Yma o Hyd

My voice when it comes to standing up for things is often infirm even to the point of silence. But I think I may be reaching a point where my instinctive yes-but-ery will need to become less buttery.

As my wife drove home on the last day of summer term 2023 from the large urban primary school some distance from our home where she is headteacher, she pinged me the usual end-of-term text to ask ‘can you get some vases ready and come and help get stuff from the car’.

Soon, our home resembled a florists, and the kitchen cupboard was stuffed full of chocolates that lasted until the pre-Christmas gifts replenished the stocks. There was also, as always, a range of other gifts from the tacky and chintzy to the tasteful and elegant: bookmarks, mugs, coasters, jewellery, a rather smart handbag; things shop-bought and hand-made; mass-produced and personalised. The wine-rack was filled and more, too.

My wife is a private person, very much not given to blowing her own trumpet, or encouraging others to tootle tunes on her behalf, so I am taking something of a risk mentioning all this. I do so, not primarily on her behalf (though I admire hugely the hard work and dedication she devotes to the school community she has helped to flourish in a leaky building on a cramped site in a deprived area), but because of the cards and letters that accompanied those gifts, and in particular, the names on these messages, and the stories behind some of those names.

Rafael, Juliene, Adyan, Nihal, Nuha, Imaredon, Kelo, Rita, Oskar, Kevin, Pawandeep.

A few weeks earlier, here in Llanelli, a four-star hotel, spa and conference centre had been closed to paying customers, and its staff of over a hundred laid-off, as the Essex based owners entered into an agreement with the Home Office and their contractors to convert the hotel into a hostel for asylum seekers. This won’t be news to most readers in Wales, and indeed beyond, as the subsequent protests and blockade of the hotel put Llanelli in the spotlight for a time, not only across Britain but internationally.

For some, here is a story of a strong, resilient, close-knit community succeeding in standing up against a distant and uncaring government and money-grabbing landlords stripping an already economically deprived town of a treasured local asset (dozens of bookings for weddings and functions for local sports clubs and community groups were cancelled by the hotel).

Others focussed on the influence of far-right and populist campaigners, often from outside the area, bolstered by opportunistic visits from the likes of Katy Hopkins and a string of UKIP and Reform-UK political wannabes — at the time I couldn’t have imagined that Richard Rice, who turned up at one point, would soon be in parliament. Faces from the fringes of Welsh nationalism forged a strange alliance with anti-Cymraeg British nationalists. The Draig Coch fluttered alongside a Union Jack that in other circumstances might be derided as the ‘Butcher’s Apron’ by some of the protestors chanting ‘Welsh Lives Matter’ and singing ‘Yma o Hyd’— drawing the condemnation of the song’s creator, Dafydd Iwan, who saw the protest as more anti-immigrant than pro-hotel, jobs and community.

Given that by far the largest semi-permanent banner at the protest camp declared ‘NO ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS’, I too found it difficult to avoid that conclusion, while at the same time being more reluctant than some to throw the term ‘racist’ at the protestors as a whole. I think there was genuine, if largely groundless, fear at the heart of the protest, and it is a fear I’ve seen before.

Around the turn of the millennium, I was a teacher in Doncaster. Like Llanelli it was a largely mono-cultural town, down on its luck, stripped of the industries on which it was built and once prospered. In the aftermath of the Balkan wars, there was an influx of asylum seekers, mainly ethnic Albanian Muslims from Kosovo. Around 800 were initially housed in a former RAF base outside the town, and as their claims were processed and most granted refugee status, many stayed locally, finding their way into the town centre.

Many of the misconceptions and half-truths I read on Facebook about the feared ‘invasion’ of ‘men of fighting age’ coming to Llanelli echoed exactly those I heard back then. They were all, it was widely believed, given free mobile phones, jumped the housing queue ahead of locals, and were given extra benefits. Many of the girls I taught in a local comprehensive school were terrified. The men hung around in groups on street corners, and they ‘look at you funny’ when you walk past, I was told. When asked, none of my students had personal experience of being assaulted, or even cat-called or approached by any of the Kosovans, but they all ‘knew’ it happened, to someone that someone their friend’s friend knows, or had heard about. Further questioning revealed that almost all of them had been groped, or had unwanted sexual comments or approaches from the local lads on the nearby estate, or even on the school premises.

Back then, the rumours and untruths spread largely by word of mouth, and I was in some position to counter them, at least among the students I taught. Now, well organised groups on social media can amplify the relative handful of stories of attacks and sexual assaults by ‘illegals’ to make them seem like the norm, while I found myself, along with many others, removed and blocked from the biggest Facebook group opposing the change of use of the hotel simply for pointing out truths such as that those housed in such accommodation only get £9.10 a week, not the £1,600 a month figure that was widely bandied around, fuelled by irresponsibly misleading use by Tory politicians of the Welsh Government’s basic income pilot scheme for care leavers that would happen, incidentally, to include a few unaccompanied asylum seekers.

Social media has simply accelerated the maxim that a lie can travel half-way round the world before the truth has got its boots on, and I became increasingly distressed by the tone of so many posts and comments I could see on social media even on those less extreme forums that didn’t ban dissent from the line that Llanelli would soon be swamped by single male sexual predators ‘of fighting age’, sent on a mission (funded, some would have it, by the Saudis, or by Isis, or the World Economic Forum) to undermine our way of life, breed with our women and replace our native population.

But even bracketing out the wilder clickbait conspiracy theories, there are problems with confronting racism and prejudice when its perpetrators don’t see it in themselves and, in an important sense, the motivation for it comes from a ‘good’ place, for many of the protestors at least. The desire to protect and preserve home, community, family, and culture is in itself benign, even noble. ‘Charity begins at home’ was a phrase I saw more than once in the online mudslinging around the Stradey protests, and more recently J D Vance has been deploying the same principle in his skewing of the principle of Ordo Amoris to justify actions such as the slashing of the USAID budget and the severing of support for Ukraine (my friend Simon Hall’s recent post included a succinct corrective to Vance’s approach: “tl;dr: He’s completely wrong. ‘Rightly ordered’ love doesn’t endorse the natural ‘ranking’ of love (Luke 6:32-36), but rather calls us to love whomsoever we are in proximity to, whatever our relationship to them). Here in Wales, it is further complicated by the appeal of a patriotism that so often defines itself against its ‘oppressive’ English neighbour, but that can all too easily shade into an uncomfortably herrenvolk sounding blood, and soil (and language) exclusive nationalism.

This strand of the wrestle with identity has made me hesitant about how to weigh into this particular skirmish in the ‘culture wars’ as an Englishman, even as an annybinaeth leaning, Cymraeg learning, Wal Goch supporting Cambrophile Saes. It’s too easy a cop-out, though, to say ‘it’s not my battle’, because I am now part of Wales. I am an immigrant; but as one who doesn’t inspire fear in those who camped outside the hotel, planning to walk their dogs in groups and escort each other’s kids to school when the ‘illegals’ would arrive. Yet perhaps, as an unwitting representative of that ‘other’ to the east of Offa’s Dyke, that has done more harm to Wales’s people and culture then any other group, I may feel more responsibility than most to call out that most damaging of impulses: to de-humanise vulnerable out-groups and present them as a threat.

So what I would like to be able to do, as arguments, statistics and even patient discussion seem doomed to failure, is to take people alongside some of the children whose families sent those cards and gifts to my wife; speakers of over thirty languages — not a single one a first language Welsh speaker, but all proudly learning Welsh language and culture. I would love those who fear the obliteration of ‘our’ way of life to see those children: Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and all strands of Christian, proudly belting out Yma o Hyd at their St David’s Day eisteddfod.

I would love to be able to tell the stories of what some of those families have endured, fleeing persecution, war and hardship of various kinds. I wish people could see the anguish caused by arbitrary Home Office decisions to move people without notice to accommodation elsewhere in the UK when their children have settled in school and made friends. For them to hear the stories of those with skills that we desperately need, unable to work until their asylum claim is settled, and filled with shame at having to live on the relatively meagre handouts provided to those seeking asylum. The idea that Britain provides a generous gravy train of handouts compared with our European neighbours simply isn’t borne out by the facts.

But I’d also want the ‘Wales isn’t a Migrant Camp’ brigade to meet those economic migrant families (a term always presented as a negative) who are keeping our universities afloat with their fees, and caring for our sick and elderly, who often choose not to claim benefits they are entitled to because they believe they should only get what they have worked for, and who in some less well-subscribed schools provide the pupil numbers that keep schools open that would otherwise be vulnerable to closure.

It is, of course, naive to suggest that all migration is an unalloyed good (how many of the doctors and nurses keeping our NHS going might be even more needed in the countries they come from) or that all migrants are benign and saintly, but surely all discussion of policy must start from seeing migrants to this Nation of Sanctuary not, in the first instance, as a threat to be repelled, a nuisance to be eradicated, or even primarily a problem to be solved, but as fellow humans, and once settled here as fellow citizens of Wales.

This isn’t necessarily easy, in world where populism and the politics of fear has gained strength from an erosion of trust in politicians and traditional media, the algorithmically driven siloing and reinforcement of opposing world-views, and the emboldening of intolerance by the global rise in strong-man political leadership. It is appalling that community groups working alongside Syrian families, happily settled here in Carmarthenshire for years, had to hold sessions behind locked doors, while their children faced racial abuse at schools for the first time since fleeing conflict, in the wake of the Llanelli ‘asylum hotel’ protests.

But that’s not the whole story: I am now part of a nation with a proud tradition of hospitality and radical opposition to reactionary politics. It is true that many good people remained quiet about the unpleasantly racist element within some of the protests here because of legitimate grievance that Stradey Park Hotel was indeed an unsuitable site for so many asylum seekers in one place, and perhaps wary of attacks from the far-right. But there were plenty of signs that the majority wanted nothing to do with the racially charged anti-immigrant element of the protests. An online pile-on to an Indian restaurant accused (wrongly) of delivering food to security guards at the hotel was countered with a wave of support for the venue and family involved, and disgust at those attacking them.

In my wife’s school office, a picture is tacked to the notice board. The children were asked to draw a picture of Saint David. There he is, complete with cross and pastoral staff — and with a smiling brown face. If I shared it, some would accuse me of being ‘woke’. That multi-ethnic school in this Nation of Sanctuary might be targeted by the hateful and the fearful. Yet the child who drew it simply saw himself reflected in the patron saint of Wales.

I still fear what we might become in a Llanelli — and a wider world — that at least in its most strident voices can seem so hostile even to such an innocent vision. Yet, despite everyone and everything, er dued yw’r fagddu o’n cwmpas, despite the rise of the right, er gwaetha pawb a phobeth, those of us who stand against hate and mistrust, fear and misunderstanding:

Ry’n ni yma o hyd

We’re still here.