Mocking the Welsh is the last permitted bigotry

‘Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans’ went a sarcastic lyric of Nöel Coward’s at the end of the second world war, and nowadays nobody of civilised instinct is beastly to them. Quite right too. Political correctness, so often stultifying to free expression, has at least ensured that racial bigotry is recognised as the cruellest kind of yobbery, distantly but recognisably related to genocide. Few of us now blame ‘the Germans’ for the evils of the war, and generalised mockery of Jews, blacks, wogs, frogs, Micks, Poles or Eyeties, let alone Muslims, has to be witty indeed to raise even a guilty laugh.

One class of person, though, one race, one nationality, is evidently exempt from this taboo. In England it is open-season still for Welsh-baiting. The Welsh joke flour- ishes. The Welsh language is still an object of derision. Scoundrels still ‘welsh’ upon their creditors, and to this day Lord Kinnock is calumnied as the old Welsh windbag. Who has not heard the English tourist complaining that the moment he and his family walked into a Welsh pub, ‘they all started jabbering in Welsh’?

So what? Yes, well, except that these adolescent attitudes are rooted in sadness. Nobody in all England lives further than 100 miles from a Welsh border, yet the public ignorance of the English about this intimate and ultimate neighbour is sad to contemplate. It is not simply geographic — every London taxi-driver, every other waitress in Leeds has been to Prestatyn or had a caravan holiday in Gwynedd. For that matter half the English middle-classes have either had a Welsh great-grandmother, or have spent their childhood holidays in their cottage near Harlech. But as to understanding anything more profound about the history, the existence and the meaning of Wales, their minds are blank and their responses generally weasly.