Extinction rabble
Matthew Paul
MOTORISTS in Cardiff were slightly inconvenienced this week, when Castle Street was closed to traffic for three days by a boat painted bright green, placed there by a number of demonstrators with similarly-coloured political views, and – in many cases – hair.
Protesting under the banner of Extinction Rebellion (XR), the Cardiff demonstration was part of XR's 'summer uprising'; a series of protests in cities around the UK. XR made a spectacular entry onto the political stage in April this year, when its demonstrations brought much of central London to a standstill and resulted in more than a thousand arrests. The actor Emma Thompson took XR's message of climate emergency so seriously that she flew five thousand miles in first class, just to be there.
XR only came into being a year or so ago; initially formed of a disparate rag-tag of the usual anarchist suspects. Previously, its founders had participated in the Occupy movement, and run an obscure fringe anti-capitalist group called 'Rising Up!'
Its ideological leaders are Julian Roger Hallam, once a very unsuccessful two-organic-goats type smallholder in the Carmarthenshire village of Gelli Aur, who claims to have been persuaded towards eco-activism when extraordinary weather events –rain, possibly– spoiled his crop. Hallam makes no secret of his political ambitions for the movement: "We are going to force the governments to act. And if they don't, we will bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose… and yes, some may die in the process."
His colleague Gail Bradbrook's inspiration to become a full-time activist was less meteorological and more pharmaceutical. On a trip to Costa Rica –be fair, perhaps she walked there– the 'neo-pagan' took mind-bending quantities of ayahuasca (a potion brewed up by shamans in the Amazon jungle) and the psychoactive shrub iboga. This experience, Bradbrook relates, 'rewired' her brain and gave her 'the codes of social change'. Soon after, she left a no doubt relieved husband and began her vital work to save the planet.
XR's demands on the Government are not modest: a halt to extinctions, the establishment of citizens' assemblies, and the total decarbonisation of the UK economy by 2025. To achieve this latter goal, there would need to be a total ban on commercial aviation, 38 million cars sent to the scrapyard and gas boilers removed from 26 million homes.
To bring this utopia about, XR advocates an economic model of 'de-growth'; or what conventional economists would more baldly term permanent recession. They see economic resources on the planet as finite, and –despite the experience of European economies that increased prosperity leads to population reduction, and that technological advance leads to a cleaner environment– believe that only mass impoverishment can save the Earth.
In any democratic system, that ain't going to happen. People will never vote to make themselves that much poorer.
This may be why XR's founders have little confidence in achieving their political objectives by traditional means. Democratic politics don't work for them. Roger Hallam stood as an independent candidate in London in the recent European Parliament election, sweeping up a miserable 0.04% of the vote and making even ChangeUK look wildly popular.
The people behind XR are cranks and dangerous cranks at that. XR's great success is in hiding the cranks behind the banner of a cause that has real merit and dressing up the old anti-capitalist movement in green clothes. Alongside the predictable anarchists, hippies and conspiracy theorists, XR gets on board a load of yummy mummies for whom a more typical act of environmental activism is buying something from Waitrose with a butterfly on the label.
Previous anti-capitalist activism has always looked a bit too lairy for the middle classes. It was also ineffective. The police developed effective crowd control responses to disorder like the May Day riots of 2000 and 2001; the tactic of 'kettling' demonstrators, making them seriously uncomfortable for a while, then letting them go in dribs and drabs while ensuring obvious organisers get nicked, effectively put a lid on the more riotous kind of demonstration for years.
By contrast, XR have done a good job of keeping the scumbags at arm's length and putting a friendly, non-violent middle-class face on their protests. They are promoting just as hard a political agenda, more effectively, without – for the time being – smashing shop windows. Their organisers recognise that people aren't hugely enthusiastic about the central message of 'smash the system' but might be prepared to engage in a little light system-smashing if they see themselves as heroes saving the planet in the process.
Compared to April's traffic meltdown in London, the Cardiff demo was small potatoes. Cardiff isn't a huge place and Castle St is easily bypassed. As usual with such protests, any economic damage it caused was felt most by low-wage workers –taxi drivers; tradesmen trying to get to a job – rather than the big corporations it affected to target.
Climate change is real, and the Government are doing something about it. Effective pressure groups are a necessary part of any democratic system, but ultimately so is respect for the system itself, and for the rule of law.
XR's founders don't respect our system of democracy and want to destroy it. That isn't in the interest of any of the middle-class people who now offer XR their uncritical support. It is to be hoped that a few of those thousand who were arrested in London get to experience the ghastly mortification of being frogmarched to a holding cell at JFK and summarily repatriated, next time they attempt to pop over to New York for the weekend.
Extinction Rebellion's anti-capitalist manifesto represents exactly the wrong way to fight climate change. Economic growth, not a neverending recession, will develop renewable, clean technologies that allow people to live in prosperity without harming the environment. If they really want to make a difference, rather than sitting down in front of Cardiff Castle XR should go and sit down in Tiananmen Square, and tell that country's government to take climate change seriously.
Is Boris boxed in?
The Darroch affair
'Nasty Neil' McEvoy is in the soup again.
Regular readers of this column will be familiar with Nasty Neil, the now-independent South Wales AM (after Plaid Cymru disembarrassed themselves of his affiliation), Cardiff City councillor, and general thorn in the side of the Cardiff Bay establishment.
Styling himself –minus the racist aggro– as a sort of Welsh Nat Tommy Robinson, Nasty Neil follows the whiff of controversy like some ASBO version of the Bisto kids. McEvoy is an obstreperous, uppity, bad-to-the-bone populist who seems well-liked amongst his constituents. This doesn't go down at all well in the cosy, consensual atmosphere of the Senedd, where any sort of opposition to Welsh Labour is regarded as being in faintly poor taste.
Predictably, Welsh Government apparatchiks have got it in for Nasty Neil. This follows his spectacular decapitation of the Assembly's Standards Commissioner, Sir Roderick Evans, who had to resign his post when McEvoy managed to get a recording of what sounded like the Commissioner and most of his staff going around the office saying that McEvoy (whom they were in the process of investigating) was a d**khead.
Now, Karma has smiled on Cardiff Bay and the politburo have extracted a measure of revenge. Following a four-day hearing before Cardiff Council's Standards Committee, McEvoy was found to have breached Cardiff City Council's code of conduct by bringing the council into disrepute and failing to treat a complainant with 'respect and consideration'. He was suspended as a councillor for four months.
The complaint against Neil McEvoy arose in April and May last year, when a child at a privately-run care home used by the council told his parents he was repeatedly being assaulted. The parents told McEvoy and asked him to do something about it.
Nasty Neil, slightly stretching the received understanding of what it is to be a 'corporate parent', demanded access to the child, confronted staff at the home, and (in earshot of the staff) called the director of social services and the police to organise a welfare check when he was refused access.
At the Standards Committee hearing, the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales (who sees himself as a sort of Batman to McEvoy's Joker), accused Nasty Neil of acting in a threatening way towards staff with his "chest puffed out", "shoulders back" and "pointing his fingers".
"Show me on the doll," Counsel for Ombuds-Man may have asked, "where Nasty Neil pointed at you."
She then accused McEvoy of displaying "a pattern of behaviour, that as soon as something doesn't go your way, you [ask] to speak to the director." "Can you see, Councillor," she added, "that it is the way you do it that makes people feel intimidated?"
How Labour won the argument
By Matthew Paul
Even though Labour –according to Jeremy Corbyn– 'won the argument' last Thursday, the Tories comprehensively won at the traditionally more important business of getting votes. Simon Hart, Stephen Crabb and Jonathan Edwards all held their seats; the two Conservatives enjoying comfortable majorities over Labour (though it was Hart, not Crabb, who took Alun Cairns' vacant job as Secretary of State for Wales).
Plaid Cymru, as predicted, had a pretty rotten night. They can take a little comfort from Ben Lake's solid win in Ceredigion, and from seeing their majorities creep up in Y Fro Gymraeg. But the Party of Wales remains a party supported by only one in ten Welsh voters. Plaid made no progress at all outside its core areas; indeed its share of the vote has (with a very slight blip in 2015) been slowly on the slide for twenty years, from the 14.1% it won in the 2001 General Election, to 9.9% last Thursday. This is not a movement on the march.
Plaid's aggressively anti-Brexit stance, and its 'Unite to Remain' alliance with wishy-washy Britnat parties was a huge strategic error. Mistletoe-clad traditionalists in Y Fro know perfectly well that the party is pro-EU and didn't need reminding. Brexity boyos in the valleys looking for an alternative to Labour found it a massive turn-off.
In Carmarthenshire West and South Pembrokeshire, Plaid's vote share fell; Rhys Thomas having failed to mention frequently enough that he's a doctor and was in Afghanistan. Jonathan Edwards will be spooked too. He lost half his majority in Carmarthen East & Dinefwr, and the Conservatives smashed Labour into third place. With a bit of investment in the constituency from CCHQ, there is every prospect of the Tories biting Jonathan on the bum next time round.
While the doorstep in the Pembrokeshire constituencies had been showing solid support for the Tories but no reason for complacency, over in Carmarthenshire it was apparent that the Labour campaign had completely gone to bits. Labour Candidate Maria Carroll, though an avid Corbynite, was for some reason unpersoned by her party and ordered to stay away from Jezza's big gig at Nantyci showground. The dear leader didn't mention her or CE&D once in his speech.
Rattled, Carroll put out a video in which she adopted the conciliatory tone of a dying gypsy fortune-teller cursing the drunk driver who knocked her down: "your children and grandchildren will SUFFER!" Even this inspirational message failed to turn things around. Maria Carroll may have won the argument in Carmarthen East & Dinefwr; but only if the argument centred on whether or not she would lose to both Plaid and the Tories, and get the lowest vote in Carmarthenshire in the Labour Party's entire history. To her credit, she achieved both. She was fortunate not to face a credible challenge from the LibDems, or Count Binface.
In receipt of this absolute shellacking from the electorate, many candidates would step back, slightly abashed, and opt for a moment of quiet reflection. Not Maria. Erupting on Twitter, she blamed every factor for her defeat except unpropitious astrological convergences, her own incompetence, and Oh! Jeremy Corbyn. Broadly speaking, she shared the view prevalent amongst members of the Corbyn cult; that the electorate got it wrong.
Certainly, the analysis among Corbynites seems to be that it wasn't the manifesto that got it wrong; voters loved the classical socialist idea of taxing the rich until there aren't any left, then starting on the moderately well off. It definitely wasn't the leader either; he is a good, kind, honest, decent man who really cares for the poor. And, as we all know, there aren't any poor Jews. No, it was vile, billionaire-owned mainstream media like The New Statesman, The Guardian and The Pembrokeshire Herald that brainwashed a majority of the electorate into thinking Corbyn was an unpatriotic halfwit who surrounded himself with commies, bomb-scatterers and anti-Semites. What made it worse was that they achieved this by the sneaky, underhand trick of reporting things that Corbyn had said and done.
Carroll tweeted that she wants to see "an end to the abusive power of the media", and even expressed an aspiration to close the media down, so perhaps The Pembrokeshire Herald has had a lucky break.
Maria Carroll wasn't alone on Thursday night. The Beast of Bolsover, Dennis Skinner, was finally told that his forty-year long end of the pier show was being shut down. Labour were turfed out of Sedgefield; once Tony Blair's rock-solid stronghold. Redcar, Grimsby Fishdocks, Satanic Mills East, and a host of other seats which have been Labour since the dawn of time all voted with some enthusiasm for Boris and Brexit.
The strategy of forcing opposition parties to treat a first-past-the-post election as a referendum on a subject about which they didn't agree worked an absolute treat for the Tories. Even so, a competently led Labour Party with a clearly defined position on Brexit could have won. In one credible poll, 43% of Labour voters who switched sides said it was leadership, not Brexit, that was their main concern.
For the time being, Corbyn remains at the helm of his stricken party, anxious to ensure that whoever succeeds him is chosen on his terms and from his cult. Any Tory with £3 in his pocket would do well to sign up to Labour now, for the unmissable opportunity of helping to elect Richard Burgon or Rebecca Long-Bailey as the Lenin-capped loon's successor.
Entertaining as it may be to watch the Labour Party disintegrate, the Tories can allow themselves only a short gloat. Reality will start to bite soon, when they get stuck into what may not be the entirely effortless task of Getting Brexit Done.
Cadno's Carmarthenshire Election Special – Part 1
Hello, readers.
It's been a while since you've heard from this old fox.
What with things being the way they are, Cadno might have been silenced for good. But this is election time. It's the season to be jolly with holly and —- golly gosh! What larks the election is!
Let's start with Carmarthenshire East and Dinefwr.
Jonathan Edwards is the incumbent and Plaid's treasury spokesperson is likely to take some beating. He has had substantial media exposure for his virtually lone hand pummelling the various Conservative Brexit ministers and pushing the interests of his constituents, whether on miners' pensions; WASPI; or rural regeneration. Jonathan Edwards has also had the Liberal Democrats and Greens step aside to give him a clear run as an unequivocally 'remain' supporting candidate. That is a largely symbolic step, given both parties' performance last time out.
If God loves a trier, he must have a special place in his heart for the Conservatives' Havard Hughes. If ever a candidate's social media profile suggested that he was a wing nut short of a complete cuckoo clock, Havard's is the one. It's a tough sell for Havard Hughes. The policies that the Conservatives have delivered for the constituency in the past decade can be counted on the fingers of one thumb.
Last time saw a revival in the Labour vote as David Darkin, who moved from his home in Llanelli to former county councillor Anthony Jones' spare room to get local credibility, rode the coattails of a successful Labour national campaign. This time, the red rose has put forward Maria Carroll as their candidate. Maria Carroll, Cadno is happy to clarify following recent media reports, is not an anti-Semite. She simply is unlucky enough to know one hell of a lot of them online and welcome them when they joined the Facebook group she administered which advised Party members accused of anti-Semitism. Some of those concerned turned out to be anti-Semites. It's just bad luck.
The Brexit Party Limited's candidate is Pete Prosser. What we do know about Pete Prosser is that he paid a fee to be selected as the BPL's candidate. If his experience is like that of the 317 Limited Company candidates dropped in the cack by Nigel Farage when he pulled the plug on them, he must have deep pockets. 14 people like his Facebook page as the company's candidate. Cadno thinks it's best to leave it there.
While the Brexit Party Limited's General Election website (you have to see it believe it) claims it can win in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Cadno thinks it safe to say such an outcome is highly unlikely. In spite of improving their parties votes in 2017, both Havard Hughes and David Darkin were well adrift of Jonathan Edwards at that election.
By definition, all Plaid Cymru seats are marginal; however, Jonathan Edwards' is less marginal than others. It depends on whether enough leave voters are brassed off with Labour's interesting Brexit proposals (renegotiate a deal and then – potentially – campaign against it) to take one look at Havard Hughes and think 'as swivel-eyed loons go, we could do worse'. Or whether enough Conservatives think Maria Carroll MP is a price worth paying to get rid of one of their party's most significant parliamentary goads.
It should be fun finding out.
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