Something must be done, is the famous misquote when King Edward VIII visited South Wales back in the 1930s.
Aghast at the scale of poverty before his eyes, the monarch felt moved to speak his mind.
In fact, apparently, on seeing an abandoned colliery and the effect of its closure on the community he said: “These works brought all these people here. Something should be done to get them working again.”
Whatever the accuracy of what he said, the sentiment was clear.
The king was angry. His subjects were being exposed to lives of poverty and joblessness. Towns and villages which were booming just a few decades earlier were now crippled by the economic effects of industrial decline.
But nothing much was done, after that – save the continued closure of the pits that once sustained hundreds of thousands of jobs and helped built the British Empire.
We know the story, the mines closed, the jobs went, the people left behind largely failed to find anything else because there was nothing else.
Governments invested billions, the Europeans threw cash at projects to regenerate, pots of money were given to foreign firms to open factories.
But all that largely failed too.
The endemic problems continued, they continue still. There is a lack of jobs. There has been no panacea to the disappearance of coal as an employer.
That’s the conventional narrative on the South Wales Valleys, at least.
South Wales, the trust said, is the most socially and economically disadvantaged of all Britain’s former coal communities.
The report’s author Professor Steve Fothergill, sounded a warning.
“The pit closures may be receding into history,” he said. “But the job losses that followed are still a serious and contributing factor to the economic reality for most mining communities.
“Coalfields communities are seriously adrift of the national average.”
Miners’ leader Tyrone O’Sullivan – the man who made coal work when the Conservatives said it couldn’t – was even more chilling. The Valleys are facing a “disaster” – it’s an economic disaster, but a disaster nonetheless. Because it is impacting on lives, it is creating suffering, it is perpetuating social injustice meted out on the undeserved.
The prosperity that was so quick in attracting thousands of migrants from around Wales, Britain and Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries dribbled away into nothing.
In calling his historical novel about the great Welsh coal mining era Rape Of The Fair Country, Alexander Cordell summed up succinctly what happened.
South Wales’ natural resources were quickly plundered by the rich and the powerful who used and abused the cheap and all-too readily-available human resources at their disposal.
Eventually, there was no use for the coal which had fuelled Britain’s industrial revolution and put the country at the top of the global powerlist.
So the money withdrew and moved elsewhere and Governments grew tired of propping up an ailing industry.
Bit by bit, the mines closed down and more and more people suffered. The proud Valleys of South Wales which were synonymous with modernity and prosperity and radicalism, which were once cultural beacons, became synonymous with the grime and desperation of joblessness.
The communities blighted by unemployment became testing grounds for economic theory, from state interventionism to pure Thatcherism. But policy makers forget that people aren’t guinea pigs, they’re people. That people need the security and aspiration that employment brings.
Should the Valleys lose hope for the future?
I think not. And that’s not for my own naive sentimental reasons, as a son of the Rhondda.
No, I do believe that in the people of the Valleys lies a latent and untapped pool of talent and intelligence, where there is potential ready to be fulfilled.
So how to we get these places moving again? Certainly not by cutting welfare or imposing punitive measures such as the so-called bedroom tax – making people miserable and desperate under the weight of poverty will never motivate them.
Quick fixes have come and gone. But people do need jobs. The prospect of a capital region for South East Wales would be a step forward – areas are in urgent need of investment in infrastructure so people can access jobs markets better.
Treating South East Wales as a regional ecosystem, indelibly linked and interlinked with connections that go back through the ages, seems remarkably sensible.
To have not done this sooner is remarkably naive, but says much about a parochial mindset.
Solving the problems of the South Wales Valleys will go a long way to solving the rest of the nation’s problems.
Do we want these wonderful communities to thrive once more? Do we want to give people hope again? Do we want to save the Valleys from disaster?
Or are we happy to leave them to drift, to rot away in their own spiral of deprivation?
At the moment, we’re content with doing the latter.
There was a king, who on a visit to South Wales many decades ago, said something pertinent and truthful about the dire poverty he saw.
Yes, something really must be done.