Wales

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WALES.

Wales in 1914, despite the predominantly industrial nature of the economy, remained overwhelmingly devoted to Liberal Nonconformity. The outbreak of serious industrial conflict in the Edwardian years, however, coupled with a growing sense of national distinctiveness—as expressed for example by the formulation in 1914 of the first Welsh Home Rule Bill—indicated some of the ways in which Wales was to change during the remainder of the first half of the twentieth century as ideas of imperial patriotism, class solidarity, and Welsh national identity clashed and shifted. World War I, in which 280,000 Welshmen fought and 40,000 died, reinforced Wales's British identity while at the same time underpinned its sense of national difference, a tension exemplified by the political career of David Lloyd George (1863–1945), the Liberal nationalist who in 1916 became Britain's first Welsh prime minister.

Following the Armistice, political life in some respects returned to pre-war issues, as the late-Victorian demand for the disestablishment of the Church of Wales was finally passed by Parliament in 1920. By this time, however, the landed society that the Anglican Church was deemed to represent and the Liberal Nonconformity that had mobilized against it had both entered a period of sustained decline. Furthermore, the collapse in the early 1920s of the war-generated boom in coal, and iron and steel, exposed the fragility of the industrial base that had created the dynamic "American Wales" of the late-Victorian and Edwardian decades. It was in this changed climate of working-class militancy that Labour displaced Liberal dominance, winning half the constituencies of Wales in 1922, and rising to a position by 1966 where it held thirty-two of Wales's total of thirty-six parliamentary seats.

At the same time, other forces were beginning to coalesce around the preservation of the Welsh language and nationalist politics. Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth) was formed in 1922, and Plaid Cymru (the Party of Wales) in 1925. The industrial conflicts and socialist political activity of the 1920s, led by the South Wales Miners' Federation, reached their greatest levels of intensity during and after the General Strike and miners' lock-out of 1926, and were followed by years of severe economic depression. High unemployment, which by 1932 had reached 42.8 percent of insured males, led to the migration of 390,000 people from Wales between 1925 and 1939. Labour remained the single most important political party in Wales throughout this period, although many were also drawn to other organizations and movements. Thus in 1936, the Welsh Left, both Labour and Communist, organized the largest contingent sent from Britain to join the International Brigades in defense of the Spanish Republic, while at the same time the nationalists arranged an arson attack on a Royal Air Force base at Penyberth, Ll?n, to draw attention not only to the precarious position of the Welsh language but also to the weakness of traditional rural Welsh society in relation to a militarized British state.

World War II transformed political, economic, and cultural life in Wales as elsewhere. Full employment had returned by 1941, and the rise of Welsh Labour politicians schooled in the interwar miners' union, such as James Griffiths (1890–1975) and Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960), provided the government of Clement Attlee (1883–1967) with the architects of some of its key stretegic reforms, such as the National Insurance Act, the National Health Service, and the nationalization of the coal industry. Griffiths also helped to establish the Council of Wales in 1948 and became the first secretary of state for Wales in 1964.

Wales in the postwar decades began to acquire other modern attributes of nationhood. Cardiff was formally declared to be its capital city in 1955, while the Liverpool City Council's decision to construct a reservoir by flooding the inhabited Welsh valley of Tryweryn in Merionnydd caused nationwide resentment that crossed party lines and led to calls to strengthen Wales's national voice in the British Parliament. The formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society) in 1962, following a radio lecture by the nationalist dramatist Saunders Lewis (1893–1985) that called for the adoption of "revolutionary methods" to protect the language from further decline, led to an extended period of civil disobedience. Plaid Cymru won its first parliamentary seat in 1966, the first Welsh Language Act was passed in 1967, and militant nationalism attempted to disrupt the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1969. The proportions of Welsh-speakers continued to decline from 37 percent in 1921 to 18 percent in 1991, although the decline slowed from the 1980s as numbers of younger speakers began to show modest increases. In 2001, 71 percent of Wales's population of 2.9 million had no knowledge of Welsh, although in Gwynedd only 24 percent had no knowledge of the language. The establishment of Sianel Pedwar Cymru (the Welsh Fourth Channel) in 1982 was symptomatic of the new confidence that Wales could become a bilingual country, and the annual Royal National Eisteddfod, conducted in Welsh, remains Wales's largest cultural festival.

Two further issues dominated the final quarter of the twentieth century: the decline of the coal industry and devolution. While the numbers of coal miners fell from 124,000 in 1945 to 33,000 in 1975, the dangers of the industry were again cruelly demonstrated in October 1966 when a tip of coal waste engulfed the primary school in the mining village of Aberfan, killing 144, 116 of them children. The failure of the miners' strike of 1984–1985 to prevent the re-privatization of the industry led practically to the total collapse of mining in Wales, leaving an economy dominated increasingly by service industries, tourism, and manufacturing. Employment in the steel industry also fell dramatically in the same period, from 72,000 in 1980 to around 16,000 in 1995. To counteract the social consequences of the decline of heavy industry, the Welsh Development Agency, formed in 1976, actively sought inward investment into electronics, motor component manufacture and assembly, and chemicals. Manufacturing, though it continued to decline, remained the largest employer of men (30 percent of males and 12 percent of females), while 37 percent of women were employed in the service sector. The public sector, especially social services, health, and education, remained a major source of employment.

The politics of Wales were transformed in September 1997 when a referendum on the creation of a devolved Welsh Assembly narrowly carried the motion by 50.3 percent in favor to 49.7 percent against. This reversed the outcome of the previous referendum of 1979, which had shown that a majority of Welsh voters rejected devolved government. The first elections were held in May 1999, and the Welsh Assembly held its opening session later that month in Cardiff. The relationship between a devolved Wales and the rest of Britain remained in flux, as demands were made to strengthen the powers of the Assembly, especially with regard to tax raising. But constitutional change also strengthened Welsh links with the European Union, as a recipient of EU funding and in relation to such forums as those concerned with lesser-used languages. Wales in a "Europe of the Regions" emerged for some, within and outside the nationalist movement, as an alternative vision for a Wales whose political, economic, and cultural connections extended beyond the island of Britain. But while the new political and economic circumstances brought prosperity in particular to parts of the urban southeast and the M4 corridor, the rural and older industrial areas remained among the poorest in Western Europe, the gross domestic product of west Wales and the southern valleys being less than 75 percent of the European average. In 2001, 27.9 percent of the adult population was economically inactive compared to the national U.K. average of 21.5 percent, and in December 2004 it was found that 10 percent of the poorest parts of the United Kingdom were in Wales. The more secular, postindustrial "cool Cymru" of the early twenty-first century had yet to resolve many of the difficulties it had inherited from its twentieth-century history.

See alsoCoal Mining; Ireland; Scotland; United Kingdom.