Thank you to Anon (comments below) for this link to a letter from Mark Evans to Kevin Madge.
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As readers may have noticed, Ed Milliband and the unions are not exactly a mutual appreciation society at the moment, and it's not just about vote rigging in constituencies, but a much wider rift about the direction Labour is taking as it edges ever closer to the policies of David Cameron and George Osborne. Our MP, Jonathan Edwards, has coined a term for that - the Red Tories.
Of course, all of that is taking place in what Carmarthenshire's Labour leader, Kevin Madge, likes to call the "Westminster Bubble", but a letter in this week's Carmarthen Journal from Mark Evans, Branch Secretary of Unison in Carmarthenshire, makes it clear that the union and its members are far from happy with Kev and his friends in County Hall.
The letter points out that the council is about to embark on a new round of deep cuts to services, and that these cuts are being passively passed on to councils by the Labour government in Cardiff. Nobody in Labour seems to be putting up a fight, and yet they will hit ordinary families and the low-paid hardest.
Mark Evans has also spotted what Cneifiwr noticed recently (A Message from the Leader, 4 July) when the council chief executive once again took over a big chunk of the paper to warn us of dark days ahead. In a normal democracy you would have expected this to come from someone who had put himself up for election, rather than from an appointed officer who is supposed to be politically neutral. Kev ("my grandparents were miners") was nowhere to be seen.
There is a lot of pain to come, and Mark Evans points out that the chief executive (on at least 13 times the pay of many council workers), and Kevin Madge (leader's salary of £47,500) will not be sharing any of it.
Elsewhere in the paper there is a report on a meeting of Ammanford Town Council, which is being asked to take over a park and children's playground from the county council. The council has allowed the playground to fall into neglect. Some councillors noted that the county council is trying to pass off more and more of its responsibilities on to local councils, but Cllr Colin Evans (Kev's right-hand man) was there to warn of impending doom, as the county council braced itself for cuts of £18 million.
Notice how this figure is being quoted at every opportunity. In his State of the Union address the other week, the chief executive said his best guess was cuts of £12m next year.
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