- Boweled out! - 14th May 2026
- Bargaining chips - 13th May 2026
- Hacking at the foundations - 12th May 2026
In a 42 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, covered numerous important events, including the devolution referendum in Wales when the electorate voted (just) for greater Welsh powers, but to stay in the United Kingdom (UK), and this is now highlighted by a country’s controversial decision to leave a powerful economic bloc ALTOGETHER!
As the results came in it seemed clear – the devolution referendum of 1997 would not be won by those who wanted greater powers for Wales.
We all heard them being announced when we looked at the television screen in Ystrad’s Rhondda Sports Centre, and at count after count the verdict was a resounding ‘NO’.
I clearly remember the journalist standing next to me declaring: “It’s not going to happen”, and I conducted all my interviews for the next morning on the basis that it had been LOST…
However by the narrowest of margins (50.3 per cent), as we all know, it had in fact been WON, yet I didn’t actually realise this until I arrived back home in Cardiff!
Perhaps bizarrely, this extraordinary event has for me been highlighted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) going the OTHER way.
They have decided to pull out of a hugely powerful economic bloc, rather than renegotiating to have greater power but staying within it.
This time it is the OPEC and OPEC+ groups of major oil producing nations, with the country quitting today.
It is seen as a blow to the cartel, which oversees oil production and has a major influence on global prices – with one analyst describing the exit as “the beginning of the end of OPEC”, and the UAE’s departure representing a win for US President Donald Trump, who has previously attacked the cartel for “ripping off the rest of the world”.
Neil Atkinson, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) former head of the oil industry and markets division, said it is “a major blow to the future effectiveness” of OPEC.
Professor David Elmes of Warwick Business School (WBS) declared: “This presents a fundamental geopolitical reshaping of the Middle East and oil markets”.
This is a significant international event, and perhaps even bigger than that night in September 1997 when I came back from the Rhondda thinking there wouldn’t be one in Wales!
News covered by Phil, including major stories like these, as he was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in the book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Next week – another failure by a supposed media executive, and ‘comic’, has put centre stage how major questions have been raised about him, after a previous failed venture announced being ‘part-funded by Welsh Government’, but The Eye have shown that the man behind it had made sick ‘jokes’ about a murdering gunman, was placed under police investigation, tried to finish off this website, and been officially reprimanded.
