Save Wales from the Welsh: Children told they can't go to the loo if they ask in English. Architects shunned if their plans aren't in Welsh. ROGER LEWIS on Welsh Language Society 'nutters'

Half a century ago, I was born in Caerphilly Miners' Hospital and raised across the sludge of the Rhymney River in Bedwas, Monmouthshire, where my family owned the village butcher's shop, which had been in operation since 1868 but has since closed.



I was a Mixed Infant at primary school locally, and the Eleven Plus having been abolished, I was then a pupil at the comprehensive in Bassaleg, near Newport.



I am therefore Welsh - and very proudly Welsh. But I've never spoken the Welsh language, except for the odd untrans- latable word like 'cwtch', which means 'cuddle', 'cosy', 'safe' or 'hidden'. I also know that 'Popty-Ping' is a word for microwave.



In South Wales, where I am from, there was never any tradition of Welsh speaking. And at the turn of the last century, though my great-grandparents spoke Welsh to each other, they deliberately didn't impart the Welsh to their 11 children, because they wanted them to be able to get on in life.



Rightly or wrongly, English was seen as the language of the future, Welsh as the sign of regional backwardness.



In some respects, I rather fancy knowing more Welsh. It would appeal to my hankering after lost things, like steam trains or gas chandeliers.

But that surely doesn't mean the Welsh language should be imposed on people living in Wales today.

For Welsh has become a political and divisive weapon in the principality - and the stories one hears are like those tales of oppression that used to seep out from behind the Iron Curtain.



Now, we learn that at one school in Ceredigion - which used to be quite happily Cardiganshire when I was a lad - the children are not allowed to use the toilet unless they ask the teacher in Welsh.



Furthermore, one mother is said to have been urged not to read her child English bedtime books, and at another school, a child was admonished for speaking English in the playground.



Some children are, it seems, too frightened to speak English, even at home. This sort of thing would have done the Warsaw Pact proud. It is despicable.



But what can be done about a place that now states, on job applications, 'Welsh speaker preferred'? Unless you are willing to go to classes and learn Welsh, what such xenophobia means in practice is that third-rate local people get the posts - as doctors, teachers, psychologists, architects, and so forth. The Welsh language becomes a trade union ticket for employment.



One architect told me that he can't get his plans through unless he submits them in Welsh. Yet those youngsters being educated exclusively in Welsh are also going to be a bit stuck.



Where else can they go but Wales? Patagonia? They are ill-equipped for anywhere else the other side of the Severn Bridge.



Even Bristol will be abroad. How can you teach French in Welsh to children who think in English? It creates a maze of confusion.



I have been told that English-sounding announcers on Radio Wales have been purged; that the Welsh Arts Council turned their back on the great artist Sir Kyffin Williams because he had a posh accent and a moustache; and that Sir Anthony Hopkins and comedian Rob Brydon would never land an acting role on BBC Wales in 2012 because they don't speak the old lingo.



There's an outfit in Cardiff - a writers' society - now calling itself The Welsh Academy, which though I'd never heard of it, tried to elect me: I resigned immediately because they spelt it 'academi', which got my goat for some reason.



The fact is that the Welshifying of Wales is a mad nonsense. It has nothing to do with history. So, how has it all happened?



I asked a former colleague of mine at Oxford, whose speciality was changing speech habits in the United Kingdom from 1800 to 1914.



He explained that an analysis of the late 19th-century census data revealed that Welsh-speaking was in steep decline and that, left to its own devices, the language would have 'died of inanition because Welsh people themselves were casting it off as a mark of backwardness'.



This was the view of my great-grandparents in Bedwas. 'English was embraced for reasons of social and economic advancement.'



This is what those teachers in Ceredigion - and those who support them - can't accept: what my friend at Oxford called 'the evident cultural superiority of English', i.e. that English has, for example, a richer literature, going right across the world, from Irish writers such as Shaw or Wilde to everyone in America.



Correct me if I'm wrong, but as of yet there isn't a Welsh Shakespeare.



However, Welsh has survived - initially because of a political deal done in Whitehall when the Liberal Government in 1907 created a Welsh Department of the Board of Education, which 'captured state resources' i.e. taxpayers' loot, and allowed Welsh to be taught in the schools and artificially revived.



Allowed to be taught - not made obligatory, please note. Out of the 1,000 pupils at my school in Bassaleg in the Seventies, Welsh O-level was taken by two in seven years.



One failed and the other got a grade C in the re-sit. But the chief problem has been the perversion of the Welsh Language Act of 1993, which stated that Welsh and English should be 'treated on the basis of equality', that there should be an 'equality of treatment', 'equal validity', and so forth, in matters dealing with public administration.



Equality, however, has not been in evidence. The first thing that happened was a pressure group called the Welsh Language Society went round vandalising the English road signs.



Tenby was always Tenby, for example, until a few years ago when it suddenly became Dynbych-y-Pysgod - a bit of nonsense about 'bay of the little fishes'. Millions were spent printing official communications in two languages.



One thing led to another and now children are wetting themselves because they are not allowed to go to the loo.



It doesn't end there. Because a taxi in Bangor didn't have the Welsh spelling 'tacsi' on it, a man preferred to walk home.



Even though it is true that there is no letter 'x' in Welsh, this is 'twp' (daft). No doubt the Welsh Language Society chieftains, not renowned for a sense of humour, would rather drop dead than get into an ambulance instead of an 'ambiwlans', and refuse pudding if it's not 'pwddin'.



I'm sorry, but proud Welshman that I am, I find all the anti-English stance of the ethnic cultists vicious and stupid in equal measure - particularly as it is English taxes that keep the Welsh language going.



