Stop the Self-Serving, Gesture Politics, Gary!

County Councillor Gary Price has star billing in the letters column of today’s Mid Wales Journal. In his letter he explains how Powys County Council could save £36,477 if only his 72 fellow county councillors were as altruistic as himself and forgo the recommended increase in their overall allowances.

Now this self-serving, holier-than-thou, gesture politics may fool some of Gary’s cronies in Llandrindod, but I expect more from our County Councillors. I expect them to put their heads together and save something in the region of £10 million before March next year. They have already proposed the easy savings: £350,000 off voluntary sector contracts and grants – making the more vulnerable members of the community take the pain. They seem intent on giving up any meaningful support of our vital tourism industry by off-loading all remaining tourist information centres, and they are implementing the grand and ill-thought through switch off.

What we really need are ideas to save sums of £0.5 million at a time if the increase in Council Tax next year is not to be of astronomic proportions. So come on Gary, forget the loud, publicity-seeking gesture to save the loose change, take your increase, but start thinking about the really big ideas to preserve frontline services and balance the budget.

Doing The Right Thing

According to the local press, Llandrindod Wells Town Council is concerned that our local Police are not enforcing the Designated Public Places Order relating to Temple and Memorial Gardens with sufficient zeal. Regular followers of this blog and the local press will recall that this order was brought into force on 1st August 2008 and is designed to prevent the nuisance of excessive drinking in those designated areas.

The request for such an order originated with the Town Council and was enthusiastically taken up by such local notables as Harold Nicholls and Gary Price. Indeed so keen were they on this method of addressing the problem that they made it a keystone of their vicious and dishonest campaign to remove me as County Councillor for Llandrindod South.

At the time that this order was proposed, I voiced severe reservations about whether this was the most sensible approach as it seemed to me that it did nothing to address the real needs of the obviously unwell and vulnerable people who were causing the problem. I also stated that confining the order to Temple and Memorial Gardens was likely to result in the displacement of the problem to other areas of the town.

I would reiterate these reservations. Public drinking continues in Memorial Gardens, I have seen it myself. Public drinking is now to be seen regularly near to the Chalybeate Spring in the Rock Park, again I have seen it myself.

Surely it is now time for our three County Councillors, together with Llandrindod Wells Town Council, to lobby Powys County Council and Powys Local Health Board to create a facility within Powys for the treatment and rehabilitation of people suffering from alcoholism. It is no longer acceptable for the Council’s Housing Service to continue to offer accommodation for such people in Llandrindod Wells without also providing a system of active and appropriate support.

Let's Keep a Sense of Persective About Brand and Ross

I would like to make clear at the outset, I am no great fan of Jonathan Ross, and even less a fan of Russell Brand although I occasionally read his newspaper column. However, I am also deeply sceptical of the politicians who have been inclined to express their outrage towards this pair of over-priced comedians and their childish prank over the last forty eight hours. Yes, the messages they left on Andrew Sachs’ ansaphone were in extremely bad taste, but that is all they were - distasteful and childish. And that is presumably why their regular listeners tune in to their show.

This whole issue seems to have been clouded by general envy at the considerable salaries that these two can command, but that is an issue of commerce and not of taste. The tardy reaction from the BBC has allowed the tabloids to engage in yet another feeding frenzy. It is perhaps pertinent to remember that those same tabloids are owned by people and organisations who have a pressing commercial interest in attacking public sector broadcasting in general, and the BBC in particular.

As a general rule of thumb, you don’t listen to Radios One and Two if you are interested in serious issues, you listen these stations to be entertained in the most basic manner possible, and in that context, the antics of Brand and Ross are probably what your average listener is after.

The real issue here is the apparent inability of BBC executives to control what is broadcast and their slowness in soothing the troubled brows of politicians of all parties who wish to score points with their expressions of mock outrage.

Yet another tirade from Harold Nicholls

Yet another tirade from Harold Nicholls in today’s Mid Wales Journal on the issue of the proposed hostel for homeless young people at Gwynfa. This time he alleges that: “The decision by Powys Planning Committee to give itself planning permission to establish a hostel for ex-offenders etc at Gwynfa, Lant Avenue, shows the people of Llandrindod that they now have no say in what happens in Llandrindod to the old and the children of the town…”

What utter rubbish, the people of Llandrindod were able to say plenty on the subject of this hostel through the Town Council, through their County Councillors and through Harold himself in his statement to the Committee. The Planning Committee heard all that they had to say, and then they made a decision. Just because Harold does not like that decision does not give him the right to allege that the people of Llandrindod had no say.

I have taken issue with Harold’s transmutation of ‘homeless’ into ’ex-offenders’ before, but I’ll say it again in yet another attempt to get through to Harold and his cronies. Being homeless is not a crime, and to label homeless people as ‘ex-offenders’ or ‘criminals’ or ‘drug dealers’ without one shred of evidence is both unjustifiable and offensive.

Finally, Harold refers to me and this blog in his current letter, and never one to let the truth get in the way of his own particular understanding of events, once again he seeks to misrepresent what I had written in that blog. Here is what I actually wrote about the earlier attempt to establish a hostel for young homeless:

“I am very mindful of a previous attempt to establish a similar facility at Trafford House in Temple Street a couple of years ago which failed miserably, and in so doing caused a great deal of unnecessary aggravation for local residents. That facility was ‘managed’ by a specialist housing association and, because of an extremely casual approach to the supervision of its clients, much latent goodwill towards homeless young people on the part of local residents was put in jeopardy. This must not be allowed to happen again.”

Which Motion Would You Support?

Here are two motions on the agenda of today's meeting of Powys County Council. It strikes me that there is a quite distinct qualitative difference between these two motions. I have anonymised each motion, which one would you support?

Motion 1
"We believe that the implementation process for turning off 67% of street lights throughout the county was and continues to be seriously flawed for the following reasons:
*Based on public outcry the review programme is not immediate enough and needs to be exercised quicker than originally planned.
*Alternative policies and ideas such as one in three lights, part time night lighting, use of LED bulbs etc or a combination of the above were not considered extensively enough.
*The consultation process was not as effective and robust as it should have been, once officers decided which specific lights they would propose to turn off Town and Community Councils were not given the opportunity to comment and decide if they wanted to pay the cost of keeping certain lights on, County Councillors were not given enough time to absorb the information and make any comments they felt necessary

As a result we therefore propose that an immediate review be undertaken taking into account all of the concerns given."

Motion 2
"While acknowledging the need to save energy costs and reduce the Council’s carbon output, this Council notes the significant public safety and amenity concerns expressed by the residents of Powys as a result of the progressive implementation of the Council Board decision of the 15th July 2008 to switch off 67% of streetlights outside core and sensitive areas of towns and villages, in order to meet projected overspends in the council’s streetlighting budget; and notes that there are alternative options available to the council, including those being explored by other Welsh councils, e.g. Spend to Save investment in part-night lighting dusk/dawn switches on all non-core area streetlights (producing a 50% energy cost saving in year one) plus the fitting of lower wattage lamps to lighting columns.

Council therefore calls for a moratorium on the roll-out of the switch-off programme and as soon as possible restores lights where public safety has clearly been compromised by their removal, pending the return of the matter to the council’s Streetlighting Energy Reduction Working Party and instructs the working party to urgently explore all available alternative options to achieve the equivalent budget savings, with a view to producing a further recommendation to the Councils Board within one month."

Perhaps some of Powys' County Councillors are a little out of their depth?

Time to Clean Up British Politics

A fairly strongly worded editorial in today’s Guardian gets straight to the point regarding what went on in Corfu last summer, and that point is that British politics and politicians are demeaned by seeking to associate with those whose lifestyles are so extravagant as to seem almost contemptuous of the rest of humanity.

“How tawdry, how craven and foolish, certain British politicians and their friends seem to have been this summer in Corfu. Leave aside for a moment the matter of who saw whom, and when, and on whose yacht or villa terrace, and whether party funding laws might have been broken as a result (though the details matter immensely to the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, whose career depends on them). The whole atmosphere of wealth and power, of big yachts and tycoons, seduced people whose claim to political importance depends on solid good judgment. The intersection of New Labour, new money and new Tories has been exposed. When the future business secretary or the shadow chancellor go wobbly at the knees at the prospect of a drink on a shiny boat with a Russian aluminium magnate, the whole of politics is demeaned. A public that is repeatedly urged not to be so sceptical is given another reason to doubt…”

The case for public, rather than private, funding of political parties is made all the stronger by this episode whatever the outcome for the individuals involved. The thorough clean up of British politics is now long overdue.

A Council At Odds With Itself?

It has been both interesting and revealing to follow the street lighting saga in Powys. During the last term of the Council, and my memory might be deceiving me, I recall that it was originally proposed that every other street light be turned off between the hours of 12 midnight and 6 am in so-called ‘non-sensitive’ areas. Early this year, this seemed to be a reasonable suggestion and few, if any, Councillors appeared to be inclined to oppose this measure. In the event, two in three lights are being switched off permanently in ‘non-sensitive’ areas, and what precisely is meant by ‘non-sensitive’ has become a matter of fierce debate. This is a quite different proposal.

Three things strike me about the current situation: firstly, the role of Powys County Council’s lighting experts, who appear to have a totally inadequate understanding of the impact that this more draconian switch off would have on vulnerable residents; Secondly, the role of the Council’s communications team, who appear not to have prepared the residents of Powys for the switch off with anywhere near sufficient care, and worse, appear to have managed what can only be called a public relations disaster.

Thirdly, I am very intrigued by the actions of Powys County Council’s Chairman, Cllr. Viola Evans with regard to the street lighting issue. I always understood that those who proudly wear the chain of office have, in addition to their ceremonial duties, a crucial role within the Council, that of unifying the Members of Council behind the actions of the County Council, and by implication, the decisions of the Council's Board. However, it appears from a BBC Wales news report this morning that this same Chairman of Powys County Council, conveniently described as a town councillor, is leading the revolt of the members of Llanfair Caereinion Town Council against the unitary authority of which she is Chairman, by persuading that town council to spend some £3000 to have some 50 or so street light switched back on. This is quite unprecedented and surely needs to be considered by the Council's Standards Committee.

Does this mean that the democratic processes in Powys are close to collapse? And am I right to assume that, on this occasion, the Members of Powys County Council, and the residents of Powys have been badly let down by some officers of the Council, as well as by the Welsh Assembly Government whose totally unrealistic and wholly inadequate budget settlement precipitated this sorry tale?

Cut the Rate of VAT to Help the Economy

Reading press reports about the Conservative proposals to help small businesses – a six-month VAT holiday and 1% reduction in employers’ National Insurance contributions, I can’t help thinking that, welcome as these proposals might be to small businesses, they do nothing to help the wider economy or the hard-pressed citizens currently facing huge difficulties in making ends meet.

A much more practical idea which would be infinitely easier to administer and offer a much greater benefit to people generally would be to remove VAT from all energy bills for households and reduce the general rate of VAT from 17.5% to say, 15% or even 12.5% if the severity of the downturn warrants it. This way, people are encouraged to continue spending to some degree, and thereby ensuring that money continues to circulate through the economy.

The Conservative proposals above, together with their promised Council Tax freeze in England only, are merely “fiddling while Rome burns”. Once again the Conservatives have demonstrated that they are completely devoid of any sensible economic policy ideas. I despair at the thought that in two years time this Old Etonian clique might actually have real power.

Remembering Historical Events

Timothy Garton Ash in today’s Guardian draws our attention to the Appel de Blois, launched at a conference in Paris last week:

"Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecution if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia.

This week a group of historians and writers, of whom I am one, has pushed back against this dangerous nonsense. In what is being called the "Appel de Blois", published in Le Monde last weekend, we maintain that in a free country "it is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth and to restrict the liberty of the historian by penal sanctions". And we argue against the accumulation of so-called "memory laws". First signatories include historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Jacques Le Goff and Heinrich August Winkler. It's no accident that this appeal originated in France, which has the most intense and tortuous recent experience with memory laws and prosecutions. It began uncontroversially in 1990, when denial of the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, along with other crimes against humanity defined by the 1945 Nuremberg tribunal, was made punishable by law in France - as it is in several other European countries. In 1995, the historian Bernard Lewis was convicted by a French court for arguing that, on the available evidence, what happened to the Armenians might not correctly be described as genocide according to the definition in international law."

It is not only European governments who seek to determine precisely how we understand and debate historical events. Local Conservatives here in Mid Wales still maintain that the Welsh Liberal Democrats, and Kirsty Williams in particular, scuppered the proposed Rainbow Coalition after the last Assembly Elections when, as we all know, it was Plaid who walked away from the table after the Welsh Liberal Democrats had taken a democratic decision at a special conference to endorse the Rainbow deal.

What have I learned from this unfortunate episode? Never trust Plaid and don’t believe the Conservatives.

Does Michael White Read My Blog? (Click here)

No, I don’t think so, but I can dream. We did pass one another on a walkway at the Hay Festival earlier this year and, having recognised him I said “Hello” and he had the good grace to acknowledge my greeting but he was clearly in a hurry to get to a venue and so was I. Still we appear to be on the same wavelength. Here are the first two paragraphs of his political comment in today's Guardian:

“Barely three weeks ago he was a doomed loser. Now Gordon Brown is acknowledged in unlikely high places as putative saviour of the world's financial system. A banker with such a spectacularly upgraded credit rating would - not so long ago - have embarked on a reckless borrowing splurge.

What will it do for Brown? Nothing enrages his political opponents more than the thought that the government's belated but sweeping financial rescue package may allow Brown to do what Margaret Thatcher managed in the Falklands war of 1982. She absolved her team's mistakes and failures which led to war, by burying them in a larger success - and blaming others. For Argentine generals, read American estate agents and Icelandic bankers. History gets written by the winners.”

As a footnote to my previous blog, and developing Michael's assertion that history is written by the winners, I found this intriguing passage in Mark Stuart’s biography of Douglas Hurd – Douglas Hurd: The Public Servant (1998), page 115:

“In April 1984, Hurd would visit the Falkland Islands as Foreign Secretary. There, he donated to the island’s museum a collection of letters written by his mother in which she described the people and the wildlife on the island. After the visit, Hurd was inspired to write a short story entitled ‘Sea Lion’, about an historian who discovers that Mrs Thatcher did not engineer a war to influence the outcome of the 1983 General Election.”

Does this imply that there was a serious suggestion that Margaret Thatcher did engineer the Falklands War for electoral gain? I always thought this was a far-fetched conspiracy theory.

Gordon Brown's 'Falklands Moment'?

Will we remember this day, 13th October 2008 in much the same way that we remember 14th June 1982, the day the Falklands War ended?

The transformation of Gordon Brown from the embattled and deeply unpopular Prime Minister of a couple of weeks ago to the world statesman and economics guru of today is nothing short of spectacular.

It reminds me of the similar transformation undergone by Margaret Thatcher in 1982 when her government, facing dire economic distress and losing by-election after by-election, looked to be facing electoral annihilation at the next General Election. Along comes the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, the creation of the Task Force, the sinking of the Belgrano and, eventually, final victory with the retaking of Port Stanley. The fortunes of that Conservative Government were transformed and they duly swept all before them in the subsequent General Election of June 1983.

Is this going to be Gordon Brown’s Falklands moment? The day the tide turns as the public begins to realise that the Conservatives are completely bereft of any meaningful economic policy, and certainly have no–one on the benches of the House of Commons with any economic credibility, and capable of handling a crisis such as the one the world faces now.

A measure of Gordon Brown’s revised global standing appears in an editorial on today’s Le Monde, the French newspaper that has always been deeply suspicious of New Labour’s support of deregulated markets:

…ce sont les propositions solides de Gordon Brown - injection de liquidités, nationalisation partielle des banques en difficulté et garantie des prêts interbancaires - qui ont inspiré le plan global adopté à Paris pour tenter de rétablir la confiance des marchés financiers.

En perdition à la fin de l'été, en chute libre dans les sondages, contesté dans son parti et menacé par les conservateurs à deux ans des prochaines élections générales, le travailliste Brown tient peut-être sa revanche. Sans doute a-t-il été, entre 1997 et 2007, comme ministre des finances de Tony Blair, l'un des militants les plus actifs de la dérégulation des marchés qui a conduit à la crise actuelle. Mais, devant le séisme, il a su réagir - réagir en européen et en s'émancipant de ce à quoi il a trop longtemps cru.

Those who don’t read French will have to suffer my very poor and rough translation:

…these are the sound propositions of Gordon Brown – injection of liquidity, partial nationalisation of the banks in difficulty and guarantee of interbank loans – which have inspired the global plan adopted in Paris to attempt to re-establish confidence in the financial markets.
In distress at the end of the summer, in free-fall in the polls, challenged in his own party and threatened by the Conservatives in two years time at the next general Election, the Labour [party member] Brown is perhaps taking his revenge. Without doubt he has been, as Tony Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1997 and 2007, one of the most active supporters of deregulation of the markets that has led to the current crisis. But, in the face of the earthquake, he had known how to react - react as a European and having been liberated from that which he had believed for too long.

Collective Services and a New Theory of the Mixed Economy

As an economics graduate of the mid 1970s, I am finding it both interesting and instructive that the current crop of economic commentators are diving for their copies of J M Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money rather than Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom or Milton Friedman’s 1968 address to the American Economics Association, in order to seek a sensible theoretical solution to the current world economic crisis. It would appear that the mixed economy is back and with it, a general realisation that free and unfettered markets may be a recipe for short-term prosperity for the few but certainly cannot offer long-term stability and freedom from poverty for the many.

David Marquand in yesterday’s Guardian, makes a telling point: “In truth, the fundamentalisms of right and left mirror each other. One says, “markets good, states bad”. The other says, “states good, markets bad”. The truth is that they are both good and bad – at the same time. What the present conjuncture shows most obviously is that unregulated markets sooner or later destroy the ethical and institutional foundations on which market economies rest. Even times are good, greed and credulity drive out prudence and common sense, not just in the City, but on every high street. When they turn bad, as they always do sooner or later, fear drives out hope. Ebbing confidence feeds on itself.”

Marquand goes on to call for: “… a new theory of the mixed economy, framed for the global marketplace of today, as the now-defunct Keynesian system was framed for national post-war economies.” Oh to be an economics undergraduate now, rather than thirty or so years ago!

Seriously though, I have long thought that there needs to be a general review of what precisely constitutes the mixed economy, and I pose the question: is it possible to have a clear idea of which goods/services are best provided by the state on a collective basis and which goods/services are best provided by the private sector?

The difficulty of course, surrounds those goods/services such as education, which can be provided either collectively or privately. Here the issue of choice becomes paramount. The right to choose to opt out of a collectively provided good/service does not and should not imply a right to opt out of contributing to the collective cost of providing that good/service. So if you decide to start your own school with like-minded parents, as the Conservatives are thinking of encouraging you to do, you have no right to expect to be allowed to opt out of contributing through taxation, to the cost of providing the collective state education system.

Your choice to opt out of consuming the collective service cannot, and should not, be allowed to imperil the integrity of that collective service. Jeremy Bentham’s theory of utility must apply, or must it? If the state, in the form of Powys County Council, switches off my streetlight and denies me the benefit of a collective service that I formerly enjoyed, does it have the right to continue to charge me for this collective service it is no longer providing? Or put another way, should Councils balance their books by withdrawing frontline services? Answers on a postcard to the Chairman of Powys County Council.

Not So Fast, Betsan

It was illuminating to see how quickly Betsan Powys, BBC Wales’ political editor, blogged yesterday with her implied criticism of the investment decisions of Powys County Council. What was even more galling was the way she linked the issue of these investments in the Icelandic banks with the switching off of some streetlights in Powys. She was obviously keen to make some sort of point.

Perhaps it is worth reminding Betsan and her colleagues at Llandaff House that if Powys County Council does, eventually, lose £4 million with regard to these investments, then that amount is less than one quarter of the amount that the Welsh Assembly Government has ‘lost‘ this year by baling out the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay.

The other thing to note is that the enforced switch off of street lighting in Powys has more to do with the avowed intention of the One Wales Government not to provide the authority with any additional funding for the financial year 2009-2010. If local government in Wales overall, is going to benefit from a 2.5% increase in its funding next year, then you can rest assured that all the other local authorities in Wales will receive a far greater increase than Powys will, and that this is because the so-called One Wales Government steadfastly refuses to recognise issues of rurality.

Deprivation is not confined to urban Wales, but until our politicians, both local and national, can get that message through the Cardiff Bay bubble, there is absolutely no prospect of rural East Wales receiving equitable treatment compared with the more favoured South and West Wales.

Who Do You Think You're Kidding, Mr Bourne?

Interesting to watch Nick “Bandwagon” Bourne squirming on the Politics Show yesterday. That public apology really had to be wrung out of him. One wonders if he had actually read any of the document before he signed it off, after all, even if you only skim-read a document you tend to get the sense of all the paragraphs which presumably would include the offending five. Towards the end of the interview he was keen to reassure viewers that this incident would not affect his standing as Leader of the Welsh Conservatives - Yeah, right, I should imagine several of his 'loyal' colleagues will have marked his card.

Regardless of Bourne’s personal difficulties with this wonderful Tory dossier, the whole episode is pretty disgraceful. The very fact that the Tories feel the need to resort to these petty personal attacks on opponents seems to me to indicate that, far from dropping their “nasty party” image, they are enhancing it and will continue to do so.

For example, in this week’s County Times there is a letter purporting to come from a Mr P Lewis of Brecon which is simply a deeply personal attack on Kirsty Williams and Roger Williams, alleging that someone in the Assembly, at sometime, has called Kirsty Williams ‘the Socialist’, and that Roger Williams used to be a member of the Labour Party. Is this really relevant? How pathetic can you get? Winston Churchill was once a member of the Liberal Party, Shaun Woodward was once a member of the Conservative Party – bid deal!

There will be more such letters in the local papers and we know they originate from local Conservatives and are published under the names of difficult-to-find people. They are nasty, pathetic and reflect very badly on the Conservative Party in general. No doubt some people will be taken in by these smear tactics, but most of us are getting so used to them that they simply irritate and give us yet another reason for never voting Tory.

Why the ‘Bandwagon’? Well, Nick Bourne appears to jump on any local issue and tell us he is doing something about it. However, he has probably only skim- read part of the story and wants to create an impression of support.

I Know What You Mean, Gary

County Councillor Gary Price has resumed his correspondence with our local papers with a memorable letter in today’s County Times. Under the heading: “Mission conquered was really a bad day for democracy”, he begins:

“Whilst some in Howey may see this as a mission conquered it is in fact a bad day for democracy, something that we should in fact, be truly grateful for and savour the fact that many countries don’t have the opportunity to act and speak freely like we do?”

I think he means ‘mission accomplished’ rather than mission conquered. The gist of the letter, however, appears to be Cllr Price’s indignation that the Radnorshire Committee of Powys County Council failed to act in accordance with the views expressed by the local Community Council with regard to the introduction of double yellow lines on Howey Bridge.

So concerned is Cllr Price to belittle and discredit his colleagues on the Radnorshire Committee and Cllr Leslie Davies in particular, that he cannot stop himself straying into outrageous hyperbole with this classic sentence:

“However saying this something has gone drastically wrong and my Radnorshire colleagues have failed in their duty to recognise the democratic proposal carried out by Disserth & Trecoed Community Council, but the biggest failure of them all is County Councillor Leslie Davies who again found his fortune by sitting on his hands, and pouring out crocodile tears of the past fights against the closure of Howey School and Post Office that he supposedly led single handed?”

Not content with telling us how terrible his colleagues were, Cllr Price goes on to tell how good he is:

“At the Radnorshire Committee meeting I was again the lone voice of true democracy and never tricked by the anecdotal opinions of a few exhibitionist who would rather be part of a dictatorship led by the so-called democratic peer that thrives on self-importance and totally oblivious to wishes of the people he should be representing.”

There is more but I refuse to inflict ever greater pain on the few readers of this blog. During the last county council term there was considerable speculation locally as to whether Cllr Price actually composed his own letters to the press. Many thought that most of the letters purporting to come from Cllr Price were actually composed by Cllr Price’s eminent patron, so closely did their style resemble the vitriolic prose favoured by one, Harold Nicholls. This letter, however, appears to be Cllr Price’s own work, and is one of the best examples of this unique genre - so far.

The Great Wales Millennium Centre Scandal (Click here)

The Wales Audit Office has published a highly critical report into the scandal that is the lack of control of the funding of the Wales Millennium Centre by the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG). It is particularly damning with regard to the “wholly inadequate record-keeping” associated with the Centre. Most telling however, is the complete failure of the WAG to respond adequately to warnings from auditors concerning the Centre’s running costs over a significant period of time.

The result has been that, earlier this year, the WAG moved to clear the centre’s £13.5 million debt and, at the same time, increased the Centre’s annual revenue funding from £1.2million to £3.7 million a year.

The real scandal is that here in Powys, for example, we have community arts projects such as Celf o Gwmpas having its core grant completely withdrawn and the County Council is switching off street lights to save a few hundred thousand pounds because WAG are ruling out any increase in the Council’s grant for 2008-09, while the so-called “One Wales” Government can find £13.5 million to bale out the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff because it failed to keep adequate financial records. They’re kidding – aren’t they? No Government professing to represent the whole of Wales could be so blatant in withdrawing funding from increasingly impoverished rural areas simply to direct that funding to support dubious projects in the capital?

Remember, all this is happening at a time when WAG is preparing to ask the people of Wales to support their bid for greater devolved powers. Perhaps our response to this ought to be:

"Ask us again when you have proved you can properly manage the powers you already have.”

A Triumph for Common Sense

So the planning application to convert former Powys County Council offices at Gwynfa into a hostel for single homeless people has finally been decided in favour of the applicant. Yesterday, the Planning Committee was unanimous in supporting the application having at last recognised that there were no material planning reasons for rejecting it. This represents the triumph of common sense over the xenophobic intolerance of Harold Nicholls and Llandrindod’s Conservative County Councillors.

However, it is now up to the housing agencies who will operate the hostel to prove that they are capable of the sound management and stewardship of this facility. The objectors have predicted dire ramifications on local residents if planning permission was to be granted. Most reasonable people have considered their ‘doom and gloom’ predictions to be grossly over exaggerated, only time will tell who was right.

I am very mindful of a previous attempt to establish a similar facility at Trafford House in Temple Street a couple of years ago which failed miserably, and in so doing caused a great deal of unnecessary aggravation for local residents. That facility was ‘managed’ by a specialist housing association and, because of an extremely casual approach to the supervision of its clients, much latent goodwill towards homeless young people on the part of local residents was put in jeopardy. This must not be allowed to happen again.