I started work on Cambria magazine exactly ten years ago. For many years I harboured a dream of seeing a Welsh national magazine on newstands and in homes throughout the world. With very hard work - and with your invaluable help - I have managed to make that dream a reality.

This magazine has grown in tandem with the new Wales, the Wales of devolution. Devolution at least offers the country the mechanisms it needs for change. Given the right circumstances, and the will, the future is indeed bright. But first we must see a fundamental change in our poltical climate. Without it Wales is destined to limp painfully on into the future, a sad appendage of a shrinking United Kingdom on the far fringe of Europe. Wales’s primary task must be to shed itself of the curse of the Labour Party - old and ‘New’ - which squats like an incubus on the political, social and economic life of Wales, stifling all initiative, enterprise and inventiveness. Until the Welsh people rid themselves of nineteenth and twentieth century shibboleths, myths and ideologies - as have virtually all other European countries, whether old or new - we can never move forward. The rank corruption of the dependency culture which pervades Welsh life with its bread-and-circuses, its intolerable economic inactivity, its almost total dearth of new ideas, leadership, or dynamism, its stale and talentless cabal of post-devolution politicians, its stagnant and sterile political culture, its visceral loathing of anything proud and patriotic, would bode ill for any society. It bodes worse for a struggling, economically depressed ‘province’ which is told it is doing ‘so very well’ by the present administration. Any intelligent Welshman or woman knows very well that this is a blatant falsehood. Wales is in trouble, and Wales needs a change. Let all of us who love Wales hope and pray that the coming election will prove the long-awaited turning point, when the country turns away from the politics of corruption and failure, towards that of regeneration and hope. It’s been a very, very long time coming.
This is my last issue as editor. Ten years is, I think, a credible and reasonable term and I have enjoyed every minute of it. I feel it is time to step aside and let a new generation take your magazine forward.

 

Gyda phob dymuniad da.
Henry Jones-Davies