Chwarae teg i Carwyn

Ymddengys bellach bod Carwyn Jones yn fwy o genedlaetholwr nag yw Dafydd Elis Thomas!

Edinburgh

The city of Edinburgh, viewed from the flanks of Arthur's Seat, centred on Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament.

Just before Christmas I visited Edinburgh for the first time (that's one of my holiday snaps). It's a fantastic city, I recommend it to anyone who's never been. While there I realised the importance of the city to the idea of nationhood, and the absence of a city in Wales' history represents a key explanation, I believe, as to why Wales seems to lag behind Scotland so much in terms of progress toward statehood and the strength of Welsh nationality (Dublin probably plays a similar role for Ireland).

Edinburgh was the political, cultural and economic centre of Scotland from the middle ages. Up until the industrial revolution, Wales, by contrast, consisted basically entirely of countryside. The settlement that could claim to be the largest in Wales shifted frequently as various areas experienced booms and busts, with Carmarthen, Merthyr and even Amlwch able to claim the distinction at various times. Cardiff only came to the fore during the second half of the nineteenth century, and, whatever one's feelings about that particular city might be, I don't think it's inaccurate to say that it was largely built on the back of investment from England; the city was reclaimed by the Welsh, not built by them. Maybe this explains the anti-Cardiff feeling that still exists in parts of Wales, particularly the north (how many local newspaper correspondents have boasted about how "we relate more to the North-West of England than to Cardiff...").

Regardless, whatever its history we should be proud of Cardiff as it now is - in my admittedly biased view, one of the best cities in the UK - whilst working to make it better still. Whether the northern newspaper correspondents like it or not the future of Wales is tied to Cardiff, like any other small nation with a centralised population.

Welshguy's Thoughts on HS2

As a person who is generally pro-railways (fine, I'll admit it, a train buff / railways geek!) people are sometimes surprised to learn that, while not feeling incredibly strongly about it, I'm generally opposed to High Speed 2. Now, unlike most of the anti-crowd, I'm not particularly bothered about tunnelling in the Chilterns and I think that Sam Cam's Dad's claim that HS2 is the work of "northern Labour MPs who relish the thought of the beauty of the Chilterns being destroyed", while an amusing image, is frankly ridiculous (although, when you think about it, it'd only be fair after the damage done by industrial activity to the Peak District, Lake District, Yorkshire Dales etc... not to mention Snowdonia and the South Wales Valleys!). I generally find NIMBYism about anything a rather self-centred attitude; and can think of far worse things to have nearby than a train line. I'm also reasonably in favour of the idea of High Speed Rail in general - it seems to me to be just about the only effective way of stopping people from flying short of making it illegal, although even then it's only any good for the short distances over which it is effective. And as a train buff, I obviously think its cool.

Nevertheless, I'm lukewarm about the idea of improving connections between two already well-connected cities at such a high cost, especially when there are so many parts of the UK either without a train service at all or with a very poor one. In addition, the environmental credentials of such a line (Chilterns-wrecking aside) are highly suspect. The existing service from Birmingham to London is already significantly faster than driving; so those who make the journey by car at present aren't doing so because of speed. Most of HS2's customers will probably be people who currently take the train, and the faster trains that will run on HS2 will use more energy and therefore increase, not reduce, the carbon impact of travel between the two cities.

Regardless; now that it's happening, here in Wales we should be clamouring for better rail links. When the second stage of HS2 is completed, every city in England will be a shorter time from London than Cardiff except Newcastle (as explained here). HS2 will boost travel times to all locations north of London (because trains will be able to continue on existing infrastructure to locations off the network like Newcastle and Scotland); so the logical destination for HS3 should clearly be Wales and the South West. Parts of the existing Great Western Main Line could even form part of that route (and I'm not sure whether having all these routes running more or less parallel to each other makes much sense anyway), as it was designed (by Brunel to be very straight and have little grade difference from the start. We should welcome the electrification of the GWML and enthusiastically encourage the further electrification of the Valley lines and other routes in Wales (the North Wales coast would be an obvious choice) but we should not allow these projects to delay the bringing of HS rail to Wales. Even if its a dubious project - if we are to share the costs anyway it is only fair that we share the benefits.

Boundary Changes

I wanted to comment on the proposed boundary changes for Wales' Westminster constituencies; in fact, it was while waiting for other Welsh politics blogs to start doing so that I decided I should finally get round to starting blogging again myself. Although there has been a lot of complaining about the changes from the direction of Labour and Plaid Cymru, the coalition's basic point that the current arrangement - where MPs might represent anything between 20,000 and 120,000 voters - is unfair, is difficult to argue with.

Wales has been historically over-represented at Westminster, the rationale always having been that this prevents Wales' interests being swamped by England's. In the Assembly era this is no longer relevant. The point has been made that some of the new constituencies represent places with no sense of community together; but while I can't comment on most of the changes with respect to that point I think it's pretty rare for political constituencies to ever really represent coherent communities. Take Anglesey for example - the complaint has been made that the changes lump the island in with the mainland for the first time; and while Anglesey politics often feels a world apart from the rest of Wales, I'd say that the inhabitants in, say, Menai Bridge, are more interested in Bangor than they are in Amlwch or Holyhead. Anglesey isn't really an island constituency in the same way as the Shetland Islands or the Outer Hebridies, or even the Isle of Wight. Constituency borders will always have to be drawn somewhere, and in the old arrangement there were no shortage of geographical oddities. I would hazard that most people don't actually know what constituency they live in anyway, treating most elections on a national basis.

So on the whole, I'm neutral toward the changes and I think Plaid are wrong to oppose them: in fact, I'm mildly in favour of them because I'd like to see a bigger Welsh Assembly and I think that accepting these changes strengthens the case for such an institution. Welsh MPs are of questionable value now anyway, as most of the matters that people care about are decided at the Assembly anyway; and as their remit is correspondingly smaller than their English counterparts' if anything there should be even fewer of them!

Added 12/01: That said, you have to laugh at "Newport West and Sirohwy Valley", consituency #17 on the map. Whose idea was that one?!

S'mae!

Hello! / S'mae! (that's hello in Welsh, in case you didn't know!)

So a little bit about me then. I'm a PhD student and occasional Freelance Translator currently living in Bangor in North Wales. My interests include classical music and jazz, politics, mountaineering, futurism and various other pursuits.

There's probably some kind of starting-a-blog-etiquette, but I'm going to self-consciously ignore it if there is. This new blog is my second attempt at keeping one. My first blog had no particular remit and I ended up giving up on the thing fairly quickly (which is probably what will happen to this one too, given my limited staying power, but fingers crossed!); I've since been advised that the way to keep a successful blog is to have a specific purpose and a subject, which seems to make sense. I debated starting a blog on various of the many things that interest me but ultimately settled on blogging about Wales and Welsh things because a) it's the topic of the larger part of the blogs I read, b) it's a topic very close to my heart and c) it's a topic that relatively few people blog about. I'm hoping to discuss a variety of things to do with Wales but mainly I'll probably be discussing Welsh/UK politics and nationhood, as well the Welsh landscape (something I have a personal interest in as a mountaineer). I also intend to blog in Welsh from time to time (if you don't read Welsh but still want to read my Welsh posts you'll be able to use GoogleTranslate to get an idea) The idea is to make the internet, in some small way, that little bit more Welsh.