Wonder where this fine young Englishman will get to serve his sentence?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-40851118

Not content with sending us their pensioners now we get to enjoy the company of their racist criminals. Hopefullly he will get sent back over the bridge to serve his sentence at the expense of English tax payers.

There are ways of combating the big players, though our Welsh Government doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to the idea, or more likely ti way too afraid that it would allow citizens too much control of the everyday things they need.

Faced with similar false promises from BT a group of people in north Lancashire set up their own fibre broadband company as a non-profit community benefit company. It’s been something of a runaway success, and offers world class fibre broadband connections to rural areas, including one such connection that required a four kilometre connection to the cabinet, done for the standard connection fee of £150 and then £30 a month for a 1 Gb/s connection, synchronous. None of the big companies would have touched that one, or if they did the connection fee would run into the many, many thousands.

You can find out more here, it makes a very interesting read, and there is a lot that is very relevant to large parts of Wales.

https://b4rn.org.uk

It’s initiatives like this that confirm that our government is complicit in farting about pandering to corporate capitalism and ripping us off.

Nice to see that you’ve found Fellow Worker Chomsky, Big Gee – he makes a heck of a lot of sense, not matter what subject he happens to be talking about 🙂

I agree, but journalism and propaganda are often closely related. During the Cold War many people around the world, and especially in regimes supported by the Soviet Empire relied on the BBC’s World Service as it was a voice they trusted, and saw as the most objective source of news. I know this as I had some interesting, and sometimes quite heated conversations about the role of the World Service. This was in an age where there were few international sources of information, other than obviously propaganda service such as Radio Moscow, or Voice of America. And there was some substance in the claim that the BBC’s World Service was somewhat objective by comparison, but I always maintained that it was biased, (but I have to concede, not anything like as dumbed down and partial to UK government line as it is now)

Even then, it was realised that most regimes pandered to what would be acceptable to a western audience, and self- censored accordingly, but with the advent of the internet and satellite broadcasting, along with the massive cheapening of the associated technology, (setting up a TV station is now much cheaper in terms of capital than it was) has allowed many countries to jump on the bandwagon and report their own angle on international events, and as many as possible need to be considered before making up one’s own mind, with the awareness that bias is a definite.

Also, image swappery has a very long history, and was used by both sides in the WW2 period, the same, or elements of the same images swapped around and used to illustrate not only different points of view, but also as illustrative evidence of completely different events.

Even shortly after Orgreave, no one who had listened to those who were there believed for a second, that miners, clad in T shirts and daps due to hot weather, were out to cause a riot. The state version of events there that day were rapidly debunked soon after.

Anyone who read the WCCPL publication ‘Striking Back’ will be in no doubts whatsoever over the kind of dirty tricks the state will use to undermine and vilify those they cast as the enemy.

I live in Cardiff and make it a point of using Welsh in all my dealings with the council and the housing association. Yet still the council does not ensure that all people staffing the reception counters are Welsh speaking, thus putting any Welsh speaking citizen in the awkward situation of having to ask for a Welsh speaker – which is completely against the spirit of both the 1993 Welsh Language Act, and the 2011 Welsh Language Measure. And even after 27 years the housing association still doesn’t get it, and still sends me English only communications, despite knowing full well that I demand, and have consistently demanded communication to be in Welsh. Now I’ve decided to completely ignore anything sent to me in English only, and indeed I put them on warning that I won’t speak to any member of staff in English. I demand the Welsh language services I’m entitled to!

It still completely amazes me that after nearly a quarter of a century that any publicly funded body in Wales is still allowed to get away with disrespecting Welsh speakers. It would be quite simple to add and enforce a mandatory condition to public funds stating that the recipient will provide a full Welsh language service. There are thousands of people in South East Wales who received all their formal education through the medium of Welsh who then find that their Welsh language skill atrophy due to lack of opportunity to use it. So there is no real barrier for any publicly funded body from providing a full Welsh language service.

Indeed, I’d like to see things go further, with the Welsh government initiating a scheme to gradually Cymricise the administration of the entire public sector over, let’s say, a generation. Despite the constant worry of bodies like Cymdeithas yr Iaith, I don’t think there is much opposition to Welsh medium education amongst the majority in SE Wales, and certainly not in Cardiff: if anything, people in this area don’t seem to be able to get enough of it! Of course education is paramount, but where is the real concern about context? What use is a language that isn’t actually used? Do we really want Welsh to end up like Irish? One of the most important aspects of language survivial, indeed a language being able to flourish, is economic value. At present, despite the arguments of some, (those unable to speak, and largely unwilling to learn) there are still precious few jobs where Welsh is an essential qualification, (though it is the case that there are more than there were)and whilst Welsh is highly valued for itself, (no bad thing) it is still seen as too much of a desirable, rather than an essential qualification in Wales. If English was once sold to the Welsh as the language of progression, there is no reason why the process can’t be reversed, thus making it practical, to demand that all workers are required to be Welsh speaking. But this must be real, and it be genuinely the case that Welsh is the language of daily administration, (which wouldn’t affect the delivery of a bilingual service to the public anyway, so the process would be ‘invisible’ to English speakers, yet deliver Welsh speaker their full rights). At all costs we must avoid the experience of Ireland, where at one point in time an a certificate in the Irish language was required for jobs in the civil service, despite the fact that administration was in English. I have heard that this was even the case in the department that administered the Gaeltacht.

We could learn a lot from countries such as the Republic of Cameroon, a relatively poor African country that has French and English as the official languages. In order to work as a civil servant in that country, an applicant must be fluent in both. I learned this whilst at Cardiff University, where the education department attracted a lot of students from the developing world, which allowed me to have many very interesting conversations with people from many places where they had achieved their independence from European domination – it made a huge difference to be able to relax and to not have to explain the context to doubting co-conversationalists, as was usually the case with English students! People from former colonies often had a far greater understanding of the context of Wales than I did! But then, they had the benefit of perspective, plus a generous dollop of education in deconstructing the process of colonisation, which just doesn’t happen very much in Wales, even amongst the majority of those who consider themselves to be nationalists. I’m so grateful to those people, as they helped me understand the position of Wales. They had a fundamental understanding of the apparent national/international dichotomy; that they are not antipathetic, but but different aspects of the same thing. English people, by and large, struggle to understand that, and imperialists don’t get it all.

Aye problem is there’s not a lot of alternative to Plaid. So I kind of hold out hope that if enough noise is made they’ll sort out their shit. But since the election I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that its not going to happen.

They’re no longer a Welsh nationalist party just one that falls back on that for the stable Welsh speaking vote. Beyond that they’re a Republican party… wasn’t Wood spotted at some crazy event a few years ago with a Welsh tricolour?

I have just added an ADDENDUM to my guest post on Jac’s Blog.(“Careful where you park your car . . .”)

View

You’ve brought us some fascinating stories, Sally, and this one is up there with them.

I have an apology to make public.

I withdraw my earlier comment in the ‘Guest Post’ I published in Jac’s absence some time ago.

I said that I had written to the Plaid quartet (Dafydd Llywelyn, Arfon Jones, Ellen ap Gwynn & Ben Lake) that’s two police commissioners, a council leader and an MP.

I further said that no one should hold their breath for a reply. Well I take it back. Ben Lake – to his credit – HAS replied with a friendly, sensible and what I believe to be a genuine answer.

Click HERE to view my original e-mail and Ben Lake MP’s answer as a downloadable PDF file. Read it from the bottom up. It’s in Welsh so if you’re not capable in the language of heaven, you’ll have to get it translated.

It’s given me hope that there may actually be a Plaid MP in Ceredigion (at last) who may be of the right material. I don’t often say things like that about members of the “Hide behind the sofa” party of Wales, but on this occasion I’m pleasantly surprised. Not only surprised that I got a reply, but the fact that this young MP may be made of sterner stuff – WELL DONE BEN! I hope it’s not the manifestation of the work of a new broom, and that he will continue to listen and act on matters that are of serious concern to our nation.

I will update the earlier ‘guest’ post when I get a minute.

Some very odd things were going on at BT in the mid 1990s Dafis. I have a friend who unwittingly – whilst playing a joke on someone – discovered that Ysbyty Gwynedd and the then Gwynedd Hospitals NHS Trust which ran Ysbyty Gwynedd had some sort of corrupt deal with BT. This friend was vexed that a member of staff at Ysbyty Gwynedd was being subjected to some very nasty work-place bullying by the manager of the mental health services, Alun Davies. One of the smaller kicks in the teeth that Davies delivered to this member of staff was to refuse him an office phone, although the member of staff led a team of three and desperately needed a phone to enable the patients to ring for appointments. Everyone knew this was outrageous and that Davies was trying to bully the man out of his job by making his life impossible.

So for a laugh, one of the patients rang BT, claiming to be the Chair of the Trust John Mullen and ordered a phone for this man’s office. It was staggering – BT put him through to the marketing dept, no-one at any point asked for his ID, an account number, an invoice, and the marketing dept simply asked ‘will this be on the special arrangement Mr Mullen?’. So the patient said ooh yes please and gave the location of the office for the phone. A week later the phone was installed. The patients thought it was hilarious, but just think of what this implies. That there was a ‘special arrangement’ – obviously a corrupt deal – between BT and the Trust, in which ANYONE could ring up and get a phone installed. Where did the bill for the phone installation go? What about the bill for the phone as it was used? Why did no-one ask for a number, a finance reference, NOTHING? This is a true story – I heard that phone call and I saw the installation of the phone. That phone stayed in that member of staff’s office for years, no-one ever rumbled the joke that the patient had played.

Another friend commented that the staff of that Trust were almost certainly having home phones installed at the expense of the NHS – there was serious corruption at work there. I have always used this story as an example of the shocking misconduct of the managers of the NHS in north Wales – but it does of course also point to some colluding crooks in BT.

When Alun Davies was obliged to retire from his post a few years later after his gross mismanagement could be concealed no longer, he was appointed Chief Exec of St Davids Hospice in Llandudno. John Mullen also retired but I don’t know what happened to him.

I suspect that the BT ‘special arrangement’ was only one of many scams going on in that Trust. They probably had ‘special arrangements’ with car hire companies, furniture suppliers, the potential list is endless. A young law graduate that I was friendly with worked at Ysbyty Gwynedd as an assistant to the management about 5 years ago. He walked out after a few months describing them as ‘corrupt as fuck’. Yes, I can believe that…