Responses to "Welsh 'not needed or wanted' in

Sir,

I would like to respond to RW Bradley's letter, titled Welsh 'not needed or wanted' in Monmouthshire, in last week's Beacon.

Mr Bradley presents us with a baffling, embarrassingly uninformed, spittle-flecked rant, which seems almost too unlettered to be considered racist (though the intention is undeniably there).

After admitting that Monmouthshire is in Wales, Mr Bradley describes Welsh as 'foreign'. Mr Bradley further states that Welsh 'is not our national language'. It's difficult to respond to these claims when their idiocy is so self-evident. Welsh is one of our national languages; the clue's in the name.

Mr Bradley asserts that Welsh is only spoken by 'a few fanatical, obsessive dinosaurs,' but only the most basic fact-checking completely dismisses this prejudiced nonsense. The number of Welsh speakers in Monmouthshire is increasing, up to 9.9 per cent of the population at the last census. Furthermore, Welsh is increasingly being spoken by young people. Mr Bradley and his ilk are the 'dinosaurs'.

I do, however, envy Mr Bradley's impressive sense of history: the scars of Owain Glyndwr's pillage of Monmouth, a good 600 years ago, clearly still burn deep. I would request that Mr Bradley extends his profound, millennial perspective to more recent history: Welsh only became a minority language in Wales about a hundred years ago (a mere blip on the timescales Mr Bradley works with).

This was thanks, in part, to institutions such as the 'Welsh not', a 19th century punishment for schoolchildren who spoke Welsh. These kinds of deliberate erosions of Welsh culture were nothing short of criminal, robbing many Welsh people of an identity and forcibly alienating them from the culture of their ancestors. Measures taken by the Welsh Government are a long-overdue redress of these injustices.

You can argue against the Welsh Government translating things into Welsh if you want, that I don't dispute. What I do take issue with is the ridiculous, narrow-minded bigotry with which Mr Bradley makes his arguments. The average smoking-area drunk could put them to shame.

J Thomas

(Monmouth)