Calum Davies is a Conservative councillor in Cardiff and former Senedd candidate.
Given that the new Plaid Cymru government decided to go on holiday shortly after assuming office, I was worried that there would be little material for the dreaded August column.
Fortunately, news that this Christmas will see the premiere of Star Wars: A New Hope dubbed in Welsh, led by Emmy-award winner Matthew Rhys voicing Han Solo, has served as inspiration to bring the Welsh language to the attention of Conservative Home readers. I hope it provides an insight into an area of government work of which those in England would have exposure – language policy.
For a start, the translated space opera has £100,000 of taxpayer money behind it – and Plaid ministers have just spent a month saying they couldn’t put more money into additional learning needs education. The announcement also coincides with the annual Eisteddfod, a long-running cultural event centred around the Welsh language, Y Gymraeg.
As a Welsh-speaker myself, raised in an area of Mid Wales where most people can speak the language, I have had a complicated personal relationship with my mother tongue.
In the Victorian age, in an effort to increase uptake of the professional language of society, schoolchildren were punished for speaking Welsh rather than English by having to wear a badge of shame that hung from their necks called ‘the Welsh Not’. Modern nationalists would label this evidence of English evil. Historians will tell you this was supported by their parents who wanted good prospects for their offspring.
Fast forward to the early 2000s, and my primary school teacher turned the tables and made those who spoke English wear ‘an English Not’. Trying to speak to my classmate who had moved there from England, it adorned me many a time. That teacher is now probably living nicely off a gold-plated public sector pension, presumably after decades of this low-grade child abuse. For me, it was a formative experience.
From there, I always bristled against any rules that tried to suppress English and set up Welsh on a pedestal. I have long suspected that this provoked my belief in choice and agency, pushing me towards libertarian stances and the Conservative Party during my political development.
Welsh people are said to be lacking in self-confidence. Anecdotal evidence of young Welsh interviewees for Oxbridge colleges being far too humble is rife. I once recalled a political lecturer, himself of the land of song, saying “the Welsh are pathetically grateful for poor public services”. We have long been outdone in many disciplines not just by Englishmen but Scots too.
So, whilst I appreciate efforts to instil greater self-confidence in the Welsh, I find doing this via the language has, at times, led to a misguided mindset that fails to tread the tightrope between promoting the language and denigrating those who do not use it. As a conservative, I want to preserve Welsh heritage, language, and culture. I have no wish to stymy it. I want to see it flourish. Nevertheless, in the same way the SNP tried to tie their party and their separatist cause to Scottishness, it seems Plaid and the devocratic regime in Cardiff Bay want to do the same.
Historian Ned Thomas deftly attributes the issue of the Welsh language as a problem for the furtherance of Plaid’s political cause, explaining much of their poor pre-2026 electoral performance. Despite the perception of many in the nationalist movement that Wales is an “organic nation,” the vision of Plaid founder Saunders Lewis had one substantial disadvantage: that it can “only define the 80 per cent of the country’s population which does not speak Welsh in terms of loss or of incomplete Welshness”.
The implication of this is the dismissal of whole sociohistorical experiences in Wales because they do not fit their victim narrative (a Plaid MS once claimed in a hustings I attended that Wales is a colony): for example, the extent to which “industrial south Wales became an area of mixed population and mixed cultures in the later 19th century”. So, like with ‘the Welsh Not’, much of today’s Welsh nationalism is based on a confected mythology of grievance that they projected onto Y Gymraeg.
Devolution was presented as a means of preserving, protecting, and proliferating the language. However, the census shows that whilst the population of Wales increased from 2.8 million to over three million between 2001 and 2021, the number of Welsh speakers declined. By 2011, it had fallen by 20,000 in ten years. That year, the Welsh Language Measure gave the language official status in Wales but, a decade later, it had fallen by another 24,000 to 538,298. In 2001 there were 229 neighbourhoods where more than half of residents spoke Welsh, falling to just 141 20 years later, a decline of 38 per cent.
The only time the numbers went up, in 1991 and 2001, was after Conservative governments established S4C, the Welsh language television channel, and passed the Welsh Language Act, putting Welsh on an equal footing with English in public business and justice administration.
This is despite the devolved elite’s heavy-handed approach to increasing use of Y Gymraeg, from forcing schools to abandon bilingualism (as happened to my own secondary school) and renaming national parks and electoral constituencies in Welsh only (in an act of voter suppression). The public also pays for a Welsh Language Commissioner and Welsh Language Standards that force public (and some private) bodies to produce translated versions of all their output.
This has in many cases meant supporters of the language pushed beyond parity, as they really wish for precedence. I contend that this is wrong morally (because Welsh is not better than English), practically (as virtually everyone can speak English but only around a fifth of the population use Welsh), and in law (as this does not equate to equal treatment of the languages).
Much of the good news about Y Gymraeg in recent years has been the product of the savvy exploitation of Wrexham AFC’s Welshness by its Hollywood star owners. In doing so, they have probably done more than the nationalists to further the Welsh language. Rob and Ryan do this in a way that brings the public along with them, at little public cost, rather than what devolved politicians have imposed through social engineering, all in their quest to tie the language to national and political identity. Shameless capital-driven motives is what promotes the language then.
In closing, I would say that an oppressive regime only serves to alienate its people by imposing a way of life on them. And, no – I’m not talking about Darth Vader and the Empire. Hwyl fawr!