It’s safe to say it’s been a difficult few months for the Welsh independence movement.
As said in a previous piece, at heart it boils down to a conflict between those who want independence first “and sort it out afterwards” and those who want to impose their own visions for independence beforehand (and usually without much serious thought behind it).
On the one hand, those who have a clear vision have a point: some things are non-negotiable including upholding and respecting human rights (so nobody is thrown under a bus to achieve independence), social tolerance, rejecting totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies, working to eliminate inequality and learning how to do things better from the rest of the world. But even then different people will have different ideas that will clash: freedom of speech vs social tolerance for example.
Likewise, the “independence first, sort it out afterwards” folks have a point. If we believe in parliamentary democracy and plurality, then a lot of the decisions will be made by the Senedd before and after independence. YesCymru isn’t the vehicle to deliver serious policy changes; they’re there to campaign to get the tools to make those changes. We have to say why we want them and what we can do with them, but the final decisions will be based on election results and party manifestos. Democracy is rule of the majority and it’s a basic fact of life that you won’t always get what you want and change can often be very slow (I come back to this point later).
It would be very difficult for anyone to accuse me of not being a proper nationalist and I’d argue I’ve done quite a bit for the independence movement, but the purpose of this piece is to prove that your personal views don’t invalidate the views of other people in the independence movement and you can still be on the same side.
So, what “controversial” views do I hold – some of which may genuinely annoy or anger people – that may put me in the dog house with the majority of Welsh nationalists?
Now, I like radical ideas. Something is alluring about trying fresh ideas to make independence mean something deeper and tell the rest of the world “we’ve arrived”. That doesn’t mean it’s always the right approach.
If you’re going to use the population for untested social experiments, you should at the very least have some idea of the unintended consequences. Many of history’s worst political blunders started out as, “I have a brilliant idea!” Except it doesn’t come with a laughter track. It ruins lives and often takes decades to fix.
There’s a danger that people get caught up in “radical ideas” so much they only see their worldview to the exclusion of everything else. Unconnected events will be used to boost their case. Take the Covid-19 pandemic as an example.
The main long-term issues and lessons needing to be learnt from the pandemic are actually quite boring. They include issues relating to emergency planning, the seemingly inevitable coming crisis in the social care system, as well as disinformation – but people have used it to argue for all sorts of things under the guise of “radical change is needed”.
Those who say the pandemic makes the case stronger for a universal basic income, four-day week, scrapping school exams, scrapping or paring back devolution – and even Welsh independence itself – are more than likely the same people who supported those things before the pandemic and were waiting for another “sign”. In a few years, it’ll be something else: “Why the invasion of giant parrots from Stellaris means Wales needs a four-day week.”
That doesn’t mean “radical” ideas should be written off. It’s a symptom of a bigger problem where people who care about public policy (academics, commentators and alike) get frustrated at the very slow political processes in liberal democracies, so they gravitate towards the untried, untested options as an act of desperation.
The priorities of the bureaucracy and financial/political leadership may also be moving at different speeds and at different levels of importance than what we should be doing. This means some things that should’ve happened years – even decades – ago keep getting put off to the point where it causes harm. All that’s left are the radical options regardless of the harm those options might themselves do.
Using a crude analogy, if you need to pee and keep putting it off or are told you can’t go to the toilet (by the politicians, business people, banks etc.) eventually you’ll wet yourself.
The radical idea would be to piss out the window now – it’s the wrong action because someone could be walking by outside, you’ll be exposing yourself and it would ignore more practical options like pissing into an empty drinks bottle. Yet it’s the right principle.
Likewise there are other radical ideas such as:
- Pissing on everyone else so you don’t get wet yourself and then arguing that it actually helps everyone by trickling down (neoliberals and libertarian right).
- Quietly pissing yourself then farting loudly “to cover it up”. Afterwards you go around acting smugly, shaking everyone’s hand and waving as if nothing happened and you got away with it (Blairite centrists).
- Set up a task and finish group on piss to hold a deep-dive investigation into urination with key stakeholders and third sector partners to inform the delivery of a National Toilet by 2050 in collaboration with Urine Wales (Welsh social democracy).
- Pissing yourself then accusing the Jews/blacks/antifa/immigrants/China of pissing on you (far-right).
- Pissing yourself, calling it empowering (and writing a poem/making a sign about how empowering it is) then questioning the gendered presumptions of anyone who disagrees (libertarian left).
- Pissing yourself then writing a 30-page essay nobody will read but many will pretend to understand entitled “Planet Piss: A Philosophical Framework for Urine, Class & Contemporary Dialectical Materialism” which will be hailed as the most important work of the last 30 years but boils down to “everyone should piss themselves at the same time” (Marxist).
That’s essentially the situation we’re in with regard to climate change. Most measures being talked about now – and still not being done – should’ve been done in the 1990s. As a species we’re doing a toilet dance and at increased risk of choosing the wrong options out of desperation because we’ve left it too long.
- Does any of that mean that an independent Wales should carry on doing the same things and just change the flag? No.
- Does it mean that the views of philosophers who died before broadcast television, let alone the internet, are always practical in the here and now? No.
- Does independence mean we can do whatever we want without thinking about the consequences of those actions or considering tried and tested alternatives? No.
