Colwyn Bay pier – a long and sad tale

Posted on April 6, 2012 | 30 Comments

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been heavily involved in the tortuous recent history of Colwyn Bay’s Victoria Pier.  If you’re not up to speed on the issue, I suggest that you use the search facility in the top  corner.

My blog postings have become increasingly infrequent over the past couple of years, largely because my workload is now such that what passes for my spare time is chiefly occupied in sleep; my life has become what my grandmother used to call “bed and work”.  However, since there have been significant and worrying developments in the pier saga over the last couple of weeks, I felt it appropriate to take advantage of the Easter break to compose this post.

The first piece of news broke last week.  Readers will recall that the trustees in the bankruptcy of Mr Steve Hunt, the former owner of the pier, disclaimed their trust last August.  As a consequence, the pier (to short-circuit the legal intricacies of the process considerably) fell into the ownership of the Crown Estate.  Last week, Conwy County Council announced that it had purchased the pier from the Welsh Assembly Government, which it had itself just acquired it from the Estate.  The purchase price is understood to be around £36,000.

Hard on the heels of that announcement came the news, three days ago, that the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) had turned down an application by Conwy for a grant of £4.9 million toward the cost of  restoration of the pier.  In a press release, the head of HLF Wales said:

“This month’s HLF Board meeting was very over-subscribed. The quality of bids was exceptionally high and, regretfully, we just didn’t have enough money to support all the applications we looked at on the day. We will be meeting with representatives from the Council shortly to discuss the best way forward for their project.”

The consequence of these two developments is that Conwy now owns  a listed building in the most appalling state of disrepair that is disfiguring the seafront of Colwyn Bay.  It hasn’t a penny to repair it, but does have an obligation, given the pier’s listed status, to restore it.  The cost of restoration is now probably north of £10 million.  To demolish it would probably cost around £1 million, but to do that the council would require listed building consent, which would take time, during which the pier would have to be repaired.

The liability for all this cost falls on the council taxpayers of Conwy county, who are already reeling after another substantial tax increase this year.  It is a dreadful state of affairs that could have been entirely avoided if the issue had been properly handled by the council.

Readers will probably know that the council has been in dispute for some years with Mr Steve Hunt, who contends that he was wrongly bankrupted for non-payment of business rates.  That issue is, essentially, a legal matter between Mr Hunt and the council. 

Mr Hunt is not the most user-friendly person in the world (as even he would probably acknowledge) and the manner in which he has tended to express himself has sometimes  been  unfortunate.  It has probably cost him some friends in the council, if he ever had any.  He considers, however, that he has justifiable cause to feel aggrieved by the council’s conduct.  That may well be the case, but, since it is the subject of litigation, it would not be proper for me to comment further.

I do, however, now feel it proper to acquaint readers with my concerns over the council’s handling of this issue.

My overriding objective in connection with the pier has been to try to judge the mood of the people of Colwyn Bay and to ensure that it is properly represented.   To that end, I held two public meetings in 2010, at which the issue of the pier was fully discussed, and formed the firm opinion that there was a considerable desire within the town to see the pier restored if at all possible.  This was not by any means a universal view; the well-respected Colwyn Bay Civic Society, for example, considered  that the pier had had its day and should be demolished.  That remains the Society’s position.

Nevertheless, given that the majority of those who attended the meeting, and who wrote separately to me, clearly wanted to see the pier restored, I pressed for the council to engage with Mr Hunt and his trustee in bankruptcy.  I took the view that it was neither proper nor realistic for Conwy to try to behave as if Mr Hunt didn’t exist.

It was clear to me, however, that Conwy didn’t want to speak to Mr Hunt.  At a personal level, this was perhaps understandable, given the less than complimentary terms in which Mr Hunt had spoken and written about council members and officials.  However, it was equally clear that there would be no progress unless and until some constructive discussions took place.  For that to happen, people would have to put personal issues aside.

It was not until April of the following year that I managed to set up a meeting, which took place at my office and was attended by a senior councillor, senior council officers and Mr Hunt himself.  I privately considered it a remarkable achievement to get them all to sit in the same room.

The question of the HLF bid was discussed.  It was clear that Mr Hunt, as a private individual, would not qualify for funding.  The council’s preference was for a not-for-profit company, Shore Thing, to lead the funding bid, supported by the council itself.  To do so, the council would need to have legal title to the pier, although Shore Thing would probably need a lease.

I expressed concern about the wisdom of the council’s acquiring the pier, given its condition, without an assurance that the HLF would make funding available.  The cost of restoration would be enormous and it would be folly to take on the liability otherwise.

As a suggestion to progress the issue, I proposed:

  • that the trustees in bankruptcy be invited to restore ownership to Mr Hunt;
  • that Mr Hunt agree to enter into a commercial lease to the council for, say, 125 years;
  • that the council simultaneously agree to grant an underlease to  Shore Thing for, say, 25 years;
  • that Shore Thing proceed with the HLF grant application, supported by the council;
  • that the agreements for both the lease and underlease be conditional upon the success of the HLF bid; if it was rejected, neither would proceed and would become nullities.

That, it seemed to me, was a way of progressing the matter without exposing Conwy to financial liability.  The terms of the lease and underlease would, of course, have to be negotiated and would have to be watertight, but the council had excellent in-house legal advice available to it.

Everyone present at the meeting seemed to think that the proposal was sensible, including the councillor.  It was understood that there would be further discussions between the parties and that the council should take advice from the District Valuer as to the proper level of rent.  Those were commercial considerations, not issues for politicians, and should be dealt with separately. 

I was reasonably cheered by the outcome of the meeting and briefly blogged about it. At last, it seemed, people were parking their personal differences and concentrating on the principal issue.

A few weeks later, I attended another meeting at Conwy’s offices in Llandudno Junction.  Mr Hunt was again present, but the councillor who attended the meeting at my office had been replaced by a cabinet member.  I was hugely disappointed by both the lack of progress since the previous meeting and the attitude of the cabinet member, which was, frankly, negative in the extreme.  He made it clear that he would not deal with Mr Hunt and that he took exception to “what he’s said about me”.  The council, he said, would not enter into an agreement for a lease, but would seek to acquire the pier directly.   I understood that Mr Hunt had in fact proposed three options for leases for the council to consider, but the councillor was apparently prepared to entertain none of them.

I told the councillor that I was very disappointed and that I felt that the course he was proposing to follow was dangerous and would put council taxpayers’ money at risk.  An altercation developed between Mr Hunt and the councillor; the councillor then left the meeting before it had formally concluded.  I was dismayed by his apparent inability to separate personal and business considerations. 

The council’s acquisition of the pier and its failure to secure HLF funding are, for the reasons set out above, a very serious matter.  The council has handled the issue poorly and now needs to concentrate all its efforts on working up a stronger bid for HLF funding.  The line it has put out to the press (“It is not a case of now or never”) seems, frankly, complacent and lacks the sense of urgency one might expect.

Yes, this is a very serious matter; not only for the people of Colwyn Bay, but also for the people of the entire county of Conwy, who now find themselves the involuntary owners of an enormous and depreciating negative asset without the means to restore it.

I have already contacted the council’s chief executive and propose to meet him soon to discuss the way forward.  I am anxious to do all I can to help rescue the HLF bid.  And there are a lot of other local people who, I am sure, would be equally pleased to help.  The council should be speaking to them, too.

Not only do we need the HLF money, we need another £5 million or so on top, in order to restore the pier.  We need to consider where that is to come from.  We also need to talk about the attractions that will be located on the pier and whether they will produce a sufficient income stream to maintain it.  Everyone with a sensible proposal for a sustainable future for the pier should be invited to come forward and have his or her say.

And, most importantly, we need to ensure that all this is done in public.  No more closed meetings with press and public excluded, which have been the council’s modus operandi hitherto.  This is one of the biggest issues in Conwy and it is essential that we all  know what’s going on. 

With a bit of maturity and sense of purpose, something good, even wonderful, may yet come out of this miserable episode.  But the ball is now firmly in Conwy’s court.  Let’s hope that their past performance is not an indication of things to come.

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Speech to Welsh Conservative rally, 25 March 2012

Posted on March 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

It is a huge pleasure to be speaking to you on such a beautiful spring day in the brand new city of St Asaph.

And what a pleasure it is, too, to be here at OpTIC Glyndŵr – one of the most extraordinary buildings in all of Wales.

Its great glass wall, at 1,000 square metres, is the largest photovoltaic installation of its kind in the whole of Europe.

But there is much more to the OpTIC than the PV array.

In this very building, scientists from Glyndŵr University and University College London are working on a project to produce mirrors for the European Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the largest optical telescope in the world.

The level of engineering accuracy that the project calls for is astonishing.

Only a few feet from where we are sitting, Glyndŵr engineers are polishing mirrors to an accuracy of one billionth of a metre – or one thousand times less thick than a human hair.

And the advanced work that Glyndŵr is carrying out in this building is matched by a cluster of other companies in this area.

Close by is the Qioptiq plant, manufacturing hi-tech military optical equipment, which is exported around the world.

A couple of hundred yards in the other direction, we have TRB, a supplier of advanced automotive components; and a mile or two down the road we have the Honeywell factory, making computerised environmental and combustion controls.

So the proud new city of St Asaph is home to a number of world-class industries, which have chosen this beautiful corner of North Wales to establish and expand their businesses.

But while St Asaph and the surrounding area is competing with many other parts of the United Kingdom and, indeed, Europe, and Welsh institutions like Glyndŵr are literally reaching for the stars, the same, sadly, cannot be said for most of the rest of Wales.

The hard fact is that Wales is becoming progressively poorer, not only in relation to other parts of the United Kingdom, but to many other, less advantaged, parts of the EU.

Everybody remembers Peter Hain’s classic slip-up, when he boasted that, no matter how bad it got, Wales was, at least, richer than Rwanda; but that gaffe was not so very far from the truth.

The latest Eurostat figures, published a couple of weeks ago, show that two-thirds of Wales is now poorer than some parts of Romania.

Think about that: a country that spent most of the post-war period struggling under communism, and under the heel of  one of the world’s most repressive dictators, is now richer than most of Wales.

And, unbelievably, despite the hundreds of millions of pounds poured in, through European Objective One funding, over the last twelve years, most of Wales has got poorer rather than richer.

As Dylan Jones-Evans has pointed out, back in 2000, when it first received European funding, West Wales and the Valleys was the sixth most prosperous Objective One region in Europe.

By 2009, it had had fallen to forty-second out of fifty regions across Europe.

West Wales and the Valleys is now not only the poorest region of the UK, but is poorer than parts of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Oh yes, and Greece.

And at least they have the sunshine.

Who is to blame for all this?

Well, it doesn’t take a political anorak to realise that Wales’s continued economic decline has coincided with long periods of Labour Government in both London and Cardiff.

And, sadly, although we have now turfed Labour out at Westminster level, they are still the governing administration in Cardiff Bay.

Responsible, under the devolution settlement, for economic development.

So, given that responsibility, it is entirely fair to say that Labour are squarely responsible for messing up the Welsh economy.

Do you remember the Welsh Development Agency?

The WDA was established by the last Conservative Government and was astonishingly successful at attracting foreign companies to establish themselves in Wales.

World-renowned companies, such as Sharp, Toyota, Brother and Hoya were persuaded by the WDA that Wales was the right place to set up in business.

Thanks to the WDA, Wales was regularly the most successful region of the United Kingdom in terms of attracting inward investment. 

The WDA was a world-renowned brand recognised everywhere you went.

It was run by businesspeople, who understood how other businesspeople thought.

And it was an invaluable Welsh asset.

So what did Labour decide to do with it?

They decided to scrap it.

Economic development was taken “in-house”.

And economic development, despite the Objective One millions, came to a standstill.

Meanwhile, Labour in London stood by and did little to help.

Which was also a shame.

Because the fortunes of the Welsh economy don’t depend exclusively on the actions of the Welsh Assembly Government.

Decisions taken at United Kingdom level are crucial to economic growth in every part of the country, Wales included.

That is why it is essential that there should be close working between governments in London and Cardiff, irrespective of the political hue of the parties in power at either end of the M4.

That is a fact that was recognised by the Commons Welsh Affairs Committee in its report, published last month, on inward investment into Wales.

And it urged the Government to work closely with the Welsh Assembly Government to help attract inward investment.

The committee was right.

The Welsh Government simply cannot grow the Welsh economy on its own.

It needs the close co-operation of the British Government, which has worldwide reach, through its chain of embassies, high commissions and consulates in almost every country on earth.

UK Trade and Investment, the Government’s international business agency, is there for the benefit of every business in every part of the UK, Wales included.

Its role is to promote British trade with the rest of the world; and the Welsh Government should be taking advantage of its global presence to work closely with it in seeking to attract business into Wales.

That is also something that was urged by the Select Committee.

Let me say this clearly: Cheryl and I, with the rest of the Wales Office, are anxious to work with the Welsh Government to help improve the Welsh economy.

We want to see Wales emerging from the doldrums of the last decade plus, and on the road to realising its fullest potential.

We are prepared to work very closely with the Welsh Government to help achieve this, despite our political differences.

In return, we expect a positive, mature response from the Welsh Government.

And I think that is something that the people of Wales expect, too.

There have, as everyone knows, been problems.

One of them, frankly, has been the reluctance of the Welsh Business Minister to engage with the British Government and the British Parliament.

When requested by the Welsh Select Committee to give evidence to it on its inquiry into inward investment, she refused to do so.

More recently, she even refused to allow her officials to attend a joint session of the Select Committee and its Assembly counterpart.

That, to be blunt, is plain childish; and it won’t impress the people of Wales.

She has also shown a distinct aversion to taking up any ideas for economic development that were not conceived in Wales.

Enterprise Zones being a prime example; she took six months to announce the first Welsh Zones, while almost two dozen Zones were forging ahead across England, many of them directly competitive with Wales.

That’s not good enough.

A “not invented here” mentality is unacceptable.

The fact is that Wales has two Governments, and unless they both work closely together, it will only be Wales that suffers.

Carwyn Jones and his colleagues in Cardiff Bay must recognise that, in the best interests of Wales, they need to co-operate – and co-operate closely – with the United Kingdom Government.

We at Westminster are very anxious to do all we can to help the Welsh economy grow.

We are willing to put the investment in.

But Cardiff must play its part, too.

We recognise that our national infrastructure urgently needs upgrading after many years of neglect.

So we are taking steps to do that.

Take railways, for instance.

Last year we announced the electrification of the Great Western line to Cardiff – something that Labour could have done in its thirteen years of office, but didn’t.

Electrification is crucial to Cardiff, but we want to go further.

We also recognise the importance of electrifying the line to Wales’s second city, Swansea, provided a sufficiently strong business case can be produced.

And we in the Wales Office are also working closely with the Department for Transport and the Treasury on plans to electrify the South Wales Valleys lines, which would be of immense benefit to some of the most depressed parts of Wales.

Upgrading the M4 around Newport is a priority too.

We are listening carefully to the business case and are prepared to see what we can do to help.

And efficient, fast broadband is also of vital importance to every modern economy.

But in Wales, there are too many areas with slow speeds, too many not-spots.

So we have made £59 million available to the Welsh Assembly Government to roll out superfast broadband across Wales.

The Welsh Government now needs to put its delivery plan into action.

And we are quite prepared – indeed, anxious – to work with them on that.

But there are some areas where delivery is firmly the Welsh Government’s sole responsibility.

It should, frankly, be doing more to upgrade Wales’s road network.

Take the A494 road at Ewloe.

The upgrading of that stretch of road is a matter of top priority to the economy of the United Kingdom as a whole, given that it is part of the main European transport route to Holyhead.

It has been neglected for far too long.

So we are looking to the Welsh Government to see what proposals it has for the urgent upgrade of that stretch of road.

Peroration

Ladies and gentlemen, there is much to do.

Wales has languished in the economic slow lane for far too long.

The Eurostats figures I referred to earlier should be a wake-up call to all of us.

The regeneration of the Welsh economy is too important to allow petty issues of personality or territoriality to get in the way of a business-like and efficient relationship between the Wales’s two governments.

Let me now state quite clearly: we in Westminster are prepared to do our part.

But in return, we expect a positive and grown-up response from Cardiff.

Wales is a proud and ancient nation.

As a Welshman, I consider it nothing short of a national disgrace that it continues to need bail-outs from Europe alongside impoverished Balkan nations.

Cheryl and I have high ambitions for Wales.

We want all of Wales to show the dynamism that is displayed here at Glyndŵr OpTIC.

We want Wales to reach for the stars, too.

And we want the Welsh Government to work closely with us to that end. 

ENDS

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TAN 8 is key to wind farm spread (Daily Post article)

Posted on November 26, 2011 | 4 Comments

The increasing number of applications for consent to the development of wind farms has become a significant political issue in North and Mid Wales.  Last May, almost 2,000 people travelled from Montgomeryshire to the Welsh Assembly building in Cardiff to show their concern over proposals to erect hundreds of turbines, with associated pylons, transmission lines and other infrastructure, across Mid Wales.  It was one of the biggest political demonstrations ever seen in Cardiff Bay.

The reason why the Welsh uplands have been targeted for so much wind farm development is straightforward.  It is the policy of the Welsh Government (“WG”) to encourage onshore wind farm development in the so-called “strategic search areas” identified by its planning document, Technical Advice Note 8 (“TAN 8”).

Those strategic search areas, in many parts of  Wales, coincide with Forestry Commission land, which is owned by the WG itself.  Thus, an application for consent to the construction a large wind farm to be sited in the Clocaenog forest, near Ruthin, is expected to be made in the near future, and a large area of forestry land in Mid Wales is also the subject of similar applications.

Large-scale wind farm development applications are considered by the Infrastructure Planning Commission (“IPC”), an independent body set up under the last Labour Government.  The IPC considers all applications in the light of National Policy Statements and other Government policy at all levels. 

In Wales, TAN 8 is an important element of Government policy that must be considered by the IPC.  Given that TAN 8 sets out a presumption in favour of wind farm development in the strategic search areas, it is hardly surprising that developers have sought to site new wind farms in rural Wales. 

Indeed, for so long as TAN 8 remains in its present form, it is very likely that further applications will be made, until such time as the WG’s target of 1.7GW achieved through renewable generation in the strategic search areas is hit.  That is more than four times the present installed capacity.

A few weeks after the protests in Cardiff, the First Minister, Carwyn Jones, said he believed the level of wind farm development in Montgomeryshire was “unacceptable in view of its wider impacts on the local area”.  However, since he made that statement, the WG has not changed the presumptions set out in TAN 8. 

The fact is that until such time as the WG addresses the issue of TAN 8, further applications for wind farm consents will inevitably be made.  The statement made by the First Minister will be of no force.

British Government policy is to renew and restore the electricity generating capacity that this country needs, which was neglected under the last Labour Government.  All consent applications will be dealt with efficiently and impartially by the IPC, and by reference to existing Government policy, whether made at Westminster or Cardiff Bay. 

The position, therefore, is clear.  If the Welsh Government really is concerned about wind farm proliferation, it should amend TAN 8.  If it does not do so, it must expect further applications to be made

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Nansi and the cockerel

Posted on April 29, 2011 | 1 Comment

Sometimes being an MP is not just an honour, it’s pure, unalloyed fun.

Spent today, like a third of the rest of humanity, watching the royal wedding.  Most of you watched it yourselves, too, so I won’t go on about it.

After lunch, we went over to Llanbedr Dyffryn Clwyd, a lovely village at the foot of the Clwydian range, where I was to reopen the village hall, which has recently been restored.  The new hall is fully sustainable, benefiting from solar energy, recycled rainwater and a host of other features that make it, I am told, the most environmentally friendly community hall in Wales.  This enabled me to make a joke about “how green IS my valley” (“dyffryn” is the Welsh word for “valley” and yes, I admit it’s less than Wildean).

We spent the next hour drawing raffles, eating cake and chatting to people.  One lady was a harpist and told me a fascinating story about Nansi Richards, the famous harpist known as Telynores Maldwyn, who was a friend of John Harvey Kellogg, the Corn Flakes magnate.  Kellogg was in process of packaging Corn Flakes, which had previously been sold in bags.  Nansi told him he should put a cockerel on the box, because it was a morning food and “Kellogg” sounded like “ceiliog”, the Welsh for “rooster”.  Kellogg took Nansi’s advice and the cockerel features on Kelloggs packaging to this day.

Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato.

We then went on to Gellifor, another Clwydian jewel, where we joined a traditional street party, complete with bunting, funny hats and bags of bonhomie.

It was a seriously good day, full of happiness and genuine affection for our royal family.  They are truly our country’s greatest asset. 

 

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AV vote should be good for Wales

Posted on April 25, 2011 | 2 Comments

Mary Ann Sieghart, in today’s Independent, urges us to “Vote Yes for evolution, not revolution”. 

The article, in truth, adds little to the debate as to the rival merits of the Alternative Vote and First Past the Post electoral systems.    Sieghart’s principal argument is the perennial one of the pro-AV lobby, that FPP is “unfair”:

For much of my life, I’ve been doomed to live in places where my vote doesn’t count. Voting for my preferred party has been as useful as tearing up my ballot paper and scattering it like confetti over the canvassers.

The speciousness of the argument is immediately obvious.  Ms Sieghart’s vote counts precisely as much as anyone else’s.  Her problem is that, in the areas in which she has chosen to live, her party hasn’t been sufficiently popular.  That is unfortunate for Ms Sieghart and a good reason  for her to work hard to help increase its local popularity, not for changing the electoral system. 

Sieghart goes on to explain how  AV would improve “fairness”:

Most annoyingly for the voter, it often forces us to vote dishonestly. We can’t cast a ballot for the party we want, but instead have to vote tactically for the party that has the best chance of beating the party we like least. This in itself relies on making assumptions about which party is currently in second place and how other voters in the constituency are likely to act on those assumptions.

Under AV, no vote is a wasted vote. If you want to vote Green or Lib Dem or Monster Raving Loony Party, that’s fine. You can happily put a ’1′ by the party you like best, in the knowledge that your ’2′ and ’3′ will also help to influence the result. The tellers count your votes and – at last – your vote counts.

That argument, too, is well-rehearsed and is also specious.  What Sieghart is saying, in effect, is that, rather than casting your single vote in a way that is, in her terms, “dishonest” under FPP, you should do precisely that with your second vote under AV.  And then do it again with your third vote. 

That, of course, would make sense to someone such as Sieghart, who is a self-confessed third party supporter, because AV is a system weighted in favour of third parties.  But it is an argument for skewed third party political advantage, not for anything that might reasonably be called  fairness.

So nothing really new from Ms Sieghart and, ordinarily, I wouldn’t have commented on her article, had it not been for her display of ignorance of the way politics works in Wales:

Then the Conservatives on the right point to the “danger” of the referendum being carried by Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish votes. Because the devolved assemblies and parliament are up for election next week, voters there are more likely to turn out. They are also more likely to vote “yes” to AV because they have seen different voting systems in action and have experienced their perfectly sensible results.

Actually, most Conservatives I know welcome the fact that the referendum is being held on the same day as the Assembly election.  Since devolution was instituted, voters in Wales have shown a distinct lack of engagement with Assembly elections, a matter of concern to all political parties.  In 2007, turnout was only 43.3 per cent and in no election has it reached 50 per cent.

Having canvassed for Conservative candidates across North Wales over the last few days, I can say that there is considerable interest in the referendum and I am pretty sure that voters will turn out to express their opinion on AV.  That should, in turn,  boost turnout in the Assembly election, which can only be a good thing. 

But for Ms Sieghart to suggest that the Welsh will embrace AV because of their unqualified enthusiasm for the exquisite intricacies of the D’Hondt system of proportional representation is to take speciousness to a wholly new level.

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AV gets thumbs down in the Bay

Posted on April 23, 2011 | 1 Comment
Self, Cllr Cheryl Carlisle, Roger Cummins

Disappointingly, the weather has broken today.  The barbecue Easter we were promised seems to have gone the way of last year’s barbecue summer.

Nevertheless, the Saturday street market in Colwyn Bay was bustling when I and a group of Conservatives did some leafleting for the No to AV campaign.

I’m pleased to say that we received a very positive response, many people observing that AV was a very contrived method of selecting an MP.  If we do win, it will be the straightforward simplicity of FPP that carries the day.

 We were joined very briefly by a group of Plaid Cymru campaigners, led by Phil Edwards, a local councillor.  I asked Phil where Plaid stood on AV and was told that they are urging people to vote “Ie”.  

A little surprising, perhaps, when you read this analysis.  Sadly, however, I have to conclude that the prospect of a Plaid wipeout, albeit immensely desirable, is neverthess insufficient reason to opt for a dodgy electoral system.

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The worst thing about AV

Posted on April 20, 2011 | 4 Comments

Had a very encouraging meeting this morning to discuss the issue of Colwyn Bay pier; another, I hope, will follow in about three weeks.  It’s too early to report what happened, save to say that I am more hopeful about the pier’s future than I have been for a very long time.

This afternoon, I went over to Delyn to campaign with Matt Wright, the hard-working local candidate.  Did an awful lot of walking, which really wasn’t too much of a hardship, given the wonderful weather we are enjoying.

In Mountain View Avenue, Mynydd Isa, I stopped to chat with a gentleman who was creosoting his fence.  How, I asked,  did he feel about AV?

“Disastrous,” he replied.

“Do you realise that if we’d had AV at the last general election, that [expletive deleted] man Gordon Brown would still be running the country?  It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

I must confess that the possibility hadn’t occurred to me, but it is probably the most compelling argument against the Alternative Vote system I have yet heard. 

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