Jac’s Introduction:
In the previous post I wrote that there are women in Plaid Cymru, and Cardiff Bay, playing gender politics, by which I meant they use their gender, ‘discrimination’ and all manner of evils, to promote themselves.
This is about one of them, Helen Mary Jones, former AM for Llanelli, and one of the party’s leading lights. I now hand you over to our guest writer, who wishes to remain anonymous.
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*LeadHerShip is the name of a competition currently being run by Chwarae Teg, one of the women’s groups we are about to encounter.
Plaid Cymru has always prided itself on being a party of the grass roots, the ordinary rank and file members who dig into their pockets to keep the show afloat, turn up to meetings, deliver leaflets and knock on doors. They are overwhelmingly a decent bunch who care deeply about their communities and are often surprisingly well informed about events and issues further afield.
The fallout from the Neil McEvoy affair has left them feeling a mixture of bewilderment and anger. One prominent supporter was recently moved to write on social media, “Whoever is bullying and whoever the ‘angels’ are…I could not think of a worse place to work than in the Cardiff Bay political bubble. Disappointment. Yuck.”
The party’s rank and file are not the narrow-minded, bigoted, anti-Sais hambons that Labour and the Brit media like to portray, but the Plaid heartlands are a world away from the swish restaurants and watering holes of Cardiff Bay, and the Neil McEvoy affair has exposed the chasm which exists between ordinary members and some of the party’s elite who roar around in shiny Jaguars and Range Rovers and hobnob with Labour insiders, third sector fat cats and arrogant lobbyists.
One of the many threads in the McEvoy affair was a reminder that Deryn, the consultancy firm which is now home to so many Labour and Plaid “strong women”, lobbied for a firm that pulled in £113 million in government money.
Y Cynulliad was not supposed to be like this, but we are waking up to the realisation that Cardiff Bay has happily adopted many of the worst characteristics of Westminster: the limitless greed, cronyism, secrecy, backbiting and revolving doors between the world of lobbyists, third sector bosses, politicians and their army of SpAds and spin merchants.
Helen Mary Jones may no longer be an AM, but she remains an active and major player in Plaid, as the McEvoy affair reminds us, and in many ways she epitomises the gulf which exists between the grass roots and some of the party’s big beasts.
Weighing into the McEvoy row again a couple of days ago, she tweeted that this was all about “men objecting to women gaining power and influence and coming together to change things for vulnerable women like victims of abuse. Some men don’t like that. I wonder why?”
When it was pointed out to her that her powerful and influential friends at Deryn had screwed £113 million out of the public purse at a time when many charities helping the most vulnerable are facing cuts, Helen Mary fell uncharacteristically silent.
The former AM for Llanelli is certainly a prolific tweeter, and her Twitter feed gives a good insight into how she sees the world, as she tweets and retweets an avalanche of messages to her followers every day.
An analysis of her huge output over a few days shows that gender politics dominate. Roughly five times as many of her tweets fall into this category as official Plaid announcements and publicity, which come in a very distant second. Issues relating to children and young people trail in third place, with everything else that is happening in Wales and the rest of the world making up the residue. Catalonia and the Kurds merit several mentions, but you will find nothing about independence closer to home.
She is clearly keen on history, but only it seems if it’s women’s history. No doubt she would argue that this is adressing the balance after milennia of male oppression, but the result is a view of the past which is just as absurd and skewed as the idea that only men shaped the world around us.
On average, Helen Mary tweets about one “shero” from the past every day. Here’s one of them:
This is a world where women are either “strong women” or victims, and all men are actual or potential rapists and abusers. But there is hope, as ‘Goody Veneer’, one of Helen Mary’s favourite Twitterati tells us:
Anyone foolish enough to express even a hint of dissent will be dismissed as an “angry man” or misogynist, as only a man would disagree with Helen Mary and her friends, although quite what most of Plaid’s female grass roots supporters not following her on Twitter would make of these wilder shores of gender politics is another matter.
Perhaps they will be joining Helen Mary and other strong women in Bristol for this forthcoming event. Or perhaps not.
Closer to home, Helen Mary has released a torrent of tweets to celebrate the 40th anniversary shindig of Welsh Women’s Aid, one of the plethora of women’s groups she supports. A handful of them are listed in the tweet above, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, and as Helen Mary tells us on her Twitter feed, new women’s groups and charities are springing up all the time.
As if we did not have enough of them already, some newly established women’s charities in England are also planning to set up shop here to meet what would seem to be inexhaustible demand. Not that the “Welsh” ones, such as Chwarae Teg, Welsh Women’s Aid or WEN Wales bother with the Welsh language, despite receiving hefty dollops of Welsh government dosh, so setting up shop for bodies such as Women’s Place UK should be easy enough.
The need for so many different groups and charities echoes the politics of The Life of Brian, where minute doctrinal differences and squabbles gave rise to the Judean People’s Liberation Front, the People’s Liberation Front of Judea and numerous other splinter groups.
The key difference, of course, is that the Roman Empire was not funding all of those liberation groups, but the minutiae of competing gender political dogmas help to justify all those generously remunerated chief executive and managerial posts. After all, since losing Llanelli, this is where Helen Mary has re-built her post Assembly career, first, allegedly after a brief spell claiming job seekers’ allowance, with a job as chief executive of Youth Cymru, and currently as deputy director of the Morgan Academy at Swansea University.
For those readers unfamiliar with the work of the academy, this is what it says on the tin. Warning – may contain nuts:
The Morgan Academy, named after the late Rhodri Morgan, former First Minister of Wales and Swansea University Chancellor, is a research-based think tank created to deal with the pressing ‘wicked issues’ of public policy in Wales and the wider World. Based in Swansea University, it will work across subject disciplines. As well as promoting critical thinking, it will work collaboratively to promote innovative evidence-based policy.
It is from this academic perch, with its breath-taking views of the sea, that Helen Mary now spends a lot of her time, much of it apparently on Twitter.
In addition to the recent Welsh Women’s Aid gala, Helen Mary has also been preoccupied by the sordid President’s Club Dinner in London, an event which yields more Jones tweets and retweets than you can shake a stick at. On the other hand she is completely silent on the recent spate of abandoned rape prosecutions and the CPS’s decision to conduct a major review of disclosure procedures because, presumably, the idea that women are not always victims is not in tune with the narrative.
But we have only skimmed the surface of the world according to Helen Mary. Let’s take a deep breath and take a closer look at some of the gender controversies which she is so keen to share with the world, beginning with a rare tweet written by our shero in Welsh. Well, sort of:
To save anyone from reaching for Google Translate, it translates (literally) as, “Juice am this woman. I am woman here. We. Them. Us.”
You would expect nothing less from a leading figure in academe, where in the constant swirl of competing identities it is easy to confuse “ni” (us) and “nhw” (them).
And language is important. You don’t need to be an angry heterosexual man to fall foul of some of Helen Mary’s “strong women”.
Pink News, which describes itself as “the world’s most read LGBT digital media publisher”, gets a bashing for referring to a same sex couple when any fool could see from the picture that they were lesbians. In the eyes of some of Helen Mary’s friends, this betrays a sinister male agenda.
Another Helen Mary favourite, Ruth Serwotka (“Labour Left. SocialistFeminist.network”), spells it out even more clearly:
Serwotka touches here (no smut intended) on a current major preoccupation of Helen Mary’s strong women because the Labour Party is apparently planning to add “certified” transgender women (a.k.a. non-natal women) to its all-women shortlists, some of whom may be in possession of a penis.
As another stalwart of Helen Mary’s Twitter feed puts it succinctly:
Let Bea Campbell, another leading light, explain:
Anyone suggesting that this sounds like a witch hunt risks being stoned to death.
But let’s stay with Bea for a moment, as she explains what this is all about:
Note Bea’s pioneering deconstruction of the testosterone fuelled rules of punctuation.
But this is serious stuff. It seems that a mob of transgender activists recently shouted down and heckled, abused even, some women at one of those countless conferences and workshops which are such a feature of these groups, forcing those strong women to meet in secret to discuss whatever it was they were going to discuss.
This outrage may explain some of these other Helen Mary retweets:
No, I don’t understand either. A beefy Scottish kilt-wearing werewolf, perhaps?
Perhaps Young Crone can shed some light on matters… :
Now that we have cleared that up, let’s hear from another Helen Mary regular called Michael Conroy, who probably has a penis:
If two legs were bad and four legs good on Orwell’s Animal Farm, penises are definitely not required any more in this neck of the Twitter woods:
Fortunately, as another of Helen Mary’s Twitter friends reminds us, women do not have penises:
But as Helen Mary reminded us a couple of days ago, vaginas are what we need to talk about:
But that’s enough genitalia for one day. Let’s turn to knitting instead where Helen Mary is following the Great Pussy Hat Controversy. Pussy hats, for all those living in ignorance in the backwoods of Ceredigion, are pink woolly hats which make the wearer look a little bit like a cat (albeit a skinned cat).
The hats are a symbol of the women’s movement to some, while to others they are the work of the He-devil himself:
But there we must leave the world of Helen Mary Jones.
She is now taking bookings for talks at Merched y Wawr and Cymdeithas y Chwiorydd. Or possibly not.
♦ end ♦
Jac says . . .
Where to start? I don’t want to say too much otherwise I’ll be accused again of being ‘anti women’.
I am a product of the binary, patriarchal tyranny we must all now rise up against. But what do you expect, for as an impressionable child I attended my local flea-pit and imagined that the men and boys around me all wanted to be Burt Lancaster or Robert Mitchum, with the females all wanting to be swept off their feet by these and other trench-coated screen idols.
As I grew older I learnt that some women prefer women and some men prefer men, and I was always easy with that, but Helen Mary Jones and her friends open up whole new dimensions.
For now it seems there are countless sexual or gender identities and self-identifications. Many of HMJ’s Twitter contacts seem to believe that penises and vaginas – and their removal – should be available on demand; on the NHS, I suppose – but why stop at one? Why not two or three for everybody, applied like tattoos?
If nothing else it would open up a whole new world of personal insults.
Joking aside, Helen Mary Jones is regrettably not alone in Plaid Cymru, there are others with her genital and gender fixations. Then there are those who obsess on other issues. Wales hardly enters their thinking.
While agreeing that some men would be happier as women, and some women happier as men, I also believe that anyone this obsessed with what she and others have between their legs may need help. The threat of this woman again becoming a politician, elected by people unaware of her obsessions, must be ended.
The third sector has mushroomed in Wales since devolution, with all manner of oddballs and shysters given easy access to our public money. We don’t want to add to this carnival of grotesques by Helen Mary Jones encouraging her Twitter acquaintances to Wales.
