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An 11-day cider Festival is being hosted by the Buffalo Bar in Cardiff. The Festival will carry on until Sunday 8th August. The festival will be held in the bar’s garden witha mini village fete including an outdoor bar and bandstand, stocked with organic and locally sourced Welsh cider including Gwynt y Ddraig, Seidr Dai and Blaengawney Farm. More details are in the booklet above.

Buffalo Bar
11 Windsor Place
Cardiff
CF10 3BY
029 2031 0312

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The end-of-the raliway line town of Maesteg finally has a destination worth going to as the Cross Inn has started brewing beer. This is this first brewery in the area since 1898 and landlord Dai Morgan has built the brewery on land adjacent to his pub.The first brew has been named Maiden Ale.

More here frrom the Glamorgan Gazette

Cross Inn
Maesteg Road
Maesteg, 
Mid Glamorgan 
CF34 9LB‎


The Cross Inn is hosting a real ale festival on August 27-28

Hello, I’m Arwyn Jones, a Political Correspondent for BBC Cymru Wales.

While Betsan tries to make the best of the West Wales weather, I’ll be updating her blog every now and again.

Next week, I’ll be following the political goings on at the National Eisteddfod in Ebbw Vale, proving it’s not all choirs and clogs on the Maes.

But one subject you can bet your pavilion on being on everyone’s lips will be S4C.

Betsan has already blogged that the new UK Government may well be looking to cut the channel’s funding. There have been reports suggesting cuts of up to 24% over the next 4 years to the £100 million they get from the UK Government.

Wednesday evening, news emerged that after five year’s at the helm, Iona Jones, S4C’s Chief Executive had left her her job.

A short statement from S4C followed and then hours and hours of radio silence (or should that be TV silence?)Eventually the Chair of S4C, John Walter Jones was thrust in front of a microphone to explain that a long established “due separation” between the S4C Authority (the regulator) and the Executive (the management) is no more.

Instead the S4C Authority will have a hands-on role working with a management team that has been halved to just four members overnight.

Swift stuff you may think and you’d be right — so swift that no-one in the UK Government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (they who hold the purse-strings) still had no idea what was going when I spoke to them last night.

Before she left her job, Iona Jones spoke to MediaGuardian. She told them she’d given the S4C Authority a plan of how to deal with the cuts they were expecting which included saying:

“The scale of cuts needed are not going to be addressed by working at the margins, or focusing on costs.

“There is no room to move other than looking at the scale of what we do.”

What we don’t know is what this means for the future of programming on S4C. Does “looking at the scale of what we do” suggest that Iona Jones wanted fewer programmes, for example?

Well that’s the suggestion, at least. She goes on to hint at cutting the numbers, ordering longer runs and dropping some strands of programming from Independent production companies.

So fewer programmes, but that last for longer was part of her plan, it seems.

If you think you have a better plan, S4C say they’ll be looking for another Chief Executive in the not too distant future. If the salary stays at Iona Jones’ £160,000, you might be tempted to dust off the old CV.

If you do decide to give it a punt, however, please bear this in mind. It’s a fair old salary, but open to public scrutiny.

Any MP will tell you that when the public can see your expenses, it’s often not the big ticket claims that cause embarrassment, but the little niggling ones.

Iona Jones might now be regretting, then, her claims of 66p, 55p and 33p in mileage. Nothing out of place mind. But when you’re talking about cuts, as the supermarket says “every little helps”.

See you on the Maes…

It is clear that the underlying problem affecting Wales’ potential viability is the under-performance of the Welsh economy, and that to address that, we need to improve the level of GDP per head. But not all GDP is ‘good’ GDP; there are good ways and bad ways of increasing Wales’ GDP, and chasing growth per se will not necessarily provide a sustainable long term economy for our country.

As an example, I’m sure that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has led to an increase in GDP in some areas, as people have been employed in clean-up operations, in extra drilling operations to set up a relief well, and in manufacturing a ‘cap’ for the well head. Similarly, a major nuclear accident would boost GDP in managing the clean-up after the event. But I don’t think anyone would seriously suggest that an oil spill or a nuclear accident would be good things for Wales.

It’s even more subtle than that. When people think of creating wealth, they often think in terms of boosting manufacturing industry, and indeed, the front page of today’s Western Mail draws attention to the slump in manufacturing in Wales. There’s a problem with manufacturing though – making stuff almost invariably requires raw materials, as well as using environmental resources, and in the developed world, we are already using more than our share of both of those.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t need manufacturing, or that we should simply depend on other people doing the manufacturing, of course. The raw material cost and the environmental cost is still down to the ultimate consumer rather than the manufacturer; we don’t escape those costs by simply ‘exporting’ manufacturing to India or China.

But we cannot continue to seek economic growth based primarily on an unfair share of the usage of finite resources, and there is no evidence to suggest that increasing efficiencies in the use of resources will square that circle.

‘Good’ GDP is GDP which requires no extra use of raw materials or environmental resources, or which involves investment in restoring the earth’s environmental systems. It’s likely to be more service based, more labour intensive and less profitable in the traditional sense.

Are we ready to embrace that sort of future, and accept that it means building a different type of economy?

“As the world emerges from recession, successful exporting companies will be even more important for economic prosperity. Globalisation means our competitors are just as likely to be across the ocean as down the road, so international focus is vital.”

Proposals by Iain Duncan Smith to sweep away Britain’s complex system of benefits and replace them with a single payment to claimants have to be a significant and radical step forward. In fact it very much reflects an old Liberal Policy of working towards a citizens’ income. I hope that the moderating and expert influence of Lib Dem pensions minister, Steve Webb is reflected in the final proposals.

Of course the devil will be in the detail and we have yet to see what that is. However, what we know so far is that the proposals seek to streamline and simplify payments, as well as improve incentives for the unemployed to swap life on benefits for work.

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is suggesting that the 51 benefits currently available to the unemployed, as well as income-related benefits for the low-paid, will be replaced with a single benefit covering all people of working age. It will also incorporate the cash currently paid out under Gordon Brown’s flagship tax credits scheme, which would effectively be abolished.

The Independent says that payments will take into account claimants’ circumstances, such as numbers of children and housing needs, and could be adjusted monthly using new computer software being developed by the Government.

At this stage the Government are just seeking to get a discussion going, though I predict that this will rapidly descend into a slanging match once Labour get their teeth into it. However, anybody who is serious about proper reform that seeks to make the system easier to access and which will not penalise those who wish to return to work will welcome this debate.

It is a sobering thought that the present system is so complex that even those administering it do not fully understand it. Although the bureaucracy around benefits has been cut since the 1990s, civil servants are still currently working from 14 instruction manuals containing 9,000 pages.

Home secretary Theresa May has said it is ‘time to move beyond the Asbo’ as new official figures showed that more than half of the orders were breached between 1999 and 2008.It is broken so will she mend it. The ASBO has never been fit for purpose , they vary from authority to authority and as some were given for insignificant offences the impact was never as strong as intended.
 I hope so her view was that there were far too many “complex and bureaucratic” powers for tackling antisocial behaviour – including Antisocial Behaviour Orders (Asbos).She added
“For 13 years, politicians told us that the government had the answer; that the Asbo was the silver bullet that would cure all society’s ills. It wasn’t.” May said that a “complete change of emphasis” was now needed and that she had launched a review of the antisocial behaviour powers available to police.”I am determined to give them and the other agencies a toolkit that is appropriate and effective,” she said. “Simpler sanctions, which are easier to obtain and to enforce, will provide the police and practitioners with a firm hand to tackle the problem cases.”
May be if bad behaviour was seen as “really not acceptable” as Supernanny says and that it not tolerated as being normal we may sort out the menace that it has become

More power to your elbow Mrs May.