Wales is for Sale: An impotent investor’s paradise

Stephen Price

Wandering through Cardiff’s busy streets one Saturday morning earlier this year with time to kill before meeting a friend, I took a detour to a few of the city’s glorious arcades to see what might have changed since my last visit.

I’m a vocal champion of smaller independents, and when and where I can, I buy from the high street as opposed to Amazon and the like, so I was thrilled to see a store I’d been following on Instagram for a good while, relishing the chance to step inside, say ‘shwmae’ and come away with some gifts for upcoming birthdays.

Chatting with the shop owner, I was shocked to hear that this would be my one and only visit. The store was soon to close. The overheads had made running the business, which was becoming little more than a museum for folk to coo over and then look to buy online cheaper later, a spiralling impossibility.

During our chat, I discovered that the owners of the shop building, and those in the nearby vicinity with their equally extortionate rents, were not Wales-based, but an English council’s pension fund.

Little more was said, but a knowing look was shared.

We know, and we’ve always known. It just takes a look.

There was no surprise.

And now, as summer approaches, the colourful, Welsh-language-leading store is but a memory.

Deaf ears

I no longer live in my home village, instead living nearby in Abergavenny. And as strange as it sounds, one reason (or benefit) is because I care too deeply about my former square mile. Bizarre perhaps, but it’s no lie.

I joke sometimes about being Victor ap Meldrew, and the great fictional character and I certainly share the same exasperation with the world.

Complaints about authorities renaming the village next door overnight got me nowhere, complaints about an English-led company taking water from my beloved river got me nowhere.

I feel almost a stranger there now, in disbelief about what it once was, who it was once for, a blink-of-an-eye ago.

Now, as I watch ‘locals’ complain over ‘the Great Wall of Clydach‘, I marvel at the hypocrisy of the opposition from obscene extension builders and fencers-off of land who, dare I mention, are incomers to the village from the other side of the Dyke. But, I digress.

It’s exhausting saying the same thing over and over again, and it’s perhaps why I’m slower to write opinion pieces these days, because it’s all been said before, by me and many before me. Why must we keep stating, and fighting for, the obvious?

But this is what we have to do in Wales. Until, at some point, we realise that it’s better for our own mental health to stop dealing with the maddening wall of silence and lack of action and care, and to, ourselves, reach a point of not caring, or at least to give up, and in many cases, to move away.

The hydroelectric power scheme at Afon Dyar, installed by Llangattock Green Valleys is a perfect case in point. Unclear, ignored, jargon-filled planning notices went up on telegraph poles, and months later, tubing appeared. Concrete and metalwork appeared. And the river flow lessened.

As someone who feels as symbiotic with the woodland there as the trees, the flora, the fauna itself, I complained to the then ‘Brecon Beacons National Park’. I warned that this would alter the makeup of the atmosphere, the feel, the sound.. but what do I know.

It hurt me to my core to look over from my viaduct, at my land, and see a huge plastic pipe smeared in my face. To clamber up my river, its volume lessened, its pools altered, a concrete cage system now in place – because that’s how we feel in Wales, how we should feel, that this land is ours, it’s all of ours.

I created a petition. It did nothing.

Almost a decade on, for whatever reason, climate change, poor management, ageing trees and whatnot, the woodland has lost something. It feels scrappy. Too many trees have fallen. Too few native beech are taking their place. It doesn’t feel like my sanctuary any more.

The company that own the hydroelectric whateverthefuckitis, owned itself by an English incomer from Surrey, had a hippy dippy blessing ceremony when it became operational, and planned to ‘give back’ to the local community. No one I know has seen any of this benefit, besides the owner of a cottage that has a bill paid by the company for use of his land.

Besides the Surrey chap, the board of Directors also features a Bromley native, a Derbyshire native, someone who has lived here since 1989 (wow!) etc. etc. – all showing us how it’s done, how to work in harmony with the land, like our forefathers and mothers never knew how for centuries before. A third world country awaiting entirely altruistic white saviours.

Well done them. Can’t blame them at all. We just bend over and take it, after all. And they have Welsh postcodes now, so that makes it all ‘local’.

I wonder how many other hidden rivers are drying up along their courses for similar profits to be made. How many people’s beloved views are blighted by wind farms and whatnot that are simply there to extract, to exploit. Perhaps we’d feel warmer towards them if they were ours, but they very rarely are.

And, why shouldn’t anyone join the gold rush? People are only doing what they’re allowed to, by us.

And when one or two of us complain, we’re NIMBYs aren’t we, what do we know?

Wales this week: Extraction, extraction, extraction

We tend to focus on the large scale here in Wales, it’s more headline-grabbing, it’s wider reaching – and most often look at the Crown Estate (and not enough on the Duke of Beaufort et al) which provides a handy smokescreen for all the others – the smaller, the localised, the confusing, the one-man-bands – that are at it at a relentless pace.

But let’s look at just three news items from Wales this week…

First, the lovely Sir and Lady Dashwood from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and their plans to site wind turbines near Bluestone.

One can assume they’re not short of a bob or two, but of course, they must have more. And why shouldn’t they want more, and why shouldn’t they choose Wales – it’s a free market, isn’t it?

Let’s not think about the poor natives nearby (if there are any left), or those visiting, unable to enjoy an unspoilt natural view, nor the people in the county who are promised time and time again that ‘this energy will provide enough power for x number of homes’. They can admire the new view, as approved by our councils and Government, from their windows as we all bend over yet again, ripe for extraction.

As one of our commenters wrote: “These people are openly laughing at us as they do what they want with our resources. Fat chance, I appreciate, but it is about time that local authorities, national parks, Welsh Government and the Crown Estate (ha! ha!) just said No to these hoodwinkers, outlanders and arrivistes.”

Also this week, there was the London-based landlord wanting another HMO in Rhyl.

Majid Khan, of London-based Genics Investment, has applied to Denbighshire County Council’s planning department, seeking permission for a change of use of 15 Chester Street from a dwelling to six-bedroom HMO.

According to the application, the HMO is already in use but is not registered with Denbighshire County Council.

A planning statement issued on behalf of Mr Khan reads: “The property was purchased in 1996 for a HMO use, and the previous landlord did submit a planning application in (the) late 90s (or) early 2000s, but this was not registered formally on the council’s records.

“Before the new directives came in 2014, a HMO Licence was not required. A HMO licence was granted and expired in 2020.”

Rhyl councillor Brian Jones said he believed the town already had enough HMOs.

“In my opinion, Rhyl has more than enough HMOs,” he said.

“When Rhyl is compared to other towns in Denbighshire, Rhyl has by far the highest number. We have enough of them. We certainly don’t need any more.”

We certainly do need more houses for the growing number of folk living and moving here, but is the current method fit for purpose? And are we allowed to talk about who it is that’s extracting the money, at the expense of the people who live nearby these HMOs and mini empires?

Anyone visiting our coastal towns and cities whose eyes are open, whose ears are open, can see and hear what is being done by absentee landlords cashing in on England’s down-and-outs, not to mention England’s overpopulation and housing crisis. But again, who can blame anyone coming in and taking what’s made so readily available?

Aberystwyth, once the Welsh speaking capital of Wales, sounds more like Birmingham on sea. Lucky them.

And then, of course, this week we had news of the Craig yr Hesg Quarry, owned by Heidelberg Materials, headquartered in Maidenhead, with its parent company headquartered in, oh yes, Heidelberg, Germany.

More than 11,000 people added their voices to a chorus of calls for a mandatory 1,000-metre buffer zone around all quarries – but their pleas continued to fall on deaf ears.

Labour’s Carolyn Thomas led a Senedd debate on an 11,473-name petition – submitted by Monika Golebiewska – calling for an exclusion zone around homes, schools and hospitals.

Ms Thomas, who chairs the petitions committee which met campaigners in November, urged Welsh ministers to show they are listening to those profoundly affected by quarrying.

“These are people’s lives…,” she stressed. “It is the safety of children on the way to and from school, with quarry lorries going past … the worry about airborne dust in communities, with high rates of serious respiratory conditions …  the fear about structural damage to homes.

“And it’s the shock people experience when blasting takes place. It’s hard to watch a video of vulnerable children being terrified by blasting.”

Excuses of ‘but it employs local people’ are wearing thin. If we have materials to extract, to exploit, why aren’t we holding the reins, or seeing the benefits?

Whether it’s buying our land, our houses, extracting our resources, choking our children, poisoning our rivers, or decimating our native wildlife for the benefit of those calling by for a spot of hunting, we’re impotent, and the Labour-led Welsh Government look on approvingly.

Staring in us the face

The simple solution is, of course, independence. How we, a nation of three million plus people, can’t believe in ourselves, can’t watch the success stories of other countries that have broken free from Empire, and other smaller countries that are doing just fine, is unfathomable.

And until that point, the other solutions are equally simple: voting in representatives that also care, that are also NIMBYs and won’t accept anything less than we deserve in our own back yards.

Whether it’s tighter regulation and property acts, better support for small businesses and our own people, or a firm ‘no’ to extractive industries that are of no benefit to anyone in Wales other than the person selling off their unwanted land, enough is enough.

Instead of complaining to the wall about vultures swooping in on a dead carcass, an independent Wales could think radically and nationalise all green energy in Wales. This would, indeed, provide energy for ‘x number of houses’ – energy that could also be sold to those that currently leech off us with our full consent.

The power is in our hands, only we fail to see it, and continuously fail to vote for it.

Until that point, however, and despite whatever the slogans and banners might say, Mae Cymru ar Werth (Wales is for Sale) and we only have ourselves to blame.

There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song

(Welsh Landscape, R S Thomas – extract)