Views of Wales
Metro would be so easy to implement
JOHN D Rogers of Nantymoel made some interesting points in his recent letter, particularly about a Metro network of modern teams serving Cardiff and hinterland.
Orleans, Val de Loire, France, provides an excellent model, in a town one-third the size of Cardiff, with two lines, vaguely cruciform in alignment.
Two lines in Cardiff, one eastwest from St Mellons/Castleton to Culverhouse Cross, and one north-south from, say, Coryton and/or Thornhill to the Pierhead, intersecting at Kingsway/Queen Street would be a start.
This would provide the basis for an intergrated, transferable oneticket transport solution. Buses could then connect the arms of the tramways, reducing the need for their entry into the city centre. Cardiff Central station could be included simply by “diverting” the north-south arm via Wood Street, Central Square/Great Western Lane and Saunders Road. Dr Paul Langmaid
Cowbridge
Look again for the whimberry patch
CAN I help Ian Price in his search for the lost whimberry patch?
He couldn’t find it because he was looking in the wrong valley.
The legendary whimbery patch of my youth was on the west-facing slope of Aberdare mountain, just above Maerdy.
The Rhondda Fawr is of course bigger than the Rhondda Fach, but the whimberries aren’t. Or at least, they weren’t half a century ago.
After eating our fill the remainder were sold on the street.
The unit of measurement was a pint bottle, but I can’t remember whether it fetched a bob or half a crown. Jon Owen Jones Roath, Cardiff
Rushed rail job not likely to prosper
ANOTHER controversy has surfaced not long after you published my letter on August 5, setting out what I think might improve the UK’s performance on mega-infrastructure development.
The latest surrounds a row over £1bn funding for overhauling the rail network for Wales and the Borders. By way of a leaked letter, we learn that it involves the same Secretary of State for Transport who vowed to complete HS2 on time and within budget, but was not prepared to disclose the programme, nor the budget, by which to measure the vow.
This time he has delayed the tendering process kick-starting the overhaul which, it seems, was thought to have been devolved to the Senedd, so that the recipient of the £1bn would be the Welsh Government.
In keeping with the UK’s plagued record on infrastructure development, the devolution itself seems to have been less than clear; as it has been in other policy areas, it seems.
Against this backdrop, the leading transport expert Professor Stuart
Cole has warned of a rushed job in getting the right deal for the future rail network in Wales.
As the UK’s long history of megainfrastructure development has shown time and time again, rushed jobs are seldom, if ever, delivered on time and on budget.
Moreover, soundbites such as the one delivered by Andrew RT Davies about the Welsh Government not being up to speed contribute nothing to ensuring that they are.
Unfortunately, if things go expensively wrong in the rush feared by Professor Cole, none of the parties in the Senedd (including the Conservatives) will carry the same kind of clout as that delivered by Northern Ireland’s DUP to extract £1 billion to keep Westminster’s Conservatives in power. Derek Griffiths Llandaff
Demography played its part in language
IT is an old chestnut that the Welsh Not never existed or was very rare. There are quite sufficient surviving examples of it to prove that wrong, not to mention the numerous oral accounts of its functioning. It was not something that its victims would forget.
Certainly there was never an official government policy about the subject – it was not needed once people had been persuaded that the Welsh language was not only a mere patois, but that the simple knowledge of it was a positive disadvantage.
Whether Nonconformity officially sanctioned contraception in the 1930s, I cannot say. It seems unlikely. What was far more effective with regard to the birth rate was the need for young Welshspeakers like my father and my uncle to go to England for work. Many never came back, ceasing to be counted in any population figures based on language, and that is still the case, as I know from my own family.
Though compulsory education was introduced in 1870, it was not free; I well remember my grandmother, born in 1880, telling me how she and her siblings paid their weekly tuppences to go to school. Sally Roberts Jones Port Talbot
Why is Wales still so impoverished?
BREXIT will be a disaster for Wales, goes the narrative. If that’s the case after 43 years of European membership, why is Wales still so poor?
By the late 1990s the Valleys and west Wales topped the misery league and Objective One money flowed in in 2006 and Convergence Funding, again in 2014, more than £2bn in European Structural Funds, that’s more than £6 billion of povertybased spending on economic development in the Valleys and west Wales.
GDP data means we can assess the effectiveness of these aid packages. In 2005 Wales was at 79%, by 2009 it’s down to 68.4% of the European average, Northern Ireland 83% and Scotland 107.5%, GDP for the UK 110.7% and London 189.2%, all in 2009. So what’s gone wrong in Wales?
How did other regions receiving Objective One manage to increase GDP? All Greek regions did better than the two Welsh regions! Remember when Objective One was “a once-in-a-generation chance to fix the Welsh economy”. Just two hours’ drive from London lies a scene of such misery and deprivation that it seems best, to some Labour politicians, not to have to think about it. Assembly Members certainly don’t.
Of the £6bn about two-thirds of the Objective One money went to projects run by the Assembly and local authorities. The story of how £6 billion made things worse received hardly any attention in England, while in Wales itself it’s swept under the carpet.
Of the four countries in the Union, Wales, neglected by its low-calibre Labour politicians, MPs overlooked at Westminster and consistently out-shouted by Scotland, is much the poorest, the poorest nation in western Europe. After 43 years of membership and 17 years of European aid, please tell me... why is Wales still so poor? Graham Simmonds
Blackwood
Gogglebox at the athletics
MY favourite sequence from last week’s athletics was watching the 4x100m relay women, who had just won a silver medal, watching the 4x100m men run their race.
Given that the camera was behind them, and that we could also just about see the race unfolding in the background, it was so revealing that the moment the first 100m was completed the girls’ body language suggested they knew something special was happening.
And the way the women reacted when the men actually won gold to trump their silver was wonderful. We later learnt that all the sprinters, both male and female, train together, which highlights a great truth. Whether it’s sport or any other business, you can boast the best talent in the world, but if you lack team spirit – well, everything is a struggle.
Indeed, when the norovirus struck and the IAAF hierarchy did not immediately put out a senior spokesman to liaise between athletes, media and public, rather than hide behind emails and press releases, suggests a lack of team spirit – which probably says so much about the sport’s drug problems. Huw Beynon
Llandeilo