Land of my fathers, but not my neighbours

Crichton reports on a campaign of smouldering resentment that is

threatening to explode.

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THE beams in John Latter's cottage date from 1765. These and the other

vernacular features of the house are, he says, the real cultural

contribution of the Welsh. The smoke detector on the ceiling between the

beams is circa 1993, symbol of the intrusion of a darker aspect of

modern native culture into the life of the Englishman who has chosen to

make his home here.

The fire alarm is one of four in the small house in Newcastle Emlyn in

south west Wales.

Two streets away, farmers are exchanging comments on their penned

sheep in Welsh. The road signs are in Welsh, the schoolchildren are

taught in Welsh and a large part of the day's television output, if you

choose S4C, is in Welsh. Having the language would be a positive

advantage.

John Latter sits behind the window, spotting nationalists and Welsh

language activists among the passers-by. He feels he is hated by them,

that people he knows snub him in the street when acknowledging him would

be embarrassing in front of other, more ardent, Welsh speakers.

Mr Latter plans to install unbreakable bandit glass behind the

wooden-framed windows soon. He has taken other precautions. The family

have regular fire drills; they sleep in their beds wearing tracksuits.

The phone is almost certainly tapped.

''All calls are monitored,'' according to the terse message on the

answering machine which is only the beginning of the elaborate screening

act Mr Latter goes through before a face-to-face meeting. Mr Latter, and

12 other English families in Wales, are living under siege in their own

homes.

His Education First campaign to have English given equal status to

Welsh in local schools where the native language is the main means of

communication has ensured that Mr Latter has been blacklisted by

nationalist extremists and his life threatened.

The threat was delivered last November in letters to himself and 12

other English people living in Wales who were considered to be

anti-Welsh by Meibion Glyndwr, the embryonic Welsh terrorist

organisation which over the past decade has mounted a firebombing

campaign against holiday cottages and estate agent properties in the

north of Wales, along the border and in London.

The letter reads: ''You are an English colonist. You are racist and

anti-Welsh. You are on Meibion Glyndwr's blacklist. You must leave Wales

by March 1, 1993, or we will take revenge and you won't dare breathe. Go

home you imperialist scum.''

Apart from the last line, in English for added effect, the tirade is

written in Welsh. The letters signify a new development in the

anti-English campaign, extending it from firebombing empty holiday homes

and spreading from the north west of the country to the lower reaches of

Wales. So far nothing has happened, but Mr Latter is watchful.

He cannot fathom what he calls the arrogance of a minority of native

Welsh speakers who want the education system geared positively towards

the language. ''I support Welsh education but I believe there is a place

for English and all other languages in this very large country,'' he

said, before adding: ''It is not true that Welsh is the first language

here. There are pockets of 70 to 80% Welsh speakers but it depends on

how small you make the pockets. Here you either take a very servile

attitude to Welsh or you go your own way. Basically, they don't like the

English. I think it's historical, not just because we've arrived here in

alleged droves.''

The English arrived, and they did come in their droves, in the early

1980s -- on the back of the property boom in the south. They tend to

stay in their own enclaves, organise their own social circles, have the

economic power to buy up village shops and easily afford the small

houses whcih could be a first step on to the property ladder for young

locals. Mostly they are articulate, educated and resented, and they have

had a polarising impact on rural Wales. The net effect of the migration

of English settlers and holiday home owners into Anglesey, say

sociologists, is the equivalent to moving 200,000 non-English speakers

into a large English city.

Wales, of course, was anglicised a long time before the 1980s. The Act

of Union, with its declared aim that Wales should be ''for ever from

henceforth incorporated united or annexed to and with the Realm of

England'' was fashioned in 1536, a century after the rebel prince Owain

Glyndwr (in whose name the modern arson campaign has been launched) laid

the foundations for a Welsh nation state with a parliament, civil

service and treasury. The century of Owain Glyndwr also saw the

accession of Henry Tudor to the throne of England and it was under his

son, Henry VIII, that the union was forged as a deliberate move to

absorb the Welsh identity, unlike the later treaty with Scotland which

respected our separate institutions.

AFTER that Welshness and Wales survived only because a cultural

conciousness focused on the language, which remains the central and most

emotive issue at the core of Welsh politics. By the middle of the

nineteenth century Welsh sentiments found voice in the stirring national

anthem Hen Wlad fy Nhadau (Land of my Fathers) and electorally through

the non-conformist Liberals. But Wales by that time, even though 90% of

the people spoke Welsh, was a unionist and anglicised country.

At the turn of the century the first Welsh Party was formed from the

ranks of the parliamentary Liberals and an idealised vision of Home Rule

became the main inspiration for Saunders Lewis, the father of Plaid

Cymru, which came into being in 1925. But it was not until the 1950s

that Plaid Cymru became a political party proper. It was not until 1951

that a Minister for Welsh Affairs became a post within the UK government

and not until 1964 that the post of Secretary of State for Wales was

achieved, nearly 70 years after its Scottish equivalent.

By then the mythology and the symbolism of twentieth-century Welsh

nationalism had been established. The Burning of the Bombing School (the

fire of Lleyn) in 1936 was a seminal event. It resulted from Plaid

Cymru's despair at the insensitivity of the authorities in locating a

military airfield in the Welsh-speaking heartland. Saunders and two

others turned to direct action, setting fire to the site before handing

themselves in to police and admitting their technical, but not their

moral, guilt.

A jury in Caernarfon would not convinct them so it was necessary to

stage an Old Bailey trial, at which they were sentenced to nine months'

imprisonment. The incident is still a rallying point for the Welsh

national cause. It was the first time, since the days of Glyndwr that

criminal charges had been brought against the campaigners for Welsh

independence.

Civil disobedience became rooted in the cause of independence. The

activities of the Welsh Language Society in campaigning for the

language, for Welsh roadsigns and for Welsh broadcasting, embraced

direct action. ''Destruction of property may be essential to prevent

violence to people and it is a positive duty of anyone who feels

responsibility to his fellow man to be ready to take this course of

action,'' stated their manifesto. No-one knows who was responsible for

the television masts falling, but fall they did, and Welsh language

television was in place a decade before similar concessions were made to

the Gaelic-speakers of Scotland.

But nationalism in Wales is not a particularly powerful political

force. According to themselves, prospects for the Party of Wales have

never been better. At the 1992 election they secured four seats, their

highest number ever, and 9% of the vote, less than half that achieved by

the SNP in Scotland's ''Independence election''. The truth is that

Wales, like Scotland, is dominated by Labour, in its elections and in

its soul.

There were 27 Labour MPs, five Conservatives, and one Liberal Democrat

to go along with the four Plaid Cymru when the Welsh Grand Committee met

in Cardiff during stock-taking week, in which the Welsh Office offered

the same baubles as Ian Lang delivered to the other Celtic fringe of the

United Kingdom.

In Cardiff, before all the MPs rushed back to Westminster for a

Maastricht vote, Labour kept making the right noises. Neil Kinnock was

quickly on his feet to demand an elected assembly for Wales, a

devolutionist concept he never warmly embraced in his time as leader of

the Opposition and a point picked up on by a Plaid Cymru MP.

But the rhetoric sounds even more empty than it does on equivalent

Scottish exchanges. The listener is left feeling that in some senses

Wales is a culture in search of nationhood, not a country in search of

independence.

Failure to appreciate Welshness has left another English settler, Jan

Sutton, confused and bewildered by the threat her shop received from

Meibion Glyndwr for refusing to display a poster written only in Welsh.

The shop's policy is bilingual, her husband insisted. Now she makes

every effort to engage her Welsh-speaking clients in order to patch over

bad relations. She can say hello and thank you to Mrs Jones in Welsh but

she cannot understand a simple request, delivered deliberately in the

native tongue and with a wink, to buy some bread.

In their conversation on Welsh language and education Mrs Jones and

Mrs Sutton introduce contradictions at every turn. There is a slight,

polite tension, an unresolved disagreement on fundamentals left hanging

in the air. But when the Welsh language is not the charming Celtic

twinkle of Mrs Jones the Bread, it is as fierce and arrogant a culture

as English can be, as the owners of holiday homes have discovered to

their cost over the past 13 years.

Within a year 40 cottages had been torched. Within five years

insurance companies were offering #50,000 rewards for information.

EDWIN Jones is not a terrorist. As he dons the paramilitary costume of

his Meibion Glyndwr Colour Party he has to be coached to look tough for

the camera. Shoulders back please, stare hard.

The Meibion Glyndwr Colour Party is a pressure group which for seven

years has organised a march in Abergele, in North Wales, in memory of

the two nationalists of the Free Wales Army who blew themselves up in

1969, while preparing a bomb which was to have been placed on the

railway line on which the Prince of Wales was travelling to his

investiture.

Edwin Jones is good as a tour guide to burnt-out holiday cottages in

the area, passing on the way dozens of for sale signs, indicating that

the property boom in this part of Wales is well and truly over.

It is no coincidence that Meibion Glyndwr has killed no-one in the 200

holiday home attacks, Jones maintains. ''They are highly organised and

well co-ordinated. They must watch the house for months beforehand and

there must be quite a lot of them to co-ordinate attacks.'' Police

maintain it is lucky that no-one has died yet.

SOME people have been accused of terrorism. Sion Aubrey Roberts, a

21-year-old machine operator, was found guilty at Caernarfon Crown Court

on two charges of possessing explosive material and of sending

incendiary devices to two senior North Wales policemen and two

Conservative politicians. His two co-accused were acquitted after

spending 14 months in jail awaiting trial after having been refused

bail.

The Welsh letterbombs trial lasted 41 days in Caernarfon Crown Court

and was remarkable not just because it cost #3 million. It was the first

time M15 agents had given evidence in open court on counter-insurgency

operations on the British mainland.

The trial judge over-ruled a public interest immunity certificate

issued by Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke designed to suppress evidence of

MI5's involvement. An argument that the agents of state must give

evidence in camera was also over-ruled. Agents stood in court giving

details of monitoring and bugging activities, although friends of the

accused are convinced that the men giving the evidence were reading a

script prepared for them by those involved in the actual operation.

It emerged during the eight-week trial that police and the security

services launched an elaborate surveillance operation on Roberts. For

four months they watched his every movement within his flat from hidden

observation posts, presenting video evidence to the court of his

experiments with explosive materials.

MI5 involvement probably came about because the Welsh police have had

a remarkably poor record in tackling Meibion Glyndwr. In more than 12

years of activity, the police achieved only 19 convictions for minor

offences after 200 incidents of arson and letterbombing. The

perpetrators of the arson campaign have been well shielded by people who

support the aims, if not the methods, of Meibion Glyndwr.

Sion Roberts -- a chubby, immature-looking member of the Covenanters,

a small group aiming to free Wales by the end of the century -- has now

earned his place in the nationalist hall of fame. Whether M15

involvement prevents further violence or builds support for the

terrorists is not yet known.

Both organisations are in search of a new raison d'etre in the 1990s.

Meibion Glyndwr because the tide of holiday home ownership has been

stemmed, not by their activities but by economic conditions. And MI5 has

turned more attention to domestic intelligence gathering because there

is no Cold War left for it to fight. But the letterbombing trial has

demonstrated that the security forces are no nearer to penetrating the

shroud of secrecy around Meibion Glyndwr. The letterbombers and the

arsonists may be a fringe group deplored by the mainstream parties but

whether effective action can be taken against them before someone burns

in their bed is anyone's guess.