Reform MS ‘whitewashing her past’ in Remembrance Day video

Martin Shipton

A former Labour council leader has accused Romanian-born Reform MS Cristiana Emsley of “whitewashing her past” after she took part in a Remembrance Day video.

Ms Emsley, who represents Fflint Wrecsam, was among several Reform MSs who took turns reading from Laurence Binyon’s First World War poem For the Fallen.

The poem’s best-known stanza reads:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

“Romania, of course, provided the second-biggest Axis army on the Eastern Front after Nazi Germany,” said Jeff Jones, the former leader of Bridgend Council. “They massacred 260,000 Jews. She is whitewashing her past. It’s bonkers.”

Romania joined the Axis in November 1940 under Ion Antonescu and took part in the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union the following year. Romanian forces carried out mass killings of Jews, and the authorities deported many others to ghettos and camps in Romanian-occupied Ukraine, where people died of starvation and disease.

The International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania estimated that between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were murdered or died during the Holocaust in Romania and territories under its control.

Mr Jones also accused Reform MSs Francesca O’Brien, Steven Rodaway and Art Wright of seeking to make political capital out of Remembrance Day.

Ms O’Brien posted a photograph of herself wearing cadet medals between Mr Wright and Mr Rodaway. In the accompanying message, she said she had spent every Remembrance Sunday since the age of 17 in uniform with her squadron in Mumbles, but had attended a different event this year.

“Whereas posts often reflect on memories of our fallen heroes, and rightly so, my post will reflect on two colleagues who have served our great country and lived to tell the tale – the ones that did manage to come home,” she wrote.

She said Mr Rodaway had served for 10 years in the British Army and Mr Wright for 20, adding that both had completed numerous tours and led troops on the ground.

“I have so much respect for them both, and it’s a real privilege to have them in our [Senedd] group,” she wrote.

“They really are a joke. Look at her medals for being in the cadets. Wright was a tank transporter guy. Rodaway reached captain after 10 years in the army,” Mr Jones said.

“Individuals who do achieve anything don’t say much. Twenty years ago I was on a committee with a guy from the TECs [Training and Enterprise Councils] in Wales. Great guy. We talked about cricket.

“I didn’t even know he was in the army. Years later there was his obituary in The Times. He was the guy who planned the SAS operations! As I said, they don’t say anything.”

Ms Emsley, Ms O’Brien, Mr Rodaway and Mr Wright were invited to comment. None responded.