VOTERS are very interested in promises of action over specific issues that keep them awake at night.

Grand, vaguely expressed, strategies, on the other hand, tend to go in one ear and out the other. Political parties imagine that big-idea commitments expressed with a fanfare and a flourish will be winners at the ballot-box. No, they won’t. As a tactic, they’re a dud.

Drum-roll Plaid Cymru’s wholly worthy proposal to dust-off a 12-year-old plan to turn Bronglais Hospital into a “hospital of rural excellence”. Actually a marvellous idea but, as it stands, fluffy. Not something that’s going to set the Ystwyth on fire. So not, presented as a stand-alone rallying-cry, a winner.

What voters in Ceredigion and points east and north into Powys and south Gwynedd want is a simple watertight guarantee that Plaid in government, whether alone or in a majority, would decisively throw out, in its entirety, the dreadful Hywel Dda health board’s life-threatening intention to wreck, by downgrading, Bronglais Hospital’s widely celebrated stroke service.

Mabon ap Gwynfor, Gwynedd Maldwyn front-runner at the May election, and more than likely the next health secretary, would do himself, Plaid Cymru and this long-time discriminated against wedge of rural Wales a favour by accepting the reality that it is specific guarantees, not indistinct grand plans, that yield votes. Having ingested that fact, he must commit to a course of action that he should by now, so close to the election, recognise as representing an unrivalled claim to social/health justice.

Trouble is, Mabon is being infuriatingly timid. So far, he has refused to give a firm commitment that he would pull rank and throw out, for good, the health board’s awful plan to downgrade the Bronglais stroke service.

Oh, he bleats, I can’t do that. Applying false logic, the current MS for Dwyfor Meirionnydd claims he “would need to be careful not to prejudice any ministerial decision at this stage - and it may well be that, as a local member, having already expressed strong views on this matter, I would not be able to act as a minister on this matter.”

How wrong can you be? I wrote last month that this is rubbish. It remains so.

The fact that he has been Dwyfor Meirionnydd MS since 2021 and has backed Bronglais and attacked Hywel Dda’s ‘treat-and-transfer’ abomination would in no way prejudice a ministerial decision to order reversal of a policy potentially lethal to stroke patients in a large part of Wales. Indeed, it would be remiss of a health minister not to act in defence of those patients.

This would not be a constituency issue but an all-Wales judgment based on equity of health service provision, and taking into account current geographical disadvantage.

Further, it’s perfectly obvious as objective fact that health services in Ceredigion, western Powys and southern Gwynedd have for decades been neglected by Cardiff governments and, before that, the Welsh Office. Mabon does not need to worry about prejudice.

So what’s the health board up to now over the Aberystwyth stroke service? Clearly bruised by the solidarity and strength of public protest, including a 17,000-signature petition, it has retreated to its Carmarthen bunker, from which there has been silence since its display of callous ineptitude at a special board meeting on 19 February, when it said there would be “further engagement with our communities before a decision could be made.”

So what is the timeline? The board

tells me: “The engagement activities and supporting documentation are currently being prepared, with an ambition to engage with communities in the summer.” Ah. So just when loads of people are away on holiday.

IT’S SIMPLY daft of Powys council deputy leader and Labour group leader Matthew Dorrance to accuse anti-poverty champion Joy Jones of trying to scare the public with “inflammatory language” after she raised a red flag over the state of healthcare in the county.

Dorrance should be congratulating her for drawing up a comprehensive six-point motion demanding immediate government intervention to stabilise, and halt further erosion of, NHS services in Powys. He must know Cllr Jones’s health emergency declaration is serious and factual, and that his alternative suggestion of private talks with Powys health board would likely be a recipe for obfuscation and foot-dragging.

A major concern is that inadequate funding by the Cardiff government means that Powys patients referred to hospitals in England are waiting longer for treatment than English patients - even when they’re treated in the same hospital by the same doctors - simply because they live in Wales.

IT’S A PITY that Christian churches generally are so lily-livered, so un-Christ-like, in fact, when it comes to standing up to Donald Trump and his bomb-lust associates.

It’s true that the Pope, an American, has demanded a Middle East ceasefire, adding: “Cease fire so that avenues for dialogue may be reopened. Violence can never lead to the justice, stability, and peace that the people are waiting for.”

But Leo X1V didn’t refer to the US or Israel by name in comments at the end of his Sunday blessing in Rome on 15 March, though mentioning attacks that targeted a school, a clear reference to the missile strike on an elementary school in Iran on the first day of the war that killed over 165 people, many of them children.

So why couldn’t he have been properly forthright? Scarcely a fear of some kind of retribution, his status, after all, making him more or less untouchable. It’s a reticence impossible to defend.

Meanwhile, the bulk of churches have, even more weakly, stayed silent throughout this mindless assault on people and important economic infrastructure. (The doubtless serious toll on the natural environment will probably emerge only gradually.)

So just what do these institutions think they’re there for, if not to save souls by first saving bodies?