Moderator: Cross posted from Normal Mouth's blog.
Normal Mouth (Rhondda, blogger): At the turn of the nineteenth century the very idea of a “Welsh question” was largely inconceivable. This was not so in Scotland and Ireland, where a strong sense of nationhood was buttressed by the relative novelties of their respective unions with England. Welshness, by contrast was identified with little more than the backward retention of an ancient language, and a wild and uninviting hinterland. Little wonder that the likes of Bishop Basil Jones of St David's declared as late as 1886 that Wales survived only as a "geographical expression".*
Industrialisation and Nonconformism gave birth to Wales’s national movement, and franchise reform gave it the means to press itself upon the consciousness of Britain's leaders. With a voice, Welsh sentiment was harder to ignore in Parliament. So emerged the radical Nonconformist wing of the Liberal Party, and through that those essential precursors of devolution - disestablishment, educational reform and Sunday closing.
Welsh national status has grown steadily - if unevenly – ever since, gaining on that of Scotland (and less straightforwardly on that part of Ireland remaining within the UK). Today, far from the ignored and marginal annex of yesteryear, Wales is accused of having too much influence. English nationalists complain that the Celtic fringe, with a combined population of less than 10 million, outpunches England, with five times that number of people. With vocal and powerful national legislatures, Britain's peripheries are accused of to looming too large in the life of the UK.
It is this perceived asymmetry in national clout - or more specifically the risk of an English backlash it might engender - that motivates the Tory party's constitutional investigations. From within their own ranks the clamour for an answer to the "English Question" (a formulation equally incomprehensible to past generations) is growing steadily. Beyond the spectre of "English subsidies" the most readily understood hook upon which to hang English discontent is Tam Dalyell's infamously deceptive West Lothian Question.
By seeking to answer this narrow contrivance, rather than the wider, more poorly specificed grievance behind it, Ken Clarke and his Democracy Task Force have failed the real task set it by David Cameron. (I need not go into the mindbending practical difficulties of the plan - see here for that critique). The object of this phase of the Task Force was surely to pacify the increasing sense of English nationalism within the Tories and elsewhere.The reaction of those targeted shows how far short Clarke has fallen.
The Tories have been eager participants in a toxic analysis that holds the Celtic fringes to have gained excessive power and influence through devolution. They vowed to rebalance this, but clearly lack the courage to see through the implications of their critique by devolving power to England. It is a relief that they have not administered this remedy, but it would have been better if they had not helped pump so much poison around the system in the first place.
Postscript: John Dixon says Labour "seem unwilling to come back to the question [of English devolution]". Not quite; Labour are proposing to beef up the Regional Development Agencies in a way that could conceivably foreshadow a second go at English regional devolution.
* This was a sentiment prematurely echoed by Gwyn Alf Williams in the early 1980s
