Madam,

There is much to admire in the approaches that Liz Saville Roberts, our MP in Dwyfor Meirionnydd and a regular columnist in the Cambrian News, takes to politics.

But in her opposition to the Local Development Plan she seems to be her own worst enemy.

It is clear that Gwynedd Council has the resources to provide adequate infrastructure support to the housing project that the MP opposes.

Equally, it is planned that the housing development will be backed up with a £50m support programme of Welsh language education. Thus non-Welsh speaking youngsters and adults will get a real opportunity to become fluent in Welsh and become invaluable members of our society. Education lets people trapped by their background escape, offering them richer futures.

I smell ‘classism’ in Liz Saville Roberts’ failing to recommend and support such futures for those in the new communities created under the plan, whilst using, in full, her own educational advantages, obtained at an English grammar school and a Welsh university, free to her, paid for by the sorts of people whom she would leave without homes. Her past privileges should be model futures for the poor and dispossessed brought up here in Wales.

Liz quotes fine Welsh poems (without translation) in the House of Commons. She should take to heart, perhaps, the words of the Hen Benillion, and see them as a caution:

Mynd i’r ardd i dorri pwysi,

Pasio’r lafant, pasio’r lili,

Pasio’r pincs a’r rhosys cochion,

Torri pwysi o ddanadl poethion!

To avoid the nettles (danadl), Liz simply has to acknowledge that all should have the opportunities she had and understand that all are capable of taking advantage of them - those from affluent backgrounds but also those from all the poor and disadvantaged families here in north Wales. Helping them, the many, is to gather the pinks and the red roses and is, indeed, the sort of work any MP would be proud of. Leaving such opportunities to the few is Toryism, Liz, and you are better than that.

Yours etc,

Ian MacIntyre, St John’s Hill, Barmouth.

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