Latest news with #Isherwood
Pembrokeshire Herald
a day ago
- Politics
- Pembrokeshire Herald
Crowds turn out in force to celebrate Milford Haven's 235th birthday
CAMPAIGNERS warned it will be 'impossible' to hold the Welsh Government to account on progress against its disabled people's rights plan due to a lack of concrete targets. Mark Isherwood, who chairs the Senedd's cross-party group on disability, raised concerns that many of the long-term objectives in the draft ten-year plan lack firm commitments. He said Natasha Hirst, who was part of ministers' disability rights taskforce, pointed to a lack of funding to implement the plan as well as a scarcity of clear, robust targets. Mr Isherwood also quoted Joe Powell, chief executive of All Wales People First, who said: 'For this plan to succeed we need the appropriate investment into the infrastructure and services to make this aspiration a reality. 'We need clear targets about how we are going to achieve this. Without these, it is very difficult to see how the plan will make a difference to disabled people in Wales.' The Conservative told the Senedd: 'Damian Bridgeman, who chaired the disability rights taskforce's housing and community working group, said the draft document was a smokescreen rather than a plan. 'He pointed to the absence of new money and a mechanism to track delivery of the action plan further, adding that, 'disabled people have been reviewed to death, what we need is action – and there's none of that here'.' He said Mr Bridgeman described the plan as a 'collection of vague intentions dressed up as progress', with 'no targets, no teeth and no real-world accountability'. Mr Isherwood, who has campaigned on disability rights for decades, warned the plan lacks a commitment to enshrine the UN convention on the rights of disabled people into Welsh law. The north Walian also warned the UK Government's plans to cut benefits risk further disabling people in Wales by compounding poverty and exclusion. During a statement on June 3, Jane Hutt described the plan as a landmark moment in the Welsh Government's commitment to ensuring an inclusive and accessible society for all. Wales' social justice secretary said: 'This plan is a ten-year blueprint for progress, designed to ensure its outcomes are realised through actions taken across government.' Ms Hutt cautioned that UK Government welfare reforms risk overlooking the circumstances and needs of disabled people, and more so in Wales than some other parts of the UK. Jane Hutt, secretary for social justice, trefnydd and chief whip She said the plan seeks to position Wales as a world leader in the social model of disability, which says people are disabled by barriers in society – not by their impairment or condition. Ms Hutt urged organisations and disabled people to have their say by responding to a consultation on the draft plan, which runs until August 7. Sioned Williams warned the plan has been a 'long time coming', with the taskforce set up after a 2021 report, entitled Locked out, into the impact of the pandemic on disabled people. Ms Williams told the Senedd: 'We must never forget that disabled people comprised 60% of deaths from Covid-19 in Wales, and many of those deaths were preventable and rooted in socioeconomic inequality.' Plaid Cymru's shadow social justice minister, Sioned Williams The Plaid Cymru politician stressed the importance of legally enforceable rights – 'rights that can literally be the difference between life and death'. Ms Williams warned planned welfare cuts cast a long, dark shadow over the plan, saying: 'The removal of this vital support doesn't simply reduce income, it rips away the safety net that many disabled people rely on to live with dignity.' She called for assurances that disabled and neurodivergent people will no longer be detained in secure hospitals in Wales, as highlighted by the Stolen Lives campaign. Jenny Rathbone supported efforts to embed the social model of disability because 'it is society that needs to change, not the individual who happens to have an impairment'. But she recognised that a huge amount of work still needs to be done. Julie Morgan, a fellow Labour backbencher, said the plan clearly shows the Welsh Government's commitment to making Wales an open, inclusive and accessible place. But Conservative Laura Anne Jones warned the plan 'falls short in many critical areas', with disabled people still facing systemic barriers to work, transport and access to services. South Wales East MS Laura Anne Jones She said: 'With rising living costs and sweeping cuts to support services alongside welfare, this plan feels more like a statement of intent than a blueprint for real action.'
Pembrokeshire Herald
3 days ago
- Politics
- Pembrokeshire Herald
Mr Chips reigns supreme in Pembrokeshire's best fish and chips poll
CAMPAIGNERS warned it will be 'impossible' to hold the Welsh Government to account on progress against its disabled people's rights plan due to a lack of concrete targets. Mark Isherwood, who chairs the Senedd's cross-party group on disability, raised concerns that many of the long-term objectives in the draft ten-year plan lack firm commitments. He said Natasha Hirst, who was part of ministers' disability rights taskforce, pointed to a lack of funding to implement the plan as well as a scarcity of clear, robust targets. Mr Isherwood also quoted Joe Powell, chief executive of All Wales People First, who said: 'For this plan to succeed we need the appropriate investment into the infrastructure and services to make this aspiration a reality. 'We need clear targets about how we are going to achieve this. Without these, it is very difficult to see how the plan will make a difference to disabled people in Wales.' The Conservative told the Senedd: 'Damian Bridgeman, who chaired the disability rights taskforce's housing and community working group, said the draft document was a smokescreen rather than a plan. 'He pointed to the absence of new money and a mechanism to track delivery of the action plan further, adding that, 'disabled people have been reviewed to death, what we need is action – and there's none of that here'.' He said Mr Bridgeman described the plan as a 'collection of vague intentions dressed up as progress', with 'no targets, no teeth and no real-world accountability'. Mr Isherwood, who has campaigned on disability rights for decades, warned the plan lacks a commitment to enshrine the UN convention on the rights of disabled people into Welsh law. The north Walian also warned the UK Government's plans to cut benefits risk further disabling people in Wales by compounding poverty and exclusion. During a statement on June 3, Jane Hutt described the plan as a landmark moment in the Welsh Government's commitment to ensuring an inclusive and accessible society for all. Wales' social justice secretary said: 'This plan is a ten-year blueprint for progress, designed to ensure its outcomes are realised through actions taken across government.' Ms Hutt cautioned that UK Government welfare reforms risk overlooking the circumstances and needs of disabled people, and more so in Wales than some other parts of the UK. Jane Hutt, secretary for social justice, trefnydd and chief whip She said the plan seeks to position Wales as a world leader in the social model of disability, which says people are disabled by barriers in society – not by their impairment or condition. Ms Hutt urged organisations and disabled people to have their say by responding to a consultation on the draft plan, which runs until August 7. Sioned Williams warned the plan has been a 'long time coming', with the taskforce set up after a 2021 report, entitled Locked out, into the impact of the pandemic on disabled people. Ms Williams told the Senedd: 'We must never forget that disabled people comprised 60% of deaths from Covid-19 in Wales, and many of those deaths were preventable and rooted in socioeconomic inequality.' Plaid Cymru's shadow social justice minister, Sioned Williams The Plaid Cymru politician stressed the importance of legally enforceable rights – 'rights that can literally be the difference between life and death'. Ms Williams warned planned welfare cuts cast a long, dark shadow over the plan, saying: 'The removal of this vital support doesn't simply reduce income, it rips away the safety net that many disabled people rely on to live with dignity.' She called for assurances that disabled and neurodivergent people will no longer be detained in secure hospitals in Wales, as highlighted by the Stolen Lives campaign. Jenny Rathbone supported efforts to embed the social model of disability because 'it is society that needs to change, not the individual who happens to have an impairment'. But she recognised that a huge amount of work still needs to be done. Julie Morgan, a fellow Labour backbencher, said the plan clearly shows the Welsh Government's commitment to making Wales an open, inclusive and accessible place. But Conservative Laura Anne Jones warned the plan 'falls short in many critical areas', with disabled people still facing systemic barriers to work, transport and access to services. South Wales East MS Laura Anne Jones She said: 'With rising living costs and sweeping cuts to support services alongside welfare, this plan feels more like a statement of intent than a blueprint for real action.'
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Edmund White: ‘He never broke faith with the nobility of a literary life'
One of the reasons it is difficult to write about Edmund White is that he himself frequently speculated about what people would say about him after he died. Would he be a Genet, a Bowen, an Isherwood? Most artists nurse this vain anxiety somewhere, but generally they try and hide it. It was typical of Edmund to trumpet a vice: it was of a piece with the sometimes-alarming honesty and taste for shamelessness with which he approached his work (and sometimes wounded those who found themselves revealed or distorted in its pages). Entertaining conjectures about his posthumous legacy sprang, paradoxically, from Edmund's ferocious attachment to life, a result of his relentless, forever-unsatisfied curiosity. He could not abide the thought that there was this one piece of literary news he would never receive. Survival was, of course, a fundamental principle in Edmund's life. One of the very few of his generation of gay men in New York to survive Aids, he found himself in the role of witness, one of a handful of voices able to recount the rules, habits and customs of a world that had had only a brief flicker of existence before it was extinguished. READ MORE Being a surviving witness was a job thrust upon Edmund by accident, and he rose to it magnificently. But in any circumstances, he would have been a chronicler of lost ways of life. He had a passion for intergenerational transmission of many kinds, and took great pleasure in details and ideas, both obsolete and useful, passing between one generation and another. I first met him in the late 1990s. Edmund had just moved to Princeton to teach creative writing; I had come there from Ireland to study comparative literature. I already knew his fiction well – so well that meeting him at a party in Princeton felt almost like an encounter with a part of myself. A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty treated shameful, private longings as noble, universal feelings. They dealt with homosexuality not as a life sentence, but as a predicament that was exciting and filled with possibility. All the gay men in our small, fearful circle in Dublin had passed those novels back and forth. More than anything any of us read or heard or said to each other, those books gave us a vocabulary of feeling, furnished an emotional grammar for our inner lives. I was in Princeton to do a PhD, but I was also working on what would become my first novel. Edmund invited me to dinner in the house he and Michael were renting and suggested I bring some of my manuscript. I thought he was asking me to leave the pages with him, but after dinner, he had me read it aloud while he and Michael sat and listened, and Edmund read from the notebooks that would become his novel The Married Man . Later, it was partly thanks to Edmund's help that my novel found a publisher. Over the years that followed, we dined together regularly, sometimes with his friends in Princeton or with Michael at home in New York. As a student of French literature, I was an especially useful guest on the many occasions Edmund was hosting a visitor from France. He loved speaking French. It energised him, as though he had been plugged into a different power source. As he read French literature, he greedily stockpiled proverbs, idioms and turns of phrase, which he would then use to decorate his conversation. Edmund had learnt French only when he moved to Paris in his 40s, and mastering it, I think, appealed to his passion for self-reinvention. His news was always new: a new boyfriend, a new book, a new obsession with a hitherto overlooked literary figure from the past. He was a person always in the process of becoming, and his fascination with this process, with how his own plot might thicken, was endless. People often compare him to Henry James, because of his interest in the theme of Americans in Paris, or to Proust because of his meticulous observation of the gay underworld and its codes. He and I talked about the characters in Proust as though they were friends we had in common. But in my view, the writer whose sensibility was the most formative for Edmund was Balzac. Like the French novelists, Edmund had a horror of emptiness (the title The Beautiful Room is Empty , taken from Kafka, registered, I always thought, one of his fundamental fears). Humour, as for Balzac, was always immediately available to Edmund, no matter the circumstance. When recounting tales of his lovers, friends or literary activities, he spoke as though we were living in 19th-century Paris. His world was populated with faded 'famous beauties', dastardly but irresistible schemers, conniving dowagers, young men from the provinces with literary ambitions being corrupted by the city, respectable ladies with unspeakable sexual secrets. In Edmund's conception, the social world had a limited repertoire of fixed roles, but one could get to play many of them in one's lifetime. He was capable of translating everything he did himself into these slightly cartoonish Balzacian categories. It gave him a distance and colour that he needed, and it imbued his life with both irony and dignity. This Balzacian world he pretended we all lived in was one of the tools in Edmund's kit of survival smarts. He knew very well that the idea of a literary society where 'everyone' might know your book was a fiction, but he also understood the necessity of acting as though it existed. He saw many things collapse around him over the course of his life, including the old New York publishing world he had made his own career in. But as a survivor himself he expected survival as well as decline. He never broke faith with the truth and resilience of literature, with the nobility of a literary life, and with the solemn, enduring reality of writing as a vocation. These things too, as much as anything else, he made sure to pass on. Barry McCrea is author of The First Verse (2005) ; In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust (2011) ; and Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in 20th-Century Ireland and Europe (2015)
Pembrokeshire Herald
4 days ago
- Politics
- Pembrokeshire Herald
Over 200 tractors to roll into Cardigan for Welsh National Tractor Road Run
CAMPAIGNERS warned it will be 'impossible' to hold the Welsh Government to account on progress against its disabled people's rights plan due to a lack of concrete targets. Mark Isherwood, who chairs the Senedd's cross-party group on disability, raised concerns that many of the long-term objectives in the draft ten-year plan lack firm commitments. He said Natasha Hirst, who was part of ministers' disability rights taskforce, pointed to a lack of funding to implement the plan as well as a scarcity of clear, robust targets. Mr Isherwood also quoted Joe Powell, chief executive of All Wales People First, who said: 'For this plan to succeed we need the appropriate investment into the infrastructure and services to make this aspiration a reality. 'We need clear targets about how we are going to achieve this. Without these, it is very difficult to see how the plan will make a difference to disabled people in Wales.' The Conservative told the Senedd: 'Damian Bridgeman, who chaired the disability rights taskforce's housing and community working group, said the draft document was a smokescreen rather than a plan. 'He pointed to the absence of new money and a mechanism to track delivery of the action plan further, adding that, 'disabled people have been reviewed to death, what we need is action – and there's none of that here'.' He said Mr Bridgeman described the plan as a 'collection of vague intentions dressed up as progress', with 'no targets, no teeth and no real-world accountability'. Mr Isherwood, who has campaigned on disability rights for decades, warned the plan lacks a commitment to enshrine the UN convention on the rights of disabled people into Welsh law. The north Walian also warned the UK Government's plans to cut benefits risk further disabling people in Wales by compounding poverty and exclusion. During a statement on June 3, Jane Hutt described the plan as a landmark moment in the Welsh Government's commitment to ensuring an inclusive and accessible society for all. Wales' social justice secretary said: 'This plan is a ten-year blueprint for progress, designed to ensure its outcomes are realised through actions taken across government.' Ms Hutt cautioned that UK Government welfare reforms risk overlooking the circumstances and needs of disabled people, and more so in Wales than some other parts of the UK. Jane Hutt, secretary for social justice, trefnydd and chief whip She said the plan seeks to position Wales as a world leader in the social model of disability, which says people are disabled by barriers in society – not by their impairment or condition. Ms Hutt urged organisations and disabled people to have their say by responding to a consultation on the draft plan, which runs until August 7. Sioned Williams warned the plan has been a 'long time coming', with the taskforce set up after a 2021 report, entitled Locked out, into the impact of the pandemic on disabled people. Ms Williams told the Senedd: 'We must never forget that disabled people comprised 60% of deaths from Covid-19 in Wales, and many of those deaths were preventable and rooted in socioeconomic inequality.' Plaid Cymru's shadow social justice minister, Sioned Williams The Plaid Cymru politician stressed the importance of legally enforceable rights – 'rights that can literally be the difference between life and death'. Ms Williams warned planned welfare cuts cast a long, dark shadow over the plan, saying: 'The removal of this vital support doesn't simply reduce income, it rips away the safety net that many disabled people rely on to live with dignity.' She called for assurances that disabled and neurodivergent people will no longer be detained in secure hospitals in Wales, as highlighted by the Stolen Lives campaign. Jenny Rathbone supported efforts to embed the social model of disability because 'it is society that needs to change, not the individual who happens to have an impairment'. But she recognised that a huge amount of work still needs to be done. Julie Morgan, a fellow Labour backbencher, said the plan clearly shows the Welsh Government's commitment to making Wales an open, inclusive and accessible place. But Conservative Laura Anne Jones warned the plan 'falls short in many critical areas', with disabled people still facing systemic barriers to work, transport and access to services. South Wales East MS Laura Anne Jones She said: 'With rising living costs and sweeping cuts to support services alongside welfare, this plan feels more like a statement of intent than a blueprint for real action.'
Pembrokeshire Herald
4 days ago
- Politics
- Pembrokeshire Herald
Milford Haven honours community champions at Citizens' Awards 2025
CAMPAIGNERS warned it will be 'impossible' to hold the Welsh Government to account on progress against its disabled people's rights plan due to a lack of concrete targets. Mark Isherwood, who chairs the Senedd's cross-party group on disability, raised concerns that many of the long-term objectives in the draft ten-year plan lack firm commitments. He said Natasha Hirst, who was part of ministers' disability rights taskforce, pointed to a lack of funding to implement the plan as well as a scarcity of clear, robust targets. Mr Isherwood also quoted Joe Powell, chief executive of All Wales People First, who said: 'For this plan to succeed we need the appropriate investment into the infrastructure and services to make this aspiration a reality. 'We need clear targets about how we are going to achieve this. Without these, it is very difficult to see how the plan will make a difference to disabled people in Wales.' The Conservative told the Senedd: 'Damian Bridgeman, who chaired the disability rights taskforce's housing and community working group, said the draft document was a smokescreen rather than a plan. 'He pointed to the absence of new money and a mechanism to track delivery of the action plan further, adding that, 'disabled people have been reviewed to death, what we need is action – and there's none of that here'.' He said Mr Bridgeman described the plan as a 'collection of vague intentions dressed up as progress', with 'no targets, no teeth and no real-world accountability'. Mr Isherwood, who has campaigned on disability rights for decades, warned the plan lacks a commitment to enshrine the UN convention on the rights of disabled people into Welsh law. The north Walian also warned the UK Government's plans to cut benefits risk further disabling people in Wales by compounding poverty and exclusion. During a statement on June 3, Jane Hutt described the plan as a landmark moment in the Welsh Government's commitment to ensuring an inclusive and accessible society for all. Wales' social justice secretary said: 'This plan is a ten-year blueprint for progress, designed to ensure its outcomes are realised through actions taken across government.' Ms Hutt cautioned that UK Government welfare reforms risk overlooking the circumstances and needs of disabled people, and more so in Wales than some other parts of the UK. Jane Hutt, secretary for social justice, trefnydd and chief whip She said the plan seeks to position Wales as a world leader in the social model of disability, which says people are disabled by barriers in society – not by their impairment or condition. Ms Hutt urged organisations and disabled people to have their say by responding to a consultation on the draft plan, which runs until August 7. Sioned Williams warned the plan has been a 'long time coming', with the taskforce set up after a 2021 report, entitled Locked out, into the impact of the pandemic on disabled people. Ms Williams told the Senedd: 'We must never forget that disabled people comprised 60% of deaths from Covid-19 in Wales, and many of those deaths were preventable and rooted in socioeconomic inequality.' Plaid Cymru's shadow social justice minister, Sioned Williams The Plaid Cymru politician stressed the importance of legally enforceable rights – 'rights that can literally be the difference between life and death'. Ms Williams warned planned welfare cuts cast a long, dark shadow over the plan, saying: 'The removal of this vital support doesn't simply reduce income, it rips away the safety net that many disabled people rely on to live with dignity.' She called for assurances that disabled and neurodivergent people will no longer be detained in secure hospitals in Wales, as highlighted by the Stolen Lives campaign. Jenny Rathbone supported efforts to embed the social model of disability because 'it is society that needs to change, not the individual who happens to have an impairment'. But she recognised that a huge amount of work still needs to be done. Julie Morgan, a fellow Labour backbencher, said the plan clearly shows the Welsh Government's commitment to making Wales an open, inclusive and accessible place. But Conservative Laura Anne Jones warned the plan 'falls short in many critical areas', with disabled people still facing systemic barriers to work, transport and access to services. South Wales East MS Laura Anne Jones She said: 'With rising living costs and sweeping cuts to support services alongside welfare, this plan feels more like a statement of intent than a blueprint for real action.'
