Politics

AM calls for sweeping changes

Published

7 years ago

April 6, 2018

Neil McEvoy: The Welsh establishment don't want change

“IT’S BEEN a disastrous year for Welsh Democracy.”

Those were the eye-catching words with which controversial Cardiff AM Neil McEvoy spoke about the need for a new campaign group within Plaid Cymru.

Suspended from membership of his party and expelled from the Party of Wales’ Assembly group after demanding access to information held about him under the Data Protection Act after Plaid made a complete hash of an investigation into allegations made against him by a firm of lobbyists, Mr McEvoy was not talking about his own experiences.

Fed up of what he regards as nepotism and systemic corruption within the Welsh body-politic, Mr McEvoy offered a series of trenchant analyses of Wales’ political and social problems.

And he started by referring to the dismissal of the late Cabinet Secretary for Communities, Carl Sargeant.

Neil McEvoy writes: It took just three anonymous complaints about a Welsh Government Cabinet Secretary – which were not investigated, not proven, not deemed serious enough to go to the police or even written down. They led to him being sacked and judged guilty by the mob, without the opportunity to defend himself. We know the rest.

The Permanent Secretary of the Civil Service is refusing to release documents that the democratically elected National Assembly has demanded. I’ve had to invoke a clause in the Government of Wales Act used for the first time, to force the publication of the report into the Carl Sargeant leak, because I am not going to sit in our Senedd and let Wales be disrespected.

My motion is supported by the Conservatives and even UKIP, but we have to wait until after recess for Plaid Cymru to confirm if they will or will not back my motion. For the sake of the Welsh National Interest, I hope they do.

Investigations into the First Minister’s involvement into the shoddy sacking affair are being whitewashed. We’ve been hearing about a toxic culture at the heart of Welsh Government. When we campaigned for the Welsh Assembly is this where anyone thought it would end up?

Plaid Cymru – the Party of Wales – has to rise above this kind of politics and lead the way.

FREE SPEECH UNDER THREAT

Neil McEvoy had strong words about the threat posed to free speech in Wales.

Nowadays, being offended is almost a hobby for some people. They’re dismissed as virtue signallers in many parts of the world. But they don’t get dismissed in Wales. They actually make it onto the news. Too many of them have made it into our Assembly. Mock outrage everywhere on Twitter from politicians who joke about the same things in private.

The reality is that we have imported America’s culture war into Welsh politics. Instead of uniting people we’re dividing people up. Some people are said to be oppressors, simply because of their gender or race. People talk about male white privilege. Are white men in the valleys privileged? Really?

In Wales, we should know where the oppressor is, because it’s been the same for a thousand years. It’s the elite in London who have taken the wealth from our country to make themselves rich while keeping us poor.

It’s the new elite in the Bay Bubble, copying their London masters.

I’m not interested in turning people against each other because of their gender, or their race, or their sexual orientation. I know what my political purpose is. It’s addressing the injustice of our country being exploited for centuries.

WE MUST DEFEAT THE ELITE

We have to defeat the elites, they are very powerful people. They’re the political elites that don’t represent us. The London media elite that doesn’t talk about us, unless they have something condescending or negative to say. The financial elite that keeps their money off shore, so we can’t benefit from it.

But where are we now? I was thrown out of the Plaid group for questioning why we can’t sell council houses so long as the money is used to buy new ones. That’s a really popular policy that has helped tens of thousands of working class people own their own home and become independent. That’s real sovereignty as far as I’m concerned, because how can you ever be sovereign when someone else owns the house you live in?

The establishment here has had warnings. The huge rise in the UKIP vote. It didn’t matter how incompetent they were. The less competent the better in order to send a message to the establishment. And they beat us in so many elections as a result.

The Brexit referendum. The establishment didn’t see it coming. They couldn’t understand that faced with voting for the status quo or voting for the unknown, then people would pick the unknown, because that risk was better than keeping things the way they are. I voted remain but I can tell you, I understand why so many people didn’t and I’m not judging anybody for that.

A lot of people voted leave because of immigration, and there is a migration problem in Wales. Our political Leaders choose not to talk about it. Because our economy is bad, our young, talented and economically active people have to leave. And they’re replaced by older, economically inactive people because Wales is a cheaper, more beautiful place to retire.

The best thing we can do about this is become wealthy. That way the young people stay and it will be the talented, economically active people coming to our country because of the opportunities we’ll have here.

DANGER FOR THE ASSEMBLY

People are crying out for change, but nobody is providing it. The establishment in Wales don’t want change. The status quo is working great for them so they’ll fight to keep it.

What we need is equality of opportunity, which means ending nepotism and ending corruption, because nothing hurts equal opportunity more than nepotism and corruption. You can see that in Cardiff Bay. Millions dished out to the third sector, who often seem to spend a lot but deliver little. Those organisations are packed with Labour members.

We’ve got lobbyists running rampant in Cardiff Bay, selling access and information to the highest bidder. Anyone who gets in their way is smeared in the most personal and damaging way. These people are poisoning our democracy and must be dealt with.

But how can we when we’ve had the same Labour party in charge in Wales for 20 years? That’s not healthy for any democracy.

I can tell you where this is heading. People will not be voting for a sovereign Wales in future. They’ll be voting to abolish the Assembly. Because they’re looking at what’s going on and they’re thinking the Assembly is too broke to fix. But too many of us worked too hard to get a national parliament to see it fail like this.

So what are we going to do about it? We are going to get organised and we are going to change the direction of this party, change the direction of its politics and change people’s minds about voting for us. We’re going to propel Wales forward.

News

Campaigners urge Welsh Government to adopt proportional representation for Local Elections

Published

7 hours ago

November 14, 2024

Tom Sinclair

CAMPAIGNERS are calling on the Welsh Government to introduce the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system for local elections, following moves by two councils to shift away from the First Past the Post (FPTP) system being blocked on technical grounds.

Yesterday (Nov 14), Ceredigion Council voted narrowly, with an 18 to 17 majority, in favor of adopting STV. This follows Gwynedd Council’s decision last month, where 65% of councillors backed the move. However, both councils have been prevented from implementing STV due to a requirement for a two-thirds majority under the Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act 2021.

In recent consultations, public support for STV has been overwhelming, with over 70% in Gwynedd and 67% in Ceredigion favoring the change. Only Powys Council rejected the proposal, despite 60.5% of its respondents supporting STV. Campaigners argue that the current system deprives voters of representation, citing that over 100,000 people were denied a vote in the 2022 elections due to uncontested seats.

The Electoral Reform Society Cymru (ERS Cymru) highlights the contrast with Scotland, where the introduction of STV for local elections in 2007 has significantly reduced uncontested seats. According to ERS Cymru, Scotland has had fewer uncontested seats in the last four elections combined than Gwynedd Council recorded alone in 2022.

Jess Blair, Director of ERS Cymru, said:

“Decisions made in council chambers affect everyone in those areas, so every vote should count. It’s absurd that councils choosing STV are blocked by a technicality, leaving them stuck with an outdated system that denies representation to thousands. The Welsh Government must act to avoid repeating the undemocratic outcomes of the last elections.”

Campaigners are now calling on the Welsh Government to introduce STV across all councils in Wales, ensuring representation that reflects the electorate’s wishes.

Politics

Alarm over Wales’ domestic violence ‘epidemic’

Published

9 hours ago

November 14, 2024

Chris Haines, ICNN Senedd reporter

DOMESTIC violence against women and girls is the scourge of Wales and a national emergency, Senedd Members warned.

Mabon ap Gwynfor said Welsh police reported more than 45,000 cases of domestic abuse in 2022/23 and almost 10,000 sexual offences the previous year, with many more unrecorded.

Leading a Senedd debate, the Plaid Cymru politician challenged a tendency to believe rural Wales is an exception, with domestic abuse “limited” to urban areas only.

“The evidence shows otherwise,” he said. “Rates of domestic abuse in north Wales are higher than those in the city of London.

“North Wales even faces the same level of sexual crimes as Greater Manchester, which has a population five times the size.”

Mr ap Gwynfor added: “I am afraid the election of President Trump in the US is going to make things much worse as he makes misogynistic attitudes acceptable again.”

He said victims wait a year for support in Cardiff or Merthyr but four months in Swansea, asking: “How can we justify someone’s trauma being dependent on a postcode lottery?”

He told the Senedd that 16 children per 1,000 in north Wales are being seen by sexual assault referral centres compared with a rate of 2.9 per 1,000 in London.

Mr ap Gwynfor said the NSPCC found one in five children have experienced domestic violence, with Childline Cardiff holding 4,000 counselling sessions in the past year.

Calling for urgent devolution, he warned that prosecution statistics suggest sexual violence has effectively been legalised, with victims let down and public trust eroded.

Labour’s Joyce Watson said a vigil will be held outside the Senedd on November 25 to mark White Ribbon Day, the international day for ending violence against women and children.

Ms Watson highlighted her party’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls over the next decade, calling for funding from Westminster to further the aim in Wales.

She told the Senedd: “It is a national threat and it is an epidemic. There’s no getting away from that. It’s deep-rooted, it’s wide-reaching.”

Sioned Williams raised the NSPCC’s calls for sustainable long-term funding for specialist support for children and young people who are survivors of domestic violence.

Her Plaid Cymru colleague Luke Fletcher warned of the “corrosive” effect of social media, calling for a crackdown on misogynistic content targeted at young men.

Responding to the debate on November 13, Jane Hutt pointed to progress made in tackling violence against women and girls but she recognised “so much more needs to be done”.

Ms Hutt, who is Wales’ social justice secretary, highlighted horrifying statistics from July showing that two million women in the UK are victims of male violence every year.

She described domestic violence as a national emergency, with one woman killed by a man every three days and the number of recorded offences up 37% in the past five years.

She hailed the 20th anniversary of the Live Fear Free helpline, a free 24/7 service run by Welsh Women’s Aid and funded by the Welsh Government.

Ms Hutt said she raised evidence of failures in the justice system with Jess Phillips during a meeting with the UK minister

Politics

Senedd debates Eluned Morgan’s first 100 days as First Minister

Published

16 hours ago

November 14, 2024

Chris Haines, ICNN Senedd reporter

SENEDD members debated Eluned Morgan’s record following her first 100 days, with the First Minister rejecting claims she has failed to stand up for Wales.

Andrew RT Davies led a Conservative debate on the eve of November 14, which marks Eluned Morgan’s hundredth day in office.

He accused the First Minister of letting the country down, pointing to the withdrawal of the universal winter fuel allowance for pensioners and warnings of 4,000 premature deaths.

The leader of the opposition also criticised Labour’s decision to raise national insurance contributions for employers, with unemployment in Wales at 5.3% and rising.

Mr Davies said 4,000 patients have been added to NHS waiting lists since the First Minister took office in August, with a total of 614,000 people now waiting for treatment.

He told the Senedd: “That is a damning indictment of government failure here …. That is not standing up for patients here in Wales, it’s not standing up for clinicians, and it’s not standing up, importantly, for the workforce.”

Rhun ap Iorwerth said Baroness Morgan’s first 100 days have shown little evidence of a change in direction from the Welsh Government.

The Plaid Cymru leader said: “By any objective measure, nothing has fundamentally changed in those 100 days.”

He said Baroness Morgan has no plan to grow the economy nor tackle a crisis in the NHS.

Mr ap Iorwerth accused the First Minister of failing to make the case for replacing the Barnett formula, devolving the Crown Estate, and compensating Wales for HS2 spending.

He said: “I’m afraid that what we’ve seen is Labour in Welsh Government, under the new First Minister, shifting into the mode of defending their masters at Westminster….

“A fundamental difference between Plaid Cymru and Labour is that we will never let Westminster diktat hamper our ambitions for Wales.”

Labour’s Hefin David was unconvinced by the 100-day measure of success, which was coined by former US President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

He said: “It worked for him; I’m not sure it’s going to work so much across modern politics, which moves so quickly and so differently.”

He suggested the next Senedd election in 18 months will be a much better yardstick.

The Caerphilly Senedd Member pointed out that Wales’ first female First Minister, from Ely, Cardiff, one of the poorest parts of the UK, succeeded against the odds.

Describing Baroness Morgan as a “listening First Minister”, Dr David joked: “She’s the only First Minister who gives me a cwtch every time I see her. I can see Mark Drakeford getting a little worried there. I’m not expecting anything, finance minister.

“But I do think it demonstrates the warmth of Eluned Morgan.”

Responding to the debate, Eluned Morgan reeled off a list of achievements including £28m to cut waiting times, £13m on better end of life care and a new north Wales medical school.

She said £7.7m has been invested in a specialist burns and plastic surgery centre at Swansea’s Morriston Hospital, serving ten million people from Aberystwyth to Oxford.

Baroness Morgan lauded a “landmark” £1bn investment in the redevelopment of Shotton Mill, Deeside, protecting 137 jobs and creating 220 more.

She claimed the Labour Welsh and UK Governments also secured a better deal for Tata steelworkers, accusing the Tories of failing to budget for a £80m transition fund.

“This is a lengthy list,” she said. “But it could be longer and it will be longer as we continue to deliver…. The first 100 days demonstrates how Welsh Labour is delivering real investment, real jobs, real support for communities – not promises and pledges but delivery.

“I am so proud of everything this government has already delivered since I became First Minister and I’m optimistic about what we can achieve as we move forward.”