What does it mean to be Welsh?

It’s one of those questions that people think they know the answer to until they try to write it down because being Welsh isn’t about a flag, a rugby shirt or a childhood memory of rain on a caravan window in Tenby, it’s a living identity shaped as much by what we’ve had done to us as by what we’ve chosen for ourselves.

And if we’re honest as we celebrate St David’s Day in 2026, Welshness is caught between two powerful instincts of being culturally confident and economically cautious. Yes, we are a nation that has never lacked a voice – against the odds, we’ve kept a language alive that history tried to suffocate and produced artists, athletes, and scientists who have done far more than our scale should allow.

When Wales is at its best, it has a kind of intensity where talent and community sit close together, and you’re never far from someone who will help you, introduce you, or just put the kettle on for a panad (cup of tea).

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But we are also a nation that too often behaves as if economic success will only happen elsewhere, and to me, that is the tension at the heart of modern Welsh identity.

If we want to understand what it means to be Welsh today, we need to recognise that a nation of just over three million people does not get many “free hits,” and that every year of under-performance matters. So, when Wales has consistently been below the UK average on productivity, wages and economic output since devolution in 1999, those aren’t just another bunch of statistics but a situation that is shaping national confidence, narrowing the horizon of ambition, and quietly rewritingour Welsh identity from “we can” to “we cope”.

Welshness has always contained resilience, and we have endured industrial collapse, political marginalisation, and decades of being talked about as a problem to be managed rather than a place to be built. But resilience is not the same thing as ambition and modern Welshness, if it is to mean anything beyond nostalgia, has to be deliberate in deciding that’s how we will shape our economic future.

That we will not just host economic summits that discuss investment but actually go out and create it; not just train the talent of the future but retain it in our communities; and not just talk about innovation but use it to create companies that scale and stay rooted in their communities.

This is where the conversation usually becomes uncomfortable because it forces a harder question for the economic future of this nation: do we truly believe Wales can build globally significant businesses that dominate their sectors, anchor high-value jobs and recycle wealth into the next generation of founders?

To date, Wales has not normalised that kind of ambition and in fact we treat it as exceptional by celebrating the odd outlier rather than building a pipeline to make it happen.

And that’s why belief matters: small countries with a deep, repeated pattern of scale build a different psychology by producing founders who pitch bigger, firms that recruit for global growth, and policymakers who design programmes to support success.

Let me make it unequivocal – I have always believed Wales has talent, ingenuity and innovation in spades, but what we have lacked repeatedly is the conversion mechanism namely the capital, institutional muscle and the cultural permission to think outrageously big without constantly being told to “be realistic”.

Too often, the aim is preservation through metrics such as businesses supported or jobs safeguarded, and whilst those things matter, they are not the same as creating employment, growing firms and building national prosperity. In other words, we have become a development economy obsessed with avoiding failure, and the inevitable consequence is that the Welsh story has become one of survival rather than success.

This is not about demanding that every business becomes a unicorn, but about understanding that a small nation needs high value wins to change its trajectory as the mathematics of economic development are unforgiving. Simply put, you cannot build prosperity on low productivity and low value-added and instead, need firms that invest, export and grow.

That then brings us to the deeper question: what do we want Wales to be known for? Obviously not another romanticised version of coal and choirs, but do we know what the modern Welsh proposition is in a world of AI, clean energy and deep tech?

Because being Welsh shouldn’t be simply about looking backwards, but about choosing what comes next, and if we want an identity that is proud, modern and confident, then we all need to embrace an economic narrative rooted in better performance.

That requires institutional courage, such as serious mechanisms to turn research into investable companies, development finance that knows when to protect and when to go for it, and a political culture that stops mistaking announcements for outcomes. Until we fix that, Welshness will remain proud of what we have kept but uncertain about what we can create.

So, back to the question of what does it mean to be Welsh in 2026? We will have different answers but to me, it means refusing to accept underperformance as a national personality trait. It means celebrating community but not letting it become a comfort blanket. And it means being proud of what we have whilst constantly demanding better.

But most important of all, Welshness should never be reduced to grievance, nostalgia, or sentimentality, as it needs a modern identity in a modern economy with modern choices. Yes, a small nation does not need to dominate everything, but it should be expected to dominate something, and when we start acting as if we believe that calling in our institutions, our companies, and our culture, the question “what does it mean to be Welsh?” will have a completely different kind of answer.