Editor,

At the opening of the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno on Saturday, 12 March, Mark Drakeford described his vision of a nation wherein all citizens would feel secure in their basic human needs. Keir Starmer struggled to match Mark Drakeford’s electoral appeal.

Just after the war, as a young boy I went with my family to watch my brother, who was the goalkeeper in the town team. There came a time when a player from an outlying village appeared in the team, reportedly paid a £10 fee. To this day I can feel the unwelcome change in many of the comments I heard from the spectators, different in tone and content to what I had heard in earlier years.

I hope and pray that Wales will never make the Faustian bargain that so many English clubs have made with obscenely rich foreign owners. Shortly after the Berlin wall was removed, my newspaper at the time portrayed an old, stocky, peasant woman, washing her clothes through a hole in the ice, at a time when the oligarchs — robber barons — were profiteering from state assets. Something like PPE cronyism in the pandemic, only on a vast scale.

Recently I saw a spokeswoman on television who extolled the trophies that Chelsea had won over many years, seemingly oblivious to the destruction by money of the sport, and club she loved.In the Lincoln Music Festival church venue there was a motto framed upon a wall: “The object of this festival is not to defeat a rival or win a prize, but to pace one another on the pathway to perfection”. That’s the true spirit of sport.

Roger Louvet, Porthmadog