Say No To Future Welshing

That word actually has nothing to do with the Welsh, but never mind.

There is much to admire about Plaid Cymru. It embodies a Radical tradition, the rural kind that was largely allowed to die of neglect in England after the First World War. Plaid Cymru is also so much in the great Welsh tradition of peace activism that it has, from the very start, opposed the war in Afghanistan. It voted to save the Callaghan Government.

But its zeal against the English-speaking eighty per cent of the Welsh is - I use the word most cautiously - fascistic, as well as unconnected to its own base in Welsh-speaking areas, whereas the enforcement of the language in English-speaking areas is to the benefit of an oligarchy of people who use Welsh as a cordon sanitaire, and who despise the Welsh-speaking workers who often vote for Plaid Cymru as much as they despise the English-speaking workers over whom they lord it, often through the Labour Party for which those workers vote.

And then comes today's proposal from the Holtham Commission, which was set up as part of the Labour-Plaid devolved coalition, for the Welsh Assembly to be given tax-raising powers.

Created with the support of fully twenty-six per cent of eligible voters, the Assembly has already given the land of Bevan, as staunch a Unionist as it is possible to imagine, longer waits than in England for elective surgery, a forty-six per cent (in some areas, a seventeen per cent) ambulance response time to Category A emergencies compared to England's seventy-seven per cent, the worst stroke services in the United Kingdom, and the endangerment of cross-border services because of a refusal to work with English Health Trusts.

More broadly, investment per pupil is now 9.5% lower than in England, there is a worsening lack of local access to A-level courses, seventy million pounds recently had to be sent back to Brussels because it had not been spent on time, there is a sixty million pound shortfall in university funding, and even Professor Kevin Morgan, who chaired the Yes campaign in 1997, now speaks of devolution as "devolving our way to relative economic decline".

None of this would be helped by primary legislative powers for the body that has created the mess. Still less by taxing and borrowing powers for that same body, necessarily as part of a funding reorganisation that would leave it with £9.1 billion to find by one or both of those means.