Woke up this Morning (with the chauvinist blues again)

Why the Welsh have the Right to Use their Own Words for their Own Places

One of the most famous moments in Robert Bolt’s script for A Man for All Seasons occurs when Paul Scofield’s Thomas More turns to his betrayer Richard Rich - recently made Attorney General for Wales for lying under oath against him - and says sadly ‘For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, but for Wales!’

It’s a poignant joke in the context, given that the man who makes it knows that he is almost certain to be executed, though I’m not sure that Welsh cinemagoers will have appreciated the suggestion of their irrelevance and inferior status as much as their English counterparts. Because if England has often looked down on Wales, the evidence of history is that the Welsh will do a great deal for Wales, and particularly for the Welsh language.

I’m currently staying only 25 kilometres from the town of Trevelin, the westernmost of the Welsh settlements in Patagonia that were first established in 1865, when 150 Welsh settlers arrived at what is now called Puerto Madryn, on the Atlantic coast of Argentina. These colonists were motivated, among other things, by the desire to preserve their language and culture at a time when they believed that both were in danger of disappearing. Though the Argentinian government supported these efforts for its own reasons, the colonists faced formidable obstacles in a land that, for Europeans at least, was harsh, inhospitable, and difficult to subdue.

They nevertheless succeeded - with the help of the local Indians - to the point when Welsh settlements were established right across the country, all the way to the foothills of the Andes. It’s partly because I had this history in mind, and partly because English chauvinism has always repelled me, that I couldn’t help noticing how Wales has become another cause celebre in my country’s seemingly unstoppable descent into resentful, indignant idiocy this week.

I’m referring of course to the decision by the Brecon Beacon’s National Park Authority to call the park by its original Welsh name Bannau Brycheiniog, and remove the Brecon Beacons symbol that was previously associated with it. This was presented partly as a reassertion and defence of the Welsh language, and also as a rebranding of the park that the authority felt better-reflected the new era of climate change.

This may not seem like the most important issue in British politics right now. After all, the announcement was made in the same week in which it was revealed that hundreds of people are going blind because the NHS cannot give patients routine appointments in time to treat them.

In any normal country that genuinely cared about the welfare of its citizens, this appalling news would be greeted with horror and outrage, and serious questions would be asked of the successive governments that allowed this to happen. But England is very far from normal, and the debates we should be having are not the ones we are actually having, or the ones the government and its defenders want us to have.

Instead, the wrath of the rightwing commentariat was mostly directed towards Wales, where the name change was immediately identified by the gimlet-eyed sentinels of the culture wars as further evidence of the insidious advance of wokedom.

Across the English media, enraged Basil Faultys could be found pounding their heads against their seventies wallpaper. There was John Humphreys in the Daily Telegraph, remembering how he ‘wooed his wife’ in the Brecon Beacons. Now, according to Humphreys, he and other ‘proud citizens of Wales’ find the decision ‘baffling’ and many of them will ‘resent’ the change. Humphreys is probably right about the resentment, because nowadays there are many English people who live in a constant state of fury, and there are many people - generally rightwing politicians and commentators - who want to ensure that they stay that way.

Elsewhere the Telegraph invoked Orwell as it warned darkly of the ‘woke progressives’ who ‘have come for the Brecon Beacons.’ Naturally the Sun was at it, railing against the ‘woke decision’ to rename the park, while the loathsome Spiked website was also rolling its eyes and running through its grindingly-limited conceptual vocabulary to denounce the ‘woke elites’ responsible for this.

In the Mail, a former Cameron-era Bullingdon club member named Harry Mount who was once rolled downhill in a toilet could be found weeping and gnashing his teeth at the ‘woke philistines’ whose ‘climate change agenda’ had walked away with his beloved park. Meanwhile, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer, and a dismal cabal of Tory politicians, could all be found toiling away at the culture war seam with their little shovels like Satan’s little helpers. Even Downing Street took time out to enter the fray, lecturing the park authorities that their efforts could be better-spent combating climate change.

Is that the same government whose civil servants recently warned would face legal changes because the UK was failing to meet its climate change mitigation targets? That has allowed English rivers and beaches to be turned into sewage dumps? Why yes it is, since you ask.

Some of this indignation is clearly strategic. It clearly suits a lot of powerful and influential people to get the English waving their pitchforks at straw men, progressive ‘elite’ conspiracies, and whatever other bargain basement shibboleths can be conjured up by the likes of Sir Lynton et al. And this is remarkably easy to do in a country that is far more willing to confront - and invent - imaginary threats than it is to recognise real ones. In addition, England is also a post-imperial country that has taken its own cultural supremacy for granted, and tends to look down on its Celtic neighbours with condescension and a sense of aggrievement whenever they try to assert their own cultural or national identities.

For my part, I have no interest in romanticising or glorifying Welsh nationalism, which no doubt has its own chauvinistic elements. But there is a difference in the nationalism of small countries that have historically been denied their own cultural identity and that of powerful countries that have been able to impose their language and culture - often by force - on their neighbours and even further afield.

The former is essentially defensive, protective and preservationist, particularly when applied to language, and the very particular patterns of inherited thought, memory, feeling, and cultural knowledge that every language contains. In southern Patagonia, for example, the names given to the coastal regions once inhabited by the Yahgan people are almost entirely English and Spanish. Charles Darwin once disparaged the Yahgan language, and at times barely seemed able to believe that these ‘savages’ could speak at all.

Yet the Yahgan languge was eventually revealed by the missionary Thomas Bridges to contain some 40,000 words - considerably more than Shakespeare used in his plays - and the Yahgans once had names in their own language for almost every bay, cove and inlet for miles around the coast of Tierra del Fuego and the southernmost channels of the Chilean archipelago.

Today there are almost no Yahgan-speakers left, and their descendants can barely remember the language of their grandmothers and great grandparents. Wales is not in this position. Today there are 999,999 Welsh speakers, according to UNESCO, while the Welsh government listed 889,500 speakers in 2022 - approximately 29.7 % of the population.

In other words, the Welsh are not the Yahgan. They are not disappearing, nor is their language. Yet still there are those who seem to gloat at the possibility that Welsh might be dying out, or suggest that speaking and promoting Welsh represents some kind of cultural withdrawal from the wider world. Similar claims have been made by Spanish centralists about the Catalans. In both cases, such allegations wilfully ignore the existence of bilingual education policies in both countries - and the proven benefits of bilingualism when it comes to learning other foreign languages.

Coming from England - a country where the study of foreign languages is in abject decline - such criticisms are particularly rich. And when it comes to withdrawing from the wider world, England has done that far more comprehensively than any other European country in the last few years, regardless of the fact that English is an international language and the lingua franca of the EU.

Closed minds are not dependent on a particular language, but on the ideas, habits, and attitudes of the people who speak it. And the tone-deaf English response to the Bannau is partly another case of manufactured outrage; and also another indication that some English minds are very closed indeed, or perhaps that they have become so used to looking down on the rest of the world from a great height that they are unable to see that language can - indeed must be - rooted in the local, in the names that its speakers give to the towns, mountains, forests and spaces that they inhabit.

Harry Mount dismissed the Brecon Beacons name change as ‘infantilising claptrap.’ But what is truly infantilising is a country that is unable or unwilling to even begin to solve the multiple threats to the well-being of its population, and prefers to froth at the mouth about non-existent ‘woke’ conspiracies instead. Mount might dismiss Michael Sheen, who appears in the new Bannau Park promotional video as a ‘professional Welshmen’.

Personally I would take one progressive patriot like Sheen and his ‘green agenda’ over a thousand puffed-up Tory culture warriors like Mount, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

And to paraphrase RS Thomas, if the Welsh want to speak the tongue that was passed on to them, in the places where they happened to be, ‘huddled between grey walls of cloud for at least half the year,’ then let them.

Because surely no one could be offended by a decision like that - except a ‘snowflake’ or someone with an ‘agenda’ of their own?