Neil McEvoy and the Welsh National Party

[bgmnts]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-53153689

Anyone clued up on Welsh politics here have a clue who this bloke is? I had no idea until I read that article. Their policies seem pretty decent but wondering if he is our Farage or something.

[Buelligan]

No.  But words like sovereign are not helpful IMO.

[jamiefairlie]

sovereign just mean who holds the ultimate power in the state. Any state has some entity that is sovereign, in Scots law it's the people (soon to be tested in court with regards to iref2), in English law it's the monarch. All he's saying is he wants it to be like Scots law and like any true democratic country.

[thenoise]

Do you think the BBC will continually 'accidentally' call them the 'Welsh Nationalist Party' in order to make them sound a bit more threatening?

[Zetetic]

He's a prick and a grifter, I believe. Which is not to say that at least some of the people in Plaid that he winds up aren't also pricks.

[Pijlstaart]

Neil McEvoy is a literal ogre, he came lumbering down from his welsh ogre hill, swinging his taproot cudgel. He harks back to a bygone age when welshmen would join roving warbands led by nameless hill beasts to plunder nearby towns, turned back only by the sign of the cross. As the christian faith is lost in wales, so too is the protection afforded by our heavenly father, lord god almighty, and a darkness is falling upon the land once more. At the clarion call of McEvoy's banshee war dirge, hateful beasts of yore will crawl in from the savage wilds to feast upon the cherub corpse of Fair England's Wales. Only a vote for the Liberal Democrats can stop this, the only party with a clear plan for a brighter future. Become a registered member today for just £1 a month https://www.libdems.org.uk/joining-us .

[Buelligan]

Any politician who mentions sovereign in their strapline is almost certainly a grifter, a prick, a hateful beast of yore.  Avoid.

I know what the S-word means.  May they all die by it.  There, I've said it.

[H-O-W-L]

I know nothing about Welsh politics but I saw the episode of Archer with Welsh people in it! Hope that helps!

[chveik]

the saddest thing is that the Welsh National Party

[Zetetic]

Some stuff on the Plaid conflicts he was involved with last year:
https://nation.cymru/opinion/is-there-any-way-back-for-neil-mcevoy/

Note that this is almost orthogonal to the main conflict in Plaid, these days, between an emphatically socialist progressive faction attempting seriously to engage with South East Wales (of which Leanne Wood is the most well-known member) and a more nationalism-orientated faction that's happiest in the West and seems prepared to go into coalition with the Tories if the opportunity arises (and also seems to have picked up the transphobia disease) (this faction won the last leadership contest).

[bgmnts]

Fuck, its a shame he is a grifter twat, some of the policies of his party seem pretty good.

'sake.

[BritishHobo]

I've been following Welsh politics a lot more closely the last year or two, and the McEvoy stuff still seems massively oblique to me. Especially living up in the North-but-the-more-English-east-bit-not-the-more-traditionally-Welsh-west-part, it all just seems a whole fucking world away. The Senedd as a whole really have an enormous amount of work to do appealing to voters up here; any drama down there doesn't even register. If I went out into town asking people who Neil McEvoy was and whether they agree with his opposition to the Plaid cabal in the Senedd, I'd just get blank stares, and called a speccy little prick and to fuck off and shut up and fuck off, although I usually get that regardless of what I'm asking or what town I'm in.

I worry a lot that this fucking stupid Abolish The Welsh Assembly movement will end up getting a lot of traction because of this.

[Zetetic]

Fuck, its a shame he is a grifter twat, some of the policies of his party seem pretty good.

He's a populist and some of his policies are, accordingly, appealing.

But it's hard to escape the feeling that he's in politics for himself.

[Harry Badger]

I sat next to him at a friend's leaving do some years back. Very slimy man. Nearly became my AM at the last election when coming within about 1000 votes of unseating Drakeford - he got a huge amount of his support from the vast Ely estate which makes up a big part of the constituency. I can't stand the man but I genuinely think if he had become leader of Plaid, they would be in with a real chance of taking enough Labour votes to win power - I thought Leanne Wood would do this but didn't.

[Jittlebags]

Been a lot of shifty stuff between him and Plaid. Probably a lot of shit in both directions. But he did do some Welsh Labour whistleblowing which Plaid were very happy to sit on.