AT FIRST sight, a scene to cheer the troglodytes of Untrue Wales and their leader Don Touhig, Labour MP for Islwyn – (although according to the Western Mail, with its superior contacts with that part of the political agenda, the name of David Davies, right-wing Tory MP for Monmouth, should be used).
The swish coach that acts as the public relations herald for the National Assembly was receiving the attention of not one, but two, large breakdown lorries.
Appropriately, they were named Dragon Rescue.
The coach was supposedly being prepared for its new job of touring the North promoting the message of the National Assembly.
But it wasn’t driving north fast from outside the Assembly in Cardiff Bay. Apparently, it was waggling its wheels in the air because it was due for a regular safety check; it looked to me more like it had broken down in quite a big way.
To Untrue Wales this must surely be the revenge of the “people of Wales”.
For there is one thing that the members of Untrue Wales and its unholy coalition of Left-Right leaders are agreed on, and this is that the people of Wales cannot be trusted to voice their own beliefs. Or to express their democratic views (except through voices in the Imperial Parliament).
We are now told by Untrue Wales that the drive towards extra powers, which will rid the Assembly of near-total control by the Welsh Affairs Committee of the Commons – certain to be dominated by near-ignorant English Tories of unknown views after the next election – is happening purely at the behest of Church and State.
These use of these words by Untrue Wales take us almost back to the start of the 20th century, to the days of Establishment in Wales (as still exists in England). To the days when rural workers tugged their forelocks. To the days when the plebs didn’t think, but left such hard work to their bishops.
This is the view of the extreme Right – of the Davies part of the supposed leadership rather than of the Touhig, from the “Left” part.
As Prof Richard Wyn Jones, of Cardiff, points out in the new Planet, opinion poll figures show that the idea that we are still led by the crachach and the bishops is sadly outdated. Untrue Wales clearly live on another planet; Views have changed considerably since the close-run 1997 referendum, and devolution is “now very much the settled will in Wales” – in other words, the plebs have overtaken the bishops.
And yet there may still be reasons to believe that the wheels have come off the Assembly coach. There are TWO Assembly organisations currently touring Wales telling us all about the Assembly. The Convention is interested in finding the views of the Welsh public so it can recommend whether or not a referendum on extra powers should be held. This body runs a Road Show, but possesses no coach.
The coach belongs to the Assembly Commission, which is the independent body which services the Assembly’s legislative arm and possesses no political views.
Some would argue that this part of the set-up has indeed run off the road, that it has departed so much from the original route as agreed in 1997 that it is in bad need or repair.
Principally,this is because the Assembly changed radically at the 2007 election. At that time, a new Government of Wales Act from the Imperial Parliament came into force; this Act concentrated power at the centre within the Cabinet, and ended much of the openness that the Assembly was designed to provide in 1999 – the Assembly was designed to operate in stark contradiction to what happens at present in the Imperial Parliament.
Untrue Wales would, of course, know nothing of this. To the untruth-tellers from Gwent (they all seem to live there), no criticism of London can ever be broached.
It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. The Jurassic Tendency in the Welsh Labour Party, as exemplified by My Lord Kinnock and the Touphy-Murhig clique, are to be distinguished from the Bourbons in that they forget everything.
I thought the quote was that Bourbons forgot everything and learned nothing.