Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
NEW PODCAST SERIES: Truth of Lies
On 27 January 2002, Corporal Michael Phillips was killed in Sierra Leone. He had just returned there after a brief visit home before Christmas on paternity leave. Daughter Hollie was born early December.
From the moment, when his wife Julie received that dreaded knock at the door, she knew the truth did not add up.
A truth of lies.
Finally, nearly nine years later, the Ministry of Defence admitted negligence.
It has been two decades since Michael’s death. Hollie is now an adult.
For the first time, his widow Julie Phillips goes on the record in conversation with renowned ghostwriter Tony Horne to unravel that Truth of Lies…
The podcast series is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify and the iTunes app.
Bye, bye Boris – but his successor is unlikely to be much better
By MARCUS STEAD
WELL, IT WAS only a matter of time. The idea that Boris Johnson had the necessary skillset to be an effective Prime Minister was utterly ludicrous to any serious person who had worked closely with him over the years, and inevitably, his strange relationship with the truth, along with his ‘what can I get away with?’ approach to life has finally caught up with him.
Forget the conspiracy theories. Johnson has been ousted by his own MPs and his closest cabinet colleagues. Yes, it’s true to say that the mainstream media, dominated by middle class, urban, pro-EU leftists are not friendly towards him, but it was his colleagues, not the media, that have forced him out.
To understand Mr Johnson’s character, Sonia Purnell’s biography ‘Just Boris’ is a good place to start. What becomes clear through reading it is that Johnson’s main motivation is power itself, but scratch the surface and there isn’t much substance or conviction behind it, certainly not anything that would single him out as especially eurosceptic or conservative.
Let’s not forget that Mr Johnson backed Brexit not out of principle, but because he considered it politically expedient for him to do so.
In the run-up to the 2016 referendum, Mr Johnson penned two opinion pieces for the Daily Mail, one backing Remain, the other backing Leave, and he only decided at the last minute which one to publish and which to spike.
I reject claims that what politicians do in their personal lives isn’t important and that it doesn’t impact on their work. Any workplace colleague is far more likely to be reliable, stable and trustworthy if they are a decent spouse and parent.
If a person is a serial philanderer who neglects their duties as a parent, why on earth should anybody be surprised when they turn out to be selfish and scheming in the workplace?
For a serial philanderer is exactly what Mr Johnson is. He appears not to know for sure how many children he has fathered. We know that he has sired at least three children outside marriage, and that his affair with fellow journalist Petronella Wyatt resulted in one abortion and a miscarriage. This hardly sits comfortably with social conservatives who have a ‘faith, flag and family’ approach to life.
Mr Johnson’s professional moral compass fares little better. Within a year of becoming a trainee reporter at The Times, he was sacked for making up a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas.
In 1995, when Johnson was Assistant Editor of the Daily Telegraph, a recording of a telephone conversation from four years earlier emerged where he plotted with his Old Etonian friend Darius Guppy to have then-News of the World reporter Stuart Collier beaten up. Guppy was later jailed for an attempted jewel fraud.
By 2004, Johnson had spent more than a decade in senior editorial roles and three years as a Conservative MP, but, as editor of The Spectator, he still saw fit to publish a stupid and highly offensive article about the people of Liverpool, making insulting references to the Hillsborough Disaster and the death of Kenneth Bigley in Iraq.
As Mayor of London, Mr Johnson’s approach to policy was haphazard, paying little attention to detail, of spin over substance and of failing to see the policies through. His attitude to money also left a lot to be desired.
In addition to the annual salary of £143,911 he received as Mayor, Johnson picked up £250,000 per annum as a Daily Telegraph columnist, something he described during a major television interview as ‘chicken feed’, even though it is around ten times the average national salary.
As Mayor, Johnson has made several large claims on his expenses for short taxi journeys because he’s kept the driver waiting for lengthy periods with the meter running.
One three mile journey from City Hall to the Elephant and Castle cost £99.50. In his private life, he can obviously afford such luxuries, but to have such a careless attitude towards public money during a time of austerity is inexcusable.
This isn’t the time or the place for a full and detailed analysis of Mr Johnson’s record as Prime Minister. We should be grateful that Mr Johnson did, at least, prevent Jeremy Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister. For that was the choice the voters faced at the 2019 election. Labour under Mr Corbyn was not fit to govern and would not have delivered the Brexit the British people voted for in 2016. We should not underestimate the immense damage that would have been done to this country if Mr Corbyn had won the 2019 election.
Voters in the ‘red wall’ seats voted Conservative due to a combination of wanting the Brexit they voted for in 2016 to be implemented and a belief that Labour under Mr Corbyn did not connect with their values. The mentality of ‘I’m Labour, always have been, always will be, and my father before me, and all my problems are Margaret Thatcher’s fault’ was abandoned and they took a punt on Mr Johnson.
They knew Mr Johnson was no saint and was certainly not of the same social class as them, but they did feel that in pledging to get Brexit done, combined with some platitudes about ‘levelling up’, was enough for them to take a punt.
In doing so, they reshaped the political map of Britain. Put simply, the cities are overwhelmingly Labour. Rural areas are overwhelmingly Conservative (though this may be starting to change). Modern-day general elections are won and lost in medium-sized towns: Sedgefield, Warrington, Bridgend, Mansfield and so on.
The people in these areas voted for Brexit, and subsequently for Mr Johnson for a variety of reasons: Concerns over uncontrolled mass immigration; a belief that an oversupply of cheap labour caused by mass immigration forces wages down; a sense that they have been ignored by the political classes for a long time; a belief that well-educated young people need to leave the places they are from to ‘get on’ in life and maximise their potential. But overall, the one overriding factor is that life in these places just isn’t very good for a lot of people.
Mr Johnson did indeed get Brexit done. The deal he agreed, which came into effect in early 2021, was marginally better than if he had gone for the ‘take it off the shelf and plug it in’ version of Brexit, namely the Norway option, but it effectively came at the price of throwing Northern Ireland under a bus.
It’s hard to remember now just how much goodwill there was towards Mr Johnson between the start of the pandemic in early 2020 and Easter that year, when the wheels started to come off with the Dominic Cummings fiasco and a series of personal and professional misdemeanours from those in senior positions.
Mr Johnson was seen as statesmanlike and competent. As spring 2020 gave way to summer, he and those around him were increasingly seen as ‘winging it’, and horrendous errors were made, not least the purchasing of £4 billion of unusable personal protective equipment, and the abuse of contracts to the ‘old school tie’ brigade, who lined their pockets as a result.
The beginning of the end of Mr Johnson’s premiership came around the time of the disastrous speech to the CBI last autumn. Since then we’ve had Wallpapergate, Partygate, the Owen Paterson affair and now the situation with the allegations against Chris Pincher.
Do people in those ‘red wall’ seats really care about Partygate? Well, how would you feel if you had been denied the opportunity to be with your husband, wife, mother or father in the final days of their lives in the name of following Covid regulations, while at the same time parties were going on inside Downing St? Only a small minority of people were affected in such a way, but the anger they will feel is understandable.
The Sue Gray report into Partygate really does make for horrendous reading. Staff drank excessively until past 4am on the night before Prince Philip’s funeral, where the Queen movingly led by example by sitting away from her family on the most difficult of days for her.
There were accounts of red wine being spilled up walls, special advisers sending messages actively encouraging staff to break rules, security and cleaning staff being treated with a lack of respect, the child’s swing in the garden being broken and of staff getting into fights.
This matters, not least because many ‘red wall’ Conservative voters will themselves work as cleaners and security staff.
But it matters for another reason as well. We all try to take a certain amount of comfort in a belief, sometimes wisely-held, sometimes not, that those with expertise we do not have are competent and people of integrity.
When we see a doctor, we accept what they tell us about our condition because they have trained for years to reach that level. We ask a plumber to install our new boilers and service them from time to time, because they have expertise in doing so competently and safely that the rest of us do not have.
We like to think that however badly wrong the politicians get it in public, there is at least a professional apparatus of advisers and civil servants who will ensure decisions are taken and implemented competently. After the publication of the Sue Gray report, we cannot be so sure. It also begs the question as to why there are so many more people working in Downing St today than in the relatively recent past.
Mr Johnson’s tenure as Prime Minister was extended due to the success of the vaccine rollout during 2021, which was done speedily and efficiently. This was the first, big tangible benefit to Brexit. By being outside the EU’s vaccine procurement programme, the UK bought and administered the vaccine far more quickly than the EU, and many lives were undoubtedly saved as a result. The importance of being outside the EU in terms of making the Covid vaccine a success doesn’t get talked about anywhere near enough.
But beyond that, what is there? Empty talk about ‘levelling up’ in red wall areas, empty gestures on preventing illegal crossings in the English Channel (there won’t be many, if any, planes to Rwanda for as long as the UK is signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights), the promotion of green dogma, which has led to an entirely avoidable energy crisis.
The ‘Bumbling Boris’ had long since become tedious. The jokes had worn thin. He had lost the support of his colleagues, if not the ‘red wall’ voters to the same extent.
The final straw has been the allegations made about Conservative MP Chris Pincher’s behaviour during a recent visit to the Carlton Club.
Since the 2019 election, it has become clear that there are quite a few MPs in the Conservative intake who, to put it mildly, are more than a bit weird with their standards of behaviour and sexual tastes. Mr Pincher already had a reputation before the recent allegations, yet Mr Johnson considered him an appropriate person to appoint as a go-to person if staff wanted to report inappropriate sexual conduct from colleagues. What on earth was he thinking?
I cannot get very excited about the new leadership race, where there are no outstanding candidates and none look as though they would make a great Prime Minister.
Who among the candidates is serious about stopping uncontrolled mass immigration? Who will stand up to woke Marxist dogma that has infected the police, the judiciary, the NHS and the BBC? Who will put an end to green cultish propaganda based on wobbly science dictating the country’s energy policies that will see energy bills double in the space of a year? Who will tackle head-on the constitutional crisis this country is facing as a result of the Blairite devolution programme?
Who among them is truly serious about welfare reform? In the 12 years since the Conservatives came to power (with or without a coalition partner), welfare reform has consisted mainly of making life more difficult for the genuinely disabled who may need a spare bedroom to store wheelchairs and other vital equipment, and yet has done nothing to address those who consider welfare dependency a viable lifestyle choice.
The Conservative Party’s idea of welfare reform has thus far been to be downright cruel to the disabled, while doing little to address fatherless households and the misery that often causes.
By 2013, almost 50% of 15-year-olds did not live with both parents, and that figure has almost certainly increased in the years since. At the time, fatherless households (for the overwhelming majority of the time it is the mother who brings up the child as a single parent) cost the taxpayer £49 billion per year.
By comparison, nearly a decade later and not allowing for inflation, the entire defence budget comes to £42.4 billion.
On a related note, the wonderful and moving recent documentary about Katharine Birbalsingh and the remarkable success she has made of the Michaela School in London should be used as a blueprint as to how every secondary school in the country should operate.
With strict discipline, rigorous teaching methods, a pride in their British identity and a culture of achievement, the Michaela School has given children from some of the most deprived areas in the country a sense of hope and purpose denied to millions who are part of the ongoing 50-year failed experiment in comprehensive education.
Thus far, not one leadership candidate has struck me as serious about addressing any of these areas.
Since the Cameron era, the Conservative Party has more-or-less endorsed Blairism. Let us not forget that when Anthony Blair left the House of Commons for the last time, David Cameron led the Conservative MPs in a standing ovation for a war criminal who had done immense damage to this country in ways that are only now fully being understood. Only a small number of Conservative MPs refused to join in.
For the Conservative Party is no longer truly conservative (arguably, it has not been so for a long time). True conservatism means a belief in national sovereignty, a low-tax economy, the traditional family, law and order, proper education, strong defence, free speech, freedom and personal responsibility. Can any of the leadership candidates truly say that these are their values?
The Conservative Party is also very vulnerable for another reason which doesn’t get talked about anything like as frequently as it ought to.
In the 1950s, around three million people were members of the Conservative Party. Between 1965 and 1970, under the leadership of the dreadful Edward Heath, the number fell from 2.5 million to 1.5 million. It halved again from one million to 500,000 during the early years of John Major’s administration in the first half of the 1990s. David Cameron’s endorsement of Blairite policies led to a further decline, and today the number of members stands at around 180,000.
Largely gone are the days where the local Conservative Club was a hub of activity in the community. Many have closed completely. Those that remain only have negligible links to the Conservative Party itself, and are often looking in need of renovation.
There was a time when the Conservative Club was somewhere members would go for a Monday night game of snooker and a quiet pint at midweek. It would be the place where prospective Conservative parliamentary candidates would state their case and face a vote of the local members. Serious and worthwhile discussions would take place about policy formation and election campaigns would be organised and co-ordinated. The Young Conservatives dance would be the place where people may well have met their future husband or wife.
Nearly a decade ago, in 2013, the Conservative Party had an income of £25.4 million, of which just £749,000 came from membership subscriptions. Between 2000 and 2010, half the party’s funding came from a cluster of just fifty ‘donor groups’. And a third of it from only 15. In the year after the 2010 general election, half the Conservative Party’s funding came from the financial sector.
The problem is clear to see: With a lack of a grass roots membership, the Conservative Party has left itself wide open to the pressures of lobbying and big donations to keep itself afloat.
Individuals and organisations don’t donate huge sums to the Conservative Party for fun. They do so because they want to buy influence and get favourable policies.
It’s for these reasons that whoever wins the leadership contest is highly unlikely to be in a position where they can declare green dogma as bunkum and prioritise a sensible energy policy based on security and keeping bills down for domestic customers.
They are unlikely to be able to say that lucrative NHS contracts will be awarded purely on merit following a fair process.
They are unlikely to be able to tell building firms that they are to construct proper-sized family homes with gardens.
The same applies to many, many other policy areas where wealthy donors to the Conservative Party have played their hand.
Look, it’s entirely possible that the Conservative Party will yet win the next election. Labour cannot govern alone without regaining a significant foothold in Scotland, and Sir Keir Starmer seems a very long way from gaining the trust of the red wall seats in England and Wales (history teaches us that by-elections don’t count for much in the grand scheme of things).
The long leadership contest that is set to dominate the political discourse over a summer while war rages in Ukraine and inflation spirals out of control.
Thus far, there is no sign whatsoever that any candidate is serious about tackling the many challenges this country faces head-on.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 55: Harry and Meghan – The Oprah Interview
By MARCUS STEAD
AS THE dust settles following the broadcast of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle earlier in the week, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins discuss the fall-out. Are they victims, or self-centred narcissists?
It appears as though Meghan married into the Royal Family believing they would adapt to ‘Project Meghan’, and, as someone who is used to getting her own way, she did not appear to understand she was committing to a life of duty and service.
During the interview, much was made by Meghan about the restrictions placed on her personal freedom, yet did she attempt to work around that with other members of the Royal Family and the staff to reach an understanding?
One of the most controversial aspects of the interview were Meghan’s claims that inappropriate comments were made by somebody connected to them when speculating about the colour of baby Archie’s skin. Yet not much has been said about the context of the comments – were they a case of them saying ‘will the baby look more like its mother, or its father?’ (a commonplace comment among families expecting a baby, especially when the parents have different racial backgrounds), or were there more sinister connotations? There are almost certainly two sides to this story.
Much has been made of Meghan’s claims that she wasn’t given the support she needed when experiencing mental health difficulties. Yet she is by no means the first member of the Royal Family to go through such problems. Her husband, Prince Harry, has received therapy and support for his own mental health struggles. Could he not have picked up the phone and contacted his therapist and arranged appropriate support for his wife?
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 52: The Brexit Deal
By MARCUS STEAD
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 52: The Brexit Deal
ONE WEEK into 2021, and ‘Project Fear’ has been utterly discredited: World War III has not broken out, Western civilization has not come to an end, there has been no Emergency Budget, the FTSE has not collapsed, the pound has not collapsed, and there are no queues of lorries on the motorways of Kent.
In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins assess the Brexit deal announced on Christmas Eve, which both are giving a cautious ‘thumbs up’ though there are some down sides.
The podcast is available via the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 51: The Covid Christmas
By MARCUS STEAD
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 51: The Covid Christmas
CHRISTMAS is nearly here, and it’s going to be very different for all of us this year. Much of the country is already living under severe restrictions, and from Boxing Day, 24 million people in England alone will be in Tier Four.
In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins discuss how worried we should be about the new variants of Covid, and how best to strike a balance between enjoying the festive season, and keeping ourselves and our families safe.
The podcast is available via the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Antisemitism: Labour and Beyond
By MARCUS STEAD
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 69: The Royal Family In Crisis – Talk Podcasts
THE RECENT report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) into antisemitism in the Labour Party delivered a damning verdict on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
In this special podcast, Marcus Stead talks to Graham Perry, a Labour supporter and an antisemitism awareness trainer about the findings of the EHRC’s report and the events that followed it, including Jeremy Corbyn’s statement which led to him having the Labour whip withdrawn.
The EHRC found Labour breached the Equality Act in two cases when its agents were engaged in “committing unlawful harassment”, including using “antisemitic tropes and suggesting that complaints of antisemitism were fake or smears”. The first referred to former Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, and the second concerned Pam Bromley, a Labour councillor in Rossendale, Lancashire.
A further “18 more borderline harassment cases” were identified in the sample of 70 studied by the EHRC, and the watchdog also indicated relations with Labour were not always smooth during the investigation.
The discussion then turns to the wider problem of antisemitism in British politics and in wider society. Plaid Cymru was co-founded by playwright Saunders Lewis, whose work and letters contain many examples of antisemitism. Lewis is still widely revered by the Welsh nationalist community, and the party was recently engulfed in controversy after activist Sahar Al-Faifi, who has a long track record of antisemitism, was readmitted to the party and will stand as a candidate in next year’s elections to the Welsh Parliament.
Beyond politics, how prevalent is antisemitism in wider society? Marcus and Graham discuss the issue of antisemitism in institutions such as golf clubs. In this age where roads and concert venues named after slave traders are being renamed, is it right that prominent antisemites such as Roald Dahl are honoured with public monuments bearing their name? Roald Dahl Plass is less than a minute’s walk from the Welsh Parliament building.
What is the difference between blatant antisemitism and subconscious antisemitism? And is antisemitism all too often regarded as ‘the lesser racism’?
Graham Perry graduated from Churchill College Cambridge with degrees in History and Economics in 1968.
He qualified as a Solicitor and became a Partner in Clinton-Davis & Co in Hackney, East London and focused on representing clients in the Magistrates Courts of North-East London.
He made a career switch in 1979 when he joined the family firm, London Export Corporation, set up in 1953 by Jack Perry to focus on Trade with China.
Graham made his final career change when he became an independent commercial arbitrator resolving disputes between companies involved in the trans-national shipment of food, feeding stuffs and oils – which work he continues to undertake.
Graham was a Justice of the Peace from 1986 to 2002 and an Immigration Judge from 2002 to 2015.
He has made 100+ visits to China on business, with political groups and most recently with former Lord Chief Justice Woolf whom Graham arranged to give Lectures in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on the Rule of Law.
Graham writes and lectures on two main topics – China and Anti-Semitism and honed his presentational skills with LBC radio, where he was a regular overnight cover presenter in the 1990s, before focusing exclusively on his arbitration work.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 48: Free Speech
Twenty Minute Topic Episode 69: The Royal Family In Crisis – Talk Podcasts
By MARCUS STEAD
WE’RE ALL familiar with the quote from Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s biography of Voltaire, which says: “I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Freedom of speech is under attack in Britain and across the Western world, with the rise of ‘safe zones’ in universities, and the ‘woke’ movement. With every year that passes, the limitations on what it’s permissible to say become narrower and narrower. Saying the wrong thing in the wrong place won’t land you in prison, (not yet, anyway,) but it can certainly have a detrimental effect on your career.
Marcus Stead
In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins ask: What are the limitations on free speech? What constitutes ‘hate speech’? And who or what is behind the agenda to put ever-increasing limitations on what we can say?
The podcast is available via the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Marcus Stead
By MARCUS STEAD
I’VE GIVEN my corporate website a big revamp which should make it easier to navigate.
It’s still a ‘work in progress’ and there are a few elements to iron out, but it details all the various elements of what I do. You can have a look around by following this link: http://www.marcusstead.info
The Welsh Language: A Reality Check
By MARCUS STEAD
WE ARE frequently told by the mainstream media that the number of Welsh speakers is growing rapidly and that there is ever-increasing demand for Welsh language provision. But do the facts really back up these claims?
The figures shown on this graph are fascinating. They chart the number of people aged three or over able to speak Welsh according to the Census and according to the Annual Population Survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS statistics suggest a rise from 726,000 speakers of Welsh in June 2008 to 891,100 in June 2019. In contrast, the Census figures showed a decline from 582,400 in 2001 to 562,000 in 2011.
The more fanatical wing of Welsh language campaigners on social media often point to the low Census figure of 2011 and the high ONS figure from 2019 as apparent ‘evidence’ that the Welsh language has grown exponentially in the last decade, conveniently ignoring the obvious flaws.
The ONS figures are a nonsense. Welsh is not spoken by close to a third of the population of Wales. So how have the figures been massaged to give the desired outcome to their political masters, who in turn wish to use it as a justification for increased public spending on Welsh language institutions?
Language statistics are filled in by adults and parents, but include statistics on child proficiency of language. This graph from the Welsh Language Commissioner demonstrates the flaw in the figures:
So how does it happen? Put simply, parents are asked whether their children, having spent years learning Welsh at school, are any good at it. Parents are pretty accurate when assessing their own ability to speak the language, but grossly overestimate the ability of their children to do so.
When people start self-reporting from the age of 18, we see that huge drop-off.
In reality, around 6.5% of children speak Welsh as a first language, and about 7.7% of the population overall. That’s much lower than the Census figure and hugely lower than the ONS population survey.
But even when Welsh is the main language of the family home, it is very often not the language people choose to use when speaking to the wider world, to medical professionals, or to public bodies.
In this BBC Wales documentary from 2010, we see how children attending Glantaf Welsh medium school in Cardiff overwhelmingly choose to speak English rather than Welsh in the school playground and dining room. When they were on exchange and staying with a Welsh first language family in North Wales, the version of Welsh the Glantaf children spoke was regarded as very formal and stiff by their hosts.
This bears out with my anecdotal experiences as a citizen of Cardiff. It is a cosmopolitan city that has seen waves of immigration going back at least 150 years. When I am in the supermarket and on public transport, I frequently hear Arabic, Polish and Spanish spoken, but I very seldom hear the Welsh language. It seems clear that despite Glantaf School having more than 1,000 pupils at any one time, a very large number usually choose not to speak Welsh outside the classroom and do not use the language frequently as adults. There is a community of a few thousand Welsh speakers in the Pontcanna district of Cardiff, and to a lesser extent in Grangetown, but the language is seldom heard around the city beyond that.
Of course, in parts of west and north west Wales, Welsh is the language of everyday life and anecdotal experiences will be very different, though these areas constitute just a small proportion of the overall population of Wales, and consist largely of villages and small towns.
The Census is a compulsory form delivered to all homes once every ten years, and is fully available in both languages. It can be completed in paper or online. In 2011, calls made to the Census helpline were bilingual with the Welsh language option offered first. Every incentive was offered to encourage those able to do so to complete their form in Welsh.
Yet despite this, just 3.4% of family forms online were completed in Welsh, and just 2.9% of individual forms.
Paper copies fared little better for households at 4.1%, but individual forms were substantially higher with a whole quarter filing their copy in Welsh. That fact is intriguing, but as they’re requested it’s not unusual for political statements to be made via Census forms, and with old people’s homes and university halls having many individual forms, a higher return in Welsh is expected.
But overall, just 5.05% of forms were returned in Welsh.
The language preference becomes even more stark when we look at other services. Just 0.08% of driving theory tests were taken in Welsh and just 0.45% of practicals. As for NHS Direct, just 0.6% of phone calls and 0.1% of website visits were conducted in Welsh.
Last November, I published this article, where I outlined just how few people were using the Welsh language option when accessing the online support videos for Transport for Wales travel card applications.
Both the English and Welsh versions were uploaded on 16 October, and by the time my article was published on 15 November, 12,807 had watched the English language video, while just 247 had watched the Welsh language equivalent. In other words, just 1.89% of viewers had chosen to watch the Welsh language version.
Transport for Wales and its subsidised travel passes are a matter for people from all across Wales, so there can be no accusations of a Cardiff/urban/South Wales bias. This clearly shows that when people are left to their own devices to access a service from their own homes, they overwhelmingly choose the English language version.
The reasons why those with the ability to speak and write in Welsh usually choose to access public services in English are difficult to pin down. Is English better at capturing the complexities of modern society? Or are a lot of these people classed as ‘first language Welsh’ not really using the language as frequently as the statistics suggest? Or is there another reason entirely?
Language is used predominantly for communication, not for ‘feel good’ reasons. Welsh people are no exception. We use the language we regard as most useful. When not obliged to use Welsh by government subsidy or regulation, the people of Wales overwhelmingly choose to use English.
As Kristian Niemietz said in this Telegraph article: “If somebody told you they took maths A-level at school, but have since forgotten how to do basic additions or subtractions, you would not believe them. If they told you they took geography A-level, but can no longer remember what the capital of France is, you would not believe them either. But if somebody told you they took French or German A-level and cannot cobble together a single coherent sentence in French or German, you would believe them straight away.
“I’m a native German speaker. I have been living in the UK for 11 years, but people can still hear that I am not originally from here, and often feel obliged to tell me about the German classes they took at school. This is virtually always followed by a slightly apologetic “… but I don’t remember any of it”.
The reality is that a child can have Welsh lessons at school from the age of five, and stop at 16 after passing a GCSE exam, but will still not be able to speak or write in Welsh to any great extent, and will have forgotten most of it within a few years. Yet according to some statistics, they will be classed as ‘Welsh speakers’.
So why do these misleading statistics about Welsh language demand matter? The Welsh Language Act of 1993 and subsequent legislation puts a great deal of emphasis on the rights of citizens to access public services in Welsh, and as a result, the ability to speak and write in Welsh is a requirement for accessing a great number of jobs across the public sector, as well as in the civil service, the arts, the media and higher education sectors.
Every time a job is advertised requiring the candidate to speak Welsh, it effectively excludes the overwhelming majority of the population who cannot speak the language. Wales is a small country with a population of 3.1 million people. We cannot afford not to have the best people in the best jobs. It is essential that we utilise the talents of all the population. These Welsh language requirements (which are evidently not matched by public demand) not only drive bright graduates out of Wales where they can fulfil their talents elsewhere, they also result in people being over-promoted because they can speak Welsh, which in turn results in poorer policy formation and delivery of services. In other words, everyone, including the Welsh-speaking population loses out.
All new jobs at Gwynedd Council require you to speak Welsh, and the same applies to Snowdonia National Park.
It affects life in Wales in other ways as well. Take Cardiff City Football Club as an example. During the early 2000s, the excitable Ali Yassine was appointed as stadium announcer. Yassine, from the city’s Somali community, learnt the Welsh language in his 20s, and would use a small amount of Welsh during his announcements.
Shortly before the start of the 2015/16 season, Yassine was relieved of his duties, and as a temporary measure, author, club historian and veteran former radio commentator Richard Shepherd took over announcing duties. Shepherd announced in English only.
The following January, the club pledged to reinstate Welsh language announcements following an online petition signed by fewer than 300 people. To put this into perspective, at that time, the club was typically attracting crowds of around 24,000. So in other words, below 1.25% bothered to sign the petition.
But hang on…..there was no way of verifying that those who signed the petition actually attended matches. Many of the signatories could easily have been Welsh language activists who spread the word via social media. Some (many?) could either have had no interest in the club at all, or had been living hundreds of miles away in Porthmadog. Even if we are to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that every single signatory was a dedicated season ticket holder, the club changed its policy to appease a minuscule number of its supporters. How can this be considered fair or right?
Across Wales, the average pupil at a Welsh language school receives £341 more than English language equivalent.
Councils spend millions of pounds and hundreds of man hours translating every document produced into Welsh, even if it is seldom used. At a time when libraries are being closed and community facilities cut back, voters have the right to question whether this is an appropriate use of scarce resources, especially at this time of drastic economic downturn due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
By the same token, the Welsh Government has stated its aim to ‘create one million Welsh speakers by 2050’. How much will this cost? What will the benefits be? And what dogmatic measures will be imposed on the population to achieve it?
Cledwyn Hughes
The late Labour politician Cledwyn Hughes earned the respect of the people of Wales, and of Britain, as a man of integrity. He was a first language Welsh speaker, but, as Secretary of State for Wales, he faced cries of ‘traitor, traitor’ when he visited the Eisteddfod one year, following accusations that he had put the building of Wales’s economic base and civil service before the Welsh language. Hughes replied: “Language is a thing you cannot push down people’s throats.”
Hughes was correct. The current path being pursued is seeing the Welsh language dogmatically imposed on the population, which has led to a great deal of resentment among the non-Welsh speaking majority. As veteran journalist John Humphrys put it 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.”
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.”
The problem with the current policy is that a self-serving industry has grown around the Welsh language. It is being used as a means by which a small, self-serving elite can extend their grip on so many spheres of life in Wales.
To this day, nepotistic Welsh nationalist and Welsh first language cliques dominate the senior positions at BBC Wales, and recruit and promote other staff from among their own kind. Veteran investigative journalist Paul Starling outlined the scale of the problem in the early-mid 2000s, while Phil Parry, who worked for BBC Wales for more than 20 years, outlined the cosy relationship between BBC Wales and Plaid Cymru for his excellent The Eye Wales website.
Until relatively recently, the Reach Plc newspapers in Wales seemed largely immune from Crachach/Welsh nationalist influence. However, it appears that in recent years, those with Welsh nationalist sympathies have manoeuvred themselves into position and have ‘taken control of the cockpit’.
One consequence of this has been that several of its best-known journalists have ‘come out’ as Welsh nationalists in the last couple of years. The Western Mail’s chief reporter Martin Shipton has written sympathetically about Plaid Cymru and the YesCymru movement in recent years. Carolyn Hitt, known for her articles about rugby and culture from a parochial Welsh perspective, ‘came out’ as a Welsh nationalist during a speech to the YesCymru AGM in a far-from-full small converted chapel in Merthyr Tydfil in January 2020. Younger journalists are either recruited for their Welsh nationalist sympathies, or are at least willing to go along with the agenda. The editorial stance could be politely described as pro-maximum devolution, and more bluntly as increasingly sympathetic to Welsh nationalism, in the mould traditionally seen at BBC Wales.
With long hours, poor pay, and an uncertain long-term future, many journalists are looking for a long-term future in public relations, communications, or as part of the Welsh Parliament gravy train, either as civil servants, press officers, advisers, members of that parliament, or employed by lobbying bodies closely linked to it. Therefore, they are unlikely to be especially critical of any aspect of the Welsh establishment in their work.
The mindset and attitudes of those working for these media organisations puts them at odds with the majority of ordinary Welsh people, namely their readers or consumers. Coming home from work to a house in Pontcanna, and weekend dinner parties with Welsh political figures, S4C producers and Eisteddfod Gorsedd members hardly gives them an understanding of the concerns and lifestyle of the teacher from Treherbert, the plumber from Pontypool or the brickie from Bangor.
The Welsh media is dominated by white, middle class, Welsh speaking people, with a bias towards South Wales and the Welsh nationalist movement. The desire to stay on the right side of ‘important people’ to further their future careers has led to a supine media and a cowed culture. A similar culture exists inside the Welsh civil service, the arts and higher education.
When Newsnight hosted a debate on the level of spending on the Welsh language, author and columnist Julian Ruck was subjected to a tirade of appalling abuse on social media for having the temerity to suggest that extra spending and spending wasn’t achieving the goal of getting more people to speak the language.
As we have already discovered, the true number of first language Welsh speakers is around 7% of the population, or approximately 217,000 people, who can predominantly be found in west and north west Wales, around the Pontcanna district of Cardiff, and in Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan.
As Paul Starling pointed out in one of his newspaper columns: “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.”
“They try to buy off journalists or frighten us with threats. Any ‘detractors’, they say, will never build up a media career in Wales unless they keep their noses clean and independent mouths shut.”
This network of individuals and families is known as the Crachach, which to some Welsh speakers is considered a pejorative term, though prominent politicians, including former First Minister Rhodri Morgan (himself a Welsh speaker) and former Education Minister Leighton Andrews used it to describe the Welsh establishment. By no means all of those 217,000 or so Welsh speakers are part of it – the overwhelming majority are not, but the influence they hold over public life in Wales, utilising the Welsh language as a weapon, is phenomenal. And they do not like being challenged in any way.
Steve Tucker
As the late journalist Steve Tucker said of S4C: “You’re more likely, to be frank, to find out the inner workings of North Korea’s ultra-secretive government than fathom what’s going on in the higher echelons of the Welsh-language channel. Like North Korea, S4C keeps its internal workings to itself.
“Like the shady Asian nation, S4C doesn’t like to be disturbed by outsiders. As long as it continues to receive its £101m a year, others can keep their noses out. It doesn’t like to be disturbed by such minor fripperies as, say, whether anyone’s watching or if the programmes are any good. And, like North Korea, regardless of the economic situation, its elite continues to enjoy the good life, with sky-high salaries and gold-plated expense accounts.”
“…Even the most died-in-the-wool nationalist S4C staff themselves are among the first to admit that the channel, awash with cash for so long, has gone about spending it with all the hard-nosed financial sense of Richard Prior in Brewster’s Millions (ask your dad, kids).”
Julian Ruck put it even more starkly in this 2014 speech:
Ruck said: “When anyone in Wales stands up and brutally criticises the Welsh establishment with their own data, one encounters nothing but threats, dirty tricks, you name it, it happens.”
Julian Ruck is correct. Paul Starling is also correct. The Crachach look after their own and threaten ‘intruders’ with lies (often very vague), smears and threats. Vituperative attacks on social media are the favoured tactic in the modern era. A ‘first step’ towards putting things right and building bridges would be for Welsh language campaigners to acknowledge they have a problem with the behaviour of a group of their ‘activists’ on social media. Even among their small community in Cardiff and the Vale, the Crachach are perceived as ‘keeping to themselves’ and work, socialise and marry within their own kind.
In wider society, personal attacks are regarded as a sign of weakness and that you have lost the argument. Lies and smears are the hallmarks of a person who cannot be trusted. Yet among this small, insular section of Welsh society, such behaviour is considered acceptable and normal.
I do not want the Welsh language to disappear. We live in an era of bland conformity, where every high street in Britain is much of a muchness, and where the world is increasingly dominated by the same fast food and coffee chains. Different languages and cultural elements are to be celebrated and enjoyed. But in terms of finding its place in the modern world, the Welsh language has lost its way.
A key mistake was made more than 50 years ago when the plight of the Welsh language became closely aligned with the Welsh nationalist movement. A pivotal moment came in 1962 when Saunders Lewis, the racist and anti-Semitic founder of Plaid Cymru gave a lecture on BBC radio entitled Tynged Yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language), where he predicted the extinction of the Welsh language and declared that the language would die unless revolutionary methods were used to defend it.
Welsh ‘independence’ is not something that instinctively sits comfortably with most of the Welsh population (Plaid Cymru’s vote count and share of the vote has declined for the last three general elections in a row). Only once in its history was Wales ever an ‘independent nation’. That was between 1055 and 1063AD when under the rule of Grufydd ap Llewellyn.
In historic terms, most of the Welsh population has only been here five minutes. Most of us only need to look back four or five generations (if that) to discover that we are at least in part descended from waves of immigration, especially from Ireland, Devon, Cornwall or Herefordshire, and to a lesser extent from other parts of Britain and the wider world.
People in south east Wales think nothing of going shopping in Cribbs Causeway or going to see a theatre play in Bristol. People in Flintshire often spend a significant part of their working and social lives in Lancashire, Cheshire and Merseyside. These are natural economic and cultural links. And, truth be told, most people in Wales don’t have much appetite for creating artificial barriers based on ancient tribal conflicts. They care a great deal more about being able to cross the border for work and leisure than they do about Owain Glyndwr.
We are proud of our distinct Welsh identity, and celebrate it in various ways – our industrial and mining heritage, music – from classical to Tom Jones to the Manic Street Preachers, various sporting achievements, Brains beer, Welsh cakes, a night on the town, our spectacular coast and countryside. But the vast majority of us consider ourselves proudly British as well as Welsh, and do no wish to think of English and Scottish neighbours (who are often also our family and friends) to be ‘foreigners’.
With that in mind, tying the fate of the Welsh language to the Welsh nationalist movement, which has become increasingly left-wing and ‘woke’ in recent years, is a massive turn-off to those who may who would like to embrace the language but are either British patriotic socialists, classic liberals or conservative in outlook.
For many Welsh people, particularly those living in and around Cardiff, the Welsh language is something they associate with the Crachach. It is very hard to ‘love’ a language when it is so frequently used as a weapon with which to ostracise the vast majority of the population who do not speak it.
As we have already discovered, despite all these measures, the Census of 2011 showed that the number of Welsh speakers actually fell in the previous decade. In 18 of the 22 local authority areas in Wales, a minimum of 67% of people were classed as having ‘no knowledge of Welsh’. The lesson that can be taken from this is that dogmatic measures to impose the Welsh language on children do not work. Those who are genuinely interested in seeing the Welsh language thrive on its merits should watch this short film by journalist Eoin Butler provides us with interesting parallels with the Irish language. One particular segment stands out. Butler says:
“I think the truth is that compulsory Irish is a failed policy, but that a network of vested interests have grown up around it, keeping it in place. This network acts as a support system, not for the language, but for itself. It does nothing to really promote the language, or to broaden its appeal.”
Ireland appears to have its own version of the Crachach. Replace the word ‘Irish’ for ‘Welsh’ in that package, and every single word would ring true for the situation in Wales.
Butler offers an interesting solution, by comparing it to the revival and modern-day popularity of the Gaelic games. For 70 years the GAA had a closed, defensive mentality. Its members were banned, not just from playing, but from even attending soccer or rugby matches. Back then, the GAA didn’t have the confidence to believe that their games could survive in open competition with other sports. Archive footage from that time shows that Gaelic games were pretty unsophisticated.
Today, the ban is long gone, and GAA players are elite athletes. GAA, with minimal state involvement and zero compulsion, has never been more popular. GAA was once a minority interest, the way the Irish language is now. If children were encouraged to embrace the language, the way they do the sport, not out of duty or obligation, but out of genuine affection, the Irish language could thrive. The same applies to Welsh. Growth happens by consent, not compulsion or imposition.
Wales is a society where different sections live with their backs to each other. I want the Welsh language to thrive, but the current course of action is wrong, counterproductive, and leads to a great deal of resentment.
Wales needs to have an honest and frank conversation with itself about the sort of country it has become. And the discourse needs to be one carried out in a manner of respect and civility, not abuse or threat. Right now, that feels like a very long way off.
Marcus Stead 
Why it’s time for serious people to stop defending GB News
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By MARCUS STEAD
Those of us who lean to the right politically were hoping for big things from GB News when it launched in June 2021.
There was a clear need for a counterbalance to the existing broadcast media outlets. BBC News is more-or-less a broadcast version of the Guardian, and most people who work there share its Islington-esque world view.
ITN’s News at Ten was, for many years, the ‘gold standard’ of TV news bulletins, in the days of Alastair Burnet, Reginald Bosanquet, Sandy Gall, Trevor McDonald and others. But nowadays we are treated to nightly little homilies from Tom Bradby and political analysis from Robert Peston, who all too frequently mixes up ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’. It is noticeable that it continues to be a respectable-enough programme on nights when those two are absent.
Channel 4 News was a respectable, upmarket, worldly programme during its first seven years from 1982 when anchored by the late and much-missed Peter Sissons. But during the 1990s and beyond, it became ‘The World According to Jon Snow’, and it has continued in that mould, even though the man himself has now left the programme.
Sky News, from its launch in 1989, was a sharp, hard-edged, high-quality news service, and for many years it really did provide a healthy counterbalance to the BBC, but a steady decline has been happening at the channel for many years due to cost-cutting measures, and the sale of Sky to Comcast saw its content become, if anything, slightly to the left of the BBC.
There was a gap to be filled, and there was cause for optimism in the months leading up to its launch. The original chairman, Andrew Neil, had a broad vision of a patriotic news channel that was neither London-centric nor woke.
Mr Neil, who led Sky TV during its early days, understands newspapers and the TV news industry very well. But his vision clashed with that of chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos, a former head of Sky News Australia, whose vision appeared to be to create a British equivalent of Fox News.
Mr Neil was gone within weeks of launch, and, while the signs were there from the start, within months it evolved into a channel of shouty, sensationalist hyperbole that indulged cranky conspiracy theories and fringe nutters. The more sensible elements, such as Mr Neil himself, the excellent Colin Brazier and a few others were gone.
GB News is not a ‘news’ channel as such. It does not contain proper-length news bulletins that consist of facts and analysis. Nor is there much in the way of thoughtful debate.
It appears that its main purpose is to get people wound up about a small pool of topics, thereby creating clips that are then shared on social media. The topics in question are the same ones over and over again – Harry and Meghan, the boats crossing the channel, the health of members of the Royal Family, Covid conspiracies, the World Economic Forum plot to take over the planet and a few others.
And boy, does it love a conspiracy. There is little tangible evidence that the Covid vaccine has been anything other than a widespread success – the recent ITV drama Breathtaking was a solemn reminder of how we lost many good doctors, nurses and other hospital staff to Covid.
The vaccine was rolled out speedily and efficiently, thanks largely to the UK not being in the EU’s procurement programme (why don’t Brexiteers make more of this?) and high levels of uptake mean that while Covid will probably always be with us, for most people it is now little more than a cold or at worst an unpleasant dose of flu.
But by watching GB News, one would think Covid never really existed and that the vaccine has been an unmitigated disaster that has caused large numbers of deaths. There is no serious evidence to back this up, but they keep pushing the line regardless.
When pulled up by Ofcom, GB News turns this, itself into a conspiracy. The regulator’s rules are clear – a serving MP cannot be a newsreader, but he or she can host a current affairs programme. Put simply, if Jacob Rees-Mogg had handed over to the NEWSREADER when a story was breaking during his programme, he would have got away with it. The conspiracy theorists have little to say about Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy being investigated for similar on his LBC radio show. It says a lot about GB News that production staff are not properly versed on such rules.
Conspiracies make for clickbait, but this certainly has not translated into profit. GB News recorded operating losses of £42.4m in its most recent accounts, representing a 38% increase on the year before. It has reported total losses since launch of £76m. It is a very long way indeed from reaching profitability and no sensible measures are being proposed to turn it around.
The channel is, in effect, being bankrolled by hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall and investment firm Legatum. Marshall recently stood down from the board of GB News’s parent company as he steps up his bid to purchase the Daily Telegraph. There is little evidence that he understands the news media or how to manage such a company effectively. Those close to him say he is motivated primarily by a fundamentalist Christian desire to influence British society. Targeting a channel at the cranky fringes of the political spectrum who are taken in by the various GB News rabbit holes is a very strange way of going about it.
Morale behind the scenes at GB News is at rock bottom. Production staff come and go at quick-speed. There is little attempt to hire and retain top-quality producers. Unreasonable demands are made of the staff in terms of working hours and lack of expenses. In short, a weekend producer asking for an extra fiver because, for instance, their tube fare has gone up can forget it, but they find £29,290.47 per month to pay Jacob Rees-Mogg to host a one-hour show for four nights per week. He’s estimated to be worth around £100 million already.
Last week, Frangopoulos announced GB News’s first redundancy round as it seeks to trim 40 roles from its 295-strong workforce, a cut of around 14%.
40 redundancies would save enough cash to fund the channel for around 25 days at the current burn rate. Whichever way you look at it, GB News’s business model is ludicrous.
But to go back to the sensationalist, shouty, clickbait-chasing nature of GB News. The key point being, there is little to no actual news on the channel, just lots of people, some of them, like Neil and Christine Hamilton, very silly or disgraced, giving us their opinions.
Nor do they really make any effort to get to the heart of a story. Take the issue of criminal gangs orchestrating boat crossings on the English Channel as an example.
If you relied on GB News for your information, you would believe that boats are arriving in Kent from Calais each day and the migrants are taken to five-star hotels to live a life of luxury.
This is mostly nonsense. The vast majority of migrants are placed in contingency accommodation such as a hotel, which offers meals. If this is the case, they are eligible for £8.24 per week to cover clothes, non-prescription medication and travel.
If their application for asylum support is granted, theoretically an asylum seeker is moved from initial accommodation to dispersal accommodation, which is usually a furnished flat or house away from London or the south-east of England.
If they get this kind of self-catering accommodation, they can also get £40.85 per week for each person in their household on a prepaid card, to pay for things like food, clothing and toiletries. Children and pregnant women get an extra £3 to £5 per week on top of that and there’s a one-off £300 maternity payment available to those with a baby due in eight weeks or less or have a baby under six weeks old.
These are the facts. But you would never know it from watching GB News. And yes, I agree that the danger of not being able to identify those making the crossings poses a risk in terms of allowing extremists into the country, but the narrative that goes unchallenged on GB News all too often that this is a Muslim plot to take over the country is a very silly one.
So how did the five-star hotel conspiracy get going? This is actually quite easy to explain – not that GB News would be very interested in giving you the rational explanation.
It dates back to the start of the pandemic. What actually happens in five-star hotels during normal circumstances? Weddings, conferences, spa trips, exhibitions and so on. All such things were cancelled during lockdown.
Most asylum seekers are initially housed in hostel-style accommodation, sleeping several to a room, with shared washing and dining areas. This would not have been safe during lockdowns due to social distancing rules.
In other words, the ‘five-star hotel’ scenarios came about due to a ‘perfect storm’ of the hotels themselves not being able to do business in the normal way, and the usual hostel-style accommodation for asylum seekers being unsafe.
I tolerated GB News for a long time, in the hope it would improve, or, perhaps a better way of putting it is to say in the hope it would grow up.
But for me, the final straw came on 15 March. They say ‘a little local knowledge goes a long way’, but that was something clearly lacking from Patrick Christys’s programme that evening.
Christys chaired a discussion about migrants apparently being moved to a site close to my home in Cardiff Bay. Among his guests was one of the founders of a cranky fringe group called Voice of Wales, known for posting online video interviews with all kinds of conspiracy theorists, while expressing admiration for the likes of Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox. Their YouTube channel has long since been closed down. These are not reliable people.
But there was a ‘laugh out loud’ moment that really sealed it for me. I know the area in question very well indeed, and these are the the facts: There is a large IKEA store, and to the west of it is derelict land where gasworks stood long ago.
Some time ago, a small number of basic flats, not particularly high-rise, were built on part of the land. These have been used to house homeless people and, quite possibly, some asylum seekers. On the remainder of the derelict land, chalet-like accommodation is being built at the moment for a similar purpose.
My ‘laugh out loud’ moment came when this computer-generated graphic appeared during this interview on Christys’s programme, and I’ll explain why below:
The graphic is hilarious, because it bares no resemblance to what is actually there. The IKEA is real, as is the disused gas holder on the left. But on the forefront of the picture, where the flats and the chalets are is a very large retail park, containing a car park and shops such as Lidl, B&M, Home Bargains and Iceland.
The actual flats are: 1. Nowhere near as high as those on the right of the picture. 2. In a completely different location anyway, to the left of the picture near the IKEA.
Short of demolishing a very large, popular retail park to build these flats and chalets, it simply isn’t going to happen.
Here is what is actually on the site:
As you can see, a small number of flats have been built next to the IKEA mini-roundabout and the out-of-shot disused gas holder. A modest number of one-floor chalets are being built on disused land north of the gas holder where the gasworks once stood.
But, as is clear from the second image, the retail park is alive and well, with a relatively full car park and plenty of shops. I already know this, because I visit at least one of the shops most days.
The deception goes further than that. Last weekend, it was a sunny day and I spent a bit of time relaxing in the park on the far left of the picture. As I left, I walked along the pathway by the former gasworks and I went through the area where those not-very-high-rise flats are by IKEA.
There was nothing much of interest to see. One of the flats had a window open and some rather cheery music was playing, though not excessively loudly. I could see people inside some of the flats, but there was nothing worthy of comment.
People around here won’t be particularly outraged by the prospect of somebody from Sudan moving in, as GB News and Voice of Wales want us to be. We live among one of Britain’s oldest and best-integrated Muslim communities.
They rub along very well with others and there is nothing to fear (no doubt GB News will find a conspiracy of some sort for me pointing that out). We also have Hindus, Sikhs, Irish people and all kinds of other groups living in the area, going back to the days when Cardiff had the busiest docks in the world.
Yes, there are serious problems with lack of integration in other parts of the country, and we should not underestimate that, but to stir up problems where there are few (if any) is grossly irresponsible of GB News.
There is a wider, even more important point to be made on this: I know this story to be ludicrous because it is very close to my home. If they are trying to grossly mislead me on this, what else are they grossly misleading me about, in parts of the country I don’t know so well?
To end where we began: Yes, there is a need for a news broadcast outlet that is patriotic, non London-centric, non-woke, and that doesn’t patronise or condescend those who support Brexit or have legitimate concerns about uncontrolled mass immigration.
We could also do with such an outlet having a far greater understanding of economics and the private sector than the mainstream broadcast media has, and be less averse to the advantages of Thatcherism and Reaganism.
But any hopes that GB News will fill that void are gone. It is a channel for the cranks and the conspiracy theorists, and its business model is every bit as ludicrous as its content. Serious, patriotic, conservative-minded people ought to stop defending it.
Written by Marcus Stead
April 25, 2024 at 4:51 am
Posted in Business, Cardiff, Comment, Opinion, Politics, Uncategorized