Real Wales
Sir: Laid up with a virus infection, I have had time to read Duncan Fallowell's article last week and now to write from my London home so that at least one grand illusion can be shattered before it causes any rumbling in the night. Poor Mr Fallowell, lost so far from London and uncertain whether he was among the witches or in Evelyn Waugh territory (an understandable confusion after meeting Mr Booth and so much death on the road), quotes from a speech of mine made during an inward investment mission to the United States organised by the Development Corporation for Wales. I hope his map-reading was better than his fact-finding. The Development Corporation is an entirely different body from the Development Board for Rural Wales, and can claim a good deal of credit for the fact that there are today over 200 overseas companies operating in Wales employing about 55,000 people, and that about half of those companies are from the United States, I have never had a vision of Dallas in mid-Wales, but I do have a vision of the growth in Wales of a strong, diverse, high technology industrial sector built around companies like Inmos, Mitel and the eight Japanese companies that the DCW has already attracted to the Principality.
Those of us who live in Wales (yes, real people live in the Black Mountains, not witches!) can perhaps appreciate better 'than slipshod journalists on weekend visits :the value of the work done by the Development Board for Rural Wales in building small factories, providing social facilities and in helping new businesses to start in villages that resent depopulation and the lack of opportunity a great deal more than 'something called Prosperity forced on them virtually at gun-point'. As one who has represented a Welsh constituency heavily dependent on tourism for more than a decade Lam also in a rather better position than Mr Fallowell to judge the substantial contribution that the Welsh Tourist Board has made to the development of that vital industry. As one who has to struggle on a daily basis with the very serious social and economic problems that we face in Wales, I am saddened that what is being attempted and achieved should be the subject of such superficial and ill-researched comment, that so starkly reveals the distance between the universe inhabited by journalists who write for the weeklies and those in the real world outside.
If Mr Fallowell can summon up the time and inclination I should be happy to take him to the real Wales that lies beyond the arty middle-class world in which he seems to have got lost, asphyxiated perhaps by the smell of French cheeses and worse. He won't find much feudalism either, when he gets there.
Nicholas Edwards
Secretary of State for Wales, 20 Chester Row, London SW1
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