Many years ago on this blog I coined the word ‘Cymruphobia’, to mean the hatred/fear of Wales. Since then the word ‘Cymrophobia’, meaning the hatred/fear of Welsh people, has occasionally popped up in articles and books about Wales, but I think my original coinage more accurately pins down what is going on. It is not just the Welsh people that are regularly traduced and attacked, but Wales itself. The very existence of Wales as an entity seems to arouse an incoherent rage and a foaming-at-the-mouth antagonism.

Why? Why should this little nation that only ever tried to defend itself, never harmed anyone, never invaded anywhere, suffered centuries of cruelty and torment and disproportionately contributes so much that is good to the world, provoke such malice? Well, I have my theory: the fact that the Welsh were the ‘Britons’ and the English the murderous invaders of these islands stirs some barely understood visceral insecurity in today’s British/English that can only ever be assuaged by the complete eradication of the inconvenient truth. This objection to history itself is seen over and over again in attempts to rewrite that history. A classic example is the usurping of the words ‘Britain’/’British’ that until around 200 years ago meant ‘Welsh’: the ‘Ancient Britons’ who are now treated as early English when actually the Anglo-Saxon invaders waged genocidal wars of conquest against them. The wholesale appropriation of Welsh culture – from Boadicea to Arthur, Merlin to Atlantis, Tolkein to Rowling, Camelot to Sword and Sorcery, Hollywood to Netflix – without ever acknowledging the Welsh origins is another instance of this process. I could go on with countless examples of the taboo about acknowledging the existence of Wales. Only last week, for instance, a lengthy article in The Observer about the Celtic Languages by Laura Spinney somehow managed to not mention Wales or the Welsh language once – Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, yes, but not the W-word, even though Welsh is the healthiest and most used of all the Celtic languages.

This unspoken erasure of Wales is so comprehensive in the UK and beyond that there can only be one explanation for it: to spare the feelings, prop up the delusions and flatter the national image of the English. Where it becomes particularly frightening and destructive is in UK politics. Here are some current examples of Cymruphobia in action:

■The ‘Goschen Formula’ from 1888 to 1977 and the ‘Barnett Formula’ from 1978 onwards obliged the UK government to automatically adjust spending in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to reflect increases or decreases in public spending in England, but the application of that settled convention to Wales was unilaterally ditched in 2019 by Boris Johnson’s Tory government. Without notice, Wales, unlike Northern Ireland and Scotland, was denied its legitimate proportion of the £100 billion High Speed 2 (HS2) expenditure by the convicted criminal and pathological liar. In a typical example of Johnson’s notorious shameless duplicity, the new London to Birmingham railway was re-defined as an “England and Wales project” – even though not one inch of the line is in Wales – and therefore, abracadabra, no consequential funding whatsoever needed to go to Wales. A rightful Welsh proportion of the HS2 costs would have otherwise been £4 billion, a sum that could completely transform the country’s pitifully inadequate rail infrastructure.

When in opposition, Labour lambasted this brazen robbery and promised to rectify it, but as soon as they came to power last year the first decision made by Cardiff East MP Jo Stevens, the new Welsh Secretary, was to break that promise and announce that the Tory policy would remain and Wales would still get nothing. The feeble and powerless Labour administration in the Senedd, along with all the other parties, have painstakingly lobbied and explained to Stevens why this is an outrageous injustice, and even though the Starmer government and Stevens herself concede that Welsh railways suffered “chronic underinvestment” throughout the 14 years of Tory rule, UK Labour refuse to right the wrong or even bother to attempt to justify it – for instance, when UK transport minister Peter Hendy was asked last week by the Welsh Affairs Committee in Westminster to justify the classification of HS2 as an ‘England and Wales’ scheme, his reply was “I probably can’t, actually”.

Yes, those pre-election pledges were just routine Labour lies. Mind you, why should Wales expect anything different from a political party so bereft of principles and values it humiliatingly grovels to a cruel, dangerous, far-right US government that wages hostile trade wars, dismantles international bodies, promotes planetary destruction, sides with the murderous Putin regime and threatens to annex by force sovereign states such as Greenland, Panama and Britain’s loyal ally Canada, where Charles III is king? The pathetic response of Starmer (and ‘King’ Charles) to these menacing, mobster tactics is fawning appeasement. The contrast between his bullying approach to weak little Wales and his creepy cringing before the might of the richest country in the world exposes him for what he is: a spineless, lily-livered coward.

■More outright robbery of Wales happens year after year due to the continued refusal of the UK government to devolve the Crown Estate’s Welsh holdings to Wales (the Scottish holdings are devolved to Scotland while the Estate has practically no holdings in Northern Ireland). The Crown Estate in Wales is made up of the vast areas of land and sea seized by violence in the 13th century Edwardian Conquest plus subsequent annexations and confiscations. It comprises 65% of the foreshore and riverbeds, offshore waters extending 12 miles from the coast, over 50,000 acres of land, 250,000 acres of mineral deposits and every grain of gold and silver. The value of the Crown Estate in Wales is currently £900 million. But all this is just added to the huge English Crown Estate and then 75% goes directly to the UK Treasury, 25% to the monarch and Wales gets zilch, except the chance to hold out a begging bowl and plead for a few crumbs to ease our systematically ransacked and impoverished plight.

A huge majority (75% in the latest polls) of the Welsh people, the Welsh Labour government, the entire Senedd and to date 15 of the 22 Welsh local authorities (Cardiff’s British nationalist Labour Council has, of course, not even discussed the issue) support the transfer of Wales’ own resources to Wales. A series of authoritative, independent reports have concluded that there is no defence for the current state of affairs and no rational case against Wales having control of its own assets. But the Starmer government repeatedly defends the indefensible and, like their Tory predecessors, they stubbornly refuse to make what would be a simple, logical, just and honourable change that would boost Wales’ negligible income by an annual £60 million at least. This is Welsh wealth, desperately needed here and now, that could be invested in Wales for the benefit of the people of Wales. How could anyone disagree with that? Well, the Labour Party in London can – not with reasoned argument but with nonsensical bullshit. This was illustrated recently by Treasury minister James Murray who told MPs that returning the Estate to Wales “would make no commercial sense”, as if the only consideration was the UK and Wales had no needs or priorities of its own. At the same time he ignored the fact that the unwavering policy of First Minister Eluned Morgan and her Labour government in Cardiff is for Wales to control its own Crown Estate. By riding roughshod over the basic tenets of devolution in this way, Murray showed that the British Labour Party is as contemptuously anti-Wales as the Tories and as imperialist and reactionary as, say, Putin’s Russia or Trump’s USA.

The forcibly requisitioned Crown Estate, accumulated from the Norman conquest onwards, was the main source of income for England’s monarchs and governments until the 18th century when the costs of government had risen to such an extent that the Estate’s revenues were surrendered to the Treasury and funding of the monarchy was switched to an annual grant called the Civil List. In 2012 the Civil List was abolished and since then the monarch has been provided with a stable revenue (the ‘Sovereign Grant’) calculated as 12% of the Crown Estate’s annual net income. Should any royalists reading this (as if!) be concerned that poor old Charles and Camilla won’t be able to manage on such chicken-feed (currently £50 million a year), let me reassure them. The Crown Estate is merely pin-money to Charlie; it doesn’t include his Duchy of Lancaster revenues or his staggering personal wealth of palaces, castles, mansions, lands, looted treasures and raw cash which all add up to an estimated £30 billion in assets and £750 million in loose change, not to mention all the unknown dosh ‘the firm’ keeps secret. And he would still get his 12% from Wales even if the Welsh holdings were returned to where they belong.

Regardless, it is becoming more and more apparent that only independence can stop the remorseless ransacking of Wales. For century after century we have been an English/British colonial cash cow, an extractive economy to be systematically stripped of anything that can be monetised: coal, copper, lead, iron, zinc, manganese, cobalt, antimony, arsenic, barytes, calcite, sulphite, gold, silver, quartz, limestone, sandstone, slate, granite, gravel, clay, sand, forests, water and now winds and tides. All this wealth has been sucked out of Wales. making fortunes for ruthless exploiters while leaving Welsh communities ravaged by imposed, enduring poverty and the Welsh environment scarred, defiled and contaminated. This is a state of affairs that the British State is perfectly content to perpetuate for ever, while simultaneously deriding Wales for the very poverty and dependence it deliberately created. This outrage will continue until the Welsh people reject the tyrannical rule of the rotten, corrupt, oppressive UK.

■Another recent act of grand larceny committed against Wales by the UK is the so-called “UK Shared Prosperity Fund” (USPF), set up by Johnson’s government in 2021 after the Brexit referendum. The Tories repeatedly promised during the referendum, in subsequent election manifestos and when setting up USPF that each of the UK nations would not be worse off because of Brexit. Indeed, they vowed to “replace and, at a minimum, match” the lost EU funding. That funding was vital to Wales. It amounted to £680 million per year and since 2000 had been paid to Wales from the European Regional Development Fund and the European Social Fund because, after 500 years of atrocious English rule, Wales was one of the poorest countries in all of Europe. Did the Tories honour that promise? Don’t make me laugh: it was one of the many big fat fibs that the entire Brexit campaign was built on (who now remembers Johnson’s red bus adorned with the assurance that Brexit would free up £350 million a week for the NHS?).

Surprise, surprise: the USPF came nowhere near compensating Wales (Europe’s £680 million annually was replaced by the UK’s £200 million). But worse than that, the Tory government used Brexit to by-pass the Welsh government and assault devolution itself. The European funds were devolved to Wales, administered by Wales and democratically answerable to Wales; but the USPF funds were entirely controlled by the UK government in a shameless snatch of devolved matters that were supposedly reserved to Wales. The criminal Tories simply used their Westminster majority to override legally-binding demarcations and rubber-stamp the power-grab while Wales was powerless to prevent it.

Four years after Brexit, the total direct financial loss to Wales currently stands at £1.1 billion and counting – and that doesn’t include the Welsh share of losses from the disappearance of other EU programmes like Erasmus, Horizon, Territorial Co-operation and the Common Agricultural Policy, or Brexit’s 6% shrinking of the overall UK economy, or the impact on individual businesses of the collapse of the UK’s export trade with Europe (eg: food & drink exports are down 35% since Brexit). The Tories have gone, only to be replaced by a Labour Party that, if anything, is even more rightwing – exemplified by the ridiculous policy of never mentioning the ongoing damage of Brexit for fear of upsetting the Daily Mail. Moreover, the Starmer government has made it very clear it has no intention of restoring pre-Brexit Welsh finances or respecting Welsh devolution. And lurking menacingly in the wings is the predatory far-right slime-ball Nigel Farage, the driving force behind Brexit with his many megalomaniac political projects (UKIP, Brexit Party, Reform UK) supported by millionaire moguls in the rightwing press and billionaire tech bros pouring poison and misinformation from their platforms. The Little Englander would love to bring his wrecking-ball of xenophobia, supremacism, arrogance and ignorance to Wales in next year’s Senedd elections. Who, I ask, is going to defend Wales against this onslaught of hatred?

■The systemic belligerence and malevolence towards Wales manifests itself in so many ways. A good example is the UK government’s refusal to fund the removal of the astonishing 2566 coal tips that blight the environment and threaten the people. We only know that total because after the Tylorstown landslide in 2020, which only by luck stopped short of engulfing the Rhondda Fach village, the Senedd compiled a comprehensive catalogue of all the extant tips in Wales and ranked them according to their condition and dangerousness – a huge, expensive task that had never even been attempted by the British State, despite the fact that one of the worst disasters in the world at Aberfan had shown in 1966 what horrors the coal tips of Wales could unleash.

The data was issued in 2023 and concluded that no less than 350 tips were in the ‘very unsafe’ C and D categories and must be dealt with as a matter of urgency. This monumental task has begun, and the Welsh government is initially committing £100 million to tackle it, as well as legislating via the Disused Tips Bill (which is expected to become law this year) to entrench the process until all the tips are gone. What, you may ask, has the UK government done to help?

Well, despite the fact that every tip is a legacy of the UK government’s industrial history and a symbol of the frenzied rape and brutal desecration of the once-beautiful rural valleys; despite the fact that every penny of the vast profits from Welsh coal went into the pockets of the coal barons and the groaning coffers of the UK exchequer while enabling the unleashing of the world’s biggest and most lucrative empire on the world; despite the fact that the Welsh coalfields didn’t see any of this immense wealth but instead were subjected to appalling conditions, abject poverty, inexorable deprivation and a multitude of diseases until the brave communities were cruelly abandoned and left to rot when it no longer suited the British State to mine coal; and despite the fact that Wales suffered more mining disasters, more fatalities, more cavalier disregard for safety, more oppressive bosses, more lock-outs, more starvation tactics when trade unions defended workers’ rights, more pay cuts and more thuggish interventions from the military and police forces than any equivalent mining area in the world. But despite all this history, all the profits extracted and all the unimaginable wealth of the world’s 6th richest country (current worth £16 trillion – that’s sixteen followed by 12 zeroes), the UK’s derisory £25 million contribution towards Wales’ attempts to clean up after the vile vandals is effectively next to nothing considering the final price will certainly be at least a billion.

Both the Tory government and now the Labour government have told the Senedd that environmental issues are a devolved matter, so it’s nothing to do with them. How peculiar: they are only too ready to seize, override and impinge upon devolved powers when that means taking money from Wales; but they are strangely reluctant to do so when it means giving money to Wales. The message coming from our overlords in London couldn’t be clearer: they don’t give a damn if we’re buried in their filthy slurry

■Wales’ proportionate share of the UK’s annual revenue of £1.1 trillion should be around £50 billion, given that the population of Wales is 4.5% of the population of the UK, yet currently Wales gets just £26 billion a year – a structural underfunding which amounts to a deliberate policy choice by the UK to inflict deprivation and dispossession on Wales. Half of that £26 billion has to go to NHS Wales to try to deal with the long-term health legacy of dangerous, dirty, heavy industry, toxic environments and inbuilt poverty, as well as all the routine health issues that plague the UK plus picking up the tab from the exploitation of Wales as a picturesque retirement home by downsizing English geriatrics.

This domination of health issues damages all the other public services crying out for money and is made much worse by the fact that ‘NHS Wales’ is itself a fiction, contrived by the British State to dump all the administrative responsibilities on Wales without any of the powers. The key powers are all jealously guarded in London: funding, determined as a crude percentage of English spending rather than being geared to Welsh needs; pay levels, crucial to recruitment and staffing levels; infrastructure decisions on new hospitals and clinics; and investment decisions on updated equipment and medication. Without these basic levers future planning and strategy is impossible, leaving NHS Wales to muddle through day-by-day in a state of permanent crisis.

Then there are the ancillary health services. All are centralised and run according to policy decided by the UK: social care, purchased by councils from the privatised care sector and dictated by the profiteering priorities of the owners; GP practices, private businesses never taken into public ownership when the NHS was founded in 1948 and run on annually renewed contracts that leave Wales a hostage to fortune whenever GPs terminate their contracts – increasingly common since Westminster allowed private medical companies, frequently American, to take over independent GPs, close small practices and form shareholder conglomerates; dentistry, also private practices allowed to refuse to treat NHS patients unless they ‘go private’ with the result that whole areas of Wales have no NHS dental services; and podiatry and optometry, other vital areas of health in private hands thanks to UK policy.

The consequences for Wales of these ‘free market’ policies pursued obsessively by UK governments for 45 years is that NHS Wales has to purchase essential services from the private sector, at great expense, so weakening the NHS while bolstering the private sector and its fat salaries, bonuses and shareholder dividends. With these crippling handicaps undermining its already inadequate budget, NHS Wales is caught in a trap devised by the British State to ensure it can never properly fulfil its mission of free, comprehensive health care for all, set out by great Welshman Nye Bevan (1897-1960). Only an independent Wales, unshackled from the pitiless capitalist dogma dictated by England, can bring Nye’s wonderful vision to reality.

■Kier Starmer’s decision to appoint self-declared ‘Unionist’ Jo Stevens as Welsh Secretary, along with his undemocratic overriding of the wishes of local constituencies to impose his favoured ‘centre-right’ candidates in safe Labour seats at the last General Election, tells us all we need to know about the despicable, Union Jack-waving British Nationalist and leaves Wales without advocates, defenders and friends in the UK government.

The 27 Labour MPs in Wales are a motley collection of untalented mediocrities, British lackeys, parachuted-in English careerists and ‘Friends of Israel’ zealots. None vote against the treacherous Tory-style policies of Starmer and Reeves and none show the slightest interest in Wales in the House of Commons. Stevens’ answer to every request (usually from Plaid Cymru) to get fair treatment for Wales is invariably NO. No to parity with Scotland, no to control of rail infrastructure or energy infrastructure, no to devolution of justice and policing, no to developing a Welsh-specific welfare policy, no to changes to the Barnett Formula, no to tweaking Welsh income tax bands…and so on…no, no and no again. Stevens is carrying on the pattern set by a succession of Tory Welsh Secretaries before her in the previous 14 years: twisting the job so it isn’t about voicing the priorities and concerns of Wales in London, but about autocratically foisting London’s policies on Wales without debate, like it or lump it. She is nothing more than a haughty colonial governor.

I feel sorry for Eluned Morgan’s well-meaning if powder-puff Labour administration in the Senedd; all those high hopes that at last, after the long years of Tory assaults on Wales, there would be sympathetic Labour comrades in Westminster to work with constructively and co-operatively and begin to repair the damage have been dashed in no time at all. If anything this UK government is, incredibly, even worse than the Tories. Unless the Welsh people start to completely ditch their Labour loyalty and shift allegiance to Plaid or even Propel, Gwlad, LibDems or Greens, Labour will carry on treating us with contempt and, ridiculously, this latest cabal of inept Westminster buffoons will remain in charge of all these fundamental aspects of Wales:

● Economic, fiscal and monetary policy
● Exchequer, budgets and expenditure
● Finance, financial services and financial markets
● Taxation
● Banking and currency
● Constitutional matters
● Civil service
● Criminal law
● Common Law
● Policing and public order
● Prisons and offender management
● Courts, tribunals, judiciary, legal proceedings, legal aid, coroners and arbitration
● International relations and treaties
● Defence, security, armed forces and the making of peace or war
● Military bases and training areas
● International trade and import and export control
● Electricity, gas, oil, coal, nuclear, wind and marine energy
● Land management, forestry, rivers, waterways, mines, minerals, sewage systems
● Traffic, rail, ports, air, navigation, coastguards and vehicle & driver registration
● Social security, national insurance, child support and pensions
● Employment, unemployment and training
● Industrial relations and trade unions
● Statistics and censuses
● Land registry
● Infrastructure planning
● Regulation of businesses, insolvency and competition
● Regulation of the professions
● Health & safety, consumer protection, product standards and weights & measures
● Drugs, firearms, betting, alcohol, hunting, prostitution, Sunday trading, pubs
● Charities
● Copyright, public lending right and intellectual property
● Broadcasting, film classification, telecommunications and postal services
● Access to information, data protection, personal data and public records
● Marriage, family relationships, child welfare and gender recognition
● Registration of births, deaths, marriages, civil partnerships and places of worship
● Medicines and medical supplies
● Abortions, transplants, embryology, surrogacy and genetics
● Equal opportunities
● Ordnance Survey
● Bank holidays, public holidays
● Time and calendars

In every one of these spheres we can do so much better than the cruel imperialists who despise us. The time is long overdue for the Welsh people to unite to end our suffering and debasement, gather support from around the world, and bring Cymru into being.