Plaid Conference speech - September 2008

Ers dechrau arwain llywodraeth Cymru’n Un y llynedd, ry’n ni wedi meiddio bod yn wahanol fel Plaid. Mae’n gweinidogion a’n haelodau cynulliad wedi creu llewyrch ym meysydd iechyd, amaeth ac addysg, drwy bolisiau beiddgar ac ymroddiad arbennig. Ond mewn meysydd eraill nad sy’n ddatganoledig mae pethau dipyn yn fwy ansicir

Rydym yn cwrdd eleni yn ystod cyfnod stormus iawn i filoedd o deuluoedd a phobl hyn dros Gymru. Mae’r sefyllfa yn y farchand dai wedi bod yn ddifrifol ers dros flwyddyn a phrisiau olew, tanwydd a rhai bwydydd nawr yn codi allan o afael rhai.

Yn Llanelli o le rwy’n dod, mae yna strydoedd y symudodd teuluoedd ifainc iddynt dwy neu dair mlynedd yn ol gyda hanner y tai ar werth - nid ar ocsiwn eto gan fod pobl yn dewis gadael eu tai cyn i’r banciau eu meddiannu a chyn iddyn nhw golli’r hawl i fenthyg am byth. Rwy’ wedi bod yn chwilio am dŷ newydd yn Llanelli yn ddiweddar, ac wedi gweld dipyn o’r tai hyn. Llefydd braf, wedi eu haddurno a gofal, gyda lloriau pren gloyw, aelwydydd newydd, gerddi wedi eu plannu. Roedd y perchnogion yn bobl oedd yn falch o’u cartrefi. Roedden nhw’n meddwl eu bod yn buddsoddi yn nyfodol eu teuluoedd. Pobl o’m cenhedlaeth i gyda’u tŷ cyntaf a’u plant ifanc. Pobl a ddewisodd i aros yn Llanelli a buddsoddi ynddi. Nid trachwant oedd hyn ond pobl yn dangos eu bod yn perthyn i dref ac i ardal, ac oedd am gael rhywfaint o sicrwydd ariannol i’w teuluoedd. Mae’r ddelfryd yna allan o gyrraedd llawer erbyn hyn.

I’r sawl sydd yn llwyddo i gadw’u tai mae’r pwysau hefyd wedi cynyddu. Rwy’n ‘nabod athrawon ysgol sy’n cynnig gwasanaethau gwarchod plant ar ben eu gwaith dysgu er mwyn cadw 2 ben llinyn ynghyd. O achos newidiadau ar drethu eiddo, buddsoddodd lawer o bobl hyn yn eu tai yn hytrach na mewn pensiwn. Maen’ nhw nawr yn gweld eu sicrwydd yn diflannu mewn ffordd na chredon nhw oedd yn bosib.

We didn’t get here by accident. The London consensus led by the Tories and New Labour rewards huge risk-taking in the city of London. Many mortgages were offered on multiples of more than six times the borrower’s income. Some borrowers were encouraged to lie about their income and loans of 125% created instant negative equity. Fuelled by this bonanza of credit, house prices became absurdly inflated and it was inevitable that this pyramid of greed would topple as the people at the bottom could no longer sustain their increasing level of debt.

With a 70% fall in home loans approval rates on last year, we are now seeing the greatest collapse in the housing market since records began. The signs are now clear that we’re entering a recession and it won’t be a short one. The Governor of the Bank of England says we’ve come to the end of the NICE age – that’s to say non inflationary continuous expansion.
We remember, don’t we, TB’s bright new idea of Britain in 97? He talked about the chains of mediocrity being broken, “the tired days are behind us’, he said ‘we are free to excel once more’. But what we see is pawnbrokers profits up 50% as people have nowhere else to go to meet the bills. Northern Rock alone repossessed nearly 4 thousand homes between January and August this year. The governments’ own reports predict a steep increase in crime as people are impoverished and dispossessed and begin to turn on each other.

Yes the market gives and the market takes away, but it takes away mostly from the poorest.

Land rover sales are down 32% and BMW’s by 40%. Looking at the car park this morning, most of us will not feel directly effected. But we make Landrover parts in Llanelli and we make them from Welsh steel.

The problem with the recession isn’t that it makes many of us spend more carefully or even that overblown house prices correct themselves. Those are undoubtedly good things insofar as ensuring that people’s first homes are affordable. But recessions hurt the poorest the most – older people whose income doesn’t rise to meet inflation, and younger people on lower wages. These groups spend a high proportion of their income on food, fuel and housing, and they have already been hit from all sides as these costs keep on rising. The cost of a basket of food has risen 20% in the past year, domestic fuel 19% and petrol is up 25%. British Gas has raised prices by over a third and others will follow.


Of course we’ve been here before. When I grew up in the 80s in Llanelli, things were pretty dark. I remember Duports, the steel works, closing and the thousands of redundancy letters left in the streets by people whose lives as well as their livelihoods had been shattered by an overnight closure. I remember the last pit in the Gwendraeth closing and coming through Pontyates at night and seeing there were no more lights in the houses in Cynheidre. The whole community had migrated to find work.

Not everybody left. My friends’ fathers took jobs as security guards or long distance lorry drivers. As happened all across South Wales, families began to depend on the woman’s wage. It was a community where people did not have enough and certainly didn’t have all they wanted. But those who could stay, chose to do so. It was a place where people were known for their talents and their abilities and there was a tactful silence about other people’s wages or how long they’d been unemployed.

Llanelli is a town that punches above its weight – its rugby and football teams, its male voice choir, the Burry Port opera and brass band, and the annual pantomime at Theatr Elli that would play to packed houses. It had a string of carnivals when I was a child, including one in Furnace where I used to try to ride on the floats on some pretext every year. The carnival committees must have met all year long to organise them with no funding and in some areas like Seaside and Hendy the carnivals and the hard graft behind them persist to this day. What Llanelli also has is an enormous richness in the voluntary sector –organisations for people living with medical conditions or reduced mobility and for their carers, and dedicated, high profile campaigns such as that for a hospice that the people of Llanelli built and a world class centre for breast cancer treatment built with funds collected locally and secured through the One Wales government. People in Llanelli stand together and if some fall, they will be helped up.

Growing up in Llanelli, I learnt what solidarity and a love of community meant before I could ever describe them.

I love Llanelli. I love the stubborness of the people who stayed when times were even harder than now. I love the honesty and unpretentionusness that even newcomers are forced to adopt. I love the increasing confidence Llanelli has in its Welsh identity. The other side of love is that you fight for what you care for. Fight to keep jobs and for fair working conditions, fight for affordable homes and fight for a prosperous society that leaves no-one behind.

And there are many battles that need to be fought. In the past year, we’ve seen nothing but announcements of redundancies. Corus, Avon Inflatables and Draka, the very last tinplate works in a town that used to be called Tinopolis plan to shed hundreds of jobs. Corus is focussing European production in the Netherlands, Avon’s owners are moving to France, while Draka, intends to close in Llanelli because its suppliers have moved elsewhere. These are skilled jobs that we will struggle to replace and the truth is, we lost them because it is easier to sack people here than virtually anywhere else in the EU. Some people may think that the European elections are not relevant to them, but we need to send Plaid Cymru MEPs back to Brussles to fight for fair working conditions, because it’s right, but also because now more than ever we have to protect our skilled manufacturing jobs.

If I leant about solidarity in Llanelli, I’ve also seen what the free market can do to our communities.

What has Gordon Brown and his government done?

So far the lifeline of public money has been flung only at the financial institutions not to the victims of their reckless lending. In April, Brown’s failing government agreed to channel 50 billion pounds of public money into banks in exchange for mortgage bonds they couldn’t sell. The banks were then meant to reduce mortgage rates and provide loans for first time buyers but what they did was take the money and run, increasing mortgage rates for anyone without a large deposit. New Labour got nothing for our money – not even a moratorium on bonuses or a promise to go easy on repossessing people’s homes. This is 50 billion not spent on schools and hospitals. It is real money that small businesses and individual families have been paying through their taxes.

More recently, the government published a review into the crisis, chaired by Sir James Crosby, the former HBOS chairman. Sir James wrote that he: “held extensive consultations, with a wide range of…mortgage lenders, banks, building societies, specialist lenders, investment firms, mortgage brokers and trade associations”. Well that’s alright then. With the advice of people like that the ordinary man and woman has nothing to fear. Vested interests? Us? The report predictably advises that the only thing to do is to give more public money to the banks to support mortgage lending.

To give a false boost to the housing market is immoral and dishonest.
It is an incredible injustice that the same men who gambled away other people’s security expect ordinary people to pick up the bill through higher interest rates or having Gordon Brown’s washed-up and confused government underwrite the debt.

Where is the opposition from the British left?
The truth is, there is none.
Gordon Brown is held in thrall by the New Labour doctrine of light touch regulation. His backbenchers may complain about him, but they do nothing to challenge the dominance of reckless bankers even when that means that people’s most basic needs for affordable food, a job, and a home in their own communities are not being met. They know they have lost the next election and that selfish knowledge has paralysed them while their constituents are going under.
The left has used economic crises in the past to envisage a more equal society. Most notably the depression gave us Roosevelt’s New Deal.
In this case though, silence speaks volumes.
In the US, with the Democrats sighting a possible presidential victory, there are plans for banking reform to ensure that greedy lending by banks is brought to heel. On this island, neither hide nor hair has been seen of New Labour.
Silence is one thing. But New Labour has run out of ideas.
What started with moves to accommodate the market has ended in ignorance of how markets function and how they may go wrong. All of this didn’t matter when interest rates were low and mass unemployment seemed to be a thing of the past.
Now it does matter. New Labour’s failure to tame the market means people lose their homes. New Labour admits that this will lead to higher crime and family breakdown and it is time to do something about it.
So how will we create a progressive strategy to deal with the crisis? Firstly, we will support people, not mortgage lenders. We will target fuel providers and use the mechanisms that the market already has so those who can’t pay inflated prices receive a reduction before they’re billed.
Plaid in government will offer practical help to those most in need. We have launched a mortgage rescue scheme to help people at most risk of losing their homes by enabling housing associations to take on some of the mortgage debt or buy the home outright and let it back to its owners. On fuel prices, we will demand that the UK government helps Wales’ most vulnerable people and we were the first party to call for a fuel duty regulator to alleviate the burden of rising fuel costs on families. We have made funds available to develop 'Community Land Trusts', in partnership with local people to expand the supply of affordable homes in rural areas.

A new Welsh Agenda means protecting our people as much as we can in these hard times. We can’t stop the financial crisis but we can act decisively to help those at most risk of going under. A new Welsh Agenda means not mortgaging fairness for quick fix popularity and staying committed to supporting young people to find affordable housing for sale or rent in their local communities.
We know that the right to buy legislation meant the loss of the right to a home for less well-off and homeless people. We all know of council tenants who bought their houses without considering the impact on their benefits and who became homeless when they couldn’t pay the mortgage. Jocelyn Davies our housing minister is driving through a law so that this most unfair mechanism can be abolished by local authorities in areas of housing pressure.
Long before it was fashionable, Plaid was committed to tackling the climate crisis. We can see that while peak oil is a threat, it is also an opportunity for local communities to build a better and more sustainable future. And there are substantial savings to be made. We know that UK industry wastes almost 7 million pounds per day through energy inefficiency. It could save 2.5 billion a year, which would be equivalent to the annual salaries of more that 100,000 people on average wage.

Labour has neither the knowledge nor the stomach to take on the bankers. We know the next Tory government will do nothing to curb the excesses of their city friends. We, Plaid Cymru, are the only party who can continue the radical progressive tradition of our nation. We must follow in the foot steps of the cooperatives, trade unions and credit unions. We must speak with authority about the need to put people ahead of city bankers.

Through the one Wales government we have reached across political divides to help create a modern, just and prosperous nation. We will do so again. We believe in an economy where people’s lives, their families and their communities are at the heart of decision making - a moral economy rather than a pure market economy, and in time we will build that economy in Wales.

We want to lead a debate about how to ensure fairness is built into a stable and sustainable economy but there are no takers among the London parties. The Tories and New Labour will always put the market first, believing in light regulation with the fervour of those who have nowhere left to go and nothing else to say. But in these dying years of New Labour, they are wasting an opportunity that would have been beyond the dreams of the trades unionists who first formed their party. Why doesn’t Gordon Brown’s government make a stand against greed? Why won’t they learn from these hard lessons and back ordinary people? Why won’t they say that the tens of billions that we have spent to patch up the failures of the banking system would have been better spent on hospitals and schools and effective small businesses? What do they have to lose? Anyone can see that they will not win the next election, but they are so frightened of the ordinary people they have left behind, that they won’t help them even now.

Labour has chosen its side. It is on the side of the market whatever the price to the working class, to people too ill to work and to anyone who’s extended themselves too far.

New Labour has left its values behind and it’s left Llanelli behind. It is no longer a party that has anything left to say to the Welsh people and it is sad that it will go into its electoral twilight clutching at its banker friends and ignoring the needs of the tens of thousands of Welsh people they have ruined

We never left working people behind and we never will.

Mudiad i gynnal gobaith mewn cenedl y buPlaid Cymru am y rhan fwyaf o’i hanes. Plaid fach gyda gweledigaeth fawr i Gymru, sydd yn brysur cael eu gwireddu drwy Lywodraeth Cymru’n Un.

Diolch i’n llwyddiant yn etholiad 2007 ry’ ni mewn sefyllfa i newid pethau er gwell ar lefel ymarferol - i helpu pobl i gadw’u tai, i ddarparu tai cymdeithasol o’r safon uchaf ac i helpu pobl i brynu eu tai cyntaf. Ond roedd Gwynfor hefyd yn sylweddoli mai diben Plaid Cymru oedd i newid Cymru gyfan. ‘Dyw hi ddim yn ddigon da bod penderfyniadau ar forgeisi a phensiynau’n cael eu gwneud yn Llundain. Chawn ni fyth fwyafrif ymhlith pleidiau Llundain i bennu amodau ar y farchnad. Tan hynny bydd trallod a thwyll benthyg dilyffethair yn parhau. Bydd 3 cenhedlaeth yn byw dan yr un to yn Llanelli fel ar ddechrau’r ganrif ddiwethaf. Pa wahanaieth wnawn ni fel Plaid? Mynnwn gael gwneud ein penderfyniadau ni ein hunain – marchnad sy’n parchu hawliau pobl a chymunedau. Economi foesol yn ogystal a’r farchnad yng Nghymru. Plaid gobaith y’n ni unwaith eto ac fel o’r blaen mi wnawn ni lwyddo am ein bod yn credu yng Nghymru a’i phobl, ac yn caru Cymru a’i phobl. Bydd Cymru rydd yn Gymru greadigol, yn Gymru lewyrchus ac yn anad dim yn Gymru gyfiawn.

Myfanwy asks Health Minister for specialist treatment for injured Gaza children

Dr. Myfanwy Davies Plaid’s Parliamentary candidate for Llanelli has written to Assembly Health Minister Mrs Edwina Hart backing calls for seriously injured Gaza children to be evacuated to Wales for specialist treatment.

Health facilities in Gaza have been under severe strain for the past year as a result of a blockade. During the past month they have been directly targeted further limiting the care they can offer to injured children.

Writing to the Minister, Dr Davies drew attention to the EU proposal to coordinate the medical evacuation of children by member states. Dr. Davies also noted that other countries including Cyprus, Luxembourg and Greece have already offered support.

Speaking on Sunday, Dr. Davies said:

“In Wales we have a proud tradition of offering help to people from other countries who are facing exceptionally difficult circumstances. We know that medical care in Gaza is completely unable to cope and I am asking the Minister to make available places in specialist units like the burns unit at Morriston for those children most badly injured by the recent air-strikes.”