Matt Smith has stood as a Conservative and Unionist candidate for Parliament and the Senedd. He was a Policy Analyst at Vote Leave

Early in Keir Starmer’s government, Lisa Nandy, the new Culture Secretary, promised “the era of culture wars is over” signalling a Labour vibe-shift to a more positive and less divisive vision of Britain. This was news in Cardiff Bay where the Welsh Labour Government is inflicting its radical progressive identity politics on a captured and long-suffering public.

Devolution was to end the democratic deficit of politically asymmetric Westminster governments ruling through the Welsh Office and ‘quango state’. A certain kind of elite reorganisation has indeed taken place. A new Cardiff-centric metropolitan political class has come to prominence whose world-view is at right angles to reality-based communities across Wales.

The Welsh left has long since moved from the coal mines, the factory floors, and the farms into the Quangos, the faculties, the third sector and the party salariat. This assembly-linked community constitutes the shadow party that runs Welsh Labour, which in turn runs devolved government.

Their ideation of Wales owes more to the political economy of Islington than Islwyn. The cultural workers with their decolonisation ideology are now on a long march through the commanding heights of society, spreading a historical narrative that is one-sided and caricatural.

The ‘spirit of BLM’ inspired the Government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report of March 2021. Yet Tony Sewell’s landmark report rejected the idea of systemic racism, positing modern Britain as “a model for other white-majority countries”. Five years of Cabinet Office Race and Disparities data showed the UK is not “deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”. It warned against ‘importing bleak new theories about race that insist on accentuating our differences’ and ‘cleaving to a fatalistic account that insists nothing has changed’.

Separately, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights’ Being Black in the EU report found the UK has the least racial discrimination in Europe (except Malta) and the highest public awareness of at least one national equalities organisation (except Ireland).

More recently, Policy Exchange’s A Portrait of Modern Britain records ethnic minority Britons wanting their children to be taught to be proud of Britain’s history unlike ‘white progressives’ who think it racist to teach this.

By contrast, the Welsh Government has adopted the bleak new theories criticised in the Sewell Report that are increasingly outdated even in America. Their so-called ‘Anti-Racism Action Plan’ pitch-rolls a deeply pessimistic view of Welsh society.

First Minister Eluned Morgan’s ‘refresh’ to the plan shows she is steeped in the counter-productive identity politics of her ‘inspiration’ Mark Drakeford. Rather than forging a ‘beacon nation’, progressive overreach through the relentless politicisation of public spaces is patronising, alienating, and disintegrative.

Drakeford’s ‘task force’ of culture establishment talking-heads ‘audited’ the alleged memorialisation of slavery and the British Empire (a contentious juxtaposition given the Royal Navy’s role in suppressing the slave trade). Campaigners target ‘persons of interest’ including William Gladstone, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi. Andrew Roberts panned their accusations against the greatest Briton as “tripe posing as history”.

The ‘Inclusive Futures programme’ of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Wales (backed by £135,000 of Welsh Government funding) unleashes ‘decolonisation training experts‘ to teach ‘anti-racist library practices’ so library staff can identify ‘racist’ buildings.

The Welsh Government culture minister ominously called on galleries and museums to “set the right historical narrative”. Art will be ‘decolonised’ or memory-holed. Grants of between £3,000 and £15,000 are now available for ‘anti-racist art projects’.

Museum Wales told the Big Pit National Coal Museum to ‘decolonise’ and recognise ‘historic injustices’ despite coal miners having toiled in appalling conditions. The National Museum of Wales offered £12,000 to ‘reframe the colonial narrative’ around Thomas Picton’s portrait when Cardiff’s iconic National Museum building has been threatened with closure. Even the David Lloyd George museum at Llanystumdwy will be woke-washed by diversitycrats.

The Welsh Government has imposed a ‘race equality charter mark’ for scoring already left-leaning universities on their efforts to ‘decolonise’. Consequently, Higher Education Funding Council for Wales allocated £3million to help Welsh universities pay consultancies to tell them how politically correct they are.

Schools will have to ‘decolonise’ the historical cannon in favour of disaggregated and fragmented histories, an approach former UK education minister Nick Gibb argued is antithetical to the goal of creating a “more harmonious, tolerant and equal society”.

Even BBC Wales and S4C are being leveraged to the government’s agenda of shifting ‘the beliefs and behaviour’ of a majority presumed benightedly in need of re-education.

The one form of diversity the woke apparatchiks are not interested in is viewpoint diversity. In October 2022, People Polling for Policy Exchange’s History in the UK project found more people in Wales have a largely positive view of Winston Churchill (39 per cent) than largely negative (3 per cent). In June 2020, Redfield and Wilton for iNews found most did not think that Churchill was racist and 67 per cent said his statue should remain on Parliament Square. 

Surveying opinion on Britain’s world role, Policy Exchange found more people in Wales think the British Empire did more good (38 per cent) than harm (30 per cent). Earlier in June 2020, Redfield and Wilton for The Sunday Telegraph found more people in Wales (68 per cent) thought that the British Empire did more good or had some positive aspects than 16 per cent who thought it was more bad.

Policy Exchange also found that 33 per cent of people in Wales already think that children are not taught British history in a balanced way compared to 19 per cent who say they are.

Why is the devocracy burning political capital (and taxpayers’ money) on a ridiculous culture war that divides Wales into those who lecture and the lectured to?

One answer is that Welsh Labour ideology is a localised expression of the crisis of the elites. Across the democratic world, elite self-confidence has been demoralised through incompetence and repudiation by electors. Welsh journalist Alison Pearson has described the politics of Cardiff Bay and Edinburgh as wormholes of woke, safe spaces for discountenanced hyper-liberal progressives fleeing the realignment.

Another lies in their re-imagining of Wales. The devocracy projects onto Wales its progressive values contradistinguishing their host from England that they paint as more right-leaning. Left-wing nationalists see the history wars as a means of delegitimising the Union. Yet contrary to their gaslighting narratives, Wales is a nation of comparatively small cities, towns, and villages. It is often rural and provincial and infrequently metropolitan. It is more a nation of somewheres than anywheres.

A more prosaic explanation is that virtue-signalling gesture politics and ideological halo-seeking is easier than fixing structural problems in the economy and society of Wales.

Devolution has given rise to a particularly self-indulgent form of the luxury beliefs left that would privatise public spaces so only they can enjoy them. Only in a dominant party satrapy could a senior Welsh Labour advisor push post-rational New Left nonsense claiming racism is when “white people hold negative views” of others.  Only a left-wing entertainment complex would produce a report recommending dog free zones to make Wales’ countryside less racist.

The peak woke Welsh Government is betting on the social and cultural ambitions of a postage stamp-sized elite. Its lamentable culture war exposes a legacy party long out-of-touch with the surface reality of the communities it was created to represent.

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