AS 2014 wends its weary way towards 2015, Badger has glanced back over it to pick out his favourite morsels of news. Rather like juicy worms, stories keep on sticking their heads up, demanding Badger’s voracious attention. There is one story above all others about which Badger wants to speak with his readers. It is one on which Badger has spoken with you on a number of occasions over the year and a story to which he expects to return in the future. The petty idiocies of our county councillors are pretty small beer compared to the way the Welsh Government, and its all too biddable flunkies and placemen in local health boards across Wales have torn the heart out of communities.

Pembrokeshire is not alone in fi nding small community facilities, which we all might have taken for granted over the years, taken away with the stroke of a bean-counter’s pen. Cardiff is not much over 100 miles distant from most of Pembrokeshire. But as far as the Welsh Government’s ministers are concerned, we – and the other parts of Wales outside Cardiff Bay, beyond the M4 – may as well be on The Moon. To technocrats like Mark Drakeford, everyone outside the drones and party hacks to which they belong are laboratory samples, whose lives are rather like that of bacteria. Too numerous to eliminate, we poor specimens can be experimented upon without fear of upsetting those in the Valleys and old industrial towns of Wales who would elect a donkey if it wore a red rosette.

And, if you look at the current Welsh Cabinet, readers, it is evident most of those places have done just that. Our communities – not theirs – are the crucible in which Welsh Labour gets to test the notion of turning a glorified local authority – the Senedd – into a malign and immanent presence in our lives. Badger is a fi rm believer in Wales’ right to determine its own future. But bloody hell, readers, the current barmy army in the Bay sorely test his resolve on the issue! The truth is that the Welsh Government is too cowardly to tell people the truth: their ‘reforms’ are cuts.

Earlier this year, Welsh Government ministers were too lily-livered meet the protesters who had travelled to the Senedd by the coach load. Neither have they dared to show their faces to the public in Pembrokeshire since. Perhaps, and Badger is giving them the benefi t of a very large doubt, they are just too ashamed. The Local Health Board is no more than the blunt instrument– oh so very blunt, readers – with which the Welsh Government has beaten down local health care in our county. The Board plays a complex game with language always saying precisely what it means while leading others to reach a separate understanding.

Then, when the proverbial hits the fan, when the Board takes an action which results in protest, it is able to say that its position has been in the public domain for ages without protest and it is all too late to do anything about it now. Trevor Purt it was, in an interview with this newspaper’s editor, who tried that one on for size. With evident annoyance, he said that if the Board lost the then pending judicial review proceedings about specialist maternity services, it would simply run the consultation process again to ensure that it got the result it wanted.

What does that attitude say to you about the good faith with which the Health Board ran the consultation process? Rather like a stage magician, Trev the Magnifi cent wanted you to pick a card – to pick any card – to pick his card. Of course, having gutted healthcare in Pembrokeshire like a fi sh, Trev the Magnificent shortly thereafter decamped to Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board, there to try and perform his favourite trick of sawing a hospital in half. It worked in Rochdale, it’s working at Withybush: Trev the Magnifi cent is less an NHS executive than the grim reaper. Where he goes, service closures follow.

A new Chief Executive starts at our Local Health Board in the New Year. The question is how will he deal with Trev’s toxic legacy of resentment, mistrust and pig-headed indifference to the public? Frankly readers, such is the state to which essential services have been reduced in Pembrokeshire, will he even bother to try? Well, readers, back in the summer the Health Board appointed a new Chair: Bernardine Rees and from her actions we are well able to discern the Board’s direction of travel. There will be no more hiding away. Instead Bernadine has come out swinging with a new line. She wants to make it clear that she is a new broom determined to sweep clean. But there is a problem.

A stonking great big one right at the outset. Bernardine has deluded herself that the Board’s problem is communication. If only, the rationale goes, if only the Board could get its message through that taking child healthcare out of Pembrokeshire is a good thing. If only it could get its message through that consultant-led maternity services are unnecessary anywhere west of Carmarthen. If only all those beastly protesters and media types would stop being so beastly and let the Board tell people the good news about its slashing cuts to health services. It’s all a question of perception, see readers. And for good measure a new factor has been thrown into the mix.

The Board has now cynically adopted a plan to silence protesters by telling them that their campaigns are driving down staff morale – particularly that of the nursing staff. The Board is relying on public unwillingness to hurt the feelings of those who deliver care to throw its critics off the scent. They are using those at the sharp end as a shield to protect the Welsh Government’s blunt instrument from justifi able criticism about its past cynical double-dealing and snide manoeuvring. Look to the future, Bernardine says; judge my words on the Board’s actions. If one was judging on the message being promulgated by the Board since she took over, we can see a new aggressive and hectoring tone to the Board’s relationship with the outside world.

The Board’s claim that its problems are all the fault of the media and campaigners is self-serving tripe being dished up a body that has manag e d to lose the m o r a l argument w h i l e w i n n i n g the battle on the ground. The Board’s line is so far beneath contempt that when those who peddle it look up they see not the stars but the ceiling of the sewer. The problems Bernardine Rees faces as a new broom, readers are both that she is decidedly second-hand and that, such is the mistrust with which the Board is viewed in Pembrokeshire, it is not a new broom which is required. Rather, it will take an industrial vacuum hose to suck the poison out of the Board’s past relationship with Pembrokeshire. As a consequence, the Board had better start sincerely sucking up to Pembrokeshire very, very soon.