Sorry about missing last week – it was one of those weeks, if you know what I mean! We had to settle for making the last three with the Leading Wales Awards, but we got to meet some pretty interesting people, and we hope that it will turn out to have been a useful experience, as well as a help in the process of establishing Cymuned’s right to be taken seriously.

I promised I’d talk a bit about our local branches, and what the right way forward is for them – I’ll give that a go now. It would be very interesting to hear from others on this subject, be they members or not.

The vast majority of local branches have been pretty quiet for a fair time now, since the ‘revival’ spirit of the first year or so went past. Only those with strong local leadership have really continued to be effective, which is a pity, because local branches can do a great deal (as the Sir Ddinbych branch is at the moment) in terms of local campaigning, and especially in terms of lobbying local government. I could talk for hours about exactly what local branches haven’t been as successful as we would have liked, but the important thing is how to get back to a situation where local branches lobby locally while the movement as a whole takes action nationally.

I believe strongly that we need winnable local campaigns if we’re going to re-inspire our local branches. This is a significant part of our strategy for this year, where we are working on lobbying the Assembly on a national level and running specific campaigns to target county councils, starting with the launch of our new booklet ‘Cymricising the Council’ in Ceredigion.

I don’t personally believe it would be possible to get many branches up and running again without something absolutely clear-cut for them to get their teeth into. A monthly meeting when you can’t see anything moving can be a thoroughly dispiriting experience, and I don’t think many people would give it a go again unless we can show that things are different now.

Fortunately, I also believe that things are different now. We’ve got clear, practical roles for our local branches – two specific roles, to be precise. A local branch can choose to play a part in the national strategy through lobbying the county council on the specific campaign for their county, or they can concentrate on helping build membership through promoting our membership websites. Both of these make a real difference in the short term, and are therefore significantly easier to keep going.

Finally, local branches can also choose to follow the example of branches who have concentrated on community involvement – specifically, we now have functioning patterns that can be followed if people are interested in setting up community land trusts or local business networks.

Those local branches who choose to go after this kind of specific, direct work (whichever one of the three patterns above they choose) will, I am entirely confident, experience a very real amount of success. Our work centrally, with regards to this matter, is to encourage people to get involved again at the level of the local branch – easier said than done at a time when that sense of excitement isn’t in the air, but do-able nonetheless.

And we’ll certainly be giving it our best shot…

Many apologies – this won’t be a very long entry. I’m just about to leave the office to travel down to Aberystwyth, and then on to Cardiff tomorrow morning, for the Leading Wales Awards dinner. It’s been quite a scoop for us to reach the short-list, but we’ve got to admit that there isn’t really much chance that the prize in our category (Voluntary Movements with a turnover of less than £250,000) is going to go to anyone closely involved in the political sphere!

Anyway, in the event of a shock, I’ll pass on any good news next week…;-)

I’ve promised that I’ll have a go at starting discussion here about Cymuned’s local branches – and I will, but not right now, with so little time – it’s a subject that calls for a little more consideration.

So to finish with today, I’d like to mention quickly the meeting last week in the Celtic Hotel in Caernarfon, where I was speaking as part of the Commission for Racial Equality’s panel. The discussion, about the rights and responsibilities of people moving into new communities, was quite interesting, but the key moment came when Chris Myant, the Director of the Commission in Wales, made the point that it’s important to ensure that population movement into Welsh-speaking areas doesn’t have a destructive impact on the language.

Hearing this in public from the Director of the Commission was a very real boost, and shows how far our relationship has come in the last year. It’s no longer feasible for anyone to insinuate that our work is in any way connected to racism, and this was further supported in our meeting with the Culture and Language Minister, Alun Pugh, last week. Alun Pugh said that he fully accepted that Cymuned is not in any way at all a movement which condones racism – what we’ve been saying for five years about how our work is essentially anti-racist finally seems to be gaining the acceptance it deserves.

Is this a turning point as regards that side of the argument? The campaign from the Labour Party and the Welsh Mirror in 2001 and 2002 to create the idea that language campaigning was a racist act was extremely successful (anyone remember the Mirror’s description of the Eisteddfod as the ‘festival of fear and hatred’?) – but it’s extremely difficult to imagine any similar campaign working today. I hope that, with time, this will trickle down to the arguments at grass roots level – we’ll know it has when we see a decrease in the amount of emails we get in the office which call us, in a delightfully ironic way, ‘you stupid Welsh racists’…!

The anti-colonisation movement Cymuned has praised the Minister for Culture, the Welsh Language and Sport, Alun Pugh, for his warm response in discussions on how to strengthen Welsh-speaking communities, and for his understanding of the importance of Welsh as an internal medium of communication in the Assembly’s new branches in Llandudno and Aberystwyth.

‘We had an extremely useful meeting,’ said Aran Jones, Cymuned’s Chief Executive, ‘and it was very encouraging to be able to discuss the importance of the Fro Gymraeg as a unique cultural area, and how exactly this priceless inheritance can best be supported and strengthened.’

Cymuned is eager to see official recognition of the Fro Gymraeg as a key step towards ensuring better co-operation on policy development to strengthen Welsh-speaking communities between the county councils with responsibility for those communities.

‘We agree with the Minister that it is important for this to be the starting point of a dialogue between the Government and Cymuned,’ said Owen Llywelyn, ‘and we are looking forward at a series of meetings in order for us to develop a better, more co-operative relationship for the good of our Welsh-speaking communities.’

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