This assumes political attitudes don’t change with age, which given what’s happened to the generation that spent the 60s being overwhelmingly progressive seems like a very bold thing to claim.
Some will I am sure. If that will be a meaningful number of course remains to be seen.
I'd argue that with a growing population of Welsh Speakers and the continuing trend of support for independence among the under 35's the numbers will be there in 10-20 years. But thats just a projection of course.
Sure, but the issue you’ve got is just the hard reality of independence versus the fantasy that this stuff relies on.
No nationalist movement on the planet makes the only real unassailable argument: “you’ll be poorer but it’ll be worth it because we’ll have sovereignty”, as it just doesn’t work with any vaguely rational voter.
The current arrangement has has had hundreds of years to deliver and hasn't. Wales sits at the bottom of the UK income tables decade after decade, inside one of the world's richest states.
At some point "you'd be poorer outside" has to reckon with the fact that being inside made us poor in the first place.
Sticking with a system because it might be marginally less bad than the alternative isn't an economic argument, it's Stockholm syndrome.
Westminster has managed Wales in a piss poor fashion and now it tells us we could not do any better.
This is incredibly broad brush stuff. Leaving aside that absent actual history and the development that came with it Wales wouldn’t even have any major industrial or commercial centres at all, and would be even more rural than it is, it simply suffers from the same issues all deindustrialised states face (including whole swathes of England), albeit more acute due to geography.
I’ll happily agree we need UK-wide reform of planning to allow for the kind of infrastructure that would get growth going (as well as not throwing money into a black hole of welfare entitlements rather than productive investment), but it’s a little rich banging on about ‘Westminster’ (and leaving aside Wales sends MPs to it and votes for the party of government at various points like everyone else) when in devolved competences - notably education - Welsh performance has gotten worse while England’s has improved solidly.
The notion things would magically be better with less money but slightly more localised government, or indeed that things cannot be markedly worse, is bold to say the least.
"Wales wouldn't have industrial centres without the union", possibly, but that history cuts both ways. Wales was industrialised as an extraction economy, coal and metals shipped out through ports built for export, profits capitalised in London and Bristol. When the extraction ended the capital left and the infrastructure was never repurposed, which is exactly the pattern you'd expect from a periphery run for the centre's needs. Comparable small European countries that controlled their own development, Denmark, Ireland eventually, transitioned differently.
On deindustrialisation hitting England too, agreed, and that's rather the point. Westminster's model has produced one hyper-productive city-region and a long tail of managed decline. Wales isn't uniquely victimised but we have a border and a legal identity, which gives us an exit option Teesside doesn't have.
Education is is your best point and I won't pretend otherwise, PISA results under devolved Welsh Labour have been poor and that's on Cardiff, not London. But note what it proves, governance quality matters more than constitutional status. That argument works against "Westminster is fine" just as well as against "independence fixes everything".
Nobody serious says it will be magically perfect. The honest case is that centuries of the current arrangement has Wales bottom of the UK income tables with no plan on the table to change it, and at some point "it could be worse" stops being a reason to continue with something that demonstrably isn't working.
I don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of this (though none of it is a particularly strong argument for independence), but you definitely don’t have a border or a separate legal identity. At least not anything like of the kind that would be needed on independence.
It also ignores the fact that Wales (like most of the UK) was actually rather wealthy on average compared to most other states globally for most of the last 200-300 years. The ‘bottom of the league table’ stuff is a relatively recent development.
I genuinely believe Federalism is the most likely outcome but that would require proportional representation (to stop giving absolute power to one party who has a minority of the vote) along with rejoining the EU.
I don't have any moral or ethical objection to being part of the UK other than it is not in Wales's best interests.
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u/Adr_LDN Sep 14 '26
This assumes political attitudes don’t change with age, which given what’s happened to the generation that spent the 60s being overwhelmingly progressive seems like a very bold thing to claim.