Jacob Williams https://jacobwilliams.com

The results of the outgoing jacobwilliams.com poll are hardly surprising, but, in a week where yet another Welsh council has been told to expect special measures imposed on its education department, is the answer that gained 11% of votes becoming a more credible stance to take?

Torfaen County Borough council is now the sixth Welsh authority to receive highly critical follow-up reports from Estyn, who will report to the Education Minister, Leighton Andrews. He’s expected to respond by imposing special measures. He’s well used to doing this, and when this same thing happened here, the cries from Pembrokeshire’s political leaders were, if not loudly, that this was a political vendetta.

In Pembrokeshire’s case, time was unquestionably wasted on improvement. Readers of this website will know that I’m certainly not one to play-down failing departments, badly-performing authorities, mismanagement, a lack of accountability or unprofessionalism; yet if there was a vendetta to be run against Welsh councils’ handling of education, then it’s hard to imagine how much differently – or more effectively – it could be carried out.

The fact that Leighton Andrews remained unscathed in the huge cabinet shake-up a couple of weeks ago might suggest that he’s committed to his portfolio and has been allowed to finish the assignment he started. One wonders whether all or part of this assignment is to strengthen the argument for the return to larger authorities.

The current composition and potential future for Welsh governance are the topics covered in a series of incredibly thorough blog posts on the Bridgend-based blog ‘Oggy Bloggy Ogwr.’ So far the series, called “Local Sovereignty” is up to four editions, starting with Local Sovereignty I – Principles, Practices & Problems. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, whether you agree with it or not, it takes an interesting look at the political actions we see in Wales being taken today, and how they might be shaping the ground for radical changes to Welsh authorities in the future.

---

New poll

The new poll asks your views on the sincerity of the efforts made by the Hywel Dda Health Board in its consultation on shaping its future healthcare provisions. Take part below, or in the usual place at the top right. Once you’ve voted, the ongoing results will show.
Poll now closed. Result:

---

101 Damnations

On a recent visit to the Western Telegraph website, I happened to notice that they’ve started their own online readers’ poll.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say. Indeed, the WT even posted a comment on one of my articles just a few days ago, so there’s no denying that they regularly sniff around these quarters.

Although it’s admittedly trivial and not updated very often, mine is the original Pembrokeshire peoples’ poll, and still the very best.

I would never make such a strong claim without evidence, and it’s because of this that I’m happy to go further in claiming that the WT’s poor attempt is, in fact, dubious and fundamentally untrustworthy.

Aristotle famously said: “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Nonsensical in a numerical sense, maybe, as the mathematically-minded won’t need me to point out that, when expressing the collective constituents of a whole, percentages can’t come to greater than 100%.

Perhaps the translation of this well-known Greek quote in the Western Telegraph’s philosophical dictionary reads: “The poll is more than the sum of its parts,” because totting up the 34%, 40% and 27% results from the WT’s latest poll (on overnight street lighting) amounts to some 101%!

And anybody who says this is proof that the WT poll is ‘1% better than the JW poll’ can get knotted!