspiration which holds us back as a nation and crushes the hope among the young and disadvantaged.
As a nation we have always had a penchant for sentimentalising the past, while neglecting the present; in part, this has been because the problems of the present were too big and too insoluble for us to solve for ourselves. Literally beyond our grasp, they had to be addressed at one step removed. Our ersatz leaders, the ‘flame bearers of Welsh history’, were often, in the last analysis, tragic and marginal figures and, most of the time, literally dead. Wordly success - writ large, in the present tense, in the major not the minor key - has always been achieved in exile (meaning mostly London, though sometimes America).
The decision by the Welsh Government to extol the virtues of our ‘national living treasures’ - the likes of Bryn Terfel, Gwyneth Lewis, Gareth Edwards - (the FT has an interesting list of their Welsh pantheon, both living and dead, though personally, like the Japanese and the WRU, I would apply the ‘home rule’) - is then an act of collective self-affirmation. Far from nationalism ‘vanishing’ in the shadow of the Coalition, as some Labour intellectuals have rather unconvincingly argued , nationalism has become the dominant theme of One Wales iconography as well as the animating principle of its policies. We’re the flame-bearers now.