YOU MIGHT have thought that unquenchable anger and grief over the flooding of Cwm Tryweryn 58 years ago would at least have made Wales determined to never again let non-Welsh businesses exploit the country’s natural resources.
But it hasn’t.
Water, then and now, is gushing out of the country with minuscule financial gain for Wales, while, increasingly, billions in profits generated by the country’s 40-plus windfarms are being salted away by their multinational owners. And Wales is doing little to stop it.
The pain caused by the 1965 flooding of the Tryweryn valley, including the village of Capel Celyn, to create a reservoir to supply Liverpool will probably never go away.
How astonishing therefore that, more than half a century later, the country continues to tolerate injustice over water despite the fact that, with climate disruption accelerating at the speed of a flash-flood, it becomes an increasingly valuable resource.
In the case of water, there is now a real and present danger that Wales is on the brink of again being shafted, that, aided and abetted by sleepy politicians, the country will offer little resistance to now active proposals to export, by pipe or canals, vast quantities of water to drought-prone parts of England.
The body advising the UK government on infrastructure challenges, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), has already announced that talks have begun aimed at diverting millions of litres a day to needy parts of England. Current selling price of such exports? A reported derisory 3p per 1,000 litres.
Bear in mind that any new outflow arrangement would be in addition to the 243 billion litres a year currently transferred from Wales to England. It’s therefore a vast disappointment that the plan now being hatched by Severn Trent and Thames Water has so far stimulated little, if anything, beyond rather meek demands for Wales to get a better price for this sought-after export, and for security of supply for the home market to not be compromised.
In March, Adam Price, then Plaid Cymru leader, demanded that the Welsh government “should announce its intention to block the project until the benefits to Wales from an economic and environmental perspective can be conclusively shown.” Unsurprisingly, the Drakeford government did no such thing, and Price signally failed to push his point.
Price also said: “At the very least we should receive a fair price for the export of our water, with the profits being used to invest in our communities, not to line the pockets of private companies that aren’t even based in this country.” It was a fair bar-room summary of the problem and underlined the redundancy of rhetoric detached from resolution.
Clearly, the pressing need must be for an uncompromising political strategy that identifies water as a high-value, nationally-owned resource which water companies will no longer be free to sell across the border for virtually nothing and will from now on be a major contributor to Welsh public finances.
LARGE PARTS of rural mid and north Wales are plastered with wind-turbines, while across Wales as a whole the planning pipeline bulges with applications for about another 75 developments, some with turbines up to 250 metres high, or nearly five times the height of Nelson’s Column.
Yet Wales is already a net exporter of electricity, using only about half the amount it generates. Forty per cent goes to England, where new onshore windfarms have been more or less banned since 2018. If the proposed installations go ahead, optimum wind capacity alone will be more than three times Wales’s own energy requirements.
But, just as with water exports, the financial return for Wales is abysmally low, while aesthetically, and in terms of landscape protection, there are strong reasons for halting expansion.
Previously uncluttered and ecologically important landscapes are invaded by industrial structures whose massive concrete foundations often detract enormously from the land’s role in soaking up high rainfall, lessening flooding risks. Service roads and sub-stations are ugly. All right, some people like the look of turbines, even I don’t mind the odd few – at a distance. But, overall, enough is enough.
The bulk of Wales-resident windfarms are owned by overseas companies – German, Italian, Australian, Norwegian, Swedish, Irish.
The biggest in Wales and England is at Pen y Cymoedd, near Aberdare, its 76 turbines owned by Vattenfall, a company owned entirely by the Swedish state. Profits from its Welsh operation feed into heating Swedish hospitals and schools, and supporting other public services.
Would that Wales benefited similarly. Instead, the country draws a pittance relative to the number and profits of foreign-owned windfarms rooted on Welsh hillsides and offshore. A few maintenance jobs, exceptionally meagre financing of ‘community funds’ compared with companies’ astronomical profits. Behold a cake most disproportionately sliced.
The most recent wind proposal is for a major development near Ponterwyd that would spill down the southern slopes of Pumlumon to include Y Garn, the most southerly of Pumlumon’s summits, with a Bronze Age cairn. All is a special landscape area, part of the largest watershed in Wales, its soils a huge sponge for rainwater and carbon, and there is a site of special scientific interest.
A few environmental drawbacks there, then, but a safe bet for its would-be developers, Norwegian multinational Statkraft and Australian-linked Eco2. And for local economies no doubt the usual financial crumbs.
The immediate and medium-term solution is for Cardiff to demand a commensurate share of Jeremy Hunt’s 45 per cent windfall tax on the “excess returns” of electricity-generating companies. That levy is scheduled to last until 2028. Time enough for the government to get thinking about longer-term rake-off strategies.
Press freedom’s encounter with inflated egos
WHY DID Ceredigion council waste public money by taking the time and trouble to submit baseless complaints about the Cambrian News to the Independent Press Standards Organisation?
The immediate answer is because no-one at the authority apparently understood the nature of press freedom. They thought they had the newspaper cornered with their daft allegations of bias, and it took the regulator to point out to them how wrong they were.
Press freedom in Britain was not won without much struggle and strife, and the council’s attempted assault on it, while ill-informed and so doomed to fail, nevertheless revealed an unhealthy hostility to freedom of expression.
At another level, this episode is a reminder of how councils can labour under a basic misunderstanding about their identity and role.
In a literal, but in no way demeaning, sense, they are public servants. Without local authorities, the organisation of society as we know it could not survive.
Things go wrong, however, when public servants – elected and unelected – start to regard themselves in an inappropriately exalted light. Voters may then be denied proper democratic control because councils have fallen into the trap of seeing themselves as quasi private businesses built on assumptions of powerful hierarchies dismissive of public involvement.
Press freedom can be all about countering such an undermining of democracy.
21 December 2023
Bronterre News 