The sickening screech of tires on poorly maintained tarmac gives way to a quieter ride as you cross the Anglo-Welsh border. It’s a surprisingly symbolic awakening. Welcome to Wales, a country that has elected, for the first time in modern history, a nationalist pro-independence government: Plaid Cymru.
Labor – the party that had governed and dominated Welsh politics for more than a century – has fallen from first place to third. Removed from office, its leader even lost her seat to the nationalists. By any measure, it is a tremendous humiliation.
Living in a border town like Chester, the idea of a hardened border or any serious constitutional breach may seem impossible to imagine. From Cheshire to Flintshire, the accents barely change. The economic interdependence is just as seamless: Cestrians commuting to Hawarden for Airbus, Flintshire residents shopping in Chester and communities on both sides of the border existing as one interconnected region. These marching lands have long seemed instinctively resistant to any constitutional upheaval. And yet Flintshire – one of Wales’ historically unionist border counties – recorded a sharp rise in support for Plaid Cymru, mirroring trends across the country.
Plaid now governs alone. It does so without a majority in the Senedd, just as the Scottish National Party did during its first term in office at Holyrood two decades ago. In a proportional system, an absolute majority is extremely difficult to achieve. But symbolism is more important than arithmetic. Work is withdrawn. A pro-independence party takes office. And with power comes legitimacy.
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Welsh independence no longer feels like an abstract fringe fantasy. It feels imaginable. Support for Welsh independence has, for most of modern political history, been marginal. Just 4 per cent of voters listed it as a key issue in the election just passed, even if most agreed that constitutional change would inevitably remain high on Plaid Cymru’s long-term agenda.
Polls still suggest independence would be easily lost in any snap referendum. At best, around a quarter of Welsh voters currently support it – up from roughly a fifth two decades ago. But the most revealing statistic is not the number in favor. It is the disputed number. In 2007, 69 percent of Welsh voters opposed independence. By 2014, this figure had risen to 74 percent. Today, it stands at 54 percent.
As a trend, it is remarkably consistent. Enthusiasm for independence remains limited and unlikely to lead to secession before 2030. But hostility to the idea is steadily eroding. Increasingly, many voters seem willing to adopt a cautious attitude of ambivalence: wait and see.
The generational change is even more striking. In 2018, only 24 per cent of 18-24 year olds supported Welsh independence. Among 16-24 year olds today, support is 47 percent.
It is a sign of not today, but never. Why? The causes are familiar across Britain, whether in Makerfield, Dundee, Gorton or Denton: decline, alienation and irrelevance. National institutions – British and local – no longer have the loyalty they once had. Hollowed out by years of austerity and centralization, communities increasingly rely on charities or overstretched local networks to provide what the state once guaranteed as standard. The common life of the country, in many countries, has been privatized or abandoned altogether. And with this abandonment has come detachment from the idea of Britain itself. Because what does the Union mean when public institutions feel distant, ineffective or absent?
Twenty-five years of political frustration has accelerated the process. Austerity breeds apathy, which breeds mistrust. And mistrust creates fertile ground for insurgent politics. Helped in the rise of the Reformation. She promoted the rise of the NPSH. And now she has pushed Plaid Cymru into government.
The same shift can be seen in attitudes across Britain towards the future of the Union. Only 43 percent of Britons say they would be upset by Scottish independence. More than a third say it wouldn’t bother them in any way. The emotional attachment to the Union – once a defining feature of British political identity – is fading into something increasingly passive and detached.
The same sentiment is present for Wales. Only 53 percent of Britons oppose Welsh independence, while nearly a third do not express a strong opinion at all. Even in Northern Ireland, indifference increasingly rivals conviction. For many voters in Great Britain, whether the province remains in the Union or joins the Republic has become a matter of limited personal concern. This may be the most important political fact in Britain today.
The breakup of the UK was once mooted as a dramatic constitutional possibility – loudly predicted in 2007, revised in 2014 and repeatedly postponed since then. Scotland has hovered around a 50/50 split on independence for much of the past decade, albeit overshadowed by the more immediate crisis. In Wales, independence remains less urgent and less electorally dominant. But the idea persists. Not because nationalist fervor has suddenly swept the country, but because faith in the Union is waning. And in Wales, that slowly growing indifference to an increasingly irrelevant Union may eventually bring independence closer than anyone once imagined.
(Further reading: Labor’s war of words)
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