The word was no slip, it occurs in official BNP communications. It gives permission to dream of extreme violence. It signals the real Fascism behind the New Fascism.

In these circumstances as the moral failure of the political class brings forth demons, the BNP has to be confronted. Stuart Hall got it right [3]: they need to be engaged with by the media when they are part of a news story, but they should not be on Question Time giving us their views about everything as if they are an acceptable part of fireside conversation.



So what is the BBC up to? I refer to it in the singular as having an approach and an attitude. Of course, it employs a lot of people with minds of their own who have differences of view. But with over 40 people earning more than the Prime Minister and executives looking after its 'vision' paid over £500,000 a year, it is also a machine with a commanding perspective of its own, however this may be arrived at.



What it claims is that it speaks in a representative way and objective way, permitting wide access to the arguments that genuinely touch people, thus playing a responsible democratic role in the service of the public. 

The reality is that it is part of the larger political class now seeking to perpetuate itself in the face of public discontent. Take the expanses scandal. This genuinely alarmed and alienated the public, to put it mildly.

Did the BBC with its immense research facilities help to break the story? After it broke, did the BBC track down the most egregious examples or invest in its own sustained coverage of the issue that so moved the public, for example by commissioning a series of documentaries on the expenses culture of the Commons, the Lords and the different political parties? Did it keep the issue alive through the party conference season, as the public wished? 

Did it, hell!

Of course, it had been warned by the Prime Minister that it too might be subject to 'transparency' so it had better be careful.... What? You thought that the BBC had of its own volition published its expenses? As openDemocracy Chairman David Elstein points out in a wide ranging speech on public service broadcasting in the digital age:

"The BBC's much-touted publication of the expenses incurred by its senior executives" was nothing of the sort. It was just the limited amount reclaimed by those executives, after they had initially laid out cash. 99% of total executive expenses are actually covered by central bookings, so not requiring reimbursement, and so still unpublished.”[4]

To put it kindly, the BBC is part of the expenses racket and its associated culture of entitlement which it defends from public scrutiny.

Or take the issue of modern liberty which the Convention that I co-directed with Henry Porter brought to the public's attention in a concerted fashion in February.[5] It got widespread press coverage and was cross-party in its approach and we helped uncover a profound, intelligent, open-minded public concern about the reshaping of the state and its treatment of citizens. This is surely exactly the kind of responsible issue that a public service broadcaster should embrace. It allows important questions about how we are governed to be asked, from an interesting and new angle with clearly important scientific and technological changes being part of the mix. Was the BBC interested? Was it, hell!



The BBC, it turned out, was making videos saying that it knew where you lived, to reinforce the intrusive imposition of the license fee. It is itself an extension of the surveillance society and the database state (for our own good of course).

One related aspect of this is its support for unaccountable coercion aka the Met. See Guy Aitchison and Stuart White's patient documentation in OurKingdom.[5]

The Convention showed that there is a smart public that does not want to be patronised and wants to think about how we are being governed.

This same attitude emerged again more strongly with the expenses crisis. A true public service broadcaster as opposed to a regime service broadcaster would welcome this, probing the strength and vitality of the concerns. This should be the duty of the BBC. Instead...it broadcasts fascists.

Why? Because it is in the interests of the regime service broadcaster to project public opinion as dangerous and potentially racist. Responsible democratic opposition is squished and deprived of 'oxygen'. But if you can show that beneath the veneer the public are worse than unwashed they are proto-fascist, why then, we will indeed need the BBC to protect us, won't we?

It refuses to cover matters that could make it accountable in a good ongoing way, that would help open up the political class to democracy. It will, however, cover the dark side of public opinion to ensure that the rest of us are faced with a choice between that and them. In short, it wants us to think of the great public as proto-fascist. This is the significance of the revelation by the current New Statesman political editor James Macintyre who was a former producer on Question Time, quoted by Stuart Jefferies in the Guardian:

“They've always wanted him on and I went to meetings where I had to argue against that position. They lost the battle with management then and now, after two years' lobbying, they have won." [6]

 The argument about whether the BBC should give Griffin a home on our screens should not be conducted in narrow terms to reinforce the idea that there is only a choice between the rise of the New Fascists or better government by the Old Patricians. In that case we will have to back the latter and the BBC executives can laugh all the way to the bank.

References

 1] www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n7j35#synopsis


[2]www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/adviceandsupport/prison_life/femaleprisoners/

[3]www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/16/does-question-time-accept-racists


[4]www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/24/david-elstein-beesley-lecture


[5]www.modernliberty.net/


[6]www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/16/does-question-time-accept-racists

•  Anthony Barnett is Editor of OurKingdom, a blog on the Opendemocracy.net website which engages with constitutional questions and the future of the UK, where this article appears.
  

“It may be a language that these days is only spoken by some 20 per cent of the population,” he said. “But it is a language, heritage and tradition that all the people of Wales are intensely proud of, something that marks us put and makes us different.”

And then there was the new Wales, the one created in the furnace of the first industrial revolution that had occurred across the south Wales coalfield. This was a modernising, disruptive experience that had cut right across the older Wales and creating a completely different tradition in its wake.

But Rhodri Morgan said he had felt comfortable and at home with both dimensions of Wales. Indeed, both were embedded in his own upbringing, political career and personality. His family background rooted him in the old linguistic tradition of Wales. His father T. J. Morgan was a Professor of Welsh and one of the  finest essayists in the Welsh language. His brother Prys remains the leading authority on every aspect of Welsh cultural history.

Meanwhile, Rhodri himself rooted himself in the traditions of the Welsh Labour Movement, from the time that he frequented Cardiff pubs in the 1960s with the likes of Jack Brooks, Paddy Kitson and Neil Kinnock, to becoming Labour MP for Cardiff West in 1987.  In an elegant essay on Rhodri Morgan’s achievements as First Minister in the current issue of the IWA’s journal Agenda, the cultural historian Peter Stead remarks:

“What marks Rhodri out from most people active in public life in Wales is that he does not have any attitude or affectation at all about being Welsh or Welsh speaking. His Welshness is not rooted in any anger. Moreover, it is nit something that has to be continuously worked out in any sense of antagonism with Englishness, Britshness, or indeed any region or sub culture within Wales itself. He was born into a natural state of Welshness that allowed him to study at oxford and Harvard and to be a Westminster MP without ever having to concern himself with questions of identity or loyalty.”

In fact, as Rhodri Morgan observed about himself at last night’s dinner to celebrate him and ten years of devolution, he embraces within his own personality the bi-focal Wales he described. This is why he will be such a hard, perhaps impossible, act to follow.

• John Osmond is Director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs.

It was a contentious figure, repeatedly challenged by politicians at the time, for the official statistics (based on claimant counts – and most young people in this age group had not been entitled to income support since 1988) suggested that the numbers were miniscule. It took another four years for the incoming Labour government, through its Education Select Committee, to acknowledge that the phenomenon was “not a residual policy problem but a significant policy challenge”.

Beyond the disputed statistics lay the more human experience. The South Glamorgan study interviewed a small number of young people about their pathways into inactivity and where they expected to go from there. The stories were predictable: school exclusions, family breakdown, substance misuse, and criminality. Yet, surprisingly, they were generally optimistic about their futures, believing that eventually they would settle back into education or training, or get a job. 

The reverse picture was, however, the case in a further study that took place in Mid Glamorgan two years later. There, the young people interviewed continued to be supported by their families and were well integrated into their communities. However, they were deeply pessimistic about the future. As he put it,  there was not much point in queuing for jobs when there were no jobs.

The term I coined for this group back then was ‘status zer0’ (or status 0). It attracted a great deal of criticism and sometimes hostility. I had intended it as a metaphor for young people who seemed to count for nothing and who were going nowhere. It was meant to be evocative.  Certainly, my thinking was picked up by the media and it was in fact a newspaper article that really brought the issue to public and political attention. The article in question was called Too Young and Too Precious to Waste. It would be equally apposite now.

Even before the election of the Labour Government in 1997, there were modest attempts to address the issue. In England, a programme called NewStart (later rebranded as Relaunch) was established. In Wales, the Youth Access Initiative was introduced. Both were designed to help support young people to stay ‘included’, to reintegrate those who had already dropped out (or been kicked out), and to prevent young people from dropping out in the first place.  Most local authorities in Wales appointed dedicated outreach workers and sometimes school-based workers to tackle the issue.

The terminology steadily changed. ‘NEET’ was introduced in 1996 by a civil servant who was adamant that ‘status zer0’ was an obstacle to political debate and policy progress.  Subsequently, he was the lead author on Bridging the Gap: new opportunities for young people not in education, employment or training, the Social Exclusion Unit’s flagship report on the NEETs that was launched by the Prime Minister in June 1999.

Bridging the Gap was but one of a raft of policy ideas and initiatives designed to strengthen support for more disadvantaged and allegedly ‘disaffected’ young people. Some initiatives were very explicitly directed at the ‘NEETs’, the Connexions Service in England being a case in point. Others, such as Extending Entitlement in Wales were more implicitly concerned with ensuring reach and improving opportunities for young people at greater risk of, or already experiencing ‘social exclusion’.

Yet we arrive in 2009, during the latest recession, with quoted figures of approaching one million NEETs across England and Wales, though this statistic refers to a broader age group: 16-24 year olds.  Bridging the Gap had proclaimed, with surprising assuredness, the number to be 161,000 16 and 17-year olds.  Our own extrapolations in 1994, from a local study, would have placed the national figure at something similar, and most studies conducted later put the scale at between 100,000 and 200,000. The ‘official’ estimate for Wales is some 12,000 young people, between 10 and 12 per cent of the age group.

Yet the scale of the challenge is but one part of the context. Where policy has failed rather miserably is in differentiating between the ‘disengaged’. They are by no means all the same and of course there are different criteria on which they can be disaggregated, such as attitudes, previous experiences, current circumstances or something else.

My own ‘classification’, some years ago, related to the ‘seriously confused’, the ‘temporarily sidetracked’ and the ‘deeply alienated’. The first two groups were not fundamentally opposed to ‘re-engagement’ - the former needed attention and encouragement, the latter understanding and patience. In contrast, he last group had switched off from mainstream participation, and had either sunk into ‘purposeless’ behaviour (drinking, drug misuse) or become active in more ‘purposeful’ behaviour (instrumental criminality).

As one lad said, ‘I’ve got alternative ways of living’.  The point here is that policy approaches have also to be differentiated in recognition of these differences.  Too often, they are not.

Moreover, we have still failed to grasp in sufficient detail both the causes and consequences of being ‘NEET’. There are numerous precipitating and underlying factors that merit consideration and attention, and their relative weight and impact will vary amongst different clusters of individuals.

Equally, though the statistical evidence of the long-term consequences of being NEET at 16 or 17 is itself pretty dire, the future is not cast in stone and new prospects can shift the pathways of these young people’s lives in more positive directions. However, the bleak prognosis for many (and the public costs attached to dealing with it) remains the strongest economic case for more robust investment now.

Policy has to consider both preventative measures and ‘bridge-building’ opportunities. The latter have to be sure that they command some level of relevance and credibility for the individuals in question. Too often, they do not. What many, if not most, of these young people want is work and income, in other words a job. They are unwilling to be fobbed off with what they often see as meaningless and unattractive training ‘opportunities’, even if – to the labour market analyst – these make most sense to a particular context.

And this is the overarching issue. How do we reconcile what may appear to be a rather wishy-washy ‘youth work’ approach to those who are NEET? How do we  connect the often devastating consequences of teenage idleness with the tough-nosed labour market and economic imperatives that usually govern the recruitment strategies for the jobs that these young people really want?  These are the vital questions that policy makers need to address.

·      Howard Williamson is Professor of European Youth Policy at the University of Glamorgan. The IWA’s conference ‘Delivering a NEET Solution for Wales’ is being held at Coleg Gwent, Pontypool Campus on Friday 23 October. Click on Events on this website for details or ring 02920 660820.

He argued that if the achievements of Welsh scientists and the tradition of Welsh science was more widely known then we could expect that more young people would be encouraged to become involved with science in our schools.  They would also become aware that science and technology were drivers in the creation of modern Wales, from the 17^th Century onwards, and are essential to our contemporary economic competitiveness and sustainability.

One reason why there has been no effort to record and celebrate Welsh scientific achievement may lie in the judgement of an early pioneer in the field. This was T. Iorwerth Jones, who contributed an article to the Cymmrodorion in 1934 on the relationship of Wales with science. In it he described Welsh scientists as “isolated individuals rarely associated with one another and as unlinked as is conceivable with earlier or later prevailing thought in their native land. It therefore follows that little in the nature of a Welsh tradition in science emerges in these pages.”

This is a judgement that needs to be challenged, according to Professor Tucker. Personalities and achievements that would be underlined in any  history of Welsh science  would include the following:

·               The equal sign (=) was invented by Robert Recorde (1510-1588), born in Tenby.

·               William Jones (1675-1749) originally from Anglesey was a co-worker with Isaac Newton when the calculus was invented.

·               Links between the tin plate industry and Felinfoel Brewery led to the first ever beer can in Europe.

·               The work of the bone-setting physicians of Anglesey continued for almost two centuries leading to the establishment of a world famous orthopaedic clinic in Liverpool and the invention of the Thomas calliper, which saved thousands of limbs during the First World War.

·               The Denbigh born Isaac Roberts (1829-1904) took the first picture of an extra-galactic object, the Andromeda nebula.

·               Sir Brynmor Jones (1903-1989) who pioneered use of liquid crystal display.

·               Charles Wynn-Williams (1903-1979) invented the “scale of two” particle counter which became the basis for virtually all computers and digital equipment.

·               Donald Davies, born in Treorchy devised the technology, which lies behind the Internet.

·               The first transmission of radio waves was in Wales by Marconi (1897).

·               Britannia bridge was the first iron rail bridge in the world.

·               Richard Trevithick rail locomotive made its first journey on the Merthyr Tramroad.

·               Two of the most important geological ages (Silurian and Ordovician) are named after ancient Welsh tribes

·               The copper-zinc alloy (muntz metal) was invented in a Swansea copper works. Its use in naval ships was a significant factor in the dominance of the British Empire.

What we need, says Professor Tucker is a university course on the History of Welsh Science, more museum collections and archives, more blue plaques, more conferences and events to celebrate the anniversaries of Welsh scientific achievements and, of course, that book.

 ·      John Osmond is Director of the IWA

Wales’s 25 further education colleges and institutions provide 80 per cent of all post-16 qualifications in Wales. The majority of these courses are part time which enables students to work whilst studying for a qualification. Wales has consistently been shown to provide a better standard of Further Education than England which gives Wales a real head start in the provision of skilled workers to the business community. This may be why further education colleges are over-subscribed across Wales.

The Welsh Government should use this recession as an opportunity to increase the skills of Welsh people in order to make a meaningful contribution to the Welsh economy in future. These cuts undermine the ability of Wales to develop a skilled workforce and are likely to contribute to redundancies our colleges.

A sensible person might assume that during a period when youth unemployment is at its highest in over 15 years the Welsh Government would make it a priority to make sure that young adults have the skills that will be required in the upturn. When the recession is over it will be the countries which invested in skills and education that will be the first to succeed. Wales’s most precious resource is her people, and especially her young people. To make so-called ‘efficiency savings’ that in practice are more likely to involve real cuts to this area is shortsighted in terms of our long term prosperity.

· Kirsty Davies is Deputy Director of the IWA.

As befit the son of a emigrant Irish doctor, brought up in Aberdare, and the holder of both British and Irish passports, Hannan viewed Britain’s democracy from outside the English and British metropolis, both geographically and mentally. It is also a book that seems to delight in the fluidity of our current situation, and the sheer unpredictability of things. But it is definitely not a book to be lodged in the local interest sections of our large bookstores, rather a wide-ranging and mature reflection that draws on a lifetime’s reading and observation, and a depth of quirky knowledge that made him one of the stars of the BBC’s Round Britain quiz. 

It is also prescient. In a chapter entitled Where have all the voters gone? he was ahead of the game on MPs expenses: “The system of allowances (a word with neat overtones of legitimacy) was in many ways a sham devised to keep the public in the dark about the money MPs received  and why they received it.” He did not, however, join the lynch mob on this issue.

The expenses row rather illustrates one of his main theses that in the British constitution nothing is quite what it seems. Things happen “in fact, if not in theory”, like MPs allowances – or were they expenses? - or the transfer of sovereignty in different directions from our supposedly still omni-competent Parliament.

The book is prescient in other ways too. Hannan rightly surmised that Peter Hain’s rehabilitation was only a reshuffle away. It happened only a week after the book was launched at the Hay Festival. Then again, his excoriation of the Prince of Wales for wishing “to put Britain back the way it once was, or the way he thinks it once was, which is not the same thing”, was swiftly followed by yet another architectural row between the prince and Richard Rogers. Neatly, he described Charles as “a one-man Britain walking (or, more often, being driven) among us.”

Unlike most works on constitutional matters A Useful Fiction is entirely jargon free and immensely readable, as anyone who knows Hannan’s work might expect.

Countless committees are presently beavering away at the intricacies of the Barnett formula, and at its possible substitution by a needs-based formula, something Hannan describes as a “poverty contest”. His account of the current block grant for Scottish and Welsh governments is both funny and sobering – “leaving [the devolved governments] little more than pensioners drawing their allowances at the Westminster Post Office. They have to allocate a large part of their income to the fundamentals of everyday life – food, power, accommodation – and with what’s left over they can choose between cat food or a couple of pints of beer.” Why do I see Rhodri Morgan in that picture?

Hannan’s journey took him through all three nations of Great Britain and both parts the Irish island, tracing the elusiveness of Britishness, and concluding that Britain “is not actually country, but a state of mind”, and that English people are the group least alert to the governmental revolution that is taking place. He observed Scotland as it toys with the notion of independence and the prospect of becoming to England “what Canada has long been to the US”. He also noted the rise and fall of the Irish ‘tiger economy’ and its relevance or irrelevance for Welsh circumstances.

Hannan was not an evangelist for any cause - either conservative or radical. He was always resolutely sceptical of the certainties of the faithful. But as Britain faces yet more constitutional change - if we are to believe the politicians – this book is an incisive and accessible guide to, as he put it, “the rebuilding work that’s taking place behind the scaffolding and tarpaulins of Britishness”.

·      Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA. A Useful Fiction: Adventures in British Democracy, by Patrick Hannan, is published by Seren www.seren-books.com  This review appears in the current issue of the IWA’s journal Agenda. A further appreciation of Patrick Hannan, journalist, broadcaster, wit and raconteur, who died last Saturday, aged 68, will appear in the Autumn 2009 issue of Agenda, out in mid-November.

The content of the launch debate, with its emphasis on the urgent need to develop the concept of a polycentric city region, confirmed that we have probably got it right. The reality is that the branch will serve the area covered by the now defunct South and Mid Glamorgan County Councils that includes the Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend – although to have included both those places in the title would have given the branch are rather bureaucratic ring. 

The branch will be chaired by Huw Roberts, who qualifies on three counts – born in Abercynon, now working in Cardiff, but living in the Vale of Glamorgan. He is Director of Welsh Affairs for the Royal Mail Group and managing director of political consultancy, Huw Roberts Associates. He was Senior Special Adviser to Ron Davies MP, when the latter was Secretary of State for Wales. Huw, who has already gathered together an eclectic committee, will rejoin the IWA Board, having previously been a member in the 1990s. 

The new branch fills a major gap in our branch network in south Wales which already has three branches – for West Wales, Swansea and Gwent. The last of these has successfully addressed issues that relate both to Newport and to the Gwent valleys. The creation of the Cardiff and valleys branch means that Wales’s two eastern cities and the whole of the heads of the valleys area is now covered. 

Without agreeing on a solution both speakers at the launch event – Russell Goodway, the former Leader of Cardiff Council, and Professor Kevin Morgan, from Cardiff University’s City and Regional Planning Department – both agreed that regional solutions were needed for things such as housing, transport and waste management, and that current governance arrangements do not match our needs. 

Yet, by the end of the evening, the debate had come back to cultural differences between Cardiff and the Valleys and Wales’s historical unfamiliarity with large cities and urban discourse, leading to a Welsh affection for the Valleys that has never been extended to the capital. Culture may yet be a crucial determinant of the outcome of this debate. So join the branch and join in.

·      Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA.

 The credit crunch, recession and the expenses scandal have created a hugely unstable political backdrop. Gordon Brown’s claim that boom and bust were over has plainly backfired. But his light touch adulation of the City only continued what the Conservatives began back in 1986 when Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Big Bang’, which abolished the distinction between stockjobbers and stockbrokers on the London Stock Exchange and freed them to pursue a pirate-like operation across the globe.

 As for the MPs expenses scandal the Tories are as deeply mired in ordure as Labour. As far as I recall duck houses and moats were mainly Conservative creations and they flipped their properties as boldly and cheerfully as anyone else. I think both Tories and Labour are still in denial about what offending MPs can expect from the electorate when the time comes.

 It was noticeable that this issue came up hardly at all during the conference season. Yet it is the elephant in the political room. It hasn’t gone away. And getting tough on spending cuts, claiming candour about freezing public sector pay, and generally making a virtue of having to reduce our living standards – a novel approach to the electorate – won’t make it go away either.

So is it really 1997 all over again, that glad confident morning when Tony Blair swept in with his landslide and “to be alive was very heaven”? It doesn’t feel like it. History rarely repeats itself so soon.

To begin with Labour should have won the previous election in 1992, and if they had been led by John Smith rather than Neil Kinnock they would have. The Tories were not within sight of winning in 2005.

 By 1997 Tony Blair had really changed the Labour Party. New Labour wasn’t simply new, it was completely different. When the late, great Gwyn Alf Williams declared in the 1980s that we would never see a Labour Government again he was right.

David Cameron hasn’t changed the Tories in the same way. Certainly he has presented himself as a plausible figure. He looks and sounds as though he could be Prime Minister, which is better that all the previous candidates who have been Leader of the Opposition since 1997. But he hasn’t fundamentally changed the Conservative Party. It remains in favour of low taxes, against any real distributive fiscal policy, anti Europe Union, pro fox-hunting, basically anti green, but in favour of neo-colonial grandstanding in Afghanistan and other places around the world.

There is no real enthusiasm for the Tories who remain stuck around the late 30s in the opinion polls. If Labour loses its majority, as seems likely, it will be because they do not deserve to remain in office – mainly because of allowing the city to let rip and going to war in Iraq on a false prospectus. When he took over as Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised to be different, to restore the authenticity of Labour before it was seduced by Blair’s promise of electoral success. Above all he promised to be decisive, for instance on pursuing the constitutional change that Britain so desperately needs. He has reneged on all these fronts.

 None of this gives me any pleasure. We desperately need a government in London that recognises the reality of Britain’s place in the world, as a medium-sized country that sees itself in the European mainstream, no longer harbouring imperial pretensions and no longer clinging to the delusion of a special relationship with the United States. We need a Government with a proper understanding that the urgency of Climate Change means much, much more than promoting renewable energy on the one hand while allowing a third runway at Heathrow on the other. We need a government in London that acknowledges that the economic relationship between the City and the English South East of England needs to be rebalanced with the rest of the multi-national state. We need a new regard, and some actual help,  for people and businesses that earn their living by making things we really need.

 My main hope, therefore, is that neither the Tories nor Labour will win the forthcoming Westminster election, whenever it comes. Instead, we need a hung Parliament in which one or other of them will need to negotiate with the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Nationalists and Plaid Cymru to produce a modest, practical programme for government. This should be one that meets the economic  needs of the whole of Britain, that is determined to modernise our feudal constitution, and one that acknowledges that Britain itself can no longer be imagined as the global economic power it briefly was in the few decades leading up to World War I.

•  John Osmond is Director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs.
  

 Briefings were given by Victoria Winkler of the Bevan Foundation, Graham Benfield from the WCVA and myself on behalf of the IWA.

 Only two of the 22 trusts represented at the session claimed to have no shortage of Welsh applications: the BBC’s Children in Need and the Lloyds/TSB Foundation. Significantly, both have staff based in Wales, while Children in Need has the added benefit of massive guaranteed exposure on television.

 This evidence confirmed my own experience while at the Arts Council of Wales some years ago when a few of the largest trusts in the UK told me of their common experience that, first, they had few applications from Wales, but just as significantly, the applications were often badly researched, failing to meet the trust’s aims and criteria and, more surprisingly, that Welsh organisations often did not ask for enough.

 Why should this be? Graham Benfield, told us that that there were 30,000 voluntary organisations in Wales, representing half a million volunteers. This speaks volumes for the community spirit in Wales. Uniquely in the UK, this has been recognised in the devolution statutes that decree a partnership between the Assembly and the sector, complete with a Voluntary Sector Partnership Council and County Volunteer Councils in every county.

 The awful thought occurred that Welsh organisations may be passing up the chance of funding from trusts and foundations because, as Professor Kevin Morgan of Cardiff University often argues, Wales has become too Welsh Government-centric.

 The thought was buttressed by Graham Benfield’s data which showed that 43 per cent of the income of the voluntary sector in Wales comes from public sources: 22 per cent from the Welsh Government, 17 per cent from local government and health authorities, 4 per cent from Europe, with another 4 per cent from the National Lottery. As for the remaining 53 per cent, the public donates 26 per cent, with another 20 per cent coming from trading and investments, 4 per cent from business and only 3 per cent from trusts and foundations.

 There is just the possibility that voluntary organisations in Wales, often with tiny staffs or no staff at all, find it easier to apply for public funding schemes in Wales than to research the thousands of private trusts that exist, most of them outside the coungry.

 The Trusts themselves acknowledged that there is often a difficulty in dealing with the small scale of almost everything in Wales. In discussion several started to think in terms of what consortia of private trusts could do to tackle issues in a coordinated way, either on an all-Wales basis or, more likely, across a more limited area.

 Equally, there might be a role for the WCVA, by adding to its existing training and support services with more research and brokerage, leading to the aggregation of the needs of organisations with similar issues into larger applications.

 It’s not just a question of bringing more money into Wales, although we could certainly do with the extra £66m that would bring us up to the magic 5 per cent share of UK trust giving. It’s also a question of philosophy. The underlying value of the voluntary sector is to keep open that public space that is neither tied to government nor private business. We must be careful not to let our voluntary sector be nationalised. 

 ·      Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA. 

 “The M4 does not have to be a barrier. The only way to break the deadlock that prevents us moving forward is to create a city regional government with a directly elected mayor who could come from anywhere in the region. Only an initiative on this scale could change our direction of travel.

 “We cannot leave this to chance,” he declared. “As things stand our governance arrangements in Wales do not meet our economic needs.”

 Professor Morgan said south-east Wales currently suffered from a “cacophony of voices all straining to be heard” – 10 local authorities, including two cities. He said if he went abroad and came back after ten years he did not believe he would return to a country that had 22 local authorities. Local government reorganisation was unavoidable in the next decade and perhaps during the National Assembly’s fourth term following 2011. The case for a city region centred on Cardiff should be part of the thinking that was gathering pace around another shake-up of Welsh local government.

 He warned, however, that while the advantages of a city region approach were clear enough for Cardiff, the case had to be made for the Valleys. He did not believe that people in the Heads of the Valleys would ever see Cardiff as the magnet for jobs that people in the lower end of the Valleys did. Any city region scheme had to have a built-in distribution of investment across its area. Mid-Valley towns such as Pontypridd, Caerphilly, Blackwood, and Oakdale would need to be seen as complementary development poles to Cardiff.

 “What is the long-term future for the Valleys?” he asked. “Surely it can only be combination of being a commuter belt for Cardiff, but combined with an investment strategy that genuinely spreads resources and benefits across the region.”

 Much of the discussion among the 80-strong audience focused on the need for improved communications to make the integration of a potential city region centred on Cardiff feasible. It was argued that south-east Wales was ideal both in terms of geographical size and critical mass of approaching 2 million people for investing in a high speed light rail system along the lines that connected many continental cities, such as Stuttgart in Baden Wurttemberg, and Bordeaux in western France with their hinterlands.

 ·      John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

 If British broadcasting can claim to be superior to the bulk of US television, among the quality prints perhaps it is America’s New York Times and the Wall Street Journal  that take the laurels. How many British broadsheets would carry an apology (as the NYT did this week) for misspelling Cosi fan tutte as Cosi fan tutti, even if they had spotted the mistake.

 Tuesday, 29^th September

 Today, two case studies in American philanthropy.

 First to the mansion of the steel and coke magnate, Henry Clay Frick, overlooking Central Park. Frick assembled an eclectic collection of European paintings and sculpture, and bequeathed the collection and his restrained but opulent pile to the American nation on his death in 1919. His agents must have been at work at the same time as the agent of Wales’s Davies sisters whose collection of impressionist paintings, bequeathed to our own National Museum, is now on a tour of American cities.

Frick and the Davies sisters had one thing in common, their collections were drawn primarily from outside their own countries. Only two American artists feature in the Frick collection – five paintings by Whistler, and a solitary painting by Gilbert Stuart, there only because it is a patriotic portrait of George Washington. The Davies sisters were clearly more resolutely contemporary in their patronage than Frick.

 Wales today may not have the wealth of New York, or even of the heydey of Welsh coal, but how many of today’s Welsh millionaires – of which there are a surprising number - busy themselves assembling collections of contemporary art whether Welsh, British, French or American?

 Second, further down Park Avenue that evening, to the deconsecrated former Christian Science church, that now serves as an elegant up-market function room – a cross between Morriston’s Tabernacl chapel and Barry’s now vanished Bindles ballroom – and the setting for a recital by Bryn Terfel – the inaugural event of the American Friends of Welsh National Opera.

 WNO enjoys two considerable assets at the moment – the support of the brightest star in the global opera firmament, Bryn Terfel, and the fact that WNO’s Chief Executive and Artistic Director, John Fisher, was for many years a senior figure at the ‘Met’. As a result the evening produced a remarkable turnout of patrons of opera in perhaps the richest city in the world, as well as of Welsh Americans.

 Philanthropy is more deeply ingrained in the civic culture of the USA than in Britain. It is an historical phenomenon that has to do with much more than a benign tax regime, though that has helped. For its 125^th anniversary the New York Metropolitan Opera raised no less than 175 million dollars!

 What was heartening for all of us in the WNO team was the obvious warmth and high regard for our company, the ready association of Wales with song, and the determination of so many to visit Wales next June for WNO’s new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger in which Bryn will sing the lead role of Hans Sachs for the very first time. In this influential group the forthcoming Meistersinger is more important and enticing a prospect even than the Ryder Cup, though some opera goers play golf and vice versa. Bryn Terfel’s handicap is 12. 

 For WNO, the event was a flying start for the long-term task of building an American network of support for Wales’s best-known cultural asset, as well as deeper two-way creative relationships. It builds on the successful Welsh presence this summer at the Smithsonian Festival in Washington – at which a WNO Max team arranged song workshops with local children. But it also underlined how much more Wales could do to exploit to the full the potential of the arts to raise our profile abroad. Its now almost 20 years since the full WNO company performed in the US.

 I can offer Wales’s image builders one moment of encouragement: one opera lover who has visited Cardiff regularly told me he particularly enjoyed his hotel, with ‘a lovely view of the lagoon’. Cardiff Bay will never be the same again. 

 Wednesday, 30^th September 

The almost overwhelmingly large Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition of the work of the American photographer Robert Franks – The Americans. His documenting of Americans in the immediate post-war years in grainy black and white pictures is a masterpiece. But good to see that the museum shop is also selling London/Wales – Franks’ contrasting take on London bankers and Welsh miners in the early fifties. In 1953 he spent many months in Caerau and Maesteg capturing an industrial culture that would be all but dead within 20 years. The contrasts that Franks captured seem especially and painfully relevant today.

 Thursday, 1^st October

 In political terms New York is a Democratic Party stronghold. As a result conversations turn quite quickly to the saga of health care reform. This week the Senate Finance Committee ruled out all attempts to include a ‘public option’ in the reform proposal, concentrating instead on forms of insurance. For many east coast democrats this was a depressing result, not just on policy grounds but because it underlined again the hideous gulf that now exists between liberal and neocon America.

 This led one seasoned commentator, Thomas Friedman, in a New York Times column, to argue that “our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word ‘we’ with a straight face. There is no more ‘we’ in American politics.” He went on to worry that much of the language of attack on President Obama is so vitriolic that “someone might draw from [them] a licence to try to hurt the President.” He drew a parallel with the political climate in Israel before the Rabin assassination in 1995.

 Among the contributing factors, Friedman cites the dark side of the blogosphere “that gives a new power to anonymous slanderers”. Seeing a serious commentator like Friedman feel the need to express such fear for the consequences of the collapse of rational debate, pulls you up short. It should remind us in the UK of the value of the requirements of fairness and impartiality placed on broadcasters - requirements that James Murdoch, in his recent Edinburgh lecture, was so keen to get rid of.

 ·      Geraint Talfan Davies is Chairman of Welsh National Opera as well as the IWA.

 Labour pointed to this result and declared it was absurd for “everybody to be elected”. Thus the ban on dual candidacy was introduced in the Wales Act 2006. However, this could now rebound on Labour itself. For what it means is that none of the three contenders for the leadership, all of whom represent first-past-the-post constituencies, can also put their names on the List as a fail safe back-up.

 When Labour brought in the dual ban, only a few years ago, it could hardly have imagined that they would have any problems with seats like the Gower, Bridgend, and least of all, Merthyr - the constituencies of the three contenders for the leadership Edwina Hart, Carwyn Jones and Huw Lewis. Yet in the wake of the 2007 Assembly election, this year’s European elections, and the current state of the polls, none of these seats look invulnerable.

 Most marginal is Gower, followed by Bridgend and Merthyr. Indeed, on the basis of the polls, the Electoral Calculus website predicts that both Gower and Bridgend will fall to the Conservatives at next May’s Westminster election. In Gower it places the Conservatives on 34 per cent (25.5 per cent in 2005), and Labour on 32 per cent (42 per cent in 2005). In Bridgend it puts the Conservatives on 34 per cent (26 per cent in 2005) and Labour on 32 per cent (43 per cent in 2005).

 Could Conservative victories in these constituencies in the Westminster election be followed up in the Assembly election in May 2011? Again it is Gower that is most vulnerable. In 2007 Edwina Hart polled 34 per cent (down 9.5 per cent on 2003) and the Conservative’s Byron Davies 30 per cent (up 10 per cent). That was close enough. Indeed, Labour probably only held on to the seat as a result of the UKIP candidate polling six per cent of the vote, which otherwise might have been expected to have gone to the Conservatives.

 Carwyn Jones’s position in Bridgend looks a lot safer. In 2007 he polled 40 per cent of the vote (only 2 per cent down on 2003) compared with the Conservative’s 30 per cent. Even so in the volatile political situation we can anticipate in 2011, 10 per cent is not a comfortable margin.

 Merthyr might be thought one of the safest seats imaginable, and for next year’s Westminster election it will remain so. However, the Assembly election looks more problematic. In 2007 Huw Lewis’s vote crashed by an extraordinary 23.5 per cent - down from 60.5 per cent in 2003 to 37 per cent, from 11,148 votes to 7,776. The main reason was the performance of an array of four Independent candidates who between them polled 15 per cent of the vote. This was a reflection of a dissatisfaction with Labour that is being exhibited across the Valleys, especially in Blaenau Gwent where Independents hold both Westminster and Assembly seats, and which could be accentuated in 2011.

 So all three candidates for Labour’s leadership may have cause to look back ruefully at their party’s decision to ban dual candidacies. A boomerang may be down the track.

• John Osmond is Director of the IWA.