Video is from tiktok, but I’ve tried using “tikvib” to make it easier to watch without an account/app. Sadly no proxies front-ends appear to work :( Original link
I’d certainly pick on a few bits of his language here, such as “The English” being used when “English Bourgeoisie” is more accurate (or “ruling class” to placate the libs in the audience) but from my first hand experience he is 200% spot on.
You’d be hard pressed to find more than a handful of Welsh politicians who could describe this relationship without trying to shoehorn it into the lens of “colonialism”; after all, we are still in the imperial core, just not benefactors of all its spoils.
The working and non-working poor in Wales are so numerous that the beneficiaries of imperialism are few and far between though they do exist. Wales is and has been peripheralised through and through, and viewing it as part of the core misses some of the truth because the only real benefit we have is that we can easily commute or move to London, or work remotely for large multinationals with fewer barriers than the rest of the periphery.
Fair points.
Wales is unique in being a region occupied by the English state before its development of colonialism. What Wales experienced historically was the experimentation that eventually became the hardened imperial blade that was forged with Welsh steel, iron, and muscle.
It benefits, even today, from its proximity to the imperial core, which has granted Wales some autonomy and funding to develop in ways would never be granted to the periphery, though of course directed by the pivot from manual to informational labour.
That closeness is not only geographical but temporal in nature - Wales has been occupied longer than Ireland, yet the scale of violence to do so has always been much lower. The slow burn of this domination has shaped our class struggle in ways unique to the rest of the imperial periphery, but not alien to it. Which is why I get icky about some folks declaring Wales a colony, but also why often I agree with comparisons of Wales to other colonies.