Why Plaid Cymru Should Go On The Attack To Defend Jobs In Wales

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

What does Tesco, Virgin Media and now Barclays Bank have in common? All three have made or are to make major job losses within Wales. 180 jobs are to be gone from their Mortgage centre in Llanishen in Cardiff. So instead of mortgages being dealt with in Wales they will be dealt with in Leeds and Liverpool instead.

Now Barclays have said that their aim is to redeploy the people affected to other parts of the bank. What Plaid Cymru should do is monitor this and keep them to their word. Because when these situations have occurred recently there seems to be a tenplate as to what occurs.

1) [Insert company here] decides Wales is an easy touch and makes redundancies.

2) [Insert Labour Politician] complains about the decision outside the firm involved. Then proceeds to do hardly anything and returns to their relatively secure job unlike the people involved.

3) Redundancies occur.

What Plaid should do is protest from day one. As I suggested with regard to Virgin Media in a previous post (and it's not too late yet) Plaid should actively campaign for people to cancel their contracts once expired and new customers not to choose them for their custom. In the case of Barclays Plaid should encourage people living in Wales to avoid them when picking mortgages if redundancies do occur.

What Plaid will gain from such direct action is that the people living in Wales will know that they,and not Welsh Labour are on their side. People may be apathetic to politics but they are not apathetic to job losses. They will see the Party of Wales battling for Wales It will show companies that Wales is not a soft touch. It will also make companies think again about inflicting Wales with job losses disproportionately (It's always the bottom line folks).

Campaigning for Wales Fighting for Wales like this will galvanise the party and I would hope the people living here.

Until the next time.