The secret life of Billy Lang

One damp chilly morning last week a small group of us met at the Parc Gwyn crematorium near Narberth to say goodbye to Billy Lang, one of our Plaid members in Preseli. It was not an altogether sad occasion because Billy, who hailed from Fishguard, had lived a good life for a full 92 years. But there was something touching about the event all the same, because in a real sense we were Billy’s family. He was an only child, his parents died long ago in the 1960s, he never married, and as far as we know he had no other close relatives.

On the face of it Billy was one of those thousands of people who live their lives without disturbing the surface of public affairs. But it transpires that he had a secret war record. Aged 18 he joined the RAF in 1940 and became a Leading Aircraftman, working with ground crew in the UK and Egypt. Very soon, however, he joined the Special Services Brigade with which he served for much of the Second World War and was only demobbed in 1946. However, mystery surrounds what Billy got up to during this time as he hardly ever spoke about it.

After the war Billy worked on farms, at Trecwn and for a time was a lineman (pole climber) for the South Wales Electricity Board. Aged 37 the 1950s he became a deckhand with trawlers working out of Lowestoft and Milford Haven. After a few years he enrolled as an Able Seaman and later Bosun in a succession of merchant vessels.

For 27 years Billy criss-crossed the oceans of the world. He sailed the Pacific in ships from a Scots owned line. He worked out of Bristol down the coast of West Africa, to Cape Town and then on to Australia. He served on ore carriers that brought iron ore into Port Talbot. He sailed across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and down the coast of East Africa. In 1982 he was on a ship in the South Atlantic carrying water supplies to the forces that recaptured the Falklands. His last voyages before he retired in 1987 were on large container ships owned by Canadian Pacific that plyed the North Atlantic. At least three of the vessels he sailed on later sank. Sop Billy was a lucky man to sail with. 

He was extremely fit, strong and resourceful. He was also a very private man and fiercely independent, characteristics that were almost his undoing. After a fall in his Fishguard bungalow on the Thursday before the August Bank Holiday in 2012 he lay on the floor until the postman heard his cries the following Tuesday. Sipping water from a hot water bottle that had been near his bed and with a bag of nuts to hand Billy, as ever, had a ‘plan to survive’ and it worked. 

Friends who recently applied for his Service Record from the Armed Forces archive in Glasgow were told they would have to wait for 25 years. So it’ll be a long time before we know what Billy really did in the war.

Jeremy Corbyn’s democratic challenge

What will Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in Labour’s leadership election mean for us in Wales? What are the chances he can mobilise progressive forces across the political spectrum and provide leadership for a real change of direction for the economy away from austerity?

He has certainly galvanized ordinary members to mount an insurgency against the tired economic thinking of their party at Westminster. But can he continue the momentum to reach out to the nations beyond London and to those outside his party? A lot hangs on the answer to that question. If he gets sucked into political infighting within the Labour Party at Westminster, as the right wing media would love him to do, he will be lost.

During the campaign Caroline Lucas the Greens’ sole MP at Westminster gave him some sound advice. She observed that it was a hardly a coincidence that the first truly democratic leadership election in Labour’s history was producing such a resurgence of optimism. However, she was disappointed that Corbyn was giving so little emphasis to democracy more widely: “If you do win this contest I believe you should take this opportunity – and the huge amount of momentum behind you – to call a constitutional convention to allow people across the country to have a say in remodelling Britain for the future,” she wrote in The Independent on 13 September. “A convention has the potential to energise even more people than your leadership campaign, or the Green surge, and to inspire the kind of feeling across the UK that swept Scotland in 2014.”

I have looked for what Jeremy Corbin has said on this during his campaign, and found very little, save one interview he gave the online Novara TV website on 30 July. In it he said he was in favour of the additional member proportional system that operates for the Welsh Assembly to be used for the House of Commons and also for PR for a directly elected House of Lords. And he continued: “I want to see a constitutional convention set up now in Opposition that would look at the issues of electoral representation, the voting age, the voting system… We also want to look at the question of the different powers and financing of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the operation of the Barnett formula and whether or not it wouldn’t be better based on levels of poverty in Scotland rather than more generally on population and area, and at the question of English regional government.”

This is fine as far as it goes. But these ideas can hardly be said to be central to Jeremy Corbyn’s thinking. Otherwise they would have featured much more widely than on an obscure online current affairs website early in the campaign. Certainly he has said little, if anything, on this score during the first few days since being elected as leader. Nonetheless, this agenda will be a litmus test for whether Jeremy Corbyn is interested in creating an effective coalition for progressive politics beyond the narrow confines of his own party.

Leanne Wood’s vision for Wales

Leanne Wood has been touring Wales this week to launch Plaid’s campaign for next May’s Assembly election. After 16 years of a Labour government in Cardiff Bay she says it’s time for a change and that Plaid can offer better policies on the economy, health and education.

To succeed she has to persuade voters that she would be an effective First Minister. She certainly has recognition. As a result of the television debates in the general election this year she became a household name across the UK, and mobbed on the streets from Carmarthen and Wrexham to her native Rhondda. Polling after the election gave her a higher visibility than Carwyn Jones, the current First Minister - 78 per cent recognition against his 74 per cent.

Electing an English speaker from the Valleys as leader in 2012 marked a distinct departure for Plaid Cymru. Living in the same Penygraig street as she was born, she is as far from the party’s rural Welsh-speaking heartlands as it is possible to be.

 

Born in 1971 she was educated at Tonypandy Grammar School and the University of Glamorgan. In the 1990s she worked as a probation officer in Mid Glamorgan before becoming a lecturer in Social Policy at Cardiff University. She was first elected to the Assembly in 2003.

Why did she join Plaid in 1991, aged 20, rather than Labour? She says that when she was growing up in the Rhondda the local Labour Party came across as right wing and reactionary, or as she put it: “Sexist, homophobic – and just generally representing old-fashioned dinosaur politics, which in my view had no place in my life.” More fundamental was her teenage experience of the 1984-5 miners strike. “It had a profound effect on me, to be honest,” she said. “When you live through a historical period you don’t realise it, but looking back now I can see that.”

She has an eye for practical policy innovation. Opponents said her call for a tax on sugary drinks to combat diabetes and obesity was impractical, but it has now been taken up by the BMA

Leanne is a departure for Plaid Cymru because of her emphasis on a modern, inclusive sense of who we are. “All people have a stake here, if they live here,” she says. “Nationality and identity - those kinds of questions - are not really important from a political perspective.”

She has two aspirations for Wales. First she wants to see Plaid Cymru leading the Welsh Government after the Assembly election. Then her priority will be putting the economy on its feet.  After that she says it will be up to the people to decide: “I think most people in Wales want to see improvements in our economy before being able to contemplate voting yes in a referendum on greater self government.” That she says involves building a new Britain, involving co-operation between England, Scotland and Wales on the basis of equality and shared interests in common.

Slurry threat to Blue Flag beaches

Pembrokeshire’s Blue Flag beaches, so important for the county’s image and tourist offer, are under threat from Welsh Government environmental regulations imposed at the behest of the European Union. How could such a situation have come about? You might well ask. Bear with me, for this is a complicated tale.

Every four years the Cleddau river catchment, which covers about 80 per cent of Pembrokeshire’s land area, is tested for nitrates that are largely caused by farm waste flowing into the water system. If they are too high they cause the growth of algae and other harmful organisms. In turn this upsets the fish and plant life that depend on the health of the waters in Milford Haven and the Marine Special Conservation Area beyond.

When the rivers were last tested in 2012 the nitrate levels almost reached the point where the Welsh Government would have been obliged to impose severe restrictions. As Ged Davies, Pembrokeshire Team Leader for Natural Resources Wales told me, “It was too close to call.”

If a Nitrates Vulnerable Zone had been declared it would have had a massive impact on the 1,800 farms that operate within the river catchment area. There would have been severe limits on the amount of muck spreading, a requirement for much greater winter slurry storage capacity, a clamp down on fertilizers, and strict record keeping of nitrate discharges.

It now looks inevitable that all this will be demanded following the latest measurement of nitrate levels. A report goes to the Welsh Government in October and it will make an announcement early next year with the likely imposition of a Nitrates Zone from the beginning of 2017.

If this happens farmers will be faced with a stark choice: to either reduce the livestock on their land and consequently their income, or increase the amount of land for muck spreading. Many will opt for the latter and look first to buying or renting land immediately adjacent to the Nitrates Zone. The problem is that much of this is next to the coast. As Ged Davies says, “The land outside the Nitrate Vulnerable Zone would likely be in the coastal fringe, in the National Park, and draining to bathing waters. This land would be available for unregulated and potential over applications of slurry. This could have the unforeseen effect of the Nitrates Directive adversely affecting the Bathing Water Directive.”

Hence the threat to EU designated Blue Flag beaches that is coming from EU environmental regulations. So what can be done? One option is for farmers to work with Natural Resources Wales on a voluntary basis to reduce their nitrate output. Ged Davies points to a successful scheme that has operated in recent years among farmers supplying the First Milk cheese processing plant at Merlins Bridge.

If initiatives of this kind could be undertaken across Pembrokeshire there is a chance we could avoid the imposition of a Nitrate Vulnerable Zone in 2017 and the unintended consequences that would be likely to follow for our Blue Flag beaches. But for that to happen there should be an injection of urgency with action taken now.