The Election

 So here we are a week out from an election in a country with an economy ruined by self inflicted wounds - covid, climate change and immigration.  Oh and a few weeks before a possible planet destroying war really kicks off. 

The funny thing is that no-one is talking about the coming war, the real reason tweedledum called the surprise election - he supposedly wants out before it happens.  Meanwhile tweedledumber - the guy who is perfectly OK with cutting off the water to Gaza - has no such qualms.

So off we'll trot, photo identification in hand, to cast a vote in what may well be the last election for a few generations, it doesn't really matter does it?  Our Plaid Cymru candidate - I voted for them in pre-woke days - was the Green Party choice at the last election.  I wouldn't vote for her then so why should I now?  There's an abolish the Welsh Assemby guy, a limited ambition while you have two main candidates eager to abolish the world.  I'll probably not bother.

UPDATE:

The LibDems won B&R which was probably the best possible result of the parties in with a chance- hopefully they are less likely to lust after war than the Tory or Labour leaderships.

Plaid are exactly where they have been for the last 50 years, the party of choice of the diminishing Bro Gymraeg.  The promised breakout is as distant as ever and they were easily outshone by Reform unknowns.  Do they ever think why?   Perhaps they'll blame the racist voters - that's the usual go-to of the Western globalists. The election of Llinos Medi was one bright spot, a candidate who clearly has some understanding of the voters.

The new Labour defence secretary quickly scurried off to Odessa to pledge undying support for the occupying regime - plus ça change.

Not much to do with Radnorshire

What do you do if you're broke, no-one will lend you money because your credit rating is through the floor and you've sold off the last of grandpa's silver?  Well one option is to go on the rob, which is basically what Western foreign policy is all about.

The juciest plum in the locality is the Russian Federation, rich in oil and gas, minerals, wheat, timber all those goodies waiting to be stolen to keep the West afloat.  Forget that stuff about democracy, international law etc.  It's about loot.  No need to believe me since it's openly admitted by a variety of Western leaders from Von Der Leyen up.

And of course Russia is weak and Putin is an unpopular despot, it's ripe for the picking. Except of course it isn't, he isn't and the West's plan to use simple, corrupt Ukraine to topple the deck has failed miserably.

What now?  A graceful exit?  Not likely, more of the same, even risking nuclear war while driving China and Russia into an even closer alliance.  Oh and let's force the Global South to take sides .. Guess what they're not choosing you.

Blackmail and bribery are the only explanations as to why the European leaders go along with this self-evident nonsense, but what about the minions?  The journalists and various other apparatchiks who oil the wheels of self-destruction - put that down to mortgages.  You don't need strongarm tactics in a time of near universal debt.

Unfortunately for Wales our intellectual class are fully on board with the globalist project. Of course they may be unsettled by all those videos of dismembered children coming out of Gaza but otherwise they've swallowed it all, the jab, the climate racket, the rules based international order etc.  It doesn't augur well for Wales and the Welsh language when the whole rotten structure collapses.  We've put far too many eggs in the Western basket.

Promising Young Women

There was a recent twitter spat between fans of two rising actresses, the obviously white but Spanish speaking Anya Taylor Joy - a fluent native speaker of rioplatense, the dialect of the Buenos Aires region - and Jenna Ortega, a brown but monolingual American.  Which of the two was a better Latina or were they even Latin?

None of this was helped by American hangups about race and colour.  The US authorities for example considered Spanish speaking migrants (even from Spain) to be non-white, while North Africans were classed as white.  No wonder the showbiz magazine Variety celebrated Taylor-Joy's win at the Golden Globes as the first by a "woman of color in twelve years."  

The spat throws up some interesting points, what exactly is a Latina/Latino/Latinx?  Is it someone who speaks Spanish or Portuguese like Ms Taylor-Joy - I'm not sure if French speakers get included here  - or is it someone with native American ancestry like Ms Ortega?  Choose one and you exclude many Latina icons from the United States, choose the second and you exclude many Cubans and Agentinians or even Puerto Ricans, whose distant Taino ancestry was largely invisible before dna testing.

Anyway let's leave such questions to the pigment obsessed Americans, what is of interest is the monolingualism of many Latin Americans in the United States and its parallels with Wales.  

While many US towns, especially on the border with Mexico are overwhelming Spanish-speaking this is not the case elsewhere, here families must decide whether to pass on the language to their children.  Many do not and their reasons for doing so are similar to language shift in the South Wales valleys in the first half of the twentieth century.  Parents feel that their children need to learn English and that a knowledge of their native language will hold them back or be of little use.  The end result is the obviously Latina Jenna Ortega struggling to pronounce even simple Spanish and being ridiculed by her more fortunate compatriots.

Ortega actually comes from a county close to the border with around 50% of the population identifying as Hispanic with less than half speaking Spanish as a first language.  For those in cities such as Chicago and New York the experience is more like regular immigrants, expected to assimilate fully in the second and third generations.  This is similar to the situation of another promising young actress, Carey Mulligan, who has a Welsh speaking mother. Never having lived in Wales and with an English speaking father any fluency in Welsh would be unusual. 

Around half of Hispanics with no Spanish or Portuguese skills report being humiliated, especially by their fellow Latinos - the no sabe kids they call them.  Again there are similarities to Wales where the English-speaking Welsh are often described as Saeson.  Here in Radnorshire for example our history is routinely ignored or misrepresented by those for whom it might as well  be located in Central Asia for all they know.  It's not good enough.

How are things in Lackawanna

If you delve deep into Welsh family history you'll soon be as familiar with Pennsylvanian counties such as Lackawanna and Luzerne as you are with places nearer home.  We tend to underestimate the Welsh contribution to North America, look at this interesting youtube of ethnic background in the US for example.  Even as late as 1931 the Welsh element made the top 17 and even that was a big decline from the proportion in earlier years.

Two things to remember, the US immigration and census authorities were the first governmental bodies in the modern world to recognise the Welsh as a separate nationality - this at a time when the for Wales see England attitude ruled the roost.   Secondly the great majority of Welsh migrants in the Victorian period were Welsh speakers.  Anyway take a look:

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These Times We're Living In

I discovered Kate Wolf during lockdown, enjoying the sunshine and wondering at the stupidity of it all.  I do believe that some are chosen, Kate obviously.

Armageddon and Idpol

I don't know if the West ever thought they could beat Russia in Ukraine, perhaps they did but clearly that's not the case now.  Today the aim seems to be to kill as many Russians, and Ukrainians, as possible.  Hang on, they want to kill Ukrainians?  Well clearly if you think the Russians are going to win and that Ukraine will be absorbed into the Federation, then the more damage you can inflict both economically and demographically to the future Greater Russia the better.

As a last throw of the dice the extreme warmongers want any nuclear incident at the Energodar reactor to be treated as an Article 5 attack on Europe, necessitating direct Nato involvement in the war.  Clearly this is an invitation to the Kiev regime to carry out such an attack knowing that the mainstream media will rush to blame Moscow.  Today's announcement of an evacuation of Nikopol is extremely worrying in this regard.

Meanwhile Wales carries on blissfully unaware that there's a good chance that we are living in the last days of humanity.  The actions of the laughable Welsh government make even fervent supporters of devolution regret ever voting for the Assembly.  Steadfastly ignoring the real problems facing Wales the Drakeford clique and their Plaid allies seek to solve non-issues by imposing busy-body controls on an apathetic population.  The controls rather than the solutions being the whole point of the exercise.

Wcrain

Every now and then during the last year I've typed Wcrain into the twitter search to see what my fellow countrymen have to say about the war.

Apart from a Ukrainian lady who is learning the Welsh language - hir oes iddi  - posts from individuals are rare, the majority come from bodies in receipt of public funds,  it's almost as if posting something in support of Nato's war was a condition of receiving government handouts.  The same thing is true, if less markedly so in respect of the climate change agenda and other right-on issues.

A few months ago there was a bit of a stir when the online magazine Spiked published an article criticising the over reliance on public sector employment in Wales and the way in which a new elite was forming, employed by the state, paying lip service to the language, intolerant of criticism, prone to nepotism and group think; oh and divorced from the lives and attitudes of ordinary working class folk.

This developing class certainly fits in well with the pro-war, anti-democratic, pro-globalist forces which are dominating much of the Anglosphere and its European puppets.  The only problem is that these forces are having their bluff called by the multipolar world.  Their days are numbered.

Given how devolution and even the Welsh language have become associated with this class of apparatchiks there is a danger that their inevitable fall will see the baby thrown out with the bathwater.

Red Radnorshire

 I'm sure a lot of Welsh folk have an image of Radnorshire as a rural backwater, anglicised, probably Tory voting, an extension of Herefordshire protruding into their imaginary radical Wales.

Here's some anomalies to ponder:

Nye Bevan, mother Phoebe Protheroe, her family went to the coalfield from Glasbury

George Lansbury, the Labour Party leader, his mother was from Clyro

Arthur Horner, Communist boss of the Miner's Union, mother a Lewis from Gwystre

Clem Edwards, radical lawyer and MP, from Knighton, one of the organisers of the London dockers strike and the famous laundresses demonstration in Hyde Park

Charles Edwards, MP for Bedwellty from 1918 to 1950, a Labour Chief Whip, he was from Llangynllo

That's enough for now, maybe I'll add some more later.

Reflections on wasted opportunities

As someone with an interest in family history and the science of dna, I've taken tests with a couple of companies.  All very interesting, with hundred year old affairs being revealed and a personalisation of history - migration, war, disease and the like as they affected the extended family.

One surprise were the dozens of Mormon third and fourth cousins who popped up in my match list.  These people all traced back to a clan of Flintshire stone masons who were early converts to the church and played an important part in the development of Salt Lake City, from building the Temple to establishing the forerunner of the Tabernacle Choir.  The link was an illegitimate birth in Llanwrthwl, my great great grandmother being born the child of a visiting mason with the necessary surname.

Anyway this handful of Mormon kinsmen have multiplied so that today literally thousands of folk can trace themselves back to these pioneers.

This made me think what a great opportunity the Welsh National movement missed in the 1960s.  Now I'm not suggesting polygamy but what if patriotic couples had decided to marry and have large families back then.  No doubt their lives would have been less bourgeois but how many thousands of extra Welsh speakers would exist today, how much talent would exist, how many businesses?    Wales would surely be different, richer both culturally and economically ...... because people aren't a problem, they are an opportunity.

Instead we followed the Anglo-Saxon model, Plaid Cymru is just New Labour's little helper, the language figures might look reasonable but less Welsh is spoken in everyday life, the rural areas are taken over by outsiders and locals are priced out of the housing market.  Worse still the Sion Whites are disconnected from the ordinary folk, more interested in American virtue signalling than the everyday problems of the gwerin.

So go on your little marches, put a flag in your twitter profile, virtue signal to your heart's content but what are we doing to actually build alternative structures to the dying empire.

Another Old Post

 

Widows and Spinsters

You don't find much written about the Welsh businesswomen of the Victorian and Edwardian period.  Such females did exist of course, although it helped to be a widow or a spinster or otherwise unencumbered with a spouse.

The Hotel trade in pre-First World War Llandrindod was no small beer, as the buildings of the town, now somewhat decayed, still testify.  And it was a trade which was dominated by the women who owned, or managed, the majority of the most important such businesses in the town.

Look at the 1911 Census and you'll find Miss Duggan and her sister, they were from Hundred House, the owners of Duggan's Temperance Hotel.  Then there was the Llanyre born Miss Sheen, manager of Plas Winton - now the Commodore.  Miss Ace ran the Waverley, Miss Jenkins York House and Miss Smith the Montpelier.  If they weren't spinsters they were widows like Mrs Bentley of the Spring Hotel and Mrs Smith of Ye Wells - currently occupied by Coleg Powys's Llandrindod campus.

The largest hotel in the town, indeed in the whole of Wales, was the Pump House; with its posh clientele and Continental cuisine - one of my aunts married the son of a Swiss chef from there.  It was managed for many years by the Monmouthshire born Miss Duffield, who interestingly enough was elected to the town council in 1900.

 The great rival of the Pump House was the Bridge, which would eventually supplant it as the largest hotel in the country.

Like many of the businesses in the town it was originally built and operated by local Radnorshire families.  For even though Llandrindod has been described as "not a Welsh town, but a town in Wales," most of the entrepreneurial spirit that built the place was Welsh.  In 1897 the five Wilding sisters and their two brothers sold the Bridge Hotel to the redoubtable Mrs Miles (see picture) for a tidy £7850.

Born in Treforest in 1847, Elizabeth Miles (nee Spencer) was the daughter of Pontypridd innkeepers.  Married at 20, she found herself widowed by the age of 24, and with two young sons to boot.  Perhaps because of this setback Elizabeth went on to own or lease some 10 hotels in South Wales, including the Angel in Cardiff.  A Welsh speaker - and so were her two sons - Mrs Miles eventually changed the name of her Llandrindod purchase to the Metropole Hotel.  This was for the rather frugal reason that she had bought a quantity of bankrupt linen and crockery, all  inscribed with the letter M.

So why aren't such women, and others like them elsewhere, better known?   Well, apart from the fact that history has largely been written by men, such successes may not have suited the agendas of those who tend to sell Wales short