Monday 23 September 2019

"It's the bloody Welsh who are the problem".

We must be very careful in completely accepting  the claim by  research by Oxford  Wales would not have voted by a majority for Brexit if not for retired English people moving across the border,.

Nation Cymru covers a report  that says
This was despite a pro-Leave vote in the valleys of the south-east of Wales, according to Danny Dorling, professor of geography at Oxford.
“Wales was made to look like a Brexit-supporting nation by its English settlers,” he told the Sunday Times.
In the 2016 referendum, border towns and areas of central Wales popular with English settlers saw a large proportion of leave votes. Wrexham and Powys were examples of this, he said.
Dorling revealed the statistics at the British Science Association’s annual meeting at Warwick University.
He said: “The Welsh did not want to quit the EU, but that is one of many false beliefs about Brexit.
“The biggest is that the pro-leave vote was due to northerners. It’s true some northern areas were strongly pro-Brexit, but the population there is too small to swing the vote.
“The real support for Brexit, in terms of numbers of votes, was in places like Cornwall, which was 57% for leave, Hampshire, with 54%, Essex with 62% and Norfolk with 57%.
“It is those southern English voters that are dragging Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland unwillingly out of Europe.
“Everyone blames Wigan and Stoke for Brexit but we should really be blaming Cornwall and Devon.”


Map showing the percentage of the population born in England according to the 2011 census.
There does nit seem to a major correlation  with the percentage born in England  and the areas (in blue) that had a majority voting for Brexit.


Indeed some of the areas that did have the lowest number of those born in England had  a large vote for Brexit. Especially the "Working Class" Labour voting valleys,


I haven't seen the complete details of the Oxford University research , but even if it is true . We must accept that in large areas of Wales and with the highest population it was Welsh born people  who voted for Brexit.

In the years after Brexit as Wales sees itself suffering the consequence it may be that some will attempt to attribute blame on "English immigration" that did not give us the moral authority of claiming (as Scotland can) that "
Wales didn't vote for Brexit".

The late Gwyn Alf Williams often said that "it's the bloody Welsh who are the problem".

The danger of attributing Wales's problems to "outsiders"  must be averted the whole Independence  campaign based on us taking responsibility for not only our future but our past as well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Further to the discussion of national identity and Brexit vote. These are the percentages of people who did NOT record a Welsh only identity on the 2011 census and the UKIP vote in the Euro election 2014. Correlation does not equal causation, but I found this fascinating.
Rhondda: 26.7 and 26.1
Torfaen: 33.8 and 32.5
NeathPT: 28.2 and 26.4
Caerphil: 28.8 and 30.7
BlaenGwent: 27.6 and 30.2
Merthyr 26.8 and 33.8