On 14 March 2024, the Conservative Party peer Lord Daniel Moylan stood up in the House of Lords to deliver what would turn out to be a rather contentious speech. One part in particular drew the ire of his fellow members of the House:
There is no doubt—and Sinn Féin fully appreciates this—that the use of language is a tool for promoting nationalist sentiment. When I look at Wales and see the almost linguistic fascism that now exists in parts of it, I am deeply concerned that we will find ourselves, on some occasion in the future, in a situation rather like we were with Scotland in 2014, when, half way through the referendum campaign, we realised that unionism might lose the referendum, so out of touch we were. I do not want to see something like that happen in Wales.
The comments, made in response to a debate on safeguarding the Union, did not receive much attention from the media, but were criticised in the chamber as ‘high-handed’ by Labour frontbencher Baroness Chapman. Former Welsh Liberal Democrats Spokesperson Baroness Humphreys also made her objections known, stating that ‘people fail to understand that Wales is a bilingual nation and people have the right to use their first language’. However, as a Welsh speaker, the notion of linguistic fascism intrigued me. Could it be true that Welsh existed not as a language spoken willingly by thousands of individuals daily, but as a gateway to an authoritarian ideology which would tear apart the Union?
Ignoring briefly the more incendiary implications of invoking fascism, it is important to note that Moylan’s statement does make sense within the proper context of Welsh nationalism’s history. Plaid Cymru, the primary nationalist entity within Wales, was formed originally as a Welsh-language movement. Plaid’s earlier years saw them repeatedly face accusations of fascism, and this persistent connection seems to be a fundamental aspect of Moylan’s accusation of ‘linguistic fascism’. Crucially, we must consider what anxieties are being expressed—or perhaps, perpetuated—by rhetoric surrounding ‘linguistic fascism’ within Wales.
The story of modern Welsh language policy begins in the nineteenth century, with the heavy industrialisation of the Welsh landscape. As workers moved from the rural counties towards industrial towns, they took their religious beliefs with them, and the nonconformist Calvinistic Methodist denomination soon reigned supreme over Wales, with strong links to the Welsh language through preachers utilising it to deliver their sermons. However, within Welsh society at this time, English was seen as a more beneficial language to learn, mostly for its economic prospects.
Unfortunately, this led to a hostile policy towards Welsh in educational institutions. Use of the Welsh language in schools was often dealt with through corporal punishment. The most infamous was the Welsh Not, a token used to demonstrate that a pupil has been caught speaking Welsh and was therefore due to be punished. The Welsh Not has since become a historic symbol of cultural genocide against the Welsh to Welsh nationalists.
However, what is curious about this particular example is that it was not a punitive policy of the government of the United Kingdom; rather, it was the policy of Welsh educational organisations, with the general blessing of the parents of the punished students. The Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, known in Wales as the ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’ due to its disparaging attitude towards non-conformity and Welsh morality on the whole, provides the following passage on the Welsh Not:
Another injurious effects, this custom has been found to lead children to visit stealthily the houses of their school-fellows for the purpose of detecting those who speak Welsh to their parents, and transferring to them the punishment due to themselves.
In his work Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault draws upon the metaphor of the panopticon as a model that explains how a technology of control that began to emerge in the eighteenth century. According to Foucault, surveillance is a key disciplinary tool through which power is exercised, with the panopticon representing this broader anxiety that one must behave in line with the rules of society, as one may be punished at any point for failing to do so. In this quotation from the Treachery of the Blue Books, we see this theory of power exercised in reality; the gaze of the school child’s classmate extending into their home with the threat of violence, supported by the educational authorities who proudly deliver such punishment.
As Foucault would later express in the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, the ‘[totalising] paranoia’ of discipline exists as a form of fascism, an oppressive weight on the shoulders of each individual in society. Crucially, fascism permeates beyond political identity or ideology and exists ‘in us all, in our heads, in our everyday [behaviour]’. In this sense, the Welsh Not was a unquestionable symbol of punitive power, a symbol that worked as a reminder of the gaze of others, and the accompanying paranoia and judgement of speaking Welsh. In other words, while there might be some form of linguistic fascism at play, it is not clear that it is in the way Moylan suggested.
In 1925, a new party emerged in UK politics: Plaid Cymru, ‘The Party of Wales’. Originating at the intersection of Welsh home rule and Welsh language activists, it has grown to be a key political force within Welsh politics in the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century.
However, the emergence of modern Welsh nationalism was not embraced with open arms. Rather, a narrative began to emerge especially during the Second World War that Plaid Cymru was fundamentally, in its ideological roots, fascistic. Given the cooperation between certain factions of the Catholic Church and Mussolini, anti-Catholic sentiment began to form amongst some Calvinist Methodists, who as previously mentioned dominated the Welsh nationalist movement due to their links to the language. It is no wonder, therefore, that allegations at the time tended to focus on one of the founders of Plaid Cymru, Saunders Lewis, who converted to Catholicism a few years before the Second World War. Critics have stated that Lewis’ admiration of the writings of Charles Maurras, whose anti-parliamentarian and reactionary nationalist thought is said to have inspired the ideology of Franco and Mussolini, is evidence of a fascistic core within the party. In A Letter Concerning Catholicism (1927), Lewis hit back at these critics, stating that while he admired Maurras’s contribution to literary criticism, he firmly believed that ‘Wales exists as a part of Europe”. In his extensive book on these accusations, Richard Wyn Jones makes the point that much like how the Nazis had conflated Jewishness with Bolshevism, so too was Catholicism conflated with fascism by critics of Plaid Cymru.
Thomas Jones, the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet under David Lloyd George until the end of Ramsay MacDonald’s tenure, wrote in his diaries (published in 1946 as ‘The Native Never Returns’) that Welsh nationalism was ‘a new, narrow and intolerant dogma, and the vision of a new Promised Land of Fascism…it will offer everything to everybody provided sooner or later they will speak Welsh. This is all part of the Hitlerian technique’. This passage raises two curious questions: what is this ‘Hitlerian technique’ that Welsh nationalism employs, and why was the notion of increasing Welsh usage treated with hostility?
The ‘Hitlerian technique’ Jones refers to could be about fascistic language policy; in Hitler’s case, it was Germanisation. This was a process that involved eroding previous cultures and enforcing the German language and culture in the land to the east of Nazi rule. Was it then the spread of Welsh to the east that Jones feared so greatly? Not quite. Hitler’s language policy was not based on the spreading of a language alone; it existed as a biopolitical tool to crush all ethnicities besides the Aryans. He wrote in Mein Kampf describing his disgust at different ethnicities using the German language:
Here again it was thought that a Germanization of the Polish element could be brought about by a purely linguistic integration with the German element. Here again the result would have been catastrophic; a people of alien race expressing its alien ideas in the German language.
This distain for other ethnicities speaking a language seems out of touch with the forms of nationalism we see in modern international politics. Improving accessibility to minority languages, especially through digitisation schemes, is a common policy among linguistic nationalist organisations and parties, which seems to run in stark contrast to the dissuasive ethnonationalism as set out by Hitler. Johann Fichte, a German idealist whose nationalist philosophy is considered by many to be a precursor to the Nazis — though like Nietzsche, whether this was a misreading is up for debate — proposed that a German nation could be formed through cultural and linguistic education to unify Germany. Unlike Hitler, Fichte’s nationalism was grounded in culture and aesthetics, not ethnicity and pseudoscience. Moreover, it explicitly disallowed violent methods, rather that promoted them. In The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge, he wrote:
If you say that it is your conscience’s command to exterminate peoples for their sins…we can confidently tell you that you are wrong; for such things can never be commanded against the free and moral force.
The current politics of Welsh nationalism has been dominated by a rejection of all forms of ethnic nationalism in favour of a purely linguistic one. For them, anyone and everyone can learn Welsh and, more importantly, should be free and encouraged to do so. As Baroness Humphreys stated in her rebuttal to Moylan’s comments, ‘people have the right to use their first language, whichever language that is, or both languages, if they want to’, and this is crucially where we see contemporary Welsh nationalism as essentially separate from Hitlerian fascism. Hitler’s cultural views were inherently built upon genocide; the aim of ‘Germanisation’ was never to encourage German culture to grow, but to destroy others. What we see instead from the Welsh nationalists is a pluralist ideology, one that aims for a world where Welsh and English coexist. While the more extreme wing of Welsh nationalism can be seen to want to remove the English language, we see the more institutional aspect of the movement, Plaid Cymru, seamlessly weaving the two languages together in the Welsh Parliament, and working in cooperation (until recently) with Welsh Labour for the common good of saving the endangered Welsh language. These peaceful forms of praxis are seemingly miles away from the brutal violence and bigotry that was demonstrated in the early twentieth century, and to argue such a comparison seems ill-informed, if not outright offensive.
So, where did this anxiety from Jones come from? Namely, this notion that Welsh speakers will have ‘everything offered’ to them. In the context of the time of this quotation, Jones was well aware of the power of extreme promises, as illustrated by Hitler’s promise to dismantle the Treaty of Versailles, which, in the end, propelled his party into power. Perhaps Jones feared a similarly destructive position emerging from Wales, one that threatened the state of the Union. In that sense, Jones’s issue is not within the language itself, but that the language acts as a means to achieve other political goals, such as despotism.
Returning to the present day, it is clear that Moylan is being very selective in the wording of his speech. Rather than suggesting that ‘linguistic fascism’ exists in all of Wales, or even worse, is an intrinsic part of speaking Welsh, he states that such phenomena exists in ‘parts’ of Wales. But Moylan here is not thinking of a geographic part of Wales; after all, Welsh is spoken throughout the country. Instead, he is speaking about a ‘part’ of Welsh culture: specifically, the part he happens not to like.
Welsh-medium schools are now allowed to stop using the English language in all classes (except for English classes, for obvious reasons) and set disciplinary policy to enforce this, almost a modern reversal of the Welsh Not. I have taken the train to England in the past and overheard men complaining that the Transport for Wales train had made announcements in Welsh, particularly before they were given in English. Many road signs in Wales place the Welsh text above the English text. Complaints are made about the waste of resources that comes from offering information in Welsh, as is required by law. All of these are examples of the Welsh language ‘imposing’ itself in its own homeland. Perhaps this is fascistic to Moylan, if fascism is best understood as the process of making others feel bad themselves for not being able to speak the nominal language of the country. The key assumption at play in Moylan’s thinking is that if English is not clearly superior culturally, legally, and socially, then it is being oppressed.
Looking back at Foucault’s notion of fascistic thought, the idea that using the Welsh language within Welsh borders is in some way imposing fascism is an excellent expression of the totalising paranoia that he discussed. Speaking Welsh, in the eyes of those who disparage it, is not a neutral act, it is an assault on the senses. At the first sign that the gaze may be tilting towards them, that they may be the ones being judged for their non-compliance, the paranoid mind resorts to castigation of the ‘threatening’ language. Perhaps it is more pertinent for Moylan, and indeed for all of us, to ask why we treat language in this way. If we wish to kill off that ‘fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’, we would do well to consider how much personal and cultural importance we place on the hegemony of our mother tongues. To defeat linguistic fascism, we must realise that the true threat to liberty comes from a desire to punish others, corporally or reputationally, for not submitting to the idea that one language should be supreme over others.