Debate about Welsh house buying policies
The BBC is reporting that a couple, of Iraqi origin, have been blocked from buying a house in north-west Wales because they are not from the area. The current owner is talking of suing the council for breaching her “human rights” and trapping her in her current home, while the couple complain that they are now homeless after moving out of their old home, without knowing about the council’s rules.
Gwynedd represents the area where the Welsh language is probably strongest. Much of it is a national park, and a well-visited tourist attraction, and it is one of the strongholds of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru (pronounced Plyde Cumree, which means the Party of Wales). The problem is that although Welsh has survived hundreds of years of English domination, it has been on a steady decline all that time. It dominates almost nowhere in east Wales or the populated areas of the south, and its dominance in the west is threatened by incomers from England, who can afford to price locals out of the housing market. Houses in London and elsewhere in south-eastern England cost well into six figures; in Wales, it’s still in five figures, and wages are lower and there are few of the “new” jobs like finance and IT.
I spent three years in the mid-1990s studying in Aberystwyth, in west Wales about halfway down the coast, but politically in south Wales, and the Welsh nationalists and language activists were very strong there. In fact, the Welsh former speaker of the House of Commons, George Thomas, said that there was (or might be) “something in the air of Aberystwyth” that made people into nationalists. The Welsh speakers had their own hall, and you had to drive past that to get to the National Library of Wales, and when the Queen came to town to “open” an extension to that building, she was greeted by a rabble of residents shouting obscene Welsh slogans. To much consternation, they then called off a trip up to the main university campus to “open” two departments which had been open for years.
The contradictions in the Welsh national movement are striking. The young, in particular, are strident about the language, and our student union had a policy by which anything displayed on union noticeboards had to have the Welsh translation in “obvious priority”, i.e. to the left or on top. All meetings had to be translated, usually by a union member whose participation was thus limited, and the minutes of the meetings were translated also. Yet many of the same young people also saw nothing wrong with dropping whole phrases of English into their Welsh. And there was some stupidity also; for example, the word for “warden” is the same in Welsh, and I saw a sign on which the word was printed twice in order to fulfil the obligation of having both languages.
Generally the response to the report (at the bottom of the article) is actually supportive of the council – sentiments that the couple should have known or that the solicitors (lawyers) should have done their job properly, and that this sort of policy (which applies only to former council properties, not houses which were always private) is vital to make sure that people can buy properties in their own communities. The problem is that many of the incomers don’t actually want to live there, but just spend their holidays there, and those that do often do not want to learn Welsh (the same is true of British expats elsewhere, by the way). Some even go out there to avoid muliticulturalism in the cities, and a Welsh politician was sacked a couple of years ago for saying so.
