The Final Abandonment of Rural Wales

The BBC web site, in its article warning of big council tax rises, is suggesting that Powys might get an increase in its Revenue Support Grant of only 1% when the detailed figures are published tomorrow. If this turns out to be the case, then it surely represents the final abandonment of rural Wales by the ironically named 'One Wales' Government.

So much for Plaid trumpeting themselves as the champions of rural Wales - they are mere poodles for urban Labour whose only agenda seems to be to further aggrandise Cardiff and its immediate environs.

I suppose the writing was on the wall when the bale out of the Millenium Arts Centre was arranged, and to add insult to injury, an additional £2,5 million subsidy per annum was also offered. Kirsty Williams is right, there is a Cardiff Bay Bubble, and if you are not inside the bubble, then you might as well not exist.

Labour throughout the UK is looking tired and jaded, but nowhere more so than in Cardiff Bay where they are being sucked down the dead-end road to independence by an unscrupulous band of political opportunists. By the time they get there, rural Wales will be an abandonded wasteland, the population having moved away in search of a reasonable standard of public services wherever they can find them.

It is clear that if rural authorities are continually starved of adequate support from our precious devolved government, their aging, low-income populations simply will not be able to afford the levels of council tax that they will inevitably be asked to pay and the authorities will be totally unable to offer them anything other than the most basic of services, and eventually those will be withdrawn.

If "One Wales" is anything other than an idle piece of rhetoric, then those inside the Bubble need to unite the people of Wales by giving a fair settlement to all rather than seeking to divide them by creating a resource-rich South and starving the Rest.