GONE MISSING – SERVICE AND COMMON SENSE
A MAN has gone missing in Newport (we are no longer allowed to use “man” so have to call him a “person” in case we offend him if he is found) and we are being asked to dial 101 then quote an inordinately long unique number if we can offer any information to help find him.
FIRST 101 is not a telephone number – it’s yet another of these bloody stupid centralised call centres where you have to go through endless keying-in options at “press one for….press two for…” points while enduring some sickly confected pre-prepared overlong dialogue telling you that the police are wonderful and always on your side, never tolerate racism nor abuse of gays so encourage you to report these “hate crimes” immediately delivered by a mildly inebriated overexcited numbskull to tepid background music as you wait for seconds which run into hours for a human being to engage with you (all while the mad axe person loiters menacingly just inches away from you).
Imagine, if you will, spotting the missing man then dialling 101 and being asked to quote that number starting with a two as you desperately try to make sense of anything on our mean streets. Do you have to key it in on your mobile phone?
Dixon of Dock Green doesn’t salute you in stations nor on the end of a telephone line direct to him at a real police station with a blue light outside any more. The bullshit and braggadocio of these ridiculously annoying police and NHS emergency-style three figure dialing gizmos has replaced him and we aren’t allowed to call him “him” either in case “he” isn’t or in case he’s considering transitioning and could have his tender feelings hurt by insensitive comments. Imagine George Dixon in a skirt. “Evening all” would become “Evening all sorts”. All the stations have been shut or turned into lividly lit-up beacons of LGBTQ rainbow rights.
SECOND Who the hell is going to remember that unique number if you dial 101 and are they seriously going to ask you to give it and if you don’t or, more likely, can’t (it’s a ten figure number for God’s sake, why include it at all? Oh, I know, to make life a bit easier for the lazy lounging lard-arsed lumps on the end of the line at a call centre by completing some of their admin for them so they don’t have to) refuse to listen to what you have to say?
I’m on the verge of deciding who to vote for as police and crime commissioner from a list of Labour, Conservative, Plaid and Liberal Democrat with absolutely no evidence at all to explain what any of them can offer me nor any opportunity to engage with them about issues like this because there are no election leaflets, formal presentations nor any door-to-door activity (partly, I suspect, because people are so disgusted and angry these candidates would get endless abuse and might even have to call the cops themselves to save them from raging Reg at number 33).
Word has it that current Newport City Council leader Jane Helen Mudd (cruel wags call her “Clear as” in comments sections of local media) is a shoe-in inside a sham democratic exercise to further radically feminise cops and fully transition them into a multi-cultural, inclusive and diverse sisterhood which to a woman would probably knee old George Dixon in the groin, repeatedly whack him over the head then taser him before bundling him off to the nearest 24-hour emergency diversity and inclusivity workshop – if they could get out of their cars or actually be in a station anywhere near you anytime soon.
Tory Hannah Elizabeth Jarvis has put “More police, Safer streets” on her tagline, preferring that to giving the Welsh version of her party’s name so she’ll get my vote. I doubt that the second actually follows from the first and I seriously wonder how she could pay for more cops, though, but these are desperate times.
But where oh where are the police in terms of their relationship with the public now – absolutely nowhere and the election of police and crime commissioners to add political jaundice and wicked wheeling, dealing and dirty tricks hasn’t helped matters one jot. Not one jot.
The facts are that you are far, far more likely to see a robber than a cop almost everywhere now so far more likely to get into conversation with one and for those conversations to become routine and everyday.
Talking to your friendly neighbourhood police constable these days is like getting an audience with the Pope or your local councillor (or, come to think of it, your local police and crime commissioner candidate) because they are either stuck in a car or at some university lecturing loftily from secular pedestals or pulpits while adopting a nauseously righteous non judgemental, even-handed tone, refusing to actually tell you anything about anyone at any time at all.
In fact, far, far too busy to answer the phone or respond to local people they know, having developed lasting trust and rapport with them inside truly consensual, convivial, confident and considerate intelligence networks which work like nothing else can to help track down villains and find missing persons, male female or whatever.
Police and crime commissioner, my arse!
HAIL THE FLYING SCOTSMAN
THE blog Wings over Scotland today published a post which took typical courage, strength of purpose and some impartiality.
Courage, strength of purpose and impartiality are not, any longer, attributes we naturally attach to mainstream media, particularly in the banana republic without the bananas or morality we now call Scotland.
Police Scotland have been warning people about posting on social media anything which might jeapordise the fairness and impartiality of a criminal trial of Scottish National Party treasurer Peter Murrell, the husband of former party leader Nicola Sturgeon, on charges of embezzling party funds – that is taking without consent money given to him by party members.
Blog writer Stuart Campbell is a Scottish independence supporter – not, strictly, an impartial observer – who broke the story of missing funds when mainstream media either didn’t care or didn’t notice.
This sorry tale has gone on and on and on and by its bizarrely legally strangled nature has exposed wonderfully first the danger when a devolved government runs crime and justice including, crucially, contempt laws AND exposed – as, indeed, did the trial on sex charges of former SNP leader Alex Salmond, though in a different way – the danger of an accredited, formally regulated-only national press and media formally and/or informally accredited and regulated by the very government it reports on or by its allies and associates.
The gist here is that only accredited and regulated press and media, according to many, can truly report with integrity, impartiality and genuine authority and anything else should always be dismissed.
Now Campbell was not accredited nor regulated so he attracted only the ire and disapproval of the professional body, which still generally takes a dismissive, disapproving tone to unregulated and unaccredited sources, seeming, often, to disproportionately magnify the danger of rampant speculation and accusations, particularly within a febrile online jungle where anonymous sources can now write nonsense.
But a keen sense of smell and the guts to stand up and say something when your nose feels offended is not only a journalistic asset but a very human one, too, and our right to do so is not always aided and assisted in a healthy way by mainstream media, particularly if that media is weak and hopelessly compromised.
So, thank you Wings – may you soar and sweep free as a bird forever.
LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER
YES, folks, my last post about turning FAR RIGHT was an April Fool’s joke but another joke (less funny but much, much more insidiously dangerous) is a piece written for Wales Online by Rhun ap Iorwerth, my fellow north Walian also with a background in journalism (mine in Manchester by the sea north Wales coastal riviera and his in cruel Welsh speaking Gwynedd Biblical sects like the godforsaken Dolgellau – I always remember going there in my youth and always finding it shut, dark and forbidding – where your father’s religious leanings dictated everything and still does).
One of the constant and predictable shelters incompetent politicians serving in Cardiff Bay like Rhun, current leader of Plaid Cymru, though by the time you read this he may have been replaced (again, probably by a woman), hide behind while bleating about endlessly is the concept that Welsh people (specifically, Welsh speaking people) don’t really know what is going on around them – he states that too many people do not know Welsh government run health in the above piece – because too little bespoke Welsh news is offered.
This – errant nonsense in the main to serve a deceitful parochial agenda and cover deficiencies while protecting feather-bedded state subsidised abject media like Nation.Cymru and S4C- of course, is the very reason why devolution appealed so much to him and others like him as a chance to awaken Cymru and Cymraeg over England and English by setting up some sort of distinct and dedicated media with the premise that Welsh people (speaking a different language, although the numbers that do now is infinitesimally small and in no way justifies the wildly disproportionate expense lavishly dedicated on it) living in Wales have different needs to English people and so need some sort of different and distinct media service. In fact, a totally different dedicated and bespoke form of address altogether with, very probably, different subject matter entirely delivered in an entirely different way.
Media to people like Rhun, of course, is the feather-bedded, stodgy, risk-averse and cosily consensus-led sort with some overarching glue-like bond and shared ideological purpose I avoided like the plague, probably fearing that if too many people told me I was an entirely virtuous person rather than a guttersnipe (always looking up from the gutter rather than down into it) I might one day come to believe them.
While he was easing up the BBC Wales career ladder alongside all the other Urdd-inspired fluently flatulent accomplished young Welsh speakers, sons and daughters of teachers, clergymen and Eisteddfod bards who would cwtch together mildly inebriated at Cymanfa Canu gangly and awkward yet safe in the certain knowledge that if all else failed they could always get a job at BBC Wales, I was by then in England still trying to be Charles Dickens but failing, permanently barred from BBC Wales’s inward-looking brotherhood because of my lack of Cymraeg and lowly academic status while struggling to make it big in an English media dominated by public school and Oxbridge high-fliers who had already said what I wanted to say before I had thought it.
I took my Welshness out to them partly to escape the dozy doltishness of Dolgellau and reminded others of it or, more accurately, was cruelly reminded by others, whenever they or I thought necessary (surprisingly often, actually) but Rhun appears to have dedicated himself to righting the wrongs of life for those closeted and groomed in rural Wales intending, for some reason, to remain there with all the zeal and spring of an authentic son of Gwynedd.
But just how, I wonder, does he set about achieving this at the helm of a deliriously radical leftist Woke increasingly unhinged far out radical feminist, rainbow alliance, green and identity issues obsessed party which has lost touch with Dolgellau altogether and now only goes down well at Chapter on Thursday nights inside that social humming huddle of wimmin warriors nursing glasses of responsibly sourced organic pale ale safe from the wandering hands of stray lonely farmers or anyone male and even mildly threatening (being male itself, now, considered very threatening).
Why is turnout in Welsh elections so poor? Rhun asks, almost as if he really, and here I mean really, doesn’t know.
Answer: Labour always win. Stupid. Devolution was designed specifically for this very outcome and that was why I voted against and urged anyone else to do the same.
Being amenable to Labour while secretly living off scraps thrown from their table of lifelong power, therefore, becomes Plaid’s only reason for existence and Iorwerth’s pallid two-faced attacks on them in this piece are dreadfully unconvincing.
A far more prescient and meaningful question would be: Why would a universal worldwide question be answered best with the most parochial and inward looking response? Why have a justice system in Wales separate to England when we have neither the infrastructure nor resources needed to even begin to do it, leaving out entirely why you would want to create boundaries criminals would naturally cross knowing that sentences were lighter on our side.
And a probe into the internal finances of these meek and mild enablers might be in order lest we unravel something similar to the frankly criminal brief encounters in murky Scotland, where independence is now dead and buried.
“The spirit of 1999 was one of ambition and expectation,” he laments, “a chance to devise Welsh solutions to Welsh problems”. But who really cares where the solutions come from and why should anyone really care where anyone comes from?
Indeed, it is this profoundly tone deaf and entirely contradictory position of wanting Wales to be FOR the Welsh (the true heart of nationalism is right wing in its roots and fibre and can be nothing else, exemplified by Jac o the North and the furious “truly Welsh” farming folk besieged by deceitful globalist agendas outside their control) but at the same time rigidly compelled to warmly welcome outsiders with dubious credentials to be here at all by making ourselves a natural country of sanctuary for immigrants and asylum seekers which now not only jars but simply no longer sells.
Iorwerth is on the one hand presenting himself as Welsh through and through so naturally selective to and paternal to his own kith and kin – the pure blood Welsh – but at the same time he is hopelessly dependent on a crippling social justice theory caucus holding power on and around Aberystwyth and Cardiff university campuses who always feared most of all the party’s sympathy to Hitler and the Nazis so insist on ever expanding multiculturalism and a fiercely visible welcome to outsiders who now impact negatively on life in Wales, costing jobs, GP appointments and all manner of other things.
“In 1888, The Encyclopaedia Britannica read “For Wales, see England.” It is the lingering fixation with seeing our nation through the lens of another which holds us back in many regards,” he writes, invoking that rancid historic grievance and resentment which embitters and twists like a knife in the nationalist heart.
No, it’s not the fixation with seeing ourselves through the lens of another which holds us back – it is the mean-spirited, petty, inward-looking entirely parochial and rancidly resentful mien which that obliges you to adopt that holds some of us back.
WALES FINDS NEW DIRECTIONS
RIGHT turns on mobile phones, sat navs and vehicle GPS digital route planners will automatically convert into FAR RIGHT in Wales from today but LEFT will remain unchanged. Signs on motorways which warn KEEP LEFT UNLESS OVERTAKING will change to KEEP LEFT and will be repeated every 30 miles.
If, for instance, a driver, cyclist or pedestrian is trying to find a location a few streets away, the audio and written direction on all devices once they cross the border with England will be: “At the next junction, turn FAR RIGHT, then take the first turn LEFT. Pull up at the second house on the FAR RIGHT.” This will replace the previous direction “At the next junction, turn RIGHT, then take the first turn LEFT. Pull up at the second house on the RIGHT.” Mobile and in-vehicle devices have been pre-set and users will not have to do anything.
“This is a major step in the right direction and further transports Wales on a super speed world class digital super highway to the world as a modern, forward-thinking and future-proof dynamic place totally at ease and comfortable in its own skin,” a spokesperson for BBC Wales/Welsh government said.
The change in language is designed to fit seamlessly so that FAR RIGHT becomes everyday and routine and is used as prolifically as possible by people inside Wales.
There are currently no plans for a “zero tolerance” clampdown on anyone who refuses to adapt though there will be device inspections to make sure they comply and police will have powers to confiscate any devices or persons still using old terms in random spot checks near every border point.
HOW NEW DIRECTIONS WILL SOUND:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DhLzp2gOPT7NvaaWlyuM_pjMW2hhR3l8/view?usp=drive_link
TRADES UNION TIES WEAK?
IF THE Labour Party were a church then trades union members would naturally and automatically be the hymn-singing and earnestly praying worshippers or congregation.
Its ties to the trades unions gives them real grass roots presence with recognisable blue and white collar toilers in offices, factories and clubs all over Wales having a meaningful say in first selecting politicians then advising them and inspiring them to fight their corner, even helping with their subscriptions to funds (though these, clearly, were not enough for Vaughan Gething).
Rather, we should be saying “used to” or, perhaps, “should do” because in the Welsh Labour leadership contest where Vaughan Gething beat Jeremy Miles to become new First Minister, replacing retiring Mark Drakeford, the turnout among “affiliates” – trades union members with a vote as part of their membership – was less than 10 per cent compared with 58 per cent of party members in Wales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Welsh_Labour_leadership_election
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/labour-party-leadership-contests
My question at the Cardiff University shindig when Gething was announced as new leader on Saturday would have been “why was the turnout among union members so low? Don’t they care?”
I think that this is the single most troubling and potentially damaging factor facing Welsh Labour and Vaughan Gething as new leader of a party which is rapidly losing touch with its natural foundations and its greatest asset – a committed, naturally similarly motivated working community.
To make any meaningful, accurate and reliable comparison between the 2024 turnout and those in previous Welsh Labour leadership elections with meaningful, accurate and reliable different percentages between party members and trades union affiliate voters we would need rich data including the total number of trades union affiliates eligible to vote in each election, election rules and design, analysis of how turnout (and actual membership of the different trades unions) may have gone up or down over the years, a breakdown of how the affiliates voted in comparison to Labour members and elected officials as well as some idea of which trades unions were most partisan in which ways and for which candidates.
I have tried to access this kind of data but have found it almost impossible using limited mainstream search engines. I suspect that only records gathering dust somewhere would give the true picture and I also suspect that knowledge of dwindling interest among trades union members in internal Labour Party selection and staffing is not something the party would want to focus on currently.
At the height of union power in the masculine, muscular old days of Harold Wilson enjoying beer and sandwiches at Number Ten with Len Murray and Vic Feather to discuss wage rises in the 70s, union affiliates wielded immense power over Labour, particularly in elections for leaders, and attendance at Trades Union Congress’s summer seaside conferences was compulsory.
Today’s Labour Party is a totally different, radically reformed and redesigned body with very noticeably less close and public connections to the trades union movement partly, I suspect, because the voting public broadly distrust and dislike uncontrolled union power so a 1970s-style love-in would hit them hard.
This was my understanding of how the dominant Labour Party operated when I was growing up in the 1960s in Bangor, North Wales.
Working men, breadwinners in nuclear families with dependent housewives and children, became shop stewards or otherwise active in unions at their workplaces, seamlessly and naturally engaging in party politics. Then a select few worthy living embodiments of socialist ideals fighting for a fair wage for a fair day’s work became local councillors, went on to become more high-profile politicians or rose within the unions.
Many older male councillors – former postmen, railway workers, miners, steel workers, engineers, technicians and printers – still active in Welsh local authorities from Rhiwlas to Rhiwbina will have been honed and crafted within this system of natural nurturing and tried and tested patronage and many may still yearn for its relatively simple idealist strain, particularly when set against today’s convoluted chaos.
After all, the Labour Party sprung from and out of a committed working community or communities and advanced most speedily and formidably inside areas where that rich heritage of lower working class struggle and strife to raise a nuclear family often against the competing selfish interest of cost-cutting owners and business magnates dominated most visibly and what, some might say, could be wrong with that.
A committed, naturally similarly motivated working community took pride in its heritage to form a united and strong worshipping congregation for a Labour Party at high altar stuffed to bursting point with masculine, muscular titans respected by the proletariat.
As Welsh Labour now surveys the damage inflicted upon it by its own internal leadership election, the watching public is entitled to wonder where the committed, naturally similarly motivated working community is any more.
They are also entitled to wonder what dogma and doctrine is uniting its members these days to establish whether or not they are now praying for and with us or preying on us.
A “RACE” TO THE BOTTOM
THE TOP ministers in Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff Bay will now all be ethnic minority “people of colour” – Rishi Sunak, the Indian heritage Hindu, Humsah Haroon Yousaf, the Pakistani heritage Muslim and Vaughan Gething, the Zambian-born first black European leader.
The identity-obsessed leftist postmodernist social justice theory academic extremists who made equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity compulsory on campus – flooding us with visible representatives in key positions as part of a political plan to normalise being white and British as shameful and redolent of a colonialist, imperialist past – must be jubilant today because a clear message has gone out to job applicants that if you’re white you may as well not apply.
Reaction to this is easily branded racist if it is from a white person like me. Everything, ultimately, can be viewed as racist to suit a political agenda which very conveniently negates you and I altogether because we automatically come from a currently toxic place in even mentioning anti-white racism.
Only 16 per cent even bothered to vote in the Welsh Labour leadership contest today but a Labour comfort blanket has already been thrown over Gething – his colour shielding him from properly exposing his all-too obvious glaring incompetence – and will further support him when he takes over from Mark Drakeford. It was a done deal long ago so don’t let anyone tell you this was democracy.
Keir Starmer has said the election of Gething spoke “to the progress and values of modern-day Wales”.
“Modern-day Wales” is really not all that different to old-day Wales except that a motivated and highly organised unrepresentative minority has now got complete control of the steering wheel and is driving us in directions we do not want to go in and is going way, way, way too fast, breaking all speed limits.
The inevitable election of Gething (we all really knew this was going to happen weeks ago) in supposedly “open and transparent” processes to appoint people to major roles is just another box-ticking equality of outcome rather than opportunity move where social and racial justice is visibly ensured and seen to be ensured then it is celebrated as a sign of progress in and of itself totally divorced and detached from everyday reality.
That is many things but it is NOT progress.
You cannot build a future on your shame and embarrassment about your past, you have to move beyond it. You cannot, either, consequently design all processes including, most specifically, entire recruitment procedures as public cleansing and de-toxifying exercises as if to rid or attempt to rid us of the lingering smell and appearance of whiteness, particularly if it is associated with masculinity.
Wales remains an essentially socially conservative place and the voiceless majority will rise against the clear injustice here and they will do it within speed limits as low as 20 mph.
BACKLASH TO GETHING WILL BUILD
WALES Online’s story announcing Vaughan “Calamity” Gething as the new Welsh Labour leader got hundreds of mostly critical comments from members of the public in just hours today and the backlash is growing by the minute prompted partly by a spectacularly low turnout for the contest.
Gaffe-prone Gething would not have been chosen by the public, who naturally associate him with incompetence during COVID-19 and dodgy donations from big business to fund his questionable leadership campaign, and wonder how he can now seriously become First Minister in place of retiring Mark Drakeford.
He beat current education minister Jeremy Miles – the only other contender – by nearly 52per cent to nearly 48 per cent but, according to the above story, only 9.4 per cent of eligible trades union members voted – 9.4! – and just 57 per cent of Labour members, giving an overall turnout of JUST 16 per cent, 16 per cent! No wonder they held this on a Saturday morning perhaps hoping it would sneak in under the radar beneath the Wales v Italy rugby result.
Expect the negative, critical reaction to grow in the coming days and weeks as more disturbing questions about Mr Gething’s cash donations emerge as well as natural doubts about how a turnout of just 16 per cent can, in any way, be considered conclusive, even, perhaps, valid.
In the comments section of media online platforms, a huge wave of critical reaction from angry and disgusted Welsh people furious at growing waste and expense now dominates with growing calls for a referendum to either dismantle devolution altogether or redesign it.
In their defence, Welsh Labour appears to be relying on a system of democracy in which less than 10 per cent of trades union members can be bothered to vote with a total turnout of just 16 per cent.
The backlash will not come from BBC Wales – which has sold out lock, stock and barrel to liberal postmodernist racial identity extremism running rampant on American university campuses after the death of George Floyd – but it will come hopefully from Wales Online and its numerous anonymous public commenters and, of course, from the blogosphere and just about any independent media not currently dependent upon funding from Cardiff Bay (not a huge sweep).
The election was closed within a Labour system which attempts to create a picture of healthy democracy but controversial Gething got into hot water well before today’s announcement was made by refusing to hand back £200,000 of money. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/vaughan-gething-lobbied-regulators-on-behalf-of-waste-offences-company-that-later-donated-200k-to-his-campaign/ar-BB1jLos6
You do wonder, frankly, what part that played given that his was such a slight majority overall in a contest with only a tiny proportion of those eligible to vote actually bothering to if these statistics are accurate.
The apathy speaks loudest here.
THIS IS A LOCAL SHOP FOR LOCAL PEOPLE
WHAT we have learned from the COVID Inquiry visiting Wales is that Cardiff Bay Welsh government is hampered horrifically by holding a parochial, territorial and out-of-touch view generally but most specifically, for me, in the way they view the media consuming and using public in Wales as being distinct and separate to, for some mysterious reason, the people of England.
Rather like Edward and Tubbs – the League of Gentlemen “this is for local people, it’s not for people like you” village shop proprietors – Mark Darkeford et al naturally seem to see us in a totally inaccurate way as part of some sort of localist fantasy world rather than what we actually are which is always on 24/7 internet internationalists unburdened and unbordered by parochialism.
Millenials and Gen Zs already totally disengaged with Welsh politics are hardly likely to be attracted any time soon given the breathtakingly anachronistic, old timer tack taken to media communication in that glass-fronted facade.
Mark Drakeford told the COVID Inquiry – yes, actually told it – that “people still get their news from Bristol and Manchester” (the dirty devils).
What I think he means is that people living in Wales, many of them neither Welsh nor even particularly conscious of a difference to England given that we are a United Kingdom, consume UK media generated in English centres of industry.
Wow. Do they really? Surely not!
THE MAGIC DISAPPEARING ACT
FIDDLING with his pen and arranging and rearranging papers on his desk, a daffodil on the lapel of his loose-fitting grey suit only slightly relieved by a flat claret tie, Mark Drakeford said he had “no way of knowing how or if” his informal messages which mysteriously disappeared (“just like that”, as fellow Welshman Tommy Cooper used to say) from July 2018 to March 2021 could be retrieved.
There was no top hat upturned on a small square white linen cloth-wrapped-table into which a great magician under a Palladium Theatre spotlight might have put all these messages “like that, not like that” but the watching audience will still marvel at the mental sleight of hand and wonder, even sometimes out loud (though not, of course, while the act is proceeding), how on earth you could pull it off.
How, how, how, we will always wonder, when even old embarrassing drunken late night snaps, decidedly dodgy texts from decidedly dodgy texters and all manner of other compromising potentially actionable material stays doggedly and stubbornly on hard drives when Plod comes to call to trawl through Joe and Joanna Public’s internet history.
There is, of course, the underlying question, too, of whether or not data is ever truly deleted or an be retrieved if external national security decide it needs to be retrieved. This was never addressed.
How, how, how, we will always wonder.
Mark Drakeford is no ordinary Joe so the question of why didn’t even arise, of course.
Again, Like Vaughan Gething earlier, he explained for no particular reason other than to mystify and fog, that he could use two phones – it appears that Senedd members are issued with one and a second, different one may be issued to Welsh government ministers for some reason.
No explanation has ever been sought about why two phones were available to them and we still have absolutely no idea of how these are actively either needed nor how they can aid and assist us, the watching public, especially relevant given that we pay for them.
Tom Poole KC gently pointed out to him that the public now needed access to “informal methods of communication” as well as formal ones to understand the often baseless and bizarre uneducated “discussion that led to decisions being made”.
“It’s what people do all the time” Drakeford said, dismissively without even a hint of apology. I assumed that he was referring, here, to engaging in baseless, bizarre, uneducated discussion and not the systematic deletion of it after the event but I may have been wrong.
I do not systematically delete anything, by and large partly because I simply do not have the time, though I certainly do not trust the technology to make decisions for me. Whether or not this was a “magic” disappearing act with artificial intelligence acting autonomously (AGAIN) or some less savoury and sweet smelling act was – again – left entirely open to interpretation.
I think – very broadly – that people are completely relaxed about politicians engaging in baseless, bizarre and uneducated discussion because they understand how knowledge is gained but the systematic destruction and/or deletion of that material and even the process itself remains disturbing because it hints at insecurity and complete lack of the supposed assets and character traits these people are selling us at elections.
After the next election, for instance, will we get an assurance that open and transparent discussion to inform decision taking will be made routine?
Someone needed to PIN (If you’ll excuse the pun) Drakeford down.
Why are you given two phones? Isn’t this needless and wasteful? Are they ones which anyone can reach you on or just a select group of insiders? Do you ever answer it when it rings? How broad is the scope of people you engage with on these devices? Why did you only use WhatsApp 11 times when people around you seemed to be on it all the time? Which service provider did you use and were they any good?
He accepted that it was wrong to use informal methods of communication though seemed grudging because he did not think the messages “would be very helpful to anybody”. “It was against the policy of 2009” he conceded but “in the circumstances of a pandemic it did not make any sense” and, consequently, he did not give instructions to his ministers to retain all the data (unlike Nicola Sturgeon who, I think, said she did, actively misleading press and public).
WHERE DID THE DATA GO?
THE COVID Inquiry has given us all rare, valuable and hugely useful insight into the workings of Welsh government in terms of how it actually operates as opposed to how it would like us to believe it operates in its open, welcoming and transparent Cardiff Bay glass-fronted facade.
Never again will we casually accept anything after seeing and hearing this. Indeed, already we can now fully see and appreciate just why Mark Drakeford didn’t think a Wales-specific inquiry was needed.
A general picture of paralysing distrust, obsession with its own inferiority in comparison with England and Westminster and needless suspicion dominates and seems, to me, to have blackened and badly biased their response to COVID-19.
Clearly, underlying tensions and disputes between Welsh Labour – always siding with nationalist Scotland – and Tory England far too often intruded and their will to impress and improve upon Westminster rule, as if the Welsh population somehow desired just that when all they wanted was clarity and certainty, set them from the very outset against and not with key decision makers.
Ministers in Welsh government giving evidence at the COVID Inquiry have fully amplified that in the way they engaged with legal representatives and with Lady Hallett because none of them appeared confident, open and transparent, having to be almost visibly made to apologise and/or admit anything, even relatively minor points. Rather, they busied themselves in constructing needlessly oblique and wordy rambling narratives about their own windy processes to deflect and distract.
Devolved health powers enabled them during this dark period in history to erect “borders” and present a picture to the public of having real and practical control of who enters and leaves Wales, despite it being a country of sanctuary for immigrants with no measurable control of who it accepts in with sea ports, coastlines and our only airport practically unable in this day and age to refuse entry on practical grounds.
No end of illegal immigrants could have been landing in Fishguard or the coastline of Clwyd or Gwynedd while ministers busied themselves prohibiting Welsh residents from entering England and vice versa.
The flexing of muscles is only possible if you have real muscle and the Welsh government has little to none.
Therefore, Potemkin practically unenforceable measures and rules were issued by a Welsh Labour cabinet acting by fiat under emergency powers but on the ground there was a woefully meagre presence to practically police and/or enforce them.
Key evidence about the use of, storage of and importance of digital application data on mobile phones by politicians and their staff has been ever-present throughout as a legally contested moot issue because so much of the data has mysteriously disappeared, prompting outrage and disgust in the watching public and relatives of the dead.
Vaughan Gething told a story of having two phones issued by Welsh government (why did he need two?) and seemed, to me, to be implying that the fact that he had two was somehow a contributory factor to the disappearance of the data. He had no explanation to offer nor any apology.
Jeremy Miles stated that he had had a mobile phone stolen and was very concerned about losing valuable data or it falling into the wrong hands “in the gym” (gyms, of course, were closed in Wales during COVID), to me, appearing to be offering that as some sort of explanation of why he was unable to produce data. He had no explanation to offer nor any apology.
Both were implausible and distressingly unknowing and had to be made to admit their errors very, very reluctantly.
Indeed, throughout this inquiry, politicians have been deliriously loose and unknowing about digital devices, how they work, how you can safely store or delete data and whether or not there is a way of retrieving lost or deleted data.
Which raises the question of why such sophisticated devices are issued at all if the users do not know how they work and can so easily and apparently unknowingly lose vital information which should be available under basic public accountability rules.
Co-incidentally, the Post Office sub-postmasters inquiry is also deeply mired in complete confusion about digital technology and exactly how the Fujitsu computers could so easily and merrily cause complete chaos and havoc leading to the wrongful conviction of many innocent victims.
Was the digital device deliberately set to do things or was it doing it almost as if it had a life and purpose of its own?
Digital devices are meant to aid and assist but first we have to know how they REALLY work in a practical day-to-day use before we use them because without that we risk being mastered by them or whoever is “behind” them and in the case of the sub-postmasters’ completely duped, disabled and destroyed by them.
Nobody seems to be nailing the actual truth about WhatsApp technology, nor even attempting to and this, it seems to me, is a terrible failing letting us all down. Plausible deniability and a convenient haziness and perplexed vacuousness with some ministers actively saying that they did not know how to operate these devices has too easily and lazily been allowed, letting far, far too many off the hook.
Surely, someone somewhere knows that the stories being spun about deleting WhatsApp messages on bizarre grounds is hogwash and total nonsense and could easily prove it.
GARRY W GIBBS 