So essentially, Wales's most successful economies (i.e. East Wales) are those that have the best connections to and are the most integrated or inter-dependent with those over the border in England. Good thing the WAG is prioritising electrification to Swansea over The valleys then I suppose?

Again, it's all statistics. Ebbw Vale (close to England) is one of the poorest regions.

Basically the whole East/West Wales split for EU statistical purposes is gerrymandered bollocks, designed to make a big chunk of Wales as statistically poor as it can be. The upshoot is that East Wales does okay.

Recognising both is important (I think people concentrate on the west Wales figures and then use that to hammer all of Wales)

Now the shops are open again would all those on this thread stop talking about the economy and go out and start spending!

On a different note...

What!!! are they mad!! surely this rusty creek of a ship that does pleasure trips from Penarth pier is not the most suitable vessel to sail accross the Atlantic?
Then again, maybe they are trying for a complete re-enactment!

^^Same name, different ship

http://shipfinder.co/about/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/MS-Balmoral-MMSI-308785000-495x329.jpg

On the flip side you could view the NUTS2 regions as being designed to make a big chunk of Wales look statistically better performing than it is, by that line of logic.

As an aside, the likes of Ebbw Vale aren't close or well connected enough to the best 'markets' i.e. conurbations, in Wales let alone those in England; unless oil has been discovered in rural west Herefordshire of course!

From the report that was released earlier this year, revealed an interesting tidbit; the vast majority of those who are of working age in West Wales & the Valleys, and form the majority of the working population for Wales in it's entirety, still don't commute out of that region, with only the lower end of the valleys having net outflows. Hopefully that might highlight the need to electrify rail into The Valleys?

The reality is that the NUTS2 regions in Wales were drawn up in the way they were, at least in part, to ensure the poorest areas received EU objective 1 funding. It wasn't just the case of arbitrary line doodling with some pre-conceived notion to make Wales look artificially poorer.

Absolutely..east Wales is artificial too. My main argument is that parts of Wales are doing okay...parts are doing badly, and I don't think that is being recognised properly.

On your last point, it was and is an arbitrary line, of that there can be no doubt. I'll change my opinion when I meet someone who says 'I'm from West Wales and the Valleys' the way someone says they are from 'Cornwall' or 'Merseyside'

Sound familiar?

Except Kent, Essex, Outer London, which have a GDP below East Wales...

All, lies, damned lies and statistics. This data is very important, but it's difficult to draw general conclusions without considering an array of other data.

James

you are correct - you need to consider all the data. Therefore would you think wales is a better place to be that Kent, Essex etc when considering the economy only? do you think wales performs better than those areas? bear in mind a lot of people live in those areas but commute into london where they generate their own personal contribution to GDP?

I spent a bit of time in Harwich recently, which is as far as you can go from London in Essex. It has a direct rail link to Liverpool street (electrified), it is obviously a ferry port and it's just across the water from Felixstowe. There is a dual carriageway that is better than the South Wales M4 about 10 miles from the town. It is within half an hour by train and road from Ipswich and Colchester. Plenty of people commute to London.YET the town is poor. The only place to buy clothes, bizzarely, was Peacocks in an out-of-town retail park. I have never seen so many cheaply dressed people. There werent any nice bars or restaurants or shops. More recently I spent time in Watford. It makes Newport look like Cardiff. It has a rail link to Euston that takes fifteen minutes YET the town is poor! Again, we asked around for a decent restaurant, I checked on Tripadvisor and a Chinese place on the High st was praised. We went and it was like a trip back to the 80s, gloopy sweet and sour etc. We went for a drink afterwards and honestly, the place is in a time-warp. Compared to Cardiff, there are plenty of poor places in the South East. A friend has been working in Kent, in the Medway and Thanet areas (which are about 40 miles apart). He was shocked by the poverty and lack of sophistication.and ambition. There are many,many places like this all over South East England.

Mr Appeasement

Bizarrely, you seem to be comparing the best of what Wales has to offer with the worst of what the South East of England has to offer. Why not compare Kensington & Chelsea with somewhere in the neath valley just for consistency? As always, we compare what we have in Wales with the shittest parts of elsewhere and then think we are lucky. We really do set the bar low if our comparators are the arseholes of any region. We need to look at the best.

Cardiff isn't that bad by all means, but its not as great as other UK cities thats for sure. Likewise, Wales isn't the worst economically, but lets not kid ourselves that we aren't near the bottom in terms of productivity, performance and wealth because we are. We only have the wealth we do because of the westminster subsidy and the euro objective 1 funding. If we didn't have that then i'd say we'd be a lot worse as a nation.

All I want is a business friendly government who understands what is required to make signficant structural changes and not play petty party politics. Welsh Labour have messed around for far too long preferring public sector largesse than economic development of the productive sector.

I find it quite shocking that (in the economic sense) parts of Wales are akin to impoverished parts of Romania and yet posters are trying to suggest this is due to gerrymandering. Whether it is gerrymandering or not to score political points, parts of Wales have very little economic output and this needs to be addressed.

WG/Welsh Labour and their pathetic approach to business via the likes of Venture wales, entreprenuer action, business eye, business in focus type agents have done nothing to stimulate the real part of the economy that drives it forward: the SME sector. I'm talking businesses £5-100m turnover, of which we have comparatively few in Wales. These business are based locally, employ indigenous staff and spend their money pretty much locally. These are the businesses WG needs to encourage, not Rhodri Morgan's plan of getting as many start ups as possible to make it look like Wales is an entreprenuerial nation.

Setting up a 'Disco Dave and his wheels of steel' wedding dj business may be good for the start up stats, but it really doesn't promote long term economic growth.

I disagree with you, Jantra. I think that Cardiff is the best British city and nothing you say will change that. Manchester with its hideous architecture, ugly people, big-headed chip-on-it's-shoulder attitude, horrible accent, dreary weather,appalling crime rate and gang culture isnt compensated by a few trendy bars and restaurants. Bristol with its joke accent, terrible divisions along class lines, crappy shops, yardies and traffic jams isnt compensated by a few trendy bars and restaurants and a slice of medieval city centre. Cardiff is great.

Tell me again how London subsidizes us?

http://www.clickonwales.org/2012/04/boris-wants-devo-max-for-london/

Northern Ireland, London and Scotland all receive more public expenditure than Wales.

I'd far rather live in Cardiff than the South East of England.

I live in a flat with a lovely view. The same job in London, on comparatively the same wages would give me a cardboard box or one of those basement flats with bars on the window.

I say that in jest..but seriously, my London based friends have less material wealth than me. Most probably earn more, but it doesn't go further. On paper they produce more GDP, have a higher salary, but get less for it. Who's the real winner?

Wales economy is poor. Cardiff's is average to above average for the UK. If we can agree on that, then we can move on.

the very simple easily understood fact that Wales contributes £20bn in taxes to HMT but receives £29bn back.


I'm not sure what any of the above has to do with Wales? Can you explain the relevance of the above and how it relates to the subsidy Wales receives from Westminster?

as for London spending more than Wales per capita on public services - is this the london that is the seat of the UK government and all that goes with it or is there a different London? If it is the former then I am surprised anyone with any sort of intellect would even suggest this is unsusual. If it is another London then fair enough. Can you confirm if it is the London that is the seat of the UK govermment and all the public sector that you only find in london and nowhere else in the UK or whether it is a different London?

I suppose it depends on whether you want your children to have opportunity as they grow up or whether you are happy for them to live in a state that is marching relentlessly towards a chomskyist nirvana


alwyn will confirm that the view from my house is possibly equal to any view in Cardiff and Penarth. i'd happily give it up to know that my children have opportunity. A view is a view, opportunities are few and far between.


you forgot we get free presscriptions. Seriously, what if your friends want to trade up in their career thus earning more money in the process. do you think you have better opportunities to do so in the Peoples Socialist Republic of Wales or in the World city of London?




HERETIC...burn him



have I ever said anything else regarding Cardiff? no i have not. However, being mediocre is not a badge of honour. I am not interested in where we are at but where we are going. If the best we can muster is average UK then the rest of Wales is below the average and we have got a long hard slog ahead of us.

do you think adopting socialist policies and left wing anti business pro bureaucratic policies is going to do anything to ensure Wales closes the ever increasing gap. I don't

You think kids growing up in Cardiff have no opportunities? A laughable thing to say, in addition to quite insulting.

honestly, where had i alluded to anything remotely like that? What I have said was that there are many more opportunities to be had in other cities.

Bristol has many divisional headquarters of national and international businesses. The direct result of that is that there is a higher grade of job in Bristol than in Cardiff. (please note I use Bristol only as an example).

Opportunity will be the driver to develop people and business. Compared to other cities, we have poorly paid jobs and poorly graded jobs.

Compare LBG presence in Cardiff and Bristol and you'll see that in Bristol its almost all back office highly skilled professional jobs whereas in Asset Finance/Card Services the majority are call centre staff.

How much brain drain do we have in Cardiff over to Bristol every day? certainly more than comes the other way thats for sure

Can anyone find out how much Westminster has spent on infrustructure in the se of England in the last 10 years?
It would be interesting to compare it to that spent in Wales.
PS Bristol is not a rival city when it comes to the electrification of the Great Western railways

Off the top of my head Crossrail is costing £16 billion, Thameslink £6 billion, High Speed 1 was £5.8 billion, the Jubilee Line Extension £3.5 billion. There's also the Docklands Light Railway extension, which I can't find figures for.

Plus whatever the Olympics ends up costing.

As for Wales...................???

The article shows how unjust the British state actually is. London receives more money than Wales and is yet the richest region in the country. It shows how much money has gone into infrastructure projects in London whilst we know that Westminster hasn't given anything to Wales, infrastructure wise, since the completion of the M4, they even closed rail-links such as the Carmarthen - Aberystwyth line which would make it far easier for the people of Ceredigion to get to Cardiff, Swansea and Carmarthen than now. This should also be a priority as it is in poor region of 'West Wales and the Valleys' why has this nor been addressed properly?

London has 8m people living in it and around an extra 5-6m that commute into it. that's 14m people, around a quarter of the UK's population that rely on it for work.

I'd expect London to get the lions share of investment.

London sucks the economic, political and cultural life out of the rest of the country.

The UK is the most geographically unequal nation in the OECD.

give over. London contributes more to the nations economy and politics than anywhere else by far. Culturally (well the culture that matters) it comes a close second. On the 6th day God created MANchester

see that heath park model railway has got the green light for an extension, not sure if its electrified track, but frankly blows Jantras arguments out of the water, massive infrastructure investment and funded from private sector pockets in wales. have that!

when is bayscape being built? a promise is a promise

Those 4 projects in London cost more than 30 Billion.
The Olympics cost?
HS2 cost?
How much for the electrifcation of the Welsh railays?
Grow a pair Wales - we being kippered big time.

perhaps you'd like to see the removal of the Barnett subsidy of £9bn per annum and have it replaced with say an extra £2bn per annum for infrastructure development.

just how much extra do you want Westminster to give Wales on top of the £9bn per annum it already gives?

Listen up Manc fool.
Snoop wants decent railroads and motorways in the south west of Britain.
Devolve transport from Westminster.
Let us do our own thing.
Wales delivers on time on budget.

The dawg wants at least double the peanuts they are allocating now.
Decades of Tory and Labour neglect.
No electrified line and a single motorway.
Woopee doo.
Just 4 projects in London amount to 31 billion.
They having a laugh

I am from Cardiff


cornwall? very admirable, I prefer West Britain but I admire your desire for others to benefit ahead of yourself


it has been


we have done for 13 years and we have gone backwards


someone has been on the cooking sherry.

perhpas if less of our allocation was spent on benefits and welfare then more could be spent on infrastructure. but the Welsh will not give up their benefits.

perhaps if we were more productive we would have a case for receiving more from Westminster, but we prefer unproductive socialism.

we reap what we sow. when we have a productive economy we can afford all the things you desire.

Decades of neglect from the Saxon government.
PS Did you really mention Northside?

what Saxon govermment? I find your chauvinism offensive. my wife is English, ergo my three sons are half English. it is this petty parochialism that will keep Wales held back.

NB yes I did mention Northside, the album Chicken Rhythms was a very good album and certainly a product of its time. 5th Avenue used to play LSD, Take 5 and Take a trip on a regular basis.

Jantra, for the last time - Infrastructure is not devolved to Cardiff Bay. If it wasn't we wouldn't bee needing to go to Westminster to have the Valleys electrified. If infrastructure was devolved to us like it is in Scotland and Northern Ireland then there wouldn't be a problem

Snoop Dogg, you have spotted the fake welshman. Please continue to pop metaphorical caps in his arrogant, pompous manc/wurzel worshipping ass. A well-versed verbal drive-by will hopefully rub out this fizzle fo shizzle. You should read the egomaniacal stuff he posts all over the internet. He be frontin, his intellect be stuntin,my theory is he aint been laid, karma comes to the overpaid, he think he cool, with his manc music but he a fool, with a flaccid tool, hey Jantra, loot some viagra. Word up. Peace out

so how did WG manage to open the Ebbw Vale line and the line to Rhoose if infrastructure is not devolved?

Department for the Economy and Transport, this department is now the responsibility of our erstwhile marxist. there is a clear objective of, and I quote

wannabe american

the word you are looking for is arse, you should be familiar with it, its where you talk from

actually i think he is referring to your pet Equus africanus asinus.

seriously though, back to free prescriptions, a million prescriptions for paracetamol £3 million. It's a joke. How much could be saved by telling patients to go but 16 tablets for 16 p in Tesco?

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2012/04/09/paracetamol-prescriptions-costing-welsh-nhs-up-to-50m-a-year-91466-30719111/

I don't own a donkey.

FWIW if the solution is only paracetamol, then it was probably a problem that could have been dealt by a pharmacist instead of a GP. so the GPs time is being wasted by having to consult and diagnose the need for paracetamol.

I read somewhere else that the cost of the GPs on top of the prescriptions put the total cost to £50m.

I suppose this sort of behaviour is what happens when you make everything free.

Doesn't mention infrastructure Jantra, my dear chap. Argument is invalid, please forward to your MP and Westminster to be ignored

so the re-opening of the Ebbw Vale line wasn't infrastructure? the opening on the Rhoose line or the widening of the M4 around Cardiff - were they not infrastrucutre as well?

perhaps you could define infrastructure as we clealry have different definitions.

Devolving transport policy is probably not the gold egg laying goose some expect it to be, however I seriously doubt Wales is any better off by not having it; if we did, one could speculate that issues such as the prohibitive costs of the Bridge tolls, M4 relief road, Links to cardiff airport and so on would have been tackled sooner, or more effectively, or being dealt in a way that we are just not seeing currently.

Are posts like that really appropriate?
Perhaps Westminster can devolve better manners to both you, as well as transport for Wales.


Given London was already one of the established, premier cities of the world prior to that, to put it quite simply, no.

If anywhere were to have benefitted from the Chunnel opening, it would have been Lille. A city in a region that shares many cross similarities with Wales.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2011/11/14/at-last-the-devolution-train-has-arrived-for-welsh-railways-91466-29770205/

Huzzah-ish!

Dear Caesawr,
You are either Jantra in disguise, or his wife, or completely ignorant of his internet trolling. He is an ego maniac with little to be maniacal about. He seems to think that his turgid pronouncements on the failures of Wales and the Welsh are actual truth, rather than being the outward urges of a set of diseased membranes. He believes that he is the arbiter of all good taste, and furthermore that his life is more interesting than other people's. He is probably overcompensating given that he is an accountant, that most beige of non-professions. He has assumed a kind of ownership of this board, commenting on whether or not people are posting the "right kind of posts" and after flouncing off to his even worse alter-ego of "Feedback" on the Cardiff City Messageboard, he insulted the denizens of this forum. He then invented a series of ridiculous alter-egos to allow him to continue to post here. His return turned my scorn of the man behind these identities into dismay and a desire to ridicule him. I mistakenly insulted him by coining the aphorism that he was "a fat man talking to thin air", to which he took great umbrage, and I sincerely apologised. Last week he called me a burk (sic) which I don't really mind, but which I thought was quite hypocritical. He did it on page 3 of this thread. So he is fair game now. He is the only person who provokes other people on this board. I believe he does it deliberately. Classic trolling.

and breathe...

a troll is not something that exercises his right to free speech. you disagree with what I say, thats fair enough, but it doesn't make me a troll


really, how have you ascertained that?


are you suggesting that Wales has not failed and that we are in fact doing ok?


so you're commenting on mental illness now? just how young are you?


again, how have you ascertained that. taste is subjective, i have mine, you have yours. On other forums discussions move away from the main purpose of the forum and posters also discuss aspects about them away from the forum. Nowt wrong with that, if you dislike it then you always have the option of not reading


Mr Ad Hominem is back ,oh how you have been missed. you obviously know little of what work i do so what you need to do is make it up to suit your argument


Paul's board, it is free to post. there is no limit on what you can post and I doubt we'll run out of internet any time soon.


WTF are you on about now



when have I insulted anyone?


nah, not me although I did find it tres amusent that people were guessing every new poster as being jantra. you've even done it in this thread.


feel free, I post in the open and you can say what you like. honestly, it won't offend me in the slightest


I most certainly didn't take umbrage in the slightest, as I said at the time, I also said there was no need to apologise. there still isn't. honestly, you may struggle with it, but being called mean and nasty names by keyboard warriors really doesn't register in any way.


you don't mind so you'll go on about it.


why, where have I ever stated that I disliked your pet names for me? where exactly? I really could not care one bit how you refer to me or what you say. quack quack it is water off a ducks back. please don't flatter yourself


brilliant, filly er boots, let rip. I'm all ears.


that's because I'm really the only person who, by and large, bothers engaging in any sort of debate and provides an alternative viewpoint.

oh dear things aren't as friendly here as was my grand masterplan!! still I won't stick my oar in and I'm glad that this 'discussion' stays in one thread. From my own point of view things getting somewhat ugly as they are here sure detracts from new people joining in to 'pass comment' on all things Cardiff on this forum without fear of some massive debate. Still it'll all come out in the wash? I guess!!? - but it seems some of our golden oldy regulars have tired of this place which is a real shame, maybe things just don't need to be so serious here - rightly or wrongly that's not what I wanted, aren't there forums out there more 'political'?. I mean I'm pretty scared of posting myself and its my forum!!!
still nothing that bayscape proceeding wouldn't cure eh!!

apologies Paul. I've said before I'll respond to poster in kind.

I don't think any of the regulars are scared off (well I like to think they are not). I just don't think there is much going on in Cardiff regarding what people tend to come here for...skyscraper porn

yes you could well be right - it'd be nice to see a few things getting going - admiral next week apparently.