Madam,

Neither you nor your readers should be taken in for one moment by Plaid Cymru huffing and puffing about the money allocated to Gwynedd County Council for 2016-17.

‘Gwynedd one of councils hardest hit by budget cuts’ you say, reporting, I hope, rather than endorsing this odd view by the Plaid councillors, and you say ‘MP extremely disappointed by cuts to Council’ (Cambrian News, 17 December).

Plaid had been telling us that the Labour Government was going to have to cut the grant to Gwynedd by four per cent, which would have been £6.8m down compared with 2015. Now we learn that the figure is 1.7 per cent. Gwynedd got £168m in 2015-16 (Her Gwynedd, page 4). You report £166m for 2016. That is a drop of less than 1.2 per cent.

Even on Plaid’s own cockamamie figures, that means that the Labour Government is acting like a Daniel to the fray, fighting Tory austerity to the tune of £4m in relief for Gwynedd.Why isn’t Plaid cheering from the rafters, I wonder?Because they are too ungenerous to give the Labour Government credit for actually fighting austerity rather than just talking about it?

Because they are a party very like the Tory Party in England, dominated by their traditionally wealthy and nouveau riche, deceiving legions of poor fellow countrymen, telling them we are ‘all in it together’ because we have a language in common?

Because they like cuts? Do they hope to add to the fear of our country’s poor, already fearful of job insecurity and so willing to take low-paid work in poor conditions to the satisfaction of their rich? The £2m of back office savings that everyone is agreed can be made safely and a 1.5 per cent on-cost in council tax would mean no cuts whatsoever. Twenty per cent of council tax payers would get benefit relief for such an increase. The worst off would be better off. Free refuse collection and other services could be brought to an end for the richest (highest per capita income) households. Then services, creche facilities, after school child care, old people drop-in centres and youth clubs could be enhanced, rather than cut, in the poorer areas. That way, the Tories’ notorious council tax would have a Robin Hood flavour. But Plaid doesn’t propose anything remotely as radical. Is it because Plaid likes cuts?

Because they don’t want to admit their whole Her Gwynedd project is based on the wrong information?

Because they didn’t have the political acumen to realise that £4m of relief was on its way to Gwynedd?

Because Plaid is a party that pretends to radicalism where it has no power but shows its true Tory face when power is in its hands?

Let not your readers be taken in by Plaid seeking fig-leaves to cover its betrayals of all those Welsh people who are not rich, and its traducing of the champion of the poor, the Labour Government.

Yours etc

Ian MacIntyre

Prospective Labour AM Candidate for Dwyfor Meirionnydd

Arthog Terrace

Arthog.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Re the second paragraph of the letter, we are confident our readers know that newspapers report news and comments, but that it is not an endorsement of them.