I’M IN SEMI-RETIREMENT AND THIS BLOG IS WINDING DOWN. I INTEND CALLING IT A DAY SOON AFTER THIS YEAR’S SENEDD ELECTIONS. POSTINGS WILL NOW BE LESS FREQUENT AND I WILL NOT UNDERTAKE ANY MAJOR NEW INVESTIGATIONS. DIOLCH YN FAWR.
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The title is of course taken from Tony Blair’s famous speech of May 2001. It seems apposite because this offering is also about the UK Labour Party (Welsh branch) and education.
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Last Friday, the BBC Wales website ran a story headlined ‘Black history lessons to be made mandatory in Welsh schools’. (If the link is broken, then the article is available here in pdf format.)
On the same day, Llais y Sais ran a full-page piece (below) by Jane Hutt MS, speaking on behalf of the ‘Welsh Government’, setting out her gang’s plan for an “anti-racist Wales”. (It too is available in pdf format.)
The two pieces are obviously linked. And both connect with a petition from last year demanding that the ‘Welsh Government’, ‘Make it compulsory for Black and POC UK histories to be taught in the Welsh education curriculum’.
It’s clearly orchestrated. And it needs to be answered because this campaign is misinterpreting statistics, telling outright lies, and marginalising the history of the people to whom this country belongs.
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Let’s start with the BBC piece.
It focuses on Professor Charlotte Williams, “who led a working group set up by the Welsh government to look at how BAME contributions through history was taught in schools”.
To the surprise of absolutely no one Prof Williams discovered that the current education system could have been designed by the Ku Klux Klan. Her working group made 51 recommendations – all of which have been accepted by the ‘Welsh Government’. Which has also shelled out £500,000 to help implement those recommendations. (With more to follow, I’m sure.)
I can’t tell you much about Professor Williams. She’s probably a Labour Party loyalist, and that explains how she got the gig. That’s how things work in Wales.
Though I’m not clear about her field of expertise and her titles seem to be honorary. Certainly, that’s what’s suggested by this piece on the Bangor University website. (Available here in pdf format.) She’s an honorary professor at Bangor and an honorary fellow at Glyndŵr and South Wales.
In the Bangor University article I’ve linked to Williams says: “We have a rich history in Wales, built on difference and diversity”. Er, no.
For the greater part of our history we have been one people, speaking one language, divided only by geography and dialect. This is what held us together, this is what gave us our sense of ourselves as a people during centuries of conquest and subjugation.
As late as the 19th century that unity was reinforced by the Industrial Revolution and our adherence to the nonconformist denominations. Making me wonder how much Prof Williams really knows about Wales.
The ‘diversity’ to which she refers is very recent. And while its proselytisers preach unity, in practice they label and divide.
While Welsh children are to be taught BAME history the ‘Welsh Government’ has decided they will not be taught their own history, or the history of their country unless this is done through the prism of a ‘diversity’ that is absent from the history of Wales until comparatively recent times.
Something very strange is happening. The desire to tell the story of ‘colonialism, discrimination and exploitation’ is being used to ignore or marginalise the history of an indigenous population with first-hand knowledge of colonialism, discrimination and exploitation.
And this has all been prompted by the death of a man last year in a US city most of you can’t even remember the name of.
Another untruth in the BBC article can be found with, “In 2019, 12% of all pupils aged five and over came from minority ethnic backgrounds . . . according to Pupil Level Annual School Census data.”
We are encouraged to interpret that as meaning 12% of pupils in Welsh schools come from non-white backgrounds. But the source used, StatsWales, makes it clear that’s not the case. What it tells us is that 12% did not identify as ‘White British’.
This 12% is made up of Irish children, Italian children, and Polish children, maybe even white Welsh kids who didn’t want to identify as British.
But if we are to have an à la carte education system then I suggest our pedagogues get their answers ready for when Mrs McGillicuddy rocks up demanding to know why Seamus and Siobhan are not being taught the history of Gaelic Ireland.
Polish history is very interesting as well. And what about the Risorgimento!
It may sound like a good idea, but once history is tailored to group or individual backgrounds then it can become as irrelevant to others as one’s family history.
That’s why sensible countries take the ‘broad sweep’ approach to the history of their country and then fit that national past into the wider, global picture.
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Now a quick shufty at the petition.
A hybrid beast, this. It is addressed to the Welsh Parliament, yet it keeps referring to the UK and Britain.
To take the petition wording at face value it seems to be asking that Welsh children be taught about the experiences of immigrant groups in England. But why?
It also wants our children to learn that Wales, “benefited from colonialism and slavery for centuries”. Did we really! These ‘benefits’ must have passed my family by.
But what is Black and POC history? Is it the history of African people(s)? The spread of Islam? Moghul India? Asia? China? Pre-Columbian America? With nothing to connect these disparate stories other than their contacts with Europeans, at what point will BAME history degenerate into, ‘White bastards . . . ‘.
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Finally, let’s look at the Llais y Sais article. There are so many distortions that it’s difficult to know where to start.
The article is written by Jane Hutt of Surbiton, who spent much of her childhood in colonial Africa. Her career in Wales began in the third sector, which helped her become a Labour councillor. She was then an unsuccessful Westminster candidate before securing the consolation prize of a seat in the new Welsh Assembly in 1999.
So, yet another Labour politician who’s never done a real job.
In the second paragraph Hutt says, “. . . our partners have shared more shocking stories of racism and hate crime endured in Wales”. Who might these ‘partners’ be, I wonder?
I would hazard a guess that these are Labour’s cronies in the third sector and elsewhere. People and groups reliant on public funding that can be best secured by exaggerating a problem and / or telling the ‘Welsh Government’ what it wants to hear.
What’s in it for the Labour Party? Well, the sub-text has always been – from the days of Naz Malik and his Swansea Bay Race Equality Council – ‘Welsh nationalism is by definition racist’. (Remember Naz?)
In discussing the impact of Covid, Hutt suggests that people from ethnic minority backgrounds have suffered worse than white people. This is more bollocks. The critical factor has been deprivation. The kind of deprivation experienced in the post-industrial communities that the ‘Welsh’ Labour Government has condemned to managed decline. Communities where the population is almost exclusively white, and Welsh.
Towards the end Hutt writes: “We want to make sure that Wales becomes not just non-racist, but anti-racist, by the year 2030”.
‘Non-racist’ means the absence of racism. To go further is to pander to extremists who argue that all white people carry the guilt for slavery and imperialist exploitation. A sentiment we saw articulated in the petition.
We are now in the territory of Critical Race Theory, reporting neighbours for watching Gone With The Wind, and shopping Nain for her Robertson’s golliwog badge. Maybe even self-flagellation.
Wales does not want to go there. Labour should not be taking us towards this fresh kind of intolerance.
And yet Hutt’s overlong homily is not without its unintended humour.
The idea of Travellers complaining about ‘racism and hate crime’ is laughable. What they’re far more likely to be moaning about is being collared for their criminal behaviour. (Here’s a very recent example.)
‘Colourism’ may be a term many of you are unfamiliar with, but it’s rife in India, where it seems people of darker skin tone tend to be looked down on. All tied up with history, caste, religion, etc. It also seems to operate in the USA. Where, again, it is something found within communities, in this case, African-Americans.
Either way, ‘colourism’ or ‘shadism’ is a complex subject internal to certain countries and groups. It should never be a concern of the ‘Welsh Government’.
Hutt concludes with, “We must stand proud with open hearts and minds, and take positive action to banish racism, discrimination and inequality from Wales”. All very noble, and guaranteed a round of applause at the next Labour Party bunfight.
But this commitment to combating discrimination and inequality would carry more weight if, instead of playing to certain galleries, Labour politicians took action to stop Welsh people being ethnically cleansed from their own communities.
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BAME education is so typically ‘Welsh’ Labour – about Wales, but not the Welsh. Twenty-two years of devolution has been all about gestures and virtue signalling for external audiences and tiny groups of activists.
While the essential Welshness of Wales, that sense of identity that brought devolution into being, has been undermined and the threats against it ignored.
Twenty-two years of anti-Welsh devolution.
This is why the Labour Party is opposed to both Welsh language education and the teaching of Welsh history in our schools. They fear it might make our young people more patriotic, and therefore, less likely to vote Labour.
Which is why, the more I think about BAME education, the more I suspect Labour may not have thought this through.
As I’ve just said, Labour does not want to enthuse Welsh children with a sense of patriotism, or worse, grievance. Nor does it wish to encourage anti-British or anti-English sentiment.
But if history is to be taught from a BAME and leftist perspective then how are children to be told about the slave trade, the Amritsar Massacre, An Gorta Mór, the Bengal famine, the coup against Mosaddeq, and so many other episodes of Britain’s past without encouraging a “Bastards!” reaction?
What you’ve read here is my interpretation of the Labour Party pandering to yet another vocal and unrepresentative minority. And while we should all strive to marginalise racism – for it will never be entirely eradicated – I believe that what is being suggested risks damaging the Welsh education system and doing more harm than good for communal relations.
I say that because I can think of few things more insulting than middle class left liberals designing a curriculum that tells kids relying on food banks in post-industrial shitholes that they should feel guilty for being the beneficiaries of slavery and ‘white privilege’.
It really is time to get rid off these dangerous and insulting clowns in the Labour Party, and the same goes for any other leftist party that might keep Labour in power.
♦ end ♦
I saw a comment from a quasi-literate on that Marcus Stead’s blog moaning that Welsh language defenders are invariably woke, and (Egad!) yet the language is spoken by hardly any minorities; a sort of inveterate thicko’s run on his irony bank, or doing of his outraged-at-the-hypocrissy [sic] beans.
Regarding Stead himself, he’d be an archetypal candidate for a trademark Jac-skewering of old. The man is obviously insufferably smug, culturally cringes with the best of them, and makes unverifiable claims to be a property developer. Oh, and 6 appointments on Companies House to boot! I wonder how long before the quota indicates crossover from dilettante to shyster?
Tedious and hackneyed claims are to be found in his blog, such as the movement being all about fanatical ethnic purity, and places over the border being natural hinterlands for leisure and business. Gobshites like this follicularly-bereft try-hard never grasp that the latter situation is obviously a function of alignment of major transport links, and not some axiomatic inevitability.
Message to George from Somerset – “No hard feelings mate but why not fuck off home and go for a paddle round the Levels”.
Last time I checked that would qualify as an outdoor activity. Equally picking his remains up off a mountainside would be an unnecessary and unpleasant task for our mountain rescue teams.
Just another wanker exercising his right to irritate everybody else. Back in the day curfew breakers were shot on sight. This next few weeks could provide good practice for reservists and regulars wishing to sharpen up skill sets.
The problem now might be that with travel restrictions within Wales lifted people like George are encouraged to think, ‘Once I cross the border . . . ‘.
The difference between ” freedom to…” and “freedom from…”
I see that the subversives have succeeded in Scotland. SNP now so infested with wokey creeps pushing all sorts of deviant agendas that Salmond and backers are setting up a new party – the Alba Party. The deviant 5th column which has torn Plaid apart in Wales now drives a wedge into the Scots indy movement at a far more critical time. Deviants and weirdos rule, so it seems.
Neil McEvoy seems to have had a similar background as Charlotte Williams. And somewhat similar experience when young. Both self-identify as mixed race, otherwise most people wouldn’t notice because most of Wales is not racist. Very different when they were adults. Mixed race prof gets on gravy-train, share of £500k. Mixed race MS gets hounded from Plaid. Endless complaints via Ombudsman and Standards Commissioner all upheld but trivial or baseless. Blocked by Presiding Officer and, possibly forced out of the Senedd by the police who don’t want him to canvass. Williams and McEvoy both loosely leftish but two very different outcomes. Why? What did McEvoy do wrong? His staff struggle to understand but think it may be he’s micro-aggressive with his eyebrows! You can’t make this stuff up! All because he stands up for the people of Kairdiff? Because he can win actual votes? Can someone please explain?
This is a question that has fascinated me since the first early signs of rifts between McEvoy and certain Plaid “thought leaders” or “empty heads” as they have become with alarming speed. McEvoy’s militancy and general dissent is driven by the issues that bother his constituents in the region and in the wider country. He is a hard working community representative, a good example of how some of the others in Y Senedd should operate if they could tear themselves away from those faddish ishoos that preoccupy them.
You are right, Jonathan, in that McEvoy was not seen by me as a BAME, POC or any set of letters used by the smart set. Having worked for c.12 years with a variety of ethnic communities in Cardiff there were loads of guys with various shades of dark skins who were part of our day to day bubble so race, colour, shit like that never came into it. They were part of a very mixed team and pulled together.
Of course none of us ever got on the gravy train. Hell, if we saw the gravy train we’d probably pinch the wheels off it and flog them down the scrappy out Lamby Way ! What was notably missing then was any trace of mouthy ishoo infested types who would seek to cause division where none existed. Academics, like our politicians have had too much resources dished out to them so they could go off and create research output with the express purpose of generating follow up work when in reality they were just pulling our legs. And our “leaders” fall for it every time and we end up paying.
That is the fundamental flaw in identity politics. It preaches unity and equality while imposing differences and dividing us.
Charlotte Williams makes a big thing of her childhood in the only black family in Llandudno, and I’m not sure how we’re expected to react. Llandudno was a town of white people, black people were not excluded, then her family moved there. That’s it. Playing on it suggests we’re expected to see racism where non existed.
Will they be teaching how the Welsh Quakers were the first in the world to abolish slavery, in Vermont and Pennsylvania? I schools in the United States they teach this history, especially in the Welsh tracts, the townships of Gwynedd, Merion, Narberth, Bala Cynwyd, Radnor, and Berwyn. It’s part of the curriculum there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDiSCTlHl5Q%5Bremovetoplay%5D
Black History of Wales is anti-British.
The BBC claim to be the first in the world to Abolish slavery in the 1830s. This is false. The first Acts of Abolition were in Vermnont and Pennsylvania in the 1780s, and the Welsh Bapists and Quakers were instrumental in this. Perhaps if black history is to be taught in Welsh schools they will hire some teachers from Pennsylvania who have taught this Welsh history for centuries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_LFGb84VxA%5Bremovetoplay%5D
Why import ignorant excuses like Jane Hutt and Vaughan Gething, both colonial servants of the British Empire in Africa? Time to kick out these colonial parasites from Wales. Wasn’t the fake doctor also a colonial reject?
Details like those are too confusing, Brychan. Everything must be reduced to black and white, literally.
The thing is, details like that are within the living memory of the “black community”.
A few years ago one of my work colleagues in London a mate of mine in the football crowd was second generation, ex Trinidad, by some fluke of fotball he visited Swansea. He observed paintings and carvings in the Cape Horner, other dock pubs too, as you might know, depicted black men. In London black people were never depicted as heroic, either subordinate or erased. In Wales, most tellingly Swansea, they were sea captains!
We have a different history in Wales.
As did South America, the main trade routes, liberated from colonialism much earlier. This thing about Picton. To Trinidadians, that time was known as the British proxy from Spain. Where slave ownerahip was continued by Spanish laws, within the British Empire. Details that like of BLM are ignorant of.
I also think it’s time to remind the Labour Party that the Windrush was a ship built by the Nazi’s, requisitioned by the British after WW2, and the immigration status of the passengers aboard that arrived from the Caribbean in 1948 was determined by a Labour government, and continued thereafter. As you say, details.
Who’s history will be in this curriculum?
Neither Welsh nor black, but what they want to depict.
£100 bail was a lot of loot in 1968/69-ish. Still, no one else took the head off a prince around that time. Typical Swansea oneupmanship !
And then the Quarter Sessions. When did they end?
I think there was some reform sometime in the 70’s. I’m not intimately familiar with the history of the courts as I was quite good at avoiding capture ! In the late 60’s Cardigan Quarter Sessions were still sentencing blokes to months of hard labour digging peat on Tregaron bog, or worse still cleaning up after students at Aber !
Cranogwen appeal
We have to put up our own tributes, no point waiting fir Welsh Labour to do so. https://gofund.me/94a4525f
The Courts Act 1971 (effective in 1972) merged Quarter Sessions with Assizes to form Crown Courts.
I was among the last to appear at the old Cardiganshire Quarter Sessions. Brings a tear to my eye.
Nothing quite like sentiment with a hefty layer of haze bought on by passing of 50+ years ! At least you can say you was there, and you still here today !
I remember Naz Malik, of the Swansea Bay Racial Equality Council, along with Dafydd Wigley (then Leader of Plaid Cymru) both refusing to help quell the ANTI-Welsh Racism being printed weekly in ‘The Sunday Times’ as written by the late racist A A Gill. Examples below may shock you. Gill was then living under the same roof as his then wife Amber Rudd who later became Home Secretary. Where does Welsh Labour keep finding these ‘gems” like Hutt and their cronies? Dafydd Wigley was too scared to confront ‘The Sunday Times’. That was left to a few individuals who pushed the case and Gill was then formally cautioned by the Metropolitan Police for incitement to Racial Hatred. That formal caution proved that the Pol9ice considered an offence had been committed. Of course it was not just Malik or Wigley who failed to react to this racism – it was everyone then in Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour then. Are they the same now? Look at these examples below of A A Gill’s weekly comments as published in ‘The Sunday Times’ :-
Examples of that offensive, sexist and racist ANTI WELSH material :-
(1) [referring to Wales] It ought to be called the un-principality.The Welsh would not recognise a principle if sheep wore them as underpants.
(2) {referring to a Film about Wales] This film was a story of incontinent,mendacious fornication, child abuse, drug addiction, prostitution, depression and despair, all on the dole. In fact, it was an every day story of Valley girls. There was so much thoughtless serial rutting that it should have been called La Rhondda. It was brilliantly convincing…………….. By God, it was Wales.
(3) Now the Welsh women and make-up. If you look Welsh, you do see the problem. You either mortgage the house and go for it with a trowel, or just forget about it as being a bigger job than painting the Forth bridge.
(4) Valley kids were revealed as the most likely to be criminal no hopers who believe further education and training is a stupid waste of time.
(5) The Welsh are particularly mean about vowels. They are mean about everything, of course, but they hoard their vowels for eisteddfods.
(6) [referring to a Welsh Hotel] I know it’s actually in Wales, but it has got a carpet, so it counts as English.
(7) A group of sporting personalities were asked to drop-kick an amusing goal over quarter sized posts. They all failed. So Wales will be seriously considering them for next season.
(8) His guardsmen were typically Welsh; mournful, pudding-faced stoical moaners. You could see why the regiment’s nickname is “the Sheepshaggers” they spend a lot of time crouching with intent in fields.
(9) I hate Japanese tourists most of all. I would hate the Welsh even more, but there aren’t any Welsh tourists; they are too mean and they do not have the wanderlust of the Japanese.
(10) Being my agent is about as profitable as being a Welsh dental hygienist.
(11) Gastronomically, Wales is a foodie “diversion-free” zone. You can easily travel from Cardiff to Anglesey without ever stimulating a tastebud.
(12) Wales enjoys a panoramic range of prejudice. We all know they are loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark ugly, pugnacious little trolls. If you find a two faced Welshman, then back home in the valleys they think he’s been short changed in the boat race department. Television has tried to create a series made up entirely of Welsh people, but only the Welsh have the stomach to watch them. God knows what they say about the rest of us on their own channel. As Rabbie Burns said “a man’s a man for a’ that” – unless of course he’s Welsh.
(13) I yield to nobody in my deep concern for the malingering man of Europe – the gargoyle-visaged Welsh. With innate disregard for veracity they have traduced my charitable concern for their hideous blighted country and are reported as saying that I called them “hideous trolls”. Nothing could be further from the truth. They go on to whine that my honest observations are affecting inward investment, that the truth may damn the cornucopia of Asian electronic companies paying them to lift televisions and videos a skill all Welsh lads learn as children in the holiday homes of their English neighbours. The clear light of truth may hurt.
(14) ..the Welsh. All they’ve ever been systematically humiliated with are copious Giros and repeat prescriptions of pessaries for ovine cystitis.
ALL QUOTES FROM A.A.GILL IN “THE SUNDAY TIMES” .
All that proves is that he had a sense of humour and you don’t. Have you ever heard of satire? Adrian Gill had a lot of affection for Welsh people – even the ones who hated the English and told you so repeatedly.
I wanted to read a review of the 2018 Spike Lee film BlacKkKlansman, which was on at the cinema but was unsure it would be worthwhile me seeing it so I tried to read a review first on a computer at a public library in Wales’s capital city. The pages had been blocked as being unsuitable for my eyes by the local authority. I went up to the desk and asked the member of staff why on earth that should be as all I was doing was trying too read a film review and he said it was probably because the letters KkK were grouped together in the film title. It is quite possible that had I written an e-mail at a public computer or posted anything online with those letters grouped together it would have been stopped and I might have been reported for some minor “hate incident” or asked to “check my thinking”.
Welcome to Wales, where anti-racism will mean you are barred, blocked and banned from accessing basic, perfectly legal information on the grounds that someone more powerful than you decides it isn’t good for you purely and simply because it isn’t good for them and the radical feminist progressive BLM neo-Marxist extremists who help to fund them.
You cut Gill a lot of slack there. Had it been a “one off” I think I could agree with you but the man had form for repeated prejudiced insults fired from behind a protective screen of journalistic “licence”. Had he written similar junk about BAME or POC he’d have been put out of business a long time ago. Try it sometime, see how long before the guardians of correctness come looking for you.
Exactly, Gill was a repeat offender. A compulsive Cymrophobe. Though I could never understand what he had against us.
The good news is he’s entirely decomposed by now. He told you he was Gill!
Gill was an alcoholic and the drink would likely have killed him had he not given it up. Once “dry”, the self loathing that often accompanies alcoholism developed into a lifetime of being spiteful and downright nasty towards others, not just the people of Wales. A thoroughly unlikeable character, and one of quite limited talent, which I’m pretty sure he knew himself. This in turn probably fuelled his dislike of the rest of the world. Infamously shot a baboon just to see what it felt like to kill a living creature. What sort of bastard would do that? But there are quite a few out there.
Apart from the baboon there are parallels with another odious dry drunk who was once Tony Blair’s right-hand man.
I’m glad I never gave up the grog!
Never trust a man who doesn’t drink!
Or to capture the zeitgeist of the “metoo” era, never trust a man full stop.
Stan you forget Harold Wilson’s right hand man. I forget his name – was it George Brown – who appeared hilariously drunk on UK B/W TV. Any way let’s concentrate on the “Dick Head” Garry W Gibbs whose web site is full of self boasting praise “prize journalist” SHIT! He supports the racism of A A Gill. Let’s make it clear – Garry W Gibbs SUPPORTS RAW ANTI WELSH RACISM ! Is he a wimp who has a shower before going to work, or a real man who has a shower after work. In my 77 yrs I’ve done both – more the latter – the pick and shovel or the pen and paper GWGibbs!
I enjoyed Gills humour, he was very funny, And he actually gave my brother and his mates a fantastic review for their te and tost van in Glastonbury.
When it comes to racism it does exist in today’s Wales, I would say it is worse now than it was a 100 years ago. , I hear it frequently coming from the mouths of friends and so called respectable people who never met a black person in their life. They also love the royal family, Boris JOhnson, anti- Welsh independence and thankfully, dying out.. We have the tabloid press and Brexit to thank for that..
over a hundred years ago people of all races were welcomed to Wales, settled and integrated and married into our families. But Jac you are bang on the nail with regards to the teaching of history, Once I saw this petition I knew how it would go with regards to teaching Welsh history in Wales – and the bollocks pouted by Kirsty Williams “there is no Welsh history” but histories as she said. That is utter nonsense.
As Dylan Iorwerth pointed out in yesterdays Western Mail how can you teach about the Pennant’s West Indian colonies if not in the context of the Penrhyn’s exploitation of the Welsh quarrymen? Multicultural and colourful Tiger Bay /Cardiff Docks would not exist without the coalfields of south Wales.,
As you said history is the story of conquering and exploitation, Welsh history is also the story of heroic deeds not just in some stupid war but in the fields of medicine, education, science, industry, culture, social justice and politics. And should be taught in our context. and our kids should be taught about it in its totality .This business as you say is a totally knee jerk reaction wheras they had over a year to consider the Welsh history curriculum and came up with ….SFA. I learnt more about Welsh history in 1975 than they do now as they are obsessed with the sex life of a tenuously Welsh Henry 8th without even mentioning the Acts of Union ( serious).
Currently sorting out a plaque to remember a Welsh speaking suffragette, that Chware Teg (useless quango) has no interest in helping fund . Too Welshy probably. Anyway I did it myself with the help of the local council and civic trust and a crowdfunder.. the Welsh govt are happy to see us obliterated.
Makes me mad, Welsh governments do far more damage to Wales than a dead food and TV critic ever did, is what i am trying to say
You’re right about 1970s teaching of national Welsh history. I was taught it, as a major modue in UK history, and separate from it, with a separate exam paper. Kirsty Williams’ edict that teachers now focus on local history “because there’s no such thing as Welsh history” is therefore a verifiable backward step, and ploy for integration and eradication of kids’ notions of Welshness.
My critical piece written on 20th March in comments under your “Lucky Black Cats” fits better in here. Bit of Dafis jumping the gun. Spring is in the air, and the mood is getting into gear for more attacks on these creeps whose sole aim seems to be eradication or assimilation. Wipe out any trace of our history and identity and it will be job done. So here it comes again :
“We must develop from being non racist to being anti-racist” – now that is a fine piece of idealism, and in a completely fair and unbiased world I would completely endorse the underlying sentiment. However, in another tweet we get as big a contradiction as one could ever ask for. It is demanded that BAME and POC history should be leveraged to a more advantageous position in the curriculum for Welsh schools.
FFS, we haven’t even got a decent representation yet for our own history – something more detailed about what we are, where we came from, and what it was like to be on the receiving end of Roman occupation, Anglo Saxon aggression and Anglo Norman invasion and slow assimilation into the post Plantagenet Greater England. Thereafter we experienced the Industrial Revolution ( where Kinnock’s awareness of history starts !) and the more modern version of colonial exploitation up to the present day.
Indeed there are many parallels with the aggressions and exploitations experienced by the various homelands of BAME and POC communities. Perhaps the real time bomb is contained in the teaching of a comparative history where those communities now domiciled here in Wales can see that by adopting an Anglophonic identity and its superficial gibberish they are now betraying their new homeland in much the same way as their countries of origin were screwed by the Anglo Brit colonists of earlier centuries. That’s a prospect that could give a lot of Unionist wankers down the Bay a bad case of the bilious.
20/03/2021 at 11:29