Where in the world does Wales stand now?

I am at Sam Ash’s music emporium on 48th Street in Manhattan, hanging with Isaac Hayes, when the news comes in. (I’m not shitting you, good people - Zarina can confirm it since she was with me.)

A dark uptown voice beside me says, “You English, guy?”
“Well, no, not exactly, man. I’m from Wales, a small country with mountains and sheep and slate and steel works and coal mines, next door to England. You know…?”
My poor explanation produces a perplexed expression in my interrogator, which is understandable considering it’s unusual to meet an American who knows where the British Isles are to be found.
“Oh. I thought that sounded like a British accent.”
“Well, yeah, it is…” (I was brought up in England, which means I don’t have a Welsh accent, just to add to the confusion of trying to identity myself to those from foreign climes.)
“You wanna know what’s happenin’ in the British elections?”

It is 1997 and Isaac’s friend is keen to tell me that Labour has ended what has seemed an eternity of Conservative misrule with a crushing landslide victory. And he’s right as it happens, I do want to know.

So we stop talking about things musical and repair to a bar down the street where, to my astonishment, the election results are being shown on television. The scale of Tony Blair’s popular victory is such that it has made the main evening news and this is remarkable in that Americans normally pay scant attention to events outside their home state, let alone the federal borders.

My companions join me in a tequila-charged toast to celebrate a new era of social justice and the hope that co-operation between our two great countries - I don’t have the strength to explain again - will establish a more fraternal world order.

These events seem a very long time ago. Ten years have passed and the New Labour promise is mired in the lies that enabled Tony Blair to cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Iraq, that concealed the corruption behind British arms dealing and the selling of titles to the rich, immoral bastards who exploit ordinary, decent people.

Now, having stuffed us with a massive bill from his American friends for renewing nuclear weapons we don’t need, it’s time for the old lion to slope off with his reward from Rupert Murdock. The other New Labour big cats, such as our own king of the veld, Peter Hain, are going to change their spots again to save their skins.

Just hang on to the fact that these are the same people who have spoken vociferously in support of the war in Iraq, the same party that may have benefited from the cash for honours scandal. They are going to impose Gordon Brown on us, a prime minister for whom we haven’t voted, a chancellor who just took money out of the purses of poor Welsh people to pay yet another bribe to English middle class voters.

Personally I’d rather struggle with explaining to foreigners where in the world a tiny independent Wales is than live under the leadership of such people.

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'Captain Crap' and the lost boys

Stephen Jones being nicknamed ‘Captain Crap’ by his team-mates is reason enough to support Gareth Jenkins’ decision to bring in a sports psychologist. It may be a wittily ironic, inversely supportive reaction to media criticism of Jones’ leadership, but it’s hardly redolent of a winning group dynamic.

In Freudian psychoanalytical terms, it’s the ‘ego’ rather than the ‘id’ or the ‘superego’ that’s at the root of the current problems, and Jenkins is therefore right when he says the players are their own worst enemies.

It’s pointless to speculate on whether Stephen Jones might have chosen more shrewdly, but James Hook’s decision to kick for touch in the dying seconds was hopelessly naive. He may be a technically exceptional player but as yet he lacks the maturity to make a game defining call.

A focused side would have accepted the virtually-guaranteed three points and the ensuing draw, rather than risk their humiliation and the honour of the nation on the slim chance of going over from a lineout. But this is a team in complete mental disarray.

The malaise afflicting the boys might be seen as an extension of our national psyche. After all, this is largely the same group of players who spectacularly won the 2005 Six Nations only to bring about the demise of the architect of their success in an attempt to play their Australian drinking buddy into his job. How bloody Welsh is that?

Beating England on Saturday now looks a tall order. Yet we’ve only been narrowly beaten in the games to date so there’s still reason for hope. Whatever the outcome, we need to remember that Gareth Jenkins is one of us, not some hired gun from the Southern Hemisphere, and he’s trying to engineer exactly what we want for all the right reasons. Let’s leave the guy to get on with it.

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A right royal coup

There has been a typically muted reaction in Wales to the news that the Duke of Cornwall has asserted his rights over the Three Feather’s symbol and that the Lord Chamberlain, on his behalf, has instructed a handful of companies producing tacky crap for tourists to stop using it.

There have been no demonstrations in the streets and virtually no comment from politicians. Maybe nobody cares? Or maybe we’re so used to losing what we once thought of as rights that we simply don’t react any more. The Three Feathers emblem belongs not to the people of Wales but to the Duchy of Cornwall, so what? A few tat merchants bleat a little in the media and the Duchy pretends to back down having tested the temperature of the obviously tepid water. It’s possible Charles' marketing people were valuing unexploited assets, exploring ways of monetarising a well-known piece of his intellectual property. If this is so, you can be sure they’ll find a way to do it, eventually.

Like just about everything in life nowadays, the monarchy is more than anything a business, and The Duchy of Cornwall branch is Charles’ private firm. He is its sole beneficiary, meaning that he pockets all of its profits. What he can no longer milk from our taxes through the civil list, he extracts from us in exchange for biscuits.

Unlike my business or your business or even BP Amoco’s, The Duchy has some very powerful players on its side to lean on little people, like the Lord Chamberlain, for instance.

This begs the question: Can anyone tell me why we need these people? Please don’t suggest they benefit Welsh tourism because they obviously don’t. I can see how it might be argued that they’re of benefit to London but I suspect people would still visit Buckingham Palace whether the Royals were there or not. Don’t tell me they do a lot for charity either, unless you can quantify it. I suppose they might be good for opening things or visiting cheese factories but you’d probably get more people along if you asked Charlotte Church to do it instead.

The Duchy of Cornwell obviously cares nothing for the people of Wales. It’s just a money making machine. But it has inadvertently given us a golden opportunity to be rid of an ancient symbol of oppression. Let’s get together and hand it back, eh?

Then, why don’t we begin creating new emblems for the 21st Century, emblems that represent Wales while belonging to all the Welsh people?

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Three feathers, two fingers

For once I agree with Charles Windsor. He maintains that the three feathers emblem is his personal property. Fine. It has nothing to do with Wales anyway. It may be symbolic after 600 years, but it’s still the mark of the occupier. Let’s get it off the shirts of our rugby team and erase it from the tat we sell to tourists. Let’s remove it from the uniforms of our soldiers. While we’re at it, let’s stop kowtowing to this pompous, arrogant anachronism and take our country back.

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Newsnight Tonight

It being St David’s Day tomorrow, I’ve agreed to be interviewed by the BBC about the ‘Hendrix’ recording of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. The interview will be broadcast during Newsnight on BBC2, tonight at 10.30pm.

Tomorrow being a day of daffodils and leeks and women (but not men) in ‘traditional national dress’ and Charles Windsor’s Three Feathers and the rest of the supposed paraphernalia of Welshness, I thought it might be an appropriate moment to do something they’ve been badgering me about since the story first broke.

I suppose the BBC might accuse me of cultural vandalism, if not cultural terrorism, but I’m going to try to make a point about the myths of Welshness we’ve been saddled with, and how these myths were created.

I don’t want you to think I’m a killjoy; I think it’s really important to celebrate pride in our origins. But what makes us Welsh is our true heritage not the iconography, both political and religious, that’s been used to control us down the centuries. What’s important to me is belonging to a community of human beings who share my ancestry, my sense of ‘home’ and my struggles with life.

Also appearing on Newsnight will be my great friend and creative collaborator, the brilliant guitarist John Ellis. John founded Bazooka Joe and The Vibrators and was a member of The Stranglers. More recently he played with Peter Gabriel. John is English through and through. We’ve known each other since we were at Hornsey College of Art together in the early 1970’s when we used to perform at the Stapleton Hall Tavern in Stroud Green.

Armed with this knowledge, the gist of the Newsnight interview should come as no surprise to you.

Are you watching Tony Blair?

Now that the government in Westminster has manoeuvred us into a state of perpetual war with Islam both at home and abroad, it can easily justify taking away what’s left of our personal freedoms, a circumstance George Orwell imagined in 1984, a novel he wrote in 1949.

With the introduction of identity cards, which will carry our biometric data, the intelligence agencies will, we’re told, be able to tell the white hats from the black hats. I personally think there is still plenty of room for confusion, especially when you consider that nowadays we’re being taught to think of the guys in the white hats as the baddies.

Incredibly, we live in a state where a Labour Prime Minister has, for our own good apparently, outsourced the management of our security to the Central Intelligence Agency. Perhaps the Cousins offered to do the job for free on the condition that they get use of the information they collect.

The CIA already has access to British bank accounts. It receives copies of international Swift bank transfers. It monitors our phone calls. It can track us anywhere in the world from our cell phone signals, from airline passenger manifests, or from where we use our credit cards.

This is an organisation that operates outside of international law, snatching people it considers a threat to American interests off the streets and transporting them, on occasion via British airports, to be interrogated in places like Afghanistan where torture is still condoned. Ultimately, innocent people can be detained indefinitely in places like Guantanamo Bay without ever coming to trial, simply on the suspicions of the CIA.

You think I’m raving? Wake up and smell the coffee! Consider the case currently being brought against the CIA by the German government because one of its citizens was treated in just such a manner in a case of mistaken identity.

In writing this, and in advocating Welsh independence, do you think I represent a threat to American interests? Should I be concerned, then, that a disproportionately high percentage of visitors to my firm’s website originate from the Commonwealth of Virginia, a state in which Langley, the home of the CIA, is located? This is in addition to the disproportionately high number of visitors I get that are actually identified as being from the US government. At least the visitors I get from the British security services, including a lot from the Special Branch, appear to be easily identifiable from their IP addresses.

I’m not losing any sleep over it, mind you, although perhaps I should. After all, knowing that the average American knows little of the geography of anywhere past the state line, it would be foolish to have confidence in the CIA being able to tell the difference between an extreme Islamic fundamentalist and a Welsh separatist fundamental atheist.

Who knows, perhaps at this very moment Tony Blair is on the phone to George Bush, sanctioning a cruise missile strike on my web server.

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On the integrity of Peter Hain's New Unionism

Over a coffee in my kitchen last week, before that panicky propaganda onslaught about Wales staying in the UK was unleashed in the Western Mail, a friend told me about a meeting he had a few years ago with the Right Honourable Peter Hain MP.

When he became Secretary of State for Wales in 2002, Peter held a reception for the great and the good of the Welsh music scene, following on from the example set by his boss, Tony Blair. My friend, being both Welsh and a rock star, was invited along with his fellow band members.

When my friend got to the ‘meet and greet’, the Secretary of State gripped his hand firmly, as you would a close associate, and maintaining a vice-like grip, deftly manoeuvred my friend into the best position for the photographers to get the ‘glad-shot’. Before parting, he handed my friend a business card, impressing upon him the idea that he shouldn’t hesitate to call if ever he had a problem. Then, with a few images of my friend’s tacit support duly harvested, Peter turned his attention to inducting the next celebrity-best-friend-of-the-moment.

My friend instinctively counted his fingers and, finding everything still in place, joined a party at which all had a good time, apparently at the expense of the Welsh Office.

Now, my friend never came across anything he thought worth bothering his new friend Peter with, but his dad had a problem in the village, which needed political support. So his dad called the number on the card and left a message. No reply. He wrote a letter. No reply. He sent an email. Nothing came back.

I suppose this could be the result of a series of administrative mishaps but it is just as likely to indicate that Peter Hain is without integrity.

So when he writes about the potential ‘Balkanisation’ of Britain if Wales and Scotland were to break free of England, you’d be safe to assume that he’s actually trying to scare you into believing the party line. And when he mentions that public spending is £1,000 per head greater in Wales than elsewhere in Britain, you might be right to assume it’s a bald-faced lie designed to further propagate the myth that Wales is financially dependent upon England.

Ask yourself this question. Is Peter Hain providing this information for your benefit, or is he doing it for reasons of self-interest or the interests of his party? Because if it’s the latter, then this amounts to corruption, ‘sleaze’ in other words, and he has no place being in public office.

In reality, there’s nothing to fear except, perhaps, the consequences of placing power in the hands of disingenuous people like Peter Hain and Tony Blair. Let’s have a debate about whether we want to be ‘Montenegro’ to England’s ‘Greater Serbia’ with all of the relevant information available for public scrutiny. Then, when it comes to elections, we need to look for people with integrity… and beg them to become politicians.

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