- China crisis - 15th July 2026
- Burned out again - 14th July 2026
- Broken - 13th July 2026
During 23 years with the BBC, and in a 42 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, became used to focusing on the ‘bad’ aspects of any information, and that politicians especially, rarely look at the reality (particularly during election periods), but new research is today painting a rather different picture…
It’s always best to do your own research.
Do NOT rely on others to tell you what is going on – especially politicians because there are more votes to be won in showing how bad things are in a society under an opposition party (or even your own group if you happen to be opposed to the incumbent!).
We recently saw this in spades during, and immediately after, the recent elections to the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru (WP/SC) when Labour lost Wales after 100 years.
The former First Minister of Wales Eluned Morgan (Baroness Morgan of Ely) called the election result in Wales “a catastrophe” for Labour.
Lady Morgan and her party fell victim to a tidal wave (which is NOT a mixed metaphor) of support for the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru (Plaid), and for the right-wing populist party Reform UK.
One website described it in these terms: “Given that (it had) been predicted as a distinct possibility for months, it’s easy to miss the seismic nature of this moment”.
But it goes on FOR MONTHS after the result, when the new party can put the responsibility on the previous lot for everything that is going wrong today (you only have to look at Rachel Reeves blaming the Tories for a huge ‘financial black hole’ for that!).
So we saw earlier this month, the new First Minister of Wales (FMW) Rhun ap Iorwerth telling the unions that his administration would fight to reverse Wales’ status as a low-pay nation.
Get ready for more of the same when the UK Premiership starting gun is fired. In fact we have already seen it from Andy Burnham when he declared that the UK had been on the “wrong path” for the past 40 years.
This seems an odd metaphor to use, when it includes events being driven by successive Labour governments!
This might, of course, be dismissed as standard political knock-about, but for me it underscores why you need to find out things for yourself.
For example, one area might be the economy. We are constantly being told how bad things are – is this the truth though?
The UK’s nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is approximately £3.04 trillion ($4.26 trillion) in 2026, with an estimated growth rate of around 0.8 percent to one percent for the year.
This is not stupendous, but the economy HAS experienced recent growth surges, driven heavily by the dominant services sector, despite continuing global price pressures as well as inflation concerns, and it is demonstrating steady (albeit slow) expansion, with GDP growing by 0.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 and by 0.3 per cent in March.
OF COURSE there are major problems to be addressed – not least with productivity and the large level of debt – but the truth is that the economy is not doing TOO badly, especially when you consider all the huge shocks it has suffered recently like Brexit and the war in Ukraine.
What, then, about the field of investment, particularly in new industries?
Demis Hassabis
It emerged this year that UK start-ups had raised £6 billion in venture capital in the first three months of this year – which is more than the next THREE countries combined!
Money is pouring into new technology companies like Nscale, Wayve and ElevenLabs.
Then there is DeepMind co-founded in London by Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman.
Theirs is the biggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) lab outside the United States of America (USA).
But this seems only to be the start of things, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison is building a 7,000 scientist campus in Oxford, with Microsoft creating Europe’s largest AI supercomputer at a site off the M25.
This is the reality – but don’t expect this sort of good news to be seized on by opposition politicians!
The memories of Phil’s decades-long award-winning career in journalism (including his time covering politics), 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!
Next week – new academic research has completely debunked so-called ‘information’ about a religious revival this year, and it could have enormous implications for Wales.
