FAIRER, GREENER, AMBITIOUS, AND MORE PROSPEROUS

Plaid Cymru Leader Rhun ap Iorwerth MP has announced his team in the Senedd which will build "a fairer, greener, ambitious and more prosperous Wales". Mr ap Iowerth said that the party's focus in the Senedd would be "firm" on key issues including the health service, housing and living costs.

The Plaid Cymru Leader added that the group would continue to work together with the government through the Collaboration Agreement to fulfill promises to change people's lives for the better such as free school meals and reform of the Senedd, while also holding Labor to account. there are “flaws”.

Delyth Jewell has been appointed Deputy of the Senedd and will deputize for parliamentary matters including Prime Minister's Questions in the Leader's absence. Llyr Gruffydd resumes his role as Chairman of the Senedd Group while Heledd Fychan takes on the role of Business Manager. Mabon ap Gwynfor will take on the role of Chief Whip as well as responsibility for the core Health and Care portfolio.

In announcing the Senedd team, Plaid Cymru Leader Rhun ap Iorwerth MP said,

"I am proud to lead a united, talented and committed team in the Senedd that will build a fairer, greener, ambitious and more prosperous Wales.

"Our focus will be firm and clear as we tackle the issues of the day: the health service, housing, and the economy - focusing on the cost of living crisis and ensuring sustainable public services.

"We will work diligently to achieve for our communities and make a difference to people's lives, working together with the government where there is common ground but at the same time holding them to account where there is a lack of urgency and provision.

"Together, we will continue to argue that Wales' best interests are served by making our own decisions as a nation. By talking to those who are confident about independence as well as those whose interest has not yet been sparked, we will continue to build the case for independence and a brighter future for all.

CONTACTING YOUR PLAID MS'S

 

DEVOLVE THE CROWN ESTATES

It’s time for Wales to be given control of Crown Estate properties worth billions. Liz Saville Roberts,  Plaid Cymru MP, said doing so could help end a "begging bowl" culture and drive prosperity. The Crown Estate belongs to the reigning monarch and the revenue from its £16 billion pound property portfolio flows directly to the Treasury.

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.

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. 

Ms Saville Roberts said an arrangement similar to Scotland would give Wales a direct say in how the profits from new floating wind farms planned off the Welsh coast would be spent.

The Dwyfor Meirionnydd MP has suggested that if the profits from this were in the hands of the devolved government in Cardiff Bay, it could be used to provide better energy security and lower heating costs for Welsh homes.

"One of the criticisms that any Welsh politician on the left will face is that we are forever asking for more money, that we are asking for the Barnett Formula to be revised," she said.

"I am very interested in what are the mechanisms that we could bring to Wales that would allow us to build our own economy more effectively, and not to be an adjunct."

The Plaid MP said previous attempts to raise the issue with the Conservative Westminster government had been a "non-starter" and that her party would be "certainly pushing" the cause if Sir Keir Starmer's Labour were to win the next general election.

Ms Saville-Roberts added: "I think the devolution of the Crown Estate feels fair, it feels equitable, and we could do so much with this. It could be one critical step that could make so much difference to the Welsh economy in the furthest westernmost regions of north and south Wales."

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. 

By 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 kilometers of coastline, has been an early mover in commercializing 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. 

A quarter of the Crown Estate’s profits goes to the British monarchy via a system called the sovereign grant, while the rest flows into the public purse through the finance ministry. 

In Scotland there is a different system, where the government takes 100 percent of the profits generated by the Crown Estate Scotland, a separate entity. The new monarch will preside over a royal family that is partly funded by a new era of ocean industry.

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 millenium ( 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 capitalize 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 85% of the profits or dividends directly benefit the people who live here rather than opaque absentee landlords. 

Daniel Llewellyn

Some sad news today, as we have heard that Daniel Llewellyn, who was our candidate for the Newport East constituency for the Senedd Elections in 2021, has passed away aged 36. Our thoughts and best wishes are with Daniel’s family at this difficult time. 

A MOMENT OF CLARITY

The recent demise of the former Conservative Party Chairman for being caught out with problems with his tax returns ( to be generous ) should have provided one of those moments of clarity, if ever one was required. 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. 

Basically if you have more money than you can comfortably count, then you are wealthy enough to pay someone else to count it and to look after it and to protect your money from taxation. The largest penalty to be paid ( aside from politically ) will be the social one, in that the former Conservative Party chairman got caught, which is embarrassing socially amongst the elite. 

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 and probably always will be (and probably always has been) 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 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. US Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (in 1896); who noted ‘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, even 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. 

Interestingly 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 here 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 distracted Major Government and largely 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 in the interests of the City (of London).

In the belly of the Westminster beast lies 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 4 - since 2019 ) have been and remain 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 and 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. 

The problem is that the 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.

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023

This Friday (27th January 2023) is Holocaust Memorial Day, which is commemorated each year on the 27^th January because this is the day when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.  

Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to take time to remember the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed beyond recognition during the Holocaust, Nazi Persecution and in other subsequent horrors which have followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and in Syria.

 

We should also forever remember the earlier genocides that inflicted on the Armenians and the Ukrainians.

 

It is only right and proper that we honour the survivors and continue to challenge ourselves to use the lessons of their experience to inform our lives today.

 

By the end of the Holocaust, six million Jewish men, women and children had perished in ghettos, mass-shootings, in concentration camps and extermination camps. 

 

As Allied troops made progress across Nazi-occupied Europe, they began to uncover concentration and extermination camps and the remains of camps. 

 

The camp of Majdanek in Poland was the first to be liberated, in summer 1944.

 

Faced with defeat and advancing Allied armies Nazi forces burnt the crematoria and the mass graves in attempts to hide the crimes that they had committed. 

 

The Operation Reinhardt camps of Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka were dismantled by the Nazis from 1943, and Auschwitz itself was evacuated in late 1944. 

 

The surviving prisoners, weak from starvation and ill-treatment, and poorly clothed against elements were forced to walk into the interior of Germany, away from the Allied armies, many thousands died on the enforced ‘death marches’. 

 

Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27^th January 1945,  they found several thousand emaciated survivors, and the smouldering remains of the gas chambers and crematoria. 

 

In the following months, the Soviets liberated Stutthof, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck.

 

In the west, US troops liberated Buchenwald in April 1945, followed by Flossenburg, Dachau and Mauthausen. British Troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15^th April 1945. 

 

It is estimated there were over 60,000 prisoners in Belsen by April 1945. Approximately 35,000 prisoners died of typhus, malnutrition and starvation in the first few months of 1945.

 

In 1999, Jewish leaders, were once asked by Tony Blair (the then UK prime minister) whether we needed Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain? 

Jonathan Sacks (former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth for 22 years, until 2013) noted that that, when it was proposed that the UK have a Holocaust Memorial Day, Blair wanted the opinion of British Jewish leaders. 

 

They explained that they did not need a specific day to remember as Jews.

 

When it comes to remembrance Jewish people already had Yom ha-Shoa, their own memorial day, which falls soon after Passover in the Jewish calendar. 

 

Every Jew literally (or figuratively) lost family in the Holocaust. For Jews, Yom ha-Shoa is a grief observed. 

 

The Jewish leaders said that the Holocaust was not just a crime against Jews and other victims – Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political opponents of the Nazi’s among them; it was an assault on all of humanity.  

 

As has been said previously by a survivor perhaps we need is an additional eleventh commandment along the lines of – Don’t be bystander!