Here’s another edition of this series of “looking at arguments against Welsh independence/Owen creates a strawman”.
Today, I’ll look at the belief that there are too many problems facing the world for Wales to consider independence – whether that’s at this particular moment in time or ever.
There’s a fairly long list of issues that could be considered “more important than independence” including but not limited to:
- Climate change – It goes without saying. It’s been done to death as to why it’s important and is tied to several related issues such as migration, food security, loss of biodiversity, extreme weather, decarbonisation, “greenwashing” by corporations and countless other things.
- Energy security – We’re seeing why this is important now. It’s not just securing and decarbonising the supply, there’s also the issue of profiteering, outdated infrastructure and the method of energy generation.
- Russia/Second Cold War – This problem was brewing long before Crimea and Donbas, let alone this year’s invasion of the rest of Ukraine. The miserable performance of the Russian military has to be parked to an extent. There’s been a more general trend in the last decade of cooling relations between democracies and autocracies – Russia being just one of them.
- The rising cost of living/inflation – There are multiple causes, but governments have proven that they either don’t care about what’s happening or don’t know what to do about it. The unfettered free market and policies in areas such as welfare reform, interest rate rises, cost and availability of housing and employment law can either make the problem worse or help ease it.
- Mental health – Mental illness is now discussed far more openly (particularly in men) than it was even 10 years ago, which is a positive development. What that’s meant though is that a quiet ticking timebomb of a backlog of cases is threatening to go off when services are already stretched.
- “The Culture War” – A new culture war seems to flare up every few decades or so (though some may argue it’s the same social conflict since the 1960s). It usually follows a major political change in the United States which ends up spreading to the rest of the west, where reactionaries and populists try to swing social attitudes in their favour. As of now, the media-fuelled so-called “war on woke” is leading to a new wave of nastiness – ranging from concern trolling to outright bigotry. There are separate but related problems such as disinformation and cyber-security too.
- Public service delivery – These could all be deemed “bread and butter issues”, some of which are within the remit of the Senedd and Welsh Government, like waiting too long for medical or dental treatment, local government cuts, delays to ambulance services and recruitment crises in sectors like social care.
- Short-to-medium term national emergencies – Things like the Covid-19 pandemic, flooding, ongoing issues relating to Brexit etc. You could argue that demographics/depopulation is going to become a bigger issue in Europe in the coming decades as well (and is already becoming one in rural Wales).
As said, you can in all reason argue that Welsh independence pales into insignificance compared to most – if not all – of the above.
The flip-side is that you can just as reasonably argue that we could be better placed to help address these issues to some extent (at least on a Welsh level) if Wales was independent.
