The slow death of Wales

If the United Kingdom is in terminal decline, then it seems to be dying from the edges inwards. Northern Ireland, with its sclerotic government and inexorable demographic shift from Protestant to Catholic, metaphorically and politically moves away from the mainland with every year. Scotland’s disasters are well-documented: Devastated by high unemployment, failing educational standards, and catastrophic levels of alcoholism and drug addiction, it is a shell of the country that once produced Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Alexander Fleming, David Hume, and James Clerk Maxwell. Now, even the Krankies look like cultural high points for the country to aim for.

Across the regions, there seems nothing but despair: the North East, that once-proud cradle of shipbuilding, is a land bereft of industry and hope; Lancashire and Yorkshire now only make the headlines because of their football teams and crime. England’s second city is a study of neglect and corruption. Rural counties, such as Cornwall, Devon, Suffolk, and Norfolk, criss-crossed by county lines and shit-filled rivers, see their farmers more regularly protesting on the streets of Whitehall than tilling their increasingly valueless fields. The country they once served looks alien to them. London, the once-beating heart of the country’s wealth, culture, and political power, still has a pulse, but it, too, is both bloated and fragile, overpriced and undernourished, susceptible to a financial heart attack that would see the end of its already furred-up stock exchange.

Perhaps the only way to stop the boats is to make their destination as appealing as a listing sperm whale, rotting off the coast of France. We’re doing our best to achieve this, to make the whole country a Shitlife Theme Park. Philip Larkin was right: we’ve become the “first slum of Europe”, a place governed by “crooks and tarts”. But where Larkin was wrong is in believing that the country’s death would be an accident: no, this death is intended; it is a slow homicide from the outside in, a smothering of the past done out of a sense of self-loathing and shame. Whether you went to Eton College, Reigate Grammar, or Cardiff High School, the inability to care for this nation-state is evident in every act of self-harm.

But what about Wales? Well, of all the parts of the United Kingdom, it is the Principality which has declined the most. Like a patient suffering from dementia, it lurches on, vaguely aware of what it once was, forced to live in old clothes it can no longer fill, bereft of purpose, increasingly made to feel ashamed of its own identity, of becoming a nuisance to all. To refer to Larkin again, Wales is an “old fool”, its days of “thin continuous dreaming”, of having a purpose, now at an end. Why, then, are the Welsh not screaming?

The Port Talbot steel works, still visible and impressively vast, exists as yet another symbol of a nation’s decline

Screaming at what has been done to them by a ruling class that has turned a once-proud land into a failing state. Not a week goes by without an act of self-flagellation being announced. What sane country would reject building a nuclear power station, with all the jobs that would bring, because it could result in some minority language speakers leaving? That would be Wales. What sane country would claim that many of its most historic buildings are racist? That would be Wales. What sane country would insult the majority of its population by, effectively, calling them racist? That would be Wales.

Such ludicrous initiatives would be almost tolerable if the country was luxuriating in a state of fiscal and cultural prosperity. The reality is, inevitably, the opposite, and so such publicity-grabbing ideas are self-indulgent acts of policy onanism enacted by the overeducated and underworked. By any measure, Wales is in decline. Take education: according to the recent PISA scores, standards fell across the country more than in any other nation in the UK. To put it another way: the average pupil in Wales performed at the same level as the most disadvantaged pupils in England. There is, simply, no good news about education in Wales, and much of this is a direct result of policies introduced by the Welsh government. If the Senedd (the Welsh Parliament) was a school, it would be put in special measures. Such outcomes ensure that the workforce for tomorrow is underqualified and lacking even basic levels of education.

Or take the NHS. I know from personal experience that dealing with the NHS in Wales can be a very different experience — and much more dangerous — than dealing with it over the River Severn. For instance, waiting times are far higher, with just over one in five of the Welsh population unable to get the treatment they need quickly (compared to one in eight in England). Such statistics hide the fact that if you are ill in Wales, you are more likely to die because you don’t get the care you need. You are also less likely to work (and if you do work, it is probably going to be in the public, rather than the private sector); you’re more likely to be a victim of crime than if you lived in England, and you will probably pay more council tax. With such a bleak outlook, it is not surprising that the number of deaths related to drug misuse has risen sharply.

If you drive from London to Swansea (before you have to creep along at the mandatory 20mph speed limit, another symptom of inertia), you pass through what was once an industrial heartland of coal and steel. Now, there is nothing left, and the Port Talbot steel works, still visible and impressively vast, exists as yet another symbol of a nation’s decline. But there are other, less obvious but more frequent signs of the country’s loss of its own identity and the pride it once took for granted. Those rugby posts that populate so many fields speak of a glory that has gone forever. Saturday’s predictable defeat to Italy was illustrative of the country’s decline. The hymns and arias that once sang out so loudly as JPR, JJ, Gareth, and Barry ripped through the defensive lines of the other home nations have been extinguished. The Wales that could raise giants like Aneurin Bevan and Richard Burton is now a denuded land that produces figures with the stature of Lord Hermer and Michael Sheen. The land of my fathers is dead, and what has taken its place is nothing but a cruel imitation of its past, a place denied even its own identity. The centre cannot hold together a country that is dying at its outer edges; sooner, rather than later, that centre dies too.