Farewell to Rhodri – you were right to protest
Over my years on this column, I have enjoyed working with individual MPs of all parties who were valiantly opposing the powersthat-be on some particular important issue. I worked with Labour’s Austin Mitchell on several, including a horrendous case of corruption in our overseas aid spending; the Lib Dems’ Paul Tyler over the ruthless cover-up of the dreadful sheep-dip tragedy; and the SNP’s Alex Salmond over the disaster inflicted by the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy on Britain’s fishermen.
But one collaboration I particularly enjoyed was with Rhodri Morgan, the former Labour MP who died last week, over his opposition back in the Nineties to the famous Cardiff Bay Barrage scheme. This was the plan to permanently submerge a huge area of tidal mudflats – the feeding ground for thousands of wading birds – in clear breach of the EU’s Habitats directive.
It was Rhodri who explained to me the cunning ploy discussed in Brussels with our then-environment secretary John Gummer, which would enable him to get round this law. The European Commission would waive its objections to the barrage if “compensation habitat” could be created for the displaced birds by allowing the sea to reclaim a large area of farmland on the Gwent Levels along the coast.
I was also in touch with a splendid farmer, chairman of his local Tory association, who earned his living from the fields due to be flooded, which had been reclaimed from the sea since Roman times. When I last spoke to him a few months ago, he told me what the result had been. Not a single dunlin or redshank had been seen on his former fields, which have been turned into stagnant, brackish pools. The skylarks, yellowhammers and goldfinches that once delighted him had all disappeared. The so-called “compensation habitat” had been reduced to an ecological desert.
Ironically, Rhodri Morgan later became Wales’s First Minister: gazing out from the Welsh Assembly building, looking like a concrete filling station, over the very barrage he had once fought so doughtily to stop being built.