A Possible Future? by Joe England

Jon Gower

The Wales described in the sobering opening pages of this book is plagued by problems.

It is a country where one in four children lives in poverty. It is a place where the gap between average household incomes is huge – the highest, Heath in Cardiff, is over £58,000, twice as much as Caerau in the Llynfi Valley, where just over £29,000 goes into the household.

A fifth of the Welsh population is hungry because they don’t have enough money. The greatest economic inequality in Europe is between London and the South Wales Valleys, with gross domestic product, the conventional way of measuring wealth, nine times greater in Inner London than in the Valleys. It’s a ticker-tape of miserable facts.

Bright

Incidentally, this clear and sober book also catalogues some of the things Wales is doing right now, or that offer hope for a better future. Joe England tells us about experimental food production on Anglesey, where hydrogen is being fermented using bacteria, which ‘if successful, could transform the future of the planet.’

Wales is leading the way in repair cafes, with the largest network in the world. By 2030, it is possible that all carbon emissions will be reduced by two-thirds, with 70 per cent of Wales’ electricity being generated from wind, solar and tidal power.

England also tells us how it all happened, taking us through years of boom and bust, from the heyday of coal, iron and steel to the advent of what he calls ‘Factory Wales’ and a period of extraordinary economic growth:

The Severn Bridge, the M4, the three-lane A465 motorway leading to the M50, the huge steelworks at Port Talbot (‘Treasure Island’) and Llanwern (‘Eldorado’) attracted – from a wide area including the Valleys – process workers, craftsmen, draughtsmen, metalworkers, office workers, accountants, managers and directors.

The Trustee Savings Bank in Port Talbot was known as the Rowing Club. ‘The company put our money in there on a Thursday and by lunchtime we’d got it out. In, out. In, out. The big working men’s clubs in Port Talbot were known for their bar revenues of over £100,000 a year.

Constitutional collapse

For Great Britain see Wales: A Possible Future explores the looming constitutional collapse of a divided UK, and asks what a reunited Ireland or an independent Scotland might mean for Wales, the UK’s poorest country. The political landscape it seeks to chart has changed considerably while the book has been at the printers, with the general election giving the SNP much to think about.

Meanwhile, Sinn Féin is now the largest party in the Northern Irish councils, assembly and Westminster, marking the path not only towards reunification but also towards Ireland joining Europe.

The omens are not good. The British government for 2021 Plan for Wales promised a range of initiatives to boost economic growth, including a post-Brexit pledge that ‘Wales would receive the same amount of funding as it would have received from the European Union’, but these promises have not been delivered.

Bystander

Joe England himself sees the plan as one ‘in which the Welsh Government would be a bystander (a bit like ‘Glamorgan County Council on stilts’)’, although I suspect it would have to be on steroids, even if things are more than a little wonky. That same Government was sidelined in the talks with Tata Steel over the future of the Port Talbot steelworks, or the discussions that led to the cancellation of the second part of the HS2 rail link between Manchester and Birmingham.

There is a lot of solid history and policy analysis in this book – particularly when it explores ideas like the Foundational Economy, where communities are built from the bottom up and challenge globalism in the process. It is really relevant when you read that the NHS in Wales spends almost half of its £22 million food budget outside Wales.

Bananas

In between the heavier issues there is also a nice and unexpected touch of humour in the writing. I particularly liked that when David Maxwell-Fyffe was appointed Home Secretary, with the additional title of Minister for Welsh Affairs, ‘he was inevitably known in Wales as “Dai Bananas.”’

All in all, this is an accessible, clearly written and topical book that ultimately strikes an optimistic tone, or comments on a future Wales, but at the same time recognises that we live in uncertain times, when absolutely nothing can be taken for granted.

For Britain see Wales: A Possible Future? by Joe England published by Parthian. Available from all good bookshops.