After answering Monday’s aubade I stumbled down the stairs to meet the day (as Kristofferson put it) and prepared my usual breakfast of nourishing laverbread-flavoured flakes, after which I switched on my computer to see what the night had brought.
I was pretty shocked – and a little confused – to read the tweet at the top of my pile. It was from a previously unknown tweeter using the handle @WKDWax. The tweet was responding to something I’d put out the previous day, when I’d learnt that understaffed and underfunded Dyfed Powys Police is helping Carmarthenshire chief executive Mark James pursue his vendetta against blogger Jacqui Thompson.
What really shook me, I suppose, was that @WKDWax seemed quite happy for Jacqui and her family to lose their home, because that was “better than the cost of forcing people to speak Welsh”! I couldn’t understand why anyone should make the connection between Jacqui Thompson – an Englishwoman (who speaks no Welsh as far as I know) – and “forcing people to speak Welsh”.
So who is @WKDWax? The profile pic suggests a woman, and her claim to fame seems to be that she is a “mum of five and a Leonard Cohen fan”, reason enough for anyone to be a bit grumpy of a Monday morning, or indeed any morning if you’re a LC fan.
The clue to her making the unfathomable linkage between Jacqui Thompson losing her home and the Welsh language lies in the fact that her tweet included @Poumista, who is of course Gary Robert Jones, a member of the Labour Party in Llanelli and a campaigner against Welsh language education. I have written of Gary Jones before, in, ‘Welsh’ Labour – The True ‘Nasty Party’, and published a further piece by a guest writer, Llangennech – A Tale of Two Campaigns.
There were a few more tweets, her mentor chimed in, she admitted to being “fascicious” (which threw me for a while), and offered her “appologies”. You can read the full exchange here in glorious Technicolor®.
Knowing that Gary Jones was involved I guessed that @WKDWax was a member of the Labour Party, and sure enough, she is, but a very new member. In fact, she joined at the start of July, simply to support Comrade Corbyn.
It’s reasonable to assume that she met Gary Jones through their involvement in the campaign against the Welsh language being waged by the Labour Party in Llangennech. It would also be reasonable to assume that Labour is now recruiting from the anti-Welsh element in that dispute. (Jim Griffiths would have been so proud!)
Her attitude would also appear to bear out the allegation that Corbyn supporters are aggressive people who like to intimidate opponents. Then again, it could be that she’s against Owen Smith because his name sounds a bit too . . . well, you know, Welsh.
But let us not be judgemental, for this woman has clearly suffered, perhaps being one of those “forced to speak Welsh”. Picture it, gentle reader, taken from her home at three in the morning, thrown into a darkened room where she is strapped to a chair before being beaten mercilessly with a sock filled with Cefn Sidan sand, and shouted at by a demented bard – Siarad Cymraeg!! he screams, over and over . . . Or perhaps while walking along Stepney Street one day she was pounced upon by the Language Police (those bastards are everywhere!), and they issued an on-the-spot fine of 3 goats for speaking the forbidden English. (And if you can’t pay, then it’s the Cefn Sidan sand treatment!)
These things happen! If you don’t believe me then I’m sure you’ll believe my old Serbian mucker Jacques Protic, of whom I have also writ . . . many, many times. Start here with Cymrophobia and the Many Identities of Jacques Protic. Or just put ‘Jacques Protic’ in the Search box at the top of the sidebar to access a veritable library.
This is the man who blames the Welsh language for the weather, and believes that Rhodri Morgan and Carwyn Jones are closet nationalists! Protic is, or was, a member of the Labour Party, but probably not ‘Welsh’ Labour, despite living in Wales. Quite frankly, Jacques Protic is an unhinged obsessive.
Needless to say, soul-mates @WKDWax and Jacques Protic have been drawn to each other, and now follow each other on Twitter. Though oddly, she follows Llangennech Labour but not Llanelli Labour; UK Labour, the Labour Press Team and Red Labour but not ‘Welsh’ Labour. She follows Andy Burnham, John McDonnell, Dianne Abbott, @JeremyCorbyn4PM, even Boris Johnson and George Galloway, but not her local MP or AM, or any other Welsh politician. The pattern repeats itself with her following the Welsh Rugby Union, but not the Scarlets.
And yet, @WKDWax and Gary Jones, plus their allies, belong to the party (nominally) led in Wales by Carwyn Jones who, just a few weeks ago, set the target of one million Welsh speakers by 2050. With so many local authorities in Wales run by the kind of people organising the campaign in Llangennech there’s more chance of me joining the Labour Party than there is of Carwyn’s pious hope being realised.
Let’s remind ourselves of the kind of people lining up with Gary ‘Poumista’ Jones and @WKDWax.
First there’s Michaela Beddows, who was so proud of having humiliated a supermarket checkout girl. As she put it: “ . . . the checkout operator was a complete and utter jobsworth, no personality and pretty gormless, the Till Manager was arrogant, cocky and downright rude, obviously being a till manager has gone to her pretty vacant head – and the Manager of the store was a bumbling buffoon who should grow a pair of balls”. After reading that, you have formed an opinion of Michaela Beddows.
UPDATE 09.10.2016: I should have done this earlier, but there you are . . . WKDwax and Michaela Beddows are one and the same. You may have seen her on last Thursday’s Question Time. If not, then you were very lucky.
Also to be found at the school gates is the Reverend Dr J K Plessis, a priest in the English church, originally from the Six Counties. I’m prepared to stick my neck out and suggest that Plessis is a Britlander, who regards any language other than English (be it Irish, Afrikaans or Welsh) as a threat to the greatness of Britain and her (sadly) diminished empire.
That the Welsh branch of the English Church permits his public displays of intolerance, and his odious references to apartheid, can only be interpreted as support for his views.
And now we know – the one and only Jacques Protic is also involved!
These are strange and ugly people most of us would cross the road to avoid. So let’s stop pretending that we’re dealing with reasonable people who can be be won over with rational and sincere arguments, because we’re not. Those I’m discussing did not sit down for a few hours weighing up the pros and cons before reluctantly deciding against Welsh language education for their children.
These people are instinctively hostile to the Welsh language or anything ‘too Welsh’. I have previously referred to this phenomenon as ‘the package‘, for anti-Welsh views usually come as a boxed set. Basically, these people want to be British or English except for a few guilty hours now and again when the national rugby team is playing.
Their opposition to all things Welsh is atavistic and irrational, a bigotry no different to racism, antisemitism or homophobia, and it should be treated as such. There must be no dialogue with bigots.
On the bright side . . . In Wales now, in addition to Labour’s more publicised struggle of the Corbynistas and the Smiffites, we have a parallel fight between those who believe in Welsh identity and those who reject almost everything distinctively Welsh. Labour in Wales is at risk of falling apart!
O happy day!
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