For many, deep in the Valleys of South Wales, poverty is the grim reality of daily life.
Utility bills rise, school transport is cut, shops in the high-street close down and inflation bites. Austerity has done a lot to decimate the coalfields of Wales, leaving the population reeling in it’s wake.
These people are scared, poor, confused and unsure how to dig themselves out of this hole. Snake oil salesmen like Nigel Farage have opportunistically seized this shared plight in an attempt to elevate themselves materially and politically.
It’s a good article, but very generous. I live in the valleys, and there are a lot of racist people here. They obviously won’t admit it if you ask them, but talk to them in the pub, or read their Facebook posts, and you’ll see the truth.
It genuinely makes me sad to see how accepted it is here these days
Perhaps too generous, though I am holding out some hope that many of the people caught in the cynical political machine of Reform can still be pulled out of the spiral.
Ignorant, perhaps, but not beyond hope.
Nice write up! Would you think that the plan to ban lying in the Senedd would help prevent this shift?
Absolutely - I think it would go some way towards building back the trust that has been lost with politicians in Wales. Unfortunately, though, I think that alone won’t be enough to bring people back into the fold, so to speak.
We need greater communication, easier to understand bills and political action, and I would imagine it would also help if we had some kind of legitimately progressive innovation in Welsh Government. We’ve been stagnating for years now, simply ‘un-doing’ whatever disastrous things the dreaded ‘Past governments’ did, is no longer enough.