Archive for December 2019
Brexit – Radio Sputnik Interview
By MARCUS STEAD
ON CHRISTMAS EVE, I gave an interview with Radio Sputnik where I outlined how I expect the Brexit process to unfold in 2020.
The United Kingdom will leave the European Union on 31 January at 11pm, but that will be the start, rather than the end of a process.
It will be followed by many months of intense negotiations between Boris Johnson’s Government and EU officials as to what the future relationship between the UK and the EU will be. Those negotiations will realistically have to be largely concluded by the summer recess, with ratification in the autumn, and the deal being implemented by December. In the meantime, the UK will continue to follow EU laws and regulations. In other words, Brexit will be a ‘step by step’ process, and the benefits and trade opportunities will be felt gradually.
I also reflected on a difficult year for the Royal Family. It is my view that the institution is safe for as long as the Queen is on the throne, but that within a few years of her passing, calls for a republic are likely to become much louder.
You can listen to the interview in full below:
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 28: Review of 2019
By MARCUS STEAD
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
AS 2019 draws to a close, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins reflect on how the year will be remembered in the history books.
They also debate whether the Labour Party can recover from its current dire state, and assess whether the time has come for decent, patriotic Labour supporters to break away from the party and set up an alternative opposition movement.
The podcast is also available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 27: Brexit Is Happening!
By MARCUS STEAD
Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins reflect on a week that saw the EU Withdrawal Bill pass through the House of Commons with ease.
They discuss what’ll happen next, how the EU is likely to react, and the challenges Boris Johnson’s Government will face in handling the next phase of negotiations during the early months of 2020.
Marcus and Greg also discuss the serious problems facing the Labour Party, and a lack of a credible opposition in Britain at the moment.
The podcast is also available on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Coffee Break with Marcus and James: 2019 Christmas Special
By MARCUS STEAD
2019 Christmas Special
AFTER A GAP of more than two years (nearly three years, actually) the Coffee Break podcast returns in its new home on Talk Podcasts with Marcus Stead and new regular presenter James Easton.
Christmas isn’t far away and that’s the basis of our first podcast back. Topics covered include:
- Classic Christmas telly
- Advent calendars
- Crap Christmas decorations
- Retro toys
- Christmas dinners for pescatarians, vegans and vegetarians
- Hovercrafts (erm, very festive, we know…)
So pour yourself a cuppa, sit back and relax. Oh and don’t forget to send us your feedback!
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 26: The Boris Breakthrough
By MARCUS STEAD
The election is over, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has won with a majority of 80, exactly as Marcus Stead has been predicting on Twenty Minute Topic for many weeks!
In this week’s podcast, Marcus and Greg Lance-Watkins assess how quickly Brexit can now be implemented, now that the United Kingdom has a stable Government with a large majority.
They also discuss what went wrong for Labour, and conclude that the party’s sneering contempt for its heartlands is what led to the catastrophic defeat. Labour has spent the last few years telling them they were wrong about Brexit and didn’t know what they were doing when they voted Leave. They have patronised their voters, ignored their concerns and obsessed about niche ‘woke’ issues that only really resonate with the London bubble and middle class students.
The election result is a clear rejection of Jeremy Corbyn’s Marxist or close-to-Marxist agenda, and a rejection of the stench of toxic anti-Semitism that surrounds the Labour Party.
They discuss the extraordinary arrogance of Corbyn-supporting media pundits, who as the results came in decided NOT to reflect on where Labour went wrong, but chose to attack Labour heartland voters and give them a telling off for daring to vote for another party!
Is the Labour Party beyond saving? Is it now a party made up of hardline Marxists, and middle class students and academics, totally out of touch with working people? Does the country have a credible opposition that looks like a government in waiting? If not, where do we go from here, in the interests of democracy?
Have Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party done damage in this election by denying the Conservatives seats in constituencies where they split the anti-EU vote? The presence of a Brexit Party candidate also almost certainly cost honourable Labour MP Caroline Flint her seat.
And what about social media’s role in this election? It’s now beyond doubt that the Twitter mobs and the echo chambers bear absolutely no resemblance to how most people think and behave.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, as well as on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts and the TuneIn app.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 25: Decision Time
By MARCUS STEAD
Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn
With less than a week to go until polling day, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins take stock of the situation.
The polls consistently show a consistent and substantial lead for the Conservative Party, but Marcus and Greg interpret the data in slightly different ways, and have reached different conclusions as to how the votes will translate into seats.
Is it the case that people are massively unimpressed with the entire election campaign, and that faced with the inevitability that either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn will be Prime Minister, people will vote for the ‘least worst’ option?
What should habitual Labour voters who feel uncomfortable with the direction in which Jeremy Corbyn has taken the party do on Thursday, especially those who can’t bring themselves to vote Conservative?
Marcus and Greg reflect on the appalling slurs from the once-respectable Channel 4 News during the election campaign, and the decline in trust in other media outlets, including the BBC.
They also discuss the gradual decline of proper investigative journalism in both the print and broadcast media over the course of the last 25 years.
The podcast is also available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts and the TuneIn app.
Devolution in Wales: Twenty years of failure
By MARCUS STEAD
WALES is the country whose devolution settlement is talked about the least, for reasons that are understandable with all that’s happening in Scotland and Northern Ireland. But there are big problems emerging, and the case needs to be made loudly for the abolition of a failed institution the people of Wales never really wanted.
From the outset, Wales was never very enthusiastic about devolution. Fewer than one in four of the Welsh electorate voted for the creation of the Assembly in 1997. Fewer than one in five voted to increase its power in the referendum of 2011.
Social media is hardly an accurate snapshot of society, but it’s telling that First Minister Mark Drakeford has just over 62,000 followers across his two Twitter accounts, compared to Nicola Sturgeon’s more than one million.
As recently as 2014, data collected by BBC Wales showed that just 48% of respondents knew that the Welsh Government is responsible for the NHS in Wales. A similar number, 42%, wrongly thought policing is a devolved area.
In the 20 years since the Assembly first came into being, turnout at elections has been as low as 38% and has never exceeded 48%.
The very principle of devolution has created a constant tension between the governments at opposite ends of the M4. During the years when Carwyn Jones was First Minister and David Cameron was Prime Minister, a culture of ‘blame Westminster’ was coined every time shortcomings in the Welsh NHS or education system were exposed. Successive Welsh Government ministers have blamed the ‘Barnett Formula’ for supposed under-funding in Wales.
Yet the reality is that in July, figures released by the Office for National Statistics showed public spending in Wales was £13.7 billion more than the total amount collected in taxes, which works out at a deficit of £4,376 per person.
In other words, the English taxpayer is being compelled to subsidise the Welsh standard of living, but has no say in who makes the decisions on devolved areas of governance. This is taxation without representation, or an instruction to the English taxpayer to give Wales your money but mind your own business when it comes to policy formation.
The culture of the Assembly has been that of a ‘groupthink’ cartel in Cardiff with limited competition between Labour, Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats. Former Labour Welsh Office Minister Jon Owen Jones referred to a ‘great deal of cohesion around consensual views’. This infects not only the Assembly, but also the civil service and prominent lobbying bodies.
The cartel has manipulated public appointments. Between 1999 and 2015, 195 Welsh appointees had direct links to Labour (nine times the Conservative total) and 45 had direct links to Plaid Cymru.
Devolution was supposed to bring to an end the ‘quango culture’ in Wales, but, in the words of Cardiff University professor Kevin Morgan, Wales now has a ‘cowed culture’ of public bodies who are reluctant to speak out against the political status quo because they are dependent on funding.
There is no Welsh register of lobbyists, but the Cardiff Bay bubble is full of people who were once Assembly Members or worked for them.
One outfit alone boasts of four former Labour Special Advisers, along with a former Plaid Cymru Assembly Member and the party’s former chief executive.
The Welsh Labour group in the Assembly fares no better. Of their 29 Assembly Members, 24% used to work on the party payroll as advisers or staffers, 21% worked for third sector organisations, 21% worked in the media and 14% worked for trade unions or a union-affiliated law firm. Even Mark Drakeford himself was a predecessor First Minister’s special adviser.
A decade ago, the political editor of BBC Wales was Rhun ap Iorweth and his ITV Wales counterpart was Lee Waters. They are now Assembly members for Plaid Cymru and Labour respectively. During the intervening period Waters was vice chair of the ‘Yes’ campaign in the 2011 referendum on increasing the Assembly’s powers.
Many job advertisements among the Assembly apparatus state that the ability to speak Welsh is either a requirement or an ‘advantage’, despite the fact that the 2011 Census showed more than 80% of the people of Wales spoke little or no Welsh. Of the areas within reasonable commuting distance of the Assembly, 89% of the population of Cardiff and Swansea classed themselves as unable to speak Welsh, while in Newport the figure was 90%.
Not only do Welsh language requirements drastically reduce the potential talent pool of Assembly staffers in a country of just three million people, it by definition attracts a certain type of person, one who is highly unlikely to say that Welsh language provision has already gone far enough, or that the Welsh Government’s target of one million Welsh speakers by 2050 is absurd.
For example, since 2016, there has been a policy of ‘Welsh first’ road signs being gradually rolled out across Wales, regardless of the fact that in most parts of the country, only a small minority of the population speak Welsh.
There was virtually no public consultation or debate about this. It did not appear in Labour’s manifesto at the last Assembly elections. It was just decided by the cosy cartel, and as a result, citizens and visitors alike face a potentially dangerous and confusing distraction while travelling at high speed on Welsh roads.
There are enormous perks to being part of the Assembly gravy train, keeping your mouth shut and not rocking the boat too much. Welsh Government SPADS can earn over £50,000 a year working in a culture Steve Jones, ex-adviser to Carwyn Jones, described as ‘toxic’ and ‘pure poison’.
Between 2017 and 2018, Welsh Government credit cards were used to spend more than £1.5 million on frivolities, including £203,645 on flights and £110,890 on luxury accommodation.
A favourite tactic of the Welsh political establishment is to muddy the waters, to make comparisons between other parts of the UK more difficult.
For example, the proportion of children in England and Wales achieving five or more GCSEs at A*-C was very similar between 1995 and 2002. By 2011/12, 82% of children in England achieved this threshold compared with just 73% in Wales. The Welsh Government chose not to mirror Michael Gove’s reforms in England, and within a few years created a completely different grading system, so making comparisons has become much more difficult.
In September 2018, Wales’s Education Minister Kirsty Williams (the Assembly’s sole Liberal Democrat) decided that a taxpayer-funded trip to Los Angeles and New York at a cost of £32,123.12 would help matters. A further trip to Texas, Alabama and Georgia followed in September 2019.
The very principle of devolution inevitably sets one part of the UK against another. For example, thanks to the Welsh Government, people requiring residential care will stop paying care home fees when their assets have been whittled down to £50,000, more than double the figure in England. Now Plaid Cymru wants to abolish care home fees entirely.
It all sounds very noble, until we consider that this policy will encourage English retirees to move to Wales. At the same time, bright graduates are leaving Wales due to Welsh speakers being given preferential treatment in so many public sector jobs, along with the lack of a skilled private sector (just one of the FTSE top 100 companies is based in Wales).
Post-Brexit, the United Kingdom will need to take an urgent look at its constitutional arrangements, from the botched Blairite House of Lords reforms to the restoration of the devolved institutions in Stormont.
Wales needs to be honest with itself. Twenty years of devolution has led to the worst public services in Britain, and an unhealthy culture of groupthink has emerged around the Assembly, the civil service and lobbying institutions.
The people of Wales have always been lukewarm about the Assembly. They now deserve the opportunity to vote for its abolition.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 24: London Bridge terror attack – How should we respond?
By MARCUS STEAD
Episode 24: London Bridge terror attack – How should we respond?
On Friday, Usman Khan, an already-convicted terrorist out on licence, killed two innocent people on London Bridge.
In this week’s podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins pay tribute to the extraordinarily brave people who helped disarm the terrorist, and discuss what steps can be taken to prevent similar attacks in the future.
Marcus and Greg also assess what effect the terror attack has had on the election, which is now less than two weeks away.
The podcast is available via the Talk Podcasts website, as well as on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts and the TuneIn app.
Marcus Stead 
How Wales punished Labour’s betrayal
with one comment
By MARCUS STEAD
THE PEOPLE of Wales have finally said ‘enough is enough’. For years, the Labour Party, in both London and Cardiff Bay, has treated its heartland voters with contempt, dismissing them as stupid, racist and xenophobic.
Wales’s First Minister, the ultra-Corbynista Mark Drakeford, even said that the next national Labour leader should ‘keep the same basic message’. He just doesn’t get it.
The disconnect between the Labour Party membership and its heartland voters is now blatantly obvious. The membership base, changed beyond all recognition by the entryism of the last four years, now consists of middle class students, their lecturers, and white collar public sector workers, preoccupied with the dogma of the woke agenda, a mythical ‘Climate Emergency’ and stopping Brexit at all costs. This puts them at odds with the party’s traditional heartlands, who have routinely backed the party for a century.
In 2017, the Welsh electorate gave Jeremy Corbyn the benefit of the doubt. They took him at his word when he said that he respected the result of the previous year’s referendum and was committed to implementing Brexit. This, combined with Theresa May’s lacklustre campaign, saw Labour gain three seats, taking their total to 28 out of 40 in the Principality. What followed in the next two-and-a-half years was a complete betrayal of the trust the Welsh electorate gave to the Corbyn project.
In December 2018, Drakeford became Wales’s First Minister. Drakeford, a dry, academic man approaching retirement age, who spent his entire career before entering politics working in the public and charity sectors, hardly seemed in touch with the post-industrial Labour heartlands of the south Wales valleys or the weathered seaside towns of the north Wales coast.
Drakeford didn’t grow into the job, nor does he behave like a leader. He still seldom does up the top button on his shirt, nor is his tie straight. Many people in Wales have no idea who he is – his personal Twitter account has just 14,000 followers, while the official ‘First Minister’ account has fewer than 49,000. By contrast, his Scottish counterpart Nicola Sturgeon has more than one million.
A year of Drakeford’s insipid leadership in policy areas that are devolved gave the people of Wales a taster of what a Jeremy Corbyn government would be like. Under Drakeford’s socialist Government, Wales has the worst school attainment levels and A&E waiting times in Britain. Betsi Cadwaladr health board has been in special measures for more than four years, with little sign of that status being removed any time soon.
The original Severn Bridge
But perhaps Drakeford’s flagship cockup of the last 12 months was his decision in June to break a key Welsh Labour manifesto pledge by scrapping plans to build a much-needed M4 relief road in the Newport area, after more than a decade of planning, during which time £114 million had been wasted.
Drakeford, keen to boost his woke credentials, said it was Wales’s way of doing its bit to tackle the ‘Climate Emergency’. The decision came just six months after the UK Government’s Secretary of State for Wales, Alun Cairns, removed tolls on both Severn bridges, designed to improve economic links between South Wales and the West of England.
As a result of Drakeford’s decision, a Cardiffian employed in Bristol, or vice versa, now faces no end to the tedious daily dawdles in traffic around the Brynglas Tunnels, which are enough to deter many people taking jobs on the opposite side of the bridge, thereby massively diluting the economic benefits of removing the tolls.
The irritation and anger that followed this decision was huge. £114 million had been squandered. The ‘Climate Emergency’ is only a theory, and a very wobbly theory at that, but even if it was indisputably true, any benefits of not building the relief road will rapidly be offset by China, whose coal use since 2011 has been greater than the rest of the world combined. Drakeford’s decision was a pointless act of virtue signalling that will have serious implications for the Welsh economy.
First Minister Mark Drakeford and Hannah Blethyn AM at the Cardiff ‘Pride’ march in August 2019
Drakeford’s pandering to the woke agenda goes much further. At last summer’s ‘Pride Cymru’ carnival in the centre of Cardiff, Drakeford marched in the front row, wearing a rainbow tie and waving a rainbow flag, before delivering a speech to the crowd.
Drakeford’s wokeness played well to the Cardiff hipster community, no more than a few thousand in number, but it did nothing to endear him to the Labour heartlands ten miles up the A470. It’s not that the people of the valleys are rabidly anti-gay or anti-trans, but the country’s First Minister seldom showed as much enthusiasm for their concerns, such as delivering the Brexit they voted for, or for meaningful measures to bring good, well-paid, stable jobs to areas that decades ago lost their main source of employment.
It was Labour’s policy on Brexit that was regarded as the biggest betrayal in the Welsh heartlands. They voted Leave in 2016, and they meant Leave. They believed Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 when he said he was committed to implementing the referendum result.
But in the two years since, Corbyn and Drakeford changed the party’s policy in both London and Cardiff Bay from one of implementing Brexit, to the farcical position of renegotiating a deal that would look like Brexit in name only, after which they would hold a second referendum in which both Corbyn and Drakeford would be neutral, with only Labour’s deal or remaining in the EU on the ballot paper.
Welsh Labour voters saw this policy for the fob-off it was. So what of the natural alternatives of the left and centre left? Few in Wales were taken in by Jo Swinson’s metropolitan elitism and policy of ‘let’s cancel Brexit because I know what’s best for plebs like you.’ The party held four seats in Wales until 2010, but since 2017 they’ve had none. Their sole Assembly Member, Kirsty Williams, is the country’s education minister, who has overseen the worst attainment levels in Britain.
And what of Plaid Cymru, who ditched Leanne Wood as leader and replaced her with Adam Price following disappointing election results in 2017?
Plaid Cymru has long been perceived as a party for rural Welsh speakers living in west and north west Wales. Outside these areas, there is little appetite for siphoning Wales off from the rest of the UK. What’s more, the party is firmly pro-EU, even entering into an electoral pact in selected seats with the Lib Dems and Greens.
The pundits heaped much praise on Price’s performances in the TV debates, but the party’s vote share dropped for the third general election in a row, and they failed to build on the four seats they’ve held since 2017. Plaid failed to finish second in any of the other seats it contested.
And what about the young ‘activists’ who have come onto electoral roll in the years since, and make a lot of noise on social media?
The reality is that under the leadership of Wood and Price, Plaid Cymru has become increasingly cult-like and obsessed with woke issues.
It’s now those forces that are firmly in control of the party, which only has around 10,000 members. It’s even threatening their support base in the four seats they hold, where people usually have the sort of socially conservative attitudes that are despised by those now in charge of Plaid.
The party has an electronic army on social media of fascist-hunters, climate change crusaders, EU fanatics and trans lobbyists who hurl vile abuse at anyone who dares to question their agenda. They exist within their own echo chamber, but it looks very ugly from the outside, and it’s easy to see why the party has been unable to expand its appeal.
So where did that leave the voters of Wrexham, Ynys Mon and Bridgend? Labour had betrayed them, and neither the Lib Dems nor Plaid Cymru had any intention of honouring their decision to vote for Brexit in 2016.
In many respects, the Conservatives were the ‘least worst’ option. Many Welsh voters put a cross next to the Conservative candidate knowing their grandfathers would be turning in their graves. Many don’t exactly ‘trust’ Boris Johnson, but they were willing to give him a chance. He was promising to honour the result of the referendum by delivering Brexit within a matter of weeks of the election, and offered them an optimistic vision of how he wants to reshape Britain. For that, the voters broke the habit of a century and backed him.
The voters in these parts of Wales know that Boris Johnson is not ‘one of them’ – he doesn’t look or sound like them, but he does appear to respect them.
The election in Wales could have been far worse for the Labour Party. They still hold 22 of the 40 seats. In truth, the presence of the Brexit Party almost certainly cost the Conservatives at least an extra four seats in Wales, possibly more.
Wales has given Boris Johnson a chance. With Labour and Plaid Cymru in disarray and unlikely to get their act together any time soon, the onus is on him to honour his pledges. Get this right, and the Conservatives could end up the largest party in the Assembly elections of May 2021 (by which time it will have been renamed the Welsh Parliament).
By the time of the next general election, highly likely to be at least four years away, the Brexit issue and the Brexit Party will be a distant memory, and as a result the Conservatives will have the opportunity to win yet more seats in Wales if the people can see tangible improvements to their lives.
If the Conservatives seize this opportunity, the general election of 2019 could go down in history as merely the opening chapter of a political revolution in Wales.
Written by Marcus Stead
December 21, 2019 at 4:14 am
Posted in Comment, Opinion, Politics, Review