Following his election to the Senedd (Caerdydd Penarth constituency), Labour’s Huw Thomas has stood down as the Leader of Cardiff Council and a Splott councillor. The 49 remaining Labour councillors have unanimously voted for Chris Weaver to become the new Council Leader, while a by-election next month will determine who replaces Thomas in Splott.

Weaver has been a Cardiff councillor (Cathays ward) since 2012 and the Cabinet Member for Finance since 2017. In that capacity he has presided over a near doubling of Cardiff’s debt to what will have sailed past the £ billion mark by the time of this year’s financial statement – far and away the highest of any Council in Wales, costing £30 million annually in interest charges alone. But to lay the blame on Weaver for this catastrophic financial mismanagement that will burden future Cardiffians for decades to come would be wholly unfair: he was only obeying orders.

Those orders came from – yes, you guessed correctly – none other than Russell Goodway, the man who has done more damage to Cardiff than anyone in history. The 71-year-old has been in charge of Cardiff for a scarcely believable 23 of the last 34 years, as Leader of South Glamorgan Council from 1992 and then Cardiff Council when it replaced South Glamorgan in 1996. After a series of scandals and controversies too numerous to list here, Labour lost control of the Council in 2004 and the widely-loathed Goodway stood down as the party’s Leader. However, he remained an Ely councillor through Labour’s eight years out of power and, far too unpopular to occupy a high-profile position, he settled for being a Machiavellian puppet-master behind the scenes when Labour regained control in 2012.

Hopeless Heather Jones, a conveniently dim Aunt Sally, was the new Council Leader and she put him in charge of Cardiff’s finances – akin to giving Jack the Ripper free access to a women’s refuge. Goodway was soon overseeing Cardiff’s plunge into mountains of debt, pursuing banal boosterism and handing over the city to corporate predators. Internecine warfare within the Cardiff Labour Party saw him ousted in 2014 when slightly left of centre Phil Bale replaced Jones, but the rightwing ideologue was soon back in control in 2017 after Bale’s overthrow. With British Nationalist bootlicker Thomas now the leader and the party entirely captured by closet-Tory capitalist whores, Goodway was obligingly appointed Cabinet Member for Investment & Development and he then proceeded to spend the last nine years destroying what remained of Cardiff’s heritage, culture, civic dignity, public realm, social glue, sense of purpose, architecture, parks, green belt and distinctive character. The result is today’s dysfunctional, filthy, hideous hell-hole.

In this period, Goodway kept a low profile. The only time he drew attention to himself was when he absurdly asserted that criticism of disgraced black First Minister Vaughan Gething for his outrageous acceptance of an unexplained £200,000 gift from a convicted criminal was ‘racist’. In so doing Goodway exposed his rotten values: a cavalier disregard for basic standards of decency in public life, a contempt for the overwhelming majority of the people of Wales shocked by Gething’s indefensible behaviour, and a wickedly irresponsible, inappropriate and authentically racist perversion of the serious issue of racism in order to defend one of his rightwing cronies. The people of Ely who have been voting for such a person across four decades should hang their heads in shame.

Gullible stooge Chris Weaver assisted Thomas in doing Goodway’s bidding during these nine years while learning all he knows about unsustainability, bankruptcy and perpetual growth for growth’s sake at the behest of property developers, hedge funds and buy-to-let parasites (“devout Christian” Goodway must have missed that bit in the Bible about Christ kicking the merchants and money-lenders out of the Temple). Weaver is now deemed sufficiently groomed to be the next front man who can take the flak and utter the knackered sales-patter as creepy-crawly Goodway lurks in the background.

We know nothing about Weaver. Very secretive about his background, past jobs, interests and anything remotely personal, he’s the epitome of an an anonymous drone. What’s certain is that, like Goodway and Thomas, he is not a Cardiffian and, from his reluctance to ever mention the w-word, it is obvious he’s not even from Wales. That will go down well with Goodway and all the Starmerite rightwingers and Cymruphobes on a Council that, for instance, refuses to fund a new Welsh medium secondary school despite the huge demand for one across the city, that couldn’t find the money to reopen St David’s Hall, the National Concert Hall of Wales, without flogging it to an offshoot of rapacious American corporation Live Nation, and that refuses to close any roads for just an hour for Cardiff’s St David’s Day parade yet will close every road in the city centre all day long for, say, the sake of an English league rugby match between Bristol and Harlequins or the Americanised petrol-head trash of Monster Jam motorsport. Cardiff’s immense debt has definitely not been built up by spending on Cardiff’s needs or on anything remotely Welsh.

What we know for sure about Chris Weaver is that he’s no economist. After all, his stated remedy for Cardiff’s basket-case finances is to “grow ourselves out of this crisis” – the very Goodway-driven policy that accrued the debt in the first place! Everything else we need to know is revealed by the identities of the two people who most loudly congratulated him when he became Council Leader: Jo Stevens, the Secretary of State for Wales that Starmer hasn’t even considered sacking even though she’s just delivered Labour’s worst-ever election result in Wales since the party was founded; and Stephen Doughty, MP for Cardiff South & Penarth, another vile British Nationalist who is Starmer’s Minister of State for Europe, North America & Overseas Territories and manages to do the job without so much as a hint of criticism of, say, Trump’s war on the world, or the US government’s interference in UK affairs, or England’s unresolved illegal annexation of Wales and continued robbery of Welsh resources. When a thoroughly nasty pair like these two are singing your praises, no further condemnation of Weaver is necessary.