Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 68: How’s Brexit Going?
By MARCUS STEAD
IT HAS NOW been more than three years since the United Kingdom formally left the European Union. Since then, the UK, and the world, has gone through a pandemic that has caused enormous economic and political upheaval.
In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins take stock of the situation.
What have been the advantages of Brexit so far? Being outside the EU’s procurement programme led to a far swifter rollout of the vaccine, which inevitably saved many lives and allowed society to return to a larger degree of normality far more quickly than it otherwise would.
Beyond that, why is our political establishment being so slow to take advantage of the freedoms and flexibility Brexit allows? Who are Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt actually working for?
It appears as though the price to be paid for a broadly-favourable Brexit deal was throwing Northern Ireland under a bus. Can the Northern Ireland Protocol be made to work?
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the iTunes app.
The column: It’s time for a grown-up national debate on the future of the NHS
By MARCUS STEAD
WE NEED TO have a grown-up conversation about the future of healthcare in this country. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that the current system isn’t working.
Months after almost all Covid restrictions were eased, GP surgeries are still doing all they can to stop patients from having a face-to-face appointment.
Back in June, I had a medical problem that could have been resolved in ten minutes with a face-to-face GP appointment. I was told that a phone appointment was all that I could get.
I explained the problem as best I could, and was instructed by the GP to attend my local accident and emergency facility.
I knew this was a gross overreaction, but irritated though I was, I went along with it. I spent sixteen-and-a-half hours in a stuffy waiting room with uncomfortable metal seats, a broken coffee machine, and surrounded by people who were in various states of distress, including some with high anxiety and two patients who had suffered suspected strokes.
Outside, the ambulances queued up, with patients being kept waiting for up to several hours before being admitted. I knew I shouldn’t have been there. The triage nurse knew I shouldn’t have been there. When I was eventually seen, the problem was indeed something that a GP could have diagnosed within minutes, and sent me on my way with a prescription.
A record 6.73 million people are on NHS waiting lists at present. Not being able to get a GP appointment is dangerous. They notice lumps, bumps and moles that could be cancerous. They can put their hands on your neck and feel your glands.
As a child, I had serious ear problems that required surgery. The problem wouldn’t have been spotted if the GP hadn’t looked inside my ear, noticed something was very wrong and referred me to a specialist. That’s not something you can do over the phone.
We cannot go on living like this. The NHS was created as a consequence of the Beveridge Report (not as a result of Aneurin Bevan, as is often stated) in 1948 on three core assumptions, which sounded reasonable at the time but turned out to be completely incorrect.
The first was that as people got healthier, demand would decrease. The reality has been that people are living longer, healthier lives thanks to drugs and expensive treatments, which substantially increases demand on the NHS.
The second assumption is that demographics would remain roughly the same. In reality, life expectancy in 1945 was 64, by the early 1970s it had reached 72, by the turn of the millennium it was 77, and by 2020 it had reached 81.
At 38, I’ve noticed a big change in my own lifetime. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, the people I knew who were then in their 70s had a much more ‘elderly’ demeanour than those in their 70s today, who very often don’t really have much wrong with them at all and continue to lead sprightly, independent lives.
I get irritated by those who romanticise coal mines and heavy industry. The truth is that for all the camaraderie and community, they brought with them a shortened life expectancy due to the dirty and dangerous working conditions. We should be glad people no longer earn their living in this way.
Levels of smoking have also declined. In 1962, more than 70% of men and 40% of British women smoked. By 1980, only 40% of adults smoked, this figure fell to 30% in 1990, 20% in 2010 and 15% today.
The cost of tobacco products and the ban on smoking in public places means that even those that continue to smoke do so far less than they would’ve done in the past. You don’t see many 60-a-day types around nowadays.
Yes, there are problems with obesity and people relying too much on junk food, but overall, diets are far better than they were in the 1940s.
We are living longer, healthier lives in the past. That is something to celebrate. But it comes at enormous cost to the NHS.
The third assumption was that the NHS could be funded entirely by ‘the stamp’, or what we now call ‘National Insurance’. That ended many years ago, and the NHS is now funded by general taxation.
The NHS is not a god to be worshipped. It is a service that we all pay very heavily into, and we are entitled to expect certain standards in return.
There are numerous ways in which NHS money doesn’t reach the front line. Gordon Brown’s Private Finance Initiatives, which saw gleaming new hospitals replace Victorian ones up and down the country during the New Labour years are still being paid for, and will be for many years to come.
The Thatcher government’s foolish moves to more-or-less abolish legal aid have led to the rise of ambulance-chasing ‘no win, no fee’ law firms, which are a considerable burden to the NHS.
The 2007 BBC series in which the late businessman Sir Gerry Robinson tried to bring good business practices into Rotherham General Hospital demonstrated how the management structure is overcomplicated and that measures can be put in place to ensure far less bureaucracy and waste. The basic messages was that you can’t solve these problems simply by throwing money at them.
People in both the Conservative and Labour parties will privately admit that the current NHS system is unsustainable, but that it’s too much of a political hot potato to say so. They just hope that the other party is in power when it finally collapses.
Well, we’re pretty close to that moment right now. Is the Welsh NHS, controlled by the Labour-led Welsh Government in worse shape than the English NHS controlled by the Conservatives at Westminster? Almost certainly, yes. But both systems are badly broken.
Any attempt to debate alternatives to the NHS are usually met with cries of ‘you wouldn’t like the American system’. I probably wouldn’t much like it, but to respond in that cliched, predictable way dismisses the very many workable alternatives that exist in Europe, Australia, Singapore and elsewhere, which involve a mixture of public and private and a form of compulsory insurance.
We shouldn’t ‘worship’ the NHS. Nor should we ‘love’ it. The current system is at breaking point. Serious illnesses are going undiagnosed and the public aren’t getting adequate access to treatment.
The longer this issue is kicked into the long grass, the worse the situation will get.
The track record of Prime Ministers quite often looks better the more time that passes from their time in office.
Since the end of World War II, I’d say Britain has had two good Prime Ministers in Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. We’ve had two moderately-good Prime Ministers in Alec Douglas Home and James Callaghan. The rest have been awful in varying degrees and ways.
Boris Johnson will be judged as awful. Throughout his life, he has shown a ‘what can I get away with’ attitude, in both his personal and professional life.
Mr Johnson does not have a political philosophy, but he DOES have a sense of entitlement and believes in being in office for its own sake.
His lack of attention to detail and his inability to organise properly has caught up with him time and time again, in journalism, as Mayor of London, and as Prime Minister.
There is a personal lack of awareness of his own weaknesses, typified by his failure to appoint a Chief of Staff.
The ‘political memory’ only lasts about 18 months. People struggle to remember the specifics of events beyond that timescale (try it!). It’s easy to forget now just how much public goodwill there was towards Mr Johnson in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 general election and during the early months of the pandemic, which began to ebb away after Easter 2020 when the Dominic Cummings fiasco became public and Professor Neil Ferguson was found to have broken lockdown rules to meet his married lover.
Mr Johnson’s time as Prime Minister ended with a death by a thousand cuts. Partygate, Wallpapergate, the Owen Paterson fiasco and Mr Johnson’s failure to death with Chris Pincher were ultimately what brought him down. Colleagues were also sick of being briefed for media interviews, only to discover from the interviewer that the government line had changed in the intervening hours or minutes.
Mr Johnson’s time as Prime Minister won’t be remembered too fondly by me. His failure to put a stop to the nonsense of green dogma (no doubt influenced in part by his absurd wife) will lead to problems for all of us in the months ahead in the form of high energy bills.
But for all his faults, Mr Johnson did at least get Brexit done (albeit at the expense of throwing Northern Ireland under a bus), stopped Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister, and ensured the smooth and efficient rollout of the Covid vaccine, made possible because we weren’t a part of the EU’s procurement programme. For that, we should be grateful.
It looks as though we’ll be stuck with The Hundred for at least the next five years. It was a response to a problem the England and Wales Cricket Board didn’t understand.
The decline in interest in county cricket is due to several factors. Firstly, central contracts mean that England stars are seldom playing for their counties. In many ways that’s a good thing – I don’t want to return to the days when England players were playing County Championship matches in the rest weeks between Tests, but it does nevertheless create a feel that the county game is separate from the England setup.
Secondly, county cricket hasn’t been seen on TV for many years. Sunday League cricket was routinely seen on BBC Two until 1998. Round-by-round coverage of the NatWest Trophy was seen on the BBC every Thursday. The final of the NatWest Trophy at Lord’s was a major national sporting occasion on the last Saturday of August each year.
When Channel 4 took over the England Test contract from 1999, they showed the semi-finals and final of the NatWest Trophy’s successor, the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy until they, too lost the rights in 2005.
Since then, there has been no live free-to-air county cricket on British television. The scheduling of matches has been complex and absurd. I grew up in an era when four-day County Championship matches began on a Thursday and concluded on a Monday. The ‘rest day’, Sunday, would be for the Sunday League, which had TV coverage on the BBC and Sky Sports. Thursdays were NatWest Trophy days, where we could watch the exciting climax to matches in the few hours after school. Test matches always began on a Thursday and concluded on a Monday.
But for more than 15 years, the various county competitions, both four-day and limited over, have taken place at odd times and it takes quite a bit of commitment to know what’s going on and when, let alone to watch them.
The Hundred, with its dumbed-down, patronising terminology and early-1990s computer game style graphics is not the solution.
Learning cricketing terminology needn’t take a newcomer more than ten minutes. Commentators (both BBC and Sky) display hugely unconvincing attempts to ‘big up’ the competition as though cricket has just been invented.
As for the franchise system, what on earth made the powers-that-be think that people in Gloucestershire and Somerset would be inclined to travel to Cardiff to support a team called the ‘Welsh Fire’? Or what about long-serving Lancashire fans on Merseyside, who are expected to support a team called the ‘Manchester Originals’.
The whole idea is barmy and naff!
One very, very basic fact Liz Truss needs to grasp as she becomes Prime Minister: The Rwanda migrant policy would be impossible to enforce for as long as the Human Rights Act is in place.
It came into effect in October 2000 and saw the European Convention on Human Rights applied to our legal system. As an A level law student at the time, I thought it was dangerous and would be hugely damaging.
Its impact has been enormous, not least in terms of it being made far harder for dangerous criminals who are here illegally to be deported.
The Human Rights Act has a far ‘nicer’ sounding name than it deserves. Most people who say ‘don’t you believe in human rights?’ almost certainly haven’t read it.
The Conservative Party has made noises about amending or repealing it for many years, going back to Theresa May’s time as Home Secretary. But as is so often the case with the modern Conservative Party, actions don’t match their words.
The Conservative Party long ago accepted the main tenets of Blairism. It’s taking some people far too long to suss this out.
Bilderberg 2022
By MARCUS STEAD
BETWEEN 2-4 JUNE, a group of Europe and North America’s leading politicians, elder statesmen, bankers, businessmen and academics met for a four-day conference at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington DC.
There were no journalists present, no TV cameras, no reports on mainstream news bulletins or in newspapers. So what was it all about, and why the secrecy?
The occasion was the annual Bilderberg Meeting, named after the venue of the first conference at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands. In a free and open society, a gathering of such high-profile and influential people would command significant media coverage and scrutiny, as is the case of meetings of the UN General Assembly or the G8 Summits, but with Bilderberg, there is secrecy and silence.
An official agenda of items is published on the Bilderberg website, but we have absolutely no way of verifying what was discussed, nor are minutes of the meetings taken. It is hard to believe that such a group have met up to discuss the weather and their holiday plans.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger turned 99 shortly before this year’s meeting. He hasn’t missed a Bilderberg Meeting for decades. But why? In theory, at least, he hasn’t been a major political figure for well over 40 years. The same applied to the late former Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who continued to attend Bilderberg for decades after he ceased to be a frontline political figure.
The British delegation was, to put it mildly, eclectic. There was Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, and veteran intelligence officer and diplomat John Sawers.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, a British artifical intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, which is in turn part of Google, and his colleague Mustafa Suleyman.
Also part of the British delegation was Shashank Joshi, Defence Editor of The Economist, as was the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes. The only other British journalist to be a part of it was Gideon Rachman, the Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator of the Financial Times
The ambitious Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat (who also attended in 2019) as was Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
Other British representatives from the business community included Emma Walmsley, the CEO of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and Bernard Looney, the CEO of BP.
Among others present was former Bank of England governor and Brexit doom-merchant Mark Carney, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, CIA director from the Obama administration, David Petraeus and Pfeizer chairman and CEO Albert Bourla.
What is Bilderberg REALLY all about, why the secrecy, and why did the mainstream media almost entirely ignore a large meeting consisting of such influential people?
Here is a full list of participants:
Achleitner, Paul M. (DEU), Former Chairman Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank AG; Treasurer Bilderberg Meetings
Adeyemo, Adewale (USA), Deputy Secretary, Department of The Treasury
Albares, José Manuel (ESP), Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation
Altman, Roger C. (USA), Founder and Senior Chairman, Evercore Inc.
Altman, Sam (USA), CEO, OpenAI
Applebaum, Anne (USA), Staff Writer, The Atlantic
Arnaut, José Luís (PRT), Managing Partner, CMS Rui Pena & Arnaut
Auken, Ida (DNK), Member of Parliament, The Social Democrat Party
Azoulay, Audrey (INT), Director-General, UNESCO
Baker, James H. (USA), Director, Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense
Barbizet, Patricia (FRA), Chairwoman and CEO, Temaris & Associés SAS
Barroso, José Manuel (PRT), Chairman, Goldman Sachs International LLC
Baudson, Valérie (FRA), CEO, Amundi
Beurden, Ben van (NLD), CEO, Shell plc
Bourla, Albert (USA), Chairman and CEO, Pfizer Inc.
Buberl, Thomas (FRA), CEO, AXA SA
Burns, William J. (USA), Director, CIA
Byrne, Thomas (IRL), Minister of State for European Affairs
Campbell, Kurt (USA), White House Coordinator for Indo-Pacific, NSC
Carney, Mark J. (CAN), Vice Chair, Brookfield Asset Management
Casado, Pablo (ESP), Former President, Partido Popular
Chhabra, Tarun (USA), Senior Director for Technology and National Security, National Security Council
Donohoe, Paschal (IRL), Minister for Finance; President, Eurogroup
Döpfner, Mathias (DEU), Chairman and CEO, Axel Springer SE
Dudley, William C. (USA), Senior Research Scholar, Princeton University
Easterly, Jen (USA), Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
Economy, Elizabeth (USA), Senior Advisor for China, Department of Commerce
Émié, Bernard (FRA), Director General, Ministry of the Armed Forces
Emond, Charles (CAN), CEO, CDPQ
Erdogan, Emre (TUR), Professor Political Science, Istanbul Bilgi University
Eriksen, Øyvind (NOR), President and CEO, Aker ASA
Ermotti, Sergio (CHE), Chairman, Swiss Re
Fanusie, Yaya (USA), Adjunct Senior Fellow, Center for a New American Security
Feltri, Stefano (ITA), Editor-in-Chief, Domani
Fleming, Jeremy (GBR), Director, British Government Communications Headquarters
Freeland, Chrystia (CAN), Deputy Prime Minister
Furtado, Isabel (PRT), CEO, TMG Automotive
Gove, Michael (GBR), Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Cabinet Office
Halberstadt, Victor (NLD), Co-Chair Bilderberg Meetings; Professor of Economics, Leiden University
Hallengren, Lena (SWE), Minister for Health and Social Affairs
Hamers, Ralph (NLD), CEO, UBS Group AG
Hassabis, Demis (GBR), CEO and Founder, DeepMind
Hedegaard, Connie (DNK), Chair, KR Foundation
Henry, Mary Kay (USA), International President, Service Employees International Union
Hobson, Mellody (USA), Co-CEO and President, Ariel Investments LLC
Hodges, Ben (USA), Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies, Center for European Policy Analysis
Hoekstra, Wopke (NLD), Minister of Foreign Affairs
Hoffman, Reid (USA), Co-Founder, Inflection AI; Partner, Greylock
Huët, Jean Marc (NLD), Chairman, Heineken NV
Joshi, Shashank (GBR), Defence Editor, The Economist
Karp, Alex (USA), CEO, Palantir Technologies Inc.
Kissinger, Henry A. (USA), Chairman, Kissinger Associates Inc.
Koç, Ömer (TUR), Chairman, Koç Holding AS
Kofman, Michael (USA), Director, Russia Studies Program, Center for Naval Analysis
Kostrzewa, Wojciech (POL), President, Polish Business Roundtable
Krasnik, Martin (DNK), Editor-in-Chief, Weekendavisen
Kravis, Henry R. (USA), Co-Chairman, KKR & Co. Inc.
Kravis, Marie-Josée (USA), Co-Chair Bilderberg Meetings; Chair, The Museum of Modern Art
Kudelski, André (CHE), Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group SA
Kukies, Jörg (DEU), State Secretary, Chancellery
Lammy, David (GBR), Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, House of Commons
LeCun, Yann (USA), Vice-President and Chief AI Scientist, Facebook, Inc.
Leu, Livia (CHE), State Secretary, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs
Leysen, Thomas (BEL), Chairman, Umicore and Mediahuis; Chairman DSM N.V.
Liikanen, Erkki (FIN), Chairman, IFRS Foundation Trustees
Little, Mark (CAN), President and CEO, Suncor Energy Inc.
Looney, Bernard (GBR), CEO, BP plc
Lundstedt, Martin (SWE), CEO and President, Volvo Group
Lütke, Tobias (CAN), CEO, Shopify
Marin, Sanna (FIN), Prime Minister
Markarowa, Oksana (UKR), Ambassador of Ukraine to the US
Meinl-Reisinger, Beate (AUT), Party Leader, NEOS
Michel, Charles (INT), President, European Council
Minton Beddoes, Zanny (GBR), Editor-in-Chief, The Economist
Mullen, Michael (USA), Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Mundie, Craig J. (USA), President, Mundie & Associates LLC
Netherlands, H.M. the King of the (NLD)
Niemi, Kaius (FIN), Senior Editor-in-Chief, Helsingin Sanomat Newspaper
Núñez, Carlos (ESP), Executive Chairman, PRISA Media
O’Leary, Michael (IRL), Group CEO, Ryanair Group
Papalexopoulos, Dimitri (GRC), Chairman, TITAN Cement Group
Petraeus, David H. (USA), Chairman, KKR Global Institute
Pierrakakis, Kyriakos (GRC), Minister of Digital Governance
Pinho, Ana (PRT), President and CEO, Serralves Foundation
Pouyanné, Patrick (FRA), Chairman and CEO, TotalEnergies SE
Rachman, Gideon (GBR), Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator, The Financial Times
Raimondo, Gina M. (USA), Secretary of Commerce
Reksten Skaugen, Grace (NOR), Board Member, Investor AB
Rende, Mithat (TUR), Member of the Board, TSKB
Reynders, Didier (INT), European Commissioner for Justice
Rutte, Mark (NLD), Prime Minister
Salvi, Diogo (PRT), Co-Founder and CEO, TIMWE
Sawers, John (GBR), Executive Chairman, Newbridge Advisory Ltd.
Schadlow, Nadia (USA), Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
Schinas, Margaritis (INT), Vice President, European Commission
Schmidt, Eric E. (USA), Former CEO and Chairman, Google LLC
Scott, Kevin (USA), CTO, Microsoft Corporation
Sebastião, Nuno (PRT), CEO, Feedzai
Sedwill, Mark (GBR), Chairman, Atlantic Futures Forum
Sikorski, Radoslaw (POL), MEP, European Parliament
Sinema, Kyrsten (USA), Senator
Starace, Francesco (ITA), CEO, Enel S.p.A.
Stelzenmüller, Constanze (DEU), Fritz Stern Chair, The Brookings Institution
Stoltenberg, Jens (INT), Secretary General, NATO
Straeten, Tinne Van der (BEL), Minister for Energy
Suleyman, Mustafa (GBR), CEO, Inflection AI
Sullivan, Jake (USA), Director, National Security Council
Tellis, Ashley J. (USA), Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs, Carnegie Endowment
Thiel, Peter (USA), President, Thiel Capital LLC
Treichl, Andreas (AUT), President, Chairman ERSTE Foundation
Tugendhat, Tom (GBR), MP; Chair Foreign Affairs Committee, House of Commons
Veremis, Markos (GRC), Co-Founder and Chairman, Upstream
Vitrenko, Yuriy (UKR), CEO, Naftogaz
Wallander, Celeste (USA), Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs
Wallenberg, Marcus (SWE), Chair, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB
Walmsley, Emma (GBR), CEO, GlaxoSmithKline plc
Wennink, Peter (NLD), President and CEO, ASML Holding NV
Yetkin, Murat (TUR), Journalist/Writer, YetkinReport
Yurdakul, Afsin (TUR), Journalist, Habertürk News Network
It’s time to say ‘enough is enough’ to Covid conspiracy theorists – if you want the NHS to treat you, get your jabs!
By MARCUS STEAD
THE TIME has now come to stand up to those who peddle absurd conspiracy theories about the Covid vaccine.
A little over a week ago, I had my top-up jab, the Moderna version. I can confirm that I do not have a magnet in my arm where they put the injection in. Nor have I had a heart attack. Nor have I been microchipped. Nor have I got any of the things the likes of David Icke say you’ll get.
But what I HAVE got is a massively lower chance of dying should I contract Covid. That was a pretty good free Christmas present to myself.
There are many good reasons why data on Covid, or any other subject for that matter, should be treated with suspicion.
In the case of Covid data, if you test more, you’re bound to get more positive cases. If children are being tested daily in school, positive test results among children will rise compared to school holiday periods, or during periods of lockdown where home schooling is taking place.
But what is beyond any doubt whatsoever at the moment is that the overwhelming majority of people requiring hospital treatment due to being unwell with Covid haven’t had their vaccines.
What are the reasons why people don’t have their jabs? Cards on the table, I was a little nervous as the date of my first jab approached last April.
Why? It had nothing at all to do with David Icke, Vernon Coleman or any of the other banal conspiracy theorists that have strong followings on social media.
My thought process led me to question the speed at which the vaccine was approved. Normally, when new drugs become available for any number of illnesses, they have to go through several trial phases, often lasting a few years, where the impact is assessed in the short, medium and long term.
The recent Royal Institution Christmas Lectures with Professor Jonathan Van-Tam offer an insight into how the Covid vaccines were approved so quickly.
The long and short of it was that huge amounts of money and resources were thrown at it by global governments, and therefore a process that would normally take many years was sped up into a matter of months.
The other logical conclusion we can take from that is that if such an effort is possible for Covid, surely similar strides can and should be made to treat cancers and all number of other illnesses?
The way governments and big pharmaceuticals have pooled their expertise to produce Covid vaccines shows what is possible with collaboration, money and resources. There seems no logical reason why a similar global push couldn’t be made to treat cancers, tumours and other life-threatening conditions.
The second reason for my hesitancy about the vaccine was that I knew so many people who suffered nasty side-effects as a result of it.
The vaccine was initially offered to the oldest members of society, and it was gradually rolled out to middle aged and younger people.
Almost everyone I know in old age reported few, if any, side effects. But by the time friends of mine in their 50s and 40s had their jabs, reports of severe headaches, flu-like symptoms and shivering, sometimes lasting for several days, were commonplace. At the age of 37, I thought the chances of me suffering side effects were high.
So what ‘swung it’ for me to turn up for my first jab in April? There were a number of factors. First of all, I rightly concluded that a short period of unpleasant side-effects was a price worth paying for the level of protection I would receive.
The second reason was that if, at any time, I expected health professionals to treat me for Covid, it was only right that I was willing to do my bit to make their life (and mine) easier by having the jab.
The third was the duty I have to my family, my friends and other members of society I meet on the train, in the supermarket or in the pub, to keep them safe.
The fourth was seeing what my friend Paige Christopher was going through. Paige was an energetic 25-year-old who enjoyed climbing mountains and cycling, and trust me when I say she was great fun on a night out – she was the life and soul of the party.
But since contracting Covid in late 2020 (or was it early 2021?), Paige has suffered terribly with long Covid, which has included several trips to A&E with symptoms resembling a heart attack or a stroke. Paige has been relying on the support of her partner and her family, and her recovery continues to be slow.
Unfortunately, Paige contracted Covid before the vaccine became available. I owed it to myself, my family, my friends and healthcare professionals to keep my chances of requiring that level of care to a minimum by having the vaccine.
The staff at the vaccination centre on that April day were excellent. The process was efficient, and the jab was almost painless (though, if I’m honest, the subsequent two jabs have been somewhat more painful).
Around 12 hours after my first jab, I began to suffer from a terrible headache and shivering, which went on for about four hours. Once the shaking had stopped, I took some paracetamol and went to bed.
When I woke up the following morning, I had a hangover-like headache that gradually eased as the day went on. The day after that, I had only the mildest of headaches. The day after that, I was completely back to normal.
This struck me as a very good trade-off when balanced against the level of protection against Covid I had as a result of it.
I had no side-effects whatsoever following my second jab in July or my top-up jab a few days before Christmas (unless you include a slightly sore arm for a couple of days, which was only really a hinderance if I tried to put my arm above my head).
Most people’s refusal for having the vaccine had nothing much to do with the understandable hesitancy I initially had.
For the most part, people’s reasons for not having the jab are based around nonsense they’ve read on the internet from disreputable conspiracy theorists.
Let’s put some of this into perspective. David Icke used to be a sports presenter on the BBC. He would occasionally present Grandstand, Match of the Day and Sportsnight, and was a regular sports news bulletin reader in the early days of BBC Breakfast Time from 1983, but a very large amount of his work saw him present snooker, darts and bowls.
I cover snooker and darts extensively, and older colleagues who knew Icke in that era tell me he was a very strange man indeed, even in those days, long before his ‘son of God’ claims of the early 1990s, a watershed moment saw him behave in an utterly barmy way when he appeared as a guest on Terry Wogan’s chat show.
The problem with Icke is that he is sometimes right. For example, Icke has written and spoken extensively about the Bilderberg Group.
Yes, the Bilderberg Group is very real. It meets once a year in a luxury hotel in Europe or North America, and consists of senior politicians, business leaders, bankers and journalists.
I strongly suspect they don’t meet up to talk about their families or share one another’s holiday snaps, but Icke ‘joins the dots’ in a very peculiar way when talking about their plans for a one-world government and, most bizarrely of all, how certain regulars turn into shape-shifting reptiles by drinking blood.
This is not a man to be taken seriously. It seems likely to me he suffered some sort of very public nervous breakdown in the early 1990s, from which he is long-since recovered, but he’s sussed that he can make a lot of money via books and theatre tours spreading his nonsense.
Look back on the video footage of things Icke said during that interview on Wogan, or any of the other predictions he made in the early 1990s. Almost none of it has come true. He was wrong about that, and he is wrong about the Covid jab.
As for Vernon Coleman, I can remember him as an agony uncle on daytime television in the late 1980s. Then, in the 1990s and early 2000s, I recall him making regular appearances as a conspiracy theorist on radio shows hosted by James Whale and Ian Collins.
Coleman is a man who has in the past run some 200 premium rate telephone helplines on ‘medical’ such matters as ‘how to make a large penis seem smaller’.
Dr Coleman, who is now 75 years old, has spent 2021 spreading dangerous and misleading information on his vlogs.
Yes, a minuscule number of previously-healthy people have died within days of having the vaccine. But there’s no solid evidence connecting the two events.
Most of us have, at some point in our lives, experienced the sadness of a seemingly-healthy family member, friend or acquaintance dying suddenly. The reality is that Covid kills, and the vaccine does not. There is no conclusive proof whatsoever that anybody has died as a direct consequence of having the vaccine.
During the summer, Dr Coleman predicted that come the autumn, people (especially older people) who had received the vaccine would start dropping like flies. That has proven, absolutely, to be complete and utter rubbish.
But no doubt Dr Coleman will cite examples of older people who would’ve died anyway as ‘evidence’ of his claims.
The internet, and especially social media, has a lot to answer for in the way it can poison the minds of the easily-manipulated.
In the earliest years of my life, there were just four television channels, and the internet didn’t really exist at all (aside from being a data-sharing service for the university sector, and not much else).
What we saw on television was subject to regulation by the BBC Board of Governors, and in commercial television by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, later to become the Independent Television Commission.
We could trust what we saw on television to be broadly true and accurate.
Of course, it was never perfect. The institutional bias that has long existed at the BBC (but has intensified and become much less subtle in recent years) was summed up excellently by the corporation’s former political editor Andrew Marr in 2006 when he said: “The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”
It goes beyond that, and the autobiography of the late former Question Time host and newsreader Peter Sissons articulates it well, when he wrote: “At any given time there is a BBC line on everything of importance, a line usually adopted in the light of which way its senior echelons believe the political wind is blowing.
“This line is rarely spelled out explicitly, but percolates subtly throughout the organisation. Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good — it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN.
“Soaking the rich is good, despite well-founded economic arguments that the more you tax, the less you get. And Government spending is a good thing, although most BBC people prefer to call it investment, in line with New Labour’s terminology.
“All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint. George Bush was a bad thing, and thick into the bargain. Obama was not just the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, he was the BBC’s. Blair was good, Brown bad, but the BBC has now lost interest in both. Trade unions are mostly good things, especially when they are fighting BBC managers.
“Quangos are also mostly good, and the reports they produce are usually handled uncritically. The Royal Family is a bore. Islam must not be offended at any price, although Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if they are offended.”
It goes beyond what Mr Sissons said. Very few BBC journalists strike me as having much interest in the private sector or the world of business.
The then-Director General Greg Dyke wisely appointed the excellent business newspaper journalist Jeff Randall as its first business editor in 2000, months after the BBC completely missed the Vodafone/Mannesmann merger, worth a then-record £90 billion, creating Britain’s largest company.
Months before his appointment, Randall dismissed BBC types as ‘patronising, middle class, guilt-ridden, do-gooders’ in a Sunday Business editorial.
Beyond that, the BBC in Scotland gives Scottish nationalists a soft ride, the BBC in Wales is a hotbed of Welsh nationalism, and at UK level, they no longer have any serious heavyweight political interviewers left following the departure in recent years of Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Neil and Eddie Mair.
In the commercial sector, ITN’s Channel 4 News has for many years felt like ‘the world according to Jon Snow’, complete with all his biases and prejudices.
But overall, we could trust what we saw on television to be truthful, even if they ‘could do better’ a lot of the time, and instances where complaints were upheld were humiliating for the broadcasters.
By comparison, the internet is the Wild West. Anyone can publish anything. There are seldom consequences for publishing untruths on social media, and the banning of YouTube accounts belonging to the likes of Icke and Coleman allowed them to proclaim martyrdom, and their most devoted disciples followed them to alternative platforms where they continue to peddle their agendas.
A glossy poster can be shared many thousands of times on Facebook or Twitter before it is removed, and then re-uploaded. Disreputable and discredited individuals and organisations are widely-shared, with few taking the time to check the credentials of the people whose work they are publicising.
The internet effectively allows anyone to believe anything, and to find a like-minded community to reinforce those views, no matter how absurd.
Do you want to believe the world is flat? Sure enough, there’s an online community for you. Do you want to believe Elvis is still alive? Yep, there’s an online community for that. Do you want to believe Icke when he says that senior members of the Royal Family and former US Presidents turn into 12-foot lizards? There’s an online community for that.
And so it goes on. If you want to believe something, there’s an online community that will reinforce your views, whereas in the past, the regulated spheres of television, radio and newspapers would force you to reconsider your absurd viewpoints.
It really does appear to be the case that most people who refuse to have the vaccine have done so based on bogus information they’ve read online.
We should only sympathise with them up to a point. They have now had many months to reconsider and come to their senses.
The time has now come for a tougher approach. Their refusal to have the vaccine is resulting in vast quantities of NHS money, expertise and personnel being used to treat them. These are resources that now could and should be used to treat the backlog of people who need and deserve treatment for everything from cancer to hip replacements.
It’s now entirely fair and reasonable for the government to announce that on a date, a few weeks from now, any person who turns up at a hospital suffering from Covid who previously refused to have the vaccine without having a valid medical reason for not doing so will not receive treatment for Covid at the hospital.
Instead, they will be sent home with a packet of paracetamol, and told to go to bed and keep themselves well-hydrated. If they die, tough luck – they have brought the situation upon themselves by not having their jabs.
To be clear, those who didn’t have their jabs due to a medical condition SHOULD still receive the best possible care if they contract Covid, as should the small number of people who will still require hospital treatment despite having received their inoculations.
It’s time to prioritise those with cancer, as well as those who need organ transplants, bypasses and hip replacements over those too stupid and selfish to have their Covid jabs.
Andy Fordham Remembered
By MARCUS STEAD
ON 16 July 2021, I appeared on talkSPORT with Paul Ross to remember darts legend Andy Fordham, whose death at the age of 59 was announced the previous day.
Andy won the Winmau World Masters in 1999 and the BDO World Championship in 2004. He was a gentle giant whose popularity transcended darts.
Paul also knew Andy from when they appeared together on Celebrity Fit Club in 2005. In this discussion, Paul talks fondly of the time they spent together in their bid to lose weight.
Andy battled serious health problems for many years, but shortly before his death, he was planning a return to competitive darts at the World Seniors Championship, due to be held at the Circus Tavern, Purfleet in February 2022.
Wales Decides 2021 – The Aftermath
By MARCUS STEAD
AS THE DUST begins to settle on the election results to the Welsh Parliament, this is a good time to take stock of what actually happened.
The first thing to point out is that this has in no way been a triumph for parliamentary majority. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2019, there has been a greatly heightened awareness of devolution among the Welsh population and of where power lies.
Far more people are now aware of who Mark Drakeford is, and understand that matters such as healthcare and education are now decided in Cardiff Bay rather than Westminster.
Yet despite far greater levels of public awareness, turnout last Thursday was just 46.5%, an increase of 1.2% on the previous elections in 2016, and a record high, narrowly beating the 46.3% turnout of the inaugural elections of 1999.
It is disturbing that well over half the Welsh electorate chose to stay at home rather than exercise their right to vote for those who will decide a substantial portion of policies that will affect their lives for the next five years. Why did this happen? Thursday was a sunny day across Wales, so the weather couldn’t have been a major factor. Concerns over catching COVID-19 at polling stations were alleviated by the fact that anybody could obtain a postal vote without having to specify a reason.
The reality is that most people living in Wales do not take a huge amount of interest in Welsh politics. The fact you are reading this now suggests you are the exception to the rule. Of those that do take a degree of interest, most are not heavily-engaged. A lively political discussion on social media can be highly misleading, in that the overwhelming majority of people living in Wales do not participate in such things.
Why did so many people choose to stay at home last Thursday? Were their minds on other, more pressing matters, such as rebuilding shattered businesses following the pandemic, or meeting family and friends for the first time in many months? Or is it the case that while polls show a broad support for maintaining the current levels of devolution in Wales, the public’s level of enthusiasm for that support is, in reality, very low.
With that thought in mind, back in 2016, the chattering classes patronised Brexit voters, particularly those living in the valleys of south Wales and working class communities in northern England by saying ‘they didn’t know what they were doing’ by voting for Leave.
That was patronising and insulting, but in terms of elections to the Welsh Parliament, there is some truth in it in relation to the regional list vote. To put it simply, how many people know that the absurd D’Hondt method used for counting the regional list votes means that voting Labour with your regional list is a complete and utter waste of a vote if you live anywhere in South Wales? Anyone living in the southern regions of Wales who voted Labour with their regional list vote may as well have not bothered voting at all, or left their ballot paper blank, as former Labour head of Bridgend Council, Jeff Jones, always does at Welsh Parliamentary elections.
In other words, this election had an appallingly low turnout and used an absurd voting system that hardly anybody knew how to use to aid their desired outcome.
The blame for this lies not with the voters, but with the candidates themselves and with the media for failing to adequately engage with the people of Wales.
Losing parties in this, or any other election, would do well to remember this rule when carrying out the post-mortem: Think of your party as a shop selling products and remember these three points:
- It’s a good idea not to shout insults at potential customers as they walk past the shop.
- Have you got the right products in the shop window?
- Have you got the right salespeople selling the products to customers?
It is with this in mind that we’ll now look at the performance of the different parties last week.
Labour
Mark Drakeford’s Labour Party massively exceeded expectations. The conventional wisdom in the weeks leading up to polling day was that Labour would fall some way short of a majority, yet when the votes were counted, they won exactly half of the 60 seats in the chamber, equalling their best-ever performances in 2003 and 2011.
Drakeford succeeded for two key reasons: Firstly, he managed to put clear distance between himself and Sir Keir Starmer’s UK Labour Party. Starmer is no more popular in Wales than he is in the medium-sized towns in northern England and the Midlands where modern-day general elections are won and lost. In 2019, the ‘red wall’ vote that saw Labour seats fall to the Conservatives in places like Bassetlaw, Balsover, Sedgefield and Dudley North applied just as effectively in Bridgend and Wrexham.
Last Thursday’s Conservative gain in Hartlepool suggests the Conservatives would retain most of those seats if there was another general election any time soon, and would quite possibly make further gains, particularly if Brexit Party votes in 2019 went to the Conservatives. This also applies to Wales, where the Conservatives could expect to hold those seats, and would have a realistic chance of gaining seats such as Cardiff North and Newport East.
But in Welsh Parliamentary elections, it is a different story. Drakeford succeeded in putting distance between himself and Starmer (despite a token visit during by Starmer during the campaign), and the Welsh electorate think of Welsh Labour and UK Labour as separate entities, and vote accordingly depending on the election.
The second factor is that, to a very large extent, this election felt like a mini-referendum on Drakeford’s handling of the pandemic. People can see shops and hospitality gradually starting to reopen. The vaccination programme has been a huge success, with efficient procedures and friendly staff working in all corners of Wales. This undoubtedly played in Drakeford’s favour.
There is also an overriding sense that in Wales, Britain and elsewhere in the world, people are less impressed with telegenic leaders than they were 25 years ago in the days of Clinton and Blair. To his critics, Drakeford is dry, nannying and uninspiring, but to his supporters, he is low-key, steady and methodical.
What the election campaign did not do was place a sufficient level of scrutiny on Labour’s track record over the last five years, or indeed the 22 years of unbroken power it has had since the start of devolution (with or without a coalition partner).
Drakeford’s ‘firebreak’ lockdown in late October and well into November was a response to a flare-up of COVID cases in and around Merthyr Tydfil and Swansea, yet traders in Rhyl, Pembroke and Rhyader were forced to close for a substantial period of the Christmas trading period.
Furthermore, Drakeford’s government wasted £114 million of taxpayers money on preparations and consultations for an M4 relief road near Newport, before scrapping the plans completely.
Drakeford himself was Health Minister during a calamitous period for the Welsh NHS which saw numerous failings and health boards in Special measures.
The list of failings goes on: Huge sums of money continue to be thrown at Cardiff Airport, with no real prospect of it becoming commercially viable any time soon. There is still a ban in place on shops selling alcohol after 10pm, apparently in the name of halting the spread of COVID (there is no logical explanation for this), but, like Scotland, could this ban be here to stay? Likewise, the 50p per unit minimum pricing on alcohol has done little to prevent alcoholism, but has punished those on low incomes who enjoy a glass of wine or beer at home.
Wales is now a country where parents cannot lightly smack their children for misbehaving, yet parents do not have the freedom to remove their children from sex education classes, even at primary school age. The balance between parental and state rights with regards to the raising of young children has altered massively under Drakeford’s administration, yet this largely passes without comment.
There was very little talk during the campaign of Welsh Labour’s appalling track record over 22 years of attracting inward investment to Wales. During the years of the Welsh Development Agency, 20% of all inward investment to the UK came to Wales, which is a remarkable achievement. Today, that figure stands at just 2%. Very little was said during the campaign about the need to create a more dynamic, ‘get up and go’ private sector-orientated economy in Wales, or of the problems Wales has holding on to its bright graduates.
Drakeford’s government has made radical changes to the Welsh school curriculum, with the help of outgoing Liberal Democrat Education Minister Kirsty Williams. It will be some time yet before we can measure their success or failure. In England, the reforms imposed by Michael Gove in the first half of the last decade in terms of literacy and numeracy at primary school level are now bearing fruit, while the Welsh education system has gone in a radically different direction. As these differences become more pronounced, it may well become more difficult for universities and indeed employers in England to assess the value and rigour of a qualification obtained in Wales as opposed to one in England.
None of these factors were properly discussed during the election campaign, which is largely the fault of a supine Welsh media, which, with some notable exceptions, is far too close to the Welsh establishment. This played to Drakeford’s advantage. The end result was a constituency vote for Labour of 39.9%, up 5.2% on 2016, and a regional vote of 36.2%, up 4.7% on last time around.
Conservatives
The circumstances of the Conservative campaign were unusual to say the least. Andrew RT Davies originally resigned as leader of the Welsh Conservatives in June 2018 due to internal plotting, with his opponents never having forgiven him for backing a Leave vote in the 2016 EU referendum.
Davies was replaced by Paul Davies, who in turn resigned as leader in January this year after reports he was drinking alcohol with other members of the Welsh Parliament on the building’s premises days after a ban on serving alcohol due to COVID regulations. Andrew RT Davies was quickly reappointed leader.
While the Conservative result is widely regarded as disappointed, it is nevertheless the party’s best showing in any election to the Assembly or Welsh Parliament. They gained just two constituency seats, and even one of those (Vale of Clwyd) was by a tighter margin than they would have liked, along with three gains on the list vote, giving them a total of 16.
At the 2019 general election of December 2019, the Conservatives made significant gains in Wales, with a total of 557,234 people voting for them. Yet in the Welsh Parliament constituency vote last week, just 289,802 voted for Conservative candidates.
So what happened to the 267,432 voters across Wales who voted Conservative in December 2019 but did not do so this time? A lot gets talked by psephologists about ‘swing’, and indeed that is a factor, but a very big part of electioneering is about persuading your party’s natural supporters to come out and vote while persuading those who support your opponents to stay at home.
It appears likely that while some of those 267,432 supported other parties on this occasion, a substantial number simply stayed at home. Why did they choose to support a Conservative government in December 2019 over areas such as the Treasury, foreign policy, defence, law and order and work and pensions, but in May 2021, they did not entrust the party with their support on devolved matters such as healthcare, education and housing? Or perhaps that is to assume that all those voters fully understood which institution was responsible for the different policy areas, both in December 2019 and last week.
The Welsh Conservatives have largely failed to develop a substantial grass roots connection in communities where they stand a realistic chance of winning constituency seats. All too often, candidates fight just one election, then move to other areas or do not fight again, whether that is due to lack of time, money, or that family and work responsibilities get in the way of political ambition. Not enough time is given to embed themselves in the communities and develop a rapport with potential local voters.
There are issues with Andrew RT Davies himself. Whilst being telegenic is probably not as important a factor as it was 25 years ago, Mr Davies has problems. He appeared ill-prepared for both televised debates and appears very uncomfortable in interviews. He speaks far too quickly and with little variation to his voice. His attempts at humour all too often fall flat. He looks as though he really doesn’t want to be there. Mr Davies would have benefitted from some media training of the sort provided by ex-TV journalists Scott Chisholm or Graham Miller.
It may also well be that while the Welsh electorate make a clear distinction between Sir Keir Starmer’s UK Labour Party and Mark Drakeford’s Welsh Labour Party, they make a similar, clear distinction between Boris Johnson’s UK Conservative Party and Andrew RT Davies’s Welsh Conservatives.
Whatever one may think of Boris Johnson, he has consistently shown that he has the means of communicating and relating to people in those medium-sized towns where modern-day general elections are won and lost, and that is to the benefit of Conservative candidates in Wales at UK general elections. But there has this far been a lack of stand-out figures who are able to do likewise in Wales.
In terms of ‘selling their product’, the Welsh Conservatives fell well short. There were some solid ideas in their manifesto, such as reviving a new body along the lines of the Welsh Development Agency, which, as has already been outlined, was stunningly successful at bringing inward investment to Wales, whereas the Labour-led Welsh Government has consistently failed in this task. Yet despite whatever merit there was in the Welsh Conservatives’ manifesto, they failed to sell it to the people of Wales, the most important demographic being those 267,432 people who voted Conservative in December 2019 but did not do so this time.
Plaid Cymru
The conventional wisdom in recent weeks was that the results would pan out in such a way that a Labour – Plaid Cymru coalition would be the likely outcome of the election.
There was always going to be a major obstacle to overcome with that. When Adam Price became party leader in September 2018, one of the key pledges of his campaign was not to repeat the arrangement that existed between 2007 and 2011 when Plaid Cymru was the junior partner in a Labour-led administration. Price repeated that pledge during an interview with ITV Wales reporter Rob Osborne, who put a clip of it on his Twitter account last week.
Price said he would only consider a partnership with Labour if Plaid Cymru was the single largest party, and needed Labour support to get them over the line in terms of a parliamentary majority. That was clearly never a realistic prospect. The second circumstance Price said he would consider was a partnership of equals, but again, that was never a realistic prospect, as with either just below or just above a quarter of the seats in the Welsh Parliament, Price would have no mandate for a partnership of equals.
Much was made of Price’s supposed skills as a media performer by the mainstream media in Wales, particularly the BBC, which has long faced accusations of being a hotbed of Welsh nationalism. To his critics, such as journalist and blogger Garry Gibbs, Price is detached and phoney.
Make no mistake, this has been a disappointing election for Plaid Cymru. Their overall tally is 13 seats, an increase of one on last time, but well short of the 17 seats they won in the inaugural election of 1999. Former leader Leanne Wood suffered a heavy defeat in her Rhondda constituency, and they failed to make any gains at all or even come close in the valleys seats they considered targets. They have a net gain of one seat due to the regional list system, but unless they can win constituencies, they have no chance at all of forming a government.
Every election seems much the same with Plaid Cymru. They overhype their chances, underdeliver, and spend the next electoral cycle convinced the electorate got it wrong and will put it right next time. Their ‘Vote For Wales’ tagline underlines one of their major flaws, a mentality that they have a monopoly on Welshness.
‘Vote For Wales’ also assumes that identity trumps other issues and that everyone lives their lives through a prism of Welshness. That is just not how most people live in most parts of Wales. 20% of people living in Wales today were born in England. Most people outside west and north west Wales only have to look back three or four generations to discover they are at least part-descended from English ancenstry.
For those living in Flintshire and Denbighshire, crossing the border to Lancashire, Cheshire and Merseyside for work and recreation is a routine part of daily life. Similarly, people in Gwent and Monmouthshire routinely travel to Bristol and Gloucester for the same purposes.
That is not to say that people aren’t proud of their distinct Welsh identity, but they are equally as proud to belong to the British family. The ‘othering’ of English people sits uncomfortably with most, since they are likely to have family and good friends of the English side of the border. Pride at being Welsh doesn’t come alongside considering English people to be ‘foreigners’. On the whole, people from Newport do not consider themselves to be radically different to people from Bristol, a city they are likely to know well and visit regularly, and would not feel a greater affinity with somebody from Porthmadog over a Bristolian.
Plaid Cymru continues to be seen outside its heartlands in west and north west Wales as a party for Welsh speakers. Most of us do not live in a world where the Eisteddfod is one of the highlights of the calendar, or of nights in front of the telly watching Pobol y Cwm. The reality of many people’s lives is that they feel shut out of so many areas of employment, particularly in the public sector, on the basis they cannot speak Welsh. This, in itself, leads to a suspicion of Plaid Cymru and the sort of society they would create if they were ever able to form a government.
This has not been a good five years for Plaid Cymru. In 2018, one of their Welsh Parliament members, Simon Thomas, was forced to stand down after being arrested for, and later convicted of, possessing indecent images of children. Months later, Adam Price won a leadership contest after ousting the incumbent, Leanne Wood.
In October 2019, Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald spoke at the Plaid Cymru conference in Swansea, something that would have sat uncomfortably with a large number of voters.
In March this year, Liz Saville-Roberts, the party’s leader in the House of Commons, published an internal report into antisemitism in the party, which recommended the adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in full, having not included two clauses in full from a previous statement on antisemitism in February 2020.
The review also said the party’s handling of complaints ‘needs to change as a matter of urgency’.
In its submission to the inquiry, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) named seven current and former members of Plaid whom it claimed had posted or shared material on social media that had breached the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism.
Among them were Sahar Al-Faifi, a candidate at the Welsh Parliament elections, and the party’s former leader, Leanne Wood, who in June 2020 retweeted a link to an article which included a false claim that Israel was ultimately responsible for the killing of George Floyd.
Five months later, Ms Wood’s account retweeted a comment by American journalist Glenn Greenwald in which he claimed Jeremy Corbyn was the victim of a ‘repellent and cynical’ smear campaign over his handling of antisemitism in his party.
The Jewish community in Wales expressed disappointment that Plaid Cymru didn’t take the opportunity to acknowledge the party’s long history of antisemitism, dating back to its 1925 co-founder, playwright Saunders Lewis, whose writing included antisemitic slurs such as the phrase “Hebrew snouts”, which he used when referring to Jewish financiers.
A year after founding the party, Lewis wrote in the party’s internal newspaper Y Ddraig Goch (The Red Dragon), “It’s a low, churlish thing to slur a man by calling him a Jew.”
Yet Plaid Cymru members seem more concerned about an increasingly baffling internal dispute about gender identity, centred around Helen Mary Jones’s support for comments made by veteran feminist Germaine Greer. The same dispute appears to be tearing apart Welsh nationalist campaign group YesCymru. The reality is there is a clear divide in Plaid Cymru between its small, but vocal support base in the Crachach classes (many of whom work in the Welsh media, arts, civil service and higher education sectors) who are obsessed by identity politics and showing off their woke credentials, and its more socially conservative voters in west and north west Wales.
The fact that the party spends so much time arguing about gender identity and so little time addressing serious issues of antisemitism provides a worrying sense as to where its priorities lie.
On a similar note, Adam Price has been conspicuously silent about the serious problem the party has with a section of its activists on social media, who frequently resort to smears, threats and foul and abusive language, while often hiding behind pseudonyms. Their inability to debate in a polite, civil and respectful way puts off a lot of potential voters. If Price is to continue as leader into the years ahead, he would be well-advised to address this issue head-on and make it clear that there is no place for this sort of behaviour in the party he leads. So far, he has not done so.
In the previous election of 2016, Leanne Wood was deemed to have had a disappointing result when Plaid Cymru had 20.5% of the constituency vote and 20.8% of the regional list vote. On this occasion, under Price, those figures have fallen to 20.3% and 20.7% respectively.
The Welsh nationalist movement can also take little comfort from the fact that there were other parties on offer this time around in the form of Neil McEvoy’s Propel and Gwlad, who each managed well below 1% of the vote. They finished well behind other minority parties such as Abolish the Welsh Assembly, UKIP and Reform.
Some of the Welsh nationalist social media mob are trying to talk up Labour’s victory as a sign that Wales’s appetite for independence is growing, based on a poll from last September showing that 51% of Labour voters would back Welsh independence. However, it is VERY important to note that this poll removed those who didn’t know, refused to answer or said they wouldn’t vote.
In reality, every single Labour candidate stood on a unionist manifesto (albeit one that advocates a federal UK-wide model), and Mark Drakeford himself said on Saturday that independence wasn’t raised once when he was out campaigning on the doorstep. The evidence strongly implies that Welsh independence is essentially an obsession of the Twitterati and the Welsh media classes, and that enthusiasm for it among the Welsh population is low.
Whatever spin the party’s friends at BBC Wales want to put on it, Plaid Cymru has had a poor election.
Liberal Democrats
As Friday evening progressed, it seemed entirely possible that the Liberal Democrats would be completely wiped out from the Welsh Parliament, but they were saved when the party’s leader in Wales, Jane Dodds, secured a place via the Mid and West Wales list.
For the last five years, the sole Lib Dem in the chamber, Kirsty Williams, propped up the Labour administration in return for the Education portfolio, where she has introduced a radical new curriculum to Welsh schools, the success or failure of which has yet to be determined.
It could be argued that the Lib Dems would have been better off keeping Williams in opposition, where she could oversee the process of rebuilding the party’s grass roots following the disappointment of the 2016 results. But Williams herself chose not to seek re-election this time around, and it appears it was her own personal following that sustained her in her Brecon and Radnorshire constituency, and with her departure, the seat has been lost to the Conservatives. However, despite the overall seat tally remaining at one, the party’s vote share has doubled to above 4% compared to five years ago.
Dodds will likely be the first port of call for Drakeford’s administration when seeking the sole non-Labour vote required to get their legislation through the chamber. It is possible that Drakeford will offer the Education portfolio to Dodds, so that she can oversee the implementation of Williams’s curriculum reforms.
Dodds was a member of the Labour Party until 2003, and left due to the invasion of Iraq. She is unlikely to find herself in any deep ideological conflict with Drakeford, who is on the left of the party, but she will need to strike a careful balance between being a constructive supporter of Drakeford’s administration and not being seen as a pushover, which could cost her and her party heavily in the next election.
Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party
There’s no getting away from the fact that this has been a horrendously bad result for the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party. Five years ago, the party was hardly known at all in Wales, its Party Election Broadcast consisted of nothing more than a black screen with white writing scrolling up it, and they faced a serious electoral threat from UKIP.
This time around, their leader, Richard Suchorzewski, had a platform on the televised debate on BBC Wales, they had a slicker Party Election Broadcast, and they had a considerable presence on social media, polls consistently showed they were likely to win four or more seats, and yet their regional vote share declined from 4.4% to 3.73%.
So what went wrong? The first thing to point out is that theirs is a minority viewpoint. However lukewarm the Welsh public’s enthusiasm for devolution is in terms of actually voting at elections and engaging with the political process, there is nevertheless a large degree of support for maintaining the Welsh Parliament.
The party ran a campaign that lacked focus and discipline, they had only a small number of high-quality candidates, they spent far too much time arguing with the Welsh nationalist mob on social media, and they failed to state a positive case for what the Welsh Parliament would be replaced with.
A substantial number of people may well like the idea of abolishing the Welsh Parliament, but what would it be replaced with? Whatever one may think of John Redwood (and I have a lot of time for him), there is not much public appetite in Wales for a return to the days where a Conservative in his mould could be imposed on Wales as Secretary of State, assisted by two junior ministers.
Handing all devolved powers back to Westminster is in itself unappealing to many when they see mismanagement and the poor calibre of politician in the House of Commons, with the additional risk of Wales being treated as a distant afterthought by the UK Government under those circumstances.
What were Suchorzewski and the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party proposing to replace the Welsh Parliament with? They never did tell us.
They were also mistaken to try and present this election as a choice between abolition and Welsh independence.
Yes, the overall constitutional arrangements across the United Kingdom are in a mess, and urgently need addressing. We have a devolved assembly in Northern Ireland as part of the wider peace process, a parliament in Scotland where a defined list of reserved and excepted matters are still in the power of Westminster. London has seceded to a far greater degree than most people realise with a mayor and an assembly, while regional elected mayors in areas such as Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire have a substantial degree of autonomy over many policy areas. Yet other parts of England are still under the auspices of Westminster. At local council level, the system has been a mess since the Heath government of the early 1970s destroyed the old county structure, leaving us with a messy hybrid of unitary authorities, two-tier systems, London boroughs and metropolitan districts.
This is a dog’s dinner and urgently needs addressing. The onus is on Boris Johnson’s government to outline the various options, and that process needs to begin as a matter of urgency. Clarity over which institution does what needs to be at the heart of it.
The Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party also failed to take into account that federal structures work effectively in many other countries. Countries such as Australia and Canada have states with substantial levels of federal powers, though it should be pointed out that both countries are geographically vast. There is also a far greater degree of clarity as to which powers are held by central government and which are the responsibility of state governments.
Yes, federalism can work, and are the established norm in many countries. The Blair government never properly outlined or finished its devolution project, and it has left the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements in a horrendous mess two decades later. Successive governments have kicked the issue into the long grass, but the need to tackle it head-on has now become urgent, and it is the responsibility of Boris Johnson himself to undertake that process.
Conclusion
Like it or not, Mark Drakeford’s Labour administration has a strong, democratic mandate for governing Wales in the devolved areas for the next five years.
There is no getting away from the reality that the years ahead will not be easy. We continue to be impacted by the pandemic, and there is no guarantee that new variants of COVID will not set us back in the months and indeed years ahead.
The enormous economic impact of the pandemic has not yet begun to be understood, in terms of the permanent changes to our working habits, and the tax rises and public spending cuts that will be necessary to repay the debt accumulated by more than a year of furlough payments and loss of tax receipts during the pandemic. It will not be easy to improve the lives of citizens in Wales under these conditions.
But one of the most important issues for Drakeford is to address the state of civic life in Wales. As veteran journalist Paul Starling put it in his Welsh Daily Mirror column in April 2002, “Our country is run by no more than 50 extended families or individuals. They carve everything up for themselves, and each other, behind cupped hands and closed doors. They sideline fierce debate, churn out meaningless pap, and ignore the crushing realities of most peoples’ lives.”
Starling, one of the most courageous journalists in Wales, was referring to the crachach, an inter-connected elite, usually Welsh speaking and broadly sympathetic to Welsh nationalism, who dominate the upper tiers of the Welsh civil service, arts, media and higher education sectors. The crachach were in existence decades before devolution, but their influence has intensified as the scale of civic life has grown.
In a 2001 column, Starling elaborated on the influence the crachach have inside BBC Wales. He wrote, “There is something sinister lurking in BBC Wales. It feeds off fear, does untold damage to the country and the notion of truth, drives many of our most talented people to leave and hides under the cloak of silence…I have worked as presenter, journalist, and producer for BBC Wales. I could list many people, whose names you would recognise, who would agree with what I am writing.
“But they will not say it publicly – for fear they would never work again for the BBC in Wales. The Welsh media is a tiny pool. If you want to move upwards and into Broadcasting House you never criticise BBC Wales. And when you finally make it there you continue to keep your mouth shut. You see the problem every day. But the mortgage, or the short-term contract, come before speaking out.
“You say nothing about corridors which are shut-off to highly creative people because they cannot speak Welsh. You mutter how jobs go to certain people when others, more talented and experienced, don’t get a sniff. And, if you are fair-minded, you despair at the tactics used to side-line or sack people…
“Is it a good policy that BBC Wales’s Head of News, Aled Eurig, was chosen despite having a fiery background as a militant Welsh nationalist and later as a paid worker for Plaid Cymru. Is it a good policy that Patrick Hannan is allowed to take the lion’s share of quiz shows and political punditry – when the woman employing him is his wife – Menna Richards.”
The crachach is far from some swivel-eyed conspiracy theory, and Starling is far from alone in pointing it out. Indeed, Drakeford’s last-but-one predecessor as First Minister, the late Rhodri Morgan, understood the tenets of the problem, though little has been achieved to find a solution. Two decades ago, Morgan said, “As well as horizontal devolution – spreading power and responsibility more widely – we have to have vertical devolution as well. I have sometimes tried to sum up this dimension by describing our devolution settlement as a shift from crachach to gwerin, from government by a self-replicating élite to a new engagement with a far wider and more representative group of people, women and men, people from north and south Wales, Welsh speakers and not, black people as well as white, and so on.”
Veteran journalist John Humphrys, originally from Cardiff and still a frequent visitor to the area, said in July 2000: “There is some unease in some areas of south-east Wales that unless you speak Welsh you are a second-class citizen. There is positive discrimination in favour of those who can speak Welsh. There are many jobs that are barred to you if you don’t speak both English and Welsh and that does create some casualties and some resentment.” Such feelings have intensified in the 20 years since Humphrys said those words, as devolution bedded in and the influence of the crachach increased.
In the same month, another seasoned journalist, Vincent Kane, put it even more starkly, when he said: “There is an elitism built into our society which few nations anywhere in the world would tolerate. The 80% in Wales excluded from positions of influence and authority, no matter how talented they might be, simply because they don’t speak Welsh, are victims of injustice.”
Former Education Minister Leighton Andrews was also a fierce critic of the crachach, and in May 2010 said, “For too many in Wales, higher education remains a distant, and irrelevant activity, clouded in mystery. It appears that higher education governance in post-devolution Wales has become the last resting place of the crachach.”
The crachach and the influence it has over public life in Wales is very real, and it is holding Wales back in a major way, with many non-Welsh speakers feeling excluded from positions of influence and the ability to fulfil their potential. Though it should be pointed out that many Welsh speakers who don’t have the right connections are also excluded from the clique.
It will take a courageous government to tackle this network of vested interests head-on. Whether Drakeford has the will and the decency to do so remains to be seen.
Boris Johnson reveals roadmap out of lockdown
By MARCUS STEAD
EARLIER today, I appeared on Radio Sputnik ahead of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcements on the roadmap out of lockdown in England.
I argued that the Prime Minister ought to act with caution, because we don’t yet know what length of time vaccine immunity lasts, nor do we know whether the vaccine will be effective against new variants of Covid-19, or even against a mutation.
It seems clear to me that Mr Johnson was at least in part motivated by a desire to appease the backbench Conservative MPs in the Covid Recovery Group, such as Mark Harper and Sir Desmond Swayne. However, it is clear that current strains of the virus are having a much more serious impact on younger people than the strains we saw in spring and summer last year.
The vaccine rollout has been an enormous success story, thanks in part to the more professional manner in which government is now run following the departure of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain in November. It has led to a more harmonious and professional working environment, and the approach of under-promising and over-delivering is bringing with is rewards.
Polls suggest that if a general election was held any time soon, the Conservatives would largely hold on to the ‘Red Wall’ seats they gained in December 2019.
Those ‘red wall’ seats that took a leap of faith and backed Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019 feel their faith is being rewarded. They voted Conservative on the back of a key manifesto pledge to get Brexit done, and on that, Boris Johnson has delivered.
The new Brexit deal, confirmed on Christmas Eve and implemented from 1st January, has now bedded in. Yes, there are some difficulties, especially in relation to Northern Ireland, which we should not shy away from, but overall, once initial teething difficulties were overcome, it has proven to work rather well Last week, we learnt that Government figures revealed freight traffic coming into the UK is already back to 99% of last year’s levels.
In terms of the pandemic, voters in those red wall seats are seeing a swift, efficient rollout of the vaccine. They know big mistakes were made last year, some of them very serious, but at the same time, they don’t regard the Labour Party led by Sir Keir Starmer as a government in waiting.
Modern British general elections are all about winning medium-sized towns, often post-industrial towns. The rural areas are safely Conservative. The big cities are usually safe Labour. Elections are won and lost in medium-sized towns. And in Sir Keir, the polling strongly suggests he is grossly out of touch with people in those very seats Labour needs to win. A lot of people barely know who he is. Very few people could name three members of the shadow cabinet if asked. His agenda might impress university lecturers and middle class wokes in Islington, but for people in Bolsover, Sedgefield, Wakefield and Bridgend, who care about job creation, crime, housing, education, public services, he has virtually nothing to say to them and is a very long way from gaining their trust.
I also discussed the enormous challenges facing Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who is due to deliver a Budget next week.
We’re now not that far away from the end of the 2020/2021 financial year. The UK is expected to recorded a deficit of at least £350 billion as a result of the pandemic. To put that into perspective, in 2019/20, it was £56 billion. These figures are absolutely eye-watering. It’s the highest level of public borrowing since the Second World War.
The Chancellor will deliver a Budget next week and he’s likely to defer most of the really painful measures for the time being, but difficult choices lie ahead.
Chancellor Sunak has two things playing in his favour: First of all, he can borrow very cheaply at the moment, so it’s not as though there’s a huge amount of interest to pay on these sums. And secondly, the whole world is in the same position, with normal economic activity having ceased pretty much everywhere. That said, there is a great deal of uncertainty about the true situation in China.
The UK national debt is currently rising at £5,170 PER SECOND, and the overall debt is at £68,351 PER TAXPAYER.
Mr Sunak said last week that ‘once the economy begins to recover, we should look to return the public finances to a more sustainable footing.’ What that really means are tax rises and cuts to public spending. It’s just a case of what form those tax rises will take. Will it be VAT, or income tax, or will there be a tax on savings given a fancy name such as an ‘NHS levy’, which’ll make it harder for people to argue against because of the emotion attached to the NHS label?
There are serious questions to be addressed about the overall size of the state, where Government intervention ends, and where personal responsibility begins. In 1991, the entire UK welfare bill was just short of £43 billion, by 2010 it had rocketed to £110 billion, and last year it reached a record high of just under £155 billion.
People have got used to the state stepping in for matters that were once the responsibility of the individual and the family unit. Even under normal circumstances, these figures wouldn’t be sustainable. This huge welfare bill means cuts will have to be made to other areas of public expenditure, including the NHS, and that people will bluntly have to be told they’ll need to take more personal responsibility for their lives and their lifestyle choices.
There are unlikely to be any particularly painful announcements in next week’s Budget, but there’ll be some tough decisions ahead for the Chancellor.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 54: Having the Covid Vaccine
By MARCUS STEAD
GREG Lance-Watkins recently celebrated his 75th birthday, and a few days afterwards he had his first Covid jab.
The aim of this podcast is to put your mind at rest if you’re nervous or feeling anxious about having the vaccine. In conversation with Marcus Stead, Greg details the process from beginning to end, and having been there and done that, he explains that it’s well-organised, painless, and that you probably won’t have any side effects at all, though if you do, they’ll be short-term and very mild.
As a survivor of cancer and a heart attack, Greg explains that the vaccine has given him a huge amount of protection from Covid-19, and urges everyone to have the jab.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 53: EU Cannot be Serious!
By MARCUS STEAD
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 53: EU Cannot be Serious
THE ROLLOUT of the Covid vaccine has been an enormous success story. The United Kingdom now leads the world in terms of the speed and efficiency in which the population is being vaccinated.
Boris Johnson’s Government decided not to join the EU vaccine procurement programme last year, and the decision was widely vilified at the time, yet the events of the last few days have shown that the decision not to join was absolutely the right one.
Less than a month into the new Brexit deal and it’s clear that not being part of the EU is quite literally saving lives in the United Kingdom.
In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins discuss the extraordinary spat between AstraZeneca and the EU. They assess the reckless language and behaviour from Brussels bureaucrats in relation to the vaccine and with regards to Northern Ireland.
With Greg due to receive his vaccine in the days ahead, they discuss the importance of having the vaccine, though they question whether it will, in itself, lead to the return of normality.
Towards the end of the podcast, Marcus and Greg discuss the dangers of misinformation on the internet, and the urgent need for new legislation to regulate social media.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Marcus Stead 
NEW PODCAST: Twenty Minute Topic Episode 69: The Royal Family In Crisis
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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.
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.
Written by Marcus Stead
March 24, 2024 at 2:40 am
Posted in Comment, Health, Opinion, Politics