Madam,

I was glad to see that MP Liz Saville Roberts had replied, in last week’s Cambrian News, to my letter published the week before (‘Do your homework before putting pen to paper!’), but its content and tone disappointed me.

I suppose I had simply hoped that Mrs Roberts would agree that the people of Fairbourne, and indeed all in Dwyfor-Meirionnydd, are entitled to have their MP act for them wholeheartedly. Plaid’s Gwynedd Council has failed to help Fairbourne to overcome the adverse publicity that the media brought them, but instead accepted and endorsed the very shoreline plan causing the problems.

I’d hoped that the Plaid MP would say she will do all in her power to help directly and get Gwynedd’s Plaid Council to help to overcome the effects of ‘newyddion ffug’ on Fairbourne. The Senedd’s Public Accounts Committee reports the need for “stronger and more resilient local authorities” and recommends that “local evidence and local knowledge” should modify shore line plans. The case for Mrs Roberts gingering up Gwynedd Council is overwhelming.

Gwynedd’s Plaid Council has so overestimated the level of cuts that would balance the books that it is impossible not to believe that they think cuts to be good in themselves, that public services are ways the rich are coerced into helping the undeserving poor. One had hoped Mrs Roberts would upbraid this Plaid cabal with the full power that her position in her party and in parliament gives her.

I had hoped that, instead of bringing her rhetorical guns to bear on me, she would address the Tories in Parliament, lacerating them for their commitment to inequality and crushing them for their wish to destroy Welsh agriculture by importing ruinously cheap lamb from their ex-colony, Australia. Instead she uses what is, by a long, long way, her longest address to the Tories in Parliament to invoke Seithennyn and Cantre’r Gwaelod to commemorate what she herself acknowledges we all recognise as the disgusting treatment meted out to Trweryn.

What about the desertion by our Plaid political leadership in Dwyfor-Meirionnydd and on Gwynedd Council, on cuts, on housing, on the environment, on income equality, and so on and so on.

Yes, I had hoped that Mrs Roberts would have expressed the intention to act justly and determinedly in trying to right the wrongs, the excesses and the failures of her own party right here in 2017.

Yours etc,

Ian MacIntyre, Shelbourne Court, St John’s Hill, Barmouth.

Have your say on the local issues affecting you - email [email protected] or join in the conversation on our Facebook page