Why fight the Wrexham Mega-Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex?

A new prison has been on the cards for north Wales for quite some time. Prisoners from Welsh speaking areas are incarcerated in England where the language and culture is different, families have to spend large sums of money and travel for hours to visit loved ones in prison. Why then as someone who has and has had relatives and freinds incarcerated in English prisons, do I oppose this Mega-Prison being built in north Wales?

Aside from the issues that plauge mega-prisons in terms of their awful conditions, as a prison abolitionist I don’t belive that prisons solve any social problems or make our communities any safer . The prison propulation is on the rise, between June 1993 and June 2012 the prison population in England and Wales increased by 41,800 prisoners to over 86,000 and the numbers are still rising.

Opposing the DPRTE Arms Fair in Cardiff

Two anti-militarists are up in court this coming week, having been accused of disrupting last year’s DPRTE arms fair in Cardiff. The pair are due to stand trial on Tuesday 6th January 2015 at Cardiff Magistrates Court and could potentially face custodial sentences.

They are accused of damaging the luxury goods of DPRTE arms dealers -including a £400 suit and a £200 pair of designer shoes - with childrens play paint.

According to it's website, DPTRE (the Defense Procurement, Research, Technology and Exportability exhibition) is the "UK’s Premier Defense Procurement Event" and is now being hosted annually at Cardiff Motorpoint arena. Their first time hosting the arms fair in Cardiff was on the the 8th of October 2014, with exhibitors at DPRTE include BAE Systems, the world’s 3rd largest arms producer with a very special relationship with the UK government & Saudi dictatorship. BAE also supplies Israel with the tools to wage war on the Palestinans and after the horrors seen perpetrated by Israel over the summer, from bombing a UN school to the killing of children playing on a beach, there is no doubt that BAE systems is complicit in these crimes through it's arming of the Israeli state.

Direct action against austerity cuts

Early on Sunday morning, on the 6th of March, Jamie Bevan and I were arrested for taking direct action against the Tories in because of their cultural vandalism against the Welsh language. We broke into MP Jonathan Evans’s office in Cardiff and sprayed the slogan ‘Achub S4C’ (Save S4C) on the wall. The sirens went off straight away when we broke the window to get into the office. The police arrived while we were on the phone notifying them of what we had done. The policeman shouted at us to come out of the building and threatened to break the door down and spray us with pepper spray. We opened the door and came out peacefully, the police told us to get on the floor and on our stomachs.

We were then put into the back of the van and were taken to the police station at Cardiff Bay. Jamie and I had been arrested about 3 months prior for spraying a slogan on a government building in protest against the weak Welsh Language law that let big companies get away with not providing services in Welsh. That time I was only in the cell for about 8 hours and I was allowed my phone call straight away. I thought I knew what to expect but it turned out that that this it would be a little different. I was not allowed my phone call until 17 hours after being arrested and would be in the cell much longer.

I was very glad to get my phone call, i was worried that my father had come all the way down from north Wales, it was lambing season so this would have been quite an inconvenience! I received a newspaper while in the cell that my friend Menna had bought me. I don’t know what I would have done without it, being alone for 33 hours would have been absolutely unbearable without something to read! There were a few articles about protesters in other countries, this really made me appreciate how lucky I was that I was not worse off. I was allowed plenty of tea and almost all the police (except maybe one or two) treated me with respect and were perfectly pleasant.

ConDems vs the Welsh language

The Welsh word for Tory (‘Tori’) also means ‘to cut’ in Welsh. Now there’s a coincidence. The cuts that the ConDems are imposing on us will have a profound impact on our society for generations to come. From the extra strain on our public services to our ‘jobless generation’ it will change the face of Wales. What people do not necessarily take into consideration is how the cuts are going to threatan our identity as distinct people. After 700 years of being ruled by our big next door neighbour, what we were left with as a symbol of our identity was our language. The ConDem’s plans to hack away at public services as well as their decision to put and end to S4C as we know it could be the final blow that could kill the Welsh language.

Statisticaly, the number of Welsh speakers is on the rise. Although this is heartening, a rise in the number of speakers does not necessarily mean that the language is in a healthy state. Latin, although being spoken by many, is a 'dead' languauge. In no part of the world is Latin the community language or the language of the home and the same must be kept in mind when we look at the situation with Welsh.