An idea: A more Representative Voting System that keeps the Constituency link

How can we have an electoral system that retains the local constituency link between the voter and MP but which is more representative than the First Past the Post/Winner Take All system?  My answer:
         In this system which has popped into my mind (for all I know other people may have thought of it before me), single member constituencies would be retained but the candidate with the most votes will not be guaranteed to be the new MP if he receives less than 50% of the vote.  Should no candidate receive a majority of the votes cast, whoever is to become the new MP would need the endorsement of another candidate who himself has enough votes to bridge the gap.  For example, if the candidate with the most votes gets 42% of the vote (candidate X), he or she will have to enter an agreement with another candidate who has received at least 8% of the popular vote (Candidate Y) for Candidate X to be over the line and become the new MP.

 ,Under this system, if within a year of X becoming the MP, Y feels that X, has not been keeping the promises that he made in their agreement, Y can withdraw his endorsement and the post of MP for the constituency will now be vacant.  A new MP will have to be selected from the list of candidates at the last election, and that new MP will need the endorsement of himself and a fellow candidate who received enough votes at the last election to get him over the 50% line.  If no such agreement can be made within, say 3 weeks of X being removed as MP, then a by-election will have to happen and the process will start fresh from there.

The benefits of such a system are great, in my opinion.  For starters, tactical voting would be unnecessary; every vote would count and that is, after all, what Democracy is all about .  It would also require common ground to be made whenever no single candidate gets a majority of votes cast; and that is only fair.  The link between the constituency voter and the serving MP will be preserved but more importantly the way the constituency voted at the last election will be relevant throughout the parliamentary term and the sitting MP, should he have been elected with fewer than 50% of the votes cast, will have to remain in touch with how his constituency voted.  Don't forget that due to tactical voting no longer being necessary under this system, there would no doubt be fewer constituencies in which single candidates get a majority of the votes cast.

Just how Welsh speaking is Anglesey?

After the blog on the Welsh Language in Gwynedd was completed, I thought 'Next Stop:Anglesey'.  And why not? The isle of  Anglesey, or Ynys Môn, as it is known is Welsh, is the only local authority area apart from Gwynedd where a majority of the population can speak Welsh as of the 2011 Census;  namely 57.2% in Anglesey's case.  But I, like with Gwynedd, wanted to find how widely Welsh was spoken as a mother tongue on the Island, and by the youngest generation, namely Primary School Children.  Primary school inspection reports, produced by the regulatory body Estyn, give both the pupil population and the percentage who speak Welsh at home.  I therefore retrieved such information from the latest inspection reports on all 45 primary schools and keyed them into excel.

The results showed that of the just over 5100 primary school pupils in Anglesey, 37.3% speak Welsh at home compared to 59% in neighboring Gwynedd.  While Gwynedd is still majority Welsh speaking in every sense, Anglesey is not since although a majority can speak Welsh, a majority of children on the island don't speak it at home.  Like in Gwynedd however, the schools range spectacularly; there are 5 schools on Anglesey where  more than 80% of pupils speak Welsh at home (WAH) and there are 10 schools where it is less than 10%.  Of those pupils educated in schools with WAH majorities, 66.6% spoke WAH while of those in schools where a majority didn't speak Welsh at Home, only 16.4% spoke WAH.  Anglesey can therefore be described as a 'Belgium County', the island is sharply divided into areas where Welsh is very much the venacular, and areas where it isn't anymore.   

So how are these schools distributed? Schools where less than 10% speak WAH are found mainly in Holyhead or near the RAF base in Valley with the other two being in Beaumaris and Cemaes.   Schools between 10 and 30% are mainly on the East Coast but also in Porthaethwy/Menai Bridge and Rhosneigr.  Those between 30 and 50% are largely clustered around the South West of the Island but do exist elsewhere while schools where a majority speak WAH dominate the middle, the north and north west (excluding the coastal towns of Amlwch and Cemaes) but can also be found near the south, east and Menai Strait coasts but here they are less numerous than schools with more anglicized home backgrounds.  But looking at urban areas, how Welsh speaking is each town?  In the island's administrative centre, Llangefni, 63% of primary school children are from Welsh speaking homes while in the largest town, Holyhead it is only 8.4%.  As for the other towns, Amlwch is at 30%, Benllech is at 27%, Menai Bridge is at 20% while Beaumaris is at 5%.  

Thus the island is strongly divided. While the interior, North West coasts and a few areas on the Menai are still majority Welsh mother tongue, most coastal areas, along with Holy Island, are now majority First Language English.  To add an anecdote, I once met someone who had grown up in an anglicized area of Anglesey who did not even seem to be aware of the fact that much of the island is still Welsh speaking;  in his village primary school only around 10% of pupils spoke WAH according to Estyn an he stated that he became fluent in Welsh while at school due to it being Welsh Medium but had since lost fluency while on the island since he never used it in everyday life.  The question is, therefore, for how long has Anglesey been a divided island? How far back do you have to go for the whole island to be homogeneously Welsh speaking?

A bit of History

Since I was unable to get hold of reports on pupil mother tongue dating back much more than 10 years (with one exception), the Census is what I have used to see how the vitality of Welsh changed on Anglesey during the twentieth century; the percentage of people over the age of 3 speaking welsh at Parish, District and County level being given.  Clearly, the island was almost homogeneously Welsh speaking until after the second world war.   In 1961, areas where more than 80% of the overall population could speak Welsh covered nearly the whole island but significant enclaves below 80% had emerged, all of which were coastal.  By 1971, with the exception of the North West coast and two small areas in the south West and Menai Coasts, respectively, nowhere coastal was above 80%; Welsh was strongest in inland areas while most coastal areas had become more anglicized.  Thus the linguistic divide that we see today had already come into existence by 1971, with the sixties being a decade of significant territorial change and the decades since seeing much less change. The fact that, on the whole, the areas that were still above 80% in 1971 still have a majority of their school children speaking Welsh at Home now, shows how resilient the Welsh language has been territorially in the past 46 years.  A question thus arises; why did most of Anglesey's coastal areas become English speaking in a relatively short period of time when Welsh as a living vernacular has managed to survive relatively unscathed on the rest of the island?

Of course, the Census's age breakdown is far more useful because it allows you to see the position of Welsh as the language of the home and family by revealing what percentage of 3&4 year old children spoke the language.  In 1961, 60.5% of 3-4 year olds in Anglesey could speak Welsh but by 1971, it was only 50.0%. If you compare that to the 37.3% of primary school pupils today speaking it at home, you will notice how fast Welsh declined between 1961 and 1971 (1.05% points a year) but how much slower it has declined in the 45 years since (0.28% points a year). This is no doubt due to the fact that it was during the 1960s that Welsh lost ground in those coastal areas but that since then the geographical divide has changed very little.

But how has the strength of Welsh as a mother tongue changed in Anglesey's towns? Unfortunately, after the 1921 Census, age breakdowns stop being available for any district, either urban or rural, where the population was below 20,000 at the time.  Simply, none of Anglesey's towns were large enough for the 1931 Census and later censuses for such information to be provided, which is annoying to be honest.  So what was the situation in 1921? As you can imagine, much more Welsh speaking but even then, one of Anglesey's towns had already become an enclave of English; in Beaumaris, only 43.1% of 3&4 year old residents could speak Welsh, down from 46.8% in 1911. In Holyhead 81.4% of 3&4 year olds could speak Welsh in 1921 (practically unchanged since 1911), in Menai Bridge, 73.8% (compared to 87.5% in 1911,) in Amlwch the figure was 98.8% in 1921 while Llangefni was at 93.5%.  Thus the picture in 1921 is of an almost entirely Welsh speaking island but in which Beaumaris had already become an English speaking enclave while the town of Porthaethwy/Menai Bridge, still Welsh speaking then would likely have become an enclave of English within a few decades.  

What I do know is that by 1968, only 23.3% of primary school children in Holyhead spoke Welsh at home (A figure I found on the website Syniadau.)  This is surprising, since there wasn't a very sharp decline in the percentage of the population of Holyhead (all ages) able to speak Welsh before 1961; such a figure stood at 73.6% in 1951, 71.4% in 1961 before falling to 60.9% in 1971.  However, it must be said that overall percentages can be very misleading. A notable example of this is in the large town of Llanelli, Carmarthenshire. 70.1% of the town's population said they could speak Welsh in 1931, and the consensus seems to be that as long as the percentage speaking Welsh is above 70% in any given area, the language is safe there.  What that 70.1% doesn't reveal is that only 45.9% of 3&4 year old children in the town could speak Welsh, down from 61.5% in 1921.   Since the census doesn't reveal when such a generational decline occurred in the town of Holyhead, that is again something that I would welcome some ideas about.  

Murder on the Streets of Harlow raises Serious Questions for us as a Country.

This Saturday, a 40 year old citizen of Poland, Arkadiusz Jóźwik, was brutally attacked by a group of six teenagers on the streets of Harlow, Essex, and died later in hospital.  He was living in Britain and employed as a factory worker and was assaulted merely because he was speaking Polish in the street.  

This appalling and barbaric attack, just like the ultra-nationalistic murder of Jo Cox, immediately raises questions about what has happened to our country.  A country which I, and people across the world have seen as a key example of multiculturalism working well.  To say that each of those six youths had to be 'not well-educated' to commit such an act is an understatement.  They can only have been educated/propagandised in the wrong direction; their attitudes and beliefs didn't just appear out of nowhere.

We, as a nation, cannot just sit on the knowledge that xenophobia and attacks driven by xenophobia and ultra-nationalism have risen since the referendum on leaving the EU.  Because I can tell you this, both the hate crimes themselves and the attitudes that drive them can only belong in an uncivilised country. How has this all happened? There is no doubt about the role of the Brexit referendum.  But when it comes to the notion that foreign nationals shouldn't be speaking their mother tongue on our streets, Nigel Farage's remarks, two years ago, that he felt awkward hearing other languages on a train, come to mind.  I assume therefore, that the rule is that whenever two people, for example, travel to another country, they should only communicate to each other in the language of the country they are in and therefore have to refrain from talking the language of their home country?

That means therefore that whenever UK Nationals travel to the Costa Del Sol or Ibiza, they should only be allowed to speak Spanish, or Catalan in Ibiza's case, to each other in the street.  Why don't we start by demanding that those of British descent in New Zealand should only speak Maori in the street and on trains? The truth is that I don't seem to remember Nigel Farage demanding that British Nationals on the continent integrate as eagerly as he demands that Foreign Nationals do so in the UK.  Would the murderous youths in Harlow have agreed to forfeit their right to speak English in France? 

There is no doubt in my mind that the argument that foreign nationals shouldn't speak their mother tongue on British streets is at its core an Anglo-Supremacist argument.  It is the idea that English speakers have the right to move  anywhere in the world (such as Australia or the Costa Del Sol) and bring their language with them (and even impose them on the indigenous population in certain cases) , while non-Anglo-Saxons shouldn't have the right even to speak their own language to each other while in Britain.  It is the same attitude which has English speakers who have moved to other countries referred to as expats while Polish Nationals in the United Kingdom are referred to as immigrants.  It even seems that some people believe that the world belongs to the Anglo-Saxons and that everybody else is second class.  Any country in which such a self-supremacist attitude has any influence at all is a country with a problem it needs to deal with.   I personally put the blame not only with UKIP but also the legacy of the British Empire and prejudices towards continental Europeans which seem all too prevalent in certain sections of British Society.  It is worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of British Nationals on the Costa Del Sol don't learn Spanish, while I personally have not yet met a single adult Polish National in Britain who doesn't speak good English.  

With regards to people moving from one country to another, we can't have one rule for some people and another for others.  The one rule for everyone should be that you are allowed to speak the language of your Home Country to other people from your Home Country no matter where you are, but you must also learn the language of the country you have moved to.  As for the perpetrators of such a crime, a just sentence would have them spend at least 20 years in Polish Prisons where they would be separated from each other and banned from speaking English.  The British government should pay for their imprisonment and not the Polish taxpayer.  
  

Why the Welsh Language absolutely should not die.

Earlier this month, BBC Radio Live Five sent a tweet asking someone to speak on air about 'why the Welsh Language should die', before apologizing.  As it turned out, No one was found who was willing to profess such an opinion.  Such comments, did, and rightly so, trigger a hostile reaction from both the Welsh Language Commisioner and Leanne Wood, leader of Plaid Cymru.  Leanne's response, which I thought was excellent, argued that the Welsh Language belonged to everyone in Wales, and an attack on the language was an attack on Welsh people in general.  I certainly agree and believe that now is an appropriate time to argue why I believe that the Welsh Language is so important.

       I, being a language learner, did French for A Level and after my A Levels, I spent a little over a month of that Summer in Brittany, another Celtic Country, in order to practice my French and see if I could hear any Breton, an endangered language very similar to Welsh.  But it was after I arrived there that I realized how important Welsh is.  One day, my host family and I bumped into a non-French woman who had moved to Brittany and learnt French.  I spoke to this lady, and it turned out she was Irish.  Nevertheless, my host family kept referring to her as l'anglaise - 'The English Woman.'  I pointed out to them that no, she was not English, that instead she was from the Republic of Ireland which was not only not part of England, that it was not even part of the UK and hadn't been for nearly a Hundred Years.  However to my Host Family, it didn't matter, to them the Irish were English.  This was an attitude or belief that cropped up more than once while in France, and I had also encountered it on the Continent before.  

       The same belief/attitude does not appear to exist towards the Baltic States, all three of which gained independence from the Soviet Union only 25 years ago, or towards the other Post-Soviet states by that matter.  So many countries have gained independence from larger neighbors since the Ireland gained independence in 1922, and yet they are not dealt the same injustice of being thought of as the same as their former conquerors.  Why is this? Once word: Language.  In spite of everything about Ireland that is different to England, its culture, its geography, its history, its republican system of government, the be all and end all with regards to whether or not many people deny whether you exist as a nation appears to be whether or not you're ancestors adopted the language of their conquerors.  

       Wales, like Ireland, has a lot that is different from England; its geography, its culture, its architecture, its success at Rugby and its institutions such as the Eisteddfod.  But unlike Ireland, Wales is still part of the United Kingdom and is much more linked to, and integrated with, England than Ireland is; not only in terms of geography but also economically, demographically and with regards to its transport infrastructure.  Welsh people are therefore even more likely to be referred to as English by people from outside the British Isles.  It therefore seems that in the eyes of the much of the west of the world,  whether or not Wales is a nation in its own right or merely a western province of England depends on the survival of the Welsh Language.  And for those who say that Welsh no longer has a right to exist because of Globalisation, is anyone seriously saying that because of globalization, the Estonians should stop speaking Estonian and instead adopt Russian?   

Are we Brits really so bad at Foreign Languages?

In my first Blog, I did rather criticize my own Country for the attitude of much of our Press towards the Easter Rising and Irish War of Independence, along with the British Government of the day's conduct in Ireland at the time.  Perhaps now I should redeem myself in the eyes of my Country and dispel an accusation made against us all the time, and not least by ourselves, that we as a nation are bad at learning foreign languages.  I myself am a Second Language speaker of French who studied it for A Level, while I am also, as mentioned in my last blog, having a shot at Welsh right now while I have tried but temporarily given up on German.

The notion that we, Brits, are worse at learning Foreign Languages than other Europeans implies that we as a nation do try, but don't succeed, while other Europeans also try but do actually succeed.  The foreign languages most traditionally taught in Britain are French followed by German, while Spanish is somewhat of a newcomer.  In order to prove that we are 'bad' at those Foreign Languages, remembering that being good or bad is always relative, we would have to prove that other Europeans are better at those Foreign Languages than we are.  Do Germans speak better French than we do?  Are Sicilians more proficient than us in German?

There can be no doubt, that the study of Foreign Languages in Britain is in the decline. Between 1996 and 2013, the number of entries for A Levels in Foreign Languages fell by 31%.  During that period, the number of such entries for French fell by 57% and for German, 59%.  Spanish did show an impressive increase of 59% however.  Overall the issue is not that we are trying but not succeeding, but that fewer of us are trying in the first place.  Is this a uniquely British Problem? No. In the 1970s, 15% of Germans could hold a conversation in French.  Now, less than 5% can.  The study of German in France is likewise less than what it was 40 years ago, while even in Flanders, the Flemish speaking half of Belgium, French Language proficiency is in the decline despite the fact that native speakers of Dutch and Flemish have a reputation of being the best linguists in Europe.  Even stranger, given that we are living in an age of Globalization and greater inter-connectivity.

 The notion that we are under-performing in French and German compared to other non-French and Non-German speaking Countries, respectively, is therefore plain wrong.  That is not the issue here.  The reason why fewer of us are learning French and German, and the reason why other European are also learning those languages less and less is because what happens to our Mother Tongue, English, has become the undisputed First Foreign Language in every non-English speaking Country in Europe.  And even that is an understatement; for our European neighbors, the situation for them is not so much that everyone has to learn a Foreign Language and English happens to be the most popular; English is in a different category from other foreign languages, the situation is more like if you don't become proficient in English you will be disadvantaged enough in the job market to deter you from not learning it and in many countries, the percentage of people able to converse in English is now above 50%, and even above 80% in the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

This increase in the importance of English has come only at the expense of the learning of other languages.  For example, with the perception that it is quite possible to get by in Germany because 'everyone speaks English', one's motivation for learning German decreases.  In short, whereas in the past, English would have been necessary to get by in the UK but useless on the Continent, now it is necessary in the UK and useful on the Continent and along with that, the indigenous languages of the Continent have become less necessary for a Foreigner to get by through in their own respective Homelands.   This is thus why European Languages that aren't English have become less popular not only among Brits but also among other Europeans.

But for those of us who aren't put off, trying to practice one's second language is made more difficult precisely because of the pre-eminence of English.  I know many people, me included in fact, who, when trying to practice in the Country that speaks the language they are trying to learn, get replied to in English or even told not to try altogether, simply because they have a non-native accent.  This doesn't happen to often to me in France but I imagine if I was in Sweden trying to learn Swedish I would probably have pulled my hair out after a day.  I know even know some people who lie about their nationality to pretend that they don't speak English so that they get a real opportunity to practice.

Thus, the best way for a European in today's Europe to become proficient in a foreign language is for English not to be the language of their Country.  Where in the United Kingdom has the highest percentage of bilinguals? It is not the cosmopolitan and well connected cities and conurbations, but the one area where an indigenous language other than English is still spoken by a majority of children as a mother tongue: the mountainous area of Gwynedd, where 59% of school children speak Welsh at Home (see my previous blog).

So when you compare an Englishman's ability to speak German with a German's ability to speak English, you must remember that you are not comparing like with like.  Should the Englishman speak just as good German as the German does English, it would not be a draw; the Englishman would win all the brownie-points.  Also, it must be noted that, because English has such a monopoly on Foreign Language learning on the Continent while due to it being our mother tongue, we don't have to focus on it, when we Brits do choose to learn Foreign Languages, we learn a more diverse range.  So for example, in a group of ten Germans with Foreign Language knowledge, all will speak English but probably nothing else, among a similar group of Brits with foreign language knowledge, some might speak French, German or Japanese for that matter.  Thus no single foreign Language will be spoken by nearly as high a proportion of people.

I therefore feel that for as long as English remains in such a preeminent position, we Brits will always be accused of being 'bad at learning Foreign Languages.'  Only when the different National Languages of Europe are equal will we Brits be freed from the cage of Monolingualism.

Just how Welsh Speaking is Gwynedd today?

Gwynedd, the home of Snowdon, has for the centuries been a bastion for Welshness.  Whether as the last unconquered Welsh principality in the 13th Century or as the Heartland of Welsh language newspapers, novels and poets in the 19th and early 20th, to say that the region has punched above its weight with regards to Welsh culture would be an understatement.  And of course, in the twenty-first century where Welsh is now a minority language in Wales as a whole, Gwynedd is Wales's most welsh speaking area.   Thus, I, myself a learner of the language originally from London but now living in Wales, wanted to find out just how Welsh speaking Gwynedd is in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century.

             The 2011 Census recorded that 65.4% of those enumerated in Gwynedd on Census day could speak Welsh, compared to 72.1% in `1991.  However the Census is not always the best guide to the state of Welsh as a Mother Tongue; the question is on whether or not you can speak Welsh; not whether or not it is your mother tongue.  This is significant since, A Survey Commissioned by Gwynedd Council on secondary schools in 2014, showed how the home language, along with the Home Language of his or her friends, had the greatest impact on a child's use of the language socially.  A far more accurate indicator of the status of Welsh as a mother tongue and community language, than the Census, are school inspection reports by Estyn, the Welsh equivalent to OFSTED in England, which will state the  percentage of pupils speaking Welsh at Home under the section entitled 'Context'.  Thus in a spare weekend this Summer, I noted down the relevant numbers and percentages given in the latest Estyn reports in all 96 of Gwynedd's primary schools into one spread sheet, and, since they have smaller catchment areas than secondary schools they give quite an accurate picture of the town or village in which they are located.  I must add however, that for the primary schools in the Bala catchment area, I used a 2014 language impact assessment report available online via google search instead of going onto the school's individual estyn reports.

            The results showed that of Gwynedd's Primary school population of just under 9500, 59.2% speak Welsh at home (WAH).  This did not surprise me; the survey referred to earlier concluded that 59% of secondary school pupils came from either wholly Welsh speaking or bilingual homes (the former 44%, the latter 15%).  What astonished me about the Estyn results,however, was the variation: The school with the highest percentage of pupils from Welsh-speaking homes (Ysgol Bro Tryweryn in Frongoch) stood at 96% while the 3 most anglicized schools had no pupils from Welsh speaking homes.  In 7 schools the percentage exceeded 90% while in 10 schools it was less than 10%.  There's no other way of putting it, that is an astonishingly wide variation.  Furthermore, Schools above 50% averaged 73.6% while those below 50% averaged 14.4%. Clearly, the state of Welsh as a living vernacular in Gwynedd today varies spectacularly depending on which part of Gwynedd you are in; there are areas where nearly child has Welsh as their mother tongue and areas where literally no child does.   So how exactly does the strength of Welsh vary across the county? I will thus delve into each of Gwynedd's three territorial divisions; Arfon, Meirionydd and Dwyfor: 

          Arfon, in the north of Gwynedd where 60% of pupils speak Welsh at home, contains Gwynedd's two largest towns: Bangor and Caernarfon.  In Caernarfon's primary schools, 81.6% speak Welsh at home; Welsh is clearly the town's living vernacular.  In Bangor, however, it is only 24.3%.   Clearly, although the influx of university students in Bangor does have some impact on the percentage who can speak Welsh there, what matters more is that it simply doesn't seem to be the town's vernacular any more.  Of Arfon's 41 Primary schools, in only 13 do less than half of pupils speak Welsh at home, and of these, 10 are in or around Bangor.  Thus Arfon can be described as an essentially Welsh speaking area in which Bangor is an English speaking enclave.

        In Meirionydd, essentially Southern Gwynedd, only 47% of pupils speak Welsh at Home and only 16 of its 31 primary schools have WAH majorities.  For much of the twentieth Century, before the area of Gwynedd was created as an administrative area, Meirionydd was the most Welsh speaking county in Wales.  The results show that it is now sharply divided and so I will deal with the two halves of Merionydd separately:  the North and East of Meirionydd (essentially mid-snowdonia) is still Welsh speaking with 76.5% of the primary school population there speaking it at home; in Trawsfynydd and Frongoch's primary schools it exceeds 90% while only one school in this region has a WAH minority, Ysgol Bueno Sant in Bala.  Although mostly rural, this region does include two towns; lakeside Bala and the post-industrial slate mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog.  Bala has two primary schools, one, Ysgol Bro Tegid where 64% come from WS homes and the other, Ysgol Bueno Sant where only 36% do.  Blaenau Ffestiniog, the largest of Merionydd's towns has 80% of its pupils speaking Welsh at home and none of its primary schools are below 70%.  It is tempting to think that the Blaenau's slag heaps may have deterred Anglophone incomers from settling there while it will be interesting to see what effect the town's regeneration will have on the survival of Welsh there in the years to come.   
              As for the South and Western half of Meirionydd, there, only 20.5% of pupils come from Welsh-speaking homes.  Essentially, everywhere on the Meirionydd coast south of Harlech has been anglicized.  A key example of this is the seaside resort of Barmouth, where in its primary school, Ysgol Y Traeth, no pupils speak Welsh at home. Although centred on the coast, this area of anglicisation does, unfortunately, extend inland and cover much of southern Snowdonia.   In the beautiful town of Dolgellau below Cadair Idris, only 25% of pupils speak Welsh at home and interestingly this is neither a seaside resort nor a university town.  Dolgellau is a key example of how the Census can give a false impression; in 2011, 64.8% of the town's inhabitants reported that they could speak Welsh, inducing one to think that Welsh is still a majority language there while estyn shows otherwise.  Although Welsh is stronger in Dolgellau's surrounding mountainous hinterland than in the town itself, even there, anglicisation is most definitely happening.  In the mountain-village school in Dinas Mawddwy, 73% of pupils came from Welsh speaking homes in 2007, but by 2010 this had fallen to 40%.  Similarly in Ganllwyd, the figure was 72% in 2008 and 50% in 2014.  However, in the villages of Pennal and Corris, for example, the demise of Welsh as the main vernacular for children has already occurred; their percentages were 14 and 6%, at their latest inspections, respectively.   Thus, the future for Welsh in Southern Snowdonia does not look good.

        On a more cheerful note, however, the division of Dwyfor, consisting mainly of the Lleyn Peninsular, is the most Welsh speaking of Gwynedd's three divisions; there, 70.4% of pupils speak Welsh at home.  In 12 of its 23 schools, more than 70% of pupils speak the language at home while in only 3 of its 23 schools is Welsh not the majority mother tongue: Abersoch, Borthyguest and Beddgelert with these 3 schools averaging at 26%; Beddgelert now being at 7% (compared with 50% in 2005).    To me, it's ironic that the attention of organisations such as Cymuned and Meibion Glyndwr were so focused on the Lleyn when this is the by far the language's safest territory.  Even so, it does appear that WAH may become a minority in the seaside towns of Criccieth and Porthmadog in the near future; WAH will be a minority in Ysgol Treferthyr in Criccieth by the next inspection if the current trend continues, while in Porthmadog, it was noted in Ysgol Eifon Wyn's latest inspection report (from 2010),  that although 60% of pupils overall spoke WAH, in the nursery class it was only a third.  Should the percentage in these two schools fall below 50%, Welsh will still be a majority in 18 of Dwyfor's 23 schools but no longer be the majority pupil mother tongue in two of its four urban centres.  

        Thus, Gwynedd can be described as an area in which Welsh is still a majority mother tongue, but in which there are significant areas where it is not, namely much of Meirionydd and the City of Bangor.  As for why Welsh has survived so well in certain areas but not in others, this is something I would welcome some input on.  Feel free to comment; maybe you live in Gwynedd or have a contribution to make, or just want to join in the discussion.  

The Strange Death of Labour Britain?

Labour has entered its new wilderness years.  Yet these are not going to be like those of the 1980s; unlike in the days of Margaret Thatcher, when Labour was the opposition but just as much part of the political debate as the Tories in government, now it looks like Labour is actually disappearing off stage, and could it be for good?
       During the not-fondly-looked-back-upon 'Wilderness Years' of 1979-1997, the Labour Party was out of power in Westminster and they remained in opposition election after election.  But however much Labour might not want to look back on its past during those years and for all their nickname, the 'Wilderness Years,  they weren't actually that wild a wilderness for Labour; Labour was, with the Tories, on Centre stage.  Whether it was Michael Foot vs Thatcher, the Miners vs Thatcher or Kinnock vs Thatcher and Major, on the stage before the Country's eyes was the struggle between left and right, between the two parties and the two ideologies they upheld, while the miners and the Unions too, were at the centre of attention, particularly, of course, during the Miners' strike. Labour and its ideology were out of government and for ever it seemed, but they weren't beyond mainstream attention; quite the opposite.
        Now however, Labour really is in uncharted territory, and that's being quite positive about their situation.  At the 2015 general election, they lost almost the entirety of their traditional Scottish heartland and as of the Scottish Parliament election this May, they are now the third largest party in the said institution, where nine years ago they were the government.  South of the border, Labour's internationalist and pro-European core principals were found to have not been shared by the majority of their working class constituents across most of their industrialist heartlands in the North of England and South Wales, the working class being the very people the party was founded to represent.  The party now faces a leadership election that might only lead to further catastrophe and it was widely agreed that their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, did not do enough for the remain side in the lead up to the referendum.  What ever becomes of the leadership election, whether Corbyn survives or is replaced, whether Labour stays as one party or splits into Pro and Anti-Corbynite parties, it may well be too late; the marginalisation of Labour from the mainstream of political debate may well be permanent, although this may well depend on how Brexit turns out.
        Whether it is Labour's fault or not, the party, or at least the leadership, didn't seem to have a very high profile in the referendum debate, a debate which consumed nearly all of the country's political attention.  It was of course, in many ways, a 'Tory Debate'; it was called by David Cameron and it was his party which was divided on the issue there and just as it had been the Tories for whom Europe had been a hot-potato issue for 25 years.  In the Wembley debate, the key figures who stood out most notably for me were Boris Johnson and Andrea Leadsome on the Leave side, and Ruth Davidson for Remain; all Tories.  UKIP, it goes without saying was central to the debate, while the Lib-Dems as an internationalist party threw all their effort into the Remain campaign.
       It just seems that the old debate between Capitalism and Socialism just doesn't exist any more.  Now it's nationalism vs Internationalism, or rather Pro-Europeanism vs British nationalist Europhobia, that is the play before the country's eyes.  Celtic Nationalism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be a third force which will of course be Centre-stage again if there's a second independence referendum in Scotland.  Where's Labour's socialism's place within that two/three way struggle? Obviously firmly within the internationalist camp but is it possible for Labour to have the starring role there? I'm not so sure.  Corbyn's inaction doesn't seem to have helped.  Perhaps we need a new progressive but non-socialist force to embody Internationalism in Britain.  The Lib-Dems are the obvious party for the job, and they have been capitalising on that opportunity.  Nevertheless, having May rather than Leadsome as Tory leader will make it less easy for them to attract remain voting Tories.  Either way, I wish them good luck.
      As for Labour, if they are not careful, crises such as their loss of support and even retreat from the mainstream in Scotland, their ideological detachment from their working class constituents south of the border (who are their raison d'etre) and, not to mention their savage infighting after the referendum, might end up leading to, if such problems don't constitute it themselves, a strange death of Socialist Britain too much like the Strange Death of Liberal England, so described by George Dangerfield writing in 1931, which occurred a century ago, seeing the Liberals fall from being the governing party before and into the First World War, to what it has been in the century since.