What Will Be Next To Go Down The A470?

Yesterday, Powys County Council’s Board decided to close Theatr Powys and make it’s eight staff redundant. I do not blame Powys County Council, faced with the earlier withdrawal of funding for Theatr Powys by the Arts Council for Wales, the members of the Board had no real choice. It was clear that the county council could not bear the entire cost of funding Theatr Powys. Nor do we have any commercial businesses willing to step in and cough up any sort of contribution for the arts.

This is yet another example of the Welsh Assembly Government deciding, through their ‘arms-length’ agents, that projects in Powys and in Mid Wales in general can be sacrificed as long as the projects in South Wales and the Valleys are preserved. The closure of Theatr Powys follows on from the Aberystwyth Film Festival being ‘acquired’ by Cardiff and it won’t be long before ‘Brecon’ Jazz and the ‘Hay’ Festival of Literature will both find themselves re-located to the M4 corridor. Both these events have been fighting off the Cardiff grasp for years.

When are the movers and shakers of Mid Wales going to get their act together and resist the destruction of all that’s good and worthwhile in rural Wales?

World Book Night

I was in Cardiff on Saturday last for a gathering of those interested campaigning to secure the REFORM of our voting system. I say REFORM because apparently certain Conservative fundamentalists have persuaded the BBC that the proposed change to our voting system is not a REFORM but merely an amendment. Anyway, while I lounging outside the Senedd I was given a copy of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, one of apparently 1 million books that were given away that week-end by some 20,000 specially selected donors.

I have now read and thoroughly enjoyed this book and wish to pass it on to someone else who has the stomach for it, so the first person to contact me with their postal address will get a copy of The Reluctant Fundamentalist on condition that they agree to pass it on to some other deserving person when they have read it.

Warning: Reading this book will change your life, well your world view, at least.

At Last! At Last!

Just as I was beginning to totally despair of the current Welsh political scene, with the smug complacency of Labour and Plaid in their ‘One Wales’ coalition and the noisy irrelevance of the self-styled ‘Welsh’ Conservatives, Kirsty Williams has proved that someone down at Cardiff Bay has listened to the Welsh people, has taken on board the smouldering discontent that permeates throughout Wales outside Cardiff, and is prepared to offer sensible, workable solutions for getting the devolution project back on track. She, at least, has realised that there is a yawning gap between the talking shop at the Senedd and the pubs, clubs and village halls of the real Wales, and well done to her for doing so.

Boys Will Be Boys

Reading a number of recent reports and perusing recently published statistics dealing with educational performance in Wales, the well-established trend of boys underperforming vis-a-vis girls in most subjects, but particularly in the humanities, is getting progressively worse. This is a serious issue and needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

At the risk of being labelled politically incorrect, I would argue that the problem is deep-rooted and extensive and is, in some measure, a consequence of profound changes in our society. There seems to be a current fashion for single parenthood which, when combined with ‘education’ coming to be regarded as a ‘female’ profession, especially at primary level, can result in male children rarely having any contact with male role models in their formative years. As a result they have little awareness of the benefits of a sound education and how a lack of a good education affects their economic prospects. Moreover, these boys tend to become disaffected from school relatively early and under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that they under perform.

Alongside this, households seem to be more likely to have widescreen televisions and computer games machines than books and in such households there is apparently little encouragement for children to read of their own volition.

What could government do to address this problem, assuming that they are aware of it? Well, one thing they could do is to positively discriminate a little in favour of getting more males into the teaching profession, particularly in the primary sector. Secondly, in the secondary sector, they could arrange for children to be taught in single-sex classes for the core subjects of English, Mathematics and Science. Thirdly, they could instigate a serious and integrated campaign throughout the education system to make poor literacy and numeracy as socially unacceptable as smoking. Such a campaign would be an ideal theme for Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and have a much more profound effect that all the much-vaunted foreign aid that he proposes to target in other countries to prevent the radicalisation of potential religious extremists.