In Welsh politics, the phrase ‘democratic deficit’ has been rubbed to a shiny patina of over-use these last twenty years. It was used as a cattle prod into voting for the National Assembly’s initial establishment, to underpin the Yes campaign in the 2011 referendum on extra powers and regularly to rattle chains about our apparently sickly media. It has now mutated into the title of a series of seminars organised by the Assembly about its own media profile. Like Trotsky’s revolution, our democratic deficit, it would seem, is permanent, and ongoing. The seminars, entitled ‘Addressing the Democratic Deficit in Wales’, were called by Presiding Officer Rosemary Butler AM, who outlined her worry that our still infant democracy is ‘under threat’ from its low media profile. ‘Very few people relatively watch BBC Wales or ITV Wales compared with UK news and Sky television. Therefore they are not getting a full flavour of what’s happening here in the National Assembly,’ she declared, bemoaning too the sorry state of the Welsh newspaper industry. ‘My concern is that we are sleepwalking into this area in ten years' time where people are not going to be able to access news about what's happening in Wales.’...
Despite the English capital’s economic attraction for workless Welsh migrants, from nineteenth-century merched y gerddi to domestic servants between the wars, the modern Welsh expatriate has been lured there just as much by the potential for escape, adventure, and the expansion of social and cultural horizons. The negligible status of Cardiff until 1955 made London the most expansive vista to hand, and, for those needing room to grow, the desire for self-actualisation fuelled the escapism which continues to drive so many of us up the M4 into self-imposed exile...
At first sight, the main premise of Bella Kerr’s show, Keeper, appeared to be an invitation to read – in company, aloud or silently. The Mission Gallery had been turned into a reading room. Kerr herself was reading, surrounded by an array of books, forming short towers. ‘Being in the space is a new thing for me,’ she explained. Kerr was following a long tradition of makers opting to be physically present in their created space – the writer, Will Self, wrote in a gallery; the artist, Sophie Calle, often attended her own shows, handing out comment forms and sitting blank-faced while they were filled out. A brave act. One of responsibility, of accountability...
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