Category Archives: Ieuan Wyn Jones

Plaid’s flexible manifesto

Posted on April 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

To what extent, if at all, does Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones exert control over Plaid Cymru, the party of which he is nominally the leader?

Plaid’s slender, 34-page manifesto was published today and contains at least two policies of which Mr Jones must surely disapprove.

First, Plaid “reaffirm our opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales”.  Given that Mr Jones has enthusiastically welcomed the construction of Wylfa B in his Assembly constituency, one must wonder how he can put his name to such an apparently adamant statement of contrary principle. 

Second, the manifesto declares: 

We cannot tackle climate change without considering the impact of transport. The UK will not achieve its target of 80% carbon emission reductions by 2050 if air travel continues to expand… We call for the removal of hidden subsidies for air travel… 

Given Mr Jones’s strident support for the failed, heavily-subsidised Valley – Cardiff air link, one must assume that he held his nose while signing that policy off, too.

Or is it simply the case that Plaid are nothing more than a ragtag bunch of unprincipled chancers who are entirely relaxed about modifying their public stance to suit the audience they are addressing?

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Elfyn in Coventry

Posted on April 13, 2010 | 2 Comments

The question burning on the lips of those few who care about these things is: what has become of Elfyn Llwyd?

Elfyn was, until dissolution yesterday, the leader of the three Plaid Cymru Members of Parliament.  He is, so far as I know, standing for election once again, in the newly created seat of Dwyfor Meirionnydd.  He consequently has a big stake in this election campaign and one might have expected Plaid to want to give him as much media exposure as possible.

However, since campaign started last week, there has been nary sight nor sound of Elfyn.  All Plaid’s press conferences have been fronted by the party’s Assembly leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones; he was at it again this morning, saying something or other about how terribly important Plaid is going to be when we have his longed-for “balanced” Parliament. 

But Elfyn was nowhere in evidence.  I know that Dwyfor is a glorious part of Wales, but surely he would, if asked, be prepared to abandon it briefly to make the journey to the BBC studio in Bangor.

The time has come to ask what heinous thought crime Elfyn has committed in the eyes of the Plaid establishment to be so sidelined.  Why has he been sent  to the Plaid equivalent of Coventry?  Is he soon to be expunged from memory as a Plaid non-person? 

For all that he can sometimes be a bit prickly, I really like Elfyn and I think we should be told.

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Posted in Elfyn Llwyd, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Plaid Cymru

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Plaid’s absent friends

Posted on April 6, 2010 | 1 Comment

Plaid Cymru’s first campaign press conference was a particularly bizarre affair.  It featured the party’s Assembly leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, and two fellow Assembly members, Helen Mary Jones and Elin Jones, none of whom, so far as I am aware, is seeking election to Parliament.

There was no sign of Plaid’s Parliamentary group leader, Elfyn Llwyd or, indeed, of any Parliamentary candidate.

Very odd.

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Posted in Elfyn Llwyd, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Plaid Cymru

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Nuclear dilemma

Posted on March 31, 2010 | 2 Comments

I am delighted that Horizon Nuclear Power, a joint venture of the German energy companies E.ON and RWE, has announced its intention to build a new nuclear power station at Wylfa, Anglesey.  The station will not only help keep the lights on, but will also provide high quality jobs in the very poorest area of the United Kingdom.

My delight is shared, it would appear, by Ynys Môn’s Welsh Assembly member, Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones, who is also Plaid Cymru leader (or, at least, one of them).  Here’s how the Daily Post reports his reaction:

Ieuan Wyn Jones said the news was very welcome given the job losses suffered on the island during the previous 19 months.

“I will be working with Coleg Menai and Bangor University to ensure that we have the skills in place to ensure local people are best placed to secure jobs at the plant,” he said.

“Coleg Menai has set up a fabrication and engineering unit to train people for the new job opportunities that come up. We must now work with the company as they develop their plans to ensure that we maximise the economic benefit the project will bring to Anglesey, in terms of the jobs that it will create in the building and operational phases.

“Local business must also benefit from contracts on the site and from supply chain opportunities, and this will need to be built into any consents.”

Great to see such unequivocal enthusiasm from one of Plaid’s leadership triumvirate.  However, as this blog has previously noted, Mr Jones surely has a bit of an ethical dilemma here.  He, after all, signed off Plaid’s European election manifesto, which stoutly declared:

we reaffirm our total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales.

Couldn’t be any clearer really, could it?  No wriggle room whatever there.  They even put it in bold print.

So what, we must ask, is Mr Jones going to do?   Will he be prostrating himself  in the path of the bulldozers as they attempt to cut the first sod?  Or will he be resigning his leadership of Plaid in the Assembly?

If he does neither, he will effectively be saying that Plaid’s anti-nuclear policy, for which he is personally responsible, doesn’t apply in his own little corner of Wales.

And that wouldn’t be right, would it?

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Posted in Ieuan Wyn Jones, nuclear power, Plaid Cymru

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What’s in a name?

Posted on February 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

Wales on Sunday’s Matt Withers takes the BBC’s John Pienaar to task for allegedly getting the name of Plaid Cymru’s leader in the Welsh Assembly wrong:

It’s not too often that Plaid Cymru get much coverage on a UK-wide level, so they must have been pleased to hear their conference being discussed on Radio 5 Live’s Weekend News last Sunday night.

It was an in-depth discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing the party as they go into the general election – and really, a feature which could only have been improved had presenter John Pienaar got the party leader’s name right just once.

It’s Ieuan Wyn Jones, John. Not just Wyn Jones.

I have known Mr Jones since the late 1970s, when we worked together in a Ruthin law firm.  He was always known as plain Wyn to all the members of staff.

What’s more, I still call him Wyn.

And, more importantly, so does his wife.  Or, at least, she did the last time I spoke to him.

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Plaid Cymru’s principles

Posted on February 21, 2010 | 2 Comments

Arrived in London after a less than pleasant road journey and decided to watch The Politics Show on catch-up TV.

To my delight, it included a profile of the constituency of Ynys Môn, the scene of what is likely to be one of the most interesting Welsh contests in the forthcoming general election.

After interviews with the young and enthusiastic Conservative candidate, my friend  Anthony Ridge-Newman, the old independent warhorse, my friend Peter Rogers, and the incumbent Labour MP, my friend Albert Owen, there was a short exchange with the Plaid Cymru candidate, Mr Dylan Rees, with whom I am not yet acquainted.

Mr Rees was filmed standing outside RAF Valley, one of the few major employers on Anglesey.  Despite Plaid Cymru’s anti-military stance, Mr Rees seemed generally well disposed to the presence of the Royal Air Force on the island.

Mr Rees also spoke enthusiastically about the prospect of a replacement for Wylfa nuclear power station.  When it was put to him that Plaid disapproved of nuclear power, Mr Rees asked, rhetorically, how he could oppose a project that would bring up to 5,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs.  To heck, he seemed to be saying, with policy.

Plaid Cymru’s blithe willingness to jettison apparently rigid political principle when it suits their purposes is a constant source of amusement.  The incumbent Welsh Assembly member for Ynys Môn, Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones (who happens to be Plaid’s leader in the Assembly), has also welcomed the replacement of Wylfa, despite having approved a manifesto which confirmed the party’s “total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales”.

In adopting what might be most charitably described as a flexible approach to well-established party policy, therefore, Mr Rees is doing no more than following an equally well-established Plaid practice.

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Posted in Albert Owen, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Plaid Cymru

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Welcome support from Plaid

Posted on February 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones, the leader of Plaid Cymru in the Welsh Assembly, says that a hung Parliament would be “the best outcome for Wales”.

Nice to see that he is looking forward so eagerly to the prospect of substantial Tory gains, and I can assure him that we will be doing our very best to surpass even those  unexpected ambitions.

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Posted in Conservative Party, general election, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Plaid Cymru

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Sorry, no credit

Posted on January 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

The saga of toll payment on the Severn bridge drones on.

Yesterday, Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones, transport minister in the Welsh Assembly Government, announced that credit and debit card payments on the bridge should become possible later in 2010.

The lack of a card payment facility has now become something of a scandal and an increasing source of annoyance for motorists.  A couple of years ago, on my way to the Royal Welsh show on a particularly hot day, I found myself stuck in a long queue behind a hapless individual who had clearly come out with insufficient cash and was obliged to conduct an elaborate negotiation with the toll attendant before he could be let through.  This must happen reasonably frequently, given that many people carry little cash in this age of chip and PIN.

According to the BBC News website, however, there will have to be a change to national legislation before card payments can be put in place.  Given that we are now in the dying days of this Parliament and the new Parliament will have rather a lot on its plate dealing with Gordon’s toxic legacy, we are probably in for at least one more summer of sticky, bad-tempered queues before the Severn crossing finally catches up with the twenty-first century.

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Posted in Ieuan Wyn Jones, Miscellaneous

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Vote for Plaid Orpington

Posted on January 19, 2010 | 2 Comments

Plaid Cymru leader in the Welsh Assembly, Ieuan Wyn Jones, has attracted considerable ridicule by “pledging to spend an extra £20bn a year on providing a ‘living pension’, as the party focuses on the general election”.

The problem, of course, is that Plaid are not going to win the next general election, unless they have plans of which I am unaware to put forward candidates in seats such as Orpington, York Outer and Glasgow Pollok and seek to persuade voters there that it would be in their interests to vote for a Welsh separatist party.  Even then, it would be a bit of a tall order.

If Mr Wyn Jones had said that in the event of a hung parliament, Plaid Cymru would require an increase in the state pension as a quid pro quo for supporting the governing party, people might have listened to him.

As it stands, however, he has simply made a twit of himself.

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Nuclear reactors

Posted on October 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

There must be something about the sea air on Anglesey: it miraculously turns even the most hardened opponent of nuclear power into an enthusiast for a new generating station at Wylfa.

The Damascene conversion of Plaid Cymru’s Welsh Assembly leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, is already well known.  Plaid Cymru is deeply anti-nuclear; its 2009 Euro manifesto confirmed its “total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales” and its Assembly spokeswoman, Leanne Wood, declared in a plenary debate in September, 2007, that:

“Plaid Cymru, under all circumstances, will oppose any future proposal to locate a new nuclear power station at Wylfa”. 

Mr Jones was accordingly very much out of step with his own party when, in January 2008, he enthusiastically welcomed the Government’s announcement of its commitment to a new generation of nuclear power stations as “good news”. 

Mr Jones admittedly is the Assembly member for Anglesey, and Wylfa is a major employer there, but nevertheless it is rather odd to see a party leader putting his name to a manifesto policy which he manifestly considers to be a load of old cobblers.

Now Carwyn Jones has also experienced the Wylfa effect.

Mr Jones is one of three candidates for the leadership of the Labour group in the Welsh Assembly.  He visited Anglesey yesterday as part of his campaign tour and announced that, as the debate on nuclear energy had “shifted considerably”, he now believed that “nuclear power will form part of Wales’s low-carbon response to the serious challenges we face in the years to come”.

Mr Jones’s dramatic turnabout will, I am sure, please the local MP, Albert Owen, who is staunchly pro-nuclear and has put his name to Mr Jones’s nomination papers.

It may, however, be less pleasing to another of his sponsors, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson.  Ms Davidson has always strongly adhered to the official Assembly Government line (to which Mr Jones is still nominally committed) of opposition to new nuclear development in Wales.  Only two months ago, she demanded a public inquiry into the Government’s proposals for Wylfa B “on the grounds of concern over the safety and security of the management of future nuclear waste”.

Ms Davidson may now be wondering whether she has backed the right man.  Perhaps she, too, should take a trip up to Anglesey and breathe the balmy Wylfa air.

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Posted in Albert Owen, Carwyn Jones, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Labour Party, Leanne Wood, nuclear power, Plaid Cymru, Welsh Assembly Government

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Plaid’s alternative reality

Posted on May 15, 2009 | 7 Comments

Yesterday’s launch of Plaid Cymru’s European election manifesto sounds to have been a most entertaining affair.

Plaid’s leader in the Assembly, Ieuan Wyn Jones, said (accurately) that Labour were in “meltdown”: 

“Gordon Brown’s disastrous handling of the economy, coupled with the Treasury cuts into the Welsh budgets with more savage cuts to follow in the next few years, will leave Wales badly exposed.”

To which one might reasonably enquire: “Quite right, Wyn; but, since Labour are so manifestly incompetent, why do you continue to prop them up in Cardiff?”

Indeed, that query was put to Mr Jones, to which he responded: 

“You can have coalition politics at one level and yet be fighting each other at different levels.”

 Ah yes, of course.  Silly me.

 In fact, in Plaid’s alternative reality, you can fight each other on issues of fundamental policy and yet happily remain members of the same party:

 The manifesto underscores Plaid’s “total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales”.

However, Mr [Adam] Price declined to say that Plaid would try to stop one being built on the site of the Wylfa reactor in Mr Jones’s Anglesey constituency, claiming this was a Westminster decision.

Regular readers will recall that in July last year, Mr Jones declared, as trenchantly as imaginable, that::

“My priority as the local Assembly Member for Ynys Môn has always been to safeguard jobs on the island and if yesterday’s announcement is a step towards securing a future for Wylfa then that is good news.”

Why, then, as Plaid Cymru’s leader, is he allowing a manifesto to be published setting out policies that he doesn’t support?   Policies that, in fact, he obviously considers to be complete nonsense?

Nothing, I suppose, to do with the fact that he has to placate  the likes of anti-nuclear supporters such as Leanne Wood, despite knowing full well that Wylfa B has massive support on Anglesey?

A few days ago, I accused Plaid of opportunism; a Plaid blogger posted a comment objecting to that accusation.

I fear that this post is going to upset him again.

Tough.

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Posted in Ieuan Wyn Jones, Plaid Cymru

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Nuclear options

Posted on April 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

Speaking of Anglesey, the Government has today issued a list of 11 sites proposed for the construction of new nuclear power stations.

The list includes Wylfa; this will be generally welcomed on the island, even by the local Assembly member, Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones, who has trenchantly declared that “the case for nuclear power has been made”.  As I have blogged previously, his stance may put him, bizarrely, at odds with the party he leads, which is deeply anti-nuclear.  The official response of Plaid Cymru to the announcement will, therefore, be most interesting.

The development of a new generation of nuclear power stations will be an important contribution to the fulfilment of the UK’s carbon reduction target.  The only pity is that the Government vacillated for so long – over a decade – before developing its energy policy.

DECC should be publishing its national policy statement in late summer this year, which leaves the way clear for the consent process, under the new single consent regime, to commence fairly shortly afterwards. 

The first of the new reactors, which may include Wylfa, should be operational by 2018.  This will be too late, however, to save Anglesey Aluminium, which is presently in a 90-day pre-redundancy consultation period.  There, the immediate hopes for survival are pinned on finding a new, cheap supply of power after the contract with Wylfa expires in September this year.

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Posted in energy, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Plaid Cymru

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Facing both ways

Posted on February 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

A positively bizarre letter from Lord Elis-Thomas in today’s Western Mail highlights the deep and seemingly irreconcilable  divisions within Plaid Cymru over nuclear energy in general and the proposed construction of Wylfa B in particular.

 In it, Dafydd El asserts that that “Plaid policies and our attitudes as elected representatives are based on principle and practice”.  In respect of Wylfa, however, practice would appear to have prevailed over principle.

Both he and his colleague Ieuan Wyn Jones have now confirmed their support for the building of Wylfa B; indeed, Mr Jones has said unequivocally that “the case for nuclear power has been made“.

Equally unequivocally, however, Plaid’s 2005 General Election manifesto declared that:

Plaid Cymru the Party of Wales does not support new nuclear power stations, particularly as civil nuclear power fuels nuclear weapons development; is heavily subsidised; and cannot safely dispose of the highly toxic waste.

Couldn’t really be clearer, could it?  And indeed, the policy was confirmed at Plaid’s annual conference two years later. 

Moreover, in an Assembly plenary debate on 26 September, 2007, Plaid’s spokeswoman, Leanne Wood, confirmed that: 

“Plaid Cymru, under all circumstances, will oppose any future proposal to locate a new nuclear power station at Wylfa”. 

Nobody, however, appears to have told Dafydd El or Ieuan Wyn Jones that. 

Such chaotic incoherence on the part of a party that is part of the governing coalition in the Assembly is, to say the least, surprising.  

In Mr Jones’s case, in particular, it is hard to see how, as leader of the party, he can credibly oppose at a constituency level a policy for which he himself has overall responsibility at a Welsh level.  That is clearly a nonsensical position and one that is wholly untenable.

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Posted in Dafydd Elis-Thomas, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Leanne Wood, Plaid Cymru

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Separated at Birth?

Posted on September 15, 2007 | Leave a comment
Tuning in to CNN Sport in my hotel bedroom, I am briefly perplexed by the sight of Rhodri Morgan’s mate, Ieuan Wyn Jones, delivering his assessment of the likely outcome of the England–Russia match at Wembley.

On closer inspection, the pundit turns out to be Guus Hiddink, the Russian team coach, who bears a remarkable resemblance to the Plaid Assembly leader.

Mind you, it might just as well have been Wyn giving the interview. Guus was quite convinced that Russia were going to win, and pronounced accordingly.

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Posted in Ieuan Wyn Jones