Plaid and an Indy referendum.

We’re looking at a party that’s not won an election and failed to make any electoral progress in the last decade. A party which has had precious little to do with the growth of support for Independence as well. The danger here is with Labour talking the way it is that they may actually support a referendum with the intention of it failing and taking the wind out of the Indy movement.

A referendum is a no-no. Must be UDI or something.

Plaid winning that majority in 2021…

It will not happen. The Lib Dem dalliance. The NM situation. Their Brexit position.

Essentially if Plaid has an intention to lead Wales into Independence it’s got to be able to think for itself. So many people have gone along with the binary options put out by the British state – so many Indy supporters have bought into it as well. It’s cost Plaid Leave voters. The toxicity around it is just… insane. What Plaid needed to do is attack the states handling from the start. The “Owain Glyndwr fought for a Wales in Europe” post on Glyndwr Day was fucking dumb, and offensive in a multitude of ways as well.

The Lib Dem dalliance – look when Adam took over what he really needed was some kind of electoral win. He needs the political capital to take the direction he did with the Lib Dems. Instead a party with low moral that chose him to lead them into government was told to accept a relationship – albeit temporary – with austerity enabling Unionists. That requires a lot of faith and sway by an unproven leader and I personally think it’s backfired and handed the “Remain” camp to the Lib Dems in Wales. Every opportunity Brexit provides as slowly slipping through its fingers.

The NM situation. Ultimately… the worst thing that could have come out of Plaid during that was the idea that this was something external. It was – and is – internal. This isn’t just about McEvoy – it’s about that same disquiet that made Adam leader in the first place. It’s that Plaid treats its members like fools and the members now seeing it. What’s happened with Neil’s bid to rejoin has happened. HOWEVER… If Plaid select someone to stand against him in Cardiff West… I’d never vote for them again. I get not supporting him – but actively standing against him is going to do so much damage to the party.

I’ve heard some of these things being excused away as acts of principle. But lets not sugar coat it: there’s no political strategy here. No sense. No clue. No chance.

👍 Cytuno

It’s ridiculous, anyway, to allege that Welsh sheep farmers constitute a threat to the environment. If NRW were offering to green up Llanwern or Deeside, I might be more sympathetic, provided no-one ended up on Jobseeker’s. If Summit to Sea doesn’t even do what it says on the tin, then it should be actively opposed, and not just by the farming community. But no-one in our new, bilingually-named SeneddWelshParliament is likely to take that one on board. Seems they’re all for it.

That’s my point. Plaid is now a haven for the weird and not so wonderful, sitting alongside the corrupt and compliant. A heady mix indeed. And that’s a rabble that thinks it can take control in 2021. I could spring a rib laffin’ at that !

It’s gone too far in Plaid Cymru.

The damage is done by those militant minorities who continue to display male characteristics with no serious intention of transitioning but think it’s well within their right to gambol around in women’s kit in overthetop displays of self I/D.

Either Sturgeon or her successor will take a fall over this unless they nip it in the bud. That point would apply to Plaid also but they seem to be doing lots of other things that will ensure they become an increasingly minor player in the Welsh independence arena. Others in that arena would do well to distance themselves from Plaid orthodoxy as it becomes more toxic over the next year or two.

The theory that removing grazing livestock off the landscape to increase species diversity is flawed. This was done by NRW at Cors Caron. After two years they found that species diversity collapsed due to dominance by common grass species that was no longer being grazed, crowding out the diversity of the swathe. Here the link to a previous ‘get rid of the sheep’ by NRW.

https://naturalresources.wales/about-us/news-and-events/blog/monster-mower-arrives-in-mid-wales/?lang=en

You will see they that had to import a massive ‘lawn mower’ from the United States, fit it with bigger footprint caterpillar tacks to cope with the bog, and it consumes vast amounts of diesel. This is what the sheep would have done naturally, providing food.

This does not ‘save the planet’.

It just provides a country lifestyle for ignorant ‘environmentalists’. At best it changes sheep farmers into lawnmower drivers, and at worst removes the indigenous people from the landscape. All at public expense while at the same time reducing local food production.

Eiris Llywelyn has acted for the Welsh language. Perhaps more of us should do it to protest against the epidemic of distortion and downright lies.

Propaganda piece on ‘Wales Today’ (BBC Wales) this evening showing a delighted farmer explaining how he sold his sheep and took the thirty pieces of silver from Natural Resources Wales to transmogrify himself from a hill farmer into a land manager. Standing behind him (and dwarfed by him) was a female in her early twenties from NRW informing us that Wales was going to help save the planet, thanks to projects like Summit to Sea.

This is the second time recently that I’ve seen ‘Wales Today’ plugging Summit to Sea. On paper, it sounds an excellent idea that will have a symbolically important (if marginal) impact on fighting environmental destruction. But it would have been better to have introduced it in England, where the almost inevitable disruption of Welsh-speaking communities would not be a factor.