: Joe England
: For Britain See Wales A Possible Future?
: Parthian Books
: 9781917140294
: 1
: CHF 5.20
:
: Vergleichende und internationale Politikwissenschaft
: English
: 180
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Devolved governments have given Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland confidence and control over policy areas for over two decades. But their powers came into focus during Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to questions about the economy and control of funds across the UK. Now Joe England explores the possible constitutional meltdown of a divided UK and its consequences, reflecting on Wales's position as the poorest nation of all. As a constitutional crisis looms, this book contemplates a reimagined Wales and what that would mean for its people. This is the story of how Wales reached an economic and constitutional crossroads and the choices that must now be made.

Joe England was educated at Cyfarthfa Grammar School, Merthyr Tydfil and at the University of Nottingham where he studied Economic and Social History. In a varied career he has been editor of a weekly newspaper, a full-time lecturer for the Workers Educational Association, Deputy Director of the Department of Extra-Mural Studies in the University of Hong Kong, Research Fellow in the Industrial Relations Research Unit at Warwick University, and Principal and Chief Executive of Coleg Harlech, Wales' residential college for adults. He has travelled widely in East Asia and is well known as a lecturer on social and industrial affairs. He has published a number of books including the critically acclaimed biography of place, Merthyr: The Crucible of Modern Wales.

The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.

Tony Judt (Ill Fares The Land, 2011)

The United Kingdom, one of the richest countries in the world, is deeply divided. Oxfam, in January 2023, claimed that the richest 1 per cent were wealthier than 70 per cent of the population. More than two million people, and the numbers are growing, rely on food banks. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported in January 2024 that six million people in the UK were ‘in very deep poverty’, an increase of 1.5 million more than there were twenty years earlier. In the same month the Centre for Cities reported that relative child poverty had grown more between 2014 and 2021 in Swansea, Newport and Cardiff than in any other British city. The Senedd’s Equality and Social Justice Committee reported that the Welsh Government’s child strategy ‘did not match the gravity of the situation facing children and young people in Wales today’ and called for the appointment of a minister responsible for child poverty. More than one in four children in Wales live in poverty. Earnings of people in work show wide disparities. The highest earning neighbourhood in Wales in 2020 according to the Office for National Statistics was Heath, Cardiff, with an average household income of £58,300. The lowest earners were in Caerau at the top of the Llynfi valley with £29,100. These figures are not related to the size of families but are the earnings of people in work. In 1945, the British people – after two world wars separated by the Great Depression – decided it was time for a change. Let the government rather than the market provide a more caring future. Britain in the 1940s and 1950s was deeply in debt and recovering from the strains and damage of a world war. There followed full employment, a reformed Welfare State, a National Health Service, compensation for industrial injuries, hundreds of thousands of homes to rent for those who could not afford to buy, implementation of the 1944 Education Act, free university education, a levelling up of incomes, and a general increase in prosperity.

Yet in early twenty-first-century Britain, much richer than it had been sixty years previously, the signs of poverty were everywhere. The Tressell Trust charity gave out 40,000 emergency food parcels in 201