Stamping out protest backfires on London’s Olympic organisers

As the Olympic flame circus reaches Wales, it’s worth reminding ourselves how controlled and staged managed everything is to do with the Olympics and how dissent of any kind from the narrative is not tolerated as the case of anti capitalist protestors Space Hijackers highlighted to their costs on Wednesday.

Space Hijackers set up a parody website and a Twitter account last week styling themselves as the ‘Official Protesters of London 2012’ in the same vein as Cadbury are the Official Confectioners of London 2012, only London’s organizers failed to see the funny side and claimed copyright on their Twitter account and asked Twitter bosses to close the account down which they duly did.

After a flurry of tweets and articles appeared in support of the group in the mainstream media the story moved on and according to the Guardian ‘The group says that after it wrote to Twitter, the account was unlocked late on Wednesday afternoon and it had been given 48 hours to comply with Twitter's orders or face having the account, with its 2,700 followers, permanently suspended.'

The real irony for London’s Olympic organizers is that few people had probably heard of the Space Hijackers as they had 2,700 Twitter followers, but due to London 2012 lack of dissent it's given the group a timely boost and load of free publicity.

The group’s Olympic website is HERE and a full list of articles relating to the story is HERE

Wales Infrastructure Plan - fluff, spin and blame

The irony of First Minister Carwyn Jones raising concerns with the UK Government about the effect of it’s welfare changes on Welsh families while offering up the same old tired ideas on Infrastructure spending that got Wales to state it’s in now and won’t mitigate the impact of welfare cuts, is not lost on this blogger.

Besides it’s a rare occurrence, even in Welsh politics to find a 159 page report that actually says so little about its subject matter. What there is a lot of in the report is ‘context’ for the reduced budgets and lack of ambition from the Welsh Government to look at alternative revenue streams rather than simply raiding their reserves or blaming the nasty Tories and Lib Dems for cutting the Capital budget as it’s other known in the trade. 

Businesses particularly the construction sector, which much of this is aimed at want certainty from the Government and there’s nothing more than vague aspirations around social and economic infrastructure (schools, houses, hospitals and roads) for 2012/13 there's £44m of tokenism new money, a drop in the ocean in terms of the overall budget for

£2,7m for M4 junction improvements

£3m for NEST and £2m for arbed benefiting an extra 1000 homes,£6m to expand the successful Welsh Housing Partnership, levering in an investment of £30m in total to deliver 280 family homes for intermediate rent,

£5m to double the size of the recylcable empty homes fund, contributing to our target of bringing 5,000 empty homes back into use during this Assembly term.

4m to accelerate essential flood protection schemes, reducing the impact of flood and coastal erosion on our communities,

6.8m to accelerate major hospital projects at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd and Llandough, £500k to deliver premises for domestic abuse ‘One Stop Shops’ in Pembrokeshire, Swansea and Gwynedd,

£5m to support schools projects in in Lampeter, Denbighshire, Abercynon and Penarth,

£3m for the new Cardiff City Centre post-16 campus,

£3.5m to support essential infrastructure work for the Northern Gateway site in the Deeside Enterprise Zone

£2.5m to boost the Welsh Economic Growth Fund.

The Opposition parties have already pointed out that the report contains a string of re-announcements and small projects that are already underway it’s not surprising all Government do the same, but what’s most disappointing is the lack of ambition even with the limited money they have to spend on Capital projects to give the Welsh economy a timely boost when there is so much uncertainly around and welfare cuts that have hardly started to bite.

The Infrastructure Plan is HERE

Media Storm and Spending Scrutiny

As the furore over the Western Mail’s front page editorial on the Assembly's Welsh translation service dies down and everyone surveys the landscape, one thing struck me about the welsh press’s coverage yet again, for the second time in less than a week the initial reaction by the Western Mail and BBC Wales in particular and to a lesser extent other media outlets to the big stories of the day, firstly Andy Richards attack on Leanne Wood and today’s cheap shots over Welsh language translation services have been at odds with the majority of public opinion.

It’s also conveniently taken the focus of the Welsh press away from the main stories of today, the Welsh Government’s announcement of how it will spend its Capital Budget to try and boost the flagging economy through investment and job creation and the deal between the Labour and the Liberal Democrats over how the extra money from the Barnett consequential as a result of  the UK Government’s freezing Council tax last year will be spent. Both of which will have far more of an impact on people’s lives than the Western Mail turning into a poor imitation of the Daily Mail.

Bits & Pieces

Deputy Presiding Office and Tory policy wonk David Melding's new socio economic think tank will be a welcome addition to the sparse world of welsh policy making, it aims according to BBC Wales to bring together Tories, Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru and non aligned to formulate policy.

Given the dominance of the centre left in Welsh politics, the sparsity of Think Tanks and new ideas and how stale the debate in Wales is around so many of the big issues, take today’s grim but predictable figures on child poverty, new ideas from any side will be welcome if only to kick start debates on how we tackle some of Wales deeply entrenched problems rather than spot platitudes.

Moving on its nice to see at least one politician finally catching up with this blog, Plaid Cymru’s Jonathan Edwards has called for more regular GVA figures to be published for the Welsh economy, something this blog has called for since it started back in 2009. All we need now are for Labour, Tories and Lib Dems to get on board and this might have a chance of becoming a reality before the next set of GVA figures are published in December 2012, i will be continuing my campaign.

The Wales Air Forum highlighted a new report from Northern Ireland’s MLA entitled  Airport chiefs urge Stormont to fund air route strategy and scrap levy on short-haul flights,  So what about something similar for Wales First Minister while you are focused and keen to shake things up at Cardiff Airport?

The full article is HERE

 

And finally if you haven’t read it yesterday Observer Editorial on the UK Coalition’s economic policy and its political indifference, it's well worth it, here’s a taster.

‘The economic conditions through which Britain is living reflect a disgraceful abdication of responsibility by a government that has consigned millions of lives to unnecessary and avoidable hardship and great anxiety about their future prospects. It is simply wrong to blame this on the economic tsunami sweeping through Europe. Clearly a break-up of the euro would hit the UK hard and add greatly to the peril we face. But that has not happened yet and might still be avoided. What is clear is that Britain confronts this risk from a position of great weakness in substantial measure because of the economic strategy being pursued by the coalition government, whose leaders shamelessly blame an event that has not occurred for their mistakes. The true problem is that the framework in which economic policy is cast is 100% wrong.