Thats a good read. I dont agree with everything, but I thought it was a well balanced well thought out article that discussed parts of our culture some would've swept under the carpet
One of my posts, from another place, some years ago.
S4C still cannot support itself. After having thousands of millions of pounds poured into it, the subsidy of taxpayer’s money runs at £100 million a year, what do we in Wales have to show for all of this? It still needs to run adverts in English between all of its programmes? Despite years and years of all Welsh programming the station is totally financially unsustainable, and there simply is a lack of demand for adverts made in Welsh.
Wales needs to make progress in its economy. It is that which will determine the future for younger generations, not an ability to speak Welsh as a second, or even an alternative language. Very, very, few non-native Welsh speakers will ever be able to reach the high levels of proficiency required to handle legal, technical, or scientific journals. The translation skills required would take years and years of additional study and accreditation.
Businesses are not going to want to wait or risk that a) there will ever be a need or demand, and b) put themselves at risk that their operating costs, efficiency levels, and overall competitiveness could be affected in the meantime. Why should they try and relocate to a country which seeks to isolate itself from the main business language of the world (English) when everyone in that country speaks, English.
It doesn’t make any kind of sense, and I guess that’s what it comes down to. A social/political engineering program which was never designed to deal with questions related to economy, jobs, and prosperity, has been unleashed upon us like some kind of unstoppable force.
Now all political elites operate in the same way, they will tell you what their intentions are. However the problem is that if we as a constituency remain silent on these intentions then it is assumed that they have a mandate to proceed. You have to actively oppose that which you disagree with. It’s no good hoping that things don’t get worse. They will get worse, and programs will go through mission creep, amendments, and additions relying on the general apathy of the public.
As was pointed out the other day on here the £200 million which is diverted every year into propping up a language policy, is just money that could, and should be used in other parts of the economy. It’s our money, money that doesn’t belong to political elites to pursue a long term nationalist agenda. Most reasonable people would prefer to see better levels of employment, more jobs, more inward investment into Wales. That is what stimulates prosperity and energises the economy of the country. For example for every one full-time construction job that is created there will be a further five indirect jobs created downstream of this. In most private sector companies the ratio is 3-to-1. A single new full-time position leads to at least three other jobs in the wider economy. How is this ever to take place if companies are to be threatened with £5,000 fines for falling foul of laws which have yet to be made, or laws regulations and bureaucracy which can be, and will be increased and added to?
How can business leaders plan for the future of their companies, when those very plans are dependent upon a continuing and ever changing social engineering policy, a policy which has over promised and under delivered? Why should they wish to put the future of their business at risk by inward investment and relocating to Wales, when levels of bureaucracy coupled with possible fines have to be factored in to their thinking?
I highlight the exceptionally poor usage of Welsh on
www.ccmb.co.uk not because it is abnormal, but because it is quite normal. View for yourself and see some 371 posts in the Welsh Forum, as opposed to nearly a million posts in English. It merely mirrors that which happens in the wider community. From only 50,000 census forms completed in Welsh out of a total of 1.3 million households, to less than one percent of utility bills filled out in Welsh, the reality is that there simply isn’t the demand which we are fooled into believing exists.
No one wants to admit that this language policy has failed the people of Wales, because far too many are dependent for their own careers on its continuation. It’s simpler to just keep throwing more and more money at under performance, as that is preferable to just admitting that the policy has failed. We witnessed Leighton Andrews making a further unanticipated £400,000 available in an emergency bailout with further resources to be placed as and when required.
What kind of way forward is this?
The key area of failure has been education, which after all the emphasis on Welsh medium versus English medium is completely unable to demonstrate any form of tangible results.
Let us not be under any illusion about this, if the Welsh Assembly Government were able to quantify and provide information which clearly showed superior results through dedicated Welsh schools, they would have been shouting it from the rooftops by now.
The silence speaks volumes.
It is time to conduct a strategic review of policies which simply have failed the country as a whole. We cannot continue forward carrying the failed baggage and failed strategy of the last twenty six years. The emphasis on Welsh linguistic skills was doomed to fail as it did not take into consideration advances in global technology and business. That meant that we would be producing people with skills which were not needed at best, at worst people with an antipathy to a language which had been forced and imposed upon them.
No sooner are they out of full-time education than they discard or fail to use the language by way of some form of revolt against it. You simply cannot impose a language on pupils and expect them to reciprocate with enthusiasm towards it. As soon as they leave they have a free choice which they will exercise.
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