What the EU has done for us

It’s an unfortunate aspect of Welsh life that only about 10 per cent of our people buy an indigenous daily newspaper. It speaks volumes for the difficulty of conducting a serious debate about matters that affect Wales, and not least the debate on the European Union.

Most people in Wales read newspapers published in London and these give scant attention to Welsh interests. More than 80 per cent of them are owned by right wing anti-EU billionaires: the Sun, Times, and Sunday Times by Rupert Murdoch, an Australian living in New York; the Telegraph by the Barclay brothers who live in tax havens in Monaco and Guernsey; the Mail by Lord Rothermere who lives in France; and the Express and Star by Richard Desmond who built his empire on the foundation of the soft porn business.

 

Media baron Rupert Murdoch campaigning for Brexit from New York

In the coming months all these papers will be conducting a noisy and strident campaign in favour of our leaving the EU. You can bet your life that none of them will give close attention to the following benefits that have resulted from our EU membership:

• Providing 57 per cent of the UK’s trade with the rest of the world
• The structural funds that have been vital in the regeneration of west Wales and the Valleys.
• Regulations that have underpinned our clean beaches and rivers in Pembrokeshire.
• Cleaner air.
• Lead free petrol.
• Restrictions on landfill dumping.
• Promotion of a recycling culture.
• Cheaper mobile charges.
• Cheaper air travel.
• Improved consumer protection and food labelling.
• A ban on growth hormones and other harmful food additives.
• Better product safety.
• Single market competition bringing quality improvements and better industrial performance;
• The break up of monopolies.
• Europe-wide patent and copyright protection.
• No paperwork or customs for exports throughout the single market.
• Price transparency and removal of commission on currency exchanges across the Eurozone.
• Freedom to travel, live and work across Europe.
• Funded opportunities for young people to undertake study or work placements abroad.
• Access to European health services.
• Labour protection and enhanced social welfare.
• Smoke-free workplaces.
• Equal pay legislation.
• Holiday entitlement.
• The right not to work more than a 48-hour week without overtime.
• Strongest wildlife protection in the world.
• Improved animal welfare in food production.
• EU-funded research and industrial collaboration.
• EU representation in international forums.
• EU diplomatic efforts to uphold the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
• European arrest warrant.
• Cross border policing to combat human trafficking, arms and drug smuggling; counter terrorism intelligence.
• European civil and military co-operation in post-conflict zones in Europe and Africa.
• Support for democracy and human rights across Europe and beyond.

But for me all this is as nothing compared with the EU’s role in providing more than 60 years of peace between European neighbours after centuries of bloodshed. Not only that the EU has assisted the extraordinary political, social and economic transformation of 13 former dictatorships, now EU members, since 1980. But, as I say, we can expect to hear none of this from the mainly foreign-owned London press.

Forgotten lessons from the Sea Empress

It’s hard to believe that it was 20 years ago last Monday that the Sea Empress became stranded at the entrance to Milford Haven, causing a spillage of 72,000 tones of crude oil and catastrophic damage to the Pembrokeshire coast. Thousands of seabirds were killed and 120 miles of beaches were contaminated, stretching from St Brides Bay around the southern Pembrokeshire coast and into Carmarthen.  Some beaches were buried under a foot of oil. And although the immediate cleanup took place remarkably quickly, at a cost of £60m, it took the best part of a decade before the ecology of the shoreline fully recovered.

 

Sea Empress stranded off St Ann'e Head at the entrance Milford Haven

Such anniversaries always raise the question: could it happen again? Much has improved. In particular a much enhanced port control operation and command structure means the immediate circumstances that led to the spillage would be unlikely to recur. An inexperienced pilot was allowed to guide the Sea Empress in and took her too close to the north shore which led to the grounding. That was on a late Friday evening. By the middle of the following day only about 250 tons of oil had been lost, five Milford Haven tugs had managed to free her from the rocks and there was an option to tow her further out to sea away from immediate danger. The imminence of a Force 9 gale made this a pressing necessity.

The pilot aboard the Sea Empress radioed the Port Authority’s Control Room to ask permission from the Harbour Master and received the following, now infamous reply: “I agree with you but I have a room full of men saying No.” They included men from the salvagers, the oil and insurance companies, the coastguard, and the Department of Transport Pollution Control Unit. Their collective and soon to be mistaken view was that the Sea Empress could be emptied of her cargo where she was and then towed to safety.

In the event the Force 9 gale duly arrived, the towlines connecting the tugs broke and the Sea Empress was thrown about the rocks for twelve hours, losing most of her cargo of crude in the process. As I say, lessons have been learnt from the decisions that led up to this disaster.

But in another respect thre lessons are being forgotten. In the wake of the disaster, emergency towing vessels with much greater capacity than those operating in the Haven, were put in place around the coast of the United Kingdom - at Dover, Orkney, Stornoway, and Falmouth, the last providing cover for the Welsh coast.

However, in 2011 the Conservative government scrapped this fleet, as a cost saving measure, although one tug in Orkney won a reprieve until March this year.  Questioned about this last week, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency said, “The government believes that responsibility for ensuring the operational safety of ships is properly a matter for the commercial shipping industry, working in partnership with the tug and salvage industries. It does not believe that it is appropriate for the taxpayer to fund this provision."

Meanwhile, other European countries, including Spain, France, Norway and Germany are maintaining government financed emergency towing vessels. And, of course, since the Sea Empress disaster we have much larger vessels coming into Milford Haven, carrying liquefied natural gas, a much more unstable and dangerous cargo. We’ll just have to hope that this further example of the Conservative government’s ideologically-driven cost-cutting doesn’t end-up in a false economy of cataclysmic proportions.

Vote to save Withybush

Mark Drakeford, Labour’s Health Minister in the Welsh Government ventured as far west as Llanelli last week to tell us that he will not reverse the decision to centralise maternity services from Withybush to Glangwili in Carmarthen. ‘The decision was independently reviewed last year,” he said. “It will not be reversed because the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health – in other words, the clinical specialists we have to rely on for advice – tell us that the way things are done now is the best way for mothers and babies.”

 

Mark Drakeford - ignoring evidence presented by the people of Pembrokeshire

What Mark Drakeford failed to explain was that the review was commissioned by himself and relied on a narrow survey of patient experience of the new centralised service collected by Hwyl Dda Health Board. In the process it sidelined submissions relayed directly to it by the public about safety and the problems of travelling from the far west to Carmarthen. In fact the Review Team received 830 replies from the Pembrokeshire public that it described as “a massive response”.

But it chose to ignore this evidence which Sue Eardly, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s Head of Reviews, described as “colourful”, “felt emotionally” and largely the result of “fear of the unknown”. Instead the Review Team relied on data collected by the Hywel Dda Health Board itself. “The picture of actual patient experience gathered by the Health Board is significantly more positive that that expressed by campaigners in the social and mainstream media or at public meetings,” its report said.

That is hardly surprising. After all the Health Board could not be expected to highlight criticisms of itself. I went to the meeting in Llanelli last October when the report was presented to the Health Board. And I asked the following question to Dr John Trounce, a Consultant Paediatrician from Brighton who chaired the Review: “Are you expecting us to believe that out of the 830 responses you received not one, not even one, led you to question whether there have been any safety issues with the removal of consultant led maternity care and the Special Care Bay Unit from Withybush Hospital to Glangwili in Carmarthen?”   

I’ll never forget the look of consternation bordering on panic that passed across Dr Trounce’s face as I put this question. He claimed that all the responses were taken fully into account before stalling and referring to Sue Eardley who was sitting alongside him.

So what chance have we got of reversing the decision? Only one, and that will come at the Assembly election next May. There is only one party that is committed to providing the full range of emergency services to rural hospitals across Wales and also has a realistic chance of being in government to do something about it.

In these columns a couple of weeks ago Paul Davies the Conservative AM for Preseli committed to restoring maternity services to Withybush. But he has been the constituency’s AM for the last nine years and has been signally ineffective in his campaign. For instance, what has he done to highlight the shortcomings of the Royal College review? Furthermore, there is no chance that his party will be in government in Cardiff Bay after May to be able do anything about. That is because no other party of any significant strength would be willing to partner it in a coalition.

Back in 2007 Plaid Cymru went into coalition with Labour to form the One Wales Government and a key condition was an end to the proposals at that time to downgrade Withybush and other hospitals across Wales. What we did then we can do again. The future of Withybush depends on how well Plaid Cymru does in the May election.

The real question in the European referendum

 If John Redwood, MP for Wokingham and former Secretary of State for Wales was Prime Minister then I’m sure Stephen Crabb would be campaigning for us to leave the EU. Redwood, of course, is the high priest of England’s sovereignty as expressed through Parliament and an arch hater of Brussels and all its works. Stephen Crabb was of a similar persuasion when he first entered Parliament in 2005. Certainly, like most of his fellow intake into the House of Commons in that year he was firmly on the Euro-sceptic wing of his party.

However, since Crabb became Secretary of Sate for Wales in July 2014 he has adopted what he calls David Cameron’s centrist position on Europe. Last week he gave a speech to the Cardiff Business Club urging a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum based on the Prime Minister’s renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s membership.

Yet the matters being renegotiated are peripheral to the fundamental concerns at stake over Britain’s continued membership. These are to do with the economy, trade, jobs, the future of farming and above all Britain’s security in the world. The matters being negotiated – the opt-out from the Euro, Brussels red tape, the meaning of “ever closer union”, and benefits claimed by migrants – are insignificant by comparison. They are just a smokescreen to give Cameron an excuse to campaign in favour of a Yes vote, against the views of most of his party.

Security was always the main purpose of European unification and that continues to this day. The main prize was peace following the two catastrophic European civil wars that disfigured the first half of the last century. To be fair to Stephen Crabb he acknowledged this in his speech last week. This is what he said: “My late father-in-law grew up in Nazi-occupied Paris and was a teenager in 1945 when the war ended. He and I used to argue a lot about the future of Europe back in the late 1990s just before he died. For him, and for so many people of that generation including many here in the UK, the emergence of the European Union was a matter of cementing the peace in Europe and guaranteeing economic security. And it became for him and so many others an article of faith. What they lived through and what they saw meant this faith was unshakable.”

Crabb went on to say that though he respected this view it was not how his generation thinks: “The world that shaped my own political outlook has been one which has seen the rapid internationalisation of markets and the extraordinary global digital and communications revolution which has changed forever how we work and how we live.”

But in this globalising world we still need the security that European unity offers. Just take the challenge of terrorism. Tools such as the European Arrest Warrant, the European Criminal Records Information System and the Terrorist Finance Tracking System are essential in preventing and responding to terrorist activity throughout the continent.

And the basic question still remains, which is at the heart of the referendum debate and which Stephen Crabb is wrong to think is now just part of history and not relevant to the present day. Do we want to see a continent in which there is German roof over Europe, or one where there is a European roof over Germany? I know the answer to that question.