A couple of weeks ago the Assembly announced that £38m was to be spent on ‘revitalising’ run-down coastal towns in the north. This week the Assembly announced another £22m on a “targeted clean-up campaign” for the Valleys.
That’s a total of £60m, big bucks in any language. Yet the Assembly cannot guarantee that the expenditure will create a single job! The geniuses down in Cardiff docks merely hope that this tarting up will make these areas more attractive to tourists. This is optimism of a kind that makes a child putting a lost milk tooth under its pillow look like a ruthless investor.
For an underfunded body like the Assembly to spend this kind of money and then hope that someone comes along with ideas for starting businesses and providing jobs is also a dereliction of duty. And further confirms what we all suspected, anyway – these buggers have run out of ideas.
From another angle . . . We have recently been enjoined to ‘celebrate’ ten years of devolution. The most trenchant comments I read – though, admittedly, I avoided most of them – came from Ron Davies. He pointed out that a fundamental shortcoming of devolution was that it had failed to raise wages in Wales against UK and EC levels; in fact, after ten years of devolution we’ve fallen even further behind!
If we are ever to catch up we need well paid jobs: for that we need a better educated and more highly skilled workforce; we need indigenous entrepreneurs; we must have our own financial sector. All the Assembly offers us is low pay, no skill, seasonal employment. With these clowns in charge it’s only a matter of time before the ‘third world country’ jokes become reality.
By Jack of the North
