cloudsoup

The majority language in Wales (pop. 3 million) is English. Despite compulsory Cymraeg lessons until the age of sixteen for everybody attending a State-run school in Wales – although not for those attending privately run schools – only about a fifth of the population of Wales speak the ancient tongue, a Brythonic branch of the Celtic family of languages which used to be spoken natively in the principality. The vast majority of residents of Wales simply cannot speak and don’t use Cymraeg in their day-to-day life.

That’s why the awkwardly bilingual website of the Campaign for Racial Equality (CRE) in Wales – which repeats content by swapping between the two languages in successive paragraphs – has English the first paragraph, the Cymraeg equivalent in the second, and so on.

Oh no, wait a bit, it’s the other way around. For some reasons the CRE in Wales leads with the minority language, Cymraeg, which isn’t understood by 80% of the population of the Principality.

Anyway, the CRE is taking legal action against a man for organising a petition objecting to a travellers’ site.

There is already one widely-accepted official encampment in the area. Mr Carl Lewis was organising a petition against the unofficial and illegal use of a carpark as a caravan park by the travellers. The response of the CRE has been to instruct lawyers to start proceedings against him under the Race Relations Act.

Popular Welsh blogger and Lib Dem member of the Welsh Assembly, Peter Black, said,

the prosecution of local residents who are using legitimate and democratic means to bring their concerns to the attention of the local council will set a dangerous and unwelcome precedent

There are fundamental freedom of speech issues here that are not helped by the CRE’s own inconsistency

Peter Black, AM, A peverse decision

In an entirely unsuprising moment of obtuseness, the Deputy Chief Constable of North Wales, Clive Wolfendale, has added to the national World Cup excitement by suggesting that English people carrying the English flag on their cars in Wales are behaving with discourtesy and indecency.

The Welsh police are famously inept. For example, a few years ago, during the investigation into a notorious double murder in which one body had been rolled up in a carpet the police lost the carpet. So it’s hardly suprising that now another of their number suggests something so incredibly stupid that even Welsh Nationalist politicians reject his suggestions.

Elfyn Llwyd, the Plaid Cymru parliamentary leader, said:

England are the only home nation left in the competition and while we would have wanted Wales – and Scotland and Northern Ireland – there too, I would want everyone to get behind England, as I think it would be good for the whole country, just as I believe the London Olympics will benefit us all.

“If it was the other way round, I would hope that people in England would want Wales to do well.

“Why he has made these comments, I don’t know. He has made an issue when there isn’t one.

And we could have left it there as another example of Y Plod being so politically correct they’d rather support lawbreakers than do their jobs and defend law and order, if it wasn’t for the fact that Mr Wolfendale was tapping into a violent, fascisistic streak in Welsh Nationalism that hasn’t gone away since the days when early Plaid Cymru frontman Saunders Lewis supported Hitler.

Over at the blog of Lib Dem Member of the Welsh Assembly Peter Black, you can read in comments from a Ceri Grafu the sort of tripe these extremists come out with; in this case, asserting that that it was a ‘bloody good thing‘ that a sports shop in the mid-Wales town of Aberystwyth was vandalised, putting the blame not where it lies – firmly with the Welsh-language-speaking nationalist chavs who did the vandalism – but with the sportshop for displaying the English flag in its windows just before England began its World Cup campaign. Right.

Ceri Grafu points to comments on another blog, a Welsh language blog, where this diplomatic incident is discussed. Fortunately for all of us, Welsh is such a bastardised language these days that the general sense and sometimes specific meaning of the insults and invective are discernable even to non-Welsh speakers. For example:

Nid Birmingham. Nid Chesterfield. Nid Dunnny-on-the-Wold. Aberystwyth. Yng Nghymru. Ffcn Cnts.

Wherin the geographically enlightened poster of the story points out the indisputable fact that Aberystwyth is not Birmingham, Chesterfield etc but is in fact in Wales, and calls Gilesports ‘Ffcn Cnts’. Another contributor calls them, Ffacin twats, another says it is a Disgres, which is the Welsh for ‘disgrace’; directly misspelt from the English. I particularly liked basdads. Seriously, a language has to be dying, hasn’t it, if it doesn’t generate its own sweary words.

All very childish and schoolboyish until you see that these rather angry little chaps have posted on the web the name of the store manager and the telephone number and have promised to cover the shop in graffitti.

Don’t expect the police to help out here.

Update: They do things differently in Scotland:

The Scottish Commission for Racial Equality has cautioned against anti-English racism, while schoolchildren who make anti-English remarks in class have been threatened with suspension

The Times

Some visitors again from the Welsh Office (hello) and if they come back they might like to know I think I’ll have something interesting for them soon about a fiddled poll, waste of taxpayers’ money, corruption, lies and Benford’s Law.

Watching the BBC’s chef competition, split into regional finals, we come to two chefs, both working in London, who’ve been jemmied into representing Wales. They both agree that they have a problem in that Wales doesn’t really have a cuisine to speak of. One goes for laverbread, a gooey and horrible derivative of seaweed; the other plumps for cockles. My grandfather liked cockles – he’d take me down to the Pembrokeshire coast to dig in the rippled sand when I was young and we’d return with a heavy bucketful, which my grandmother would prepare and which I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. My grandfather smothered the cockles in vinegar and pepper before wolfing them down.

Dour Welsh Methodism was suspicious of all pleasures, including good food. I didn’t taste garlic, for example, until I was 17. There was even a tradition of onions being a foreign food imported by Frenchmen on bicycles, each called the Johnny Onion Man, or in Wales, the Shonny Onion Man, Shonny being either the Welsh version of John (Sion) or a Welsh attempt at the French Jean. Onions were exotic. This was Wales.

Consider the situation: money that was provided because of social networks rather than need; a project designed for prestige rather than to be used; a lack of monitoring and accountablity; an [appointment] for show by somebody with little interest in the quality of the work. The outcome is hardly suprising: a project that should never have been built was built, and built badly.

The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford

You know, I’ve worked for an outfit for which these words could have been written. Government funded, arbitrary amounts of money allocated for ill-defined projects, poor monitoring and scandalous lack of accountability, nepotism in appointments and empire-building by managers utterly uninterested in the purported aims of the organisation.

Publicly-funded bodies seem more prone to byzantine reporting and monitoring processes that appear calculated to make petty corruption easier to indulge in and harder to root out.

The passage above is specifically about the Cameroon but applies, sadly, all around the world where self-interested and ambitious people are in positions of power.

The AssemblyOnline website has had a thorough makeover. Looks like it’s going to be more debate about Welsh politics and the Assembly rather than simple making the Assembly’s own published content more accessible. Interesting.

Bill Gates: Almost everything that’s being published on the web now has RSS notification on it

Bill Gates on Gizmodo

At this stage, however, Cymru Ar-lein is not in a position to do more than monitor the rise in popularity of both RSS and Weblogs. While keen to embrace and promote appropriate new technologies both within the National Assembly for Wales and throughout Wales as a whole. Cymru Ar-lein must move at a pace which is feasible for our customers

Spokesperson at the Welsh Assembly

According to the server logs, Cloudsoup had 83 page requests through the National Library of Wales servers yesterday, and 386 from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

When Blair & Co. were voted into office in 1997 we thought that a significant difference our new Labour Overlords (and I, for one, welcomed them) would make would be the proposed constitutional changes. House of Lords reform, Assemblies for Wales and Scotland, and so on. Now the North-East is being invited to vote in a referendum for a regional Assembly.

Andrew Marr on BBC Radio 4 yesterday was chatting to the irritating Satanic ritual abuse enthusiast, Bea Campbell about a North-East identity; Campbell seemed to be making an unusually sensible observation that the North is defined negatively, as not being the South; others on Marr’s show observed the North lacked a cohesive identity or cultural hegemony.

Grey Street, Newcastle Upon Tyne

Photo : Ian Burton, Freefoto.com

The first time I stood in the main shopping street of Newcastle, just above Grey Street, I felt there was something odd about the sea of faces in front of me and it took a good 10 minutes before I twigged that every face was white. It’s a bit like West Wales.

My first job in the North-East was in Sunderland. Sunderland and Newcastle are about 12 miles apart and to nearly everyone else in the UK there’s no difference between the two. But the two populations absolutely hate each other. The hatred is played out formally in their football allegiances and less formally in the fights that explode every Saturday night on the Quayside. A bit like Wales again.

The Welsh-speaking West loathes the English-speaking South-East. The South-East thinks of itself as cosmopolitan and cultured – which is true only in contrast to the impoverished Welsh-speaking West and North-West. In contrast, the West thinks of itself as the torchbearer for a real Welsh culture, holding out against the louche English sympathisers in Cardiff: it flirts with neo-fascism and produces endless Welsh-language tv programmes about singing, harp-playing and Max Boyce.

‘The Welsh’, said the Doctor :’ are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing’,he said with disgust : ’sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.’

Evelyn Waugh, in the excellent ‘Decline And Fall’

Our experience of the Welsh Assembly has been unconvincing. Without tax-raising powers and with no chance of disturbing the Labour Party’s current monpoly on power, the Assembly has operated as a corrupt dispenser of patronage and other peoples’ money.

The Welsh Assembly’s mangement of the NHS in Wales has been disastrous and it’s been unwilling to investigate properly some specific concerns about mismanagement of funds – that is, my money and your money.

Coming back to the North-East: I can’t see how another regional assembly in an area defined by an atlas rather than a shared sense of purpose, with even fewer powers than the Welsh Assembly, would be a useful devolution of democracy.

When we lived in the North-East I discovered that some people often called each other Billy. Two managers in the first company I worked at in Sunderland called each other Billy. It’s in Newcastle I first heard someone described as Billy No-mates; and nearby was a place called Billy Mill

I thought all this Billy stuff might be vaguely related to a Protestant / Catholic tribalism (Billy = William of Orange, Protestant) but I didn’t find any confirmation of that.

The Welsh Assembly hasn’t grasped the possibilities of RSS (or Atom) syndication. Although sites like AssemblyOnline have been providing RSS feeds of the Welsh Assembly media briefings and forum postings for some time, it seems the Welsh Assembly itself thinks you aren’t quite ready for it. Here’s what they say:

With reference to the use of RSS newsfeeds and weblogs, I can assure you that Cymru Ar-lein is keen to explore all appropriate new technologies to facilitate and improve service delivery

There are merits in using RSS to drive content directly from our site to recipients automatically, quickly, and without interference from viruses and spam. The combined use of RSS and Weblogs in the education and learning communities is also very impressive and introduces the world to a whole new interactive Internet.

At this stage, however, Cymru Ar-lein is not in a position to do more than monitor the rise in popularity of both RSS and Weblogs. While keen to embrace and promote appropriate new technologies both within the National Assembly for Wales and throughout Wales as a whole. Cymru Ar-lein must move at a pace which is feasible for our customers. Translating the enthusiasm that stakeholders have toward using ICT into their habitual use of the Cymru
Ar-lein fora is a slow process, but one that is more about the culture of ICT usage than it is about the nature of the tools used. Thus, promoting the use of the Cymru Ar-lein fora by stakeholders and within the National Assembly for Wales remains a priority

New technology? The revision 3 spec for RSS 0.91 is 5 years old. It’s been around longer than these peoples’ desktop PCs and probably longer than their marriages.

In their parallel universe they will monitor the rise in popularity of both RSS and Weblogs while being incapable of creating a home page in HTML (see the new Welsh Assembly website).

If you have a moment, why not email the asembly and tell them that you’re quite au fait enough with technology to use RSS feeds.