Wales is under siege on multiple fronts. Our foes are installed in positions of power and influence across the country, they own our land, they control our public discourse, they have undermined and usurped any tiny shreds of autonomy we might have garnered and they make all the decisions that matter with zero regard to Welsh interests. Make no mistake, they are hell-bent on completing the conquest begun centuries ago to bring about their longed-for final solution: the extirpation, annihilation and abolition of Cymru.

We see this process going on across every single aspect of Welsh life, and the fact that there is now a Labour government in London after 14 years of devastation at the hands of the Conservative & Unionist party makes absolutely no difference. If anything, our position is even worse. At least with the Tories you know what to expect: out and out hostility to the very idea of Wales. But there remains a deeply entrenched residual loyalty to Labour in Wales. This gives Labour a veneer of democratic validity here that they simply don’t have in the rest of the UK; a seemingly perpetual status as the largest party that brings with it a colonial arrogance and an unwarranted licence to do as they please that even the Tories wouldn’t dare to presume.

So under Labour Wales gets the worst of all worlds: authoritarian imperialism cloaked in patronising paternalism and passive-aggressive neglect interrupted by sudden bursts of interest when Wales is deemed to be ripe for exploitation or an ideal guinea pig for the latest British atrocity. This is particularly alarming now that Kier Starmer has already made it abundantly clear he is going to run the most rightwing Labour government of all time. He has picked up where the Tories left off with cruel and wicked attacks on the poorest and weakest while doing nothing whatsoever to even slightly perturb the ultra-rich, the tax dodgers, the corporate fat-cats, the bonus-bloated bankers, the dividend-drunk shareholders, the hedge-fund billionaires, the offshore hoarders, the thieving landlords, the rip-off profiteers, the privatised asset-strippers and the deregulated rogues who all did so well under the Tories. In a UK of staggering inequality, the 50 richest families currently have more wealth than the combined wealth of half the total population (35 million people) and, if this inequality continues to grow at the rate established by the Tories, by 2035 just 200 people will have more wealth than the UK’s entire GDP! Yet the “tough choices” Starmer and nasty Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Thieves Reeves keep saying they must make always seem to involve hurting those most in need and never the filthy rich. For Wales, burdened by the British State with a massive legacy of ill-health, resource depletion, impoverishment, deprivation and environmental destruction, Labour’s cuts agenda and refusal to tackle the structural collapse of public services and the social realm will be especially harmful.

Having no say or influence on UK policy, Wales is now required by Labour to endure yet more collateral damage on top of 14 years of systematic Tory cuts that reduced the already inadequate Welsh budget by 7% in real terms allowing for inflation. One often hears the enemies of Wales gloat about our situation, attempting to imply its our fault for being so dependent on “handouts” from England/Britain and asserting that our plight just goes to show how Wales would never be able to stand on its own two feet without London’s generosity. This attitude, so prevalent amongst far-right keyboard warriors and Cymruphobic bigots, conveniently ignores the fact that the pittance Wales receives from the UK isn’t some charitable donation: it is our right; it is our money too. Wales has as much claim to a fair share of UK assets as England, having contributed to the UK’s coffers, via taxes and natural resources etc for the past 500 years. Anyone would think these British Nationalists don’t consider Wales to be part of their beloved, sacrosanct ‘Union’!

The truth is that Wales is being grievously ripped-off by the UK year after year. Do the maths: Wales is 4.5% of the UK, therefore should receive 4.5% of the UK’s annual income (currently £1.1 trillion). Can you work out what that figure would be? Answer: £55 billion – a far cry from the £23 billion Wales currently receives. And if one takes into account the total wealth of the UK (£11.8 trillion), this means Wales would be entitled to a ‘divorce’ settlement of around £2 trillion should the glorious day of our total independence ever dawn. In total contradiction to the ludicrous and insulting lie put around that Wales would be a starving economic basket-case without the kindly thoughtfulness of those saintly geniuses in Westminster, the fact is that an independent Wales would start life as the 26th richest country on the planet. And that is before any of the multiple advantages of independence kicked in (like disengagement from the UK’s profligate spending on militarism and monarchy; having our own exchequer with borrowing and investment powers; spreading wealth rather than concentrating it the hands of a tiny minority; regaining our land and resources for our own benefit; ceasing the asset-stripping of wealth being sent to offshore tax havens, unleashing the suppressed talents, energies and ideas of the people, etc, etc). The undeniable desirability of independence is the reason why the 62 countries that have become independent from the UK since WW2 have all hugely increased their prosperity – and not one of them is pleading to be run from London again. What’s more, the evidence suggests that independence is even better for ex-members of the UK. There is only one example so far of a country breaking free from the UK: the Republic of Ireland. On the eve of independence in 1921 Ireland was by-word for grinding poverty, primitive living conditions and famine. Today it is the 2nd richest country, per head, on the planet! And that has been achieved despite the partition of Ulster by the British, despite what amounts to an unending civil war in the north, despite a complete lack of natural resources, despite a powerful reactionary theocracy and despite depopulation and diaspora. Wales could more than match our Celtic comrades’ example: we have nothing to lose but our chains.

Meanwhile, we must somehow survive the onslaught. To illustrate what is happening, it is instructive to look at Wales’ rich cultural sector, so vital to the health, dialogue and creativity of Wales for centuries. Here are just a few recent serious attacks on our institutions:
■ NATIONAL MUSEUMS: The marvellous storehouse of treasures in the capital has had a £3million (10%) reduction in funding; 140 staff have been made redundant; the crumbling Cathays Park building with leaking roofs has a £90million maintenance backlog and requires £25million for urgent repairs; and the Chief Executive (Jane Richardson) blithely floats the idea of complete closure. No other National Museum in the world faces such an existential threat. Meanwhile, the other six National Museums – at Blaenafon (Coal), Caerllion (Roman Empire), Drefach Felindre (Wool), Llanberis (Slate), St Ffagans (History) and Swansea (Maritime) – are all struggling to adapt in various ways to their own brutal cuts.
■ NATIONAL LIBRARY: Likewise, the huge, priceless, precious collection held in the National Library at Aberystwyth is also under threat, having to cope with its biggest ever budget cut (£1.3 million) and make 20% of staff redundant.
■ CADW: The already stingy budget of the body responsible for safeguarding and maintaining Wales’ historic places and buildings has been slashed by a massive 20%. If this were not bad enough, the cuts are having a disastrous knock-on effect on the many small organisations that Cadw itself funds. Addoldai Cymru, for instance, which seeks to preserve for posterity the best of Wales’ many redundant Nonconformist chapels, has had its paltry grant cut to the bone.
■ MID WALES OPERA: A 10% cut to the overall budget of the Arts Council of Wales (ACW) has resulted in many victims right across the arts. Mid Wales Opera (MWO), an outstanding opera and dance company based in Caersws, founded in 1989, actually had its grant entirely removed by ACW and it looked like it was finished. But thanks to emergency funding from Powys County Council and a public appeal that has raised £50,000, MWO has been given a lifeline for at least the next three years. This is what Welsh culture has been reduced to: passing the bucket around.
■ WELSH NATIONAL OPERA: The jewel in the crown of Welsh high culture, with a superb international reputation, is being shrivelled to insignificance by a draconian 30% cut that makes no economic sense. The orchestra is being forced to go part-time, musicians’ pay by is to be cut by 15%, WNO tours are being limited and the prospect of the end of the WNO as a serious, full-time company is now very real. Industrial action during this month’s production of Rigoletto at the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) is an encouraging sign that the 81-year-old Welsh institution will not be allowed to wither away without a fight.
■ ROYAL WELSH COLLEGE OF MUSIC & DRAMA: Major cuts to the RWCMD’s Junior School, which will entail the eradication of both the junior conservatoire and the young drama courses, are going to deprive young Welsh people of a music and drama education and close a pathway into the performing arts. The RWCMD is the only one of the UK’s 11 music colleges taking such an outrageous action.
■ WALES MILLENIUM CENTRE: The WMC budget has had a big 10% chunk bitten out of it by ACW and the consequences are predictably dire. Already opening times are being reduced and all the non-commercial activities that made the WMC a genuine people’s amenity, like free performances of jazz, folk, world music and small classical ensembles in the foyer, are being whittled away. Home-grown productions for the smaller stages in the building are being virtually abolished. This hot-house for developing the actors, writers and musicians of the future is being smashed to pieces.
■ NATIONAL THEATRE WALES: Having had all their funding deservedly taken away by ACW earlier this year (see this blog for more), NTW’s remnant ‘team’ has given up entirely on the ‘theatre’ bit and is now just a smug, self-selected youth club for a handful of ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ people who are, strangely, all exactly like each other. Now and then they gather in various Cardiff tea-rooms to hold twee chit-chats about the heart-rending anguish of being a ‘creative’. Entirely irrelevant to the real world, NTW has now scraped the bottom of the barrel by resorting to getting money from the last spasms of the UK government’s ‘Shared Prosperity Fund’, the totally discredited ‘Levelling Up’ wheeze concocted by Boris Johnson’s Tory administration to strategically buy votes (Labour plans to abolish it next year when Sunak’s last round of largesse expires and incorporate it into local government). It’s horribly appropriate that the thoroughly Americanised, identity-fixated internet addicts that have the insolence to call themselves ‘National Theatre Wales’ turned to their natural allies, English Tories, when in need. The Welsh government must force them to relinquish the stolen NTW name and call themselves something else (how about STOP, Small Team Of Pronouns?) and facilitate the formation of a new NTW from scratch.
■ CHOIRS: The Welsh choral tradition is being slaughtered in front of our eyes by the hollowing-out of communities, by the debasement and destruction of working-class identity, by dumbing down and by general deculturation. Being an absolute symbol of Wales and Welshness, recognised around the world, the Male Voice Choir has been particularly vulnerable to the intense, wall-to-wall Britification and Americanisation that eradicates everything else. We have all noticed how the once overwhelming spontaneous mass choral singing on the terraces of the Arms Park/National Stadium/Millennium Stadium during rugby internationals has all but disappeared today. Just a couple of decades ago there were over 200 Male Voice Choirs thriving in towns and villages across Wales; now there are just 90 and their members are rapidly ageing. The latest casualty is the renowned Rhos Orpheus Choir from Rhosllanerchrugog. Younger men are just not interested; atomised and deracinated, they are far too busy staring at screens.
■ MAGAZINES: A terrible loss to Wales was inflicted when the Books Council of Wales (largely funded by the Welsh government) ceased supporting two crucial English language magazines Planet and New Welsh Review earlier this year. Planet, founded in 1970, has been a magnificent and unique Welsh resource packed with superb writing, intellect, critical thinking and radicalism. On my bookshelves I have almost every issue from number 5 onwards to the final issue (number 253) and I am bereft without it. New Welsh Review, founded in 1988, was also pretty essential reading, particularly for anyone interested in Welsh literature and poetry. Fortunately it continues to be published thanks to donations and sponsorship, but that leaves it a hostage to fortune and cannot be a long-term solution. The end of the vital website Wales Arts Review has only exacerbated this frightening implosion of our culture. It is incumbent on the Senedd to support Welsh publishing and Welsh intellectual life – unless they want a public sphere completely controlled and defined by the lowest-common-denominator trash churned out by the rightwing English mass media. Oh…I’ve just realised…perhaps that is precisely what the British Labour Party does want…

Welsh spending on the Arts constitutes a mere 0.15% of the total Welsh budget – the lowest % of the four nations in the UK and one of the lowest in all of Europe where the average is 0.25%. The financial savings achieved by the across-the-board cuts outlined above amount to chicken-feed and will make not a jot of difference to our dire fiscal position. And please note that I haven’t even mentioned most of the cuts – like, for instance, those being imposed on many local Arts Centres and theatres around Wales.

It looks very much like this is a case of the modern Labour Party’s sickening combination of philistinism, crudity, inverted snobbery, sheer stupidity and British Nationalism in action. Compare the tiny amounts needed to reverse all the above cuts and under-funding with, say, the £138 million Cardiff’s Labour Council are splashing out on a 15,000 capacity arena being built in the Bay at the behest of giant American corporation Live Nation. Live Nation owns 26 similar arenas in the UK and nearly all the major music festivals, is the promoter of most of the big commercial pop acts and has control of ticket sales and distribution through its subsidiary Ticketmaster (masters of ‘dynamic pricing’ as Oasis fans have recently found out the hard way). While Cardiff builds special tramlines, denied to Cardiffians but quickly built for fleeting visitors barely cognisant they are in Wales, and wipes out its County Hall and most of the Atlantic Wharf area, all for the sake of an unwanted arena where millionaire pop stars can cavort half naked while purveying their ghastly ‘music’ (mimed, auto-tuned and pitch-corrected by computers) to clueless, tone-deaf, pea-brains from Shepton Mallet, it has overseen the closure of just about every small venue in the city where authentic, talented musicians and singers from Wales could perform. This is the Labour Party in action: a whore to big business, a cheerleader for voracious corporate capitalism and a ruthless, reckless, wrecker of Wales.