MAKE YOUR VOTE COUNT

Plaid Cymru has launched its manifesto for the Police and Crime Commissioner Elections – which are held on 2nd May 2024.

We’re standing to demand fair funding for our police forces, safer streets, and a Welsh justice system that will better serve the communities of Wales. You can read our manifesto here. 

Over a decade of Tory and Welsh Labour cuts have starved our public services – including our police forces. Plaid Cymru do not believe this is as good as it gets.

Our current Plaid Cymru PCC Dafydd Llywelyn boasts an outstanding track record in Dyfed-Powys. His initiatives, such as introducing CCTV in towns across the region, establishing a rural crime team, and increasing the number of police officers and staff, show a commitment to delivering on promises.

On 2 May, we have the opportunity to build on these successes by electing more hard-working Plaid Cymru PCCs and to show that policing works effectively when it is led from within our communities – not directed from Westminster.

Your Plaid Cymru candidates for this election are:

Ann Griffith for North Wales

Dafydd Llywelyn for Dyfed Powys

Dennis Clarke for South Wales

Donna Cushing for Gwent

You can read more about them here.

AVOIDING FLOODS

While much of Wales dodged the bullet by way of serious floods after the prolonged heavy rain, our neighbours in the Severn Valley and elsewhere in England were not so lucky. While our communities may have got lucky recently, in a warmer wetter world floods and heavy rain events are going to become more common. Flood avoidance rather than flood prevention will help mitigate and reduce the problems that our communities will face with future floods.  

We need to build into our communities the resilience to cope with flooding. The  severity and frequency of future flooding events means that flood avoidance  needs to become a strategic national priority and be a key principle in the siting of housing in and around our communities.  Both the Welsh and Westminster Governments need to make rational long term sustainable choices when it comes to flood defence. 

We in Wales need to develop a comprehensive planning system for our country that hardens our communities and infrastructure against the effects of severe weather events.   We need to focus on flood avoidance and develop flood avoidance schemes rather than end up clearing up after the flood is over again and again.

As our winters and our summers become both warmer and wetter we will see more instances sea and riverine flooding, persistent bad weather has meant that some of our communities have had some pretty close calls and other communities have been badly inundated (again). 

There can be no blank cheque for flood defences so we need to make rational cost effective sustainable choices when it comes to flood defence whether for coastal or riverine flooding on the Gwent levels or the Ebbw, Wye, Usk or Monnow valleys. 

The debate taking place around flooding needs to focus on re-engineering the whole water system in Wales to ensure that water is retained in the uplands to prevent downstream flooding. Here in Wales, those agencies responsible for our environment need to take the lead and work to ensure that potential flood waters are retained our uplands for longer and flood prevention avoidance schemes are comprehensively built into our planning system.

Where possible we should avoid building in those areas that are particularly vulnerable to flooding or at least when building to take into account the possibilities of flooding. And if we are going to build on flood plains or other areas that are vulnerable to flooding then we must use flood resistant or at the very least flood hardened modern intelligent design techniques to limit potential damage, loss and inconvenience as are used elsewhere. The on-going Dutch programme - Room for the River shows what’s possible.

We can be constructively innovative when we want to - the Welsh Government had previously given “indicative approval” to the Upper Conwy project. The purpose of the project is to assist in the storage of flood waters in the upland by slowing water flows through the restoration of moors, and it includes ditch blocking and river restoration. The cooperative project is spearheaded by Natural Resources Wales and the National Trust, with an agency official seconded to the Trust to push the work forward. Similar schemes have been developed in the north of England - this is good practice and we need much more of this. 

We need to think and act smarter, and shift the focus from flood prevention to flood avoidance. Our communities, our nation and our world are becoming more prone to extreme weather, torrential downpours and periods of warmer or hit dry weather. 

Dealing with the consequences of this on a marco level is one thing. Small relatively simple steps to store water for later use, with water butts (if only to water garden plants and vegetables) can make a very practical if minor use of excessive rainfall and runoff if only very locally.  Aside from helping to save water and to cut water bills.

Local water storage and management should be part of intelligent urban design, something that is becoming more common and necessary in a warmer wetter world.  On a larger scale this is something we will all have to do, naturally some people and nations are a head of the curve when it comes to re-engineering their infrastructures to deal with extreme weather events. 

The concept of the sponge city or urban sponge something that is embedded and central to urban planning should now be coming into its own, particularly in Wales, with our urban areas being redesigned or designed from the start to soak up, and store deluges of torrential rain to prevent damaging and dangerous flash flooding but without the construction of large scale flood defences.  

The Dutch, for historical and geographical reasons have been involved in serious water management for centuries. Yet in a warmed world, even the Dutch are having to take long hard fresh look at how they deal with the consequences or severe weather and more regular flooding along with a rise in sea levels. 

Many urban areas have developed with any serious co side ration of the impact of flash flooding - back in July 2021, in localised parts of London heavy torrential downpours saw local drainage systems overwhelmed - as streets became rivers, homes and businesses were flooded and public transport ( including trains and tubes ) brought to a standstill. In London, heavy rain, which fell on hard surfaces, overloaded drainage and severe flooding resulted. 

There is certain a case that it if happens on London, then Westminster, at least in the short term cannot ignore it, if it happens outside of London then it’s another matter. In Pontypridd the exciting flood defences were overwhelmed more than once simply being in poor condition and unable to cope with the sheer volume of water. 

Now elsewhere things are done differently - the sponge city concept has been embraced in parts of Berlin, were green roofs have been created with living plants, mosses and grasses, with plants Boeing on vertical walls, with courtyards planted with vegetation, etc - all of which helps to hold and slow excessive water. One beneficial side effect, if that the retained water helps to cool local neighbourhoods as the water evaporates from vegetation and the ground. 

In the Netherlands, the concept of making room for the river has been embraced to give space for flooding, something which slows the speed of riverine flooding. In Amsterdam, they have constructed rain gardens which have been created from parking areas, which are designed to collect water, people have also been encouraged to remove paving from their gardens, to grow plants and to build ponds to help with runoff and water storage. 

In the city of Rotterdam, public places have been turned into what are called water plazas which turn into shallow lakes during periods of heavy rain, when times are drier these locations are used as public parks and playing fields. Underground car parks have been redesigned or specifically built so that lower levels can be used to store storm related flood waters - which can then be pumped dry when water levels have dropped. 

These concepts are only slowly being looked at a adopted within these islands, we still tend to defy logic and build on flood planes, but, tend not to harden infrastructure of buildings ( commercial and domestic ) or to build with flooding in mind  e.g. build smart using ground floors for storage or parking and raise plug and power points, protect utilities and drains, and put washing machines, fridges sand freezers up off the ground. 

Some urban areas, within these islands, have slowly begun to adopt the concept, there are examples in Llanelli and at West Gordon Park, near Manchester - where porous pavements, shallow depressions, grass berms and small ponds help to absorb and direct surplus water into rain gardens or natural sumps or green spaces that double up as parks in drier periods. 

These are small steps, in a warmer, wetter world with more erratic and extreme weather events the problem of flooding will only get worse. As homeowners pave over their gardens for parking spaces the problem will worsen. The concept of the urban sponge is one that we all need to embrace, along with smart design and smart water management to help to reduce or alleviate urban flooding or we are going to be living with the consequences.  

A MATTER OF ACCOUNTABILITY

Profits derived from the Crown Estate which include natural resources including tidal power, have been valued at a massive £853 million. Imagine what this could do for our communities - and yet, gains are redirected straight to the UK Treasury, with a portion handed directly to the Royal Family.

This is first and foremost an environmental issue. The devolution of powers over the management of the Crown Estate would bolster our efforts in Wales to reach net-zero through the integration of energy policy with our Net Zero Wales plan. Reinvesting profits in Wales could create thousands of well-paid green jobs, helping to address the persistent problems of low pay and job insecurity. It is also a matter of fairness. 

Plaid Cymru has long argued that it is the people of Wales who should be able to determine how best to benefit from the economic opportunity of renewable energy, not Westminster.

At present the Welsh Government has control over over agriculture, forestry and fishing, education, environment and Health and social care, but devolving The Crown Estate to Wales is something the party - and others - have long called for.

The Crown Estate is an independent company which belongs to the monarch for the duration of their reign, though the revenue from its £16 billion pound property portfolio flows directly to the Treasury.

A taxpayer-funded payment, known as the Sovereign Grant, pays for the royal family's official duties each year. It is currently set at 25% of the Crown Estate's annual profits, including a 10% uplift to pay for the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.

For decades, the seabed was simply an add on sideshow to the Crown Estates largely land based property empire. Over more recent years the sea bed’s value has soared in value, as a result of the rapidly expanding market for renewable energy. After rising incrementally for years, the value of the seabed doubled between 2020 and 2021. 

Back in 2022, the Crown Estate estimated its marine portfolio was worth £5 billion. 

Around the world, there has been a dramatic growth in ocean-based industries, with the OECD projecting that the ocean economy could exceed $3 trillion by 2030.  The UK, with its 29,000 kilometres of coastline, has been an early mover in commercialising its coastal waters beyond the traditional sectors of oil and gas, seafood, and shipping. 

The Crown Estate has facilitated and profited from much of this new activity, working in tandem with the government to rent out areas of ocean to companies that want to install offshore wind turbines, dredge up sand and gravel for the construction industry, lay cables for internet traffic and electricity, or build pipelines for oil and gas. 

The Crown Estate is also responsible for handing out the rights to store carbon—a potentially lucrative future industry. While not all the money generated by the seabed around England, Wales, and Northern Ireland funds the Royal family. 

The estate's holdings north of the border were devolved to Scotland in 2016, and its revenue now goes to the Scottish government. In Wales nothing has been done to make the Crown Estate publicly account’s to the Senedd and the Welsh people. The Crown Estate owns the UK seabed out to 12 nautical miles. 

This mens that in Scotland there is a very different system, where the Scottish government takes 100 percent of the profits generated by the Crown Estate Scotland, a separate entity. Ironically Westminster recognises that the Scottish Crown Estate should be managed by the Scottish Government and devolved those powers back in 2017. If it’s good enough for Scotland, so why not Wales?

During new Monarch’s reign, Crown Estate commissioners will make decisions that will permanently change Britain’s seabed—choosing which companies and industries get priority in an increasingly busy sea. Already, the high cost of leasing the seabed to develop offshore wind projects is shutting small companies out of the process. 

And as competition to store carbon under the sea heats up, there is a danger that the new seabed economy will look disturbingly similar to the old one, with a handful of oil and gas giants dominating and locking in a future based on fossil fuels.

The Crown Estate is in the middle of process that is turning the seabed into a major source of rental income for the Crown Estate.  Historically the Monarchy has not always claimed ownership of the seabed. When oil and gas were discovered off Britain’s east coast, companies eager to start drilling demanded clarity on whose property, exactly, they were about to bore into. 

The problem was that back in the 1940’s the then foreign secretary Herbert Morrison stated that the seabed was res nullius— literally nobody’s property—effectively creating by default a decidedly legal gray area. 

So in 1964 the government passed the Continental Shelf Act, effectively passing ownership of the UK seabed to the business managing the rest of the monarchy’s property portfolio from that point onward basically everything in the marine environment, in the absence of anyone else owning it, effectively belongs to the Crown Estate. 

It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium (under Tony Blair’s Premiership) that the Crown Estate launched what would become its most profitable seabed industry. In 2000, the first two offshore wind turbines were installed on the seabed, near the English city of Newcastle. 

Since then, the UK’s offshore wind industry has grown massively, providing almost a quarter of the country’s electricity last year, and it is now second only to China's in size. Today there are more 2,700 wind turbines off the country’s coast. The world’s biggest offshore wind farm—the size of 66,000 soccer pitches—is situated 70 miles off the coast of Yorkshire, in the northeast of England.

Encouraged by New Labour, the Crown Estate saw an opportunity in this very early on, as the Crown Estate did not simply just lease the seabed, they actually played a key role in developing the sector. Offshore seabed developments are just getting started. The UK is planning for a massive, fivefold increase in offshore wind capacity to 50 gigawatts by 2030.

So far, the Crown Estate has held four major auctions, with companies biding for the rights to build wind farms on designated sections of seabed. As the technology evolves, each auction allows wind farms to build bigger turbines that are installed farther out to sea. The offshore wind market has become so competitive that the Crown Estate is now in a position to charge companies enormous option fees—just to reserve the right to build on the seabed.

Back in 2019, a partnership between BP and German energy provider ENBW agreed to pay £231 million ($290 million) in annual option fees alone. As the offshore wind industry booms, the Crown Estate is already eyeing the next opportunity to cash in on its seabed empire: carbon storage. 

The seabed around the UK has room to store 78 billion tons of carbon dioxide—more than enough space to cram in 200 years' worth of the country’s annual emissions. Increasingly, the North Sea is being seen as a destination to store carbon captured from hard-to-decarbonize industries, including steel, cement, and fertilizer production.

Although it’s still the heart of the UK’s fossil fuel industry, the North Sea will play an important part in the country’s decarbonization plans. In 2019 the Committee on Climate Change—a public body that advises the government—concluded that carbon capture and storage is a “necessity, not an option” if the UK is going to achieve its legally binding goal of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

So far carbon storage plans have had a rocky start, in 2011 and 2015 the Westminster government canceled major carbon capture and storage projects, attracting criticism from those who say the UK has been slow to capitalise on its natural storage assets. That is starting to change.

The UK has set itself the target of capturing up to 30 million tons of carbon dioxide every year by 2030, with the first carbon capture clusters centering around industrial towns and cities in the northeast and northwest of England.

What this means is that the Crown Estate is now sitting on another valuable asset deep beneath the sea. The estate is responsible for granting the rights for carbon storage under the seabed around England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as well as leases for pipelines that would transfer carbon dioxide to these underground stores, most of which are located in the North Sea. 

Storage licenses are approved by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), a public body that regulates the oil, gas, and carbon storage industries in the North Sea.

So far, the NTSA has granted seven licenses for seabed carbon storage around England. 

One of those licenses—granted in 2013 to Shell—has expired, so there are now six active carbon storage licenses, covering five sites in the North Sea and one in the Irish Sea to the west of England. In September 2022, the NSTA closed bidding on the first public round of carbon storage licensing after receiving bids from 19 companies for the 13 carbon storage sites offered up. 

Any company that wants to transport and store carbon under the sea will also need to purchase rights from the Crown Estate. So far only one project holds an agreement for lease from the Crown Estate: a chunk of the North Sea being explored by a partnership between BP, Carbon Sentinel, and Equinor New Energy for its carbon storage potential.

The seabed is now facing a massive moment of transition, with vast potential to support nature recovery, unlock huge opportunity for renewable energy, and play a major role in energy security means it is becoming increasingly busy, with more demands on it than ever before. These demands are only set to grow in intensity in the future and the profits are only going to grow. 

As with offshore wind farms, this raises the question of who gets to cash in on the race to net zero. Of the six active carbon storage licenses granted on the UK continental shelf, five of them are owned by oil and gas companies. 

Freedom of information requests which were put in to NSTA has revealed that prior to September 2022, there had only been nine applications for offshore carbon storage licenses. So basically pretty much every single carbon storage application was successful, and all but one of those licenses went to an oil or gas company.

None of this should really surprise anyone as storing carbon under the sea will mean drilling wells hundreds of meters under the seabed, exactly the kind of thing that oil and gas companies have been doing in the North Sea for decades. 

These companies have another incentive to encourage carbon capture and storage: If the technology is used as a way to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, then it could be used to justify continued drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. The NSTA has already licensed new areas for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, a move decried by some campaign groups as illegal.

The transition to a lower-carbon economy means finding new uses for the ocean, but there are still serious questions over the impact that marine industries have on the seabed, and about which companies will profit from this new undersea boom. 

In the Pacific, mining firms are currently exploring the seabed for polymetallic nodules packed with metals that are essential for manufacturing electric cars. Starting in July 2023, the International Seabed Authority will start taking applications from companies that wish to mine the ocean floor. 

A whole new era of ocean exploitation beckons—this time in the name of limiting carbon emissions and adapting to climate change. For years, the ocean has suffered as a result of human activity. Marine heat waves have prompted coral bleaching, microplastics are messing with ocean food chains, and falling underwater oxygen levels mean marine animals are finding it harder to breathe. 

Human impact on the ocean ecosystem has not been good, regulation and review of offshore activity during the on going gold rush to cash in and exploit the seabed threatens to repeat the mistakes that we have made on land, particularly if much of the development is undertaken by companies whose environmental record is not good. 

The revenues do not belong to the monarch and surplus revenue from its businesses are paid each year to the Treasury. The Crown Estates revenues in Cymru / Wales are not vast at the moment, but, the assets have what could best be described as game changing potential. 

That's why control of these marine and and coastal assets particularly in the case of renewables and off shore wind generated hydrogen could our nation to opportunity to reboot our economy and make a significant contribution to fighting global climate change.

Our energy and water resources including the responsibility for sewerage for the whole territory of Wales should be the responsibility of the Welsh Government. The Crown Estate still remains largely unaccountable to the people of Wales and all profits from its holdings (which includes on and off shore wind farms) are passed to the UK Westminster Government. Profits from these holdings are likely to grow significantly mostly due to the growing demand for renewable energy. 

For way too long our natural resources have been run for the benefit of others with few real or lasting benefits trickling down to the people of Wales. Ownership and control over the Crown Estates in Wales should be transferred to the Welsh Government. 

The final say on how our natural resources are exploited and developed should be the direct responsibility of the Welsh people (and the Welsh Government) with 100% of the profits or dividends directly benefiting the people who live here rather than opaque absentee landlords or indifferent unaccountable Treasury officials. 

CAERLEON RAILWAY STATION

Some of us in Newport and Monmouthshire have long called for the existing railway stations in Newport and on the levels to be significantly upgraded as part of the process of creating a functioning South Wales metro.  

We need far greater investment in public transport, with a much better integration and coordination of rail and bus networks and integrated tickets across all services – with the emphasis on sooner rather than later.

The one thing missing from the recommendations of the Burns Commission which included recommendations for new stations at Tredegar Park, Somerton, Llanwern and Magor was any reference to a new railway station to serve Caerleon and Ponthir.

Our City needs ground broken sooner rather than later to bring the new railway stations into being, to provide alternative means of getting around our city and elsewhere, and improved connectivity to Cardiff, Bristol and beyond. 

The new stations are an absolute necessity, a railway station to serve Caerleon / Ponthir should have been included, as this would be a real asset to both communities.

The absence of a railway station to serve Caerleon and Ponthir shows an alarming if not acute lack of understanding of local transport issues, or at best a far to literal linear focus on the problems of the M4 or could have been simply a glaring oversight. 

In this case it’s absence ensures that the residents of Caerleon / Ponthir have little choice but to drive to Newport, Cwmbran and beyond even to reach another railway station. 

If the Labour in Wales government are serious about providing realistic and effective public transport for all parts of Newport and cutting congestion on the M4 and around our city then a railway station to serve Caerleon and Ponthir needs to be added to the consultation and the consultation needs be extended. 

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Another mini budget and another raft of headlines suggesting beneficial tax cuts for all… the reality is somewhat different for most people. While the current chancellor used Wednesday's statement announced a £10 billion pound’s worth of NI cuts for millions and an uplift in benefits. 

The Conservatives, no doubt thinking about the next Westminster general election, have claimed they had delivered the biggest tax cuts in decades in a move to boost the UK's stagnant economy and top up incomes.

Yet the reality is that the UK's overall tax burden is still on course to hit a record high. The percentage of the nation's income being paid in tax is set to rise to its highest level in 80 years, according the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). 

Household energy prices will rise in January 2024  putting more financial pressure on hard pressed energy consumers at the coldest time of year. The energy regulator Ofgem said the typical annual household bill would go up from £1,834 to £1,928, a rise of £94 or 5%. This rise in bills comes at difficult time for many people, so so much for tax cuts. 

Rather than focus tax cuts on the lower paid, historically they have favoured the rich and Corporations. Basically if we had not worked it out before, then it should be clear that somewhat blatantly there is one set of rules for the rich elite and one for the rest of us - particularly when it comes to taxation. 

At the end of the day, if you have more money than you can comfortably count, then you are wealthy enough to pay someone else to count it and someone else to look after it and also to protect your money from taxation. 

Now it is fair to say that one reasonable definition of taxation is that it’s the fair dues we all pay to participate in a functioning society. Our taxes can be used to fund projects (significant and not so significant) that benefit us collectively and to provide a safety net for society. 

Tax is probably always will be a subject that stirs people up on both sides of the electoral divide within these islands. For most of us taxation, regardless of level, is not a choice, our tax contributions are largely deducted at source, when we get paid, so we don’t have the luxury of choice in the matter nor the luxury of paying someone else to look after our money. 

Now when it comes tax, the Party formally known as New Labour, the Conservatives and the neo Liberal Democrats (to a degree) have all been hooked on the illusionary idea that either by cutting, reducing taxation for the rich (and corporations) or even perhaps by turning a blind eye to tax evasion, avoidance, etc - that wealth will trickle down from the top to the rest of us. The problem is that wealth just simply does not happen… it stays with the wealthy. 

This questionable theory was pumped out by Ronald Reagan (and Mrs T) in the 1980’s is still remains  largely dominant amongst right wing libertarians; yet it was not a new theory. Back in 1896 US Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan stated ‘that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through to those below’. 

The ‘Trickle-down theory’ first appeared in the 1932 US Presidential campaign, when Democrats used it to hammer Republican Herbert Hoover’s plan to engineer economic recovery by making the rich richer.  An election that saw the election by a landslide of President   Franklyn D Roosevelt and saw the emergence of the New Deal - which saw massive state intervention as the US economy was restructured and rebooted. 

Some fifty years later even Ronald Reagan’s supporters struggled to sell the idea to their own party, George Bush (Senior) mocked Reagan’s theories of supply-side economics as ‘voodoo economics’ at least until he got the Vice Presidential slot. On this side of the pond there were even some monetarists who told Mrs T straight that the idea was nonsense and that it would not deliver results  - naturally she did not listen.

Across the pond, Reagan’s first budget brought in a moderate reduction in the basic tax rate, this was followed by the a drastic reduction of the top tax rate from 70 to 50 percent and later still to 28 percent. If the theory was correct then, the public coffers should have swelled with enough extra revenue to balance the budget within one to two years. 

Unfortunately, the theory was incorrect, within the eight years of Reagan’s Presidency the total Federal deficit soared from around $900 million to some $3 trillion dollars. What followed has been described as an orgy of speculation in stocks, shares and real estate (this was the era of ‘Greed is good’), ordinary Americans stopped saving and started spending. 

Through the 1980’s there was a near continuous decline in long-term capital investment – on which economic growth and jobs were dependent.  To make matters worse the USA went into recession and the Federal Reserve had to raise interest rates to hold down the inflationary consequence of the tax cuts, by 1981/82 unemployment in the USA rose about 10% for the first time since the aftermath of the great depression in the 1930’s.

The gulf between the wealthy elite and the rest of the population became a chasm, the rich got richer and parallels have been drawn between the 1980’s and the Gilded Age of the 1870’s (income tax was abolished in the US and was only reintroduced during the First World War).  

The 1980’s for the mega rich in the USA was an era of conspicuous consumption and extravagance – yet oddly enough very little of this prosperity tricked down to the American middle and working classes who have become poorer. 

Oddly enough average US family incomes did not return to the level they were at in the 1970’s until 1987 – wile this may have sounded good, the harsh economic reality was that Americans were now working harder and longer – in 1973 an average American worker had 26.2 hours of leisure time per week, by 1987 this was down to 16.6 hours per week and it’s fallen still further. 

One result was that jobs were also now less secure, Americans now worked on short-term of temporary contracts in increasingly un-unionised working environments - something that was also mirrored on this side of the pond. For blue-collar workers the 1980’s were a disaster, wages fell through the decade as employers threatened to move production overseas (in the 2000’s they did) because the workers had priced themselves out of employment.

The neo liberal / neo conservative right wing, in the US and in the UK crowed about how government should not interfere with (or regulate very much) the ‘free market’.  This hands off attitude was also duly applied to the US savings and loan industry, laying the groundwork for the collapse that was to follow in 2007. 

The only exception to the non state interference rule being that when things went really pear shaped (and the bankers nearly crashed the US and world economies) then obviously it was expected that Government would collect the tab. One side effect of all this was fraud, 650 savings and loan companies collapsed, with the $1.4 trillion dollar tab being picked up by the US government.

On this side of the pond, building society after building society were floated on the stock market – and within a few years were readily absorbed by increasingly greedy banks.  In the US, exploitative working practices and sweatshops reappeared encouraged by the effective withdrawal of regulation and inspection. 

The 1980’s also saw the growth of increasingly powerful media empires and a concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands despite much reputed mantras from government about greater competition and choice for consumers. More and more money drifted offshore particularly in these islands and keeping track of it became more and more difficult.

We are all still living with the consequences of that period in the 1980’s when an ideologically driven obsession with the ‘free market’ and ‘privatisation’. Heaven help anyone who dare question these sacred truths – the very heavens may fall. The problem is that the market was rather than being ‘free’ it was pretty much increasingly unregulated as Governments in the USA and the UK largely looked the other way – tax collections fell and ironically tax evasion soared.

This state of affairs was tolerated by the long time dying and much distracted Major Government and encouraged by the former New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and barely mentioned by the previous Con Dem government. Even the crash did not change things - there was some talk about tacking tax evasion which was matched by continuing (significant) staff cuts to HMRC - justified by the harsh financial necessities of austerity.

It is interesting because tax evasion and tax avoidance, at least outside of the UK, is often rarely out of the headlines with many heavily indebted governments being particularly keen to hunt down every tax dollar / euro / pound that is owed by tax evaders avoiding (unlike the rest of us) paying their fair dues to society. 

The Westminster elite privately at least regardless of whatever they say publically, appear to pay scant respect to the idea of fair taxation and fair representation, we now appear to be as close as possible to being governed by the sons of bankers and the sons of the City largely in the interests of the City (of London).

In the belly of the Westminster beast lies the questionable relationship with the City, which may explain why the former New Labour government, the former Con Dem coalition government and the current now unrestrained Conservative government ( currently we are on version 5 of that since 2015) remains very reluctant to do anything about the problem as some (but not all) of the city banks are hand in glove with drug dealers, dictators, oligarchs, rogue states and terrorists when it comes to money laundering. 

Now this inertia may be explained by the lure of comfy lucrative seats on the board for former Westminster politicians. There is something else, while the budget may be about feeding bankers and the City, it’s consequences may well have banished the illusion that the Conservative Party is even remotely economically competent - shattering this myth has taken almost as long as it has taken to expose the Westminster establishment’s cozy relationship with state aided and abetted tax evasion. 

This is the real problem in that all UK Westminster Governments (whether under Thatcher, Tony, Gordon, Dave, Teresa, Bozo, Truss or Sunak) pretty much since the end of Empire, have remained in it up to their necks when it comes to what has become state sanctioned tax evasion. 

As long as Westminster government continues to be indirectly yet heavily involved in aiding and abetting tax evasion. British Overseas territories, including the Cayman Islands, continue help to hide trillions of dollars from many nation’s tax authorities, and until the questionable relationship between Westminster and the City of London is resolved, little will  change, and the illusion of tax cuts for the rest of us, will continue to be rolled out before Westminster general elections.