What Is Wales And What Is It For?

Thanks for orders of Tom Sharkey book

2012-01-13T12:37:00.000Z

Orders coming from Gardners and Bertrams wholesalers this week.

Where are people ordering from: Amazon, Eason's and somewhere else?

I've moved!!!

2010-06-03T11:04:00.001Z

I'm now over here on Word Press.

Hidden Killer (Asbestos): TV programme link

2010-03-05T15:32:00.003Z

The "Hidden Killer" documentary about the levels of asbestos in schools is now available on the Asbestos In Schools website.
The story relates not just to Wales but to the whole of the UK and includes interviews with Scottish asbestos expert Robin Howie and with the HSE.
Just click the ITV Wales link at http://www.asbestosexposureschools.co.uk/npaper%20links/Documentaries.htm

Children who should be in our care

2010-03-04T14:21:00.002Z

Fresh questions today about the way our society treats vulnerable children.
Firstly, the Welsh Refugee Council has taken the unusual step of going public with concerns about an individual case – an Afghan refugee named Mashal Jabari, an orphan who arrived in the UK last October.
At the heart of the case is a dispute over Mashal’s age.
When Mashal arrived in the UK, he was assessed as being over 18 and was sent to Cardiff where he was initially placed in a hostel for adult new arrivals.
The Welsh Refugee Council was convinced he was clearly only 14 rather than 18. It says that both his GP and social workers in Cardiff also believe he is under 18 (although social workers never got to carry out a full age assessment).
However, they have not been able to persuade the UK Border Agency.
In November, Mashal was refused asylum. On Monday, Mashal went to the Border Agency office in Cardiff with documents from his brother, Zaki, asking for his case to be reassessed because his brother has been given refugee status.
Mashal was taken into detention and spent a day in a police cell. He has now been sent to Campsfield detention centre in Oxfordshire ready to be “removed” on March 9.
According to the Welsh Refugee Council: “Our children's advocacy officer visited him in Cardiff Bay police station and he was distraught beyond description. He had been put in padded clothing for fear of self-harm.”
One wonders how our society could treat a traumatised person of any age like this.
Secondly, figures revealed by the office of South Wales West AM, Alun Cairns, today again highlight the desperate shortage of social workers in Wales. The shortage means that hundreds of children have not been allocated a social worker.
“These figures show a worrying number of at-risk children in Wales have not been allocated a social worker,” said Mr Cairns.
“I was very concerned to learn that councils in my own region had large numbers of at-risk children, with 116 unallocated cases in the Swansea Council and 120 in Bridgend.”
The figures reveal a snapshot of the situation on September 1 last year but council funds are going to be squeezed further and recruiting social workers remains a difficult task.
And while vulnerable children wait to be allocated a social worker, it is impossible to know whether or not they are at serious risk.

Hidden Killer in our Schools - UPDATE

2010-02-22T10:37:00.002Z

Fresh fears are raised today about the way schools are protecting teachers and pupils from potentially-deadly exposure to asbestos.
The leading authority on asbestos, the Asbestos Training and Consultancy Association, took a snapshot of 16 UK schools and found that none was meeting health and safety rules on managing the substance.
It reports: “All of the schools inspected contained asbestos with the majority being of an age and type that would be expected to contain considerable amounts.
“None of the sixteen schools were found to be fully compliant with HSE guidance and only four could be said to have an adequate standard of asbestos management. The majority had unacceptable standards which were either ineffective or unworkable and with the potential to cause a contamination or exposure incident.
“In one school the system of asbestos management was virtually non-existent despite the fact that there was a significant amount of asbestos known to be present.”
According to the chairman of ATAC John O’Sullivan: “These are not minor problems that have crept in over recent years; rather they are fundamental problems that are endemic in schools in the UK.”
And leading campaigner Michael Lees, whose wife contracted mesothelioma as a teacher and died in 2000, said: “The Government’s policy of managing asbestos in schools has failed, for this report is but further evidence of the appalling standards of asbestos managements in many schools.
“It is unacceptable that in the 21st Century a civilised society has failed to implement measures that protect the most vulnerable people in that society - our children.”
Last year What Is Wales? investigated concerns about asbestos in Welsh schools. Read the report here.

The death of Dr David Kelly

2010-02-02T09:57:00.001Z

The UK Government yesterday claimed that the post mortem examination report into the death of biological weapons expert Dr David Kelly was being kept secret to protect his family.
Campaigning MP Norman Baker asked Justice Minister Michael Wills who had made the decision that medical reports and photographs connected to the death of Dr Kelly should not be closed for 70 years.
He also asked on what legal basis the decision was made.
Mr Wills told him: “No determination has been made that the medical reports and photographs connected to the death of Dr. David Kelly should be closed for 70 years.
“Rather, Lord Hutton noted in his statement on 26 January that he had requested that the post mortem examination report relating to Dr. Kelly not be disclosed for 70 years in view of the distress that could be caused to Dr. Kelly’s wife and daughters.
“The Ministry of Justice is now considering the most appropriate course of action. The options available will need to be considered carefully.”
Rhondda-born Dr Kelly became caught up in media allegations that 10 Downing Street had interfered with an intelligence report ahead of the invasion of Iraq.
On July 17, 2003, after two days of a grilling by MPs, Dr Kelly left his home in the Oxfordshire village of Southmoor and went for a walk. His body was found in woods nearby the following day. There was a knife at the scene and a cut to his left wrist.
The official line taken by the 2004 Hutton report is that Dr Kelly took his own life. But there’s still been no inquest, the usual procedure in sudden or violent deaths. A group of doctors has raised objections about Lord Hutton’s conclusions.
Last September, for a programme called Wales This Week: The Welsh Connection, I interviewed a friend of Dr Kelly’s, Welsh author and security expert Gordon Thomas.
He also disagrees with Lord Hutton.
“Twelve or thirteen doctors are saying he almost certainly was murdered,” said Thomas. “I don’t believe he committed suicide but I don’t know for certain who murdered him.”
He called for a full inquest into Dr Kelly’s death.
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office, which deals with MI5 and MI6, told me at the time it was “long-standing government policy not to comment on intelligence issues”.

Not seen and not heard: immigrant children under lock and key

2010-02-01T15:40:00.003Z

Around 1,000 children are locked up every year by the UK’s immigration system.
They have often fled countries where they experienced violence, war and discrimination.
The children have committed no crime but, according to the Children’s Society, many experience “depression, weight-loss, bed-wetting and even self-harm”.
The Society has joined with Bail for Immigration Detainees to create the OutCry! campaign to demand an end to this Government policy.
It has already gained a great deal of support.
The Royal Colleges of Paediatrics, GPs and Psychiatry, and the Faculty of Public Health last year issued a joint statement which said the “immigration detention of children is harmful and unacceptable” and demanding that the Government “stop detaining children without delay”.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has called on Gordon Brown to end “what is, in effect, state sponsored cruelty”.
And just before Christmas Dame Anne Owers, chief inspector of prisons, published her report on an unannounced visit to Tinsley House immigration detention centre, at Gatwick Airport, calling the conditions there “wholly unacceptable” for women and children.
At the time of that report, the UK Border Agency issued a statement to say that “treating women and children with care and compassion is a priority (for us)”.
But it is a Government policy without compassion and OutCry! believes that General Election year 2010 should be the year politicians shut the door on it.

999 Frontline

2010-01-28T15:32:00.002Z

NHS workers across Wales report around 7,000 incidents of violence and aggression every year.
Nurses, doctors, paramedics and other healthcare staff are spat and sworn at, punched, attacked and verbally abused.
And these are just the cases they report.
When I asked an A&E nurse recently how many incidents go unreported she suggested “a huge amount, absolutely huge”.
“Certainly verbal abuse and lots of anti-social behaviour like that. People will urinate up against the walls outside (and) up against equipment. You will give people a bowl because they’re going to be sick. They are quite capable of using that bowl but they’ll vomit on the floor. They’ll choose to spit at you. All of that I would say has gone unreported.”
* ITV Wales current affairs series Wales This Week is featuring a special programme on violence against hospital staff. ‘999 Frontline’ is on ITV Wales, at 7.30pm tonight (Thursday, January 28).

** The programme is available to view here.

Lady in the Lake

2010-01-27T16:37:00.000Z

Prison snitch evidence is a central feature of many alleged and proven miscarriages of justice.
This sort of evidence was important to the conviction of Gordon Park, the so-called ‘Lady in the Lake’ killer, who was found dead in his prison cell on Monday.
Today, in the Daily Mail, Bob Woffinden explains why Mr Park’s family will continue to fight to prove his innocence in spite of his death.

Pleural plaque sufferers battle the Government

2009-11-27T17:31:00.001Z

Government lawyers are considering whether to restore compensation rights to sufferers of pleural plaque - a scarring of the lung, mainly caused by exposure to asbestos.
Sufferers, including many in Wales, used to receive compensation – but that was stopped in October 2007 when the Law Lords rejected an appeal against an earlier ruling by the Court of Appeal in January 2006. The 2006 appeal was brought by Norwich Union and Zurich Financial Services.
The Law Lords’ decision brought to an end a 20-year right to claim compensation of between £6,000 and £10,000.
But sufferers refused to take the decision lying down. They launched a campaign to get the decision overruled and, in July 2008, the Government announced a year-long consultation on whether to award sufferers of pleural plaques around £5,000 in damages.
The Ministry of Justice promised to publish the results of the consultation by July 21, 2009.
But Justice Secretary Jack Straw then announced instead that a decision would not be made until after the summer recess.
Now Jarrow MP Stephen Hepburn (Labour) believes the Government might be getting cold feet about the costs of restoring compensation.
He told the House of Commons this week: “For over 20 years, the courts recognised that this was a compensatable illness. Everyone accepted that, and the insurers and the Government put money aside, until this dreadful decision by the Law Lords. One of the sorriest aspects of the case was that the Law Lords agreed with the lawyers who said that pleural plaques did not constitute a compensatable injury and did not cause any sort of depression or illness.”
Mr Hepburn noted that it is “estimated that pleural plaques sufferers are 1,000 times more likely than any other section of society to develop a more serious form of asbestos-related cancer”.
A recent report by the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council said that up to 90,000 people a year may develop pleural plaques, up to 20 years after coming into contact with asbestos.

What price the McKinsey report?

2009-11-04T17:31:00.001Z

The NHS in Wales is to come under the scrutiny of management consultants McKinsey and Co, it was revealed today.
This is the same company which early this year was employed by the UK government to find out what changes could be made to the NHS in England.
McKinsey and Co recommended slashing 137,000 jobs in England – a suggestion that was then rejected out-right by the UK Health Minister Mike O’Brien.
WAG stresses that the terms of reference agreed with McKinsey and Co “states that there will be no compulsory redundancies.”
The health union Unison today said WAG’s deal with McKinsey and Co – which has been asked to develop a five-year "strategic plan" for the Welsh NHS – is a complete waste of money.
But how much money will be spent on the consultants exactly?
When the English NHS report turned out to be useless, the UK government refused to say how much it had paid the firm.
“It was part of existing work that McKinsey was doing for the department,” a Department of Health spokesman said at the time. “There isn't a breakdown of the individual cost of the report.”
Will the Welsh Assembly Government be more forthcoming?
Er, no.
While it expects “the cost of hiring McKinsey to be outweighed by the efficiency gains we will realise over the next five years”, it won’t say how much it is costing.
“Due to commercial sensitivity, we are unable to provide details of the value of the contract,” a WAG spokesperson told me.

Hidden Killer

2009-10-30T16:39:00.003Z

Are Welsh schoolchildren and teachers sitting on a health time-bomb?
It is a frightening question and one which has been asked increasingly loudly throughout the last few months.
The concern relates to asbestos in our school buildings.
Between the 1960s and 1980s asbestos was widely used in the construction industry, in particular for roofing, spray coating, pipe-lagging, insulation boards and asbestos cement. Any building built or refurbished before 2000 is likely to contain asbestos.
The Health and Safety Executive estimates that half a million non-domestic buildings in the UK feature asbestos.
This figure includes many Welsh school buildings. Indeed, a Freedom of Information Act request earlier this revealed that more than eight of ten school buildings in Wales contains some sort of asbestos.
But how dangerous is it and how worried should teachers, pupils and parents be?
Fibres of asbestos dust cannot be removed from the lung once they have been breathed in. Their inhalation is linked to two forms of mesothelioma (affecting the lining of the lungs and of the abdomen), to lung cancer, asbestosis (in which the lungs develop scaring) and an inflammation of the lung called pleural thickening.
Leading the concerns is respected occupational hygienist Robin Howie. Back in April in the education newspaper SecEd, I reported Mr Howie’s appearance at a conference hosted by Nick Ramsey AM at the National Assembly for Wales.
Mr Howie claimed a hidden “horror story” was unfolding in UK schools with rates of mesothelioma “a factor of ten higher” in male teachers than in other people who do not work with asbestos. He said rates of mesothelioma in female teachers were “higher to a factor of two-and-a-half”.
He added: “These are significantly higher figures than we expect. And if the teachers are showing significantly high on the statistics then what about the children?
“I think the teaching statistics are the tip of the iceberg. For every teacher exposed, then we have 20-30 children.
“In about two-thirds of mesothelioma we cannot identify where the exposure to asbestos occurred. What we do know is that most of those people would have been in school. I think there is a significant risk of mesothelioma in schools containing asbestos.”
Mr Howie repeated these concerns in a recent edition of the ITV Wales current affairs programme Wales This Week.
For that programme, ‘Hidden Killer’, I also interviewed Tim Cox, of the NASUWT, who said the dangers of asbestos were causing increasing concern for union members.
“I think this is one of the most important issues we’ve ever had to deal with,” he stated. “We are talking about the long-term health of the population of Wales. We are talking about the teachers and support staff in schools at the moment but we are also talking about the children, the children of Wales, over the next 10 to 20 years, who could be affected by this terrible, terrible disease.”
Mr Cox is demanding the removal of all asbestos from schools as part of the Welsh Assembly Government’s plan to renovate their buildings.
However, the Health and Safety Executive’s policy is to advocate the safe containment of asbestos rather than its removal. The Welsh Local Government Association agrees, stating that “the removal of asbestos would be likely to raise the level of asbestos fibres within the air”.
The HSE’s own figures show that between 1980 and 1985 twenty-one teachers, lecturers and school workers died from mesothelioma. Twenty years later that figure had risen to 92.
However, it questions Mr Howie’s claims about rates of mesothelioma in teachers. It has carried out its own research through epidemiologist Julian Peto.
“The research by Professor Julian Peto, who is a world authority, suggests that the increased levels of deaths, because there is an increased level of at the moment across all those groups, not just teachers, suggests it may be linked to the increased environmental concentration of asbestos in the 60s and 70s which is when people will have got their exposure,” Steve Coldrick, of the HSE, told me.
“There are examples and I’m sure there will continue to be occasionally examples of people in schools being exposed from time to time to either very low levels or occasional levels of asbestos. The important thing to understand is that all the evidence indicates that does not mean either adults or the children are likely to develop these dreadful diseases.”
Asbestos expert Emma Corfield, of Core Surveys, said the majority of asbestos products in schools would be “low risk”, such as asbestos cement, floor tiles and Artex. “It’s when you start talking about the asbestos insulation board and lagging which would probably be in about 25 per cent of schools, nearly 30 per cent, that you are looking at needing a good robust management plan,” she stated.
She said local authorities had to support head-teachers who could not be experts on asbestos as well as educators running schools.
There is no legal requirement on local education authorities to have staff dedicated to asbestos management. At least four of the LEAs questioned by Wales This Week did not have dedicated staff.
The HSE is due to relaunch its asbestos campaign on Monday. The campaign focuses on tradespeople, who make up the vast number of deaths from asbestos-related diseases.
Those whose interest is asbestos in schools believe the campaign should be turning its attention to the education sector too.

Supporting the NHS in the US

2009-08-20T10:29:00.000Z

A campaign has been launched to hit back at criticism of the NHS by right-wing American politicians.
The internet campaign group Avaaz says President Obama’s “movement for change” is at “risk of collapsing in large part because of lies about healthcare in the UK”.
Say campaigners: “US healthcare is run by large corporations - it's the most expensive in the world, but ranks 37th in quality, and 40 million Americans can't afford any care at all. It's an awful system for people, but corporations make enormous profits, so they're fighting to keep it.
“We need a huge popular outcry to show the truth - how proud and grateful we are in the UK to have a public healthcare system that works, despite its imperfections.”
Avaaz is hoping to get enough names on its on-line petition in support of the NHS to “cause a stir in US media”.

High Pay Commission

2009-08-18T15:46:00.001Z

A worker on a 40-hour week earning the minimum wage would have to work for around 226 years to receive the same remuneration as a FTSE 100 CEO does in just one year, according to the campaign group Compass.
It is calling for the creation of a High Pay Commission to launch a “review of pay at the top”.
It states that the review “should consider proposals to restrict excessive remuneration such as maximum wage ratios and bonus taxation to provide the just society and sustainable economy we all want”.
See here for more information on the campaign.

Gnawed Soul Bean

2009-06-19T10:08:00.000Z

Check out the latest from Gnawed Soul Bean.

Looking Beyond The Label

2009-06-15T12:31:00.002Z

Nearly a quarter of people in Wales believe 100,000 or more asylum seekers come to the UK every year - four times the actual figure.
The figure is revealed in a special ICM poll commissioned by the British Red Cross to mark Refugee Week.
Accoring to Sir Nick Young, chief executive of the British Red Cross: "There are many myths and stereotypes around this vulnerable group, and that is why this year the British Red Cross is urging people to look beyond the refugee and asylum seeker labels, and see people as the individuals they are."
He said the ICM poll found that 23 per cent of people in Wales believed 100,000 or more asylum seekers come to the UK each year, when the actual figure is around 25,000.
"On average people in Wales also think the UK is home to 28 per cent of the world's asylum seekers, when in fact only around three per cent seek refuge in this country," he added.
"Reassuringly, however, 92 per cent of people in Wales have positive associations with refugees living in the UK. Confusion and misunderstanding should not be allowed to erode the UK's long tradition of providing sanctuary for people fleeing persecution."
The British Red Cross is using Refugee Week to highlight the positive contributions made by refugees and asylum seekers through its Look Beyond The Label campaign.
"Refugee week gives us the chance to not only celebrate individuals like these, but also to take pride in our own role in offering safety to those in desperate need," added Sir Nick.

The real killer is still out there

2009-06-14T10:13:00.003Z

Here's an update on Michael O'Brien's appearance at the Hay Festival by Duncan Campbell of the Guardian and here's a recent interview by David James of the South Wales Echo with one of Mr O'Brien's co-accused Ellis Sherwood.

Baku Or Bust

2009-05-20T10:47:00.000Z

Welsh football fans' charity Gôl has spent eight years helping children’s causes in Wales and in cities where the team plays.
Next month it undertakes one of its most ambitious expeditions as it returns to Baku, Azerbaijan, where the whole project began.
Back in November 2002, a trip to the Azeri capital had been the focus of Gôl’s first-ever project as members visited several orphanages in Baku with gifts and cash donations. The charity now makes regular visits to orphanages on Welsh fans’ away trips, as well as helping children in Wales.
On June 6, Wales play in Baku again, and Gôl will be making the trip. This time the fans are making it hard for themselves.
Their journey starts on May 22 when Neil Dymock will lead a nine-car convoy of 27 fans from the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff to Baku – by car.
They hope to get there in time for kick-off!
On the way they will be visiting and taking gifts to 20 orphanages in Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia and, of course, Azerbaijan.
If that wasn’t hard enough, Neil is driving a taxi which has 237,000 miles on the clock!
To sponsor Neil go to www.justgiving.com/neildymock

A Bullet Saved My Life

2009-05-07T11:02:00.006Z

I have a small number of copies of the Spanish Civil War book 'A Bullet Saved My Life' available for sale.

The book, which was a Morning Star book of the week when it came out in 2006, tells the story of Welshman Bob Peters and his adventures in getting to and fighting in the war.

Bob became politically active while working as a deckhand in Canada and underook an arduous journey to fight in Spain.

While working as a runner for an International Brigade commander, he was shot in the back but recovered to work as a dispatch rider.

The book features more than 30 black and white photographs and copies of civil war documents, a foreword by Rhodri Morgan and a preface by Welsh International Brigader Alun Menai Williams.

Email dontforgetroberttressell@hotmail.c om for info.

“A book that is also full of small insights into the absurdities of war” Publishersdiary.com

Hope Not Hate Day

2009-05-06T08:42:00.004Z

Three major events are being planned this month to commemorate those who fell in the battle against fascism in the last century.
Searchlight Cymru's Wales Hope not Hate day on Sunday, May 17, will also highlight what the organisation describes as the "continuing threat of fascism in Wales in 2009".
"This threat, although commonly perceived as being just against black and minority ethnic people, is actually a threat against us all," said Searchlight Cymru.
"Everyone is threatened by the British National Party and everyone can work together to remove that threat.
"This special day will give supporters as well as Euro election campaigner’s space to come together and outline to the people of Wales just why the BNP and what it stands for is a threat to people like me and you."
In Flint, Swansea and Cardiff, from 10.30am, simultaneous events will feature readings at the Cenotaph of 100 names of those who fell in World War 2 against fascism, a laying of wreaths and two minute's silence.
Cardiff will also hold a similar event at the Spanish Civil War International Brigades Memorial at Cathays Park from 11.40am.

The Death of Justice - at Hay

2009-05-05T12:45:00.003Z

The Michael O'Brien event at the Hay Festival has been confirmed for 10am on Saturday, May 23.
O’Brien will be talking with The Guardian's Duncan Campbell about the book The Death of Justice and his 11 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.
I understand the event may already be sold out but there are some details here.

UPDATE: Mike will also be signing books at the Y Lolfa stall at around 3pm.

Robert Capa's Suitcase

2009-05-05T12:37:00.002Z

Rhondda-born Alun Menai Williams had two remarkable photographs in his collection.
One was a sad reminder of a friend, Billy Davies, who served in the Spanish Civil War, and was killed a few days after the snap was taken.
The other was a source of immense pride. It showed Alun marching to the front, the flag of the British Battalion in his hands.
And it was taken by perhaps the most famous photographer of the 20th Century, Robert Capa.
Alun died three years ago but his inquisitive mind would have been fascinated by the recent discovery of previously unseen Capa negatives.
It is believed that Capa handed the negatives to someone for safe-keeping as he fled France at the outbreak of World War 2.
They have now been unearthed in Mexico.
According to the New York Times they were in an old suitcase – and were virtually untouched for 70 years.
In all, there are around 4,300 negatives taken by Capa, his lover and fellow photographer Gerda Taro, who was killed in Spain, and David Seymour.
However, the discovery does not solve the mystery of Capa’s world famous “Falling Soldier” photograph which appears to show a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward in the instant a bullet kills him.
A negative of that photograph has never been found.
All the same, Brian Wallis, chief curator of the US-based International Center of Photography, said: “We consider this one of the most important discoveries of photographic work of the 20th century.”

Spanish tribute to Welsh sea captain

2009-04-02T16:04:00.007Z

A Welshman, who helped rescue more than 2,600 refugees from Spain during the civil war, was this week honoured by the people of Alicante.
Archibald Dickson, captain of the merchant steam ship Stanbrook, risked his life to enter the port as the civil war drew to a close.
On Sunday, his son and daughter, Arnold Dickson and Dorothy Richardson, joined an estimated crowd of 1,000 to hear tributes to their father.
The crowd – which also included survivors from the evacuation - was told that Republicans from all over Spain had converged on the port on March 28, 1939 in an attempt to escape the country as Franco's troops advanced to victory.
Between 15,000 and 18,000 men, women and children gathered, desperate to flee Spain.
But Archibald Dickson was one of only a few skippers prepared to take their vessel into the port.
The Welsh captain filled his ship and ferried the refugees to Oran in North Africa.
Manus O’Riordan, son of Irish brigader Michael O’Riordan, said 1,000 people gathered in the rain last Sunday on the pier from which the Stanbrook left "to pay particular tribute to the memory of Captain Dickson".
“For some of the survivors and their children this was a commemoration which, at times, was filled with unbearably raw emotion, culminating in a mass floral tribute to the sea, in remembrance of the dead,” he stated.
Archibald Dickson and his crew were all killed only eight months later when the 1,300-tonne Stanbrook was hit by a torpedo from a German U-Boat off Belgium.

Turning memorial into political football

2009-04-02T11:16:00.003Z

The 'Wise and Foolish Dreamers' project which works with relatives of International Brigaders has been looking into the possibility of a new memorial to complement the one already in place in Cathays Park.
Some relatives have raised the possibility of a memorial in Cardiff either naming those IB-ers who died or all those who went to Spain.
At the moment there is a general plaque in Cathays Park and a list of names on a memorial in South Wales Miners Library in Swansea.
Quite separately, Leanne Wood AM has suggested a plaque be put somewhere in the vicinity of the Senedd. This is something the project thought was a pretty good idea, worthy of further discussion.
As a group, we hope to not only remember people who gave their lives but also to encourage modern-day discussions about tolerance, war and peace.
Leanne Wood was looking for AMs' support for the memorial.
This is usually the kind of subject explored intelligently and sensitively...
...and then, as you may have seen in the Western Mail, Leighton Andrews got involved.

O'Brien to talk miscarriage of justice at Hay

2009-03-29T10:04:00.004Z

Michael O'Brien is set to appear at the 2009 Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye.
O'Brien will take part in a question and answer session on his autobiography, The Death of Justice, which describes his wrongful conviction for murder, his battle to clear his name and an examination of what he believes went wrong in the investigation of the still unsolved murder of Cardiff newsagent Phillip Saunders.
The 41-year-old, who served more than a decade behind bars for the murder, continues to campaign for other victims of miscarriage of justice.
South Wales Police has had a difficult week, having to issue two apologies in the space of 48 hours - the first to a 63-year-old musician who was mistakenly arrested and strip-searched by armed police officers and the second to a grieving widow to whom officers returned the rope her husband had used to kill himself.
O'Brien has never received an apology from the force.
: The time of the Hay Q&A is to be confirmed but it is likely to take place on Saturday, May 23.

Asylum Justice: Young Family to Stay in Swansea

2009-03-26T11:46:00.002Z

Campaigners in Swansea are celebrating after young mum Venera Aliyeva was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK.
The UK Government had been trying to deport her and her two children to Azerbaijan.
But as What Is Wales? reported in 2007, locals began a campaign to have them returned from Yarl’s Wood detention centre to her home in South Wales.
Venera had previously suffered persecution on two counts in Azerbaijan: because she is a Baptist and an Armenian.
Today the Campaign for Asylum Justice revealed the family would now be allowed to stay in Swansea.

Number of executions rises around the world

2009-03-24T10:08:00.002Z

The number of people being executed around the world rose significantly in 2008 compared to the previous year, according to Amnesty International.
There were 2,390 executions worldwide last year, with an overwhelming 72 per cent of those being carried out in China (the host of the Olympics).
Japan executed highest number for over 30 years, while Belarus remains the “last executioner in Europe”.
Amnesty’s annual survey of global death penalty use shows at least 2,390 people were executed in 25 countries last year, up from 1,252 in 2007.
Methods used included beheading, hanging, stoning, lethal injection and electrocution.
Only 13 “hardcore” countries have executed prisoners every year for the last five years: Bangladesh, Belarus, China, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam, USA and Yemen.
Amnesty said there was “comparatively good news” in that only one in eight countries (25) carried out executions last year and only slightly more than a quarter (59) even retain capital punishment.
China alone carried out nearly three-quarters of the world’s executions (1,718), and 10 other countries from Asia - Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, North Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Singapore and Vietnam - also carried out judicial killings.
Japan carried out 15 executions, the highest number in the country since 1975.
The Middle East is the other world region notable for its reliance on capital punishment, with Iran (at least 346) and Saudi Arabia (at least 102) especially prone to carrying out executions.
Amnesty recently revealed that Iraq (which last year executed at least 34 people) is set to execute another 128 prisoners, reportedly in batches of 20 at a time.
Meanwhile Belarus, which executed four people last year, is shown to be the last executioner in Europe.
Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan said: “The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. Beheadings, electrocutions, hangings, lethal injections, shootings and stonings have no place in the twenty-first century.
“Capital punishment is not just an act but a legalised process of physical and psychological terror that culminates in people being killed by the state. It must be brought to an end.”
Amnesty’s report, which was launched today, emphasised the risk of executing innocent prisoners.
The USA released four people from death row last year, taking to 130 the number of death row exonerees since 1973.

Tribute to Jimmy Murphy

2009-03-23T15:32:00.002Z

A plaque was due to be unveiled today in memory of Jimmy Murphy, the coach who helped nurture Manchester United’s legendary Busby Babes and led Wales to their only World Cup finals.
Murphy, born in the Rhondda of a Welsh mother and Irish father, was the man who stepped into Matt Busby’s shoes after the Munich air disaster which killed eight players in 1958.
It was he who had to steer the grief-stricken club through a fifth-round FA Cup tie just 13 days after the tragedy.
United beat Sheffield Wednesday, and then West Brom and Fulham, before a 2-0 defeat to Bolton Wanderers in the final spoiled what would have been an even more amazing cup story.
Murphy himself only missed the Munich crash because of his other job as Wales national team manager.
He had stayed behind to guide his country successfully through a World Cup playoff match against Israel in Cardiff.
“I usually sat next to Matt on the plane and had the next room to his at the hotel whenever the team went away and I had suggested that I went to Belgrade, with it being such an important European Cup game. He had said, ‘No, Jimmy, you have a job to do,’ so [the coach] Bert Whalley went to Belgrade in my place,” Murphy recalled later.
Whalley was one of the 23 players, coaching staff, journalists and crew who died in the crash.
Busby was a spectator on crutches at Wembley in 1958 when United lost to Bolton.
“It must have been a terrible time for Jimmy and everyone at the club after the crash,” Busby said in the book, The Team That Wouldn't Die - The Story of the Busby Babes by John Roberts. “It needed someone who, though feeling the heartbreak of the situation, could still keep his head and keep the job going. Jimmy was that man.”
In the same year Murphy, who died in 1989, took Wales to the quarter finals of the World Cup.
The plaque was being unveiled at the house where he grew up at 43 Treharne Street, Pentre.

Battered over lack of ballot

2009-03-16T14:45:00.001Z

During this month’s anniversary coverage of the 1984/85 miners’ strike much has been made of the lack of a national ballot among NUM members.
Lord Kinnock, in particular, has always used the union failure to ballot all its membership as a stick to batter Arthur Scargill.
But, at a distance of 25 years, that does not tell the whole story.
After all, six years previously, in 1978, with a Labour government in Downing Street, the NUM had held a national ballot.
This had concerned a bonus scheme which miners voted to turn down.
However, the Government and British Coal cast the ballot to one side and went ahead with the scheme in the Nottingham coalfield.
“It was that that destroyed our unity,” Tower Colliery chairman Tyrone O’Sullivan told me recently. “Where was Kinnock then?”
Following the wasted ballot of 1978 – ignored by the Government and the Coal Board as it suited them – the NUM changed its constitution to allow each area to hold ballots where job losses were threatened.
In March 1984 that is what Yorkshire miners did at the start of what would become a national strike and what other areas, such as South Wales, went on to do.
Nottingham, added O’Sullivan, “would never vote for strike action. In 1981 when five Welsh pits were threatened they did not support us”.
In 2005 Ian Lavery, Scargill’s successor as NUM president, stated: “I think ballots are fine, if everyone at the end of the day is going to have to experience the same outcome. I didn’t think it would be morally right that miners at Ellington [where he worked], which at the time had a huge future, should have the right to vote someone else out of a job…
“The ones that said we should have had a ballot were the ones who were against the strike, and wanted an excuse not to support the strike.”

Cutting back on the old bill

2009-02-27T17:46:00.002Z

South Wales Police Chief Constable Barbara Wilding has had a busy week.
Her anger at her own police authority’s decision not to grant the 9.8 per cent rise in the council tax precept she demanded has put her into media overdrive.
Ms Wilding is due to step down from the role in December and told the South Wales Echo earlier this year that she was unlikely to “stay home and do nothing” as she would miss “having…influence... My husband says I should go into politics but that would be dreadful.”
Perhaps something semi-political, then? A job on a quango for instance? There must be some reason for all this activity.
During the last few days she has raised the possibility of cutting back policing of major events at the Millennium Stadium, the Ryder Cup and the M4.
One AM said “frankly, her attitude beggars belief.”
“The public is struggling to make ends meet, jobs are being lost across the region so it is not acceptable to ask people to pay three times the inflation rate,” said Plaid Cymru’s Chris Franks.
He might also have noted that Take That concerts and football matches are not the only items which have put strain on the force’s purse strings during the last few years.
There was, for instance, the embarrassing defeat the force suffered at the hands of one of its own officers at the High Court.
Neath Detective Timothy Hodgson, a "professional, efficient and effective" specialist in tackling complex fraud cases, retired in December 2006 after 30 years.
His case revolved around a programme called the 30-plus scheme, which is designed to encourage highly skilled officers to stay in the force after 30 years - the point at which they can take retirement.
Hodgson was accepted on the scheme but was forced out of the force months later.
With the support of the South Wales Police Federation he took his former employer to court – and won.
In June 2008 a High Court judge ruled that the force had acted unlawfully in not giving him a fair hearing before he was kicked out.
Fighting High Court cases is not cheap – and there were other officers too who were forced out.
Then there was the estimated £100,000 of taxpayers’ money thrown down the drain keeping another of the force’s own officers under surveillance after it wrongly suspected he was faking post traumatic stress disorder following a soccer riot in which he was hit by bricks and bottles.
The force used 11 officers to spy on PC Mark Pugh, a dog handler, even filming him as he put out the rubbish at home. He took his case to the Police Medical Appeal Board which confirmed his condition was genuine and awarded him a 100 per cent disability pension.
Its judgment stated: “It is the board's view that the surveillance tapes in themselves did not constitute any form of credible psychiatric assessment.”
Going public with his findings in September 2008, Mr Pugh said: “I feel I have been treated very badly. I was astounded when I became aware of the level of surveillance on me. I have been told that it will have cost around £100,000 of public money.”
The case was defended in the press by Dougie Woods, the then director of human resources for South Wales Police, who said the force had a “duty to manage and ultimately reduce sickness levels”. He added: “I am sure that the public of South Wales would expect us to reduce sickness of officers and staff so that we continue to provide a value for money service and keep our communities safe.”
But what of Mr Woods himself?
Formerly a HR director at food manufacturers Coldwater Seafoods, Mr Woods took the £78,000-a-year police job early in 2007. However, in October 2008, he resigned suddenly after only 18 months.
Mr Woods was the third director of human resources with South Wales Police to be suspended from duty and then either resign or be dismissed within the space of a couple of years.
The South Wales Evening Post noted upon his departure: “Since he took the post he has been responsible for trying to save £11 million of force money over three years, regardless of the recent losses the force suffered due to the Icelandic banks collapse. His cuts have included retiring officers who have served on the beat for 30 years or more, as well as replacing officers who provide ‘back room’ tasks with civilians at cheaper cost.”
Disputes with its own staff aside, the force has also had to stump up a fortune for wrongful arrests. Plaid Cymru AM Leanne Wood discovered last year that during the previous two years South Wales Police had paid out £556,700 in compensation for wrongful arrests and other civil claims.
The pay-outs, which related to claims stretching back to 1997, dwarfed those made by the three other Welsh forces.
“It is a matter of concern that large sums of public money have been paid out by South Wales Police to resolve claims made by members of the public,” the AM noted.
Plenty of areas, then, for what organisations these days like to call efficiency savings.

Dick Dastardly's Middle Eastern promise

2009-01-04T11:46:00.004Z

A week after What Is Wales? asked what Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair was doing about the crisis in Gaza he has apparently sprung into action.
Back from holiday he has been on the telephone to Jordan's King Abdullah II and is planning a series of meetings today.
AFP reports that King Abdullah told Mr Blair that the world's silence over Gaza has become "unacceptable".
What has the former crusading prime minister been up to then as the hungry and desperate people of Gaza await the tanks and troops of the Israeli Defence Force?
According to the Daily Telegraph one of the things which has been occupying his mind is the design of the Congressional Gold Medal which he has received from George W Bush.
Mr Blair has not yet been able to pick up the medal, awarded for being Bush's "staunch and steadfast ally" during the invasion of Iraq, and like Dick Dastardly's sidekick Muttley, he's understandably keen to see it looks just right.

:: Demonstrations and events relating to the crisis in Gaza are continuing in Wales. See the comments section of the previous post for details.

Gaza: where are the Christmas peacemakers?

2008-12-29T10:53:00.002Z

I never thought I’d ask this question but where is Tony Blair?
As Hamas and the Israeli government square up – home-made rockets against F-18s – just where is our Middle East “peace envoy”?
I thought he might have come out and done something (although on past behaviour I don’t know what I could have been expecting.)
The people of Gaza have been living under a crippling blockade since the summer of 2007.
Its population of 1.5 million lack fuel, food and medical supplies. Seventy per cent are living without electricity.
In November 2008, John Ging, the United Nations’ senior official in Gaza, told the Washington Post: “This is a disastrous situation, and it’s getting worse and worse... It is unprecedented that the UN is unable to get its supplies in to a population under such obvious distress; many of these families have been subsisting on this ration for years, and they are living hand-to-mouth.”
That same month, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, while urging Hamas to end its rocket attacks, demanded the Israeli government lift its blockade.
“The Secretary-General is concerned that food and other life saving assistance is being denied to hundreds of thousands of people, and emphasizes that measures which increase the hardship and suffering of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip as a whole are unacceptable and should cease immediately,” said a UN report.
Three out of four people in Gaza are living in poverty and 45 per cent are unemployed. Those, too, are UN figures.
According to the Red Cross, “chronic malnutrition is on a steadily rising trend and micronutrient deficiencies are of great concern”, while Unicef has reported that one in five of the population has access to six hours of water every five days – and other’s access is limited.
Today, on the third day of the latest violence, the death toll stands at 312 inside Gaza (according to Hamas) and two in Israel (according to Israeli police).
And what will the latest round of bloodshed achieve?
Robert Fisk notes in today’s Independent: “The blood-splattering has its own routine. Yes, Hamas provoked Israel's anger, just as Israel provoked Hamas's anger, which was provoked by Israel, which was provoked by Hamas, which ... See what I mean? Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel bombs Hamas, Hamas fires more rockets and Israel bombs again and ... Got it? And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel.”
As Israel’s people prepare to go to the polls to elect a new prime minister in the new year, its army is apparently preparing to go into Gaza on the ground.
Fisk takes an Israeli general’s claim that “no country in the world would allow its citizens to be made the target of rocket attacks without taking vigorous steps to defend them” and notes that when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, Britain did not unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic.
“Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn’t want to lower ourselves to the IRA’s level.”
And what of the people inside Gaza? What is their reaction to the Israeli government’s blockade and assault likely to be?
A yearning for friendship and peace with its neighbour? Or the harbouring of further hatred that will continue to expose the uselessness of our Middle East “peace envoys” for decades to come?

Questions over opposition to inquiry

2008-12-16T14:47:00.003Z

Cardiff Lib Dem councillors have reportedly added their support to the longstanding campaign for an inquiry into a number of miscarriages of justice in South Wales.
But the latest campaign calls – sparked by Plaid Cymru councillor Neil McEvoy – have caused a row.
If Cardiff council agrees to back the public inquiry then, as the South Wales Echo reports, it would force the city’s two representatives on the South Wales Police Authority into an embarrassing position.
Jacqui Gasson, the Caerau Liberal Democrat councillor who is Cardiff's longest serving representative on the police authority, is said to be “furious” and is particularly concerned about an inquiry’s costs.
“This smacks of old Labour,” she told the South Wales Echo. “I will not be mandated to do anything. I want to know what the public thinks. Would the public agree for their policing suffering to pay for a public inquiry that should have been held more than 10 years ago?
“I agree in principle with what Neil wants but this should have been done 10 years ago and not at a cost to the police authority purse.”
Coun Gasson’s statement raises two points.
Firstly, the campaigners have indeed been calling for an inquiry for the last decade. Michael O’Brien, of the Cardiff Newsagent Three, for instance, did so on the steps of the Court of Appeal in December 1998 – virtually 10 years to the day. His voice joined those of South Wales Liberty (now South Wales Against Wrongful Conviction) and fellow miscarriage victims Jonathan Jones and Annette Hewins.
Should those who suffered the miscarriages and the families of those who lost loved ones in the unsolved crimes be denied answers simply because the police and politicians keep batting the issue into the long grass?
Secondly, we don’t have to go back 10 years to find a dedicated and experienced councillor, and a member of the South Wales Police Authority, saying she was “embarrassed and uncomfortable” about the oppressive actions of some officers in the cases.
She said she had been “horrified” at the appeal court judges’ comments in the Newsagent Three case, for instance, and added: “I am one of those people who believes the police cannot investigate themselves and because of the number of cases here I support a public inquiry.”
The councillor was speaking at a cross-party press conference in Cardiff in July 2002, and was reported in the South Wales Echo.
The councillor’s name? Jacqui Gasson.
Maybe Coun Gasson should go back to seeing this as a matter of principle. One of her roles as a police authority member, after all, is to ensure the force is "effective, efficient and accountable to the public".
Coun McEvoy says of his motion on the inquiry: “Even if we aren’t successful in forcing a public inquiry, it is important that the capital city of Wales is saying what went on is unacceptable.”

DNA database ruling

2008-12-04T15:46:00.000Z

The storage of innocent people’s DNA by the UK government “could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society”, according to the European Court of Human Rights.
Court judges made the comment as they ruled that two British men should not have had their DNA and fingerprints retained by police.
The men’s information was held by South Yorkshire Police, although neither was convicted of any offence.
The judgment is likely to have major implications on how DNA records are stored in the UK national database.
The details of about 4.5 million people are held and one in five of them does not have a criminal record.
Under present laws, the DNA profiles of everyone arrested for a recordable offence in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are kept on the database, regardless of whether they are charged or convicted.
The European court found that the police’s actions in the case of the two men were in violation of Article 8 - the right to respect for private and family life - of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The judges ruled the retention of their DNA “failed to strike a fair balance between the competing public and private interests," and that the UK government “had overstepped any acceptable margin of appreciation in this regard”.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "The government mounted a robust defence before the court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice.
"The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgment."
Phil Booth, of the NO2ID group, which campaigns against identity cards, said: “This is a victory for liberty and privacy.
“Though these judgments are always complicated and slow in coming, it is a vindication of what privacy campaigners have said all along.
“The principle that we need to follow is simple - when charges are dropped suspect samples are destroyed. No charge, no DNA.”
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics reports on the ethical questions raised by recent advances in biological and medical research.
Its director, Hugh Whittall, said: “We agree wholeheartedly with this ruling. The DNA of innocent people should not be kept by police.
“People feel it is an invasion of their privacy, and there is no evidence that removing from the DNA database people who have not been charged or convicted will lead to serious crimes going undetected.
“The government now has an obligation to bring its own policies into line.”
Plaid Cymru AM Leanne Wood said the ruling “should signal the start of a process whereby the police should destroy DNA and fingerprints of all those who have not been convicted”.
“We are living that people living in a so called democratic society yet these two men had to take their case to a European Court to defend their human rights,” she said.
“This decision comes just before the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the December 10. Now more than ever we must be vigilant about our rights. This case shows why we must remain vigilant about our rights.”

Farewell, Studs Terkel

2008-11-02T14:00:00.004Z

On Friday, the world said goodbye to Studs Terkel.
Studs might not have been so well known on this side of the Atlantic but in the United States they are paying tribute to a "true American hero".
Studs was a performer, a journalist, an oral historian and a "rabble-rouser".
McCarthy tried to have him testify against leftist friends; he refused and never compromised on his principles. He was sacked from one job, quickly found another and never stopped working until his death at the age of 96.
Oh, yes, and he picked up a Pulitzer Prize along the way.
While much of his work centred on his beloved Chicago, he was very much for "ordinary" people everywhere, not just in the US.
He recorded the stories of hundreds of people over the years, and was a writer of great compassion and humanity.
He may be gone but his work remains - and will always be worth seeking out for the voice it gave to so many.
"Who built the pyramids?" he once asked. "It wasn’t the goddam pharaohs . . . it was the anonymous slaves."

Celebrating personal growth

2008-10-30T10:24:00.003Z

Who couldn’t enjoy Western Mail’s ‘Fast Growth 50’, its magazine round-up of the most successful companies in Wales?
Certainly not Professor Dylan Jones-Evans, academic, Western Mail business guru, creator of the ‘Fast Growth 50’ programme and, yes, blogger.
A full-page of the 34-page magazine is devoted to a celebration of this “passionate champion who is ahead of his time”.
He’s a man of many talents, there is no denying. After all, who was the editor of ‘Fast Growth 50’?
Why, none other than Professor Dylan Jones-Evans!

Energy Watch 2

2008-10-23T13:50:00.000Z

Welsh Lib Dem Mick Bates today called on the Welsh Assembly Government to form an urgent Cabinet task group to tackle fuel poverty.
It is estimated that 340,000 people in Wales will be living in fuel poverty this winter due to rising fuel costs.
Fuel poverty is defined as having to spend more than 10 per cent of household income on fuel.
Mr Bates, the party spokesperson for the environment, has written to the First Minister Rhodri Morgan urging him to form a task group so that ministers in key departments can use monies in their own portfolios to tackle the issue.
He also condemned energy companies on their lack of clarity and clear information on what they spend in Wales to reduce fuel poverty.
Speaking after a Sustainability Committee meeting which heard evidence from npower, Scottish and Southern, British Gas, E.ON, Scottish Power and EDF Energy, Mr Bates said: “It was very difficult to pin down exactly what they are doing to help the thousands of families who live in fuel poverty in Wales – it was like knitting fog.
“Energy companies should be compelled to put some of their huge profits back into insulating the homes of their poorest customers so that people can afford to heat their homes this winter without the worry of high fuel bills.”

Big Issue Cymru

2008-10-22T16:23:00.002Z

Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones is to investigate whether The Big Issue – which recently located much of its Wales operation to Scotland – is receiving funding from the Welsh Language Board.
Responding to a letter from Leanne Wood AM outlining her concerns about the company’s decision to make its Wales editor redundant, Mr Jones said he shared her concern about the future of Welsh language content in the magazine.
“I am also concerned with the intention to move Big Issue Cymru jobs to Glasgow,” he said. “It is important to safeguard Welsh language content in the magazine. I will therefore ask the Welsh Language Board to investigate this issue further and will get back to you on this matter.
“I understand that Big Issue Cymru has applied in the past to the Welsh Language Board to fund the Welsh language content in the magazine but there has been no contact recently.”

William Hague – a bargain at £16,000?

2008-10-20T13:35:00.000Z

A night out with accountants might not be to everyone’s cup of tea, but the South Wales Chartered Accountants’ Awards Dinner went with a swing.
Its success, I understand, was down in no small part to its guest speaker, Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague MP.
Mr Hague, I’m told, was worth every penny paid for Thursday’s 45-minute talk at City Hall, Cardiff.
I say ‘penny’, his rumoured remuneration was a little more generous… £16,000, anyone?
One of the event sponsors, by the way, was Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets. Credit crunch. What credit crunch!

Behind the blank statements on St Athan

2008-10-16T10:47:00.003Z

There was a very upbeat tale in the South Wales Echo yesterday, describing the military training privatisation at St Athan as “‘on track”.
There had been fears that the huge project in the Vale of Glamorgan could fall victim to the worldwide economic crisis, the Echo reported, but Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth had told the House of Commons on Tuesday that “considerable progress has been made in driving down costs and towards achieving affordable, value for money.
“Package one is on track for an investment decision in the spring of next year, with contract signature expected approximately 15 months later.”
The new base is now being called the Defence Technical Academy, as opposed to the Defence Training Academy (name changes are always a sign of trouble), but Vale of Glamorgan MP John Smith, has hit out at “the negative rumours that have been bandied about by doom-and-gloom merchants”.
“The minister’s statement confirms what I have always maintained, that St Athan is the only location that will provide technical training for all our armed forces in a high-quality bespoke environment and purpose-built facilities,” Mr Smith said.
And a spokesman for the Metrix Consortium of private companies behind the academy said greyly: “We are pleased with the progress that has been made so far and look forward to working closely with the MoD to deliver the Package One programme and the Defence Technical Academy in St Athan.”
However, over at the Defence Management Journal, the experts paint a very different picture - and rabid leftie peaceniks those boys ain’t.
They are, however, “doom-and-gloom merchants”, describing the Government's Defence Training Review (DTR) as “oft-delayed, over budget and controversial” - all elements of the DTR which have been regularly reported at What Is Wales?
“Numerous MPs have told Defence Management that the DTR's funding is heavily reliant on the sales of vacant MoD properties,” it reported yesterday. “The current financial crisis has not allowed the MoD to do this which has delayed a final financial agreement.
“The project is believed to already be £1bn over budget and Metrix and the MoD are reviewing extensive cuts to the programme. Ainsworth told parliament that even the alternatives such as moving the DTR to a central location in the West Midlands would be just as expensive if not more costly.”
The MoD’s project leader Brigadier Geoff Nield said in a statement that the MoD was committed "to continuing with the current assessment phase".
He acknowledged that there have been affordability challenges and that this had forced Metrix, the leader of package 1, to re-examine its proposal.
Ultimately, the St Athan training programme which was to begin in 2012 will now be delayed until 2014 at the earliest, Defence Management reported.

Energy Watch 1

2008-10-16T09:55:00.002Z

Who hasn’t got a story about rising energy costs?
Nobody, I suspect. And with the recent demise of the energywatch consumer watchdog (merged with Postwatch and the National Consumer Council into a body called Consumer Focus) now might be a time to keep a more watchful eye.
The Welsh Tories today revealed that petrol and diesel costs for the Welsh Ambulance Service have risen by more than £1.5m since 2001, a rise of 67 per cent in seven years.
The trust also reported a 120 per cent rise in gas and electricity prices since 2001, adding hundreds of thousands of pounds to annual running costs.
Other NHS trusts have reported similar rises in fuel and energy bills over the same period, according to figures obtained by Clwyd West AM Darren Millar.
Fuel bills for Cardiff and the Vale NHS trust alone have increased by 186 per cent since 2001 while its energy costs have doubled to £6.8m since 2000.
In the last financial year trusts spent £28.5m on gas and electricity for hospitals and other NHS buildings. In a written response to a question from Jonathan Morgan AM, Health Minister Edwina Hart said: “NHS Trust expenditure on energy, ie gas and electricity, was £28.5m in 2007/08. I expect this figure to increase this year in view of current market conditions.”

Meanwhile, as the dust settles on the bank bail-out, general media opinion is that it is good news for bank shareholders and speculators, and those with savings of £50,000...but what about everyone else?
Tax expert Prem Sikka, a professor from the University of Essex, says: "Soon ministers will be telling us that because of the bail-out public finances are to be squeezed and local and central government departments will cut services and jobs. The burden will disproportionately fall on the less well-off. There is a little chance of a bail-out for the 13.2 million people living in poverty, or for 2.1 million pensioners and 3.9 million children living in poverty, or students starting life in debt. When will the government find money for social reform?"

Privatisation on parade

2008-10-13T16:22:00.002Z

Much scrutiny of the nationalisation or part-nationalisation of various banks.
If only there had been as much investigation over the years of Labour’s love affair with privatisation.
It started with the air traffic control service and continues in defence.
This month an RAF engineer highlighted the appalling state of accommodation at St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan.
“The MoD sent us to a welfare house while our quarters were fumigated...the place they gave us was disgusting, with ripped carpets, filthy cupboards and kitchen doors hanging off their hinges,” said the serviceman’s wife.
Local MP John Smith said: “I am deeply concerned. The problem here appears to be that the property was absolutely filthy and that could not have happened 20 or 30 years ago.
"The entire housing stock of the Ministry of Defence was sold to a Japanese bank some 10 or 12 years ago and what that means is the liaison officer on camp has limited control over the standards of these properties.”
The entire housing stock of the MoD was sold to a Japanese bank? Who knew?
And, yes, this is the same John Smith who is drum major for the massive sell-off which will put the training of all three British armed forces into private hands.

Everyone a loser in ITV Wales cut-backs

2008-09-25T10:29:00.002Z

ITV is to be allowed to slash its Welsh programming by more than half in a new blow to the media in Wales.
The proposals come under the second phase of Ofcom’s review into public service broadcasting, launched as the industry prepares for the digital switchover.
One media expert today described Ofcom’s decision as a “lose-lose” situation for ITV staff and for viewers in Wales, while a politician called it a "giant leap backwards for devolution in the UK".
ITV Wales’ peak-time news output would remain unchanged, but the minimum volume of non-news programmes in Wales will be slashed from the current four hours a week, to just an hour-and-a-half after January.
The proposals will allow the quota for ITV1 programmes produced outside London to be reduced from 50 per cent to 35 per cent.
Ofcom’s Wales director Rhodri Williams said the proposals provided a “sustainable settlement” despite “the extensive economic pressures faced by ITV”.
Few others agree.
Wales’ Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones today expressed “huge concern” at the report.
“It is strongly in the interest of viewers in Wales to retain public service programming from ITV at a realistic level rather than risk losing such delivery altogether,” he said.
“It is a matter of huge concern to me that cutting the services offered by ITV Wales will deprive Welsh citizens from receiving a diverse range of programmes which reflect their everyday lives.
“Welsh audiences, loyal to ITV Wales, could also be deprived from gaining access to information about the democratic institutions which serve them - this, in turn, could affect their level of participation in those political processes.”
Mr Jones wants to meet with UK government ministers to discuss the assembly government’s concerns.
Peter Black AM, culture and media spokesperson for the Welsh Liberal Democrats, described the decision as “outrageous” and “a giant leap backwards for devolution in the UK”.
“The bottom line for ITV is that they have a public service obligation,” he said. “Quite how much service you can provide in 90 minutes, we will have to see. ITV Wales were pitching their new schedule – which already cut the amount of made in Wales current affairs programming – at around three hours a week. That was already a backward step for the people of Wales. Ninety minutes is a giant leap backwards for devolution in the UK.
“Devolution allows the nations of the UK to do more and more things in a way that is different. While TV is the main source of information people have about the politics of where they live, there can be little justification for cutting the legs from under the ITV Wales operation. There is a real danger of Wales being left with a single broadcasting monopoly.
“The BBC does a great job of reporting Wales to its own people and the world beyond. But without competition, who will keep the BBC on its mettle? Where will the alternative voice come from?
“Plurality of voice matters – Ofcom’s decision shows a regulator unwilling to regulate. It has failed democracy, and it has failed the people of Wales.”
Media professor Tom O’Malley, of the University of Wales, agreed that today’s news revealed a “failure of regulation and a failure of Ofcom”.
Speaking on the BBC, he said: “What’s going to happen is that there will be less programmes about Wales, talking to people in Wales about Wales, it will weaken ITV news in Wales, there will be less plurality of perspectives on it and of course the people who work in ITV in Wales will suffer as well.
“So this is lose-lose all round.”
He called on the Government to force Ofcom to change its attitude to public service broadcasting.

CACI, Abu Ghraib and us

2008-09-23T20:17:00.002Z

There is growing concern in Scotland about a decision to award the multi-million pound 2011 Census contract to a marketing and information company called CACI Ltd.
CACI Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CACI International Incorporated, an American company which is doing rather well in these troubled times.
It is a publicly-listed company on the New York Stock Exchange with an annual revenue in excess of US $2bn.
But it is how it makes its money that concerns campaigners: it is a key partner in George Bush’s homeland security and “war on terror” - and its staff worked with the US Army in the prison and interrogation blocks of Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
The US Army was forced to close Abu Ghraib after news reports of the torture and humiliation of prisoners. Eleven US soldiers were convicted of breaking military laws for mistreating prisoners, and five others were disciplined.
CACI International Incorporated has produced a book defending itself for its part in the Abu Ghraib scandal and says “we were not involved with horrendous abuses such as death or sexual assault at Abu Ghraib”.
But it is one of two private contractors who are the subject of lawsuits from four Iraqis over allegations that they were tortured there.
CACI's growing role in UK information systems prompts another concern: in a world which has become one big database and surveillance job, do we really want our personal information handled by a company so closely linked to the US intelligence services?
As CACI International Incorporated boasts in its mission statement: “(Our) mission is to be a leader in providing the information technology and consulting solutions America needs to defeat global terrorism, secure our homeland and improve government services. We are ever vigilant in aligning our solutions with the nation's highest priorities.”
Realistically, CACI Ltd already plays a larger role in our lives than we know. The UK Government uses the company’s ACORN ("A Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods") model in areas such as the monitoring of crime to classify us (some of us are “wealthy achievers”, some “hard pressed”).
The company is a major collator of health information too.
Welsh local authorities regularly use their expertise on retail matters. Ceredigion County Council and Bridgend County Borough Council are recent customers.

Big Issue Cymru - to be written in Scotland

2008-09-20T11:57:00.003Z

The Welsh edition of The Big Issue is moving production to its Scottish office.
Two out of its three editorial staff – including its editor Rachel Howells - are being made redundant. The editor of The Big Issue Scotland is to become the editor of both titles.
The decision is a blow to the homeless people who sell the magazine, to the media in Wales and to readers.
Plaid Cymru AM Leanne Wood has written to Welsh Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones and the Welsh Language Board “to see what pressure they can put on the owners to ensure we don’t lose Big Issue Cymru”.
“The Big Issue Cymru provides news from Wales that you don’t find in many other publications," she says. "Many people buy it because of its local stories. Big Issue Cymru has played an important role as a campaigning magazine promoting people who don’t have their voices heard. The loss of the Welsh language column is also something which will be felt by a lot of people.
“All of these factors combined could result in fewer people buying the Big Issue in Wales. This is bound to impact on the vendors who are homeless people.”
I have to declare an interest in this. I’ve had a column in Big Issue Cymru for almost four years and will be sad to see Rachel leave.
I haven’t heard from the new regime so don’t know what they plan for the rest of the magazine or how much of it will have any Wales-led content at all.
As Leanne Wood says Big Issue Cymru has often looked at issues which don't get discussed elsewhere, including ironically the on-going downgrading of our media in Wales.

Shocking treatment of asylum seekers’ children

2008-09-18T15:48:00.003Z

The Children’s Commissioner for Wales Keith Towler has condemned the “shocking” treatment of asylum seeker children in the UK.
Mr Towler said the way some children were dealt with beggared belief, according to today’s Western Mail.
He went on to describe the highly distressing way one young family was recently removed from Swansea. He is the latest in a long line of people to speak out on the issue this year.

Contingency plan for St Athan failure

2008-09-16T12:07:00.003Z

The Government's sell-off of military training continues to go badly.
It is planned that a consortium of private companies (the Metrix Consortium) will set up and run the massive new St Athan training academy.
Other training sites are to be closed with the land sold off to raise funds by Metrix.
One of the sites expected to go was RAF Cosford in Shropshire.
But now - with the credit crunch biting and few developers queuing up for the MoD land sell-off - it appears that might not be so.
According to the Defence Management Journal, Cosford's closure might be put on hold during a review of the Government's scheme, which is known in official circles as the Defence Training Rationalization.
"The DTR is facing an extended period of difficulty and a full blown financial review because its financing was dependent on the sale of surplus MoD land," the DMJ reported yesterday. "Now the MoD may have to keep the RAF Cosford open as a contingency plan in case the deal at St Athan collapses.
"If the deal at St Athan were to fall through, the MoD would need a backup site for the programme."

What made Snow fall?

2008-09-16T09:06:00.001Z

Psst, do you want to know a secret?
It’s the story of a heroic Welshman, although it doesn’t start off very courageously.
I mean, our heroes are rarely “mean-spirited” and “bony-faced”.
They don’t normally have ill-shaped ears, or make a spectacle of themselves by only putting in their false teeth to eat.
What manner of hero is this, I hear you ask?
Well, his name was Arthur George Owens and he was a very strange hero.
Indeed, it might be asked whether he was a hero at all.
Owens was a shifty character, but that was no drawback in his chosen profession.
He started out as an electrical engineer, representing his firm in Europe during the 1930s.
There, he picked up information which he figured, as Hitler grew more powerful, might be handy to the British government.
After approaching MI6 to work as an agent he quickly concluded two things: they weren’t paying very much and they were so disorganised they were likely to give him away.
Consequently, in 1936, he approached German military intelligence who appealed to both his Welsh nationalism and his wallet.
However, German ineptitude gave him away and the British recruited him to feed dud information to Berlin.
Under the code-name Snow, he became Britain’s first double agent, creating a whole network of imaginary agents to help him fool Berlin. Some were supposedly Welsh saboteurs.
Everything went well with Owens helping unmask a number of German spies in Britain (mostly with the help of his handler, Gwilym Williams, a retired Swansea policeman, but that’s another story).
But drink and Owens’ duplicitous nature proved his downfall. His British spy-masters withdrew him from the field and locked him up for the rest of the war – presumably in case he changed sides again.
There isn’t much written on Owens. He was a rather unsavoury character who inhabited the shadowy world of the black arts, but he had been of real value to his country – helping to persuade Germany that Britain was better prepared to repel invasion than it actually was.
Veteran code-breaker Hervie Haufler is the best source on Snow, having uncovered his story from National Archives files for his book ‘The Spies Who Never Were’.
All the same, much remains unknown about the mysterious Mr Owens.
What was it which led him to be such an effective double-agent and, even more intriguingly, why exactly did his London masters lock him away in Dartmoor Prison?
A little while ago I asked the Home Office about this, but fell foul of two exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, one of which concerns national security.
“The Home Office can neither confirm nor deny whether we hold any relevant information,” it told me.
In a final flourish it added that saying it didn’t have to give reasons for withholding information, did not “necessarily indicate that any information…exists or does not exist.”
Even 60 or 70 years on, we remain in the dark about Snow’s fall from grace.

:: First published in Big Issue Cymru.
If you know anything about Arthur Owens please get in touch: greg_lewis@hotmail.co.uk

Sorry, the hardest word?

2008-09-06T10:04:00.002Z

Barbara Wilding, Chief Constable of South Wales Police, has responded to the Wales This Week programme on Michael O’Brien by publishing a statement on the force’s website.
In the statement she refers to the civil action which the force settled out of court with Michael O’Brien and his co-accused Ellis Sherwood in 2006.
O’Brien and Sherwood had started proceedings to sue the force for malicious prosecution back in 2001.
Mrs Wilding states that the force made the settlement – and paid the accompanying damages – “without any admission of liability”.
She then says that they “chose to accept the payments on that basis rather than going to trial” and that both they and their legal advisers “were fully aware that this made an apology inappropriate”.
The force’s unwillingness to apologise to O’Brien, Sherwood and the third member of the Cardiff Newsagent Three, Darren Hall, has been a major motivating factor behind O’Brien’s continuing campaign.
It is something he describes in detail in his new autobiography, The Death Of Justice. It would help him move on after an 11-year jail sentence which he did not deserve.
In Monday’s programme on ITV Wales, O’Brien’s lawyer claimed that he clearly deserved an apology from South Wales Police, and most observers with knowledge of the murder investigation into Phillip Saunders’ death in 1987 and of evidence put before the Court of Appeal in December 1999 would surely have to agree.
Today, Ms Ofer has responded to the South Wales Police statement. In a letter to the press (see Western Mail) she states that O’Brien “did not reach an out-of-court settlement willingly”.
He was forced into a financial situation which meant he had no choice but to settle out of court.
“He was desperate for the case to go to trial, but once the police paid £300,000 into court he was forced to settle against his will as his legal aid would be stopped as a result,” she explains.
“Legal rules mean that if he had gone to trial and won and been awarded £300,000, all of the legal costs of both sides would come out of his damages. He therefore had no choice but to accept a settlement.”
She adds: “South Wales Police were quoted as saying that an apology would be inappropriate. This is completely incorrect. Apologies are made by police forces as part and parcel of settlement on some occasions and one was requested in this case.
“South Wales Police chose to make a payment into court a month before trial because they realised that there was a real risk that they would lose at trial.
“Had they simply wished to save money they could have made a payment five years earlier, instead of spending these years and a huge sum of money on legal costs fighting the case all the way to the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords.”

The Death of Justice: Michael O'Brien's autobiography

2008-08-30T16:03:00.004Z

Michael O'Brien spent 11 years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit.
In December 1999, after judges quashed his conviction, he asked me to write a piece about his two-week appeal.
That request turned into a plan to write a complete book of Mike’s life.
It is an incredible story.
Mike’s arrest and life sentence for the murder of Cardiff newsagent Phillip Saunders is just the start.
Locked up in some of Britain’s toughest jails, with inmates like Charlie Bronson, Mike had to learn how to act tough to survive.
He did not ask friends and relatives for ordinary presents like many others: he wanted law books.
He knew that to overturn his conviction he had to educate himself and organize his own campaign.
He had a lot to overcome. There was personal tragedy: the death of his baby daughter while he was on remand and his step-father while he was in jail.
And there were the legal obstacles. His conviction was based largely on the confession of one of his co-accused Darren Hall and the evidence of a policeman who claimed to have overheard a conversation between Michael and the third member of the so-called Cardiff Newsagent Three, Ellis Sherwood.
Michael's cell-block campaign urged MPs and journalists to take an interest in the Newsagent Three case.
And after Darren Hall retracted his confession, the case caught the eye of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
They referred the case to the Court of Appeal and just before Christmas 1999, Michael O’Brien, Ellis Sherwood and Darren Hall were able to declare themselves innocent men.
But it wasn’t the end for Michael. He has continued to champion other people’s causes as well as seeking what he believes is further justice for himself.
And, of course, there was the book. Now, complete, The Death Of Justice comes out on Monday, September 1, with a launch at Borders in The Hayes in Cardiff at 10am.
Crucially, it describes not only that decade in jail, but the ten years since: ten years in which Michael has struggled to come to terms with what has gone before.
Part of that has been the sense that in some people’s minds there is no smoke without fire, that the stench of that murder conviction hangs over Michael despite the Court of Appeal ruling.
He takes frankly about that on ITV at 8pm on Monday in a special edition of Wales This Week. For many years he has wanted to take a polygraph to put the doubts to an end.
On the programme he finally gets the chance to take the lie detector test.

Recycling history

2008-08-15T16:05:00.002Z

The International Olympic Committee awarded Germany the 1936 Games before Hitler came to power.
But once German Chancellor, he seized the Olympics as a powerful propaganda tool.
Governments, including those of the United States and the UK, rejected calls for a boycott, even though Jewish athletes had been removed from Germany’s Olympic and Davis Cup teams.
However, international opposition to the Berlin games was great and it is a little known fact that ‘counter-Olympics’ were planned in a number of places.
The biggest of these was to be in Spain. History has forgotten it, not least because the proposed People’s Olympiad never took place.
In the summer of 1936 Spain saw the rise of its own branch of fascism. General Franco moved to seize power and the Spanish Civil War began.
The People’s Olympiad had to be cancelled.
Seven decades on, though, and with another Olympics underway, the spirit of the event is being recalled.
Members of the National Clarion Cycling Club had been expected to take part in the alternative Olympiad in Spain.
After it was cancelled – and with the war in full swing - two decided to undertake an amazing ride from Glasgow to Barcelona to raise money for the Spanish Republic (two other club members were to be killed in the civil war).
That was in 1938. On Wednesday, July 30, 2008, a group of 14 riders left Scotland to begin a 20-day ride on the cyclists’ 70-year-old trail.
They are due to arrive in Barcelona on Tuesday, August 19.
Anna Martí and publisher Alan Warren, who have done so much to keep alive the memory of Welsh veterans of the Spanish Civil War, are on the team.
Maite de Paul Otxotorena, who was born in Spain’s Basque country but now lives near Ammanford, is there in support and has organised the Spanish leg of the route.
Maite says the event ties together not only the 1936 Olympics and those currently being held in Beijing (which have been controversial in their own way too) but also Barcelona’s Games in 1992.
“I was a child in Franco’s military Spain when our memory of our history had been lost,” she says. “Events like the 1992 Olympics and the Expo put an international focus on Spain. People started to research our history.
“But as I have been contacting the mayors and the cycling clubs in the places we will be travelling through no one has heard of the other Olympics planned for 1936.
“Events like this are part of the end of our amnesia.”
I spoke to Anna Martí before the ride as she took a break in her training for the 2,000km journey.
“I have been told to take plenty of clothes for Scotland,” she told me. “But when we get to Spain we come through an area which is like a desert.
“It will be like cycling towards the centre of the Earth.”
:: First published in The Big Issue Cymru, July 28, 2008

More than just the usual suspects

2008-07-07T20:31:00.003Z

A bill presented by Cardiff Central MP Jenny Willott has had its first reading in the House of Commons.
Ms Willott wants information about innocent people removed from the Government’s ever-growing DNA database.
Unfortunately, I’m told by people who understand these things, the bill has no chance of becoming law.
At the moment one million people who have not being convicted of any crime have their names on the database. More than 100,000 of them are children.
“As well as the loss of civil liberties, all the evidence shows that continuing to take, analyse and store innocent people's DNA has not improved crime detection rates,” said the Lib Dem MP. “In fact the cost of doing so means fewer resources for frontline policing.
“Our criminal justice system was built on the principle of innocent until proven guilty. We need to bring that principle back by allowing innocent people to get their DNA removed from the database.”
Last October, Preseli Pembrokeshire Tory Stephen Crabb raised the case of 75-year-old Geoffrey Orchard.
Mr Orchard had been wrongfully arrested and had received a written apology from the police - but he couldn’t get his DNA removed from the database.
Mr Crabb tackled Meg Hillier, of the Home Office.
“Does she really understand the enormous extent to which good will and support for the police and for her department are being undermined by a system in which DNA information is being recorded aggressively, but removed in a haphazard way and on a discretionary basis, dependent on police force area?” he asked in Parliament.
He added recently: “I have never questioned the usefulness of this tool for the police, but have grown increasingly concerned at the energetic way in which DNA profiles are collected, even from completely innocent parties with no connection to a crime scene.”
In Wales, the use of DNA technology in eventually solving the murder of Lynette White, killed in Cardiff in 1988, is often highlighted in support of the database.
But it’s worth noting that Lynette's horrific murder was not solved because an innocent person's DNA was held.
During that re-investigation officers and forensic scientists made a partial match of DNA found at the murder scene with that of a teenager from whom a sample had been taken following arrest.
The match meant the teenager – not even born when Lynette was killed - had to be related to the killer.
Mrs Hillier told Stephen Crabb last year: “It is worth stressing that a person's DNA being on the database does not suggest guilt.”
Worth stressing also that we are citizens, or subjects even, but not suspects.

:: Big Issue Cymru, June 30 - July 4, 2008
:: Update of 'Protecting Our DNA'

War is Peace

2008-06-27T10:22:00.002Z

Who will be training their soldiers at the new Defence Training Academy at St Athan?
It’s a question that’s been exercising campaigners who feel the development is not just pledging Wales to a future of “militarism”, but wondering to whose military we are making that pledge.
I mean, we are never going to stop people killing other people. But does it look like we even want to?
Especially if private security companies – like the ones fighting wars for ‘us’ by proxy in Iraq – will be getting trained there.
I contacted the Ministry of Defence under the Freedom of Information Act to ask if, for instance, the MoD would ban any particular nations from using the training camp.
And what about private security companies – would they be able to send personnel there?
After a short delay I received an email from Brigadier Geoff Nield, a project leader with the Defence Training Review.
Under this privatised scheme, it seems, the first decision on who comes in from the outside for training is down to the Metrix Consortium – a group of arms/defence companies and educational establishments like the Open University.
“The MoD is content that Metrix may deliver training and accommodation services to third parties as long as certain contractual conditions and restraints are met,” said Brigadier Nield.
“These include, for example, not impairing the delivery of military training to the MoD, meeting security requirements and maintaining military ethos on-site.
“Furthermore, MoD reserves the right to approve or forbid the use of training assets (including facilities) for third parties.”
So, could a regime like Burma for instance, on paying the right fees, get its soldiers trained here? After all, Britain kindly sold more than 40 Hawk aircraft to the Indonesians during the 1980s and 1990s before world attention suggested that helping the country suppress the East Timorese did not make Britain either great or a land of much hope and glory.
“The MoD…prioritises those countries that receive training on a case by case basis. Where there is a mutual agreement between the UK and countries of interest, agreed scheduled training courses can be attended by those invited, subject to availability and appropriate security clearance.”
There is, some might say, an Orwellian feel to the response. The MoD insists on calling the centre a “college” and the non-UK attendees, “students”.
In addition, the MoD also states that the training of private contractors and foreign armies is actually about making a stable world for our children’s children.

“A key tenet of UK foreign policy is to encourage diplomatic engagement with foreign countries so as to not only serve UK interests but also develop long term stability throughout regions of the world,” said the brigadier. “The MoD supports this policy in different guises, one of which is to train foreign students, both in UK and abroad as arranged through overseas embassies and high commissions.”
War is peace, then, after all.

::The Big Issue Cymru, June 16-22, 2008

Fighting for liberties

2008-06-12T14:17:00.003Z

Can there really be a person of integrity at the heart of British politics?
Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP to force a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency.
He'll fight the by-election on the issue of the new 42-day terror detention limit and as a fight against the Government's erosion of civil liberties.
"I will argue in this by-election against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government," he says.

Protecting our DNA

2008-06-11T16:06:00.002Z

Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Willott was today due to present a private Bill in the Commons to reform the way the DNA register is run.
The Cardiff Central MP says innocent people should have their DNA taken off the Government database.
Ms Willott told the Western Mail: “If you are not charged or you are acquitted then your DNA should be removed. People who have voluntarily given samples, say to help in a police investigation, can’t have their DNA taken off the register either, so potentially there are a lot of people affected.
“I don’t think the public realise quite how far it’s going.”
The Western Mail also reports that: “Although the use of DNA technology has led to the clearing-up of several unsolved murders, including that of Cardiff prostitute Lynette White, killed in 1988, there are fears that the database is a breach of civil liberties.”
But it’s worth noting that Lynette's horrific murder was not solved because an innocent person's DNA was held.
During that re-investigation officers and forensic scientists made a partial match of DNA found at the 1988 murder scene with that of a teenager from whom a sample had been taken following arrest.
The match meant the teenager – not even born when Lynette was killed - had to be related to the killer.

Keeping Faith in the USA

2008-06-07T10:47:00.002Z

On Saturday June 14, Bruce Springsteen plays at the Millennium Stadium.
It will be his first concert in Wales, although he's been coming to the UK since 1975.
Back then, a huge amount of hype surrounded his third album, Born to Run.
"At last, London is ready for Bruce Springsteen," boasted the record company's posters – some of which Springsteen himself climbed up onto billboards to rip down.
In 1984 and 1985 he rode the hype, and indeed contributed to it himself, for the Born in the USA album and tour, a period so overblown that for many it still dominates his image.
Hardcore fans, and he inspires dedication most artists can only dream of, know there is much more to him than that.
In his writing he's covered every subject from the economic despair of many of America's industrial heartlands, to the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the atrocities of September 11.
The plight of refugees, and immigrants to the United States from Mexico in particular, have been central to his work.
"For everything the North gives, it exacts a price in return," warns one Mexican father as his sons head across the Rio Bravo.
Campaigning journalist John Pilger called Springsteen a "fine humanitarian artist", real praise from someone who has charted so much that has gone wrong in US foreign policy.
In February 1999 a 22-year-old West African immigrant named Kadiatou Diallo died in a hail of police bullets in New York.
Springsteen wrote a song about it, causing the city's police department to boycott his gigs at Madison Square Garden.
But where are the major artists covering the significant events in Britain's social and political life?
Why did no artist see the 2005 shooting of unarmed Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes by London police officers as a subject for protest?
Billy Bragg has said: "Springsteen makes me keep faith in America".
Bragg is a dedicated Springsteen fan. So are James Dean Bradfield, of the Manic Street Preachers, and Swansea-born comedian Rob Brydon, who already has his ticket for the Millennium Stadium gig.
And so am I.
I think we all need Bruce – not just America.

(Bruce fans go here.)

Ana Lucia Pinzon is the most senior female trade unionist in Colombia.
And being a trade unionist – of either gender - - in Colombia takes a special kind of courage. An estimated 2,600 have been killed over the last 20 years.
The US and the UK have poured weapons into this deeply divided country, claiming to be fighting a war against drugs.
But Justice for Colombia, a British-based NGO, and others, claim the weapons are instead used in a bloody counter-insurgency war.
And according to Amnesty International, all sides in the conflict, including the army and army-backed paramilitaries, have been "responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity".
I only know what I read. Ana will describe all this first hand when she gives a special talk at the Memorial Hall, Bodhyfryd, Wrexham, at 2.30pm on Saturday (June 7).

::First published in The Big Issue Cymru, June 2-8, 2008

Archbishop Tutu in Gaza

2008-05-31T15:23:00.002Z

This short report on Archbishop Desmond Tutu's visit to Gaza is only two minutes and three seconds long.
Watching it won't take up much of your weekend. But his words might stay with you for much longer.

WAG's asylum point of principle

2008-05-30T09:44:00.002Z

There was a predictable outcry when the Welsh Assembly Government decided recently to allow asylum seekers, who have been refused permission to stay in the UK, access to hospital treatment.
It was the usual knee-jerk reaction. One has to wonder what these people would do if they came across someone in pain, or suffering a life-threatening illness, but who they suspected to be from abroad.
Would they check first whether they should be 'here', whether they pay their taxes?The Tories, as Betsan Powys of the BBC, pointed out, got very confused over the new policy.
Obviously, they didn’t want to appear soft on foreigners – heaven forbid – but the true blues are a little wet over this side of Offa’s Dyke, a little too caring.
Today, in an excellent letter to the Western Mail, Cathy Owens, programme director for Amnesty International in Wales, describes the “outrage from the usual quarters about queue-jumping and fairness for British taxpayers”.
Some of this is based on valid argument, she says, but some is based on “misinformation and xenophobia”.
Asking readers to put themselves into the shoes of some of the 3,000 asylum seekers in Wales – many of whom have fled repression and war - she says: “A few hundred may not win the right to stay, but may find it very difficult to return – they may not be able to travel back to Afghanistan, Darfur or Zimbabwe.”
If they fall ill, they can go to a GP but cannot be treated as inpatients at hospital.
Last year, only 11 people in this situation needed treatment in Welsh hospitals – a small number when you consider that more than 300,000 operations take place in Wales every year.
“For each of those 11 people behind the headlines, it could have been the difference between life and death,” writes Owens.
WAG’s decision was a point of principle – that we don’t refuse help to anyone who is ill or dying. And it was one that makes our nation a little more humane.

Questions at university over military academy

2008-04-27T11:21:00.002Z

Protesters say they’ve found the first chinks in the armour of the arms and defence consortium behind the new St Athan training academy.
Much is being made about the educational courses which will be on offer at the massive base – and the Open University’s involvement in the Metrix Consortium is key to that.
The OU has a commitment to “social justice”. But as one campaigner put it to me: “How will the OU feel if in a few years time Burmese troops are being trained at St Athan?”
It seems people within the OU have been asking similar questions.
Following a demonstration outside the OU offices in Cardiff recently its Wales director Rob Humphreys said its involvement was about “delivering the highest possible quality of support” to Britain’s armed services.
However, when I pressed the OU on claims that staff had been contacting demonstrators with messages of support and that there might even have been discussions about leaving the consortium, the OU was less bullish.
“Any community as large in number and as diverse in opinion as the Open University will include people who hold differing views about some of their organisation’s activities,” came the response from its Milton Keynes HQ.
“More than anywhere else, it is in a university that such diversity of opinion and discussion of issues are – and should be – found. In this case, a very small number of staff have raised concerns about the University’s involvement, and their concerns are noted.
“The involvement of the University in all major projects with external partners is reviewed regularly by senior managers as part of good business practice. The University’s participation in the Metrix Consortium is no different.”
Watch this space then, as the old gossip columnists used to say.

Comedy’s hot property at the moment is Wales-made ‘Gavin and Stacey’ and in a recent programme Gavin and his mum had problems at the Severn Bridge when they couldn’t find cash.
“Don’t they take card?” said mum. “Everyone takes card.”
Welsh Lib Dem leader Mike German spotted an opportunity for a press release.
“Gavin and Stacey may be a comedy, but it highlights a very serious issue, one that hits the people of Wales hard,” he said. “The Welsh Liberal Democrats have repeatedly called for changes to the Severn Bridges Act to allow road users to pay by credit or debit card.”
Far better for Mr G to continue with his other campaign – reported only four months ago – to get the charges scrapped.
As he pointed out then, the tolls on both bridges have already raised £684m – more than double the cost of the 1996 second crossing.
And there’s no sign of a free crossing for some time to come.
In February UK transport minister Rosie Winterton said the tolls would have to raise £995,830,000 before motorists would stop shelling out.
No laughing matter at all.

::Big Issue Cymru, April 21, 2008

Airman Missing

2008-04-23T16:07:00.002Z

Back in the 1970s the BBC produced a critically-acclaimed drama series called Secret Army.
The programme followed the exploits of a group of ordinary Belgians who ran an evasion line, helping Allied airman return to Britain after being shot down.
The series was based on the Comet Line, a network established by a young Belgian girl, Andrée de Jongh, who died last year.
One of the men saved by the line was John Evans from Goodwick in Pembrokeshire.
Airman Missing (see left) tells the story of John’s life behind enemy lines and, in particular, pays tribute to the brave volunteers who saved his life.
It also describes how he tracked many of them down after the war. There were some tearful reunions.
And there were sadly others who had not survived to be reunited with those they had protected during the dark days of Nazi occupation.
:: Pictured John Evans (in the hat) hides out in a Belgian wood in 1944 with fellow airmen and escaped Russian prisoners of war.

The Open University and St Athan

2008-04-17T13:53:00.007Z

The Open University is apparently facing pressure from its own staff over its part in Metrix Consortium, the developers behind the St Athan military training academy.
I've spoken to OU about these concerns and about whether it is considering pulling out of the consortium - the full report is in the Big Issue Cymru (April 21).
Thanks to Luther ap Blissett for flagging this up.

Hold The Front Page has reported journalists' concerns about provisions in the Counter-Terrorism Bill which could affect media investigation and reporting.
These include new offences of eliciting, publishing or communicating information about members of the armed forces, new search and seizure powers and new ministerial controls over inquests.
The Newspaper Society has written to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.
:: Photographer or terrorist?

The goats who lord it over us

2008-04-16T10:52:00.004Z

Digby Jones is poised to leave Gordon Brown's government of all the talents (Goat) before the next election.
Perhaps future goats brought in by the Labour Party will represent areas of society which have less access to power than Lord Jones' friends.
Jones, after all, is hardly a champion of the voiceless and the vulnerable.
A corporate lawyer by background, his previous senior corporate advisory positions have included senior advisor to Barclays Capital, chairman of the Deloitte Industries Group, corporate and governmental affairs advisor to Ford of Europe and Premier Automotive Group, advisor to JCB and member of the advisory board of Aggregate Industries.
His period in government has given big business the ear of Gordon Brown.
But it has surely helped the individual too - particularly, if that individual is Lord Jones. His consultancy and after dinner fees are certain to rise.
He also, of course, got a peerage out of his entry into government. Will he now hand that back, as suggested by one MP?

Remembering Ama

2008-04-11T11:57:00.002Z

There will be a demonstration in memory of Ama Sumani later this month in Cardiff.
Ama died in Ghana on March 19 after being removed from the University Hospital of Wales while receiving treatment for cancer.
Campaigners hope that the event will be both a tribute to Ama and a message to the authorities.
“This protest is important because we have to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again” said Janet Symmons, Ama's friend and co-ordinator of the campaign.
“Ama's tragedy touched a lot of people, but it is important to understand that there are hundreds of people in similar situations right now. I know a Zambian lady who has a baby daughter with brain damage, a Cameroonian boy with Hepatitis – all have the threat of deportation hanging over them.”
The demo takes place at 1 pm at the Nye Bevan Statue, Queen Street, Cardiff, on Saturday, April 19.
* Thanks to Respectable Citizen for highlighting this event.

Four Nations football tournament confirmed

2008-04-11T11:51:00.002Z

The Football Association of Wales has announced that the Four Nations tournament is likely to commence in 2011.
One nation is set to host the tournament on a rotational basis with matches to be played as double headers on the same day.
The associations of Wales, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland met recently and have agreed the competition is likely to take place between February and May 2011, according to the FAW.
One nation is set to host the tournament on a rotational basis with matches to be played as double headers on the same day.
The tournament will take many of us back to the Home Internationals that we enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s - but will the tournament be as enjoyable without England?

Swansea lifer speaks from jail - UPDATE

2008-03-21T11:17:00.003Z

The programme on Swansea's Richard Davies, who is serving a life sentence for murder, is now available to watch on the internet.
If you would like to see it go here and follow the link for Wales This Week, March 17, 2008.
Richard's family - along with the family of John Roden, convicted of a double murder in Risca - last night attended a meeting of South Wales Against Wrongful Conviction (formerly South Wales Liberty).
This campaigning group is always looking for new members. If you might be interested post here and I'll put you in touch.

Ama's death "on Britain's conscience"

2008-03-20T13:37:00.002Z

The death of cancer patient Ama Sumani will be on the conscience of this nation, according to the Archbishop of Wales.
Ama Sumani, 39, died yesterday in Korle-Bu hospital, Accra, Ghana, after she had been forcibly removed from Cardiff’s University Hospital of Wales in January.
The widowed mother-of-two had been taken from her hospital bed in Cardiff while undergoing treatment because her visa had expired.
The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, said today: “I am enormously sad to hear of the death of Ama Sumani.
“I believe her death is on the conscience of this nation because we removed her when it was against every humanitarian instinct to do so.
“My thoughts and prayers are with her family.”
:: Ama's deportation and the treatment of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants in Wales has been discussed extensively on What Is Wales?

Poor Position On Poverty

2008-03-15T12:24:00.003Z

Ten years ago Britain had the worst record on child poverty of any major European nation.
At the time the numbers living in poverty had soared over the previous two decades.
Since then the trend has been reversed.
According to a new report from the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee there are now around 2.8 million children living in poverty. This is down from 3.4 million in 1999 when Tony Blair announced a plan to halve child poverty by 2010.
But the new figures show the Government is well off target to reach its overall aim of eradicating child poverty completely by 2020.
The committee reported: "There is a mass of evidence…that poor children have constrained lives, poorer health, worse diets, colder and more dilapidated housing conditions, higher risks of accidents and injuries, experience more physical abuse and more bullying and have less access to childcare. They also do less well at school, and their outcomes in terms of skills and employment are worse."
So what's the situation in Wales?
Welsh Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Willott, who is a member of the select committee, says: "There are still around 140,000 children in Wales living in poverty.
"Poverty is particularly high amongst children of lone parents and disabled parents and within ethnic minorities."
One-in-five families with a disabled child are so hard up they cut back on food.
The issues behind poverty are complicated but one thing the committee's report throws up is public attitude.
There's a perception that because our country is economically stable that there is no excuse for poverty.
Sympathy for the poor, the committee notes grimly, is at a "low level".
And as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported recently the public are a "long way from supporting an anti-poverty agenda in the UK".
Quite astonishing, but that is Britain in 2008. Nearly three million children in poverty – and a large number of us don't particularly care.

Another Commons' committee has highlighted the "serious mismanagement" of a compensation scheme for sick miners.
In 1998 a court ruled that the British Coal Corporation – therefore the Government - was liable for lung disease caused by coal dust and hand injuries relating to the use of vibrating equipment.
Over 10 years the Government has settled 650,000 claims, leaving 128,000 outstanding.
Lawyers loved the scheme.
While ex-miners have received £4.1bn in compo, solicitors and administrators have received £2.3bn for handling the claims.
Solicitors have now been ordered to pay back millions.
Labour MP for Islwyn Don Touhig has highlighted the case of one miner given just 50p in compensation.
The miner in question was marked down because he was a smoker who only worked underground for two years.
The lawyers who handled his claim, though, still rubbed their hands.
A root through the report reveals their pay for handling the 50p payment came in at £1,974.
::Big Issue Cymru, March 10-16, 2008

Swansea lifer speaks from jail for first time

2008-03-15T11:53:00.006Z

Wynford and Joan Davies believe their son is innocent of the murder for which he is serving life in jail.
Richard Davies was jailed six years ago for the 2001 killing of his friend Jason Williams in Loughor. Williams' body has never been found.
The couple spent the first few years of his sentence in a state of shock but, after attending a meeting of Liberty, they learned of the Innocence Project at Cardiff Law School.
Lecturer Julie Price is overseeing the only such project in Wales. On it, law students give their time to investigate possible miscarriages of justice.
After reading notes on Richard's case they took it on.
What Is Wales? reported on the case last year. This Monday, ITV Wales' Wales This Week programme continues to follow the students as they work to uncover fresh evidence.
There are major developments - including a five-figure reward for new information and the first ever interview with Richard Davies as he talks from Gartree Prison about coping inside and about the night he is alleged to have killed his friend.
::Wales This Week, ITV Wales, Monday, March 17, 8pm

Hearing Voices

2008-02-24T14:48:00.002Z

Just read a new memoir by Studs Terkel.
If you haven't heard of Studs, you should check him out.
Studs is now 95 and has therefore, obviously, been around.
He's done a lot in that time, radio presenter, writer, oral historian.
For years he took out his tape recorder and interviewed people, "ordinary people", about the experiences of the Great Depression, racism, the Second World War.
His memoir, Touch and Go, takes its title from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, or more precisely the Rev Eli Jenkins' prayer. "For whether we last the night or no/I'm sure it's always touch and go".
With nine decades under his hat, Studs would be forgiven for having little more than lasting the night or no on his mind.
But he's not that sort of guy.
After listening, really listening, to people for God knows how many years, he now has a few observations of his own.
One should strike a cord in offices up and down the country. It's a lament for "human noise".
Studs cites the newspaper office as an example. Once, he points out, the city desk of any paper was a place of voices, people hollering back and for, running this way and that.
Today, it isn't so. And many journalists would agree.
"The young journalists are seated side by side, staring into their terminals," he writes. "They are a foot away from each other, yet miles apart."
I suppose they are emailing each other, one reason why human noise has become quieter.
Studs tells a story to illustrate something else that's taken over.
He's at an airport where they have just installed trains to the terminal. The train is packed. A robotic voice comes over the PA system to say where they are: "Concourse One", etc.
Just as the doors are closing a couple rush in and pull them aside. They collapse with their bags.
The robot voice booms: "Because of late entry, we are delayed thirty seconds".
Everyone in the carriage glares at the late-comers.
Studs smiles, he's had a drink, and he cups his hand over his mouth. "George Orwell, your time has come and gone!" he booms back.
There is silence. The crowd now takes Studs into its stare. He realises there are suddenly, in his words, "three of us before the firing squad".
The human voice is cowered, but not Studs.
There is a little baby sat in the lap of a Mexican woman. Studs bends down. "Sir or Madam," he says addressing the babe in arms, "what is your opinion of the human species?"
There's a pause. And then the baby giggles.
"Thank God," says Studs. "A giggle. The sound of a human voice. There's my hope."
:: Big Issue Cymru, February 11-18, 2008

2008-02-02T13:04:00.000Z

The Wise and Foolish Dreamers: Wales and the Spanish Civil War exhibition is now on display at the Welsh Centre for International Affairs, Temple of Peace, in Cardiff.
The centre’s links to the Welsh involvement in the Spanish Civil War go back to the 1980s when it began to manage a special fund donated by Welsh veterans of the International Brigade.
The money was to be used to maintain links between young people in Wales and Spain.
Wise and Foolish Dreamers is the biggest project so far carried out with the help of the fund, and it is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
It includes a touring exhibition, a DVD, and a book, which pupils from three schools had a hand in helping to design and produce.
The project was launched in May 2007. This exhibition, which consists of 6 large panels and a short film, has already been displayed at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, Ammanford Library, the National Eisteddfod in Flintshire, Rhondda Heritage Park, Trehafod and Pyle Life Centre in Bridgend.
It is at the Temple of Peace until February 12, where there will also be a major conference on February 9-10. Speakers will include Professor Paul Preston.

St Athan on Dragon's Eye

2008-02-01T08:44:00.000Z

The BBC's Dragon’s Eye entered the fray last night to raise questions about the actual number of jobs to be created at the St Athan military training academy.
The programme probed claims that the base would create 5,000 jobs. The PCS union claims the privatisation of training services is about “job relocation rather than job creation”.
Vale of Glamorgan MP John Smith remained bullish, having staked his reputation on the development. He claims the 5,000 jobs figure might even be an under-estimate.
What Is Wales? has long felt the 5,000 new jobs claim just doesn’t add up.
As long ago as July 2007 I focused on a report by Cardiff University’s Stuart Tannock which questioned how "many high quality new jobs" will actually be created for locals.
As I pointed out, politicians were slow to raise these questions themselves because, as we have seen in Wales, “No-one dares criticise job creation, be the creator a dodgy call centre company, a shaky Korean technology firm or the arms industry.”
In August in the Big Issue, I asked: “Just how many jobs will the academy really create? A cursory investigation reveals that many jobs will be relocated from elsewhere. Hundreds of others will be in the base's construction.”
Local people might feel they deserve further proper scrutiny of the St Athan project.

Keeping it in the family

2008-01-31T16:34:00.000Z

The suspension of Derek Conway MP from the House of Commons has prompted the parliamentary commission to remind politicians that they should always publicly declare when they employ relatives.
A friend emails me to say how fine the register of members’ interests is down at the National Assembly.
The recently-updated record notes that Tory William Graham (South Wales East) employs his son as an assistant researcher, while North Wales colleague Mark Isherwood’s wife is one of his constituency assistants (5 hours a week).
Conservative Andrew R.T. Davies (South Wales Central) employs his other half on a part-time basis as part of his Assembly support staff.
Labour’s Janice Gregory (Ogmore) employs her husband part-time to do some admin, and the partner of John Griffiths (Newport East) also does some part-time administrative support.
The spouse of Plaid Cymru’s Jocelyn Davies (South Wales East) is a part-time assistant at her constituency office.

Accident at Caerleon

2008-01-26T17:29:00.000Z

Here's a great snap. It shows a road traffic accident from almost 90 years ago.

Even with so little traffic on the road in those days, this crash was certainly unusual enough to be marked and turned into a postcard.

The card is captioned "Army (I think) Lorry Accident Caerleon Bridge, October 6, 1919".

It was given to me before Christmas by Mrs Margaret Rumsey, of Abergavenny.

By the way the people are casually crossing the bridge, it appears the lorry must have been suspended in that strange position for sometime.

Any Caerleon historians out there?

Tower Colliery's farewell

2008-01-25T15:59:00.000Z

Farewell to Tower Colliery – and best wishes to all the miners who made the final march from the pit today.
Tower, a workers’ co-operative, was the last deep coal mine in South Wales. It is a remarkable story, which has been told many times. Despite the understandable mythologizing, the colliery has always been about basic realities: a desire to work and to maintain a vibrant local economy.
As such the miners are already thinking about the future of the site and finding new ways of creating employment.
As chairman Tyrone O'Sullivan told the BBC today: “I believe our company can leave a legacy to the community that will see today's toddlers able to find a job up in the valleys when they're 16 or 17, instead of having to leave the area.
“It will be the greatest tribute that the workers could give. We'll be leaving jobs, not statues.”
A towering legend indeed.

Post Office defeat

2008-01-21T19:30:00.000Z

Sadly, it seems the residents of Llantrisant, who fought hard to save their post office, have lost their battle.
The official announcement is due tomorrow.

Asylum seekers and Cardiff Prison

2008-01-15T11:29:00.000Z

There have been rumours about the housing of asylum seekers at Cardiff Prison.
South Wales Anarchists Gagged! Newsletter and Respectable Citizen have both reported claims that the jail has again been used to make up for a lack of space at detention centres.
Although it’s not a devolved issue I contacted the Welsh Assembly Government about the rumours. A number of assembly members campaigned against the practice when asylum seekers were held in the jail back in 2001 and 2004.
WAG assured me last week that it is not happening. Read more in the current edition of Big Issue Cymru (Jan 13-20).
UPDATE: See 'comments' section.

Also, please check out if you can my friend John Gilheaney’s blog Save Llantrisant Post Office.

Asylum decisions in the air

2008-01-08T19:38:00.000Z

Should commercial airlines sell seats to allow the Government to forcibly return asylum seekers?
The issue's been brewing since early last year – but it's not one airlines themselves are particularly eager to discuss.
Take the case of Veneera Aliyeva.
Veneera settled so successfully in Swansea with her two children that when immigration officers came to take them away, the community campaigned for her.
The campaign continues although, as I write, the family had finally been released from a detention centre by the Home Office pending a possible judicial review. The threat of expulsion from the UK still loomed over them.
If they are forced to return to Azerbaijan they will do so on an airline in seats you or I'd use for our holidays.
Twice the family has been marked down for return, both times on British Midland Airways (bmi) flights from Heathrow.
When I contacted bmi to ask whether it would abandon these flights, it responded with classic meaningless PR.
“bmi is not at liberty to discuss the details of any of its passengers, under the terms of the Data Protection Act, and we do not wish to get drawn into a debate over Home Office policy. I suggest you contact the Home Office for further details of the case you describe.”
Veneera is a 40-year-old ethnic Armenian. Since a war between Azeris and Armenians in the early 1990s tensions have been high. More than 600,000 remain displaced from their homes, according to Amnesty International, despite a 1994 ceasefire.
Veneera is married to an Azeri and kept her own ethnicity secret until she was seen visiting her mother's grave in an Armenian graveyard.
The harassment began and, according to Asylum Justice, she was beaten and raped.
Campaigners, then, are concerned for her safety if she is made to return.
So note how bmi publicly absolves itself of responsibility.
It says it can’t discuss the fact that Veneera is being flown back to all possible horrors because of the awful DPA – ie, to protect her privacy as a passenger.
Note also the swish of the bat which knocks the issue in the direction of the Home Office.
The airline – whose subsidiary bmi baby flies out of Cardiff International - should take responsibility for its actions. If it is proud to be carrying out government policy then why not say so?
Other airlines who make these flights have previously intimated that they have no choice but to do the Government's bidding. But the Home Office says they can turn down these unwilling passengers.
In fact, earlier this year XL Airways said it would no longer take part in these flights out of “sympathy for all dispossessed persons in the world”.
Will we be a better country, or bmi a better company, if Veneera and her children are forced somewhere they do not want to go?

:: From Big Issue Cymru, December 27, 2007-January 6, 2008

Muddy waters in the Middle East

2008-01-07T19:54:00.000Z

Threats of terror and aggression are often more than a little convenient for some.
Take the latest Iranian incident in which five speedboats are reported to have "harassed three US navy ships at the weekend".
The story comes as George Bush prepares to travel to the Middle East to condemn the "Iranian threat".
Neat, isn't it?
The BBC reports that official media in Iran reported the incident with some "scepticism". Perhaps the BBC might try doing the same.
Instead, it tonight highlights a White House warning to Iran against "provocative actions that could lead to a dangerous incident in the future".
According to a Pentagon spokesman: "The Iranian boats were operating at distances and speeds that showed reckless, dangerous and potentially hostile intent."
He said at least some of the boats were visibly armed. Much like the US warships then, in waters thousands of miles from their home.
The BBC reports that the Pentagon insisted that the three US vessels were in international waters.
And the Beeb goes on: "The incident follows a row that erupted last March when Iranian Revolutionary Guards captured 15 British sailors and held them for nearly two weeks.
Iran said the crew had strayed into Iranian waters, a claim which Britain disputed."
To that it might be worth adding the following: the House of Commons' Foreign Affairs Committee took some time investigating that incident.
It reported: "We conclude that there is evidence to suggest that the map of the Shatt al-Arab
waterway provided by the Government was less clear than it ought to have been. The Government was fortunate that it was not in Iran’s interests to contest the accuracy of the map."
Martin Pratt, of the International Boundaries Research Unit, Durham University, told the committee that he believed the map published by the Ministry of Defence following the sailors' arrest was "certainly an oversimplification of reality, and I think it could reasonably be argued that it was deliberately misleading".

Swansea asylum family returns

2007-12-15T14:29:00.000Z

Good news in the case of Veneera Aliyeva and her two children, Anna and Murat.
According to Keith Ross, of Asylum Justice, the family has returned to Swansea after being released from Yarl's Wood detention centre.
"The family were released by the Home Office this afternoon 'pending the outcome of the children's judicial application'," Keith explained.
The children, who are just 13 and 11, were supported by Maria Battle, Deputy Children's Commissioner for Wales, who this week told me their detention at Yarls Wood was in breach of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child.
The family remains under the threat of forcible removal to Azerbaijan. Lawyers are currently seeking a judicial review into the case.
If that fails Veneera and the children could find themselves marked down for seats on another removal flight.
::I've been looking at the way airlines are used by the Government to forcibly return people to countries they do not want to go for Big Issue Cymru.
I believe it will be in the issue which comes out on December 27 - something to digest along with turkey stew, turkey sandwiches, etc.

Time for the FAW to support the fans

2007-11-28T20:24:00.000Z

Is the Football Association of Wales going to slash the extortionate prices of tickets at the Millennium Stadium?
Well, possibly, if you read today's papers.
Average turnout at matches during the Euro 2008 qualifiers was just over 24,000, with middle tier seats costing £35 plus booking and postage fees.
The Western Mail today reported that a cut in prices was the last thing on FAW secretary David Collins' mind.
According to Collins: “I have heard people say tickets were expensive for the Euro campaign just gone, but you could still purchase them for £10 and £5 in the lower tier.
“In my eyes, that represented terrific value for money. And remember, the lower tier holds 23,000 seats, which is almost a third of the ground.
“Tickets for other parts of the ground ranged from £35 to £25. But, with respect, people pay four times that to watch Premiership matches."
However, not all FAW suits appear happy to think of a stadium with just the lower tier filled.
The South Wales Echo reported today that the governing body does look set to slash prices in a bid to boost John Toshack’s assault on World Cup 2010 qualification.
"The Football Association of Wales hierarchy want a return to the capacity attendances that roared on Mark Hughes’ team to within a whisker of the Euro 2004 finals," claimed the Echo.
The decision would mean a return to the £5 and £10 ticket policy – and a cut of around £15 to sit in the middle tier.
“We want to get behind the team and we want the supporters to be there,” said an unnamed FAW official - presumably not Mr Collins. “We see no point in 20,000-30,000 fans rattling around a 70,000-seater stadium."
Interestingly, Welsh fans have just returned from Germany, where supporters pick up tickets for the top flight Bundesliga for an average price of under 19 Euro.
The 98-page A4 programme produced by the Germans for last week's international cost just one euro. Welsh fans pay £3.50 for the far less impressive product sold here.

Jesse James' Welsh roots

2007-11-27T12:48:00.000Z

Family history is one of the most popular subjects on the internet.
And our fascination with genealogy reveals an interesting truth.
It’s embarrassing to find your father is a shoplifter; but discovering your great-great-grandfather was a cattle rustler is a matter of great pride.
We long to dig up something interesting, even if it makes us a descendant of a criminal.
In this week’s Big Issue I’ve a feature on trigger-happy Jesse James, currently being played by Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
It explores James’ likely Welsh roots with family historian Eric James.
By the way, if you are a male with the surname James and come originally from Pembrokeshire or Caernarvon you can participate in the James Family DNA Study.
“We are actively searching for today’s James relatives in the Wales and the UK,” Eric tells me. “The cost is $199.00US. Individual results are not publicly published. Parties who match other parties are notified and it is their choice to contact each other or not.”
And a positive result does not entitle you to say you look like Brad Pitt.

Frankfurt Joy - Germany 0 v 0 Wales

2007-11-24T13:58:00.000Z

Great atmosphere in the cold, dark woods outside Frankfurt on Wednesday as just under 50,000 fans made their way to the Commerzbank-Arena.
Few believed, though, that Wales would come away with anything other than a four or five goal defeat.

In the end, it was a night of celebration. One of those nil-nils which feel like a victory.

Behind me a group of fans counted down the clock to see who was going to win a sweepstake on the first German goal. Two minutes gone. Then five. Seven. Ten. Twenty-two. Suddenly, it was half-time and Wales were doing more than holding their own.

On the hour mark thoughts went back to the San Siro during the last European championship campaign. We were keeping the Italians out that night after 60 minutes but got well beaten by four late goals.

It wasn't to be the same on Wednesday, though. A great and passionate performance by Toshack's men.

There was something else different from the night in Milan: the home fans.

Many Italian fans acted appallingly that night. The Germans were gracious and friendly.

There was no segregation so in Block 17N Welsh and German fans mingled and chatted.
Many celebrated the score coming through from Wembley; others laughed at the Welsh fans who suddenly discovered that the 'bier' they had been allowed to bring to their seats during the game was actually alcohol free.

Asylum Justice

2007-11-13T17:06:00.000Z

This week’s Big Issue Cymru highlights the case of young mum Veneera Aliyeva who the government is trying to deport to Azerbaijan.
She is currently in Yarl's Wood removal centre with her two children.
But campaigners in Swansea, where she has lived for more than a year, are trying to get her returned to South Wales.
According to Asylum Justice, 40-year-old Veneera (sometimes Venera) has been persecuted on two counts in Azerbaijan: because she is a Baptist and an Armenian.
During several years of persecution, she went through a series of horrific experiences, including being raped twice.
Asylum Justice, supported by Bethan Jenkins AM, is also trying to help another resident of Swansea.
Zola G idi has lived in the city for 16 years. She is described as "a wonderful neighbour", "a loyal friend", "an extremely hard worker" and "generally a good member of the community”.
All the same, she now faces forcible removal to South Africa.

St Athan, Raytheon and the Cluster Bomb

2007-11-09T16:17:00.001Z

Raytheon, one of the companies behind the St Athan development, today distances itself from the dreaded cluster bomb.
But, as reported here before, the arms trade - including Raytheon - rarely does what it says on the tin – or the shell casing: there are no "New! Improved! Limb-Remover Landmines!"
The Western Mail today quotes a company spokesman as saying: “Raytheon does not manufacture cluster bombs or any associated delivery vehicles. Any assertion to the contrary is based on dated information that is no longer valid or correct.
“To clarify, Raytheon has never manufactured cluster bombs, but in the past we have been associated with their manufacture because of our contract to produce a missile that can carry different types of munition payloads, determined by the customer...”
Well, there you go. It never made the bombs. But it did make a delivery vehicle.
And what a delivery vehicle.
The item in question was the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon, used extensively in Iraq and which in 2006 it sold to Turkey.
According to Raytheon’s own press team in April 2006: “The AGM-154 A (also called JSOW-A) variant dispenses BLU-97 combined-effect bomblets for use against soft andarea targets. It is produced for use on the F/A-18, F-16, F-15E, B-1, B-2 and B-52 aircraft.”

Ebro Memorial

2007-11-02T15:26:00.000Z

Vandals defaced a plaque in honour of the International Brigade volunteers who were killed nearly 70 years ago in the Battle of the Ebro.
But on Saturday, November 10, a new plaque will be placed in memory of the dead of one of the Spanish Civil War's bitterest battles.
The memorial is set at the top of a hill near Gandesa, overlooking the battlefield in north-eastern Spain.
The original plaque – which was inaugurated in May 2005 - was stolen earlier this year when symbols and slogans of the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, were daubed in its place.
The memorial is on Hill 705, near the village of Pinell de Bray in southern Catalonia. The site in the Sierra de Pandols mountain range was the scene of fierce fighting between the British Battalion of the International Brigades and General Franco’s rebel army from July to September 1938.
Franco was backed by German and Italian troops and aircraft sent by Hitler and Mussolini to crush the Spanish Republic.
The cost of the new plaque is being met by the local council of Pinell de Bray.
The Welshmen remembered on the plaque are: Alec Cummings (Cardiff); Harry Dobson (Rhondda); Willie Durston (Aberaman); Sid James (Treherbert); Dai Jones (Mardy); Tom Howell Jones (Aberdare); Alwyn Skinner (Neath); Jim Strangward (Neath); Brazell Thomas (Llanelli); James Watts (Swansea).

Medical Moneybags

2007-10-29T11:02:00.000Z

When Prince Charles cut the ribbon on the new Neath Port Talbot Hospital on February 3, 2003, it was time to celebrate - particularly for the building's private contractors.
A report in the Western Mail today reveals the hospital, which cost £66m to build, will end up costing taxpayers more than £300m as they pay back the PFI investors.
One winner, I note, was the Kier Group - motto ‘Working Together For Growth’.
It sold its interests in the hospital to private equity firm Secondary Market Infrastructure Fund less than two years after the Prince cut the ribbon.
It got £5m for its 25 per cent stake – twice the size of its initial investment.

St Athan latest

2007-10-26T08:29:00.000Z

There have been plenty of questions - both moral and economic - about the St Athan training academy.
Yesterday, we learnt the latest developments.
Read here how the UK's Ministry of Defence is "reconsidering the award of the second stage of a massive defence training contract to a consortium led by QinetiQ Group PLC because it will not deliver the expected efficiencies".
And here's the piece from the Western Mail.

Grand Old Party

2007-10-17T11:18:00.000Z

Good to see that while Iraq burned, Condoleezza Rice was being well looked after by the British government.
What Is Wales? is delighted to report that the Foreign Office admitted yesterday that the UK taxpayer spent more than 9,500 dollars (£4,682.73) on a 50th birthday party for the US Secretary of State in 2004.
The party, hosted by the British ambassador to the United States David Manning at his official residence in Washington, saw Rice presented with a dress as a gift.
Labour MP Harry Cohen uncovered the cost of the celebration in a written question to the Foreign Office.
Foreign Office minister and Pontypridd MP Dr Kim Howells responded yesterday: "The dinner in question was held in honour of US Secretary of State Rice and attended by the President, First Lady and other senior figures.
"There were 111 guests and the cost was US$9,512.05."
I'm sure George W and his wife Laura had a wonderful time. The Republicans aren't nicknamed the GOP (the Grand Old Party) for nothing.
According to the AFP news agency, Dr Howells' reply follows
an article in the September 6 issue of the New Statesman which criticised the Rice birthday party as a "ludicrously lavish extravaganza".
The article also described British attempts to woo "George W Bush's disastrously inept national security adviser and now his equally feckless secretary of state."
Soon after the party, the piece claimed, London's perception that Condie had the ear of the president quickly changed when they realised Bush was more influenced by former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and vice-president Dick Cheney and the "full extent of the Iraq catastrophe" became clear.
No presents for Rumsfeld and Cheney at that party, then. Perhaps Britain will help them help themselves to a little something from oil-rich Iraq?

Wise and Foolish Dreamers exhibition

2007-10-03T15:48:00.000Z

"I am here because I know that these fellows fought not only for Spain but for me and the whole world. It is my duty to be here."
Those were the words of Paul Robeson on the return to their homes of the South Wales veterans of the Spanish Civil War in December 1938.
Seven thousand people heard him speak. The communities felt an affinity to the people of Republican Spain in their fight against Franco.
And the names of the Valleys volunteers live on. Among them, Alun Menai Williams, of Gilfach Goch, who I knew for a short time before his death last year.
Alun had been at his friend Harry Dobson’s side when he was mortally wounded.
He never forgot that moment.
The Rhondda has not forgotten Alun, Harry or the others.
And for the next few weeks (until November 4) an exhibition called Wise and Foolish Dreamers will take pride of place at the Rhondda Heritage Park.
As Robeson noted all those years ago, it is our duty to remember them.

Meanwhile, Paul Robeson Junior comes to Wales this week to meet more than 100 pupils from Neath Port Talbot comprehensive schools at the official opening of an exhibition on racial equality.
Mr Robeson will take questions from the pupils at the opening of the
Croeso Project at the Princess Royal Theatre in Port Talbot.

Iraqi Oil

2007-10-01T11:15:00.000Z

In this week’s Big Issue Cymru I mention in passing the Iraq Petroleum conference which took place in Dubai recently and was attended by representatives of most of the major multinationals.
I didn’t know though that a parallel meeting took place at the same time in Basra under the banner, “Oil wealth belongs to the Iraqi people”.
Tomorrow night Ewa Jasiewicz, UK rep for the Basra Oil Workers Union, comes to Cardiff to explain how Iraqi trade unions are determined not to let the oil giants have it all their own way.
If you can’t make it to the meeting, Ewa explains all in this article.
:: Ewa Jasiewicz is at the Wallace Lecture Theatre, Main Building, Cardiff University, Park Place, Cardiff on Tuesday October 2 at 7pm.

If only GMTV was like this

2007-09-29T14:48:00.000Z

Bruce Springsteen's new song Radio Nowhere features one of his old rallying cries - "Is there anybody alive out there?"
Yesterday, he turned up on the Today show in the United States to ask that question again.
Whereas 'regular' superstars write easy listening love songs and elegies to Princess Diana, Springsteen has cast his net wider than any other major artist. He wrote a whole album about the exploitation of migrant workers (The Ghost of Tom Joad), and has written songs about police brutality and the Iraq war.
He defended the Dixie Chicks against right-wing America and attacked President Bush over his failures in New Orleans.
During the Today appearance he listed many great things about America.
Then he added: "But over the past six years we've had to add to the American picture: rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeus corpus, the neglect of our great city New Orleans and its people, an attack on the Constitution. And the loss of our young best men and women in a tragic war.
"This is a song about things that shouldn't happen here—happening here."

Campaign against Cardiff Bus privatisation is on the move

2007-09-27T08:42:00.000Z

Two notes on Cardiff Council’s proposal to sell-off 40 per cent of Cardiff Bus.
Firstly, as I revealed in last week’s Big Issue Cymru, the plan actually goes against the Lib Dem national policy.
In only September 2006, the party voted to reverse bus privatisation.
Secondly, council leader Rodney Berman might want to look closely at Bournemouth where city Lib Dems sold off that city's buses in 2005 and have seen continuing criticism of the private operator Transdev.
In August, in response to yet another passenger protest, Transdev told the Bournemouth Daily Echo a route was being changed because there were “insufficient people travelling to justify a commercial service.”
The sell-off proposal is part of a wider attempt to privatise council services and follows a report which Cardiff council commissioned from Price Waterhouse Coopers.
Unison has launched a campaign against the plan.

Tagged

2007-09-24T10:34:00.000Z

My God. I’ve been tagged by gwe. And on a Monday morning.
And asked for my earliest political memories.
Not easy for a man who can’t remember what he had for tea last night.
I’m pleased to say I’m younger than gwe and so was just a tiny babe in arms in the summer of 1969 when - as gwe recollects - Wales witnessed the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales.
I was drooling on my bib and making gargling noises at the time. I suspect gwe, though older, might have reacted in a similar fashion for different reasons.
I always felt political, I assume, because my parents felt political.
In my school there was a surprising amount of nationalist feeling. Saundersfoot had a very high proportion of English families. Football at break time was always England against Wales and the English always outnumbered the Welsh by three or four to one.
I hope now I’ve left that schoolyard nationalism behind. But a pain remains.
Even though I was growing up in Pembrokeshire, the main political event of my young life was without doubt the miners’ strike.
There had been questions in my house about the flag-waving surrounding the Falklands war. And I remember being branded a Communist early in secondary school for questioning it.
The miners’ strike, though, seemed like a real cause. It is the first time I remember feeling angry about a political issue.
And I still do.

:: I'm tagging Respectable Citizen

What Defence For Arms Trade? - St Athan latest

2007-09-18T12:01:00.000Z

What is the delay in the latest negotiations on the St Athan training academy development?
Earlier this year Derek Twigg (junior defence minister) explained: "Metrix Consortium have been declared the preferred bidder for package 1 of the Defence training review programme.
"For package 2 there is a significant affordability gap and work has been ongoing to develop a whole programme solution.
"The scale of the facility to be constructed at St. Athan will therefore depend on the outcome of this further work with Metrix.
"Our current forecast indicates that construction at the St. Athan site is planned to start after contract signature in late 2008, or early 2009, with the final phase of completion scheduled for 2013."
It was always the second stage which was going to be the most difficult. But an article about Metrix chief executive Mike Hayle in the Cowbridge-based Gem in February estimated that "Metrix has around three months to convince the MoD that it offers the best option for that package".
Those negotiations continue and two weeks ago (Hansard, September 3) Twigg updated Parliament on events since Metrix was chosen in January.
"Since then we have been exploring with the Bidder possible synergies and economies of scale across the whole programme," he said. "Significant work has been completed, but has not yet been concluded. Once it is, I expect to make a statement later this year."
Meanwhile, the campaign against the massive military project continues.
Vale of Glamorgan John Smith has asked local residents to contact him on 01446 743769 with questions about the academy ‘on many issues ranging from jobs to housing and schooling’.
"Let’s take him up on this," says one campaigner.

A word on General Petraeus

2007-09-11T08:32:00.000Z

It is only an aside, but it sums up why George Bush was so keen to make General David H Petraeus his messenger.

The New York Times reports that the general's Iraq "progress" report had been expected to provoke an epic confrontation between opponents of the war and its front-line leaders.

"But that conflict did not fully materialize Monday," it stated. "In part because only a few Democrats on two House committees seemed inclined to dispute with much vigor the assessments provided by a commander with medals on his chest and four stars on his shoulders."

Opposition politicians in the United States - and, in the UK, for that matter - let the people down before the invasion. We should not be surprised if they do it again, dazzled as they are by medals and stars.

Petraeus himself knows the importance of good presentation.

Believe it or not, his new publication, The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, is available on Amazon.

I'm not encouraging you to buy it, you understand. But you can read a review in the Morning Star (August 24, 2007).

One of the key messages is that we stop calling places where people are shot at, maimed and killed "battlefields". It's not nice.

"In a conflict among the people, terms like 'battlefield' influence perceptions and confuse the critical nature of a synchronised approach," says the general. "Refrain from referring to and considering the area of operations as a 'battlefield' or it may continue to be one."

Bus company sell-off on council timetable

2007-09-09T16:10:00.000Z

On Tuesday, Cardiff Council's executive will consider plans to sell-off 40 per cent of the publicly-owed Cardiff Bus company.
Cardiff Bus is one of the last local authority-owned bus companies in Wales and struggled to survive the wide-scale sell-off that followed the last Tory government's deregulation of bus services.
Now chief executive Byron Davies has drawn up a plan which would have the Lib Dem administration searching for a private partner.
According to Davies: “We have been looking at the possibility of a potential partner for Cardiff Bus but with the council retaining majority control. We would expect our partners to grow the existing business and provide an even better service for the people of Cardiff. It would be in their interests to do so.”
I doubt that's how a private partner would see things. When it comes to making profit they won't want to miss the bus. Less cost effective routes would certainly go and fares would rise.
As Cardiff Bus chairman Steve Pantak, says: “While I understand a minority shareholding would be involved, I believe this would be the thin edge of the wedge and will open the door to full privatisation of Cardiff Bus which will gradually reduce the service to customers.
“Any private company would expect a return of at least 15 per cent on turnover.
“The only way that can be met is through increased fares and/or a large reduction in marginal services which Cardiff Bus operates as a sort of dividend for the owners, the people of Cardiff.
“This looks like a fire sale to deal with a short-term financial position.”

ASW old boss signs for Wolves

2007-08-16T09:38:00.000Z

The hundreds of former South Wales steelworkers who lost their pensions when ASW went bust will be ecstastic to hear news of their former boss.
Graham Mackenzie, who left the company just before it went bust in 2002, has a nice new job in Wolverhampton.
Mr Mackenzie OBE will chair the proposed new Wolverhampton Development Company.
Wolverhampton City Council Leader, Councillor Roger Lawrence, welcomed Graham’s appointment, saying: "As chairman of the new company Graham will encourage private sector partners to invest in Wolverhampton, thereby increasing the pace and scale of change, whilst ensuring that local people have access to the job opportunities that regeneration brings to the city."
On Mr Mackenzie's departure from ASW, the Western Mail reported that he "had overseen a decline in the company's fortunes as it battled to cope with a multi-million pound debt and oversupply in the global steel market".
Let's hope he fares better with the jobless of Wolverhampton.
:: More in Private Eye 1191

Delaney's retirement

2007-08-15T15:34:00.000Z

Right-back Mark Delaney’s enforced retirement – having been unable to shake his knee injury - is a blow for Wales.
I used to watch Delaney when he played for Goodwick – before he moved up the line to Carmarthen Town.
He was already 22 by the time he got to Cardiff City so his full professional career (mainly at Aston Villa) has been short.
Everyone knew he was something special in his Goodwick days – and even I recognised his talent.
I wasn’t always so keen-eyed. I once reported on a schoolboys' international featuring both Simon Davies and Damien Duff – but mentioned neither of them in my write-up.

Peacemakers

2007-08-15T09:14:00.000Z

Downing Street’s failure to call for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon last summer has been criticised by the foreign affairs select committee.
MPs say a better response in July 2006 could have reduced casualties during the 34 days of slaughter.
One politician who did speak out was Pontypridd MP Kim Howells.
Howells, who is not always appreciated at What Is Wales?, did at least react when confronted with the evidence of Israeli attacks.
“The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people. These have not been surgical strikes,’ said the Foreign Office Minister on a visit to Beirut.
His words fell on deaf ears in London.
Tony Blair is now a peace envoy to the region.
Still hard to believe that’s not a joke.
Enough to make someone, somewhere die laughing.

But, oh Kim, your remarks last year, still baffle.
Admitting Iraq was "a mess but it's starting to look like the sort of mess that most of us live in" should surely qualify you for some sort of extended lie down in a dark room.
At least 200 dead yesterday, Kim. Eight million Iraqis in need of emergency aid, according to Oxfam.
It's not a mess, is it? It's a tragedy. And looks nothing like where "most of us live" or would want to.

"High tempo" Iraq

2007-08-09T07:48:00.000Z

Continuing this theme about the strange words used by the arms trade, it is interesting to note that BAE Systems has just announced a first-half profit rise of 27 percent.

Thanks to its upgrades of Bradley fighting vehicles for the US army in Iraq and production of fighter jet parts, its net income rose to £515m.

According to a company statement: "The high tempo of military operations continues to generate growth in requirements for land systems in support of US and UK armed forces deployed on overseas operations."

On the campaign concerned with the military training academy at St Athan there is more in the current issue of Big Issue Cymru. And for a lot more information on the campaign try here.