Having received this morning my voting card, I was going to write a long article about the upcoming Referendum question and vote covering all the pros and cons and analysing the opinions, but now … I can’t be arsed.
Main reason for voting YES
- Politicians of all parties are unanimously in favour.
Main numero uno reason for voting NO
- Politicians of all parties are unanimously in favour.
I think that just about sums it up.
So now those that support Independence, a separate National identity and full Devolution for Wales know just where they stand with respect to published Labour policy. Households throughout Wales will have just received through the letter box an official Liebour ‘Election Communication’ and it states quite clearly the following:
Welsh Labour believe this is a time for unity not ‘independence’ for Wales. We need to pull together not break away.
Most potential voters will read this at face value. ie. Labour do not support independence for Wales. The exhortation to ‘pull together’ is a fine sentiment but hardly constitutes a political policy which will influence voters whereas Independence and Devolution are clearly issues that our readers and Welsh voters will have a view on.
The leaflet goes on to state:
Both Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems are ineffective in Europe and would leave Wales on the fringes without an effective voice. Labour can deliver for Wales in Europe.
Well, this is a matter of subjective opinion and Cambria Politico and many others have frequently posted articles about the Labour/Kinnockian performance and legacy in Europe. The answer to this is clear from the record of Wales as an economy under Labour. In spite of huge EU investment (always delayed and tied up in bureaucratic knots) arguably it has gone backwards not forwards like the Irish economy. It is also reflected in the vast growth of the Public Sector in Wales which now employs an astronomically and unsustainably large proportion (70% +) of the workforce.
Labour claims to be investing in the Future of Wales but it is the Present that needs the investment. ProfliGate, the expenses scandals has made sure that Labour will NOT be a part of the Future of Wales.
Gordon Brown’s obsession with creating of a British football team to take part in the 2012 London Olympic Games is yet another desperate attempt to flog the dead horse of “Britishness” in the face of looming Scottish independence and the steady advance of Welsh devolution. Responding to Gordon Brown’s proposal to ‘revive’ “Great British” men and women’s football teams, Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond said that Brown showed himself to be “seriously out of touch with Scotland.” He might have added: Wales too.
The dramatic sporting successes of the Welsh and Scottish athletes in Beijing (six gold and five silver medals between them: Wales three gold, two silver, Scotland three gold, one silver) demonstrates the disproportionate contribution (6 out of 19 gold medals by 8 out of a population of 60 million) these men and women made to the much-trumpeted success of “Team GB”.
Salmond has given his backing to the ‘good idea’ of a separate Scottish Olympic team and is to draft a formal application to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to that effect. Salmond plans to arrange a series of meetings with Scotland’s sporting bodies to discuss the issue. Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones should be thinking seriously about initiating the same dialogue on this ‘good idea’ in Wales. And Plaid Cymru should seize the initiative and press for a debate on the issue as part of the drive towards the goal of Welsh independence.
We have all just witnessed the überspectacular opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Can one seriously imagine the recession-ridden, half-bankrupt, anally-retentive Brits matching that in 2012? Even getting anywhere near to it? Well can you?
The Chinese themed the opening on four thousand years of their nation’s phenomenal history. So perhaps we might expect a jamboree based on the rise of the British Empire, with Lord Seb Coe and his coiffed cohorts waving their batons in the wings? Well, probably not. A good many of the nations of today’s Olympic family would be justifiably disgusted, even up in arms – after all, many of them experienced the full civilising force of its altruistic benevolence.
Just four short years away the Britain of 2012 will be a very different place. Scotland will in all probability have its own national team. Held back by an unholy gaggle of West Brits, New Labourites, Old Labourites, trough-swilling Westminster Labour MPs, Tories, Lib Dems and Great British sycophants, true to form our own dear Wales will no doubt adopt her traditional pose and, God bless her, do what they all do under such circumstances: lie back and think of England.
Badger-lovers seem determined to turn into an international issue the cull of badgers proposed by Welsh minister Elin Jones in order to curb bovine TB.
If Plaid Cymru tried to play off Cardiff against London in order to gain a political or policy point, you can imagine the rumpus which would result from London unionists and their “rwy’n eisiau bod yn Sais” friends in Wales.
Yet the Badger Trust, the self-pronounced friend of badgers, is playing exactly that line in their current moves to force Wales to follow England and abandon all plans for a cull.
Of course, to the trust, with its bases in Britain’s richest suburbs near London and around the Midlands, it must seem almost an (unadmitted) nationalistic battle. When the English rural ministry (Defra) launched a consultation on the issue about two years ago, the responses came OVERWHELMINGLY from the South East and the South West – England’s areas of opulence, where live the upper middle classes who once ruled the world and now have only Wales to concern themselves with.
Of the total responses, an incredible 24pc came south east England, and 25pc from the south west. The government’s own figures show that a pressure group had been solidly at work – in some English regions, no less than 99pc of responses were opposed to a badger cull.
One must congratulate East Grinstead-based trust on its hard work in its own region.
But, as with all pressure groups, one must examine closely what they say. They always cry out that they base their views of “science”. But “science” is never that simple. Continue reading »
Plaid’s leaders and supporters of Welsh independence can take heart from what happened last week in Glasgow East, just as the Unionist parties who favour dependence on an increasingly shaky United Kingdom should feel a shiver of alarm.
The mid-term result might well be dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan by Labour apologists, with a lot of nonsense about ‘we have to listen to the voters’ and so forth, but the election needs to be seen against the steady rout of Labour north of Hadrian’s Wall. That there is a steady rout of Labour west of Offa’s Dyke should be obvious too. The process may be slower, but then in terms of devolution few would deny that Wales limps a decade or so behind Scotland. (Remember of course that Wales became part of the Union just over a century and a half before Scotland, and under rather less elegant conditions.)
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