WORLD AGAINST WAR
Cardiff Peace Conference
Monday 3 March at 7.30 pm
Law Building
Cardiff University
Park Place
Hosted by CARDIFF STOP THE WAR COALITION
WITH SPEAKERS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE INCLUDING:
HASSAN JUMAA, Leader of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (Iraq)
ROSE GENTLE, Military Families against the War (Scotland)
IBRAHIM MOUSAWI, Editor of Al-Intiqad, Hezbollah Newspaper (Lebanon)
ANNE GREAGSBY, Co-ordinator, No2MilitaryAcademy Campaign (Wales)
PROFESSOR JUSTIN LEWIS, Head of Cardiff School of Journalism (Wales)
Chaired by LEANNE WOOD AM
FREE ENTRY! ALL WELCOME!
Artwork by Carlos Latuff
Today Rhodri Morgan celebrates eight years as the Welsh Assembly Government First Minister.
He seems like a physically fit man. We reported a film clip of him swimming around Cardigan Bay, in August 2007 not long after his heart operation.
The important question is, whether Mr Morgan is politically fit to lead Wales in 2008.
Journalist Patrick Hannan - raised near Aberdare - comments on Rhodri Morgan in his recent book, When Arthur Met Maggie (Seren, Bridgend, 2006) :
Mrs Thatcher brought a ball and crane and other items of demolition machinery into industrial Britain. Almost fifteen years after she left office, Rhodri Morgan, marking his fifth anniversary as Welsh First Minister, told the press : “My own personal ambition is to try to undo the damage that Margaret Thatcher did to Wales - that’s what I have a burning ambition to do.”
Morgan’s political ambition reveals the poverty of Labour’s vision for Wales : a Party which can only define itself in opposition to some body else’s achievements.
At Prime Minister’s Question Time last week, Ann Clwyd the MP for Aberdare and Cynon Valley, invited Gordon Brown to congratulate the miners of Tower Colliery on their successful management of a coalmine … “despite the efforts of the Conservatives to shut them down” (
Source: Hansard via TheyWorkForYou).
Prime Minister Brown replied in kind … “I want to thank them for their efforts, proving that working people can get together and make a success of a project that other parties said would never work”.
The lack of leadership and statesmanship in the Labour Party in its present configuration remind one of Nye Bevan’s words given in speech to the Labour Party conference on October 4, 1957. Bevan warned of the perils of sending a “British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference chamber”.
And his subsequent question “Do you call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm.”
The ‘emotional spasm’ in the UK Parliament last week came from a Prime Minister who has not been elected to lead his own Party. Moreover, Gordon Brown was unwilling to call a General Election after succeeding Tony Blair in 2007, as he did not want to become known as the shortest-serving Prime Minister since George Canning, who lasted a measly 119 days in 1827.
A fortnight prior to this spasmodic exchange in the House of Commons, the Labour Government renewed their committment to Nuclear Energy. This island is made of coal and thus, to borrow from Bevan again, it takes an organising genius to ensure a future energy crisis. Prime Minister’s Question Time last week should have been used to punctuate the history of Cynon Valley with something serious and statesmanlike, but instead, we got the Labour Party emotional spasm that Bevan warned about fifty years ago.
Now that Tower Colliery has finally closed, the new language that has been incubating there during the past thirteen or so years finally emerges.
Tyrone O’Sullivan and Tower Colliery shareholders now speak the language of business development and exploitation, the language of managers of men and land, of balance sheets, profit and bottom lines.
Over the past year or so, stories have been drip-fed via the corporate press about possible developments at the Tower site after its closure, including entrepreneurial-sounding visions for a waste processing plant, a housing and retail development, a museum and a range of other schemes.
There has been much talk about creating “sustainable jobs” at the former Colliery site, but one is skeptical of this type of lofty talk. The only idea not discussed by Tower Colliery shareholders is that perhaps the land be left to recover after nearly two hundred or so years of gross industrial exploitation.
No discussion has taken part with the communities of Rhigos or Hirwaun, or indeed any other community that will be blighted by more industrial expansion or development at the Tower Colliery site.
The new language of Tower Colliery is the language of a business class.
Amidst the frenetic flurry of stories on Tower Colliery this week, one story caught our eye as an insightful breathe of fresh air …
John Redwood commented in his blog this week on the closure of Tower Colliery. He was Conservative Secretary of State for Wales at the time of the pit closure and subsequent buy-out. Without his enthusiasm for the project, it is doubtful whether the miners would ever have become owners of their own pits.
Redwood blogs thus :
When the miners arrived in my office, I think they were surprised by my enthusiasm for their cause, and by my explanation that their task was not to persuade me, but to work with me on our joint case to the Energy department and Coal Board to give them the opportunity to run the mine. As it meant being allowed to prove the Coal Board wrong it was not going to be easy, but I felt that between us we could do it.
So was forged a partnership in British politics that none had predicted. I joined forces with Tyrone O ‘Sullivan, the charismatic Lodge Secretary and leader of the buy out team to persuade Coal Board and government the should give the miners a chance. I was the only person who saw nothing strange in the alliance. I had always believed in workers participation and employee ownership. Here was a chance to show its magic in an industry that had been gravely damaged by the them and us mentality of the large corporation.
Perhaps the greatest modern legacy Thatcher left the Valleys was the Tower Colliery Story where two hundred or so workers bought their own pit and worked it by and for themselves until they dug every last tonne of coal they could dig out of the ground. The Tower Colliery Story is a success story and a story of radicalism. Every community needs a good story to tell the next generation.
