Give the Welsh a fair crack
CATHRYN SCOTT is fed up with the way the British media treat her nation
MALE VOICE choirs, miners, sheep lovers — there are many clichés Welsh people begrudgingly put up with. Yet none are quite as bad as being completely ignored. It seems that more and more journalists are writing stories about issues affecting England, but failing to mention that they do not apply in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Take the women’s magazine I’m currently reading. It has a feature on cutting health care costs. The first tip relates to prescription costs — checking whether you’re exempt from paying and whether buying over the counter is cheaper. Good stuff — but how about “move to Wales”? Prescriptions here have been free to all for two years.
That’s because areas including health, education and the environment are devolved to the Welsh Assembly, which does not have full law-making powers but can make secondary legislation. The ban on smoking in public places was introduced several months before England’s. When England announced it was going to scrap SATs exams for 14-year-olds last October, there was little reference to the fact Wales had done away with them four years earlier.
You wonder whether some writers realise that Wales is a different country. An in-train magazine recently illustrated a piece on walks in England with images of Cardiff Castle and featured a walk set in Wales without mentioning it was not in England.
I do concede that institutions such as the BBC, with its “nations and regions” remit, are good at pointing out when an issue relates only to England.
And I’m not even blaming English journalists. The dire state of the Welsh print media doesn’t help. Unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, we do not have several daily newspapers reporting our stories. The Western Mail is a lone voice — and sadly one that has seen staff cut and readership fall. No national newspapers have correspondents in Wales any more. The Welsh editions of the tabloids have all disappeared.
Given that 80 per cent of people in Wales read a newspaper published in England, it would be nice if writers could check whether what they are writing applies to all their readers.