Category: politics
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Dear Rowan, dear Laura
What sort of country do we want Wales to be in future? Rowan Williams and Laura McAllister have recently invited us to answer that question. They are the joint chairs of the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales, a group set up in 2021 by the Welsh Government to come up with options…
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A short letter to Priti Patel
Dear Priti Patel I’m writing to you with a simple request: to search your conscience. Just to avoid doubt, I don’t mean your political calculus. You don’t need any encouragement to exercise that. No, I mean your personal moral conscience. As the UK Home Secretary and a senior member of the UK government you’re responsible…
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Sir Boris Walpole and the cartoonists
It’s a commonplace that since George Osborne set in motion the immiseration of poor people, through his programme of austerity and big cuts in benefits, Britain has seemed to regress to the time of our Victorian ancestors. ‘Poor laws’, and the nineteenth century distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, are back with us, and so…
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Beyond shame and guilt
When I was a young student and easily impressed by big theory, I was struck by a book by E.R. Dodds called The Greeks and the irrational. Its origin was a series of lectures Dodd gave in California in 1949. Or, going further back, a conversation he’d had, while studying the Parthenon sculptures in the…
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Albania: from Stalin’s knees to pyramid schemes
Lea Ypi’s Free: coming of age at the end of history, published in 2021, is a very unusual book. It’s at once a rite-of-passage memoir – Lea is around eight or nine years old at the start and is about to leave school for university at the end – and a child’s view of one…
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What are museums for?
The 2021 Richard Burton Lecture in Swansea University was given this week by David Anderson, Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru (‘Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’, to give it its hyper-awkward formal name). His title was ‘Do Welsh museums matter?’ It was a learned and a challenging talk, raising crucial questions about the role of…
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Who would live in Wales?
This week the Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (RhLC from now on) wrote an article sparked by the campaign by Vaughan Gething, the minister for the Welsh economy, to persuade young people born or raised in Wales not to emigrate. An important part of her, she says, is Welsh – she grew up in north…
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Plague: a Martian sends a postcard home
My dearest brothers and sisters Five years have passed since I wrote to you about my last visit to Earth. You will remember that I ended my report by counselling you not to send me on a third mission to that hapless planet, or at least to that insignificant part of it known as the…
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Pos poblogrwydd Boris
Yn gyson mae’r cwmni pôl pinion YouGov yn tracio bwriad pleidleisio pobl ar draws Prydain. Dangosa’r canlyniadau mwyaf diweddar (4-5 Ionawr 2021) fod y Blaid Geidwadol a’r Blaid Lafur yn gyfartal (39% yr un). Sut ar y ddaear y gallai hyn fod yn bosibl? Ystyriwch yr hyn sy wedi digwydd ers i Boris Johnson ennill…
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The art of the political apology
Most politicians are egotists. (All right, I can think of a few exceptions, but as a general rule the proposition stands.) The bloodstreams of those who reach positions of real power contain dangerously high levels of egotism, or they would not have succeeded as they have. One of the results of such self-regard is that…