Look closely at the west coast of Britain. Notice how the land
reaches out, extending, fragmenting, as though desperate for release
from the island's core.
So for people as for land. Overseas, the red buses and telephone
boxes and royal family in England may well be synonymous in popular
imagination with “Britain” or the “United Kingdom”, but over
half of the UK's territory is in fact home to heritages and
identities foreign to the English. Indeed, for most of
their history, the Celtic peoples of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and
even Cornwall, have struggled against ruthless English conquest and
oppression. These nations were some of the very first to experience
the bloodshed and cultural vandalism of what became the British
Empire, whose search for people to plunder and terrorize soon took it
beyond its own neighbourhood, and on to the Americas, Africa and
Asia.
But these are tenacious cultures, who in spite of hundreds of years
of this struggle, still retain their own sense of themselves,
although only Ireland – most of it – has won
complete independence. The others have Welsh or Gaelic spoken
alongside or instead of English; compete in their own teams in
international sport, passionately expressing themselves in football and rugby; and have continued to struggle
for political autonomy within the UK, or outright separation.
This uncomfortable history feeds straight into Britain's current mire
of socio-economic repression and collapsing ethic of care. The
country is now in deep subjection to the Conservative Party's
austerity programme, which has involved the systematic dismantling of
the welfare state, the removal of measures protecting the vulnerable
and poor, the deliberate cultivation of popular ignorance and
prejudice of all stripes, and the concentration of resources and
influence in the hands of political, financial and big business
elites, effectively selling out the country to thugs, thieves, and the acolytes of a renewed and remorseless
cult of the market.
This
process's regional dimensions have been obvious. A privileged,
insulated, hankering southeast has become a tentacular Laputan
monstrosity, siphoning off resources, jobs and dreams from Britain's
north
and west, to further service the coffers and egos of the London
elites while leaving behind the rest of the country in suffering,
stagnation, and a constant bombardment of brazen southeastern
contempt. The debates surrounding Scotland's coming independence
referendum have become as much about an opportunity to claw back a paradigm of socio-economic fairness and political accountability, not to mention basic human decency; that is, to say
no to the campaign of national cannibalization orchestrated from
Westminster, over and above questions of Scotland's geopolitical
interests or long historical grievances.
And then there is Wales.
Subjected, often brutalized, by England for 700 years, Wales now has
its own national assembly with considerable autonomy over its own
affairs. More thoroughly integrated into the UK than Scotland, its
present independence ambitions are more muted, though one wonders how
a positive outcome in the Scottish referendum might affect this.
Wales, like Scotland and Ireland, is a land of wild and beautiful
landscapes. Unlike England it actually has mountains, and its moors
and coastlines carry that same sense of distinct direction as
Wales's culture: that freedom of remoteness, whose systems and
secrets, not like those that call themselves British, make themselves
known beneath your footsteps.
Here, then, are some landscapes and themes from the Gower Peninsula,
an outstanding region of natural beauty just out of Swansea's back
door.
