A PETITION signed by 17,881 people demands retention of Bronglais Hospital’s vital stroke service. Forcefully and persuasively, it rejects a highly irresponsible health board proposal guaranteed to endanger patients by forcing them to travel hundreds of miles for treatment.

It urges the Senedd and the government to intervene immediately to protect the Aberystwyth stroke unit from the board’s idiotic attempt to downgrade it to treat-and-transfer status, condemning vulnerable patients to the ordeal of being lugged half way across Wales to Llanelli or Haverfordwest.

Lives would be put at risk, the danger of long-term disability increased.

Gathering multi-thousand signatures for this mighty document took campaigners much time and effort. The petition was augmented by the thousands fired into turning out for public meetings in the enormous region served by the existing much-praised stroke unit.

Finally, this cogently argued document reaches the Senedd’s petitions committee - a name which sounds less like an arm of democratic administration than an arrangement under which serfs bow and scrape to the lord of the manor.

The name matters, because devolution wasn’t meant to be like this. Taking democracy to the grassroots was supposed to be about removing encumbrances to the direct exercising of power by the people. Any hint of deference clashes with this new order.

So a video of the occasion is an eye-opener. The seven Senedd members of the petitions committee appear as in an assumed role of bestowing favours, rather than straightforwardly expediting a public demand. On camera, these people seem on the verge of catatonia. Maybe it’s because they’re in a room apparently without windows, and suffering from a lack of oxygen. Whatever, they have a glazed look.

But they squeeze out agreement that this is a petition with so many signatures it must be the subject of a full Senedd debate. Of course, this should have gone without saying. Post-devolution, we don’t need a committee to confirm a basic right.

Meanwhile, the health secretary himself, no less, intervenes, and with a staleness equal to his petitions colleagues’ flatness. Yes, Jeremy Miles has written to the committee. A communication, it turns out, remarkable for saying…absolutely nothing in terms of meeting the public’s demands for safeguarding the Bronglais stroke unit.

Miles confines himself to stating the bleeding obvious. Health boards, he says, “must provide safe and sustainable services which meet the needs of their population.” Clearly, and this is exactly what Hywel Dda will not be doing if their dreadful plan goes through.

He adds: “Anyone experiencing stroke or suspected stroke, regardless of where they live, should be seen and treated as quickly as possible in the most appropriate setting which can provide the most effective treatment.” So, Jeremy, just read the riot act over this frankly dangerous proposal.

The Welsh government, he says, “sets the strategic direction of NHS Wales but health boards are responsible for planning and delivery…” That old chestnut. Is that the withered best you can do, Mr Miles?

You get the drift. These, unquestionably, are the words of a government minister who shows every sign of having declined to take the time and trouble to soak up the well-argued anxieties of thousands of Welsh citizens desperately worried about the prospects for survival, without permanent disability, of people suffering a stroke in the rural expanses of Ceredigion, Powys and southern Meirionnydd if the health board goes ahead and vandalises a currently highly efficient service.

Is this what being health secretary is all about - signing off a letter that scarcely merits the name because it seems to have been written by an automaton?

In an isolated moment of engagement, Miles claims emerging expert advice suggests the NHS “should treat acute stroke care as a specialist service provided regionally.”

Which neatly sidesteps the findings of a major study, reported last year in the European Stroke Journal, warning of medical “complications”, including “neurological deterioration”, for a hefty 26.9 per cent of stroke patients during inter-hospital transfers. Of this number, 4.3 per cent of complications were “life-threatening”.

Yet a “treat-and-transfer” system is exactly what the Hywel Dda board is so obstinately threatening to force on Ceredigion, Powys and south Meirionnydd.

Unsurprisingly, Bryony Davies and Lisa Francis, from the Protect Bronglais Services campaign, say they are concerned and disappointed by the health secretary’s response. That must be a restrained understatement.

A struggle forced on the people of mid and west Wales by an antediluvian establishment continues.

NEITHER the government nor the Senedd has a voter mandate for the extraordinary 50 per cent-plus growth in MS numbers from next year, or for the accompanying frantically expensive expansion of the parliament’s debating chamber. This is empire-building gone mad.

Originally, the cost of enlarging the chamber was put at £3.25m. That figure has now leapt by nearly 30 per cent to £4.22m. But don’t worry about the price-tag. Ceredigion MS and llywydd Elin Jones tells us: “This cost will be fully funded from the Senedd reform budget for this current year.” So that’s all right, then. Any impression of runaway pricing is an illusion. Senedd budgets, we are assured, are fully elasticated.

And so to the £19m - 21 per cent - budget increase to pay for another 36 members, taking the total from 60 to 96. Just like that. And in a single year. You thought public spending was under strain? Not a bit of it.

Plans for 2026-27 include an extra £12.7m to cover the salaries and costs of the new faces and their staffs, contributing to a total rise from £83.8m in 2025-26, to £102.7m in 2026-27, in the costs of day-to-day running of the Senedd.

There has never been clear voter consent for an expansion in the number of Senedd members, the scale of which from next year is profligate.

The parliament’s attempts at justification range from the meaningless - “We’ve had the same number for 25 years, despite an increase in powers.”

To the fanciful - “More members will give the Senedd greater ability to look at and challenge the Welsh government’s plans, and spending on major issues like the health service, education and transport, giving communities a stronger voice when these decisions are made.”

For a good example of special pleading, look no further.

But what instead could you get for the extra £23m-plus of public money the Senedd is about to spend on itself?

Figures from the Personal Social Services Research Unit, a leading social care research group, show £23m would pay for about 300 nurses, or around 140 NHS dentists. Or you might want to concentrate on saving village schools, or safeguarding care-homes or paying carers a bit more.

The Senedd has become inward-looking and deeply in love with its own image. Hardly surprising then that fewer than half of all voters bother to turn out for Senedd elections.