In a brazenly sham ‘public consultation’, which runs until February 4th, Cardiff Council has been asking residents for their views on the savage cuts it is proposing to make to Council services – cuts which, apparently, are the only possible way to tackle a 2024/25 budget shortfall of £30 million. Since all the major spending decisions have so obviously been made already, this dishonest exercise in faux-democratic buck-passing is actually a contemptuous and arrogant insult to the people of Cardiff.

Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that the really expensive expenditures planned by the Council are completely absent from the consultation. You can give your opinion on libraries, parks, street cleaning, waste collection, traffic, parking, sports facilities, culture, civic amenities, cemeteries, school meals, home care, council tax, language support, hubs and leisure centres but nowhere is one asked to give a verdict on, for instance, the Council’s totally unnecessary, unwanted, unaffordable and insane ‘Cardiff Arena’ project. This extraordinarily misguided and high-risk speculation will cost the Council £138 million up front to construct a 15,000-capacity arena that the city simply doesn’t need in order to host mainstream Anglo-American pop acts – while all the smaller venues that Cardiff does need and that support the Welsh music scene are closed down. Once it’s constructed, and consequential repercussions like the demolition of County Hall are completed, it will be handed over for free to the private sector operator ‘Live Nation’ (the ‘nation’ they refer to is definitely not Wales) who, having taken none of the risks, will pocket all the profits while supposedly clearing that £138 million debt in dribs and drabs over the course of a 46 year lease. Is there anyone out there, other than Russell Goodway and his acolytes, who believes that Cardiff is going to come out of this deeply dodgy, one-sided arrangement smelling of roses?

Putting to one side whether Live Nation, or Cardiff for that matter, will exist in 46 years’ time, even if Goodway’s delusional pipe-dreams were remotely feasible there can be no justification for this arena when vital public services are threatened in the here and now and £138 million would be more than enough to not just make the proposed cuts unnecessary but to actually expand and improve services across the board.

I’ve got news for Russell Goodway, Council leader Huw Thomas, councillor Chris Weaver (in charge of ‘finance, modernisation and performance’) and all the other compliant, conservative Labour stooges: you are not in a competition with other councils, you are not entrepreneurs, you are not businessmen, you are not venture capitalists, you are not property developers, you are not running a hedge-fund, you are not empire-builders, you are not the minions of lobbyists and vested interests, you are not a job-creation scheme, you are not showbiz moguls and you are not fortune-tellers. You are common or garden local government officials, elected to provide essential public services to today’s Cardiffians and to enhance and protect the city’s special, unique identity as the capital of Wales. That privilege should be more than enough to be going on with.

But Cardiff’s Labour Party is currently in the clutches of neo-liberal, ‘market forces’ ideologues somewhere to the right of Liz Truss, pathetically obsessed with growth-for-growth’s-sake, size-for-size’s-sake and doing the bidding of venal corporate behemoths who care nothing for Cardiff. Over and over again blunder follows blunder and short-termism, gimmicks, stunts and pointless boosterism replace the hard work of unglamorous civic responsibility. The arena is just one example among many where Cardiff seems to exist just to be asset-stripped to line the pockets of shareholders and the wealthy; just look at the £14 million thrown away on the ridiculous Churchill Way Gutter Canal so that more here-today-gone-tomorrow ‘hospitality industry’ chancers can dish up crap food overlooking a piddling water feature; or the £14 million Labour has handed over to self-serving ‘consultancy’ firms* since regaining control of the Council 12 years ago – money for nothing fed to fat-cats instead of being used to benefit the people of Cardiff; or the forest of empty towers that have defaced the cityscape at the behest of the ‘student accommodation industry’; or the ranks of ghastly, unaffordable legoland outer suburbs that have been plastered across the countryside to appease the voracious greed of the volume housebuilders that pump money into Tory Party funds. Then it’s all dressed up in sickening Orwellian duplicity that is the opposite of the truth, like empty, tokenistic greenwashing while nature is annihilated and fertile earth is concreted over, and ‘we care’ nods in the direction of job-creation when any new jobs are just unskilled and temporary gig-economy exploitations that never replace the jobs they eradicated.

It is for this that libraries will be closed, that bins will be removed or not emptied, that streets will be even more filthy than they are already, that waste collections will be reduced, that parks and amenities will be neglected and commercialised, that cultural jewels from Artes Mundi to the Mansion House will be ditched or privatised, and that charges will be introduced or increased for just about everything from cremation fees to school meals, football pitches to home care. And, even after all this brutal vandalism, Cardiff Council will not have made the slightest dent in its massive debt that currently stands at a gobsmacking £860 million and is soaring ever upwards towards a billion. I wouldn’t put these incompetent, inadequate, moronic closet Tories in charge of boiling an egg. We need to get rid of the lot of them at the next opportunity: the County Council elections in 2027.

*NOTE
Among the giant consultancy firms the Council has been paying through the nose are: Mott MacDonald, Capita, Peopletoo, PwC (all based in England), AECOM (USA) and Avison Young (Canada)