It has become popular to say that Wales is a community of communities and in miniature, my Wales streches from Hendy high above the Loughor in the East to the industrial villages of Ty Croes and the Gwendraeth down to Llanelli, Burry Port and Kidwelly strung along the Burry Estuary. This is the Wales I love most and want to serve.

I want Wales to be independent because only by making our own decisions as a nation can we get a fair deal for Llanelli and other similar communities. Only through independence can we play the role we need to play in the wider world.

Part of me believes in independence for its own sake.

It would serve to heal the wounds of hundreds of years of exploitation and forced subservience. A Welsh declaration of independence would put a full stop on the sorry history of parents refusing to hand on the language to their children as if it was a mark of Cain that would make them less intelligent, less capable and less talented than others.

An independent Wales would realize the dreams of the workers who built the chapels and workingmen’s halls that were the first civic institutions in their communities. Independence will make us stand taller but it is also about much more than that. Independence is about the survival of our communities in a world facing a global financial crisis where irresponsible decisions in London put them at risk.

We may face cuts of up to £500m in public spending in Wales next year. This comes on top of the injustice of the Barnett formula which calculates the Assembly budget based on a head count rather than an assessment of needs. The reason for this new round of cuts is that the bank bailouts will have to be paid for.

Llanelli has hundreds of manufacturing jobs under threat; some of them have been saved by the Assembly Government’s “ProAct” scheme. We have seen a huge rise in repossessions in Llanelli from the start of the crisis and without a doubt the Assembly’s mortgage rescue scheme and the £1 million set aside to finish affordable housing projects in the county will have helped people to keep their homes. The funding behind these schemes is a tiny fraction of the £50bn that has already been channelled into banks which has had little effect on borrowers and small business owners in Llanelli who are still seeing overdrafts called in where they have met all their repayments.

The public sector provides more jobs pro rata in Wales than it does in other parts of the UK and so these cuts will have a bigger impact here. They will fatally undermine efforts to promote the market in goods and services in Wales’ poorest communities, places like Llanelli where the economy is still much less developed than in other regions of Wales and the EU despite a second round of funding intended to close that gap. I believe that safeguarding jobs in the public sector now has to be the UK government’s priority but even if my MP agreed with me, and even if all the Welsh MPs agreed with me, they would still be only 40 voices among 600.

Welsh MPs of course do not act as a block as the majority need to follow their London-based bosses. Nonetheless, when the Liverpool corporation wanted to drown the Tryweryn Valley to supply water for the city, our Welsh MPs did vote together, but the simple arithmetic of Westminster meant that their views did not count. Tryweryn of course was drowned and its people resettled.

If we as the people of Wales believe that we have a shared experience and shared values, how can we possibly believe that the Westminster Parliament can represent us?

Independence is not about closing out the world. It is about coming of age on our own terms and now more than ever it is about protecting ourselves and each other.

In common with other towns in Wales, our town centres in Llanelli and Burry Port have been haemorrhaging businesses as larger shops move to out-of-town sites. The Sustainable Communities Act 2007 is a piece of England-only legislation that enables County Councils and local people to decide on strategies to promote local businesses, affordable housing and to draw down funds to drive those strategies forwards. If we want to be able to use these powers the Assembly will need to submit a Legislative Competency Order. These orders ask Westminster for the powers to make decisions on issues that are within the Assembly’s remit. Currently the process of deciding on Legislative Competency Orders or LCOs involves no fewer than 27 steps. This is a ridiculous situation where an LCO on assessing the needs of carers for social service support took two years to process. During that time, families I know were under the intolerable strain of providing round-the-clock care with no respite or support services provided by the County Council because their needs had not been assessed. Our Assembly, voted for by us, needs the tools to make decisions that affect us and our communities now, not in two years’ time. The situation we currently have is indefensible, because it rests on an assumption that our law-makers are not competent to make the same decisions that MPs make.

Of course we can make our own decisions. We have never needed our hand held by Westminster and we have proven through the sensible steps taken by the Assembly Government to address the economic crisis that we are more than competent to govern ourselves.

I don’t think a person chooses their national identity entirely freely. A person’s upbringing, their education and the opportunities they have in life play a role in the identities they take on. Nonetheless, I do believe in Gwynfor Evans’ phrase that that being Welsh is a choice you are free to make if you are happy to live with the consequences. If we are to take our place in the world on our own terms, the consequences of being Welsh mean that we take responsibility for governing ourselves. We need to come out from the shadow of Westminster that has starved economic growth in Wales by cutting off public spending and has starved us of the opportunity of making decisions that fundamentally affect the way people live in Wales. The working men and women who built our first institutions knew that to create opportunities in their communities to educate, to debate, to be creative, they had to step out of the shadow of a system that said they were only workers and act as thinking members of a community and a nation.

Only by making our own decisions in an independent Wales can we look after ourselves and each other. It is time to step out into the sun.

Myfanwy Davies

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