Just when it all appeared to be going swimmingly well for ultra-left, ultra-unionist devo-sceptic Labour leadership candidate Huw ‘Screwloose’ Lewis – suddenly it’s all gone pear-shaped.
Over the last few weeks in the gripping battle to succeed Rhodri Morgan as First minister of Wales, it appeared that rank outsider Screwloose, despite having more chips on his shoulders than Harry Ramsdens on a Saturday night, might yet slip under the radar and bring the contest to a tight finish.
Obvious favourite Carwyn Jones, a patriotic Welshman and the only contender with enough gravitas to lead a political party, wimped out on the burning issue facing Wales: increased powers for the Assembly – apparently terrified of being labelled a closet nationalist. Meanwhile statuesque valkyrie Edwina Hart’s campaign ran messily into the mud with an unnecessary and unwise spat over the future of Faith Schools.
No mention of anything remotely anti-Welsh, rabidly unionist or loony-left. Suddenly Screwloose seemed to be a contender. The former chemistry teacher’s 5-minute interview on Thursday’s AM/PM programme actually gave the impression of a reasonable, softly-spoken family man and with no mention of anything remotely anti-Welsh, rabidly unionist or loony-left as might have been expected. When considered against the lacklustre efforts of Edwina and Carwyn on the same programme, you’d have fancied his chances.
But then came the headline…
KINNOCKS THROW WEIGHT BEHIND HUW LEWIS’ VISION FOR WALES!
and the dream is all but over.
Political clowns
The very idea of this Wales-hating duo of political clowns and abject failures (Kinnock as Labour leader, Glenys as a globetrotting ‘Welsh’ MEP who failed to champion one single local issue, and latterly as a disastrously bad Foreign Office minister) giving a boost to anyone in this contest is as laughable as it is pathetic. Here is a couple whose loathing of Wales, its people, language, culture and history (Kinnock is on record as saying that that Wales didn’t have any) is matched only by an obscene greed for wealth and gargantuan appetite for adulation (see Cambriapolitico passim). Lewis simpered that he was “honoured and humbled to have the backing of two such great party figures”, adding bizarrely that Kinnock was somehow responsible for having “saved the party from electoral extinction”, when the exact opposite was the case. He famously and disastrously lost Labour an election condemning it to years in the wilderness until Tony Blair recreated it along Tory lines in the lead up to the New Labour victory of 1997.
Champagne-swilling freeloaders
The very idea of the avowed socialist AM for Merthyr Tydfil – who lives with his AM wife in comfortable middle-class style in the leafy avenues of smart, upmarket Penarth (he claims his “passion is to rid Wales of the curse of child poverty”) – being endorsed by a duo of champagne-swilling multi-millionaire freeloaders and political dinosaurs, is one step too far.
Let’s hope what remains of the Labour Party in Wales has the sense to see straight through this grotesque charade.
By Cynfelyn
Editor’s Note
Wales gives notice to Liebour’s Stalinist bullies – we will not be silenced!
After due consideration by Cambriapolitico’s legal counsel, we feel that the people of Wales have the right to read, in full, our contributor Cynfelyn’s article which has induced such a hissy-fit in Huw Lewis’s highly-strung henchmen Matt Greenough and Luke Holland.
The idiotic idea that reminding readers of Huw Lewis’s nickname “Screwloose” – it’s been applied to him in political circles in Cardiff Bay for some considerable time – and, DOH!, it’s also er… a play on his name, is in anyway a comment on his mental health, should send those who thought it up scrambling onto the couch of their own therapists in Cathedral Road.
The whole silly exercise shows how running scared Liebour’s lost legions
are, and that’s what’s made them so pathetically – and babyishly – touchy.As we have said – be warned – this is a foretaste of the sort of intimidatory regime a Huw Lewis Liebour leadership will mean.
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This article contains some interesting matter, but I can’t see in what sense Huw Lewis is left-wing, let alone ultra-left.
Damn the Kinnocks to hell and Screwloose with them!
I remember a very genial chap from Herefordshire pointing in the general direction of my head and saying that I had a screw loose. Cautiously, I said that there might be something in what he said. He produced a small screwdriver, with which he proceeded to tighten a screw in my glasses, which had contrived to work itself loose.
Should I have tried contacts?
This is just bullshit of the highest order. There’s no way on God’s earth any “legal counsel” would have sanctioned your unsubstantiated, unchecked and frankly libellous cobblers. You have absolutely no grounds for accusing Lewis of having a mental health problem – and even if he did have some problem of any kind (which you can’t prove), you’ve decided to stigmatise him for it. What next? Dodgy poofs? Thieving blacks? Get back to the 1970s.
What makes it worse is that you and your deluded gang of socially inadequate bedroom-based tossing champions have dressed this up as a freedom of the press issue. You’re not press! You’re a bunch of amateurs that think it’s fine to smear someone with absolutely no way of backing it up – where’s your proof? – and then pose as suppressed white knights. And you say Lewis is mad?
You’re a disgrace to any fact checker, you’re a disgrace to anyone who’s ever suffered – really suffered – at the hands of tyranny, and you’re a disgrace to the nationalist movement. If you really want independence, you’d want Lewis to win. Unfortunately, your political thinking is so stunted and one-dimensional that you can’t see further than your own underdeveloped reasoning. Any nationalist will distance themselves from this disgraceful bullshit.
Shame on you.
I fail to see what Guffington is on about. Where on earth is he accused of having mental health problems? Calling someone Scewloose is hardly an accusation of of mental illness, it’s an accusation of nasty, irrational behaviour, loss of temper, inconsistency , delusion etc. Much of which is on display in most politicians.
I hope now that Cambria will look forensically at things that Lewis has said about fellow-politicians, some from his own party, and the exceptional personal nastiness of many of his comments on others. Starting perhaps with his attack on leanne Wood a couple of years ago , where he wrote a letter that even the Western Mail apologised for, and ‘dissociated’ itself from him.
Then we can look at the time he called list AMs ‘time serving drones’ (though now he has the support of a couple for his leadership bid maybe he needs to butter them up).
And maybe Cambria can now really invesitage whcih AMs in Labour and which AMs researchers were involved in the Natwatch website, with its homophobic attacks on Adam Price, its spiteful attacks on a then-pregnant leanne Wood, anti-Welsh comments and mocking Jane Ryder’s ‘Geordie’ accent etc etc.
It would be nice to know just how high up that website went, because the amount of viciousness and smear would be enough for a couple of good lawsuits I imagine!
So come on bullies and their trolls (Guffington): it you give it, then take it, and don;t try to threaten those who criticise you.
Nu Lab are the dirtiest fighters in Wales. Waste no pity on them.
Guffington Pist made a very revealing post on Syniadau.
http://syniadau–buildinganindependentwales.blogspot.com/2009/11/totally-unacceptable-and-staggeringly.html
He has very hastily put his blog into “password protected” mode so that we can’t see his other gems.
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To me, this “extraordinarily serious allegation made in a totally unacceptable and staggeringly crass fashion” seems to be a piece of perfectly ordinary ridicule that I would hardly have taken notice of. Huw Lewis’s office has made it into something far bigger than it would otherwise have been.
If calling someone “Screwloose” warrants legal threats, then Huw is not well served by the likes of Mr Greenough. If it was done on his initiative he should be sacked
On the other hand, perhaps Mr Greenough was simply doing what he was paid to do. If it was done with Huw’s consent, then Huw will richly deserve all the ridicule he is going to get.
He must act quickly to dissociate himself from the email. I’ll give him a day or two to do so.
You’ll give him a day to do so, and then what? What are you going to do? Make a complaint? To whom? I’d love to hear that:
“Oh, hi. I just totally made up a story about Huw Lewis. No, sorry, I don’t have a shred of evidence on which to base it, otherwise I would have included it in my original pack of lies. Yes, well, as a consequence of my total bullshit, I’d like someone to lose his livelihood. Do it, or else. Or else I’ll write a blog.”
It’s not really the made-up story that surprises. It’s been clear for some time that the Morlocks have inherited the Welsh blogosphere, otherwise they might have made some sort of impact on Labour leadership election. Its collective failure to do so is something for another day. What is so irksome is that you would invoke freedom of the press and label the Lewis camp a collection of Nazi boot boys for having the temerity to complain about an untruth.
I recently met a Zimbabwean journalist who, against the odds, had managed to report on his country for four years. When he left, to go back to Zimbabwe to continue his job, someone told me he had two-to-three-feet-long machete scars across his body. Your experience doesn’t compare, doesn’t even come close. Being threatened with libel happens in a democratic country. That’s what we do instead of throwing dissidents out of windows. I note you’ve retreated from these claims and now – ha ha! – it was all a bit of knockabout fun. Boom, and indeed boom.
So, Guffington – you’re accusing Cambria Politico of being racist and hating blacks and women on the grounds that they called Huw lewis Screwloose, is that right?
Is that the whole of your ‘case’? And are you still claiming that it’s a legal issue, then?
‘Screwloose’ is a lampoon not a medical allegation. Unlike those the Labour party were preparing, in the Damien McBride days, about their opponents, which really were medical allegations and smears of quite shocking (and wholly typical) nastiness.
It’s a plain old insult, that’s all, you pathetic ranter, the kind of insult that’s been levelled at politicians the world over for years, and will continue to be so. To extrapolate from that that Cambria are racist and mysoginistic and behaving illegally is lazy and deceitful. I can quite see why you don’t use your own name.
Embarassment I imagine.
“I note you’ve retreated from these claims ”
Guff – no-one’s retreated. The original article is up again, because the people who tried to gag it failed.
What’s your point?
Do you really think that threatening people with libel for insulting you is OK? I mean, you want the days when Bob Maxwell and Certer-Ruck and co gag and sue their way through the world?
You believe it’s ok to threaten legal action , knowing full well it will fail, as a way of keeping free speech (however objectionable) in check? ]
Ah, now we have it.
Perhaps the blog police can investigate the entry on Huw’s blog where some toady of Huw calls Adam Price ‘racist’. An actionable comment I’d have thought, and one that Huw should apologise for. In legal terms, as the one who published the allegation, he is responsible and actionable for it, whoever made it. It’s like a letter in the papers – the paper is responsible for the retraction, the apology and the publication..
The fact that a moderated blog like Lewis’s thinks it’s acceptable to publish libelous or defamatory claims is worth following up, surely?
Perhaps Cambria should investigate?
I can only assume that Guffington Pist is a member of the Neagle household.
Talk about shooting oneself in the foot.
If you Google Huw Lewis Blog the first things you come up with are these Cambria Politico’s Blogs on him.
Funny how the Welsh media are too scared to report a Labour politician’s baseless legal bullying, but are quite happy telling stories about , say, Nick Bourne.
Talk about pathetic journalism. maybe the welsh media haven;t yet discovered that the one-party Laboru state is actually over?
dave Rodway
Well we are talking about the BBC owned by the ‘Government’. Remember that little spat over the lies regarding the Iraq invasion and weapons of mass destruction. Also see Nick Robinsons Blog on BBC.
ITV, well what can you say about them, Wales is invisible as far as they are concerned.
The main ‘Welsh’ daily news media are owned by The Mirror Group and we know who they support..
So what do we realy expect, they can’t even give us unbiased information on having more powers for Wales.
Sorry I’ll rephrase that, they can’t give us ANY information regarding more powers for Wales.
Oh yes, I’m sorry they do, they quote the noble Lord and Lady and their few ‘anti more power’ minions.