The WRU and its Vice Royal Patron

In view of some of the comments, and with the benefit of a good night's sleep, I thought I should clarify that my previous post was not in any way directed against the monarchy (I can do that in other posts) or against William Windsor personally. Nor, for that matter, has it anything to do with the English bid for the World Cup; which I'm sad they lost, but don't think they ever had any realistic chance of winning.

The organization I most wanted to address was the Welsh Rugby Union.

The WRU is the sort of organization that frequently drives me to despair. It should be one of the prime focuses of Welsh national identity, but all too often seems to deny its Welshness. Perhaps this is understandable since, in historical terms, sport has been one of the few ways in which our national identity could be expressed, but it had to be done within an over-arching sense of Britishness because to do anything else would have been considered disloyal if not subversive. This led to a certain "over-compensation" in which the WRU had to make a particular show of its loyalty ... and this in turn led to it having more than its fair share of sycophants, each (as Macsen put it in one of the comments) eager for their OBEs.

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But something that happened over the weekend gave me hope that things could be different. The BBC fiasco over the start of the Wales v New Zealand game resulted in deserved criticism from nearly every quarter in Wales. Roger Lewis, chief executive of the WRU, made the point particularly well in his article in the Western Mail on Tuesday, but it was the way he closed it that particularly caught my attention:

The creeping perception of the irrelevance of Wales in London by the media and for that matter by the politicians must be addressed. The voice of Wales, our voice, must be heard. It must be heard in Wales and in the corridors of the decision makers and opinion formers in London as well as in Cardiff.

If we want Wales to win, not just in rugby but beyond the field, we all have to take responsibility.

We have to take responsibility for ourselves. And that means convincing the powers that be, wherever they are, to have confidence in us and our abilities to make the right decisions.

To do that, we must have the confidence in ourselves.

All of us in Wales, in whatever walk of life, must be prepared to take control of our own destiny. In the tough times ahead we must be loud as well as proud, and we must be prepared to stand up together for what we believe to be right and fair. Wales may not have a haka, but we have a passion and a pride and an ability to shape our future around our own unique national identity.

Western Mail, 30 November 2010

As he made clear, he was talking about much more than just a bad decision by the BBC, more than just rugby, and more than just sport. He was talking about Wales as a nation. If we are to take control of our own destiny, then there is one small but highly significant step that the WRU could take to demonstrate that we do indeed have confidence in ourselves and our own abilities. It can insist that William Windsor resigns his position.

As I said, this is not because of anything that's wrong with him as a person, but because he has now chosen to identify himself as English ... which means that he can no longer identify himself as Welsh. By being British, he could identify himself with each of the nations of Britain ... that might at times have been awkward, but his position was just about tenable. Now it isn't.

Two things have come together in the past week: an expressed willingness on the part of the WRU to shape its future around our own unique national identity, as Roger Lewis put it; and William Windsor's own choice to identify himself as English. So let us raise our voices to make sure that he steps down as Vice Royal Patron of the WRU. There could not be a better time to do this than now, and the impending changes to his personal life provide a perfect opportunity for it to happen in a seemly fashion.