And BartiDdu got really out of shape with Adam ...

... Higgit when he wrote :

... which disease is the most dangerous?  Welsh Nationalism or British Nationalism? ...

The  answer by Adam was "both types of nationalism are equally dangerous";  as the vast majority of democrats in our Britain would agree.

Our angry young (maybe old) man/woman then tried to insinuate that those that oppose his nationalism are nationalists themselves by writing ...

... those who deride Plaid Cymru and the like as ‘Nationalists’ are more often than not ‘Nationalists’ themselves, of the British variety.

... he reverts to "Fallacious Argument", by introducing the false rhetoric that there exists a British variety of nationalist akin to Plaid Cymru that Adam must belong to.


A dangerous lot the "separatist agenda" in Wales, based upon the rhetoric found amongst the nationalist in Wales commentating at Wales Home these past few days, how might the individual or non-BartiDdu-conformist fare were Plaid and its nationalist following able to gain power ?

... when BartiDdu writes ...

... at Wales Home "Personally I believe that large numbers of English people settling in Wales aren’t a problem providing that they integrate".

He is sending the message to people who might want to move from one part of Britain to his corner of our sceptred isle, they must adopt his/her conventions, there is no compromise, he/she doesn't seem to include other groups of people who might wish to become his neighbour, would he prefer the Somali community of Cardiff to remain in Cardiff, how would he react to "Somali" with a Welsh accent I wonder, with intolerance I would guess, if the sounds came from next door ...

... and how exactly does integrate pan out, is it BartiDdu's wish that people who come to live near him become clones of the past, does he realise that by remaining in the past the future is unobtainable.

He/she continued "If people are to move to Wales they should respect Wales, the culture, the history, the heritage etc".

This respect, I suspect, is little more than reflection on what he/she believes Wales should be, his/her culture, his/her interpretation of history, and his/her preferences of those parts of history that might be described as heritage, so for respect I might suggest that people moving near this man/woman should bring with them a huge spoonful of subservient obedience for the thoughts of  chairman BartiDdu, anything less would be regarded as not enough.

Would you have a conversation over a beer and sandwich on a lazy sunny afternoon with this parody of respectful coexistence, I doubt it if you are the thoroughly modern visitor to Wales, needs must that you leave "freedom of speech and expression" at Offa's Dyke,  and this is ...

... nationalism in Wales, an apartheid in waiting, there's nothing "pink and fluffy" amongst the modern day irregulars ... just the loud noise of intolerance.

Wales is punching above ...

... its weight, don't listen to the doom-mongers of the left, the sky isn't falling in, in fact we have two contenders in the top thirty, number 11 is at Cardiff Bay, and who would have thought Ebbw Vale could fight off the competition from the South and West of England and sit at at number 25.


At No. 11 we have Cadwaladers at Bute place, Mermaid Quay, Cardiff, this is where to go for the best ice-cream in Wales, have a peak into the business.


At No. 25 there is Sidolis at Bethcar Street, Ebbw Vale, Gwent, who would have thought there is a shining star of ice-cream excellence to be found amongst the remains of our Industrial revolution, well, for those who write of "Poor Wales", another company with good provenance is serving excellence in the market place.


Spoilt for choice, Cawaladers is found in 9 towns throughout Wales, whilst Sidolis sits in the South, its home since 1922.  

So we have 6% of the top ice-cream parlours with 5% of the British population, punching above our weight I believe.  

There is a man who is punching well above his weight, Adam Higgit at Wales Home, he has been fighting a rearguard action in a battle with the "separatist agenda", this is a man that the Welsh Assembly Government should be employing to organise the defence of  Wales against those that would take us to a dark corner, a corner that is probably not very democratic, and reading the comments attached to the thread "Is there really a linguistic Apartheid in Wales", very definitely xenophobic, bordering on the racist, and not very agreeable,  but only with regard to people like my wife and daughter, they were both born in England.

Y Teifi, non de plume of a separatist ...

... who would be lost without the politics of identity, I missed it earlier at Wales Home, possibly because it is "so last century" as my daughter would say, linked here, but duplicated below.

... and please don’t go back to the argument that the Welsh and the English are the same and therefore should be governed the same. It’s ignorant and insulting. I’d suggest that the English and the Germans are much more the same than the English are to the Welsh, possible unity with Germany maybe?

If the writer is able to read anything other than the "separatist agenda" tripe, I would direct him to the Prospect paper written by Stephen Oppenheimer titled "Myths of British ancestry", linked here.

Genetics demonstrates the British, that is everyone other than the most recent or distinct immigrants, are in fact so similar we are quite indistinguishable,  it is not "ignorant and insulting" to consider the peoples of England and Wales the same, it is "informed and courteous".

Because I doubt those of the "separatist agenda" would be interested in anything that would usurp their vision of an independent Wales, let me tell you, we are all Basque based, the English and the Welsh, the various invasions have diluted our precious bloodlines in a way that did little to alter our heritage, having said that, I welcome people from other parts of the world into Wales because they enrich our way of life, and so should the man who calls himself a river, Y Teifi.

Adam Higgit at Wales Home seems ...

... to be a lone voice in defence of the status quo (the vast majority of people in Wales) in the face of the "separatist agenda", although the separatist diatribe is tedious in the extreme it reflects very well the views of nationalists; the nationalist in this context are Plaid Cymru, Cymdeithas yr laith (Welsh language society) and the loose canon separatists of no-fixed abode.

Adam sums up the defence of the status quo when he writes ...

"All we need to is adjust the levers of government so as to give the maximum control at the lowest possible level. That should clearly be lower than the British level and lower than the Welsh level, since the variances in the different indices that have come up in this discussion are as great within Wales as between Wales and most of England.".

... it is a classic "Sicilian Defence", the King's Pawn Game, the king puts the people into battle by sleight of hand with the sufficient weapons to win the war, in this case the war for democracy.

There a very few members of the "separatist agenda", but the commentators at Wales Home represent the mentality that is a common thread, and they have a loud voice, to defeat this disparate group of political outlaws, this"Hole-in-the-Wall Gang", the government needs to shift the agenda of the majority from the politics of identity to the politics of the economy, without the politics of identity the "separatist agenda" have nothing ...............


I deliberately didn't contribute to the discussion because Cymdeithas yr laith (Welsh language society) supports direct action against individuals, criminal activities.

Wales always had a louder voice ...

... at Westminster, with the boundary changes comes a sense of equality ...

... a case where "less is more", less government is greater freedom, as I wrote in an earlier post Immanuel Kant said ...

‘Man(kind) is free if he(/she) needs obey no person but solely the laws.’

With less of them our politicians might focus their minds creating the scaffold upon which to hang our hard won freedoms, who needs micromanagement.

What's being said elsewhere ...

... can you imagine a world where Cymdeithas yr Iaith (Welsh Language Society) imposed its views on unwary democrats in society without a health warning, the latest diatribe can be found at Wales Home here, if you read it you might recognise a certain intolerance towards anything without the 28 character alphabet.

Well David, what about Cheryl ...

... and her assumed posture of angry defiance !

Recently a internal vacancy came about at the place I work, there were four candidates.  One candidate told me that if the job wasn't given to him he would leave.  After a series of interviews, during which consideration was given to his attempt at coercion, he wasn't chosen and he subsequently submitted his notice to leave, Friday is his last day.

At Westminster you have a similar dilemma, our Secretary of State for Wales has publicly stated that if she is not given a free vote she will resign the whip, its the case of the High-speed rail project that will link London to Birmingham and on to Manchester and Leeds, fair enough, she was elected by the people of the Chilterns, and like "Nimbys" the world over the people of the Chilterns would prefer it if the project passed through the backyards of someone else.

But she has made an attempt to coerce the government.

Ministers are reported to have said "It is about bringing the United Kingdom together. It is about closing the North-South gap and stimulating economic growth, a 21st-century infrastructure for a 21st-century country."  Not just a speed issue, but a socio-economic project to link those parts of Britain that will stimulate regional economies, Wales included if our local politicians are correct.

The local political voices around Cardiff Bay have been crass in their opposition to Cheryl Gillan because her constituency is not in Wales, I don't think it matters personally, after all Wales is Britain and Britain is Wales, anybody from any-part can be the Secretary of State for Wales as long as they have the necessary political skills, civil servants do the rest.

But back to Cheryl (do what I ask or I will cross the floor) Gillan, I'm sorry David, but if you do not let her go now the message you will send to the electorate will be a message of weakness, that's not why you were elected, if we wanted weak we could have voted for the Miliband tribe.

It's nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the High Speed train, that's for debate, it's all about who is in charge.

If she is not with you she is agin you, you should do as we did, let her go, you see, we marked our employee down because he was a bully in waiting, how are you going to mark Cheryl ?

Well no-one can accuse Plaid of being ...

... inconsistent.  The left wing tomfoolery, 1950's socialism by any other name, continue to produce evidence of its narrow unimaginative vision, it seems to pour from the fingertips of the "separatist agenda" like some honeyed but bitter medicine, the latest is the exhortation for the Labour Party to continue its "great leap forward" in the tradition of Mao Zedong, by keeping central control of those aspects of our lives that provide our local needs, the Local Authority.

Rhodri Glyn Thomas, AM for Carmarthen East, demonstrates the unswerving adherence to central control when he writes ...

"Labour need to ensure that they have a long term strategic vision for Welsh communities so that they don’t risk slipping into a situation where cross council delivery creates chaos for front-line services."

 ... the problem for this Plaid politician is a vision of the future where political control would be lost to him and his.

Might it be that the Labour Party of Carwyn Jones is releasing the bindings that have held Wales back in its search for a better social and economic tomorrow, whereas a year ago we might have written of the Labour Party ...

"the economic and political dominance of one group that does not share power and privilege in an egalitarian fashion"

... and this group would include the occasional political prosthetics of Kirsty Williams and Ieuan Wyn Jones hanging onto the shirt tails of the Labour Party.  But today the Labour Party could be about to relinquish some of its dominance by encouraging our Local Authorities to take up the mantle of service provision designed for the locality it serves, including shared services with other authorities, education from Offa's Dyke to the Gower with the Heads of the Valley as a northern boundary might be a possibility if our councillors have the stomach for cooperation, a little large possibly but an example of the possibilities of cooperation



So for the likes of the 2nd division resident at Tŷ Gwynfor, a message from Oscar Wilde ...

"consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative"

... and the separatist agenda is nothing if not consistent and unimaginative.

... government in Wales, with and without Plaid, are ...

... condemned as dictators without a compass in today's Western Mail ...

THE Welsh Government has been accused of having an “endemic” inability to see policies through as it “flits from one priority to the other”.

Two aspects of the accusation springs from the pages of our newspaper ...

1. endemic inability to see policies through
2. flits from one priority to another

Whilst the report is a discussion of Schools and pupil results, it is yet another demonstration that central statist control of society is failing the people of Wales.  Those of a certain age might remember reports in the British press during the 1950's and 60's, before and after the death of Stalin, where central decisions made in Moscow were rarely if ever achieved.  The strategy of the Soviet was to issue further directives, planning every aspect of life.

And here in Wales a half a century or more later the same is happening, fail with a short term objective and create another, and  WAG continues in its futile attempts at micromanaging every aspect of our lives.

Planning versus the Rule of Law, more than two centuries ago Immanuel Kant said ...

‘Man(kind) is free if he(/she) needs obey no person but solely the laws.’

... an example of how Wales failed the people of Wales by imposing extra costs (taxes) relates to the forthcoming "carrier bag levy", read it here, the planning methods applied are tardy to say the least, all that was necessary was a simple law that insisted that free bags given by retailers were compostable, no tax, no social complexity, the obligation would revert to the bag suppliers under severe penalty if non-compostable bags were supplied anywhere West of Offa's Dyke.

... if only our statist administration at Cardiff Bay could restrict itself to creating a scaffold of liberty and equality upon which the rest of us could construct our lives without interference.

Plaid, how did ...

... they elect leaders before it had elected politicians ?

Just wondering  ...  is there a precedent in the past for the young turks at the Autumn conference.

... democracy Peter Black, a reminder ...

... from the great political thinker de Tocqueville.

"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom," he said. "Democracy attaches all possible value to each man," ............ "while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude".  Said in 1848.

... and today in his blog Peter Black, I thought him the voice of the liberal tradition in Wales, became a tyrant when he wrote ...

"... that raises questions over Murdoch and his company being fit and proper people to own any media in this country. The Americans may be content with Fox News setting the agenda and targeting individual politicians but such practises are anti-democratic and need to be stamped out." ............... restraint and servitude of the left leaning politicians.

... it was the "fit and proper ... and ... stamped out" that quickened my pulse, a term that might be expected from a dictator but not the Welsh Assembly, or is PB taking notice of arch-dictator Edwina Hart.

I'm afraid any media organisation that might bring to book politicians and their associated party is a welcome addition to our fragile pseudo-democracy, such action is not anti-democratic, it is part of democracy, holding to account our elected representatives, if there is a problem  ...

... it is a question of monopoly in the UK media, as has been ably demonstrated by the Murdoch tribe, but monopoly is the enemy of both economics and democracy, and as such can be discouraged through strong monopoly legislation that also encourages competition, good legislation could cover all economic activity

Fortunately for the electorate PB is not involved in this particular legislative arena, else he might "stamp out" other freedoms we value so much.

If the monopoly question is addressed without fear or favour what happens to the BBC .....

Returning to "fit and proper", PB might like to consider the question of "requests for information", by and large ignored by certain ministers, would a WAG minister refuse a request from the Sunday Times I wonder.

Plaid has looked into the abyss, and ...

... the abyss has looked right back.  The abyss that looks back is British politics, Plaid politico has become just another political party of the left in Britain, fortunately for Britain, and unfortunately for Plaid, Britain has the Labour Party warts and all.

With Plaid politico relegated to the backwaters of North West Wales, there remains Plaid buffoonery, the party in the park, the pig in a poke that appeals to the disturbed, the "Separatist Agenda".  The separatist agenda is the wedge that has begun the process of destruction for the Plaid Cymru of 2011, what will rise phoenix like out of the ashes.

I have a single source within Plaid politico, and this source confirms that moves are being made by the buffoonery to change the rules that only allow an elected member of the party to lead Plaid Cymru, it is understand that during the autumn conference a move to change the constitution will be made.

The preferred candidate of the buffoonery is ner do well "Price of the USA", there is of course a fan club for the man, Bethan Jenkins and Leanne Wood to name two politicians and the political journalist Betsan Powys whom many believe to be a closet nationalist on first name terms with MH the buffoon in chief amongst Plaid political blogs, in the wings we can find ex-plaid chair John Dixon who might be considered the early catalyst for the Plaid disintegration when he resigned the chair.

Peter Black highlighted the poor quality of Plaid politicians earlier today, when he highlighted our erstwhile Plaid politician Bethan Jenkins calling Martin Shipton by the name of Matt Withers, she was twittering at the time, could that be the excuse of a twit.

For those whose studies did not include Nietzsche, he's a tricky sucker at the best of times, his abyss is explained to us normal mortals as ...

"The abyss looks back at you means that when you begin to know something that is fundamentally different from yourself, you take a piece of it with you and it changes you."

Plaid has changed and the young turks want it back.

The Hellenic Republic has no clothes ...

... can no-one see it.

When Greece was provided with a second huge rescue deal of €109 billion (£95 billion), including €37 billion from the private sector and a significant lowering of interest rates, the circumstances changed not one jot, the country that is Greece does not have the wherewithal to support this European Union largess. 

In the grand scheme of things, would it be such a disaster if Greece defaulted and left the Euro, well individual banks would feel the effect, but so they should, loans were given to a country without a real economy.  Greece is a country that suffers from high levels of political and economic corruption and low global competitiveness relative to its EU partners, were the banks asleep when money was thrown around like so much confetti at a wedding.

I wonder if the Euro is a busted flush, it has all the hallmarks, a family at Christmas coming together to celebrate despite being of different religions, including the atheist step-brother who only pops in to exchange gifts, or in the case of the United Kingdom giving support through the proxy that is the IMF.

Do the people of Germany and France realise how their hard work is being used to support the grand scheme that is the "United States of Europe".

What to do when the woman is not ...

... really at home to the Assembly or Parliament, particularly as she is a minister ...

On two occasions she has been in contempt of the people, first towards the Assembly electorate, and then to Parliament.



The contempt she showed the peoples of Wales was when she refused to make public the McKinsey document which criticised aspects of the running of the health service, she at the time was the minister responsible for the health service in Wales.


The BBC reported on three previous occasions, the first when she was accused of withholding the report, the second when she made the ludicrous statement that the report was not a report, and she was publicly made a liar by her party leader Carwyn Jones when he revealed the study of the Welsh NHS by management consultants McKinsey cost £500,000.

And most recently she has been criticised by the Information  Commissioner found that "public interest favoured disclosure" of other information which the Welsh Government withheld about the reform and restructure of its health and social services department.

And what about our Parliament, the national government of Great Britain, this woman of politics is reported here  ... she refused to become part of British politics, was it because her less than competent abilities would demonstrate her inadequacies, or possibly the poor performance of the Wales administration. 

... and the greatest concern to the electorate in Wales, there is no simple mechanism where she can be called to book, how is this political dinosaur made democratic.

She should resign on the grounds she is contemptuous of the public.

One story, two pictures ...

... from BBC Wales, the dour Secretary of State for Wales ...

From Wales online, its good news week ...

The story is the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition comes up trumps for Wales.

BBC Wales news, or Western Mail.

The nationalist carpetbaggers want BBC Wales for themselves, the news is they probably have it but nobody is saying it in public.

Love him or loath him ...

... yesterday his words were the clear water in the middle of a pond covered with scum.  He wrote:

I am interested in Mr Miliband’s radical idea that we might need tighter rules on media ownership and market shares. It will be interesting to see how he defines unacceptable levels of control, as it appears  that the BBC has the largest share of the TV and radio market, and also has a very powerful position in web provision and related publishing. Rules that he thinks of in connection with News International could not be hybrid or company specific, and would have to be fair about any concentration of media power. Thoughts on what constitutes too much media power and if it should be regulated better would be welcome.

They were the words of John Redwood found here.

We would have a similar issue if government became sponsor of a Wales media start-up as suggested by the less democratic voices found hereabouts.  Can you imagine BBC Wales dominated by the far left ably supported by its political editor Betsan Powys, Romania of the 1960's springs to mind.

Pay as you go for all media would be a first step, just as I must chose what newspaper to buy at the news-stand, so it should be at the media-stand.

Not so much a dragon, more a ...

... pink pussy with a forked tongue, a pussy coming from America with an agenda to rally the faithful, maybe it's those rose-tinted glasses he's wearing because reality, the truth, presents a far less romantic picture.  But read the paper first.

For Welsh speakers, Adam Price hasn't presented the paper in Welsh, probably because its original audience was Harvard; an unfortunate state of affairs.

The paper, it is based upon a comparison of apples and oranges, small versus large, all to support the premise that "independence" is the best option for Wales in part because small is beautiful.  He bats a very sticky wicket at paragraph 2 where he writes ...

Faced with the prospect of a people choosing its own destiny and charting its own course, the champions of the status quo gravely intone that such a move would not be economically viable. Without the colonial country as benefactor, we’re told, the small could never survive.

... I'm afraid he has taken too long a sojourn in the America's, things in Britain have taken a turn for the better, we have had a referendum and gained devolved powers, we have had an election that pushed the separatist agenda further into a political corner, some say backwater, and our government in Westminster threw off the illusion of British Empire and colonialism by offering responsibility through tax-raising powers, the various peoples of Britain have yet to accept the responsibilities offered by its elected members of parliament.

For the discerning economists of Wales it is of interest that Price uses a comparison between Luxembourg, a country, with the Saarland, a region of Germany, not so much apples and oranges, more chalk and cheese.

The BBC headline is "New Tory ...

... leader to set up cabinet".

I might have been a little more impressed if Andrew RT Davies had said ...
 
"I intend to 'up-set' the cabinet",

... because there is scope.

Power and Responsibility, those ...

... attributes we naively thought the great and the good would exercise on our behalf as a norm with its excesses only appearing rarely, how wrong we have been.

As a subscriber to The Times and The Sunday Times, paper and on-line, I have helped finance through News International Newspapers Limited some of the excesses of public life being debated in the media around the world.  As Matthew Paris wrote in today's Times ...

Please don't protest: "I didna ken." C'mon reader, ye ken ...

1. prison officers complicit in the supply of drugs ...
2. banks or energy suppliers. ... cartels, robbing their customers.
3.  Many sporting records that still stand ... have been fuelled by performance-enhancing drugs
4. Insider trading. It’s absolutely endemic
5. The stock exchange has all but lost its original purpose — the financing of new business...
6. Insurance has become an almighty racket, ... citizens parted from billions by the unscrupulous sale ...
7. The policing of the criminal law is riddled with corruption.
8. This goes for the Crown Prosecution Service too.
9. The easing of credit ... that will strangle (us) them when interest rates rise.
10. Dentistry and the NHS ... Where’s the market?
11. The way that British ministers and mandarins ... to take up positions on the boards of companies in the fields that they have until recently supervised is an absolute disgrace. We’re not talking shades of grey here. It’s outrageous.
12. So is the “government-relations” lobbying industry.
13. The social services departments of local authorities are an incompetent and occasionally vicious element in public administration, particularly as regards child protection.
14. The way children get allocated to state schools is indefensible, and a huge anxiety to parents.
15. The public sector is chronically incapable even of understanding, let alone managing, large IT projects; and private sector contractors are guilty of daylight robbery.
16. When all is told there will have been some shocking war crimes in Afghanistan
17. Euro-MPs’ expenses. Enough said.
18. EU budgeting. Enough said.
19. Lawyers. That the practice of law in England has for centuries been a stitch-up to enrich a professional monopoly
20. August will be unusually dry or wet.

... there is a perfect storm coming, and now is the best time for that storm when money is tight, when the people who will always pick up the tab have nothing else to lose, when politics and politicians will be held to account for the excesses, because Power and Responsibility rests with "Parliaments" ... and with those people who manage the organisations we do business with, every aspect of the business from employee welfare to customer satisfaction.

I discovered recently that parliament is a collective noun for a group of owls or rooks, wise owls or noisy rooks I wonder.

Carwyn Jones and the Welsh Assembly Government would do well to keep their heads down for some of the debris caused by this perfect storm in waiting could very well be coming our way.


... the thunderer reminds us that ".. you must own your mistakes, or your mistakes will own you", Bethan Jenkins might like to take that little ditty on board.

In fact, is there a dragon ...

... anywhere in Wales, a docile dragon for Heledd Fychan and her boss Bethan Jenkins.

Where is the fire and brimstone remembered by the old folk, tales of the chapel and 5 hour sermons; we have become secular in Wales, except when there is a chance TV appearance on Songs of Praise with Aled Jones.  The days when the poor pregnant unmarried girl would be chastised in public, in front of the whole congregation are long gone.  So no dragon here .....


We have the Catalan kid of course, but his is more a desperate appeal to the disparate of Wales, building theoretical castles amongst the clouds surrounding Snowdon;  No dragons here, though I can imagine conversations in the snug of a pub in the Northern Plaid heartlands, or maybe the geography is wrong and it is the Cardiff smart set, cymraig naturally.


Do we have a dragon in the borough of Caerphilly I wonder, Ron Davies might be a candidate, though on reflection ... first the Labour Party, then it was "Forward Wales" followed by a stint as an independent, and finally he jumps into bed ( rhetorically speaking ) with Plaid to get a thrashing at the Assembly elections; formally Secretary of State for Wales he was once called the architect of devolution in Wales, nothing to be proud of and certainly not a dragon, except in a moment of maddness.

We remain dragon deficient except possibly on match night when tens of thousand of fans descend on Cardiff breathing fire and brimstone ........... here be the dragons ........... until they get home when they morph from dragon into the family pet some call dad.

Modified following a comment left at my migration blog.