The double-edged sword

One of the most important stories of the last decade is the influence of identity politics on the Western world. This form of politics exists at the theoretical level, as well as in public policy, but also less subtly in popular culture. The popular, or populist, expression of some of these ideas is often referred to as ‘woke’. In fact, that is not entirely fair as ‘woke’ is broader than identity politics, and also brings with it a number of controversial aspects, such as a tendency towards limiting freedom of speech.

As a result, both sides in the discourse about woke as a movement attribute different meanings to it: one equates it with social justice and the other sees in it the danger of intellectual totalitarianism. But these perceptions do not contradict each other. The woke movement is a double-edged sword that is both good and bad; positively, in promoting the interests of certain minorities, and negatively, in restricting freedom of speech.

The context of the Welsh language is very different from that of the United States where the movement evolved and that complicates everything in Wales. And yet, as far as I know, there has been no attempt to consider the specific impact of woke cultural politics on the Welsh-speaking community, bearing in mind that, as an indigenous, minoritized-language community, it has characteristics that can be quite different from those that dominate the English-speaking world.

In Welsh-speaking Wales, the woke movement has been powerful enough to be able to recast large parts of contemporary Welsh-language culture in its own image. But due to the impotence of minoritized-language communities in the international process of creating new ideas and discourses, the Welsh-speaking world’s relationship with outside ideas is dependent rather than interdependent. The intellectual tradition of Welsh-speaking Wales is based on language, but language is not awarded a place of importance in the epistemology of most Western countries, and it is not central to progressive politics in the Anglosphere. As a result, the relationship of some of the ideas of the woke movement with the Welsh-speaking world has been ambiguous, and at times harmful.

Although woke culture is essentially a form of identity politics, it could also be criticized from the point of view of a specific type of identity politics, namely the identity of those minorities who are largely ignored by the Anglosphere. The Welsh-speaking minority belongs in that category. This is where the conceptual intolerance of woke philosophy is at its most dangerous. It can collapse the intellectual discourse that is unique to indigenous, minoritized-language cultures. It can make it difficult, and at times impossible, to think independently through the lens of the Welsh language.

The superficial nature of social media, all of which are rooted in the Anglo-American world, has intensified this problem. Welsh people have been constantly attacked if they have countered views that have been regarded as sacrosanct by the woke movement, and many have been stigmatized and excommunicated from public life. The term for this is ‘cancelling’; removing someone from society on the basis of their ideas. Here, I have to declare an interest as this happened to me. There were attempts on social media to ‘cancel’ me when I published in 2021 a book about ethnic diversity in Welsh-speaking Wales, Hanes Cymry [A History of the Welsh]. The book was very supportive of ethnic diversity but contested some of the hidden assumptions of the Anglosphere in its interpretation of diversity within a minoritised-language culture.

Another person who was ‘cancelled’ was Dan Evans, and as a result there was little discussion on the book he edited with Huw Williams and Kieron Smith, The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution, one of the most important books to be published since devolution to Wales in 1999. Dan Evans’ fundamental transgression was to express doubt about identity politics because of his belief that social class is the dominant force in society. It would be fair to say that we have both written more in a British context since the attempt to cancel us in Wales, and it is heartening to see Dan Evans succeed with accomplished works such as A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie which has brought him recognition as one of the intellectuals of the Left in Britain. One of the inevitable side effects of cancel culture in Wales is that people then have to turn to writing in English, or about the world beyond Wales, or else shut up. After all, what’s the point of publishing a book in Welsh, or about Wales, if people go out of their way to ensure it goes unnoticed? There have been fewer conceptual works about the Welsh and Welsh-speaking worlds published in recent years and perhaps the intolerance, and general anti-intellectualism, of the present day has something to do with this.

Creative constraints

In the context of freedom of speech, we in Wales are living in uncertain times. There is now a fairly widespread perception that only certain types of literature, or certain ideological views, are likely to get a fair hearing. Interestingly, it is often not right-wing ideas that are dismissed but arguments historically associated with the Left, with which the woke Left does not agree, or view as important.

This is the reason why there was bewilderment and some anger about a controversial funding decision made in 2024 by the national body charged with supporting the publishing industry in Wales, namely the Books Council of Wales. It decided to withdraw its subsidy to the most important English-language magazine in Wales, the quarterly cultural and political periodical Planet: The Welsh Internationalist (1970-2024). Planet was not one of Donald Trump’s propaganda tools but rather the intellectual journal of the Welsh Left. And yet it was closed down, and in the last issue, one of the former editors, John Barnie, summarized the concerns of many about the current situation:

Who holds the purse-strings calls the shots. The demise of Planet (along with New Welsh Review) raises questions for me about the nature and purpose of public funding of the arts. In my view, funding bodies should be responsive to the quickening life and ideas of people within the arts. … The temptation for funding bodies, however, is to act as social engineers, shaping culture themselves through the disbursement of grants to ‘approved’, which is to say fashionable, causes. That, I fear, is what is happening in Wales today.

There has also been discontent in the field of Welsh-language literature. Doubts have been raised about the annual Wales Book of the Year Award which is organized by Literature Wales, the national body responsible for promoting literature from Wales. Although not all judges of the competition have embraced woke views, there have been few ‘conservative’ voices on the judging panels, and there has been a clear imbalance with regard to cultural politics. The choice of judges has also been unbalanced in terms of reflecting the Welsh-speaking audience. For example, among the twenty Welsh-speaking judges between 2020 and 2024, none were over 65 years old. That, of course, is the age group most likely to espouse more ‘traditional’ cultural values in the Welsh-speaking community.

Opinions are mixed about an organization like Literature Wales which plays an active role in identity politics despite being a national body which is supposed to represent Welsh-language literature as a whole: some young people praise it for giving them opportunities, while some authors believe that it only caters for one part of the Welsh-language literary world. The organization’s roots are in the Welsh Academy, which was established in 1959 as a Welsh-language society, was augmented by an English-language section in 1968, and served as an effective voice for writers. It’s a shame that its successor does not put more emphasis on giving authors practical support. Out of Literature Wales’ three priorities, only one, namely representation and equality, appears to be core to literature, while the other two – health and well-being and the climate crisis – are more peripheral. Literature Wales states that its main aim is to ‘create change in society through literature’, which is very different from ‘supporting literature’. It is right to ask what happens to types of literature, or categories of writers, that do not ‘create change in society’, or do not do so in an approved manner.

Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that these national bodies, and Literature Wales in particular, have done excellent work in widening access to literature for ethnic minorities, securing platforms for LGBTQIA+ activities, and in reaching out to certain other groups that have been under-represented. But in areas unrelated to the equality and representation agenda, some attempt must be made to ensure that the Welsh-language literary world is more open to a diversity of opinions, given that the Welsh language, after all, belongs to all. Welsh-language culture is so dependent on public funding that decisions by organizations that have a monopoly on cultural activity can have an impact on the ecosystem of the Welsh language as a whole. It is essential for the health of Welsh-language culture that writers and artists can say what they want, even when that goes against the point of view of an organization, council, academy or sponsoring body. We don’t want to live in a country where people are afraid to take risks lest they offend. Economic precarity also adds to this problem as many in the literary sector are freelancers, and they are extremely dependent on the decisions of organizations to get work or a grant.

Many who write in Welsh do so on a voluntary basis and make a financial loss in real terms. Literature is a labour of love for them and they should not be required to follow a particular ideological line. Writers must be allowed to find their own voice. If writers suspect that they are not being treated fairly because of the demands of cultural politics, then many will stop writing. Fewer will buy books too, of course.

To an increasing extent, the strategies of Welsh cultural organizations resemble the strategies of similar English organizations, and this makes it more difficult to formulate solutions for Welsh-language culture. It is as if our literary institutions have forgotten that Welsh-speakers are a minority. A writer in England who writes about unfashionable subjects can survive without public patronage because book sales will sustain them. But this is not true of people writing in Welsh. By virtue of the fact that they write in Welsh, all Welsh-language writers, even if they belong to the majority in terms of their protected characteristics, are minority writers. Other minority cultures understand that every group in the minority community deserves some form of support. But somehow, this recognition has been forgotten in Wales, and we must therefore ask, who provides for the Welsh-speaking minority?

Part of the problem is that contemporary cultural politics is like a multinational and its natural tendency is to continually refer back to the head office in the United States or England rather than nurturing a unique way of doing things in Wales. In the important work of promoting diversity in the world of children’s books, for example, the emphasis is almost all on translation from English to Welsh, rather than from Welsh to English, as if those reading in Welsh need to be enlightened in a way that is not true of those reading in English. This is because assumptions about the nature of equality are always based on English-language rather than Welsh-language epistemology.

It is also extremely revealing that there is no scheme to translate academic works written in Welsh into English as if Wales has nothing to offer in terms of ideas. In a land of prizes, there is no prize for non-fiction or conceptual books either. Academic books in Welsh are no longer eligible for the Wales Book of the Year Award, and outside of Welsh Departments and a few other outposts, they get a pretty cold reception from universities that disparage the intellectual value of books in Welsh in general. There is something ‘Matthew Arnoldian’ about culture in Wales today, with English-language works of the metropolis defining the conceptual high-ground and Welsh confined to creative work only, and then required to reflect the values of imported Anglophone guidelines.

Colonizing vocabulary

Anglophone cultural politics has even changed our vocabulary. The metropolis defines contemporary keywords such as ‘diversity’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘minority’, ‘ethnic minority’, ‘colonization’, ‘decolonization’, ‘indigenous’, ‘privilege’, and so on. Most of these words have slightly different meanings in the Welsh-language intellectual tradition, and in some cases the new Anglophone definitions not only replace them but also invalidate them. The Welsh word brodorol (native, indigenous) would be a prime example. In the Welsh-language tradition it is used to refer to the settlement of a minoritized-language group on its historical territory rather than an effort to exclude individuals on the basis of race. Another is dad-drefedigaethu (decolonization); a concept that has been used in Welsh-language literary theory for decades, such as in the work of R M Jones, to mean Cymreigio Cymru (i.e. to make Wales more Welsh-speaking in order to challenge Anglophone power). But suddenly its meaning was changed, namely to attribute to Wales the role of colonizer, and now the term decolonization is only used in that context by organizations.

As a result, the Welsh language is treated in a disproportionate way, such as in discourse about Y Wladfa (the Welsh settlement in Patagonia, Argentina). Y Wladfa is demonized as a settler colony. It is doubtless the case that Y Wladfa is a settler colony, but the whole of America is a settler colony. Perhaps the true aim of attacks on Y Wladfa is to elevate the morality of Welsh people today by ‘apologising’ for the past without having to sacrifice anything. This highlights another of the weaknesses of cultural politics, which is the tendency sometimes to respond to social injustice in a performative manner rather than advocating real change. The ‘cancellation’ of Y Wladfa is a convenient way of exporting responsibility for racism in Wales to a poor community in the Global South without people in Wales needing to change anything about their own behaviour.

A central part of the attempt to recast Welsh-language culture is rooted in a perception of morality. Moralism is a feature of the woke movement in the West in general, but it has penetrated further in Wales because the Welsh have always been attracted to the sort of morality that judges others. Welsh moralizing is a psychological response to the humiliation we have suffered as a linguistic minority, and it is a form of respectability politics.

This moralizing has affected aesthetics and has posed profound questions about the function and purpose of art in Wales. Should art be aligned with certain ‘values’? Literature Wales insists that ‘our values’, as they say, are ‘respected’ by their ‘creative participants’ and even by their ‘audiences’. Are we then back in the Victorian Age when literature was created in the shadow of the soft censorship of hegemonic social ‘values’ of the time, such as those of the non-conformist churches? The non-conformist denominations were sincere in their belief that they were doing good. Their temperance movements, praised in so many Victorian literary texts, saved thousands of lives. But as valuable as temperance was as a movement, the literature that glorified it in simplistic moral terms, at the behest of the main Welsh-language organizations of the time, is of little value.

When looking at literature in Welsh today, there are very obvious comparisons. Much contemporary literature emphasizes didactic messages. Children’s literature is pedagogical. Books are expected to convey approved views or themes. Work is commissioned to promote specific messages, and works that arise organically from the community are ignored. Simplicity and directness are praised because didactic messages are easier to understand in simple language. There is little complexity in our literature now, even less levity; there is no vigour. The new Welsh-language aesthetic is possible because such literature believes in absolute terms in the truth and goodness of its own arguments. Everything is either right or wrong. This is morality, but it is not ethics.

The Irish example

Perhaps the arts sector in Wales should ask why Irish-language culture is being given global coverage at the moment and not Welsh-language culture. The band Kneecap has had incredible success in rapping anti-establishment republican messages in Irish: their tours in America, Australia and New Zealand have been virtual sellouts, and their recent film in the Irish language has won them both Britain’s main award for independent films, and constant coverage in the international press. This is an example of culture in a minority language that arises from the community and reflects its ways of thinking.

Part of the story is the courage of cultural organizations in Ireland in supporting a challenging and anarchic band that it is impossible to manage ‘safely’. One of Kneecap’s aims is to interpret cultural politics from an Irish-language rather than Anglophone perspective. Kneecap compares Irish speakers with those who have suffered ‘imperialism and colonialism’ and draws direct comparisons between Irish speakers and indigenous peoples in America and Australia. In Wales, it would be impossible for such a band to succeed. They would be ‘cancelled’ for suggesting that Wales may have been colonized and the comparison with indigenous peoples would lead to accusations of cultural appropriation.

Things are far too safe in Wales, and we should be aiming higher than the creation of a culture that merely mirrors the ‘progressive’ priorities of the arts world in England. Rather, progressive attitudes that align with the context of the Welsh-speaking world should be cultivated.

Yet not everything about the woke movement is harmful. Its stated aim is to promote the ability of certain minorities to contribute to society, without them having to give up their own identity. This identity politics is a simplified version of valid philosophical thinking that argues in favour of different categories of identity that were marginalized by the Enlightenment. Things like race, gender, sexuality, disability, and so on. Views that promote oppressed groups such as feminist arguments against patriarchy, anti-racist arguments about white privilege, and arguments from the LGBTQIA+ community that oppose homophobia should be supported. It is impossible to argue that the Welsh-speaking minority identity has a right to resistance, and then deny that to other groups.

But we cannot ignore the fact that Anglophone identity politics has avoided creating an identity category for minoritized-language communities. Language is not a protected characteristic in UK (and Welsh) equality laws and policies. Furthermore, it is not important in intersectionality theory, which was first developed in the United States. It would, of course, be possible, as a ‘local’ variation in Wales, to add language to the bundle of existing identity categories central to intersectionality, and to some extent this is already happening. However, the absence of language is a weakness in the theory of Anglophone intersectionality, and promotes the view that language is not a ‘real’ consideration from the point of view of social equality.

There is another weakness in identity politics theory. As social class is not an identity as such, it is difficult for politics based solely on identity categories to respond to the reality of class. But without taking social class into consideration, what is to prevent the privileged few within a minority group from accumulating for themselves the wealth within that group? Similarly, many in the majority group will face disadvantage based on social class even though they do not belong to a minority of any kind. It’s impossible for them to benefit from identity politics to get justice. What then is their fate? This is an important issue because Wales is a poor, post-industrial society. We could easily follow the path trodden in America where Trump asserts that the Left no longer cares about the working class.

Image by Geoff Charles, 1963, via National Library of Wales, Wikimedia Commons

Identity politics has other theoretical weaknesses. Overall, it does not address forms of discrimination based on ethnicity rather than on race. The group facing the worst structural discrimination in Britain today are Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. They are an ethnic minority that is not defined by race and many of its members are white, yet racism is a daily experience for them. There are not enough measures in Wales to fight anti-semitism either. It is also possible that the negative attitude of the woke movement towards the Welsh diaspora (xenophobia which I, as a London Welshman, raised in a Welsh-speaking family outside Wales, have experienced myself) derives from the fact that this diaspora could be thought of as a type of minority ethnicity that is not based on race. Not all minorities have been able to benefit from the woke movement, and indeed the situation of some minority groups has worsened as a result of Anglophone woke ideology.

In a healthy society, it would be possible to discuss such weaknesses openly in order to ensure the best policies and ideas, and this would specifically benefit minorities, including the Welsh-speaking minority. But in Wales today, such discussion is not possible.

Ways must be found in Wales to promote equality and dialogue: we should not be forced to choose between them. We should stand up for equality and representation for minorities and at the same time challenge the more dictatorial tendencies of those types of cultural politics that try to prevent intellectual discourse. After all, if a minority culture does not have the right to express its own ways of thinking, what role exactly does it have? And if writers are not allowed to write about what is important to them, what are they for?