Free speech is clinging on in Wales, and it’s a joy to see that Welsh people are showing signs of rejecting Labour, the party that has dominated politics here for 26 years, but in the Senedd, free speech remains under threat.
In Wales, the Senedd’s Presiding Officer, who oversees proceedings like the Speaker in Westminster, is a Plaid Cymru politician.
Two years ago, she decided that GB News, watched by millions across the UK, was too “offensive” to be seen on the Senedd’s internal TV system.
Those TVs are watched by politicians who are there to represent the views of the people of Wales.
Of course, Plaid Cymru politicians rallied behind the Presiding Officer, offering full support for this decision.
The politicians who spend their days preaching diversity and inclusion, who want to make Wales a Nation of Sanctuary for asylum seekers, believe that diversity of opinion is a step too far.
Free speech is not a priority for them.
The reasoning given was that GB News did not represent “our parliament’s values”.
That phrase alone says it all. Whose values, exactly?
The taxpayers who fund it, or a small political class that cannot bear to hear an opinion they don’t share?
Let’s be clear: no one is being forced to watch GB News. Senedd Members can always change the channel. But the problem I have is with politicians being told they can’t watch it.
That’s censorship, plain and simple. It’s wrong. And the irony is clear for all to see.
GB News remains banned years later, while the BBC, our supposed guardian of impartiality, has just been caught doctoring footage of Donald Trump to make him look like he was urging violence.
In a Panorama documentary, the BBC spliced two separate lines from President Trump’s rally to make it appear he told supporters, “We’ll walk down to the Capitol… and we fight like hell,” as if it were one continuous call to arms.
What they cut out, of course, was the part where Trump urged supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically”.
By banning GB News, the Welsh Parliament just signed its own death warrant at the ballot box - Gareth Davies
|Getty Images
An egregious and disgraceful example of what many readers will consider an endemic problem with our supposedly impartial broadcaster.