A decade of limited devolution has dispelled some of the self-doubt that still infects Welsh national identity. The Cardiff assembly, which lacks the legislative powers of the Scottish parliament, has used its spending discretion to create policies modestly more socialist than those emanating from Westminster. This gradualism is appropriate. The Scots have a more institutionalised sense of their separateness from England. Welsh identity is something of a work in progress.

Such souvenir shop signifiers of Welshness as red dragons, daffodils and love spoons cloak considerable ambivalence. R.S. Thomas excoriated Wales as a land of “mouldering quarries and mines” inhabited by “an impotent people sick with inbreeding”. Dylan Thomas dismissed it as “the land of my fathers. My fathers can keep it.” But both poets were passionately attached to their homeland.