A nuclear explosion on Anglesey

 

Good news for Anglesey, as well as for its AM, in one of today’s papers.

 

We all know that the economic future of the island revolves around its large aluminium works near Holyhead – and that this in turn revolves around the nuclear power which provides the enormous amount of electricity that is required.

 

Currently, that power comes from nearby Wylfa, which is due to close around 2011.

 

The sentence in The Independent stated that Electricite de France, the state-owned power group, has bought plots of land next to the present reactors at Wylfa and Hinkley Point, Somerset.

 

EdF is the only remaining bidder for British Energy, the sole operator of the UK’s nuclear plants which London is currently selling off; the company has apparently bought the site just in case it lose the bidding for the entire company – it can hardly be called a war, as everyone else has pulled out – and wants to build its own.

 

Forget the industrial politics. This is just the sort of news which Anglesey needs.

 

It also lets Ieuan Wyn Jones off the political hook (or noose) which has been erected by left-wingers in his own party.  We all know IWJ is pro-nuclear – for the good of both the island and of his own political health.

 

Now that EdF have shown a big interest, it helps let Ieuan off the hook with his own party. If you want to take a Nationalist line, it could be said a French reactor would prove much healthier than an English one !

 

Caerffili makes its Plaid mark, and then spoils it

In all the comment about Plaid’s performance in the elections, Caerffili has been almost ignored.

Certainly, it’s significant that Plaid lost Gwynedd - but as the seats went to another lot of Nats, there’s not much difference politically.

Far more important is what happened in the Valleys. From the insignificant mention in Plaid’s main comment on their election performance, you might have thought a couple of extra seats had come their way.

In fact, Plaid is almost certain to take control. And that should have been obvious to Ty Gwynfor last Thursday at 10pm. The brighter parts of the party hierarchy knew that a coalition with the resident Independents had been in negotiation for months.

All it needed was for Ron Davies - father of the activist sort of devolution that sometimes seems to be disappearing - to win in Bedwas, Trethomas and Machen. He topped the poll there, closely followed by colleague Colin Hobbs.

So Plaid will retake control of the council which they turned into one of the best run in Wales- although to be fair to them, Labour didn’t really let things slip in their time in control.

All Plaid will have to start to remember is that the party locally remember that Plaid is NOT primarily a vote-getting machine, but that it possesses a principle or two. One of them is that Welsh is the ancestral language of Wales - and that poetry was being written in Welsh not much more than a century ago addressed at occasionally-monoglot locals : for instance, a doggerel dealing with Piccadilly. Not in London, but the current five-way road junction and pub just north of the town centre.

Sometimes one wonders whether Plaid in Gwynedd and Caerffili are the same people.

 

Cymraeg wins; English - 0

Wales is slowly a’changing as far as language is concerned.

Overwhelmingly English-speaking in the South-East for a century, it happened today for probably the first time that a premier public body in the capital city published an important document solely in Welsh.

The National Assembly’s Petitions Committee announced that its agenda for Thursday’s meeting was available only in Welsh, and that no translation into English was available.

This move - which will no doubt be rectified before the meeting commences in the Senedd - seems to parallel another not-insignificant advance on the language front.

Elin Jones, rural affairs minister, took last week to replying purely in Welsh to questions asked of her in plenary session in English.

Ms Jones replied in Welsh, of course, only to AMs whom she knew spoke fluent Welsh, both from her own party, Plaid, and from the Tories. All spoken words in Welsh are, of course, interpreted via headphones into English.

But Ms Jones’s move overturned the seeming Assembly agreement that had quietly assumed that English is the superior language down there - previously a formal question was only answered in Welsh if it had been asked in that tongue.

A small advance, but perhaps not insignificant.

Convention clatters towards a referendum

Wales started out today on the next stage towards an acceptable devolution settlement with a bid to recruit members of the Welsh “clattering” classes to become one of the 17 members of the All Wales Convention which is to chart the way forward.

Everyone knows that not many people will want to work for a year-or-so more or less full time listening to and assessing evidence from all and sundry in Wales so the convention can advise the Welsh government whether it should ask London to be allowed to call a referendum on the issue.

After that mouthful of a sentence, you can quite expect that only members of the “chattering classes” (ie. you and me) would want to take up unpaid seats to do almost the same work as the Richardson Commission completed in 2004.

But both First Minister Rhodri Morgan and Plaid deputy Ieuan Wyn Jones emphasised that they don’t want the commission filled with the “usual suspects”.

Mr Morgan said he would instead like to see appointed to the commission “members of the clattering classes” - the 8,000 Welsh people who went to Las Vegas to see Joe Calzaghe win.

It sounded lovely … until Mr Morgan suddenly saw it might not be a good idea to continue about these “clattering classes” !

The problem, of course, is finding a sportsman whose “clatter” can equal the “chatter” of Llandaff and Llanerchymedd (a suitably rural-sounding community in the far-Gog). But it is such folk who will have the last word - when the votes are cast in that referendum.

A blooming liberty with council cash

Tories used to be defenders of the public purse. But the Conservatives in the Assembly are now demanding that price should no longer be the final arbiter over which supplier should gain a contract.

Instead, Welshness should come first. Presumably at any cost … at least, some of the time.

This principle which will have quite a few Thatcherites turning in their graves - or taking it out on poor secretaries in their Commons offices - was propounded by Tory leader Nick Bourne and ably supported by Darren Millar (Clwyd West).

The issue is supply of daffodil bulbs. Mr Millar raised “a serious point about how local authorities procure goods and services”. Currently, many buy from England or the Continent

He called on Welsh councils instead “to promote Welsh produce wherever possible.”

It looks a bit like a joke. And Swansea council indeed treated it that way. Their daffs come from Cornwall, but they “naturalise” themselves the following year !

Mr Bourne tried to claim that Welsh daffs are always cheaper - what, even when you’ve lost the contract to a cheaper supplier ?

Mr Millar argued about “road miles”, and said councils should be set central targets for local procurement. It’s surely enough to have Home Counties Tory MPs dropping their G&Ts. Where does it stop ?

Perhaps Mr Bourne reasons it’s worth a few upset G&Ts if it improves his party’s Welsh credentials.

When the Press failed at the election

As expected, Labour’s local election collapse over much of Wales (eg, Flintshire, Wrexham, Carmarthen, Merthyr, Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen and Newport) was a five-second wonder in a couple of English morning papers, and all-but unmentioned in the rest.

“National” for our London newspapers presumably equals “English”.

But we’ve got problems in Wales, too. So little of depth (apart from the more-unavoidable sensations) is inclined to appear about Welsh politics in even our two mornings that it’s good to report that the long-established bi-monthly Planet is taking a bit more notice of Welsh politics - and managing to avoid using material which appears hoary with age.

But the thoughtful material in Planet, Cambria and the monthly Barn is no substitute for daily coverage, or for Y Byd.

How long ago was it that our dailies printed (in small type, admittedly) all the nominations, and then the result for every ward ?

All gone. To save money, presumably. But also because of orders from Trinity Mirror in London ?

Those ward results produced the detail to work out in detail which party was growing or declining. Now, we rely on minimal info from returning officers. Or for the “unbiased” information from party PROs.

It’s all on the web, you way. When I mentioned this facility to one of our top journalists while we were sitting on a bus from the Bay, he just looked me in the eye. The amount of drudge involved ensured that he was not going to use the web to prepare those tables of stats. And neither am I, for the same reason.

Perhaps it is no wonder that circulations are falling. Those sales figures were made up of large numbers of different groups of the “anoraks” who London nowadays seem to despise.

Honesty, Plaid and Y Byd

There’s something to be said for politicians being honest about the promises they will deliver when they get elected.

Plaid’s loss of control of Gwynedd County Council - over the closure of some of the primary schools with which the county is over-provisioned for the number of children born - may soon link up with another issue with which Plaid Cymru has historically been associated.

That is the Welsh language - and in particular the election promise which everyone understood would lead to the launch of a daily newspaper in that language. The issue of the schools and Y Byd (the putative name of the paper, which pushed the issue into the political limelight) are not really linked; but they are close enough to raise issues about the honesty of politicians.

We can leave the schools issue to Gwynedd’s newly-elected councillors and talks between Plaid (minus their group leader Richard Parry Hughes and councillor-cum-national president Dafydd Iwan) and Llais Gwynedd, odds-and-sods Independents, Labour and the Lib Labs. I am pretty sure the issue is not as clear cut as a quick glance at the election results would seem to indicate.

But the issue of Y Byd (shorthand for a daily paper, whoever starts it) is likely to run and run. Not in the public bar, perhaps, but in the more important bar of public opinion.

When I wrote in the last Cambria, I used the information to hand at the time. Some of that ‘gen was not quite correct. The small-sized extra grant for publications had been decided long enough ago for it to have been inserted in the budget - at £200,000-a-year, one third of that necessary.

On the face of it, Labour objectors were not to blame for the small figure. The not-insubstantial figure of Huw Lewis (Merthyr and Rhymney AM) would not have objected too much to even £1m (although he possessed doubts on other grounds).

Early in the autumn, senior Plaid figures discussed and agreed a civil service paper on the suitably-vague issue of Welsh-language publications mentioning the £200,000 figure.

I don’t know why the figure was so small (did Labour somehow force it that low ?). Neither why Plaid accepted the figure (were the individuals in that meeting unaware of how much was really needed ?).

Perhaps I will write more in the next Cambria.

My feeling that the issue will run comes from the editorial in the two-monthly magazine Planet. Some will say that Ned Thomas, the leader of the Byd, had too much influence in that leader (he was Planet’s founder).

But the editorial’s careful wording fits far too much with some ugly anti-comments on the Byd project by two party leaders at Plaid’s spring conference in Newport to be allowed to pass.

Planet talks of “enmities within parties”. The editor also ridicules Adam Price, MP, one of Plaid’s most sensible voices, for his over-espousal of the internet. Newspapers, some more than others (the Llandudno Daily Post is apparently doing pretty well) are suffering circulation-wise. Some web-nuts believe the last edition of a United States daily will on current trends be published in 2044 (unfortunately, I’m unlikely to be around to have the last laugh).

More important is whether politicians’ promises are to be believed. As I wrote last month, I don’t think this would have happened if Plaid had joined the rainbow coalition…

Rhodri tells why Labour lost

Rhodri Morgan wandered up in decidedly relaxed fashion to talk to the press in the wake of the “terrible” election results he had just witnessed.

His trousers seemed to have come straight from the gardening shed and his “Chile” jumper talked all about leisure and absolutely nothing about governance.

Relaxed he, indeed, was as he talked to us in front of Transport House in Cardiff. Perhaps that was because he had experienced worse - such as the year in the 60s, when Splott ward in Cardiff went Conservative. In those days, the city council was elected by “thirds” - one-third of the seats each year - which went far towards weakening that blow.

Speaking while still awaiting the blow of Caerffili, Mr Morgan spoke of the loss of “rock solid” seats around Wales. It was definitely not an attempt to seek a silver lining, but he correctly pointed out that over one wide area of Wales, no lasting political alternative was arising to Labour.

In that area - no doubt, that of greatest interest to his party - he drew consolation from the councillor-replacements hailing from a wide range of protest groups.

In the core area of the upper Valleys, Mr Morgan seemed mightily relieved that the winners were “not Lib Dem, not Plaid, not Tories”. Labour lost Merthyr, Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen to a broad range of Independents.

But it must be bad news for the First Minister that only at Torfaen could he quickly fix on a reason - the disputed closure of a swimming pool, which had led to a formal petition to the Assembly Petitions Committee.

Could the reason next door in Blaenau Gwent be the council’s cock-up which led to the reopening of the railway being delayed several months ?

Whatever - as Mr Morgan must be painfully aware - the local voters were delighted to take a kick at a Labour Party which has been in uninterrupted power almost since democratic councils were invented.

The Assembly leader saw the vote as an attack on incumbency. He already knew his own people were suffering, and he fancied (as was about to be proved) that the same would happen to Plaid in the only council they controlled - Gwynedd.

He also admitted that his party’s failure to listen to the electors - due to its arrogant belief that almost all electors were “workers” and thus best elected by a “labour” party, and that there was no need to listen outside party ward meetings - was a major cause for defeats.

The two councils where - at that time - Labour had held on or clawed back - Neath Port Talbot and Bridgend - were both credited to the local party actually listening, although in the latter case a new party leader had to be elected to replace the one who had caused so much unjustified trouble to then-minister Mike German.

Mr Morgan did his best to spoil the Tory celebrations. In Llandaff, Cardiff, rock-solid for the Conservatives for decades, the Lib Dems had swept in.

And in the rich rural acres of the Vale of Glamorgan, MP John Smith and AM Jane Hutt still had reasons to retain smiles on their faces. The council had gone Tory, but that was, said Mr Morgan, solely due to the vote in Penarth (which in part of Cardiff South constituency).

Mr Morgan had discovered a couple of pink spots on the map. But he must be thankful that he will shortly retire. It will then be up to somelike like Carwyn Jones to lead a much-smaller Welsh party, and settle down to being no more than a medium-weight partner in coalition.

Putting a cat among the tubercular pigeons

Elin Jones is swiftly getting a name as the coolest, most able and even quietly funniest Plaid minister in the Welsh government.

Updating the press on the bovine tuberculosis outbreak raging in much of rural Wales, she told of the 100 cattle recently culled from contact with the disease at the Gelli Aur farm college near Llandeilo, she suddenly added, “And a cat’s died, too, in the same outbreak.”

Not bad for a laugh. But it hid a serious corollary. If cats can be infected and die from bTB, so can humans, as she confirmed when asked.

Few people can now remember the massive TB sanatoria which dotted the countryside before the war; even fewer know the number of inmates who contracted TB from cattle (or more probably their milk).

To most town-folk, bTB is a problem for farmers, and badgers are loveable black-and-white creatures immortalised in children’s stories.

But Ms Jones is a dairying farmer’s daughter, thus producing the toughness in the Assembly’s plans which has put London to shame. And a toughness, too, in her response to criticisms.

Sir Jon Shortridge, Welsh government permanent secretary, had made clear to the press yesterday the care with which the multi-faceted policy had been adopted; the culling will be in only one area, which would be impervious to badgers; and it would be allied to universal cattle testing, plus animal welfare security.

The Badger Trust pressure group has already threatened (but has still to take) legal action for a judicial review. When presented with evidence that the far more powerful (indeed, Middle England en masse personified) National Trust criticised a cull and “would be unlikely to participate”, Ms Jones calmly replied, “They’ve already raised this in correspondence.”

Journalists were angling for a flap, over both this, and over who killed four Pembroke badgers (the Badger Trust immediately blamed “farmers”). How to deal with landowners who do not agree to a cull ? “There are a lot of legal opportunities available to us for disease control purposes for the removal of infected animals,” the minister said.

And the killer of those badgers ? Surely we’d hear a few anti-Badger Trust words ? No; to find the criminals is a job for the police, not a cabinet minister. So there !

Enjoy this video of badgers in Dinefwr Park, Llandeilo. They are TB free! (I hope).

So, who’s going to pick up Labour’s losses ?

Alison Halford always seemed a wee bit different from her colleagues when she sat as an AM in Cardiff. Her years as assistant chief constable for Merseyside gave her an outlook on her fellow man which was a trifle broader than most of us ever attained.

Although she sat for Labour, she was fiercely independent; independent enough, indeed, to eventually end up as a Tory.

Now she’s almost sure to come back into the news - although in a rather lower key than she attained in the capital. Ms Halford is standing for Flintshire county council, and she has a very good chance of winning in Ewloe. It’s not only that the Tories already hold one of the two seats in the ward. There’s also the fact that Ms Halford is very well known in the ward … she used to be its Labour councillor.

Of course, all parties are keen to talk - although without too much detail - of how they expect to make gains. Some parties are bouncier than others. Just about hitting the ceiling is Nick Bourne.

His party has put some Cabinet manpower into several local authorities. In the North, top target is listed as Conwy. But I feel they may be putting their hopes too high here - the rural/urban split in these northern areas can cause chaos with political party hopes. All credit to them, though, for having done such a solid job of demolishing what was once a Lib Dem stronghold.

Which leads me to wonder how well the Lib Dems are really doing. When asked whether Labour voters were switching straight to the Tories in the current local election campaign rather than stopping in so-far usual half-way house offered by the Liberal Democrats, Lib Dem leader Mike German did his best to answer another question in his briefing this week.

Mr German added, “We will gain seats around Wales; I will not predict how many or the outcome. Labour’s vote is very weak. They could lose a number of councils.”

He added, “Some Labour will not vote at all; others will vote for the party which locally is closest. There will therefore be a fairly mixed picture across Wales.” So, perhaps we can expect Lib Dem advances mainly restricted to the areas where the Tories are weak - chiefly, the Valleys and the cities.

Plaid are keeping mum. Minister Elin Jones was willing to circulate some top-party talk - Ceredigion could fall; Plaid’s opponents in Gwynedd “are not as strong as people are saying they are”, and Caerffili “looks interesting”.

Control of Caerffili would be a fantastic boost; the party has high hopes of regaining control, probably through an alliance with Independents. Plaid’s hopes are boosted by the weakness of both Tories and Lib Dems over most of the county borough.

Mind, many journalists would say it is dangerous to speculate on election results so close to a poll - it’s so easy to be proved wrong !