Thursday 5 December 2019

Why are Parties in Wales still sending English only election communications?

With a week to go I have received only two election communications, from the parties standing in Pontypridd from

A fully bilingual one from Plaid Candidate Fflur Elin and one from the Labour candidate  Alex Davies-Jones, where Cymraeg is  absent apart from the mast head Llafur Cymru., which 

The leaflet is to big to reproduce here , but Ms Davies-Jones has another one out  is also monolingual.
Image

I don't know if Labour have been approached as to why they still ignore the principle  of bilingualism but i suspect the reply would not be very different from the Wrexham Tory candidate criticised for saying it was ‘sensible’ to exclude Welsh from campaign material



The Conservative candidate in Wrexham has been criticised after saying that excluding the Welsh language from her campaign material was the “sensible call”.Sarah Atherton, who is the bookies’ favourite to win the seat from Labour at next week’s election, was responding to a complaint from the member of the public about the lack of Welsh on her campaign material.“Having done some research into the amount of people who speak welsh in the area it seemed like the sensible call to make,” she said.She did, however, say that the decision was because of time restraints and if elected she would make an effort to ensure that all material would be bilingual.“This was a tough decision that the campaign team sadly had to make,” she said. “Due to the limited amount of time/resources we made the decision to distribute English only material in order to widen the reach of our message.”She said she was “sorry to hear that you were disappointed at the lack of welsh on the election material you received”.
It's a bit hypocritical for this writer to criticise  Ms Atherton, but i can't help thinking that  the use of "welsh" lower case and "English" uppercase  is somewhat Freudian.

She continues
 
‘Insult’The correspondence was published online by a Plaid Cymru councillor, Marc Jones, who had received the message from the correspondent, who he said was not a member of the party.The seat’s Plaid Cymru candidate, Carrie Harper, said that the decision to cut the Welsh language from the Tory candidate’s literature was a “deliberate decision”.“It’s an insult to the thousands of Welsh speakers, the many adult learners and the thousands of school pupils currently getting a bilingual education in Wrexham,” Carrie Harper, who is a Welsh learner, said.“The decision speaks volumes about the Tories’ contempt for the Welsh language but specifically for the local candidate’s attitude to our heritage and culture. She should apologise.”

So as I said this may well be repeated by the parties , throughout Wales and I am thinking of creating a questionnaire via this blog, and other social media and see which constituencies see bilingual leaflets .

If you have any thoughts how I might put this together, let me know.

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