The Welsh nationalism that eventually found political form in Plaid Cymru defined itself in conscious opposition to this tradition. From inception, the focus of Welsh nationalism was language: this came to be the basic element of Welsh identity, and its legal and cultural resurrection the foundation of independent nationhood. The significance of this fact lies in the nature of the English-speaking regions of Wales, as described above. Welsh nationalism was at root a vision of Wales centred on the Welsh-speaking, rural communities idealised as uncontaminated by the external and foreign influence of the modern industrial world. It was, basically, nativism, with a reactionary right-wing tendency at its core. This is difficult to recall now, as Plaid Cymru eventually followed the liberal path of D.J. Davies, but the unadulterated, authentic heart of Welsh nationalism was, at this stage, personified by Saunders Lewis.
This vision of Welsh identity was regressive and insular, based on an artificial aesthetic of ruralism, provincialism, a cult of the past augmented by Welsh folktales and Celtic legends, Bardic traditions and peasant superstitions. Lewis was a Roman Catholic and brought to Plaid Cymru the influence of French Catholic conservatism, Charles Maurras and Action française (his ally Ambrose Webb wrote, “It is a Mussolini that Wales needs!”, 24). By the Second World War, this Plaid faction was propounding an anti-democratic, extra-parliamentary platform that called for abstention from the ‘Imperial War’ against Hitler and a form of direct action that led to an arson attack on RAF Penrhos in 1936. Lewis was incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs for this adventure and became a martyr for the Welsh cause, electrifying activist sentiment within the more militant Welsh-language communities (although many couldn’t have cared less). Welsh nationalism never took this radical course but did reframe the idea of Welsh nationality along the lines of language rights and a rural aesthetic that found expression in, for example, the Welsh Language Act of 1993 and the professional regeneration of the Eisteddfod. This retrogressive and insular notion of Welsh identity found home in a ‘liberal’ nationalism formulated by a primarily middle class milieu attached to Plaid Cymru, the Church, the University of Wales and the provincial BBC. For these people, language became a political weapon in a culture war.
This had an indirect effect on Swansea, which had no remaining Welsh-language enclaves like Cardiff, and maintained a residual, resolutely anglicised culture which had been the basis for its civic and cultural identity during the years of industry. In reaction to the new cultural and political definition, or ideal, of ‘Welshness’, Swansea’s sense of self-identity crumbled alongside its vanishing industries in the 1980s and 90s. It had no clear way to orientate itself in this new, post-industrial Wales of the Assembly and the Language Act. Its major industrial history, like that of the Valleys, was reduced to perfunctory heritage trails and unenthusiastic school trips, or dismissed as a legacy of ecological disaster in the case of the Tawe and Swansea Valley. Swansea’s greatest cultural achievement — the outward-facing, expansive, experimental, anglicised coterie of the 1930s-50s — was eclipsed by the capture of Dylan Thomas for the Welsh cause, despite his own antipathy to nationalist sentiment and his own conflict with Welsh identity that both animated and distorted his work. Swansea, itself, was reduced by this new idea of the nation: both the complexities of the “two-tongued” city characterised by the anglicisation of its rural, Welsh-speaking settlers, and the Anglo-Welsh culture of its elite and middle classes that found literary expression in the work of Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, were downplayed and even erased by this political project. This was a large part of the reason why, despite the apparent health of the Dylan Thomas industry, Swansea struggled to capitalise on or communicate the full significance of its own past: that past was now debased currency in Wales. Swansea, like Newport and Barry, was shortchanged by Welsh nationalism: nationalism was not interested in Swansea, or in its interests.