Gareth Davies: My mission is to reclaim Welsh culture from the nationalist left | Conservative Home

Gareth Davies MS is the Welsh Conservative Member of the Senedd for Vale of Clwyd, serving as the Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism, Sport, and North Wales.

The Welsh nationalist-Left do not have a monopoly on Welsh culture and identity but conservatives have allowed the fallacy they do to persist. Our duty is to reclaim ownership and return it to the people.

As the newly appointed Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Culture in the Welsh Parliament, I am faced with tackling a bureaucratic cultural sector in Wales which opines on niche minoritarian concerns and is increasingly characterised by a sneering elitism towards those it serves to represent. The sector is funded almost wholly by the Welsh Labour Government which recently ​mandated that heritage sites, including the Big Pit National Coal Museum in Blaenavon, must present a “decolonised” version of history that acknowledges “historical injustices.”

An insufficiently robust political Right in Wales has allowed this to happen and we need a route out of this quagmire. It’s time for conservatives to reclaim Welsh culture, not as a political weapon, but as a treasure to be preserved and celebrated by all.

Welsh conservative-unionists care deeply about conserving Welsh culture and tradition. It is a prerequisite of being a conservative. Plaid Cymru – the largest Welsh Nationalist political party – pay lip service to conserving national identity, culture, and tradition, but are ideologically divided, often displaying as much dedication to the statehood of Palestine as they do to Wales. They believe in Wales re-joining the European Union but are committed to leaving the only Union that truly matters and has historical precedent – the United Kingdom.

The Labour Party, which has governed Wales since the start of devolution, has socialism at its core – a fundamentally internationalist doctrine. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that they both have an innate loathing for national pride and cultural conservatism. Welsh Labour politicians nevertheless hold their noses and support a sufficient number of Welsh nationalist causes to placate Plaid Cymru, thus garnering the required numbers to pass their legislation.

Both aforementioned political parties are essentially globalist entities that would gleefully trade in their national identity and culture in order to become global citizens of the multicultural melting pot. This worldview does not reflect that of the Welsh people, a majority of whom voted for Brexit. Conservatives, therefore, must provide an alternative.

But what is Welsh, and thus British, culture? What underpins our national identity?

In 2014 the UK Government, in its folly, decided to publish a top-down set of ‘British values’. The Department for Education instructs that the five core British values are: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. Whilst these may not be objectionable or inaccurate, our nationhood means more than abstractions and a set of top-down values.

Our culture cannot be distilled into a passionless set of legalistic values. Sir Roger Scruton often rejected the conception of conservatism as being characterised solely by what it was against, instead defining conservatism as a philosophy that seeks to cherish what one loves. In Wales, aside from rightfully cherishing the Welsh language, we have failed to conserve what we love, and in so doing we have opened the door to ‘wokeness’ – with intersectional social justice having trickled down all the way from the Frankfurt School to coal museums in Blaenavon.

As a politician on the Right, I need to understand how our culture has been subverted and maligned by devolved government and put forward an alternative that reflects the country. The cultural sector should reflect our culture, embellish it, conserve it, and teach it to the next generation. The sector’s job is not to ‘challenge norms’ or ‘break taboos’. Neither is it to promote other cultures and vilify and attack our own.

Our culture and national identity are the distilled products of generations of tradition which are the property of the Welsh people. These precious products should be owned by the Welsh people and be managed according to their values, not be the property of political activists to destroy or subvert. Welsh Government bureaucrats nonetheless are the officials assigned to appoint the stewards of our precious cultural property who began to subvert it without the consent of its owners.

Cultural funding being funnelled through ‘woke’ quangos has resulted in a roster of endless artistic productions about the NHS, the Windrush Generation, the LGBTQ+ lived experience, and politically selective issues contrived to realise an undeclared leftist vision of Wales, and has ultimately led to a decline in public engagement with these institutions. The Welsh Government recently instructed public bodies to ‘decolonise’ statues, plaques and paintings in order to project the ‘right historic narrative’ – a phrase as troubling in its reminiscence of Orwellian thought-policing as it is in its obliviousness toward the cultural and civic dangers of such censorship.

The National Museum in Cardiff currently has an exhibition on miners’ strikes in the mid-1980s which invites visitors to learn about contemporary political activism in Wales. Perhaps it informs us of the local opposition to asylum hotels in Llanelli? Or the thousands of farmers who descended on the Senedd to protest the Sustainable Farming Scheme? Of course not. Almost as if it were written by a right-wing satirist, it directs visitors to the work of Queer activism in Wales and the formation of Cymru Queers for Palestine.

Should the Welsh Conservatives win in 2026 and form the next government in Wales, I will be tasked with overseeing the cultural sector. The time has come to wrest Welsh culture from the limp grip of elitist bureaucrats, ideologues, and those who view it as a means to a political end.

The conservative mission is not to distort or manipulate our heritage but to cherish and preserve it, ensuring it remains the inheritance of the people, not the plaything of politicians and government-appointed activists. For too long, the Welsh Left—whether nationalist or socialist—has used public institutions to promote an agenda at odds with the instincts of ordinary people. A culture survives not by diktat, but by love—by the natural affinity of a people with their traditions, their language, their history, and their way of life. That is our task, and it must now begin.