ABSTRACT
Sticking with politics for our next piece, we go almost exactly a year back to March 2011, when the Welsh electorate voted in a referendum (Refferendwm ar bwerau Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru 2011) to decide whether the Cynulliad (Welsh Assembly), which had been brought into being by an earlier referendum of 1997, should have wider legislative powers devolved from London; specifically, that powers should be extended from some to all matters in the twenty subject areas under Assembly jurisdiction. The campaigning was intense – this letter to Y Cymro newspaper from a ‘Yes’ campaigner in the weeks before the vote summarises the political arguments advanced by supporters of the change and takes to task in no uncertain terms the writer of a previous letter who had urged a ‘No’ vote. In the end, the ‘Yes’ side had an easy victory, winning in 22 out of 23 unitary authorities – the exception was Sir Fynwy (Monmouthshire), where they lost by a few hundred votes. The unitary authority with the highest percentage of ‘yes’ votes (76 per cent) was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Gwynedd in the north-west Welsh-speaking heartland, but it is interesting that the campaign also scored some noteworthy successes in areas of the far south, for example 73 per cent in Castell Nedd Port Talbot (Neath Port Talbot).
