In England, success in life is bound up with where you went to school. In Wales, where I come from, the standard of education can be so miserable that you’d do better to get expelled.
I did. I’d just spent three days in ‘isolation’ in my south Wales comprehensive — banished to a cubicle with a CCTV camera — for misbehaviour. As I left the grounds, I lit a cigarette. A teacher accosted me. I got lippy and she smacked me across the face. I was expelled soon after. Thank God.
If you want good schooling in Wales, you’d be best to go private. If you’re taken ill, make sure you’re treated in the English NHS, not the Welsh version. If you want a private-sector job, best leave Wales. You get the picture. My country, with its mighty industrial past, has become the basket case of the United Kingdom. Wales has the highest proportion of low-income households in Britain — and there is more poverty in working households in Wales than in non-working ones. Wales also has the UK’s highest level of child poverty.
When the scale of this social, educational and economic failure is pointed out in Westminster, Welsh politicians splutter about ‘a Tory war on Wales’ or ‘an English war on Wales’. To which, as a young, working-class guy who’s lived almost all his life in Wales, I can only reply: if telling the truth is war, then this is a just war.
The problem is simple: Wales has been betrayed by 15 years of maladministration by a Labour government stuck in the 1970s. There’s no shortage of patriotic fervour here: if you want a taste of national pride, visit Cardiff on a rugby match day. But that just makes it more tragic that devolution in Wales offers a masterclass in how not to run a country.
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