- Evans gate way - 6th September 2024
- Free words - 5th September 2024
- No access all areas - 4th September 2024
For our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, exposing political humbug and hypocrisy always played an important rôle during his 40 year journalistic career, and today this is being shown in spades as pressure mounts on the First Minister of Wales (FMW) Vaughan Gething to step down, as well as the 81 year old President of the USA (POTUS), Joe Biden.
It is fascinating to see double-standards come into play, or brazenness in the face of facts EVERYBODY knows!
We are seeing it now in relation to the growing pressure on President Joe Biden over his age affecting his performance, and the continued determination of Vaughan Gething to hang on to his job as First Minister of Wales (FMW), despite the fact that he has been engulfed in scandal, lost a no-confidence vote in the Welsh Parliament/Senedd (WP/S), and has apparently found that backing among many of his senior colleagues has been wiped out.
Let’s look at the one affecting President Biden first.
Democrats are in a complete quandary over what to do about him, however there has been little comment in this controversy that there are strong parallels here with their accusations about Republican behaviour.
The Republicans have continued to back Donald Trump (who survived an assassination attempt at the weekend), even though they have privately said how much they dislike him, and they have faced widespread derision for it.
The analogy with what is happening now is striking, because it is entirely possible that MOST Democrats think President Biden should step aside allowing a younger person to campaign against Mr Trump (he will be 86 at the end of his second term), but few are prepared to put their heads above the parapet and say so.
Many of those same people will have laughed at (or worse) the Republicans for hunkering down and silently backing Mr Trump, because he is so powerful, when they don’t have the courage of their convictions to come out and say: ‘This man is a right wing nativist, who does not have my support’.
What’s happening now is EXACTLY the same, but today affects the Democrats!
Even last week there were further glaring examples of President Biden’s memory failure.
A couple of hours before he took the stage at the start of the NATO summit, he mistakenly introduced Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy as “President Putin”.
“And now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination, ladies and gentlemen, President Putin”, he said.
At the same conference, President Biden was asked about his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, and he mistakenly called her “Vice-President Trump”.
His gaffes became a meme-tastic moment which defined his performance for the screen-scrolling generation, the very one he needs onside for his re-election in November.
They may, too, have played into the hands of Vladimir Putin, with the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov saying on Friday about his other comments: “We continue to consider it absolutely unacceptable and impermissible behaviour for a head of state to make such disrespectful remarks about other heads of state”.
President Biden’s latest ‘slip of the tongue’ even made the front pages of UK newspapers on Saturday as they reported that $90 million in donations could be at risk if he was the Democratic nomination.
But most of the Democrats who are prepared to go public about their misgivings, have come from the worlds of publishing or show business.
For example in The New York Times George Clooney wrote that the Mr Biden he met “was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010” or “even the Joe Biden of 2020″.
Talking about his appalling performance in the leaders’ television debate, Mr Clooney added: “Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We are not going to win in November with this president”.
The President’s abysmal performance in that debate was described as “painful to watch”, in the London Review of Books (LRB), and Rob Reiner, another prominent Hollywood Democrat who held a campaign fundraiser said they needed someone younger.
But these people are joined by only a tiny minority of elected Democrats.
Just SIXTEEN Democrats in the House of Representatives (out of 213), called on Mr Biden to bow out from the race against his likely opponent Mr Trump, and some Democrats in the Senate have held a crisis meeting to discuss the President’s standing on the ticket but were left largely stuck in limbo about the best next move.
Let’s turn then to the issue of Mr Gething, and his own determination to hang on like Mr Biden.
He lost the confidence vote less than 12 weeks after taking office, following a series of scandals that have called into question his judgement and transparency.
This was on June 5, but he is STILL there, indeed campaigned for Labour in the General Election (GE).
It has also become clear that Mr Gething has been deserted by some in his own party.
He has said that he regrets the “impact”of his decision to take £200,000 from a company owned by a man convicted of illegally dumping waste, but at the same time appeared to blame the way this issue has been reported by the media.
Yet he has crossed swords with the media before.
In August 2017, Mr Gething walked away in the middle of an interview on ITV Wales, when questioned by journalist James Crichton-Smith over his decision not to hold a public inquiry into Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board (ABMUHB), following allegations that an employee had sexually assaulted vulnerable patients.
He was also in tears before the confidence vote was held in the WP/S and commentators said they had never seen anything like it.
It was only in March that Mr Gething had made history when he became the first black leader of any European country (succeeding Mark Drakeford) as the FMW, but after a succession of controversies it seemed that MSs (Members of the Senedd) had had enough.
The main issue (although certainly not the only one), has been his connection to a man with a dubious past.
There have been months of rows over donations to Mr Gething’s leadership campaign from the company owned by a man previously convicted of environmental offences. The firm is owned by David John Neal, who was given suspended sentences in 2013 for the illegal dumping of waste, and in 2017 for not cleaning it up.
It emerged during the recent leadership contest that Mr Gething had lobbied on behalf of one of Mr Neal’s companies, before his first run in 2018.
In a separate row, Mr Gething (who has declared: “I’m going to carry on doing my duty”, when a lot of people would rather he DIDN’T!) found himself having to defend a message he sent during the pandemic, where the then-health minister told colleagues he was deleting texts from a ministerial group chat.
He later sacked Hannah Blythyn, alleging she was the source of a leak to Nation.Cymru (NC).
It has been denied now that she was the leaker, but the whole saga underlines the irony of how NC is partly funded by the Welsh Government [WG]) – the journalism there is compromised because it would be difficult fully to investigate wrong-doing in the WG when some of the money comes from the very same organisation!
Following this extraordinary business, opposition parties demanded to see evidence, but Mr Gething has declined to provide it.
Two MSs were ‘off sick’ during the no-confidence vote, and this would not have been unhelpful to his opponents.
They were Ms Blythyn herself, and Lee Waters, the former transport minister who had previously called for the donations at the centre of the main scandal to be returned.
It seems, like in the USA, they weren’t prepared to go properly public, but would only make their dislike obvious using other methods
Perhaps they might put their heads above the parapet across the pond about President Biden’s age.
Or perhaps not…
The memories of our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry’s, decades-long award-winning career in journalism (when commenting on major political stories was always paramount), as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Regrettably publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – Phil looks at how more and more today the lazy cliché is given that something is the ‘size of Wales’, and is even now being used in advertising!
