CAMBRIA POLITICO

A case of newspaper inequality at expense of the Tories

Jan 132009

Nick Bourne and the Welsh Tories seem to be storming to political advances within the next year after the collapse of the Western Mail concatenation of attacks on the propriety of the expenses he has received for being an AM and living in a flat in Cardiff during Assembly weeks.

We can expect an annual sluice of such journalistic stories each time the details of expenses paid – which almost descend to the issue numbers on receipts – are released. Normally, the not-so-hidden agenda among the public is – don’t give taxpayers’ money to politicians.

The agenda with the Western Mail, however, seems rather to serve the interests of the anti-Assembly far-right in Welsh politics.

The Mail was founded to serve the Tory Party; it then killed off the opposition which stemmed from the majority party of Wales (the Liberal-supporting South Wales Daily News); after which success it ridiculously claimed that a “paper created to serve a party now serves a nation” (Nye Bevan didn’t think so; he accordingly burned it above Ebbw Vale); and the resultant current effective monopoly (how often is the Daily Post referred to in Cardiff Bay ?) continues far too often to curry its own favourites, usually right wing Tories.

Day 12: anti-Welsh campaign starts to smell

Welsh Politics No Responses »

Dec 222008

The Western Mail has really excelled itself in its campaign to rid the Welsh Tory party of its leader who has done so much to turn the party into an organisation which supports the nation instead of looking solely towards England and copying what happens across the border.

The basis of the campaign was revealed when the paper gave an entire page to the two most anti-Assembly members who are – or have ever been – in its ranks.

One of these enemies of the Assembly – some would say, enemies of Wales – was named. The Mail - some would say Llais y Sais after reading former Mail editor John Humphries’s Freedom Fighters (from University of Wales Press) – repeated an interview with the notorious former AM for Clwyd West.

As expected, Rod Richards spat vitriol. He additionally ridiculed Nick Bourne’s attempts to learn Welsh – which was the reason for buying on expenses the iPod which the Western Mail has waxed so eloquently about.

I don’t like to say it, but Mr Richards’s comparison of Mr Bourne with the admitted spoken successes of David Davies smack of the perhaps-unwitted arrogance of a person who learnt Welsh from both parents without effort.

Two unionist blasts against Bourne … ?

Welsh Politics No Responses »

Dec 182008

Is the Western Mail’s highly-unusual over-the-top call for Nick Bourne to resign as Tory leader the final service that paper can render to eccentric right-wing Monmouth MP David Davies and his father Peter, a Newport councillor ?

The leader the next day on the paper’s own-styled “IPodGate day six” descends to hysteria as if the paper is belatedly realising that its 140-year-old campaign to save Wales for unadulterated unionism is going down the pan.

Unfortunately for Llais y Sais (the epithet we are led to bestow by former editor John Humphries in his recent Freedom Fighters, from University of Wales Press, as well as by Aled Jones in his Press, Politics and Society, same publisher), Mr Bourne can guess with ease where the campaign rises from.

The link between the Mail and the tiny Newport clique is too well known. The Tories are too much gentlemen to name the people they are referring to. But they fully realise there’s much truth in their allegations about a two-way flow of information between what’s left of Thomson House (not much) and almost the only source of Tory information which that place seemed to believe exists.

Any comments on what Mr Bourne gets up to have to be read in the light of the statement that the position he has taken of advocating a Scots-style parliament for Wales has “earned him plenty of enemies” within the Welsh party. That’s a recent comment from one of the Llais’s journalists whose words are of value – London political editor Tomos Livingstone in The Guardian (although I thought he was still with the Mule…).

The Mail decided to stick its neck out with a page-one editorial this week calling for Mr Bourne to go. Usually, of course, this space is allocated to the main news story of the day.

Were it not that the story of Mr Bourne’s expenses was also running on the BBC, one would dismiss the originating story as standard newspaper hyperbole. Indeed, precisely because is was also running on the BBC one could still dismiss it accordingly – remember the ridiculous BBC-generated furore over the totally-unscripted remarks on a light-hearted BBC programme by another Tory AM, Alun Cairns, about Italians.

But expanding the story into a page-one editorial creates the smell of the Mail - Llais y Sais of old, we must remember - doing its utmost to gain a political scalp from Cardiff Bay.

And all over a claim for £229 which the Assembly fees office was totally willing to pay. Admittedly, the claim was for an iPod – which every Western Mail reader would know is usually bought to listen to pop music. Does the Mail indeed possess nowadays any readers who listen to anything but pop music ?

Why the Western Mail should be renamed Llais y Sais

Welsh Politics 5 Responses »

Nov 242008

Slowly, we are learning what has been happening to the Western Mail, the self-styled national newspaper of Wales.

Those who have been shown the door at the Cardiff morning have generally buttoned their lips – or been reluctant to say much.

But now one of the strongest voices from that paper has spoken out, and named names and detailed company policies.

John Humphries spills the beans in his Freedom Fighters – Wales’s Forgotten “War”, 1963-93, just published by the University of Wales Press. The war, of course, ranged from Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru’s attack on pipelines sending Welsh water to England so that the English could bath and wouldn’t get thirsty, to several hundred arsons against rural cottages owned by immigrant English.

But what is really fascinating are Mr Humphries’s extensive comments on policies within the Western Mail. If we ever thought of dubbing the WM Llais y Sais, we now possess the detailed evidence. Perhaps not the Voice of the English, but certainly the Voice of the British – and of course the two are widely regarded nowadays as synonymous. Continue reading »

Plunging through Rhodri’s dress dossier and political hyperbole in the Senedd

Welsh Conservatives, Welsh Politics 1 Response »

Oct 072008

When the Western Mail runs a story quoting a “senior Welsh Tory” questioning whether party centrist Nick Bourne should “stay on as leader”, one must wonder how close that individual is to the self-styled True Wales group led by a descendant of Owain Glyndwr.

The Mail reporter with a direct line to a link to that long-ago slaughterer of English colonists is Martin Shipton, the paper’s chief reporter. The man in question is no less than David Davies, MP and previous AM for Monmouth.

Reporters are always coy about naming people who have given them information which turns up in the paper without attribution. With exceptionally good reason.

The journalist’s job is to wheedle into the public domain accurate information about what is going on, in particular behind the scenes and in what were once smoke-filled rooms.

It should be no secret that Mr Shipton has long had links with the David Davies’s family of Newport, and has been more willing to run their right-wing diatribes against the Assembly than many other journalists.

In so doing, Mr Shipton provides a public service. The problem, though, is to judge the weight which the Davies-family comments carry within the party in general.

The answer is – not much. A small coterie exists of Newport-based right-wingers; but their weight outside that city seems to be very light.

When the Tories brought out their 39-page dossier Rhodri Morgan – Leadership without Purpose journalists immediately recognised its main author as being Richard Hazelwood, for South Wales Echo political correspondent – he quit the job to become Tory press officer in the Assembly just before his paper closed its office in the Assembly, just as the Western Mail closed its own office – and his press office.

Mr Hazelwood is a wizard at filing significant press releases, etc on his computer – as well, apparently, in paper, to prevent loss. The dossier’s 13,400 words were the sort of political criticism of a opposing leader which was to be expected.

His section on “Rhodri-isms” was lovely. “Denial is more than a river in Egypt,” Mr Morgan told Nick Bourne in accusing him of forgetting the history of the Tory Party in government.

And he said that Alun Cairns, in his review of the Welsh economy, “looks like a Victorian undertaker looking forward to winter”.

I have heard many others as good.

Mr Bourne ran into trouble over the 230 words about Rhodri as a “dedicated follower of fashion”. The First Minister sometimes turns up (although not in the Senedd) in casual sports sweater – but critics should take care. One of the Plaid ministers has turned up for party press conferences in attire just as casual.

This turned largely into a BBC story. Modryb from Llandaff seems intent on bringing down at least one minister – they already possess the scalp of Alun Cairns, the Tory shadow education spokesman, after getting him, in a light-hearted radio programme, to make just the sort of rapidly-delivered light-hearted remark which the programme exists for, about Italians (and which, according to the Western Mail at the time, most Welsh Italians just brushed aside). Continue reading »

All the news that’s fit to print – but not if it’s Welsh

Press and Media 2 Responses »

Sep 242008

The appearance of full-page government adverts last week in some of the largest newspapers circulating in Wales struck right to the kernel of the Welsh media problem.

The ad – which I saw in the Daily Mail - carried emblazoned across its centre the words “in England”.

Those two words – which would have seemed totally superfluous to most readers – had been inserted by the Department for Children, Schools and Families to avoid causing confusion over London’s new plans for upper-secondary school education.

While Wales has its own baccalaureate, England was launching a “new” range of diplomas, apprenticeships, GCSEs and A levels.

Had those words “in England”, not been prominently included, enormous confusion would have been caused to Welsh parents.

Expect to see lots more of this sort of advert. For the London press is being increasingly obviously seen as an English press.

The failure by London-based managements to take note of how increasingly useless their newspapers are to their readers in Wales is dramatically different to how those managements treat Scotland, Northern Ireland and Eire. Continue reading »

Eisteddfodic rubbish from Trinity Mirror

Press and Media, Welsh Politics 9 Responses »

Aug 012008

As years advance, much in the world of newspapers goes backwards … unless, it seems, you are in a certain part of Wales.

We all know that the Western Mail has dumbed down – in order to attract some of the millions of Welsh readers of the Mirror (that’s what Western Mail and Echo always said, but I fancy they meant The Sun, because that paper has far more readers in Wales).

And our evening papers are usually printed in far-away towns, meaning that they are now “morning” rather than “evening” papers.

But on attending the Royal Welsh Show last week, I was astonished to be accosted at the exit by an old-style newspaper-seller.

At about 3pm, the paper he was selling was that evening’s. And the leading articles on both the front page and on an inside page were about that day’s happenings at the Builth Wells show – written in a sensible fashion to appeal to intelligent people, rather than idiots.

Y Byd needs new and straight thinking

Press and Media, Welsh Politics 3 Responses »

Jul 252008

I can’t be sure whether the reawakened chorus of support for the launch of a Welsh-language daily is because of rock-bound support for the venture, or because of the sad Welsh (and British) belief that politics consists essentially of demolishing your opponents rather than forwarding policy improvements.

Eleanor Burnham was quick to the anvil in the wake of the appointment of Alun Ffred Jones as replacement culture minister. The failure to fund a Welsh-language daily would be the first thing in his in-box, said the Lib Dems’ language spokesman.

Older Entries Newer Entries

A case of newspaper inequality at expense of the Tories

Day 12: anti-Welsh campaign starts to smell

Two unionist blasts against Bourne … ?

Why the Western Mail should be renamed Llais y Sais

Plunging through Rhodri’s dress dossier and political hyperbole in the Senedd

All the news that’s fit to print – but not if it’s Welsh

Eisteddfodic rubbish from Trinity Mirror

Y Byd needs new and straight thinking

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