Category: politics
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On the naming of bridges
Unsurprisingly the announcement this week by Alun Cairns, Secretary of State for Wales, that the Second Severn Crossing is to be renamed the ‘Prince of Wales Bridge’ has caused uproar. Perhaps it was intended to. Some have even suggested that the move is a dry run for the future announcement of a Welsh investiture of…
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Iaith a Brecsit
Er Mehefin 2016 mae llawer o bobl yn cynnig llawer o resymau er mwyn ceisio esbonio pam dewisodd mwyafrif o bleidleiswyr Prydeinig i adael yr Undeb Ewropeaidd. Rhesymau economaidd – yr awydd i gadw swyddi a chodi cyflogau, i sicrhau masnachu rhwyddach gyda gweddill y byd, i wario rhagor ar y gwasanaeth iechyd. Rhesymau gwleidyddol…
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Wales and Brexit, by Emyr Lewis
In this guest blog the lawyer and poet Emyr Lewis considers some of the complex questions, constitutional and legal, economic and cultural, that arise for Wales from the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. The text was originally given on 8 March 2018 in Swansea University as the Royal Institution of South Wales’s St…
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Swansea’s rebel women
For all their strengths in the campaign to gain votes for women Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were by nature autocratic. In 1907 some members of their Women’s Social and Political Union took exception to their announcement that the WSPU’s annual conference would be cancelled in future and that they themselves and their inner circle would…
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Orwell’s toads
On 12 April 1946 the magazine Tribune published a short piece by George Orwell entitled Some thoughts on the common toad. It’s not perhaps his most original essay – its central theme is the coming of spring, and how ubiquitous it is, even in the centre of a large city like London – but it…
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A waxwork opens an embassy
Like many people – or at least like many non-Londoners – I was only dimly aware that the American government was building a new UK embassy in London, when Mr Donald J Trump kindly drew our attention to its imminent opening. According to a recent tweet it seems Mr Trump was planning to come and…
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Dillad dychmygol Brexit
Yn y stori draddodiadol a addaswyd gan Hans Christian Andersen yn 1837, mae pawb yn y ddinas yn llygadrythu ar ddillad newydd yr Ymerawdwr – y gair yw eu bod yn anweledig ond i bobl dwp – nes bod bachgen bach yn dod sy’n ddigon diniwed ac eofn i ebychu, ‘Ond does dim dillad amdano!’…
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Kicking our legs away
‘Infrastructure’ is a Latinate word almost designed to put you to sleep. But it stands for something that’s crucial to us all. Spending on infrastructure – sewage systems, transport links, reservoirs, electricity generation, broadband networks and the rest – is critical to how any successful economy and society operates. The right infrastructure provides the sturdy…
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Is it time for a National Trust of Wales?
There was a time when the National Trust was invulnerable and beyond criticism. Its aims are so obviously virtuous, and the experience of visiting its sites so rewarding that anyone bold enough to question its ethos or ways of working would have been seen as eccentric. The Trust is still one of the most popular…
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Mr Skates’s ring cycle
The row over the ‘Iron Ring’ proposed for Flint Castle seems to be over, so the time is right to think more calmly about what we’ve learnt. First, a quick summary of what happened (there is an ignominious prequel, which I’ll skip). Cadw, responsible for safeguarding scheduled historic monuments in Wales, together with Visit Wales, the…