No ban on Lawson Sir: You write that the BBC ‘has effectively banned’ Lord Lawson from items on climate change unless introduced with ‘a statement discrediting his views’ (Leading article, 12 July). There’s a lot of muddled reporting of this story. Lord Lawson hasn’t been in any sense ‘banned’, and the Editorial Complaints Unit finding didn’t suggest that he shouldn’t take part in future items.
In England, success in life is bound up with where you went to school. In Wales, where I come from, the standard of education can be so miserable that you’d do better to get expelled. I did. I’d just spent three days in ‘isolation’ in my south Wales comprehensive — banished to a cubicle with a CCTV camera — for misbehaviour. As I left the grounds, I lit a cigarette. A teacher accosted me. I got lippy and she smacked me across the face. I was expelled soon after. Thank God. If you want good schooling in Wales, you’d be best to go private. If you’re taken ill, make sure you’re treated in the English NHS, not the Welsh version. If you want a private-sector job, best leave Wales. You get the picture.
Ed Miliband is in Wales with the Shadow Cabinet today, and they've been busy praising the Labour government there for 'leading the whole of the United Kingdom into economic recovery'. It's interesting that the Westminster Labour party is so keen to hang out with Welsh Labour, as doing so simply allows the Tories to attack Miliband again for admiring a party with a rather mixed record in government. The Welsh government has presided over a 16 per cent drop in the number of affordable homes being built from 2011/12 to 2012/13. One house builder, Persimmon, has stopped building in parts of Wales because the planning regulations there are so burdensome.
Independence is a fringe issue in Wales. Just 12 per cent of Welsh voters support it, and that figure has been stubbornly consistent. But it is far from implausible that within a decade Wales could find itself standing alone, not through any conviction that independence is the best bet, but because the UK has marginalised Wales. Wales is in a weak negotiating position already, as the Scottish referendum campaign has shown. Take the Barnett Formula, which adjusts the amount of money received from the Treasury by Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. An expert commission, led by respected economist Gerald Holtham, pointed out that if Wales were treated on the same basis as an English region it would get some £300million more a year.
Today, Labour in Wales celebrate 15 years in power. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, party members will congratulate themselves on what a fantastic job they’re doing. First Minister Carwyn Jones claims his administration represents a ‘living, breathing example of what the party can achieve in power’. Labour leader Ed Miliband agrees. He says ‘we have a great deal to learn from the things that Carwyn and his government are doing’. On housing, on health, on education, on people’s spending power – Labour certainly talks the talk. But in Wales, where they have had ample time to prove themselves, are they living up to Labour's big promises?
The Maria Miller problem is not going away for the government. Tory MPs who went back to their constituencies over the weekend have come back to Westminster depressed about how big the issue is playing on the doorstep. There is fear that the whole story is playing straight into Nigel Farage's hands. The 2010 intake are particularly concerned about the level of public anger over the issue. David Cameron has always prided himself on not giving scalps to the press. This is why I'd still be surprised if Miller went before the reshuffle. But her prospects in that reshuffle are looking far glummer today than they did on Thursday. In the present circumstances, sending her to the Welsh Office would look like an insult to Wales.
If politics was science, you would call Wales the ‘control’ group, for public service reform. Here is a country where Labour are the only game in town and a socialist philosophy which places a monopolistic state provider at the centre of health care and education reigns supreme – yes, even more supreme than the pupils and patients this system is designed to serve. In fact, in devolved Wales, Labour are running the public services as Ed Milliband would like to see them; a Labourite utopia of State supremacy, with none of the so-called evils of alternative providers getting in the way of the tight grip of the State. So how is this socialist utopia going, then? If a recent Question Time from Newport is anything to go by, not so good.
Bitcoins have been in the news, after a story about an unfortunate fellow who jettisoned his computer’s hard drive that contained (apparently) the code he needed to access his stash of this electronic currency — its value more than £4 million. I don’t even pretend to have an opinion on bitcoins. I only just, and most imperfectly, understand what this electronically traded currency is and why it appeals to people. But it has got me thinking. A bitcoin is a single currency, a global currency, a currency beyond the reach or control of national governments around the world. In theory (unless governments try to ban the bitcoin) it would be politician-proof.
The UK government knows that it plays into the SNP’s hands if it does anything which could be seen as trying to bully the Scots into voting no to independence. So, it has not said that the Scots would not be able to use sterling after independence but merely stated that this would be an issue for the rest of the UK too. The Welsh First Minister, though, has now come out and said that he would veto the creation of a sterling zone. This intervention by Carwyn Jones is one that the UK government had been waiting for, and expecting. It gets the message across without risking the accusation of bully-boy tactics or allowing the SNP to attack Westminster.
Something quite remarkable happened last week. David Cameron proposed a major change to the constitutional fabric of the United Kingdom and barely anyone noticed. The fact that Cameron’s proposal, subject to a referendum, to let the Welsh Assembly vary income tax rates garnered so little interest is a sign of how inured we have become to constitutional tinkering. But these constant constitutional changes are putting the Union at risk. If Scotland votes no to independence that won’t, as I say in the column this week, be an end to the matter. Everyone from Cameron to the Better Together campaign have reassured the Scots that if they vote no, more powers will be devolved to them. Tactically this is the best way to limit the yes vote, but strategically it is a mistake.
Rhys Davies was a Welsh writer in English who lived most of his life in London, that Tir na nÓg in the east, the place of eternal youth and beauty to which in the mid-20th century many Welsh writers in English, adulterers and homosexuals ran. There were few chapels in London, but many bedsits. Also publishers. And guardsmen. Here Davies followed a career unique by Welsh standards, for he did not sell milk or teach. For 50 years he just wrote.
Thuggish footballer turned terrible actor Vinnie Jones has gone all man-down-the-pub over the state of the nation. Speaking from his LA home to the Radio Times, the US immigrant said: ‘There's nothing to come back to here. To me, England is past its sell-by date. It's not the country I grew up in. It's a European country now. If someone blindfolded you and put you on a plane in LA, and you landed at Heathrow and they took it off, you wouldn't have a clue where you were. I just think we should get our own house in order before we open our doors. It's mind-boggling to me.’ After giving England two smoking barrels, is it pedantic of me to remind all concerned that Jones played international matches in red rather than white?
I haven’t used Yahoo as a general search engine since an American friend introduced me to the miracle that was Google in November 2000, but I do use Yahoo Finance for share price data, and the clunky BT Yahoo email service. All this points me to one conclusion: Yahoo is as middle-aged as I am, and the decision by hot new ex-Google chief executive Marissa Mayer to seek brand rejuvenation by buying the unprofitable blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion may not end well. It’s like me deciding to get one of those big, wavy ‘tribal’ tattoos on my neck: it might get me laid, but more likely it will make me look even more out of touch with the young.
‘Look what these bastards have done to Wales,’ Phil Bennett famously said in the dressing-room before a Five Nations match with their friends across the Severn in the mid-1970s. ‘They’ve taken our coal, our water, our steel. They buy our homes and only live in them for a fortnight every year. What have they given us?’ Someone could have piped up at that point, Life of Brian-style, and suggested the Severn Bridge. But they didn’t of course. Bennett, that maestro of a fly half, went on. ‘We’ve been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English — and that’s who you are playing this afternoon.
Wales, sadly is one of the poorest regions of the United Kingdom. GVA stands at 75 per cent that of the UK average. Just 1 in 16 people earn more than £35,000. There is an over reliance on the public sector, and we must boost growth in our private sector. Too often the approach seems to be to sit back and expect an outside investor to come in and provide our future success, but we need to harness the talent and the enterprise we have here already. Today, the Welsh Conservatives launched a new policy aimed at helping our striving small business owners to access finance – imperative for the growth, maintenance and success of any business – and in a way which is straightforward and local. Wales has an aspiring business community where 99.
Some mad black woman has been arrested for screaming racist abuse about white people on a London bus. She said repeatedly that she hated whites, and was only in this country because 'your fucking people brought my people here.' I assume the courts will have to send her to prison, just so that they can be seen to be even-handed. Jacqueline Woodhouse, a white woman, was sentenced to 21 weeks in chokey for being nasty about blacks and Asians, also on public transport. In fact there’s been a few of these cases recently, all dutifully filmed for YouTube, all taking place on trams or buses or trains. Perhaps the transport authorities should run special services for deranged racists where they can scream abuse to their hearts content without worrying about prosecution.
Forget London. Odds are that Boris will win re-election while Labour becomes the largest party on the GLA. There are far more exciting battles going on around the country. Here’s the state of play in 15 cities outside the M25: 1. Birmingham. After strong gains in 2011, Labour are looking to depose the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition and regain the overall majority they held here until 2003. They need just five gains to do so — and, with 18 Tory seats and 13 Lib Dem ones up, that shouldn’t prove too difficult. Both of the coalition parties are simply in damage limitation mode. 2. Glasgow. Labour held a majority here for three decades, but lost it just a few weeks ago through resignations.
The decision on whether or not to proceed with the HS2 rail link is expected on Tuesday. Given all the legal issues involved, the government is not making any public comment on the matter. But all the signs are that it will get the go-ahead. There will be quite considerable opposition to the projects from parts of the Tory party. It is highly likely that Cheryl Gillan, the Welsh Secretary who represents one of the seats that will have the line running through it, will resign over the matter. If she does, expect Maria Miller to replace her. Number 10 are keen not to see the number of women in the Cabinet fall and Miller is regarded as a safe pair of hands and Welsh enough to do the job.
The death of the four trapped miners in West Wales is obviously a desperate business. Desperate enough that some cads will try and use it to make political points, regardless of the nonsense of that.Anyway, here's Richard Burton on mining and, in some sense, on a Britain we'd mainly thought had mainly vanished until these recent events reminded us that is lingers on yet.
If you drive West out of Carmarthen on the A40, you pass through a landscape of dimpled hills and lonely chapels and little rivers full of salmon trout. This is Byron’s Country, the place where Byron Rogers was brought up in the late Forties, not knowing a word of English, until at the age of five he made the momentous journey a few miles east into Carmarthen town. It is a very odd place. In the graveyard at Cana, just beside the road, you will find the grave of Group Captain Ira Jones DSO, MC, DFC and bar, MM, one of Wales’s greatest war heroes. He was famous for killing Germans who had baled out and were dangling from their parachutes.
