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Cambria Online

No to Investiture - more petition responses

More petition responses and comments. Gathering pace.

What expense does this farce cost the Welsh people?
Jeff Thomas

Wales is its own country and has all the necessary functions and institutions for a nation-state. The people are perfectly capable of self-rule. Any attempt to install a "prince of Wales" is an insult beyond expression.
Theresa Clark

I wish to express my view, which I know is shared by so many of the people of Wales, that any attempt to force another investiture of a so-called 'Prince of Wales' on our nation would be yet another government led decision inflicted against our will. These decisions should never be allowed to be made from London on behalf of the Welsh people.
Karen Williams

Why on earth would any self-respecting Welsh person want or need an English "Prince of Wales"? Patronizing, insulting, and ridiculously anachronistic. Visit Wales if you wish, but please don't make any absurd pretensions to any form of princedom. Be content to be a prince in your own country. Wales is a friendly neighbour, but is not synonymous with England.
Rowena Harries

Any move to stage an investiture in my opinion highlights the fact that Wales is still only seen as another region of the UK rather than a thriving culturally distinct nation within the UK. It demonstrates the British establishment's intention to keep us from being a free nation.
Evan Ifor Powell

See the petition here

William receives Garter honour - prequel to Investiture?

Rumours of an upcoming investiture of William as the new Prince of Wales have been flying around the blogosphere for weeks. This new honour accorded Prince William appears to add strength to this speculation. Prince Charles was made a Garter Knight just prior to his Investiture as Prince of Wales.

Knights of the Garter are chosen to honour those who have held public office, who have contributed to national life or who have served the Queen personally.

William becomes a Royal Knight Companion - and the 1,000th Knight in the Register. The position recognises his seniority within the Royal Family.

His father, the Prince of Wales, received the honour in 1958, the Princess Royal in 1994, and the Duke of York and the Earl of Wessex in 2006. The Duke of Edinburgh was created a Royal Knight in 1947 - the year he married Princess Elizabeth.

The new appointments were announced on St George's Day, but the chivalric and installation ceremonies traditionally take place in June, on the Monday of Royal Ascot week, known as Garter Day.

As a Knight, William will wear a blue velvet cape and black velvet hat with elaborate white ostrich plumes and join the procession from the Castle's state apartments to the church.

Source: The Press Association: William to receive Garter honour

Dig the fancy gear and bird plumes!

Opposition to windfarms not yet blown over?

Windfarm developments are a controversial subject. We are all in favour of renewable energy sources but land based wind turbine farms appear to have generated more political heat than actual useful energy. The statement below comes from Professor Myron Evans an unimpeachable scientist of the highest calibre so perhaps county councils should pause to consider some of the scientific evidence before embarking on or extending windfarm developments.

"I am strongly opposed to wind turbines on scientific grounds (see numerous statements on www.aias.us and also on www.socme.org). My opinion is shared by the entire community of responsible and impartial scientists (for example the Darmstadt Accord on www.socme.org) of over one hundred senior scientists from several disciplines.The attached reports ( The wind monster , The case against windfarms ) by Dr. Etherington plainly show that wind turbines are a grotesque folly, driven onward by greed crazed profiteers and absentee landowners alike. In this area there are at least nineteen groups opposed to further wind turbine development on Mynydd y Gwair. These include the City and County Councils of Swansea, Neath Port Talbot Council, Ammanford Town Council, numerous Community Councils, numerous environment and preservation groups, and part of the Assembly Government ITSELF: CADW.

Source: Alpha Institute for Advanced Study - Press statement from the British Civil List Scientist regarding windfarms

No to Investiture - petition responses

There have been some very interesting responses to the No to the investiture of a new Prince of Wales petition and also some well known political figures have signed up. We have selected some choice remarks below:

Wales, like Ireland, is an indivisibly independent and sovereign nation. It should no longer suffer the yoke of colonial and aristocratic 'privilege' borne out of the centuries old burden foisted upon them by the English crown. The Welsh Nation have not voted for the English 'Prince of Wales' to govern or hold sway over them (and vast tracts of their land). The forced installation of a quasi-head of state upon the Welsh people is unjust, undemocratic and, in the eyes of the world, unlawful. It is time to end such archaic practices and for such parasites as the English 'Royal' family to be stripped of their immense wealth and power. They are not Welsh and have no right to 'govern' an entire nation as 'divine rulers'.
Cymru am byth! Ireland stands beside you. Tiocfaidh ar la!
Lawrence O'Keeffe
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Even a cursory knowledge of Welsh histoy would illuminate the manifest aim of subjugation and humiliation inherent in the first investiture by Edward 1st . Any thoughts of a future 'investiture' symbolic of otherwise would be an insult to any self-respecting Welsh person.
Dr.D.Davies
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Naw wfft i’r teulu estron hwn. Nid taeogion mohonom (er gwaethaf y cynffonwyr sydd yn mynnu taw edmygwyr teulu Brenda yw pobl Cymru – a gwelir eu dylanwad yn enwedig yn y De yma lle y mae ambell enw gwrthun ac hollol amherthnasol ar ein hysbytai - Prince Charles Hospital, Merthyrtudful; Princess of Wales Hospital, Pen-y-bont ar Ogwr; Prince Philip Hospital, Llanelli).
Ar ôl iddo chwarae sowljers bach yn Affganistan, onid yn y fan honno y dylid ei arwisgo?
Ieuan Glan Tawe

Visit the petition to see how it is progressing.

ROYALS' WELSH CHARM OFFENSIVE SPARKS FRESH INVESTITURE FEARS

A carefully co-ordinated royal ‘charm offensive’ in Wales aimed at grooming Prince William for the role of the next Prince of Wales, and a ‘softening up’ of the Welsh people for an Investiture even more lavish than those of 1911 and 1969 is underway. Indications from sources close to the Royal family’s elaborate public relations machine are that 26 year old Prince William, currently training with the Royal Navy, is secretly being prepared to replace Prince Charles as the next Prince of Wales. The moves are part of ‘Operation PW’, an advance planning programme for the moment when Prince Charles succeeds the English Queen through her retirement, incapacity or death.

The last Investiture, in Caernarfon in 1969, orchestrated by the highly controversial Secretary of State for Wales George Thomas, split the nation and took place against a backdrop of widespread revulsion and protest. A number of bombs aimed at government targets exploded across the country, prominent anti-investiture protesters were arrested and arraigned in a high-profile political show-trial and the event came within an ace of being called off. What particularly rankled with a huge section of the Welsh population at the time was that the ceremony was a grotesque mimicry of an event during the reign of the English king Edward the first, the so-called ‘conqueror of Wales’. Edward styled his 16 year-old son ’Prince of Wales’ at an ‘investiture’ in Lincoln in 1301 a few years after killing off the last male heirs of the royal House of Gwynedd and incarcerating any remaining female ones. The bitter irony of this seemed to be wholly lost on the British Establishment and its representatives in Wales.

The royal family’s gaffe-prone spin-doctors have not had an easy time in recent years. Charles’s demonstrably happy marriage to the former Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles seems to have bought them enough time them to embark on a new tack – this time aimed at a section of the population of the British Isles which scarcely merits any mention in the London press at all: the people of Wales. “Sounds a bit like the advice once given by English aristocrats to their wayward and dissolute sons” said one prominent opponent of the planned new investiture, “’When all else fails, go to Wales!’”

Inevitably, the popularity of the English royal family is on the wane in Wales after two decades of PR disasters. A low ebb came in the 1980s when the Queen’s car was pelted with rotten tomatoes in Aberystwyth, and revelations about Prince Charles’s extra-marital activities and the negative publicity surrounding the death of Princess Diana did nothing to improve their popularity. As far as possible, the royals stayed away. Nowadays, Welsh support for the English monarchy is confined to a dwindling band of pensioners clinging to memories of the glory days of the British Empire, sundry Tories who have failed to grasp their party’s new-found enthusiasm for Devolution and a tiny clique acting out the antediluvian rituals of their smarter English peers as ‘Lord Lieutenants’ and ‘High Sheriffs’ along with a group of thirsty freeloaders from County Council ‘chain gangs’. All are generally deemed to be pitifully out-of-touch with the times.

Prince William, it is said, is a wholesome and personable young man, who has provided a badly-needed dose of intelligence and charm to an otherwise drab and lacklustre crew, but there are bound to be objections to this alleged succession from a number of quarters. This is particularly so in a country with legitimate aspirations for devolution, and where there is an inexorable march towards ever-increasing independence. Prince William’s official title at present is ‘Sub Lieutenant William Wales’. This is widely seen as part of the overall public relations plan, and many are asking why he shouldn’t be referred to as ‘William Mountbatten-Windsor’ which is, after all, the correct form of his family name. Again, the Welsh Rugby Union’s assiduous, increasingly embarrassing and ill-advised courtship of this young Englishman - a proud supporter of the England rugby team - looks increasingly obtuse and, judging by the unfortunate outburst of booing and derisive whistling which greeted the Prince’s appearance on the Grand Slam pitch this year, appears to have backfired badly.

As part of ‘Operation PW’ William has been making a number of impromptu appearances in Wales over the past few months, and we can expect many more. One such, in May, to the Valleys Kids Project in Dinas, Rhondda Valley, displayed a revealing new strategy carefully contrived by the spin-doctors. A small crowd of children from a local primary school dutifully forced to turn out, North-Korean-style, by their teachers to welcome the Prince were all seen to be waving miniature Welsh national flags. For the first time on such occasions, there wasn’t a Union Jack in sight.

As the process of Devolution in this country continues apace and a new national consciousness emerges, the very use of the title ‘Prince of Wales’ itself becomes more and more contentious. It remains, in the eyes of an increasing number of people, an unsavoury and cruel reminder of the loss of Welsh independence, the violent destruction of Wales’s own royal family and the continuation of a distasteful, irrelevant and alien class system based on the Anglo-Norman mores of the middle ages, wholly irrelevant to life in Wales today.

The significance of Prince Charles’s recent purchase of a farmhouse in Carmarthenshire has not gone unnoticed either - although this is not actually going to serve as a real home, more an ‘investment’. Rather than opt for a grander establishment in one of the more anglicised and gentrified parts of Wales as might have been expected, Charles chose a modest dwelling in the heartland of one of the country’s most ardently nationalist areas, with both a Plaid Cymru Assembly Member and Member of Parliament! Indications are that the Prince has already started flexing his influential political muscle on planning policy in the Myddfai area in line with his controversial ideas on architecture and the environment – much to the chagrin of a number of local residents. Charles’s most enthusiastic group of supporters in the area are local estate agents convinced that the project will mean a dramatic increase in house prices.

With a growing awareness of this new public relations offensive, a petition opposing any further ‘investitures’ of ‘Princes of Wales’ launched by 'concerned Welsh patriots' has already been introduced on the Internet - see link.