Farage’s shadows are blinding Wales

Simon Hobson

Bigots and Brexit sold us the dark – we deserve the light

I am human. I have the right to make mistakes. I am human. I have the power to correct them. Nations, too, must claim that right. For too long, Wales has been chained in Plato’s cave, mistaking the shadows of Westminster for the whole of reality.

In the allegory, prisoners face a wall, watching shadows cast by a fire. Those illusions become their truth because they know nothing else. Only when one prisoner escapes, stumbling into the sunlight, does he realise the shadows were lies. When he returns to tell the others, they refuse to listen. They prefer the comfort of darkness.

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Breaking from the shadows

This is Wales. Our people have been raised on the shadows of unionism: that we are too small, too poor, too weak to shape our own destiny. That the safety of the cave is better than the risk of daylight. We repeat these mantras until they sound like common sense. But they are only the shadows England projects onto our wall.

Brexit proved how dangerous those shadows can be. Wales was told to believe the firelight of Farage and Johnson, their theatre of lies. We were told Europe was the enemy, that Brussels stole our voice, that migrants stole our jobs. Many believed it. The shadows danced. And when the light of internationalism beckoned at the cave mouth, Wales was dragged back into the darkness.

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The Welsh habit of doubt

The result? Economic stagnation, crumbling services, a politics of despair. England and Wales voted to leave; Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. The strain on the union was inevitable. But instead of facing that fact, Westminster’s parties – and their Welsh satellites – still cling to the illusion that nothing has changed. Their denial only accelerates the fracture.

The habit of the Welsh is to doubt ourselves. To listen when told designing our own future is too dangerous. That we are not to trust ourselves. To believe that stepping into the sunlight will burn us. Yet our own history tells a different story. Wales has never been a nation of shadows.

Bled for our freedoms

We were internationalists long before Brexit. We inspired and supported revolutions abroad. Welsh thinkers stood with the Americans in 1776, with Irish reformers in the 19th century, with liberty in Spain in the 1930s, and with Europe after the horrors of global war. When fascism rose, Welsh men and women did not hide in the cave; they fought and bled for freedom. Our tradition is radical, outward-looking, progressive.

So why now do we surrender to shadows? Why let Reform UK, English nationalists and xenophobes dictate our future? Why sit passively while England’s decline drags us deeper into its cave? Wales deserves better than a politics of fear and dependency.

Old lies and horrors

The truth is simple: Wales does not belong in England’s cave. We have the capacity to govern ourselves, to build a modern economy, to embrace internationalism again. But that requires courage — the courage to leave the firelit illusions behind, to step into the light and risk seeing reality as it is.

Our politics today is a battle between those who cling to shadows and those who reach for sunlight. The shadows whisper that migrants are to blame, that Europe is to blame, that difference is to blame. These are not new lies. They are the same lies peddled in darker times — when Jews were smeared with blood libel, when Roma were branded criminal, when the disabled and autistic were called ‘lives unworthy of life’. Demagogues always need an enemy in the dark. And too many in Wales still listen.

The courage to leave the cave

But outside the cave lies something else: the possibility of Wales standing upright, unchained, ambitious. A Wales that refuses to be frightened into submission. A Wales that trusts its people to make mistakes and to correct them, to learn and to grow.

The choice is before us. Stay in the cave, staring at the shadows cast by Westminster, Farage and his media courtiers. Or step outside, blinking in the unfamiliar warmth of self-determination and see ourselves clearly for the first time in centuries.

The shadows belong to them. The light can be ours. Wales must decide: will we cower in England’s cave, or will we finally step into the sun?