MORE SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Despite the promises of more money for Wales if Labour in Westminster actually implement the Mansion Tax, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has forecast that Labour’s plans will in fact lead to real term cuts. Perhaps it’s time for Labour to come clean and admit that they plan to cut the Welsh Budget.

Plaid Cymru has rightly warned voters not to be deceived by the Labour party’s spin. For while Labour has been talking about raising money through a mansion tax, they have already signed up to plans that will cut more than a billion pounds from Wales’ economy.

Labour has already confirmed that previously that it will stick to the Con Dem  plan to cut departmental spending by over £1.5bn across the UK. This lower base for expenditure means that Wales will lose an additional £365 million over the next five years compared with 2014-15.

The IFS has estimated (March 2015) that starting this year (2015) Wales and the other devolved administrations will end up losing 2.2 per cent of their funding in real terms by the end of the next parliament leading to a cumulative, real terms loss for Wales of £835 million. Taken together Labour will cut funding to Wales by £1.2bn (£365m plus £835m) in real terms over the coming five years.

Despite Labour’s belated acknowledgement that Wales is underfunded, Labour still intend to make yet deeper cuts into the Welsh budget. Once again Labour are trying to pull the wool over our eyes by claiming that they will put more money into Wales’ economy while signing off spending plans that will cut more than £1 billion from Wales. This is a classic case of giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

Plaid Cymru is the only party in Wales making the case to stop austerity and to grow our economy. We also want Wales to be funded to the same level as Scotland. Plaid Cymru’s economic plans are focused on growing Wales’ economy. We need to invest to create jobs, increase our tax intake and bring down the deficit. We need to close the gap between the rich and the poor and we are the only party focused on rebalancing power and wealth throughout the UK.

AUSTERITY OR AUSTERITY LITE?

It’s not much of a choice, especially when you consider that by polling day only 40% of the Con Dems cuts will have taken place. Before the Autumn Statement, Plaid warned that the Government’s spending plans for the next parliament would take us back to the 1930s if the proposed reductions in public spending were pushed through.

The Labour party understandably attacked the Tories for their plans to reduce spending on public services to levels not seen since the 1930s, at 35% as a share of GDP. Yet, what should alarm people is that the Labour parties’ economic plans are essentially the same. Labour’s plans would see spending on public services at roughly the same, 37% of GDP – reducing it to a level that we have not seen since the 1930s, a time before the creation of the NHS and when people left school at the age of 14.

If nothing else, this reveals that there is little or no difference between any of the larger Westminster parties, with Labour lumped to the Tories’ ideological plan to shrink the size of the state and intentionally hack at our public services. At the next Westminster general election, the real choice being offered the people of Wales is between the Westminster parties who all offer more austerity and more hardship, or Plaid Cymru - who, in the forthcoming hung parliament where every vote counts, will demand an end to austerity and fight for the need to invest.

Plaid Cymru has set out its plans to increase investment infrastructure by 1% of UK GDP annually. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the Confederation of British Industry have noted that for every £1 invested it produces £2.50 - £3.00 in the real economy. This would be an investment of around £16 billion at a UK level, bringing £800 million to Wales to invest in schools, hospitals, and other works to improve the economy.

This investment would help us to tackle the deficit over a much longer period. Investment is the perfect antidote to the cosy Westminster Parties’ consensus, which seeks to inflict ever greater levels of austerity on our people. Austerity will ensure that places like Wales suffer as they seek to balance the books on the backs of the poor.

INACTION THIS DAY

Tax evasion and tax avoidance, at least outside of the UK, is rarely out of the headlines with  many heavily indebted governments keen to hunt down every tax dollar / euro / pound that is owed by tax evaders avoiding (unlike the rest of us) paying their fair dues to society. The Westminster elite privately at least regardless of whatever they say publically, appear to pay scant respect to the idea of fair taxation and fair representation, we may be pretty close to being governed by the sons of bankers and the sons of the City.

The UK Government is in up to its neck when it comes to tax evasion, it’s heavily involved in aiding and abetting tax evasion worldwide. British Overseas territories, including the Cayman Islands, help to hide around trillions from pounds from the different nation’s tax authorities. In the belly of the beast lies the City, which may explain Cameron’s reluctance to do anything about the problem as some of the city banks are hand in glove with drug dealers, dictators, rogue states and terrorists when it comes to money laundering and may perhaps also offer comfy lucrative seats on the board to former Westminster politicians further down the line.

Back in April 2013  the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists [ICIJ] based in Washington DC, began in collaboration with international media, publishing  results into their research into tax evasion and off-shore tax havens. The journalists sifted through an electronic mountain of information - literally  millions of records leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world.

The leak of some 2 million emails and other documents, mostly from the British Virgin Islands (BVI), exposed the scale of the offshore tax evasion trade and the identities of tax evaders. It has been estimated that wealthy individuals involved in tax evasion and tax avoidance could potentially have as much as $ 32 trillion dollars (£ 21 trillion pounds) stashed in overseas and off-shore tax havens. The scale of this problem is staggering, if the pot were to be equally divided up then it could be parceled out as around $3000 dollars for every living person on our planet.

No while there is nothing wrong with a company being based in a tax haven does not necessarily mean that a company is avoiding tax or taking advantage of the hitherto pretty impenetrable secrecy that tends to surround tax havens, even if the tax jurisdictions are closely associated with tax evasion. That said, tax havens tend to be masked by secrecy and low taxes, and there have been few attempts to identify them. UK Revenue and Customs does not provide a list of tax havens.

The Con Dem Westminster coalition government at best can be said to have demonstrated a half-heartedly highlighted reluctance to clamp down on tax avoidance. The PM might have publically slagged off a few celebrities, for using a tax avoidance scheme in Jersey but he still appears to be acutely reluctant to deal the tax havens that happen to be UK Crown Dependent territories.  

Most reasonable people accept that there is a real need to deal on a global basis with the problem of off-shore companies and those individuals who are actively engaged in tax avoidance, tax evasion and / or money laundering. The focus on tax havens and tax avoidance is a bit embarrassing as the UK sits at the heart of the problem having consciously chosen not to regulate its own financially useful crown dependent  dependencies and territories.

The scale of the off-shore problem may take your breath away. The Cayman Islands; currently home to some 12,000 corporations has a population of 50,000, yet is home to 70% of the planets hedge funds (as of June 2012). The British Virgin Islands (population 22,000) is home to 823,502 registered companies. General Electric paid no tax in 2010, made a $14.2 billion dollar profit. Barclay's (as of June 2012) had 181 subsidiaries registered in the Cayman Islands and paid little UK tax on its worldwide profits.

The Dirty Digger's News Corp oddly enough managed to base 152 subsidiaries in tax havens across the planet (and that’s according to the US Government) and yet managed to pay no UK corporation tax between 1998 and 1999. US President Obama was 100% right to suggest that the governments of the world should jointly tackle the issue of tax evasion and tax havens. By tackling the tax havens, the tax avoidance and the questionable dealings of the derivative traders, hedge funds and the off balance sheet trading then we might go so way towards dealing with the consequences of the worldwide financial crash. Yet Mr Cameron and the other 18 millionaires in the cabinet have been stalling when it comes to closing  the tax loopholes.

The BVI has incorporated more than a million such offshore entities since it began marketing itself worldwide in the 1980s. Company owners' true identities are never revealed. Even the island's official financial regulators normally have no idea who is behind them. The British Foreign Office depends on the BVI's company licensing revenue to subsidise this residual outpost of empire, while lawyers and accountants in the City of London benefit from a lucrative trade as intermediaries, claiming that the tax-free offshore companies provide legitimate privacy.

In November 2012 a National Audit Office report revealed that of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is struggling to curb aggressive tax avoidance schemes is costing the UK billions of pounds in lost tax. Much to the embarrassment of the Con Dems, tax evasion and tax evaders and the hunt for their concealed cash remains a big issue in the USA, in the UK the impression given is that the Conservative dominated Con Dem Westminster coalition government simply hopes that if we don’t talk about the problem then perhaps the problem will go away.

Across the other side of the pond, the US government’s pursuit of tax evaders led indirectly to the closure of Switzerland's oldest bank, after pleading guilty in a New York court to helping US citizens evade paying their taxes. This was the first foreign bank to plead guilty to tax evasion charges in the USA. Rather rapidly other Swiss banks have taken steps to prevent US citizens from opening offshore accounts to avoid paying tax.

Here in the UK, as part of the public sector budget cuts, the Con Dem Government has reduced the number of staff in Revenue and Customs from around 100,000 to 65,000 and intends to further reduce the numbers to around 50,000 by 2015. So much for taking tax evasion and tax avoidance seriously and ensuring that we pay our fairshare of tax. The problem lies with the so called Westminster elite and their cronies in the City rather than with the ordinary people, few of whom were directly responsible for causing the financial crash in the first place, perhaps we are not all in it together after all.  

FOOD POVERTY

The quiet if not stealthy rise in the number of food banks across our country and the growth in the number of people who have been driven to use them should be shocking. What should also shock us is the speed with which food banks have become an established and sadly necessary part of our social landscape and people’s lives.

One interpretation is that, if nothing else the flawed austerity policy being actively pursued by Westminster is clearly not working for Wales. Also perhaps the growth in the number of food banks is also a clear indicator of a good forty years of failure of the Union to deliver real and lasting prosperity and economic benefits to the Welsh people.

According to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), food poverty may well be becoming the next public health emergency. The number of people using food banks in Wales has rocketed in recent years, and has almost tripled in the last year. Figures produced by the Trussell Trust show that the number of food bank users has risen from 12,377 over six months in 2012 to 32,500 for six months in 2013 and also that some eleven thousand children have used food banks in the last six months in Wales.

The growth in the use of food banks is a result of the combined effect of the soaring cost of living, austerity cuts and ongoing stagnation in wages all of which means that more and more people in Wales are dependent on donations and charity to eat. The figures show that over thirty thousand people in Wales have been forced to take emergency food supplies or face going hungry. A third of these are children. Health experts are correct to be disturbed by these figures which suggest that food poverty could be the next big health emergency to hit Wales.

We have to get the basics right and a healthy diet is part of the solution, and an action needs to be taken to stop this food poverty becoming a major public health emergency. The Welsh Government should shake of it's self induced lethargy and actively and urgently revise its Anti-Poverty Strategy to introduce measures that will tackle the problem of food poverty head-on.

There are a number of ways to help people to help themselves including encouraging community food growing schemes, by making more land available for allotments and by working with food producers to make sure surplus stock can be sold at markets at affordable prices as well as support for producer co-ops are all measures that could bring down the cost of food.

The Labour in Wales Welsh Government needs to act to develop a long term sustainable food plan to guarantee good quality food at affordable prices to people in all parts of Wales. We need to see long term action being taken to minimise the impact of damaging UK Government austerity measures on Wales.

As part of this approach Plaid Cymru has advocated a ‘no evictions’ policy on the Bedroom Tax so that nobody can be turned out of their home as a direct result of this cruel tax. It has to be unacceptable for families living in Wales in the 21st century to find themselves in living in such a desperate and insecure situation. That’s why Plaid Cymru continues to fight for serious action to help and support, not punish these struggling families and children.

THE PEOPLE SPEAK

The Lithuanians, given a chance to express their approval or disapproval of the austerity programme, appear to have voted out their Conservative Government. With some results still to come in yesterday, the two leftist parties, Labour and the Social Democrats, appear to have finished first and second, and their leaders have met to discuss terms of a coalition. Lithuanian PM Andrius Kubilius' government has been punished for cutting pensions and public wages.

Voters passing judgement on austerity in Lithuania (Associated Press)

In a seperate referendum, the Lithuanians have voted against plans for a new nuclear power station, which the government had previously said the plant would cut dependence on imported Russian energy. Environmentalists and other political parties had questioned its affordability. The result from Sunday's referendum is non-binding, but surely leaves a vast question mark hanging over the future of the proposed plant.

The former government enforced a harsh austerity programme, to stave off national bankruptcy. Lithuania’s economic output dropped by 15%, unemployment soared and thousands of young people emigrated in search of work. Of late the Lithuanian budget deficit has largely been dealt with and GDP reached growth of 5.8%.

Lithuania's harsh approach won praise from other governments and the International Monetary Fund. Yet the price paid by ordinary Lithuanians’ came far too late to be translated into a political revival for the conservative government, who have paid the price at the polls. The opposition had promised to raise the minimum wage, make the rich pay more tax and put back euro entry until 2015.

In the Lithuanian general election, with election counting complete in three-quarters of voting districts, the Labour party are on 21%, the Social Democrats on 19%. The former Prime Minister Kubilius' Homeland Union Party is on 13%. The bottom line may well be that if you give the people a change to express their option on austerity and you may get a decisive answer...this scenario may increasingly play on David Cameron's mind over the next few years.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT...

As Health spending in Wales currently makes up almost half of the Welsh Assembly Government budget, it is more than a tad deceitful for the Welsh Conservatives to claim that they would ring fence entire health budget, revenue and capital, in line with Retail Price Index.

Think about it - if the health spend is ring fenced in cash terms then every other budget (including the Education budget) would have to be cut by 20%, without the ring fence this comes in at around 11.9% across the board - which is bad but at least attempting to make the best out of bad job.This would be seriously massive cut to ring fence one department.

In Gwent local Conservative AMs are doing their best to try to distance themselves from their own Government's cuts including the threatened closure of the Passport Office in Newport. Yet, if you follow their ill-thought out logic then when you ring fencing in health, we will end up facing even deeper more damaging cuts than the billions that have already been proposed by the Conservative dominated Con-Dem Government in London.

The Conservatives (and their Lib Dem little helpers or willing allies - take you pick?) are already planning to take some £5 billion out of the Welsh budget, if we go with their plan to ring fence the health budget, then we would have to take that £5 billion out of only half the budget available. Every time you see a local Conservative offering their support for public spending or campaign against a cut, we should all remind them of this ill-thought out plan that they have proposed.

THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST...

As the ConDem cuts begin to hit home, all of our public funded bodies are going to be under pressure to make savings and under threat of reduced budgets. In Wales, the Arts Council of Wales is already planning to withdraw funding worth £3.6m from 32 arts groups in 2011.

Locally, in the former county of Gwent, the cuts are going to hit home hard. One of the casualties of funding cuts could be Gwent Theatre which was has worked hard over the last three decades taking amongst other things live theatre in many of our schools. Gwent Theatre which has previously received £250,000 a year from the Arts
Council of Wales, may be wound up as a result of the loss of funding.

The Theatre's small company of six people: actors, stage manager, educational and administrative staff who will all lose their jobs as the impact of the loss of funding begins to hit home. It's worth remembering that Theatre Gwent's staff have worked with the Theatre company for over twenty years and have consistently delivered work of the highest quality throughout the former county of Gwent.

There will also be a knock on effect with a further reduction in employment opportunities for actors, script writers, musicians, poets and storytellers all of whom will now lose out when the cuts begin to bite. Gwent Theatre provides employment opportunities for up to 40 people in any given year.

The jobs loses and loss of opportunity are bad enough, but, they are only part of the story. Probably the most significant impact of the loss of Gwent Theatre is going to be the loss of its role in educating countless pupils and young people in Gwent's schools. In 2009 – 2010 alone, Gwent Theatre was able to deliver 220
performances to some 14,000 + young people in some 219 schools.

Gwent Theatre held 81 theatre workshops with over 2500 participants. The highly acclaimed Gwent Young Peoples Theatre put on seven productions, with 5183 youth theatre attendances and audience figures of 1,794. This is a pretty good if not an outstanding delivery of work in a single year from a small theatre company.

Gwent Theatre has worked hard over the years to establish itself as a highly successful company which regularly takes its excellent work into our schools and our communities across Gwent – something that more than than fulfils the aims and objectives of the Arts Council of Wales to put the experience of live theatre into
individuals and communities lives.

This may on the surface appear to be an easy hit, but, it is a cut that is far too deep - Gwent Theatre has successfully and faithfully served individuals, schools and communities across Monmouthshire, Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly, Newport and Torfaen, and has worked solidly for years to build up good working relations across the greater Gwent area.

It's time to think again funding wise, Gwent Theatre does not deserve this fate and neither should our communities be culturally deprived of the important future contributions to could and should made by Gwent Theatre in future years.

Follow this web link to sign the petition to Save Gwent Theatre.

NOT BY BREAD ALONE

The plan to stop funding for Gwent Theatre, which is one of the more established theatre company's which regularly performs in schools across the former county of Gwent, is very bad news indeed. As the cuts begin to hit home, all of our public funded bodies are going to feel the cuts.

The Arts Council of Wales is now planning to withdraw funding worth £3.6m from 32 arts groups from next year. The Gwent area, especially Monmouthshire, is sadly going to be particularly badly hit. Gwent Theatre which was set up over 30 years ago, and has previously received £250,000 a year from the Arts Council of Wales, may well be wound up as a result of the loss of funding.

The impact of the loss of funding will hit the Theatre's small company of six people: actors, stage manager, educational and administrative staff who will all lose their jobs. A number of whom have worked with the Theatre company for over twenty years and have consistently delivered work of the highest quality throughout the former county of Gwent.

There will also be a further reduction in employment opportunities for actors, script writers, musicians, poets and storytellers all of whom will now lose out when the cuts begin to bite. Gwent Theatre provides employment opportunities for up to 40 people in any given year.

The most significant impact of the loss of Gwent Theatre is going to be the loss of its role in educating countless pupils and young people in Gwent's schools - I can remember them coming to my school when i was a kid. It's worth remembering that 2009 – 2010 alone, Gwent Theatre was able to deliver 220 performances to some 14,000 + young people in some 219 schools.

Gwent Theatre also held 81 theatre workshops with over 2500 participants. The highly acclaimed Gwent Young Peoples Theatre put on seven productions, with 5183 youth theatre attendances and audience figures of 1,794. This is pretty good if not an outstanding delivery of work in a single year from a small theatre company.

Over the years Gwent Theatre has worked hard to establish itself as a highly successful company which regularly takes its excellent work into our schools and our communities across Gwent – something that more than than fulfils the aims and objectives of the Arts Council of Wales to put the experience of live theatre into individuals and communities lives.

It's time to think again funding wise, this may on the surface appear to be an easy hit, but, it is a cut that is far too deep - Gwent Theatre has successfully and faithfully served individuals, schools and communities across Monmouthshire, Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly, Newport and Torfaen, and has worked solidly for years to build up good working relations across the greater Gwent area.

Gwent Theatre does not deserve this fate and neither should our communities be culturally deprived of the important future contributions to could and should made by Gwent Theatre in future years.

DON'T LET WALES MISS OUT

It looks like Wales may miss out on any chance of rail electrification this time thanks to a combination of New / Old Labour and the same old Tories. With Whitehall tightening its belts and facing significant spending cuts there is a real and growing concern that the proposed upgrade of the Swansea to Severn Tunnel (and on to London) railway may yet end up as a casualty of Tory spending cuts. No doubt New / Old Labour will be quick to blame the Tories (they have after all done this for years, even when they have been in power), but that would hide the fact that both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's New Labour Government long ignored Wales and Welsh issues.  

The planned rail upgrade, was however, conspicuously absent from the George Osborne's list of capital projects that were to take place before his Budget speech. The rail project is being reconsidered as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review, which is due to be published in the autumn. With the Tories getting ready for what are expected to be pretty savage and deep spending cuts, what guarantees can be extracted for this key project to proceed - a good question that is in need a serious and urgent answer.

More locally within Gwent, the National Assembly's commitment (in March 2010) to finish the work on Gaer junction, so that direct trains can run between Newport and Ebbw Vale was warmly welcomed, along with the prospects of a new railway station in Ebbw Vale town centre and an hourly service. These are important small steps forward to improve our public transport infrastructure and to give people a real choice when it comes to using their cars or not. Now, while it it obvious that much more needs to be done, these improvements should be completed despite the threat of immanent budget cuts.

Elsewhere in south Gwent, there is much that can be done to improve our rail services. Both Caerleon and Magor would benefit from new railway station's and serious consideration should be given to reopening the line to Usk from Little Mill, In recent years we have seen hard won improvements to Severn Tunnel Junction, yet even here there is room for improvement. No to mention the fact that better facilities and better access is needed at Caldicot, Chepstow and Abergavenny Stations, as well as more frequent stopping services.

The National Assembly does not have the same powers over transport as does the Scottish Parliament (it should) and neither does it have the same financial settlement (Wales needs fair funding) - but despite these limits there is much that can be done. We also need to get serious about getting freight off the roads and onto the rails where it belongs - if this can be done along with rail electrification then we can reduce both pollution and road congestion. If Government wants to change the way we use public transport when we need a public transport system that's fit for purpose and fit for us to use.

PLAID BUDGET RESPONSE 2010 (from Elfyn Llwyd MP)

"Last year I warned that the Welsh budget – the money that pays for our public services, our health, our education – was under threat because of cuts made at Westminster. The London parties said we were scare-mongering, but Wednesday’s UK Budget confirmed our worst fears.

The figures published yesterday showed a 5% real terms cut in the Welsh budget, hundreds of millions of pounds, not from some fantasy point in the future but in the 2010-11 financial year which starts in two weeks time. We will have £800m less to spend on Welsh public services in the next year than we should, and between now and 2014 we are likely to be much more than the £3bn worse off that we first thought a year ago.

This is neither fair funding nor a fair deal for Wales. Plaid Cymru were the only party to see this. We were the only ones who cared about our Welsh public services, about our council jobs, health and education, and the only ones facing up to the reality of the situation.

But we in Wales have no have say in these cuts. These are cuts imposed upon us by Labour and Tory masters in London, at Westminster. What’s worse is that Wales has been under-funded for many years and will continue to lose out in the future, as shown by the independent Holtham Commission, which estimates that Wales is losing at least £300m per year under the current system.

Under Labour, public spending in England and Scotland grew faster than in Wales. We in Wales have been taken for granted, and it is still only Plaid Cymru who are fighting for fairer funding, based around the needs of the people of Wales, the outcome recommended by the Holtham Commission.

Despite the successes of the One Wales Government such as ReAct and ProAct, hard working families and businesses all across Wales will still be feeling the pinch when new fuel duty rises kick in next week on what will inevitably go down as ‘April Fuels Day’.

By next January Labour will have increased fuel duty by a massive 17% since December 2008. This means that fuel duty will make up 59p in every litre when people go to the pump. It is a regressive tax that will hit families, businesses and public services budgets hard, and especially those in more rural areas who have less choice in how they travel or how far they have to go for the services they use.

When the time comes we will be fighting these tax rises and repeating our call for a fuel duty regulator which would cap prices at the pump. Labour introduced an even stealthier tax when they froze the income tax threshold. This will increase the amount of tax being paid by hard-working people and impact strongly upon low-paid families here in Wales. In contrast, Plaid would have increased this threshold by £1,000, taking thousands of people in Wales out of paying income tax altogether and putting more money in people’s pockets.

That’s why, in Plaid Cymru, we’re different. We put people first

We would also have increased the basic state pension for over-80s to the level of pension state guarantee to fight pensioner and fuel poverty, whilst increasing taxes on those who are very well off through bringing down the threshold for paying the 50% tax rate and levelling capital gains tax with income tax for example.

This can be afforded – by taking away tax breaks from the already well-off. They don’t need it… our pensioners and those on low incomes, do.

When times are tough it is a question of priorities – and only Plaid Cymru would put the people of Wales first, while Labour and the Tories are more worried by fat cat pin-striped City bankers who are back to their old tricks now after we risked billions of pounds of our money to bail them out.

Our economic future in Wales depends on there being a hung parliament, with neither Labour nor the Tories in overall control. It’s only when your votes matter that they start to pay attention to ordinary people. Plaid Cymru doesn’t owe anything to the City of London, only to the people of Wales – that’s why we’re different. Our policies reflect that and we go to Westminster to get the best deal for Wales, not to listen to anybody else."

Monmouthshire Meals on Wheels Service

Whether you call it an 'efficiency saving' or a 'cut' Monmouthshire County Council's (MCC) plan to increase the costs of meals (by 20p) and to reduce staff numbers will hit the county's most vulnerable residents the hardest as the Meals on Wheels service faces cuts of up to £45,000. Either way it is unacceptable as for many older residents in Monmouthsire the meals on wheels service is a real lifeline. Sadly such behaviour is pretty typical for MCC which over recent years has been busy robbing Peter to pay Paul merely to try to balance the books. MCC needs to think long and hard about these proposed cuts.