General News

At the weekend I was delighted to attend a service in Cardiff to celebrate Siopa Teg’s 10 years of work promoting fair trade in South Wales since I had opened the shop as Secretary of State for Wales.

Next Monday, with the party conference season behind us, Parliament will return after the summer recess. Most MPs will have enjoyed a brief rest but will have spent most of the "break" getting stuck in to all the demands of constituency work and fact-finding visits that are essential to inform our debates.

As a Labour/Cooperative MP I am one of the few MPs who gets to go to two party conferences. The Cooperative Party Conference was last week and it was held in London, the Coop Party is coming up with some new and interesting ways of involving members in policy formulation and I look forward to seeing how this develops.

Why does it sometimes sound as if BBC reporters visiting Wales have been trained by the announcer at Cardiff Central Station who can’t pronounce Caerphilly? The BBC Pronunciation Department was set up in the 40s to help news readers and reporters cope with the increasingly exotic place names they were dealing with on an every day basis.

A recent BBC News website told us about an allegation that decades of cash for regeneration has failed to help the UK's towns and cities which lost their heavy industries, and has failed particularly in coastal towns.

It's impossible to miss the fact that there is an election on in America. On 4th November the Democratic candidate Barak Obama and the Republican John McCain will ask the American people to put their faith in them and their policies.

One thing that causes instant anger in my family is when a journalist talks about MPs "relaxing on their sun loungers" as if that's all the Parliamentary recess involves. It implies that all MPs fit the media image by disappearing to Tuscany for several weeks. It also implies that we have nothing to do during August and September.

Over the last ten days there has been extensive speculation in the media surrounding several supposedly controversial aspects of the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing. Producers of the ceremony confirmed that nine year-old Lin Miaoke was chosen on the basis of her looks to mime along to a song performed by seven year-old Yang Peiyi – and that many of 29 giant foot prints seen tracing their steps towards the Beijing stadium were actually computer generated images – not fireworks.

Every year just prior to recess there is a mad rush by House of Commons Committees to get their reports published, and this year was no exception. For me it was worse than usual because in the absence of the chairman I had to take the lead on the Justice Committee's publication of a report on sentencing policy and field all the Media queries.

A parliamentary briefing for MPs from the Charity Commission gave us some fascinating facts. Every week, 190,000 registered charities in England and Wales work to improve our communities and our world. Contributing to their work are more than 200 charity organizations in Cardiff South and Penarth alone.