Labour’s dying and new economic forces are taking over

GOOD TO see some excellent business enterprise for the sake of both the Welsh language and the Welsh community last weekend.

The former mining village of Bedwas is known to few people – although some years ago, Plaid Cymru chose the then newly-refurbished Workmen’s Hall as the location for its annual conference.

Since then nothing much has happened.  But last weekend saw a performance there by the national troubadour of Wales, the forever great Max Boyce.

The significance of his visit went beyond his performance. He sang in the former workingmen’s club. Which was closed and shuttered until a couple of weeks ago.

And while he was there he formally opened in an upstairs room in the club a Bar Cymraeg. Something, I can assure you, which is totally new for this former mining village.

The pit closed, by the way, when Arthur Scargill forced the men working underground to join his strike, despite what the law said and how the men had voted. When the strike ended, the pit stayed closed.

For a new economic force is now at work in Bedwas.

Workingmen’s clubs seem to be a dying force. Bedwas had closed, and the Aneurin at the other end of Caerfffili is open only at weekends as it waits to be demolished and replaced by housing.

But there’s one difference between Bedwas and the Aneurin at the bottom of the council estate in Penyrheol. The Aneurin is a Labour Club.

And that party’s not doing too well currently, both in Caerffili, where control has been lost to a Plaid-led group, and in the UK.

But Bedwas is feeling the force of an up-and-coming political and economic grouping. Behind the reborn WMC in Bedwas – now rechristened The Greenfly – is one of the strongmen in that new grouping.

Clayton Jones was deputy leader when Plaid first took control of Taff-Ely District Council (leader of the group was Janet Davies, who went on to become an AM before she retired at the last election).

But Clayton used to have another life. He also ran a bus company which grew until it was almost bigger than the sleepy council-run operation in Pontypridd.

He then sold out to Veolia and went into semi-retirement. Until a financial crisis beset a local private coach operator in Bedwas. Top-Kat Travel was based at the former headquarters of another sleepy council-run operation – Bedwas and Machen, which was eventually run out of operation by competitors when Rhymney Valley council was Labour- run.

Top-Kat is still operating.

Next door to Top-Kat stands the former Bedwas WMC. When that also collapsed, Clayton saw another financial opening.

At one end of Caerffili, the Aneurin is closing. A political period is ending. At the other end of the town The Greenfly is opening. A different sort of political period is opening.

And the main bus past the Greenfly - the service A through Caerffili centre to Cardiff – drives at the other end of its journey every half-an-hour past a third indication that the world in Wales is changing.

The bus passes very close to a large public house very close to the University Hospital of Wales known until recently as the Cross Inn. This pub’s location in the middle of a roundabout ensured business was often slow – unlike the traffic.

But that pub has just been reopened. It takes almost the same name as the Penyrheol club.

But the Aneurin Bevan is run by Wetherspoon’s, not by the Labour Party.