Essays

The Election That Broke an Inheritance

Why Montgomeryshire in 2010 Was So Corrosive for Liberal Wales Since publishing my earlier essay on the decline of Liberalism in Wales, I have been asked how one election result in one rural constituency could prove so damaging for an entire political tradition. (source 1) The answer is that Montgomeryshire in 2010 was never merely…
Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920)

The Welsh Entrepreneur Who Engineered Distance from Newtown In the standard story of modern retail, innovation is usually associated with cities. Manchester industrialised production, London refined display, and Liverpool mastered distribution. Yet one of the most significant changes in consumer life began not in a metropolis, but in Newtown, Montgomeryshire. From this small mid Wales…
The Decline of Liberalism in Wales, and the Fracturing of Its Inheritance

For more than a century, Liberalism in Wales was not merely a party label, it was the organising language of public life. It fused chapel morality, civic ambition, land reform, and a distinctly Welsh insistence on dignity into a durable political culture. (source 1) (source 2). Its decline, therefore, is not simply an electoral story,…
Rhodri Mawr and the First Architecture of Welsh Power

Introduction, Beyond Legend Rhodri Mawr, who died in 878, stands at a structural turning point in Welsh history. He was neither the first king in Wales nor the ruler of a unified nation in any modern sense. Yet during his lifetime the scale at which Welsh politics operated changed perceptibly. What had been a mosaic…
Trevor Owen Davies (1895–1966)

A Farm Boy at Christ Church, Oxford, A Welsh Scholar in Public Life In 1920s Oxford, the halls of Christ Church were filled with the sons of the English landed elite. Among them sat an unlikely figure: a farm labourer from the Dyfi Valley who had traded his plough for Augustine. Trevor Owen Davies was…
When an English City Drowned a Welsh Village: Llanwyddyn and the Making of Lake Vyrnwy

In the summer of 2018, after weeks of sustained heat, the waters of Lake Vyrnwy receded to levels rarely seen in recent decades (source 1). Along the exposed margins of the reservoir, fragments of masonry and faint outlines of foundations emerged from the silt, traces of lanes and walls briefly visible once more (source 1).…
Voices from the Uplands, why I wrote it, and why it matters now

Voices from the Uplands: The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales is, in the simplest sense, a book about my own ancestors, the Davies family of Caeadda, Llanwrin. But I did not write it to produce another neatly ordered pedigree, nor to add one more family tree to the growing pile of genealogical summaries…
Brexit and the Broken Thread of Trust: Why Britain is Stuck in a Loop of Instability

Brexit, whatever your vote, did real damage to trust. Not simply because it divided the country, but because it exposed something more corrosive than disagreement, a political system that struggled to hear its own people, then proved unable to manage the consequences of the decision it had itself offered. Millions felt unheard before the referendum,…
Why Reform UK Will Never Understand Wales

Wales is not a branch office of Westminster politics. It is a nation with its own civic memory, its own institutional landscape, and its own lived experience of what happens when power is exercised at a distance. Reform UK’s problem is not simply that it is provocative, plenty of parties have been provocative, it is…
Nigel Farage, the politics of the headline, and the art of moving on

Nigel Farage’s most reliable talent is not governing, nor even organising, it is sensing the national temperature and turning it into a slogan before anyone else. He is a political mood-board, not a builder. He does not cultivate institutions, he cultivates moments. He does not carry arguments through to delivery, he carries them to the…
The Marcher Lords, the Private Warlords Who Invented Border Brutality

There is a particular kind of violence that flourishes on borders. Not the open violence of battlefield armies, marching under banners and accountable, at least in theory, to a crown or parliament. But the private violence of semi-autonomous men, installed at the edge of a realm, given licence to do what the centre cannot openly…
The Treachery of 1847: How the “Blue Books” Colonised the Welsh Mind

In 1847 three substantial parliamentary reports were laid before Westminster under the unromantic title Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. Their blue covers gave them their enduring popular name, the “Blue Books”, and their conclusions, or at least the spirit in which those conclusions were delivered, detonated across…