Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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The ‘Remain Alliance’ is a sad prospect
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BRITAIN’S first-past-the-post system means that the increasingly broad range of parties clustered round the “centre” ground of British politics have little hope in achieving parliamentary representation without such an alliance.
It must seem an attractive route back to power for those architects of austerity the Liberal Democrats, and a welcome lifeline for those MPs who left the Tories and Labour and have since failed to establish a viable centrist party. But the Greens and Plaid Cymru?
What madness has seized these parties?
It is the madness of the Remain narrative that has gripped the country over the last few years — the idea that to remain in the EU is to strike a blow against the Tories and the Farage mob and that is all the politics you need. This idea, of course, infects the labour movement too, but it is the narrative of defeatism for all.
Whether your goal is Welsh Independence, a sustainable environment, to end austerity and build an economy of social justice or some combination of these components, the European Union has you boxed in and a Remain alliance is nothing but a high-speed ride into a brick wall.
The proving ground for the alliance idea was the recent Brecon & Radnor by-election, so it is worth reviewing some of the themes of that campaign to illustrate these points. Brecon being Brecon, much of the focus of the campaign was on the plight of Welsh hill farmers. Under the auspices of the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), the amount of Welsh lamb sold in Wales has reached the inglorious level of 5 per cent.
The rest is for export within Britain, the EU and across the world. That adds up to a lot of carbon hoof-prints. At the same time, shoppers in Wales continue to find no difficulty in picking up a lamb chop from New Zealand.
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s the CAP encouraged massive overproduction and intensification, the consequences of which were butter mountains, wine lakes and other surpluses, increased use of chemicals, particularly chemicals (particularly in horticulture), overgrazing, and erosion of habitat that continue as problems today. Friends of the Earth summarise the impact of CAP:
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