At midday tomorrow (Wednesday, 01/02/06), Aran Jones and Owen Llywelyn from the anti-colonisation movement Cymuned will be meeting Alun Pugh AM, the Minister with responsibility for the Welsh language. Cymuned will be presenting their argument for official recognition of the Fro Gymraeg, and emphasising the need for the Assembly’s new branches in Llandudno and Aberystwyth to operate internally through the medium of Welsh.

‘We’re glad to have this chance to call on the Minister to recognise the key importance of our Welsh-speaking communities to the future of the language,’ says Aran Jones, Cymuned’s Chief Executive, ‘and to stress the importance of using the language as the internal medium of communication for public bodies in the Fro Gymraeg.’

The meeting follows on from Cymuned’s attendance at the Assembly’s ‘Fforwm Iaith’ in Porthmadog last year, and has been welcomed by the movement as a natural next step in the consultation process.

‘It’s a positive step forward that the Minister is prepared to discuss these matters directly with Cymuned,’ says Owen Llywelyn. ‘There is a real need for official recognition of the Fro Gymraeg in order to ensure that housing, economic and linguistic policies are all co-ordinated successfully.’

For more details, contact Cymuned’s office on 01758-612712

The topic this week is Asda (remember, if you want news rather than wider discussion, get yourself off to www.notenglish.com/list.html and subscribe to the weekly email!).

If someone had asked me a decade ago what I thought about chain stores, I’m sure my reply would have been rather mixed. Back then, I was living in Dubai, which plays host to some of the largest shops in the world. You needed a sat-nav just to get round Ikea, and the range of choice for CDs in the supermalls was just insane. No, really, honestly insane – I mean, I still have CDs that no sane person would ever have bought, and I bought them because… well, dunno, really.

That’s part of it, of course. Such a remarkable amount of research goes into these monsters – they probably know more than anyone else on earth about how to make people feel comfortable, relaxed, warm, happy – and ready to spend. Fair enough, I would probably have said a decade ago – nobody’s forcing me to venture inside these places, I’m the idiot who was capable of enjoying their somehow other-worldliness. Nothing could possibly go wrong while your credit card was working, and without tax or accommodation costs to pay, your credit card was always going to be working.

But as different people have been asking over the last few months what Cymuned’s stance on Asda is (members, others, journalists), and we’ve needed to talk about that at Executive Committee level, and with leading members of Cymuned who aren’t on the Executive Committee, my point of view has changed quite dramatically.

Before, I suppose I saw chain stores as something that had an impact (in so far as they had an impact) on me as an individual. I thought they were pretty soulless sometimes, but sometimes I quite enjoyed them. The catch is, that’s just a selfish standpoint – I never thought at all about their effect on the local community. To be fair to me (I’m always in favour of that!), it wasn’t as if there was that much local community in Dubai, the city busy rising out of the desert, and very, very little by way of long-term local community that wasn’t nomadic.

But here in Cymru, it’s somehow completely different. Reading reports from the National Retail Forum and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister that admit that new chain stores lead on average to the loss of 276 jobs in the local economy (so almost all of them result in a net loss of jobs), and shut down every village shop in a radius of 7 miles… well, it makes the hair go up on the back of my neck.

How did anyone ever think that gigantic shops which specialise in economies of scale, which suck the wealth out of the area, were a good idea? Sure, they’re a good idea for the gigantic shops – Tesco’s annual profit is more than the GDP of some small countries.

But for the community that happens to have the money the supershops want? It’s a massacre.

I hope that the Dwyfor Planning Committee will refuse Asda’s application for a larger shop, and that Asda will then throw a temper tantrum and not come to Pwllheli at all. I hope that everyone, in communities throughout the whole of Cymru, is starting to realise what an enormous mistake it is to let superstores destroy local economies just for the sake of saving a few minutes here and there in their daily routine.

And I hope that everyone will remember what superstores do when a particular branch isn’t profitable enough – they shut it, and move their resources somewhere else.

What would the effect be on Pwllheli if Asda succeeded in killing off all our local shops, forcing our farmers into absurdly one-sided contracts, and then vanished over the horizon?

And a very happy new year to you all…:-)

It’s been a busy start to the year, but the last meeting of the Pwyllgor Gwaith was a real boost in terms of starting to share responsibilities for particular pieces of work, with individuals taking responsibility for specific websites/campaigns, and the rôle of the central office looking as though it will become easier to manage (insha’allah!).

But the blog is for musing, not newsing… remember, if you just want the updates, go and subscribe at www.ynyfro.com/list

What’s on my mind today, after an interesting seminar the other night in Aberystwyth, is globalisation. Not as something abstract to pronounce in favour of or against, but as something which is changing the way in which politics works, and should therefore perhaps be changing the way in which Cymuned works.

It’s a wide term, of course, with perhaps too many different elements for it to be treated as one thing. What’s most interesting to me about it at the moment is the delicate balance between globalisation as a phenomenon which is of practical help to us (the ability to communicate more easily and cheaply with our members is something we’re only just now starting to develop appropriately) and as something which causes measurable damage – for instance, when chain stores drain the wealth out of a particular area.

Somewhere in the middle is the impact on government. I suspect that a global economy, and the gigantic, remarkably powerful corporations it creates (or maybe that’s the other way round!), is a real threat to government. Governments are already having to be increasingly careful that they don’t give cause for big business to drag them into the law courts, and there are a significant number of international agreements (some signed, some on the way) that strengthen big business in very real terms.

Is this connected, in an odd way, with what one might see as the increasing importance of local government in Cymru? Maybe central government is doing such a good job of learning how to duck responsibilities that it’s letting more responsibility, and therefore more power, slip through into the hands of local government.

Certainly, as regards some of the changes that Cymuned would like to see in the Fro Gymraeg, it’s the county councils that have the wherewithal to make them happen. The administrative language of county councils themselves, the policy for housing developments, education policies, public signage.

If the four main counties of the Fro Gymraeg (Môn, Gwynedd, Ceredigion, Sir Gâr) all operated internally through the medium of Cymraeg, all had education policies which meant every 16 was a genuine bilingual, new-build housing was only permitted where local need had been established, and public signage was in Cymraeg (in Ireland and Scotland, it helps bring high-spending cultural tourists in)…

Now that would make a real difference to the future of the language.

And those decisions are all in the hands of local government.

It’s looking increasingly likely that Cymuned will be concentrating more on county councils than on the Cynulliad over the next year or two – and we’ll see if our ability to push for change locally is enough to make sure that some of these developments come to pass…