An interesting one here in Gwynedd is the roads and a few fields being dug up between Llanberis and Pentir to lay a new cable for National Grid.

https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/network-and-infrastructure/dinorwig-pentir

It’s been an absolute pain for a small hydro scheme and I reckon if locals new at the start of Dinorwig what they would have to put up with over decades they’d have said nein, danke – this isn’t the first time the A4244 and A4086 environs have been dug up for power cables in the the 15+ years I’ve lived around here.

I reckon the environmental impact assessment for the scheme would make interesting reading to an expert when compared to what has actually occurred in this over running scheme. Heavy plant and specialist rock crunching machinery aside, lots of diesel vans running constantly when in situ (observably so, Core now, Waitings before), generators for traffic lights, idling motorists, etc. It’s an utter nonsense,

I blames the booze.

My Dear Jac – I do think we are indeed making the same point.

But the point about Wyoming is that there is no sense of being a separate identity to the rest of the USA. A Tryweryn-style situation would be interpreted as being put upon by a big city, or the federal government, or the corporate world. What made Tryweryn so important in recent Welsh history was that it brought into sharp relief the unequal relationship between Wales and England. And it did it more effectively than any Plaid Cymru pamphlet or any speech by Gwynfor Evans. It was there – in black and white and in your face. ‘We’re going to take hat we want and there’s fuck all you can do about it‘.

My point about Wyoming was to illustrate that superficially, it could be compared to Wales, in a hypothetical Tryweryn-esque scenario. Both are relatively sparsely populated ‘sub-national’ units, remote both geographically and in sentiment from the seat of power of the respective polity. Any such similarity ends there, as the former is not the exclusive national territory of an ethnic group, yet the latter has none of the constitutionally mandated protections the former does against egregious actions of the top-tier government.

People of Wyoming moving elsewhere if pissed off brings into sharp relief this contrast, as equivalent migration from Wales would be considered more along the lines of ethnic displacement and cultural erosion.

Galicia, I’m sure I read, is considered by some to be the seventh Celtic Nation. You must have seen that Pan-Celtic flag with that spiral thing in the centre? There are variants with the Galician flag taking up a segment. Spain gets even more complex linguistically when you consider Galician is closer to Portuguese, Catalan to French, and Euskara defies attempts at classification I believe, much like Albanian.

To answer your point about Ireland. Once the clan structure in Ulster had been broken, and after ‘The Flight of the Earls’ (O’Neil and O’Donnell), Ulster was open to Plantation, and much of it was spontaneous. The North Channel is only 12 miles wide. But governments in London and Edinburgh wanted Anglophone, Protestant, Lowland Scots. For the very good reason that the Highlanders, largely a law unto themselves, were from the same culture as those who were being dispossessed. And many of the clans remained Catholic.

South Tyrol was taken from Austria after WWI. Punishment for losing. Germany lost territory. So did Hungary. Serbia was rewarded with Jugoslavia. The Czechs were given their own state (including Slovaks and Sudetenland Germans). It was all a disaster, which, with the conditions imposed at Versailles, guaranteed WWII.

The examples you use – Germany, USA, Australia – are united by language and identity, there are no minorities strong enough to assert themselves other than Stone Age original inhabitants. These will be pandered to, allowed to open casinos, exploited by the left, but never fully compensated because to do so would undermine the state built around them.

As for Wyoming, what’s special about it? People might be pissed off, but they’d be compensated and they’d move. Americans are always moving.

Spain is far more complicated. ‘Castilian’ is not just a regional identity, it’s an alternative name for the Spanish language itself. No one would dispute that Catalans, Basques, and Galicians are not Castilian. But what about south Catalonia (Valencia)? And Andalusia, with its Moorish heritage? Or Cantabrians, who also speak Castilian, but many see them as Celtic, for there was a big Celtic presence in Iberia during Hannibal’s time, and later.

Then there’s Navarre, with its capital at Pamplona, originally a Baque kingdom. Castilian in the east and south, Basque in the west and north. A very divided province that’s not part of Euskadi.

One problem with Spain is that there’s no alternative name for a very complex country, unlike English and British. Might avoid a lot of bad feeling if there was a name for the country that recognised the non-Castilian identities.

Here’s a $64,000 question for you – where does South Tyrol fit into this respective coalescence of the Italic and Germanic peoples? My guess would be the Catholicism factor playing its part again.

Which country was the ‘blame’ for the Plantations of Ireland out of England and Scotland, then? Perhaps directed from London but for expediency those planted were largely from Lowland Scotland due to geographical proximity?

It’s a bit of a paradox in a way, that such, in many ways, decentralised, federal states like Germany, the US or Australia very much regard themselves as one nation, whereas here in the UK we have our own (sometimes overlapping) national identites within what was for centuries a unitary state.

A thought experiment might illuminate this: imagine if Washington imposed a Tryweryn on a flyover state, say Wyoming – remote from the East Coast conurbations but still very much a part of American heartland. The local people may well be pissed off at the drowning of their villages, but such chagrin would not align along national sentiment. However, the state could contest the decision by Washington in the Supreme Court, the complete inverse of our case of being a distinct nation with no such recourse under Ivory Tower Westminster rule.

Another difference I feel with the UK, is that unlike say Spain or Germany, there is no equivalence in nomenclature. In Spain, the bits that aren’t Aragon or Catalonia or Galicia, or whatever, may be informally referred to as Castille, but it is not a distinct entity and/or nation with a sharply outlined presence like England, to my knowledge at least (I’m good friends with a Spaniard and I’ve never heard him describe himself as Castillian). In Germany, when considering say Bavaria with its identity and ‘Landheit’, there is no such concept of ‘The Rest of Them’ as a unit of one identity – Die Anderen Länder?

Is that nuclear fission or fusion? If the former, it again relies on an expendable fissile elements, both in the sense of there being a limited amount in the ground to be mined, and due to natural radioactive decay, which admittedly can take billions of years depending on the half lives of the particular element/isotope.

With nuclear fusion, you’re on to something if we can crack it at scale and safely, but I fear far too many vested interests in energies green and ‘dirty’ will do everything they can to prevent this happening.

No, very different. Germany and Italy unified along lines of language and sentiment. But Bismark excluded Austria because its empire was multi-ethnic, it would have given the new Germany a Catholic majority, and Vienna was a more attractive city than Berlin.

Whereas Italy had to concede Corsica to France, but otherwise took in all the Italian-speaking areas other than the bit in Switzerland.

It was in many ways bringing together in one state people who had always thought of themselves as German or Italian. The cultural or linguistic terms ‘Italy’ and ‘Germany’ had been in use long before political unification.

The UK as we know it today is made up of four countries, three of which regard themselves as different nations (confirmed by different languages), and the fourth is a creation of settlement by one of those nations upon another nation that has now left the Union

Which reminds us that warfare, conquest, dispossession, cultural oppression, religious discrimination, and economic exploitation, all play a big part in the UK’s past..

Italy and Germany can’t really be compared to that.