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This is a free service delivered by email which notifies people of contributions made by Ann Clwyd MP in the House of Commons.
Here is yesterday’s contribution in the House of Commons from Aberdare’s MP :
Spoken by Ann Clwyd in a House of Commons debate Oral Answers to Questions - Prime Minister: National Security (25 Jul 2007) Ann Clwyd: Can my right hon. Friend assure us that none of the 4,000 people who will be deported this year will be sent to countries where torture is endemic?
This man entertained thousands of Welsh people today for he spent the afternoon sitting on a bench in Queen Street, Cardiff singing his heart out.
The sun shone on Cardiff today and it felt like summer in the mid-day sun.
Today there are more beggars and homeless people in Cardiff than in many decades past.
Aberdare’s MP Ann Clwyd raised the issue of homelessness at this year’s March 1st St David’s Day Welsh Affairs Debate in the House Of Parliament, saying :
I have been shocked recently in Cardiff to see people sitting on the streets, by lifts, wrapped up in blankets, begging.
It was nigh impossible to walk down a single street without passing someone squatting at a shop-entrance begging.
Cardiff has changed so much in the past few years, but the chasm between the richest and poorest in society is wider than ever.
How long since we last spent some quality time in Cardiff ? An exchange from the Pen and Paper shop in Royal Arcade sheds light on our problem.
Do you know where Lears the bookshop is ?
Lears closed six years ago.
We shared the sun with the statue of John the Third Marquis of Bute overlooking Cardiff Castle, with a copy of Noam Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions at hand for company. Even the stern figure of old Butey seemed to want to smile in the glorious sunny Cardiff that was Friday, March 9th 2007.
Iraq For Sale Film
Thursday 15 February at 8 pm.
Chapter Arts Centre, Market Rd., Canton
Tickets available from Chapter box office.
Organised in association with Oyster Clothing.
The film will be introduced by poet, Robert Minhinnick, who will also show a short film about his recent visit to Iraq.
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Corporate Watch UK research and report on the corporate carve-up of Iraq.
Rhondda’s dynamic duo Chris Bryant MP and Leighton Andrews AM attempt to bully Burberry at a press conference held at the Welsh Assembly this week. They are photographed looking steely faced and determined whilst holding a Burberry poster alongside their own “Made in China” poster. They aim below the belt, hitting Burberry hardest where it hurts : the Burberry brand name.
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When Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio told lies his nose would grow longer.
“How do you know I am lying?”
“Lies, my boy, are known in a moment. There are two kinds of lies, lies with short legs and lies with long noses. Yours, just now, happen to have long noses.”
Pinocchio, not knowing where to hide his shame, tried to escape from the room, but his nose had become so long that he could not get it out of the door. - from The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini)
When employees at the Cynon Valley Leader tell lies something grows for them too. Their pay checks.
Reading the Cynon Valley Liar one would be forgiven for thinking that the Welsh Assembly Government or indeed the Westminster Government had no responsibility whatsoever for the downturn in the economy and increasing costs faced by small businesses like Ferrari’s.
According to the Cynon Valley Liar, Ferrari’s Bakery of Hirwaun are facing difficulties due to the success of the Welsh Assembly Government’s healthy-eating initiative!
Trinity Mirror, the owners of Cynon Valley Liar, have a monopoly on printed newspapers across much of the South Wales Valleys. They derive a considerable income from the Welsh Assembly Government and therefore will not criticise the Welsh Assembly Government’s economic strategy.
Biting the hand that feeds one is not good for business.
Furthermore, one of Trinity Mirror’s principal sources of advertising revenue comes from the house-building industry. In the Cynon Valley Liar reporting there is no mention of the words “house” or “land” in relation to the Ferrari’s Bakery story.
The bakery is situated on prime land in a desirable part of a house-building hotspot. How many tens of millions are going to be made out of Ferrari’s Bryngelli site ? This is a question that the elite ask themselves, it’s not a question to be posed to the “stupid and ignorant masses”.
Noam Chomsky captures the media mendacity succinctly in his book Deterring Democracy, in Chapter 12 entitled ‘Force and Opinion’ :
A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent oversimplification, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the television screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organisational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. They can be permitted, even encouraged, to ratify the decisions of their betters in periodic elections. The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.
For submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in every realm. The public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products. Eduardo Galeano writes that “the majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and of power to the weak.” Nothing less will do.
The problem of indoctrination is a bit different for those expected to take part in serious decision-making and control : the business, state, and cultural managers, and articulate sectors generally. They must internalize the values of the system and share the necessary illusions that permit it to function in the interests of concentrated power and privilege - or at least be cynical enough to pretend that they do, an art that not many can master. But they must also have a certain grasp of the realities of the world, or they will be unable to perform their tasks effectively. The elite media and educational systems must steer a course through these dilemmas - not an easy task, one plagued by internal contradictions. It is intriguing to see how it is faced, but that is beyond the scope of these remarks. - Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Vintage Books, London. 1992. 369-370)
Carlo Collodi’s original tale of Pinocchio was an intensely moral tale, later bastardized and appropriated by Disney. As the story of Ferrari’s bakery of Hirwaun unfolds over the coming weeks, we should bear in mind what forces are really pulling the strings in the background : capital, powerful business interests and their allied political representatives and spokespeople in the local media.
