Last weekend the Welsh Conservatives held their annual conference. It attracted more people than any of their conferences for years. My friends in Wales expect them to win more seats in the Assembly elections and it's quite possible they could hold the balance of power. Last night I interviewed Cheryl Gillan on 18 Doughty Street and played this short film from Ciaran Jenkins, who writes the excellent Blamerbell Briefs blog and Oliver Hawkins from Counterspin.
Ciaren and his colleagues are broadcast journalism students at the University of Cardiff. They'll hopefully be sending more films to us during the Welsh Assembly election campaign. As you can tell, they're not Tories!
And at long last, the 18 Doughty Street Citizen Journalist upload facility will be ready this week, so we hope to be showing many more films like this.
11 comments:
Shouldn't that be Boyo-ant mood? Snarf snarf.
Given the leadership of party and assembly in Wales I thought Dave's choice of "Family" as his theme was quite interesting
I feel it is only a matter of time before I am exposed to a sheep shagging joke. Or the use of 'Look You' or a number of other phrases which are never actually heard..
For your information we Welsh are a very well balanced race - we have chips on both of our shoulders...
"Cymdeithas Yr Iaith' will be well pleased if that guy on 18DS gets into power in Wales because it will give them the excuse they've waited for to get their spray cans out to plaster the road signs with paint. Please guys, don't do the old colonial bollocks on us again - it is a little bit patronising and a guaranteed vote loser. You may not be able to get the miners votes back, but there are lots of farmers who desperately want an alternative to the Labour dominance of local and national government. Tally-Ho!
What's with all the hatred and bile? Where do you guys think this is, Downing Street?
"In fact without the English the Welsh would be pretty much starving."
Where do you think we used to get our food from you cretin ? The country is full of farms !! Where do you think all the inward investment from the EU and the Asian tigers has been coming from ? We could cope without the English well enough, thanks, but unlike you we are also happy to be British and welcome people into our country.
Something that racist, bilious, hate-filled scum like you seem unable to do.
newmania,
Forget the farms; forget the EU subsidy and inward investment; forget welsh claims of self-sustainability; forget pomp and bluff and bluster.
Do you think, perchance, that Wales is a net importer or exporter of water? By how much would you suppose? Where would all that excess go?
Forget tax hand-outs, it's quite hard to stay alive without water; let alone sustain economies and infrastructure of any given size. It's the elephant in the corner nobody mentions, and one of the main reasons Wales will only be allowed some small way down the road to independence. I'd like to see how England coped if the taffs turned off the taps. You'd be crying for invasion and appropriation in a heartbeat. This is the reason nobody in Westminster vocally begrudges the welsh their very slightly higher per capita return from the tax take (and it really is incremental and more to do with economies of scale, or rather the lack thereof, than anything else).
Newmania,if you check the figures,you will find that the "subsidy" (if you call it that)on public spending per head is similar to the North East of England which is the area of England with the most comparable economy.Still, I don't suppose reason matters much with you.
I see that Newmania's postings have been removed.I half wondered whether he was A A Gill in disguise.
I don't suppose reason matters much with you.
That is not true actually the North east suffers especially badly from the preference for those areas calling themselves a country and this is a particular complaint of the English. I have all the figures.
This agreement in any case can no longer hold when the Welsh are insisting ,( not that they actually did much), on having their own country with increasing powers in the same ways as Scotland.
Thus far the problem has been the Barnett Formula and Democratic defacit with Scotland but exactly the same applies to Wales. You are wrong to imagine that the preferential treatment received by the Welsh is ignored by Westminster for fiscal reasons . The Labour party are hardly likely to mention it and the Conservative Party are unwilling to look , yet , at an England without Wales , for historical reasons . These are which are wildly different to those applying in Scotland
Its a bit tragic when the Scots throw North Sea Oil at us to this this sad little reference to Water.....we`ll get by... and EU inward investement is something of joke , the EU costs us a futher fortune.
The Scottish problem is reaching the end game and then it will be the turn of the Welsh. It is not to early to start thinking about the consequences of the silly fake nationalsim that is affected in that soggy land .
BTW Sorry about previous stuff I was only mucking around...yeeesh not allowed to bait the Welsh what is the world coming to !
Any way better get back to paying for your inward investement , taffy apples
XXXXXXX
I'd say that at heart Wales was a very conservative country. The leadership of the Tories in the Assembly have realised they need to be a party that is Welsh in sympathy and not just an ethnic English party. If the English Tories keep their noses out then Nick Bourne and company should easily take a good second place in the Assembly elections.
Plaid Cymru is a party of two halves - in the Welsh speaking areas it is conservative and could easily go into coalition with the Welsh Tories, however in the valleys there are those who see themsleves as to the left of the Labour party. How this will pan out, who knows.
PR for local government would be the nail in the coffin for Labour Party rule in Wales. Bring it on.
As a Welsh Republican I would be quite happy to go it alone without any supposed handouts from England - some of those statistics on who is subsidising who are a bit superficial by the way.
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