Land of Our Fathers

The Welsh national anthem, "Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau", was composed in 1856. It is sung in Welsh, but an English translation will be found below.



Note the Welsh flag, the harp, and the Menai Bridge (linking Anglesey to mainland Wales, completed in 1826)

And here, at the end of a concert:



Note (at 2 mins 31 sec) the Welsh flags and the giant inflatable daffodil. And of course Ms Jenkins herself is draped in a Welsh flag.

This land of my fathers is dear to me
Land of poets and singers, and people of stature
Her brave warriors, fine patriots
Shed their blood for freedom

Chorus:
Land! Land! I am true to my land!
As long as the sea serves as a wall for this pure, dear land
May the language endure for ever.

Old land of the mountains, paradise of the poets,
Every valley, every cliff a beauty guards;
Through love of my country, enchanting voices will be
Her streams and rivers to me.

Chorus

Though the enemy have trampled my country underfoot,
The old language of the Welsh knows no retreat,
The spirit is not hindered by the treacherous hand
Nor silenced the sweet harp of my land.

Chorus

National symbols

The United Kingdom has few shared symbols aside from the Union Jack and "God Save the Queen". Each of its constituent nations, however, has a rich collection of national myths and symbols, often apparent in banal, day-to-day contexts, but also celebrated on set-piece occasions.

The basic national symbols are:

• for Wales the red dragon, the leek, the daffodil, the harp
• for Scotland the red lion rampant, the thistle, the bagpipes
• for England the lion (passant in heraldry, but often couchant in popular imagery) and the rose

The flag of Wales shows the red dragon of Wales. The national day of Wales is St David Day's, 1 March. It is not a public holiday. On this day people might wear a leek or a daffodil.

The flag of Scotland shows the saltire, or Cross of St Andrew, in white on a blue background. Scotland's national day is 30 November, the Feast of St Andrew. It became a public holiday in Scotland in 2007. Some people might wear a thistle on this day.

The flag of England shows the red Cross of St George, on a white background. England's national day is St George's Day on 23 April. It is not a public holiday. On this day people might wear a red rose.

In both England and Scotland the formal national anthem is "God Save the Queen", but on occasions where it is desirable to distinguish between the English and the Scots (such as international sporting fixtures) it would be inappropriate for both to be singing the same anthem. At football matches the Scots used to sing "Scotland the Brave" (still the anthem of the Scots team in the Commonwealth Games), but that is now surpassed in popularity by "Flower of Scotland" (sung before Scotland's international rugby and soccer matches). On such occasions, the English sing "Jerusalem"

The Welsh have an official national anthem, Land of Our Fathers. There is also an "unofficial" anthem, Men of Harlech (sung here with harp, daffodil, and male voice choir, at the Prince of Wales's 50th birthday celebrations). Both make reference to fighting "foemen" (meaning the English).

John Major

When Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign as leader of the parliamentary Conservative Party, she was succeeded by John Major, a relatively unknown figure who had entered the Cabinet only three years before as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

In 1992, Major called a general election, which the Conservative Party won with over 14 million votes, the largest number of votes ever cast for a single political party in a British election. After Thatcher's forceful and charismatic leadership, John Major's extremely bland public persona may well have been an asset.

The British electoral system, however, meant that the unprecedentedly large number of votes did not convert into a strong majority in the House of Commons. Thatcher in 1983, and Blair in 1997, had "landslide" victories with a smaller number of votes cast in their favour, the issue not being number of votes, or even the proportion of the national vote, but the number of constituencies in which a party's candidate gets more votes than any of the competing candidates. In 1983 the Conservatives, under Thatcher, won a sound majority in the Commons (397 of the 646 seats) on 42.4% of the national vote; in 1997 Labour, under Blair, won 418 seats on 43.2% of the national vote. In 1992, on a comparably strong 41.9% of the national vote, Major won only 336 seats - a slender majority, especially as a strong minority of Conservative MPs continued to support populist "Eurosceptic" positions, and were willing to go against their party leadership on important votes on European affairs. This put Major's government in a weak position to direct policy.

The pattern of voting in the 1992 general election also showed a country divided: Major's party won a lot of its votes in the South-East of England, where it would have done well anyway. In Scotland, Wales, and most of the North of England the Conservatives did very badly, but were returned to power in Westminster regardless. This could give people the feeling that they were being governed not by the United Kingdom's vote, but by the South of England's vote. In the 1955 general election, the Conservatives had got 50.4% of the vote in England and 50.1% in Scotland. The Conservative share of the Scottish vote had been falling ever since, and in the 1992 election they got 46.7% of the vote in England, and 25.6% in Scotland. This disparity bred discontent with rule from Westminster, and lay behind the decision of the Blair government to "devolve" powers to a Scottish Parliament after 1997.

Scotland

At its union with England, Scotland retained

• its own legal system (based on principles of civil law rather than common law),
• its own educational system (with far higher literacy rates than elsewhere in Britain, and a proud claim to be "the first country in the world with universal education"),
• a separate established church (the Church of Scotland),
• and its own aristocracy and gentry.

All this was accompanied by all the heraldry and symbolism of legal, academic, ecclesiastical and noble life.

Scotland is more sparsely inhabited than England, but contains a number of impressive cities. The largest is Glasgow, a major centre of industry and ship-building in the 19th century, "the second city of the Empire", with all the social problems attendant on industrialization and postwar industrial decline.

Edinburgh, Scotland's capital, is a centre of administration, law, banking, learning and culture.

Aberdeen, anciently important in North Sea shipping and fisheries, and a minor centre of 19th-century industry, became the energy capital of the U.K., and to some extent of Europe, after the discovery of North Sea oil.

Geographically and culturally, the Highlands of Scotland are set apart from the Lowlands. Much of the romantic imagery of glens, lochs, castles, crofts, kilts, bagpipes, etc. derives from the Scottish Highlands.

Four nations in one state

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is, as its name implies, a union of several components: the kingdom of England, the kingdom of Scotland, the principality of Wales, and the province of Northern Ireland. There are different patterns of culture, identity and political allegiance within and between each of these components.

England is the largest, richest and most powerful of the four components, and the institutional core of the United Kingdom (London being the capital of the U.K., as well as by far its largest city).

A united Kingdom of England was created in the tenth century, with Edgar I (959-975) crowned king of all England in 973. It was subsumed into the United Kingdom of Great Britain by the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707.

Wales was united to England by a long process of conquest and partial colonization, culminating in the 1536 "Acte for Lawes & Justice to be ministred in Wales in like fourme as it is in this Realme", which formally incorporated Wales into the same structures of law and government as England.

Scotland was an entirely separate kingdom, which successfully withstood English attempts at conquest in the 14th century. England and Scotland shared a monarch from 1603 onwards, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, and assumed the courtesy title "King of Britain". Formal unification of England and Scotland under a single crown and parliament, with a curency and customs union and freedom of movement between the two kingdoms, was agreed by the parliaments of Scotland and England, and legislated in the Act of Union with Scotland 1707.

Kings of England claimed lordship over Ireland from 1171 onwards, but English rule in Ireland was seldom effective or widely heeded before Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1535, initiating more intensive efforts to enforce the royal will there. Ireland was fully incorporated into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union with Ireland 1801, but 26 of the 32 counties left the Union in 1921 to form the Irish Free State (which became the Republic of Ireland in 1949). The 6 counties where the majority of the population wished to remain part of the United Kingdom became Northern Ireland.