Wales is marching backwards into independence," declared the Welsh nationalist poet Harri Webb in the mid-1970s, "everybody desperately pretending that we are going somewhere else." Independence, of course, is not on offer in tomorrow's referendum in Wales. For the Blair government, especially coming in the wake of last week's decisive Scottish Yes Yes vote for a Scottish parliament with tax-varying powers, the proposed Welsh assembly is much more about holding the United Kingdom together. The project is for rolling devolution with assemblies for London and the English regions following on from Scotland and Wales.
Nonetheless, the sense that Wales is stumbling backwards into unknown territory is palpable. The last poll of the campaign, published at the beginning of this week, revealed 34 per cent undecided, with 37 per cent saying Yes and 29 per cent No. The outcome now depends on the propensity of the three camps to turn out.
The opinion poll found that 50 per cent were certain, with a further 16 per cent "very likely" to cast a vote. Back in March 1979, when a referendum was last held on devolution, 58 per cent of the electorate turned out and registered a massive 4-to-1 rejection of the Welsh assembly then on offer.
The potential for change is much greater now, however. In 1979 the Callaghan government was at the fag-end of its administration, embroiled in a "winter of discontent" of rows with public sector unions challenging a pay freeze. Today Blair's Labour government seems to be carrying all before it on a wave of popularity.
Despite a few dissidents, the Welsh Labour Party, with 18 years of Tory rule at the Welsh Office fresh in the memory, has united around its policy. Above all Scotland has set Britain irrevocably on the devolution road, removing the status quo option from beneath the feet of the No campaign.
Yet Wales is simply not Scotland. Being Welsh is much more diffuse and fractured than is the case north of the border. There are, in fact, many different types of Welshness; for some symbolised by the language, for others the striking differences between the regions of Wales. The Welsh find it difficult to imagine Wales within an institutional framework in a way that comes naturally to the Scots, whose separate legal and education systems survived the 1707 Act of Union. Communications in Wales run east to west, along the southern and northern coasts, rather than north to south in a way that would naturally unify the country.
Many people in southern Wales, for instance, have never, or rarely, been to the north, and vice versa. Instead of Wales as a whole, the Welsh tend to identify first and most strongly with their locality; their valley, town, village or bro (as the Welsh language more clearly states it) rather than with a sense of Wales as a whole. Compared with Scotland, too, Wales has an underdeveloped national press.
The "national newspaper", the Western Mail, hardly circulates in north Wales, while the Liverpool-based Daily Post does not penetrate below a line drawn eastwards from Aberystwyth. Only 13 per cent of Welsh households take a daily morning newspaper published and printed in Wales; in Scotland the figure is 90 per cent.
Welsh institutions do, of course, exist, most saliently the Welsh Office and the all-Wales quangos whose number has more than doubled to around 80 in the last 20 years. However, they are relatively recent. The Welsh Office was established only in 1964 (along with BBC Wales in the same year), the Wales TUC in 1973, the Welsh Development Agency in 1976.
For all these reasons, and certainly in comparison with Scotland, Welsh identity is relatively weak in terms of institutions, and relatively strong in terms of cultural markers such as the language.
This is why the Secretary of State for Wales, Ron Davies, continually says that the key issue tomorrow is one of confidence, that the people of Wales should not be afraid to stand up for themselves in the world. And it is why the No campaigners constantly stress divisions within Wales, claiming that an assembly would accentuate them. "North Wales will be worried that south Wales will dominate," says the chairman of the Just Say No Campaign, businessman Julian Hodge.
"English and Welsh speakers will worry that one group will benefit over the other. Labour voters will worry that an anti-Labour coalition might, through PR, run the assembly, and the rest of Wales will worry that an assembly will take decision-making even further away from them."
There have, of course, been many changes in Welsh society since the 1970s when devolution was so decisively rejected. The Welsh economy has been substantially reconstructed, with the old coal and steel industries largely giving way to more modern service and manufacturing jobs, many the result of global inward investment.
The renewal of the economy has taken place within a European milieu in which the Single Market and the structural funds have been crucially important. So has the Common Agricultural Policy for Welsh farming, and all these have added to a heightening of European awareness in Wales that was not present in the 1970s.
Perhaps the most extraordinary change is that, unlike in 1979, the Welsh language has not become intimately embroiled in the debate. This reflects a subtle but profound change in the Welsh mood.
In 1979 the language was deployed ruthlessly by the No side as a source of division and undoubtedly produced a response. For instance, it was said that only Welsh speakers would, in practice, be elected to the assembly - an illogical claim since Welsh speakers only constitute 20 per cent of the three million population.
Today it would be politically very difficult, if not impossible, to repeat this attack. Attitudes to the language have softened. A generation that lost the language and felt underlying guilt about it has largely passed on. Today Welsh-medium schools are flourishing, and because of Sianel Pedwar Cymru, the Welsh fourth television channel, and successful rock bands, the language is linked with modernity rather than a dingy chapel-ridden past.
Another advantage accruing to the Yes campaign is the eccentric character of the opposition. The Just Say No campaign is an amalgam of a few dissident Labour voices, refugees from the late James Goldsmith's Referendum Party, and Welsh Conservatives (who lost all their six seats in Wales at the general election) desperately trying to play down their party affiliation.
Given the nature of Welsh politics, personalities dominate in any debate. The Welsh Secretary, Ron Davies, has become a major target for the No campaigners, being dubbed President Ron as a result of his thinly-disguised ambition to assume a leading role in a devolved Wales. Davies's well-known republican sympathies probably inspired the fabricated Whitehall "leak" that Queen Elizabeth would refuse to open a Welsh assembly because its powers barely resembled those of a county council.
This charge is countered by Ron Davies's wooing of Plaid Cymru to the Yes side by assuring it that "devolution is a process, not an event" and that the powers of the assembly will inevitably develop over time, in just the same way as have those of the Welsh Office. In 1964 when it was set up, the Department had a budget of less than £1 million. Yet it now oversees spending of more than £37 billion, money that will pass to the assembly.
Such arguments naturally inflame the suspicions of the No campaigners. Though the longest-serving Welsh Office Minister under the Conservatives, Sir Wyn Roberts, has been moved to attenuate his opposition by declaring: "The idea that a Welsh assembly is going to break up the United Kingdom has stumbled badly and is out of the race."
Nevertheless, tomorrow the Welsh are being asked once again: "Are you a nation?" This time, influenced by the more confident Scots, more than likely we will hesitatingly discover by a small majority that, after all, we are. But one that, unlike Ireland, still wants to be part of a united, though devolved, Britain. As the poet Harri Webb also wrote:
What Wales needs, and has always lacked most
Is instead of an eastern boundary, an East coast.
John Osmond is director of the Cardiff-based policy think-tank, the Institute of Welsh Affairs
