NEW PODCAST: Twenty Minute Topic Episode 69: The Royal Family In Crisis

By MARCUS STEAD

The Princess of Wales has revealed in a video message that in January, she underwent major abdominal surgery. While the surgery was successful, tests after the operation showed that cancer had been present, and she is now undergoing a course of preventative chemotherapy.

Kate’s announcement is yet another setback for the Royal Family, following the news last month that the King has a form of cancer, and the Duchess of York has revealed that she, too, is suffering from a form of skin cancer.

We send our best wishes to all three and will be remembering them in our prayers.

In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins discuss whether the recent difficulties could have been handled better by the Royal Family’s public relations team, and whether the clumsiness of it all played straight into the hands of vile trolls who have been spreading cruel and malicious rumours about the Princess of Wales.

The Mother’s Day photo that was pulled appears to be a collage of other photos blended together. The image of Catherine looks like one that appeared on the front of Vogue magazine some time ago.

The grainy video of Kate ‘out shopping’ with William that The Sun ran as an exclusive in the days before her announcement is certainly very odd. The woman in it looks to be no older than her late teens or early 20s, and her facial features are different to Kate’s. We also do not see a clear image of William to identify it as him.

An image from the video – the woman is no older than her early 20s, and it is far from clear that the man is Prince William

Good public relations is about clarity and controlling the story, and Kensington Palace have failed in those objectives.

The discussion moves on to wider themes – where is the line to be drawn between the public having ‘the right to know’ and respect for the privacy of the Royal Family? What can be done about online trolls, who can spread appalling rumours without consequence?

Prince Harry and Meghan have burnt their bridges with the Royal Family – if they had handled things differently in recent years, they could have held the fort while other senior members of the family receive treatment and recuperate in the months ahead. Their narcissistic behaviour means that is not possible.

The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify and the iTunes app.

Mark Drakeford’s most dangerous legacy

By MARCUS STEAD

Mark Drakeford’s tenure as First Minister of Wales is over, and there is little to celebrate from his five-year tenure.

The Welsh NHS, which lurched from crisis to crisis during his three years as Minister for Health between 2013-2016, continues to go from bad to worse, with appalling A&E waiting times, dangerously long waiting lists for important operations and extreme difficulty in getting GP appointments.

Welsh educational attainment goes from bad to worse as the country continues to slip down the internationally-recognised PISA rankings.

Drakeford’s handling of the pandemic saw countless businesses needlessly ruined, families kept apart for long periods without good reason and absurd policies of being different from England for its own sake. The devastating impact of Drakeford’s Covid policies on children’s education, mental health, small businesses and the way so many once-active older people have become more reclusive and withdrawn has still not yet been properly understood.

Like a very large number of Labour politicians, Drakeford has never worked in the private sector. Prior to becoming a member of what was then the Welsh Assembly in 2011, Drakeford worked as a teacher, a social worker, a probation officer, a youth justice worker, a university lecturer and the Welsh Government’s special adviser on health and social policy.

This sort of career path is very common among Labour elected representatives in both Cardiff Bay and Westminster. There are lots of former trade union workers, charity workers, third sector workers, ex-teachers, ex-social workers, ex-university lecturers, ex-civil servants, ex-special advisers and so on.

What there is little of is people who have spent at least part of their careers in the private sector. Indeed, there is not much evidence that Drakeford has ever really even encountered the private sector. People without private sector experience often have little comprehension of how wealth is created. They often have very little interest in the private sector, and are sometimes downright suspicious of it.

With the successes of the Welsh Development Agency attracting inward investment in the 1980s and 90s now a distant memory, the skilled private sector in Wales is grossly under-developed, and Drakeford showed little interest in rectifying the situation. It may well be that he rather likes the reality that vast swathes of the Welsh population are either directly or indirectly dependent on the Welsh Government for their salary, and are therefore more likely to vote Labour.

All of Mark Drakeford’s legacy is bad, but an especially, indeed highly disturbing aspect is the way in which Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) is now compulsory in primary schools for children aged SEVEN and above. Parents do not have the right to remove their children from these classes. What is especially disturbing is the possible influence campaign group Stonewall has had on forming Welsh Government policy.

Parents no longer have the right to inform their children about the birds and the bees at an age they consider to be appropriate, using language they consider to be appropriate, that align with their religious and moral values. This is a dangerous invasion of parental rights by a far-left government.

In 2015, Stonewall went from being an LGB organisation to one that endorsed LGBTQ+. Many gay and lesbian people have distanced themselves from the organisation in the years since.

Stonewall is a firm defender of the belief that people should be able to self-identify with the gender they choose, but has also been accused of attempting to stifle free speech on the issue and push companies to adopt policies that some argue could be harmful to women.

A number of high-profile employers, which had been part of its Diversity Champions programme to promote inclusivity in the workplace, have ended their partnerships with the charity. Among them are Channel 4, Ofsted, the Cabinet Office, and the UK’s equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the latter two of which said the scheme no longer provided good value for money.

Broadcaster Simon Fanshawe was one of the co-founders of the British version of Stonewall in May 1989, but he has now cut all links with the organisation due to the direction in which it has gone during recent years.

In Mr Fanshawe’s own words: “Far from championing a ‘diversity’ of opinions and beliefs, subscription to Stonewall’s scheme encourages a strict adoption of a narrow political ideology.

“Companies, for instance, have been urged to replace references to ‘women’ or ‘mothers’ in internal documentation in favour of terms such as ‘parent who has given birth’, or to ask that employees state their ‘preferred pronouns’ in emails.

“Stonewall also scores firms based on an ‘Equality Index’ marking firms down for a failure to parrot the charity’s narrow views on ‘gender identity’ and trans issues.

“While Stonewall started out as a well-meaning organisation that championed gay rights, it has, in recent years, morphed into a propaganda machine that preaches extreme and divisive gender ideology under the guise of ‘factual’ information. It is dogma that is far from universally accepted seeing your sex at birth not as an immutable fact but as open to personal choice.

“And it is one that is fast eroding women’s rights and their protection in female-only spaces, as well as posing a potential risk to children, who might be led to believe that irreversible medical intervention is the solution to common adolescent insecurities about identity.

“Of course, gender dysphoria (when somebody feels at odds with their biological sex) is a genuine and profound psychological issue for some people. But Stonewall’s obsession with reframing the entire narrative around gender to placate a very small minority of individuals is dangerously disproportionate.

“And the problem is, Stonewall’s influence is not insignificant. From government departments to media organisations, schools and the NHS, the charity’s reach has grown rapidly in recent years, offering highly contested ‘advice’ to public bodies with almost unquestioned authority.

“Stonewall has published a wide-ranging reading list aimed at ‘schools, colleges, parents and carers’, including books on ‘trans inclusion’ for children as young as two, with titles such as Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl?”

The Welsh Government handed Stonewall £552,326 of taxpayers’ money between 2015-19, long after it repositioned itself as an LGBTQ+ organisation. It gets worse. Accounts show Stonewall received £100,000 from the Welsh Government in grants during the year ending March 31, 2023. Stonewall also received £89,700 from the Arts Council of Wales and £52,971 from the Welsh Council for Voluntary Action.

More than 300 schools have been told to stop calling pupils ‘boys and girls’ after signing up to Stonewall’s School & College Champions programme. Schools receive awards if they ‘remove any unnecessarily gendered language’. This is the reality of where we’re at in 2024.

How is this relevant to Drakeford’s compulsory RSE policy, implemented by Jeremy Miles, the Education Minister?

‘Woke’ Mark Drakeford with his rainbow-coloured tie and ‘Never kissed a Tory’ badge

Take a look at the 14-page Welsh Government document for teachers titled ‘The Curriculum for Wales – Relationships and Sexuality Education Code’. This is where the clues are as to where Stonewall just might be influencing Welsh Government policy, and the rather, how shall I put this…’non-traditional’ mindset of Drakeford and Miles.

It mentions ‘sexuality’ and ‘diversity’ 11 times each, along with five references to ‘LGBTQ+’ and the word ‘sexual’ appears 22 times. The words ‘love’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ do not appear AT ALL, while the word ‘marriage’ appears only ONCE.

Close reading of the document reveals that from the age of just SEVEN, children will be taught:

One has to wonder why Drakeford and Miles are so keen on brainwashing young, innocent children. Parental values, family values and religious values have been superseded by the values of a far-left government.

There have always been ‘tomboy’ girls who prefer climbing trees and playing football to dolls and make-up. There have always been boys with effeminate personalities who pursue interests such as ballet dancing rather than rugby.

Very often, there is nothing more to it than that. As they get older, they may conclude they are homosexual, as is their right.

But exposing children to dangerous, sexualised messages in recent years has led to many with such traits to conclude, wrongly, that they have gender dysmorphia, and have been given drugs to block puberty, which has led to devastating consequences. Last summer, we learned that 1,000 families were suing the Tavistock Gender Service after wrongly being given such drugs, and as a result the law firm representing them said they were facing a “physical and psychological permanent scarring that will last the rest of these victims’ lifetimes.”

Earlier this month, the UK Government announced that children in England would be banned from receiving puberty-blocking drugs on the NHS with immediate effect. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss called on the ban to be extended to private practises. Soon afterwards, the Northern Ireland Government said it would be extending the ban to its area. But from the Welsh Government? Nothing.

In this day and age, most reasonable people have sympathy with the tiny number of the population who were ‘born into the wrong body’, and will support them if they choose to have surgery AS ADULTS to correct this. The late writer Jan Morris is an example of a person who underwent such a medical procedure, yet she is known and remembered for her impressive work and her engaging personality, NOT her ‘gender identity’.

Beyond the oddballs and weirdos that have huge influence over the Labour Party, most regular, everyday people believe that there are TWO genders, a woman cannot have a penis, and that the definition of a woman is an ADULT FEMALE.

Most people, including many everyday people who happen to be homosexual, also believe that, under normal circumstances, it is the job of the parents, not the state, to educate children in their own way, and in their own time, about relationships and sex. And in most cases, they will wish to do so when their children are considerably older than seven.

People can draw their own conclusions as to why Drakeford and Miles are so keen to talk about sex to other people’s children. But parents deserve to know what values and standards are being imposed on their children by the Welsh Government and its hangers on.

I urge all parents to take half-an-hour to carefully read ‘The Curriculum for Wales – Relationships and Sexuality Education Code’, and to then react as they see fit.