The Welsh Government has spent £820 of taxpayers’ money on subscriptions to anti-Reform commentator and Guardian columnist Will Hayward’s Substack. The cash is going on a multi-user subscription held by the Welsh Government press office since 1 October 2024 supposedly for “media monitoring purposes”…
Hayward spends his time attacking the opposition party with articles like “How to stop Reform in Wales” and “Reform are treating Wales as a joke.” You get the picture…
Hayward isn’t the only Reform-sceptic outlet on the Welsh taxpayer’s books: Nation.Cymru has been propped up by public grants routed through the Books Council of Wales. It was awarded £20,000 a year for four years from 2020, plus one-off grants of £42,000 and £7,200. It also got £9,400 from a fund paid for out of the Welsh Government’s Co-operation Agreement with Plaid Cymru. A fresh grant for 2024 to 2028 is worth £25,000 a year. That adds up to around £200,000 since 2020…
A Reform Wales spokesman attacked the Hawyard spending:
“Welsh taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for Plaid Cymru to get its weekly Will Hayward fix. Plaid Cymru should cancel the subscription and stop making taxpayers bankroll its favourite blogger.”
Incidentally Welsh government officials who are interested in monitoring explosive political news outlets can subscribe to Guido at order-order.com/membership…
Green Deputy Leader Rachel Millward said:
“The reality is that it’s Zack Polanski who brought the nation, Andy Burnham. And if we hadn’t had the success of the Green Party in this last year since Zack’s been leading, which has been unprecedented, phenomenal success and a growth from about 60,000 members to 230,000, if we hadn’t had that much pressure on Labour, then we’d probably still be in the Starmer regime, which was pretty much ushering in a Reform government with its lurch to the right. So actually, what we’re seeing now is that we’ve set the political agenda and the government is picking that up.”