Tuesday 17 July 2007

"Oh, I Believe in Yesterday...........!"

So runs the Swan Song of "Yesterday's Men", and another one of these eminent MPs spoke up today, with his extraordinary plea for Welsh to be the second and not the first language of the railway announcements. This time it was Alun Michael who said his piece, using the argument that English is spoken more widely than Welsh in certain areas of Wales. No matter that Welsh is the natural and native language of the nation, which happens to be Wales and not England, or that Welsh is a living vibrant language which is widely spoken nowadays and which is reputed to have the oldest living literature in Europe. From the tenor of the comments received by phone-in on Radio Wales, it would seem that the majority of people were astonished by the suggestion, and did the Welsh MPs have nothing better to do than to bring up this absurd proposal? What of the urgent and pressing needs of the Valleys, they said? What of the fact that so many live below the poverty line and what of the deprivation of the children of Wales, the real issues which should and must be confronted?
No, the function of the majority of Welsh MPs at Westminster is disfunctional, and they are an irrelevance. It is the Assembly which governs Wales today, and the MPs apparently have nothing better to do than carp on the sidelines of political debate and bring forth inane suggestions.
Like that of Alun Michael, a Man of Yesterday.
Note: according to Alwyn Hughes this statement on train announcements was contrived by anti-coalition Welsh MPs to derail and undermine the accommodation between Labour and Plaid Cymru. It has not worked.

2 comments:

Normal Mouth said...

Re-read the EDM - if you even stopped to read it in the first place.

The MPs in question are suggesting that the order of the announcements accords with the majority tongue of the locality.

This is no different to how road signs are prioritized.

Unknown said...

Why change the order of prioritisation according to the locality? IMO prioritisation should be general throughout Wales.