Tag: Welsh nationalism
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Emlyn Hooson (1925–2012)
The Barrister Who Carried Welsh Liberalism Through Its Leanest Years In the long aftermath of Lloyd George, Welsh Liberalism did not collapse in a single dramatic moment. It thinned, election by election, chapel by chapel, until it seemed less a political force than a memory. Emlyn Hooson matters because he refused to accept that quiet…
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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…
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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…
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My Political Heritage, Wales in My Blood, and the Quiet Lessons of Ancestry
Most people assume political identity is something you acquire, a set of opinions shaped by the news cycle, social media, and the dominant arguments of the moment. In Wales, that assumption rarely survives contact with the deeper story. Because Welsh political culture is not merely contemporary. It is historical. It is inherited. It is shaped…
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When Firelight Forged a Nation: A Machynlleth Tribute to Owain Glyndŵr
On a Dark Winter’s Afternoon, Everything Changed On a wind-lashed winter’s afternoon, my Uncle Glyn beckoned me closer to the hearth. His eyes glowed like ember as he whispered, “Owain Glyndŵr was born from these hills—and he swore to shield every farmer, every family.” In that flickering glow, I felt my heartbeat echo Machynlleth’s ancient…
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When the Last Prince Hid in Our Hills: A Family Legend That Still Haunts Wales
High in the forgotten uplands of Montgomeryshire, where bracken folds over ancient sheep paths and the hills roll unbroken into silence, there stands a farmhouse my family still speaks of in reverent tones. Its name is Esgair Llywelyn — Llywelyn’s Ridge. Even now, the place endures. Weathered, empty, but defiantly upright. Whitewashed stone walls streaked…
