Wales’ status as nothing more than an English possession is regularly exposed for all to see by the ‘EnglandandWales’ formula used in so many aspects of UK governance. England is 95% and Wales 5% of ‘EnglandandWales’ by population so this shackling to England is tantamount to the erasure of Wales. Being gobbled up and subsumed into England in this way denies Welsh interests, Welsh distinctiveness, Welsh priorities, Welsh needs and Welsh identity itself. It is clearly deliberate policy, increasingly utilised by Tory and Labour UK governments in their lurch to the far-right over the last 15 years, and endorsing imperialism, colonialism, authoritarianism and oppression in the process.
England insists on dominion over Wales for the same reasons Putin invaded Ukraine and Trump threatens to seize any country he fancies: the pitiful and psychopathic need to have somewhere to lord it over and bully, common to all failing empires on the decline desperately trying to be ‘great’ again.
A glaringly ridiculous example of how the ‘EnglandandWales’ construction is completely inappropriate comes every July when the Office of National Statistics (ONS) releases a list of the most popular baby names in ‘EnglandandWales’. Statistics is one of the many areas not devolved to Wales (for a full list see this article). Scotland has the National Records of Scotland (NRS), Northern Ireland has the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (NISRA), but Wales is lumped in with England through the ONS. No justification is ever given for this anomaly, which takes no account of devolution whatsoever (the ONS was formed in 1996 by the Tories before Welsh devolution happened in 1999). It seems to be nothing more than a reactionary clinging to the idea of Wales being conquered territory belonging to England dating back to its 1536 annexation, and is particularly dumb as well as damaging when Wales has its own devolved government. It actually boils down to a pointless prevention of Wales having the right to any information and data about itself, while making no difference at all to England, and means the Senedd is hampered and stymied, unable to accurately refine policies, target problems, identify issues, analyse demographics and monitor trends without the statistical facts that all governments need.
The list of baby names released last week by the ONS shows that in 2025 for girls Olivia, Lily, Amelia, Isla and Florence were the top five most popular names and for boys it was Muhammad, Noah, Leo, Luca and Arthur. The ONS states that this applies to ‘EnglandandWales’ but of course, given that England has approximately 20 times the population of Wales, it effectively means ‘England’. So, for reasons that can only be mindless bureaucracy, contempt and sheer spite, Wales is kept in the dark about its own realities and it is left to those who care about such trivia to extrapolate Welsh figures from the total.
When it comes to matters more important than babies’ names the stubborn refusal of the UK government to devolve statistics serves no purpose other than being destructive and nasty and is authentically harmful to Wales right across the spectrum of national life. The time is long overdue for this to be devolved – along with a host of other Welsh affairs also controlled by insecure, inadequate and incompetent little Englanders.