What future for our youth?

Youth unemployment rates are shocking. UK-wide, 18-24 year olds make up one fifth of all unemployed. However, in the valleys of South Wales, they make up a third of all job seekers' claimants.

According to the ONS, there are a total of 2470 people claiming out-of-work benefits in the Rhondda, 960 of whom are under 24, as of April 5th 2011. The youth unemployment levels as a percentage of the total figure for the Rhondda is 38.8%, while in the Cynon Valley it is 37.4%, Neath 36.3% and Caerffili, 35.7%. The number of job vacancies in those constituencies varies from 151 in the Rhondda to 264 in Caerffili.

The chances of current incapacity claimants finding work in the valleys are not high.

In remarks reminicient of 'unemployment is a price worth paying', Tory Energy Minister Greg Barker gives the ideological game away by telling a US audience that his government is "making cuts which I think that Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980s could only have dreamt of.”

This is not a new problem - youth unemployment rates for the valleys were shocking under the Labour UK government too.

It is safe to assume that these areas in Wales which have deep, structural and long-term economic problems are unlikely to receive any special attention from London. As the late DJ Davies, one of the founders of Plaid Cymru said in 1931, "Let us cease looking to others, or to Westminster either for help. It is Wales alone that can lift Wales from the dust."

The aim of the Valleys Greenprint is to put DJ's words into action. It is the beginnings of what I hope will be an action-based plan to create jobs, opportunities and an economic future for the valleys, by doing things for ourselves.

A willing Welsh government could help by making sure public sector purchasing power is used to help create local jobs and train people. It could bring together the various players to make finance available for people to take out no-up-front-cost loans to maximise their home energy efficiency and invest in micro-generation which would significantly reduce home heating bills and help to create more work. Government could make public land available and it could provide practical support for people to set up and run the businesses to undertake the work that needs doing. And it could make sure that the training courses are available to ensure that people have the right skills.

But a plan like this can only work if people want it to. Can we rekindle the famous community spirit and the self-belief, self-confidence and self-determination of our mining forefathers who built the institutions that were the backbone of the valleys before the days of the welfare state? Welfare halls, schools, libraries, hospitals were all built using collective resources. In previous recessions, the miners could not afford to hope that Westminster would bail them out. And neither can we.

I have already received expressions of interest from business people interested in the ideas and I have set up a facebook group for anyone who is interested in registering to help develop the job creation ideas in the Valleys Greenprint. Do you want to help turn around the economy, fortunes and future of our valleys? Why not sign up?

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Even though a fortnight has passed since news broke of the ‘lock-out’ at Rhondda Cynon Taf county borough council, the news is yet to truly sink in.

For those who haven’t heard, the Labour-run council has threatened 10,000 workers in Rhondda Cynon Taf with a ‘lock-out’ unless they accept lower terms and conditions of employment without any negotiations, by-passing the trades unions and refusing to rule out compulsory redundancies.

In the Rhondda, we have just commemorated the 100 years since the Tonypandy riots broke out. How ironic is the timing of this anniversary?

In terms of shafting their core supporters, this "gun-boat diplomacy" is up there with the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

In fact, Labour is the only party to have threatened staff with a lock-out in Wales – first in Neath and now in Rhondda Cynon Taf. The Tories have taken similar action in England but not even they have dared to try the same in Wales. The Plaid group on RCT council have battled to prevent this non-negotiable down-grade of workers' terms and conditions, but the ruling Labour group voted to hand over responsibility for decisions about staff over to the Chief Executive just before the threatened lock-out. Do those Labour councillors really believe that keeps their hands clean?

RCT council is prepared to ride rough-shod over the workers’ terms and conditions before knowing the level of finance they will receive from the Assembly Government. The Assembly's draft budget is not due to be published until the 17th of November. Councils will know their financial settlement after that.

RCT's non-negotiable plan includes cutting the overtime payments of some of the lowest paid staff. I want to know much of a pay cut the top brass are taking. And the cabinet members? How 'all-in-this-together' are we in RCT?

In the valleys before the last election, Labour told people that only they could stop the Tories. How hollow these claims must sound to their voters now that they are behaving exactly like them.

The valleys and tunnels

Great article in the Western Mail today about the abandoned tunnels that scatter the south Wales valleys. The legacy of heavy industry, these feats of engineering were used to transport coal and materials between areas that would have otherwise been separated by thousands of tonnes of rugged landscape.

Now Plaid's prospective General Election candidate for Cynon Valley, Dafydd Trystan, has proposed opening up these tunnels to link up communities that are very close geographically but miles away from each other due to the road network.
Speaking as a board member of the sustainable travel charity Sustrans about the tunnels between Abernant and Merthyr Tydfil and between Penrhiwceiber and Quakers Yard, Dafydd said:

“Both these tunnels could provide a fascinating walk or cycle ride, especially for anyone interested in our transport history, as well as a convenient inter-valley route. I very much hope studies can go ahead which could eventually lead to their reopening.”

I think this is a fantastic idea and should be seriously explored. There's a blocked up tunnel between Treherbert and Blaengwynfi in the Afan valley. If the tunnels in question are in a good state of repair it should cost a relatively small amount of money to reopen them and the benefits to all communities concerned would be felt instantly.

Travel time between the major town of Aberdare and Merthyr Tydfil could be slashed, which would not only be beneficial to commuters and the economy, but also to the environment. We need to be doing all we can to reduce our green-house gas emissions, and car-travel, which is almost essential for travelling between valleys, is one of our greatest emitters. Cutting time spend on the road would reduce emissions from cars, but re-opening the railtrack, if it still runs under the mountains, would help to reduce car usage much more.

Many communities would, I'm sure, feel and be a lot less isolated if some of the old tunnels could be reopened. It is very difficult to place a value on the benefits it could deliver as I've never experienced life living in a community where the road runs out. The idea deserves wider consideration as it could provide good opportunities to people who would otherwise struggle to access employment.

New drug treatment centre for the valleys?

Good news this week from the diamorphine-on-prescription trials which have been running in England.

In One Wales, there is a committment which reads:

"We will, in relation to substance misuse, further integrate the principles of harm-reduction models by considering, if the evidence supports it, adoption of the pilot programmes currently underway in England."

In 2007, I did some research which showed much higher levels of referrals for heroin treatment programmes in former coalfield areas. I hope this research will show that there is a strong case for a pilot to be set up somewhere in the valleys.

Remembering Thatcher

This is a translation of an article appearing in this week's Golwg.

This week marks the Assembly’s tenth birthday. It also marks the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the economic experiment which has since become known as “Thatcherism”. Two decades of being on the losing end of this experiment made it easy to persuade people to vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum which led to setting up the Assembly.

I spent the summer of 1997 campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote. At that time, people felt largely optimistic about a future which could move on from Thatcherism.

New Labour had just turfed the Tories out of government after 18 years. During that time the Tories had inflicted – without an electoral mandate – gravely damaging policies on Wales. Most people around me in the Rhondda were vigorously opposed to more or less everything the Tories stood for. Valleys people had stood up to the Tories. Throughout the miners’ strike they had given their all in an ideological battle with Thatcher’s government, because they knew that losing would be a disaster. How right they were. The price for losing that battle is still being paid today.

I was eight years old when the Tories came to power in 1979. I belonged to the much talked about “Thatcher generation”, with no memory of anything other than a Tory government. By 1984, I was a first year pupil at Tonypandy Comprehensive School. I remember complaining about having to carry heavy tins into school to give to the miners’ kids, who, because their dads were on strike, were “worse off than us” and so needed our help. But my father wasn’t a miner and so, although the strike had a massive impact on the wider community, it didn’t have an immediate and direct effect on our family life.

That was until my dad was also made redundant. He was out of work for years, which meant reliance on embarrassing home-made or old-fashioned ‘hand-me-down’ clothes, queuing for free school meal tickets, missing out on school trips and events as well as after-school activities like dancing classes. There were a lot of us in that situation. There was a real sense of hopelessness in so many of our home lives.

I have few fond memories of the ’80s – my teenage years. We had a good voluntary, on-a-shoe-string-run youth club offering somewhere to hang out on Mondays through to Thursdays. There were some great teachers in school. But there was no money to “do” things. There were too few free things to “do”. Weekends and school holidays were spent in back lanes or on street corners. Too many of my male contemporaries ended up in the prison system, their crime careers starting with a flagon of Strongbow in the back lanes. Cider too often progressed to other more dangerous substances; drugs like heroin were cheap, easily available and attractive to a generation who’d come to believe that the only thing they had to look forward to was the fortnightly dole giro cheque. Too many girls had babies too early. Jarvis Cocker summed up the culture and the feeling when he sang “We drank, and we danced and we screwed, coz there was nothing else to do.” The best word to describe the atmosphere is “hopeless”.

The defeat of the miners’ strike led to high levels of unemployment. Thatcher’s deliberate decimation of the mining industry and, more importantly, its union caused untold damage, much of which is still starkly visible today. In some valleys areas, a fifth of young people are out of work. Mental health, problematic substance usage and crime levels are shockingly high in some former mining areas, as are statistics for poverty, ill health and premature death. The legacy and the memory of Thatcher’s policies will not fade easily in my part of Wales.

But it would be too easy to place all responsibility for this onto one person. Margaret Thatcher is a powerful icon, but she is merely the symbolic UK representative of a global neo-liberal/free market economic movement which was embraced and continued by Labour after the Tories left office. In 1979 Thatcherism broke with the post-war consensus which favoured and supported the welfare state. Breaking that consensus and aiming to cut the size of the state was a revolution – but not a good one.

The current economic crisis has now laid bare the problems at the heart of the Thatcherite free-market experiment. This situation necessitates a new break with the neo-liberal consensus that has dominated UK politics since Thatcher came to power in 1979. Wales has never shown much of an appetite for Thatcherite economics and it can be argued that the Assembly would not now be celebrating its tenth birthday had we not lived through Thatcherism. It has to be hoped that her long-term legacy will be a powerful, left-leaning Welsh government, willing and able to defend people in Wales from any more "experiments" imposed by London governments, be they Tory or Labour.