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The profligacy of the Welsh Office

Wednesday, March 25, 2009
This is shocking. Brace yourselves:


Mr. Hoban: To ask the Secretary of State for Wales how much was spent by his Department on flowers in the last 12 months. [266289]

Mr. Paul Murphy: In the last 12 months, my Department has spent £40 on flowers.



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posted by Croydonian

Geraint Davies - are you listening?

Thursday, August 09, 2007
To much delight at Croydonian Towers, Andrew Pelling took Croydon Central for the Blue Team at the last election, deposing expenses king Geraint Davies. Not exactly news, admittedly.

However, Davies had a Kunte Kinte moment a while back and decided he was pining for a safe seat the Land of his Fathers and did the chicken run to Wales (note that he was born in that noted Welsh city of Chester), where, quelle surprise, he has got himself selected for a textbook pig with a red rosette constituency, Swansea West. Pelling holds CC by all of 75 votes (including mine...), and courtesy of boundary changes is notionally Labour now, so zero marks to Davies for commitment to his former constituency.

And the newly selected candidate for Labour, one Gerry Ryan, has been quoted thus: "I am a local lad, which I think is important". Source. Ho ho ho....

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posted by Croydonian

Welcome to Wales...

Wednesday, March 21, 2007
The Welsh Assembly has cooked up a guide to all things Cymric for immigrants, available in a range of languages. Fairly sensible on the face of things, including pamphlets in Polish, Estonian and French. However, it has also included a version in Welsh...

A quick peer at Wikipedia suggests that there are maybe 10,000 Welsh speakers outside these islands, concentrated in the Anglosphere and Argentina, and it would be interesting to know quite how many monoglot Welsh speakers there are outside the Principality. This is not intended as an exercise in Welsh labguage bashing, and I'm happy enough for Welsh to be an official language there, but what, pray, is the point of having a guide to Wales in Welsh available for immigrants?

Rather unhelpfully, the Welsh Assembly has not linked to the document on its website, but does carry a rather breathless press release about the guide, so I am indebted to Conservative AM Jonathan Morgan for pointing out that the guide to the law suggests that Wales is appealing to some less than salubrious characters, as it points out the illegality of incest and rape.

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posted by Croydonian