Local politics and blogging and flags and languages, oh my!

morfablog

The Necessary Group - a group which is campaigning for devolution in North-West England. They have a flag prepared, which is fair enough.[1]

It would be easy to be cynical or unkind about this (or to ask for our water back, please[2]), but after some thought I believe it's a fine idea. Not only for people of their own area, but for the skill-effects this can have on us in little Wales[3]. With some honourable exceptions, the motivation towards devolution in Wales has come from Assembly people, and the process has been slowed as a result. How much time has been wasted arguing that we're not "English cases" or "England cases"? And will this group need to protect themselves from the accusation of being "out of London" or "out of Birmingham"[4]? I doubt it very much.

There are advantages to living in England, and this is one of them: it's possible to be a devolutionist without being a nationalist. I would argue that Welsh nationalism has more in common with the "devolutionism" of these people (the "Northwesterners") than with "English nationalism", which is all too often nothing more than Tories who don't like Wales or Scotland </joke>.

These people here have fine ideas about campaign materials, too. The master-stroke was getting the support of a world-famous designer like Peter Saville (the boy who made covers of New Order and Joy Division). And with them beginning at the beginning, in a world that's very different to the one which saw the beginning of similar migrations in Wales, their use of modern campaign tools is looking more certain - I'm not sure if I'm being clear here; what's with me is the fact that they encourage people to start blogs to spread the word about devolution, while nobody in Wales knows what a blog is (one cannot accept a word we ought to use as a description, without mention of the support of more than half a dozen of the bloody things between the half-million of us who speak the language).[5]

Anyway, I think this thing tends to encourage our neighbours, so I'm proud to show the logo below:

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[1] Chwarae teg is a Welsh stock phrase-- it literally means "fair play". There isn't really a direct equivalent in English that I can think of.
[2] Northwestern England is a major consumer of Welsh water. Many valleys have been flooded for this purpose.
[3] Cymru fach is a conventional phrase, I think. It's also the name of a song.
[4] I'm not sure I understood this sentence correctly. I also don't recognise the prefix wrth-+SM, and can't seem to find it in dictionaries, so my translation's probably wrong.
[5] my translation crashed and burned at several points in this sentence.