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Hwyl Fawr

Editorial

Emily Trahair

Introduction

The text that follows is a longer version of the editorial published in our (final?) issue from February 2024, giving additional information about the troubling circumstances behind us losing our funding. It also features a postscript giving my perspective on recent correspondence with the Senedd’s Culture Committee from the Books Council of Wales and myself relating to unfolding questions about the fairness and transparency of the decision-making process that resulted in Planet and New Welsh Review losing their grants – plus more positive developments. These updates have been publicised partly in response to calls from concerned readers for more information about our closure, but also for the benefit of Welsh publishers more broadly, as we wouldn’t want any other organisation to go through what we have experienced, and for this to set a precedent. I hope that these perspectives will be constructive for longer term aims to debate and reform the funding strategy and ethos for Welsh magazines and websites in both languages.

Emily Trahair, July 2024

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It was a struggle to work out how on earth to write this editorial, so I took a twilight walk up Constitution Hill, to gain some perspective. From there, if you squint a little as you look down on the sweep of the bay as the lights come on, Aberystwyth looks like a city in miniature, a Donostia perhaps, or a Rio. It was a clear early evening – the indistinct blue peaks of Yr Eryri and Pen Llŷn were visible across the horizon, so Cardigan Bay looked like a vast lake as you might find in Sub-Saharan Africa, Canada or the Caucasus. In moments of crisis your desire to be very much anywhere else than where you find yourself can lead the mind to trickery. But we are, prosaically, where we are; in this case juggling packing tape and spreadsheets in wintry mid Wales, in the midst of the administrative nightmare of winding up a beloved magazine; and from there to the dole queue.

But we’re not quite there yet. There is still this issue left to launch – and, thanks to our contributors, what a beautifully defiant issue it is! Jan Morris once spoke of how she admired the ‘chutzpah’ of a small magazine that could call itself ‘Planet’. It was this Welsh internationalism, this dizzyingly liberating play with scale, which first attracted me to the magazine. From a little office on the western periphery it has bypassed the London media agenda to connect on its own terms with the rest of the world, an independent spirit also over-reaching the cramped limits of the devolution settlement to imagine different futures for Wales. It has played a significant part in helping an often tragically divided nation understand itself better, transcending so many tedious culture wars over the decades. It has been both a weathercock and a signpost, attuned to the undercurrents, the emerging tensions and possibilities within Wales and the world, while also shaping readers’ consciousness about everything from the Welsh language and national identity to climate change, neo-imperialism and racism. Countless readers have told me that Planet has changed the way they see themselves and the world forever, from when it was founded by Ned Thomas onwards.

It has often irreverently held powerful interests to account, a brave little light burning away almost undisturbed, sometimes needing protection from the chilling draughts of marketisation and political censure. Hand-packed by ourselves, the magazine lands on doormats in almost every corner of Wales, and arrives in postbags everywhere from prisons to New York Public Library, Guyana to Russia, Stormont to Patagonia, Ivy League universities to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and most of the stateless nations of Europe, a global reach for Welsh culture that has taken decades to build up.

In an online event in 2020 to celebrate fifty years of Planet, I said that I was so excited to discover Planet back in 2006, as it was a miracle a magazine like this was allowed to exist in such a philistine, cynical, neoliberal world. It seems this has finally caught up with us. How? The explanation is decidedly dispiriting, and much of the picture is as yet unclear, but an (abridged) account needs to be given.

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How we came to lose our funding

Every few years there is a competitive tender for funding from the Books Council of Wales (BCW) for magazines. Magazines like Planet depend on this funding for their core costs, and couldn’t operate without it. BCW receive funding from Creative Wales, and while BCW are formally autonomous, and responsible for decisions with regard to the distribution of grants, they receive funding from Welsh Government in line with an agreed operational plan. In November we received the devastating news that we would not receive any funding from April 2024 onwards.

Since 2009 we have experienced successive reductions in our BCW core funding for reasons unrelated to need: our current core grant is less than half what we received prior to devolution, less than half that received when Thatcher was in power, even, not even factoring in inflation. The extent of the reductions were initially due to WAG cuts to BCW, then to Welsh Government misinterpreting changes to European Commission state aid restrictions as applying to magazines like Planet (following our research the Directorate-General for Competition in Brussels had concluded that this was an erroneous interpretation of the regulations) and finally, in 2018 as the BCW panel decided they wanted to fund a wider range of websites and magazines. During this period funding targets had got ever more demanding and interventionist, requiring additional staff hours. Business costs have also risen sharply. While we have recently been successful in applications for small supplementary BCW grants, which we were very grateful for, these were to (partially) address specific additional costs and losses emerging from contingencies that emerged after 2019, such as the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and ongoing cancer treatment; plus a small grant for extra activity around our fiftieth anniversary. Our editorial standards have been consistently praised by funders – including in the final grant decision correspondence.

The direct consequences of these reductions in core grant levels (and nature of the targets) were ever-increasing unpaid overtime hours for staff like myself who were also company directors. While we could only afford to pay me for twenty-seven hours, I usually work between fifty and seventy hours per week, sometime well over eighty to keep the magazine viable. Staff have been paid £12 per hour since 2012; and while we fulfilled all our legal obligations as employers within our desperately restricted means, the funding cuts had other impacts on working conditions as detailed in an editorial I wrote in issue 248. We have been alerting BCW to these issues for over a decade in our annual reports and franchise applications, as funding worsened further and further, to no avail. In light of this, in 2019 we staff weighed up whether the magazine should continue, and decided it should, due to our love for it as a collective endeavour, alongside more vigorous lobbying for better funding. What has prevented us from quitting has been the support we offer each other as a grassroots micro-organisation with a progressive ethos, whereby staff are always in a majority in board meetings and are all paid the same wage per hour.

The working conditions determined by funding reductions had become unbearable for a number of publications in both languages, and many of us could no longer balance our budgets at all, despite strenuously engaging in myriad additional income-raising activities, and having no shortage of expertise on the most appropriate alternative forms of revenue and support. So collectively we publishers (most prominently Planet and New Welsh Review) worked with authors to launch an open letter addressed to Welsh Government, Creative Wales and BCW campaigning for adequate grant levels to enable ethical working conditions. It was signed by 174 authors plus the NUJ, Wales PEN Cymru, Society of Authors Wales, Cymdeithas yr Iaith and the Association of Welsh Writers in English. The campaign was initiated to halt this race to the bottom in working conditions, and done so in order to uplift everyone – all existing publications and those that may emerge in the future. In my editorial in issue 248, I expressed the anxiety publishers feel about speaking out about these issues, as they fear the magazines they love will lose funding as a consequence. However, we were encouraged that some BCW staff expressed their support for the letter and wished the campaign luck in lobbying Creative Wales.

This autumn we drew up our application for our core funding, submitting two budgets – one for the (very approximate) maximum per annum, ‘anticipated’ to be ‘c. £55,000’ in the tender documents (but with no sum ringfenced). Having liaised with BCW, the other was for an amount we demonstrated in our report would enable much more sustainable working conditions and the ability to withstand rising costs – albeit we made it clear this would be the minimum we would need (£75,500 – up from £45,000 we currently receive, but less than the £93,892 we received in 2008). During this period, Wales Arts Review announced in an editorial that they would not be applying for their core funding at all and would thus wind up their own website, citing BCW’s unsustainable ‘Slow Death Grants’, a ‘status quo’ that would ‘kill us all’; plus concerns about BCW’s governance.

We were notified by BCW that the franchise panel had concluded £75,500 was beyond the maximum we could receive due to the limited funding available and the quality of the applications across the scheme, noting we had demonstrated that £55,000 would not enable sustainable working conditions, and that our funding was to not be continued. We were then surprised to learn from a BCW announcement released a few weeks later that the panel had decided approximately £85,000 of the overall £180,000 budget per annum for English-language periodicals (perhaps more) would be kept aside for a brand new magazine ‘with a sustainable business model’ (yet to be launched, that hadn’t submitted an application in 2023). This would have a narrower remit and be less ambitious in scope than Planet (a literary magazine, rather than a cultural/literary/political magazine like ourselves). The ‘precise vision’ for the new venture will be drawn up by the BCW Subcommittee in February 2024.

There has been an outpouring of disbelief and outrage, including expressions of what can only be described as grief, from the reading public, writers, organisations, publishers and politicians at both Planet and New Welsh Review losing funding. There is further dismay that the extent of this ‘cultural vandalism’ is needless – with c. £85,000 left to disburse. We have been overwhelmed by calls for petitions, investigations, lobbying, protests and fundraising efforts. We are very grateful for all support and ideas, which have really lifted our morale. We are especially heartened by the solidarity we have received from almost all Welsh publishers. However the legacy of the funding cuts, combined with illness and the administration needed to wind up the magazine leaves us with little capacity to campaign, challenge or commentate further at this stage, without risking severe burnout.

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What ‘rationale’ was given for Planet losing its grant?

The ‘rationale’ given for BCW denying us funding can be most succinctly described (suitably enough) by two literary adjectives: Kafka-esque and Orwellian. They attempted to argue that the BCW panel had ‘deep concerns’ about our ‘obligations as employers’ in view of the working conditions illustrated in the application. This was despite that in our application we demonstrated clearly how our employee conditions were a direct consequence of severe grant cuts and funding targets; that we had been alerting the BCW panel to the same points in our reports for many years without them raising any concerns previously (indeed these points formed the basis for previous successful applications for smaller, supplementary grants); these points also formed the basis for the open letter campaign for all magazines, that a number of BCW staff wished those involved luck with. Their ‘rationale’ regarding employer obligations was also deeply unfair and baffling as we had also demonstrated that we are a tiny, largely employee-run organisation operating with a co-operative element as a collective endeavour. Nowhere in our application was there any evidence that we actually broke employment law or failed to uphold all our legal obligations to staff within our means.

This potentially amounts in my opinion to not only victimising us as employees for raising concerns about the working conditions determined by core grant levels and funding targets, but, in a further twist, victim-blaming us as well. What does this mean for Fair Work Wales?

Even more troublingly, it of course emerged that it was untrue that BCW couldn’t offer us the minimum we’d demonstrated would enable ethical working conditions due to their budget and the strength of submissions to the scheme, as there was even more money left over that would be offered to another magazine in a new tender.

Another, relatedly absurd element cited in the BCW decision correspondence was querying why in our application ‘there were no plans in place to scale production or alter the business model based on the level of funding available’. With regard to our publication model, in the application we gave a clear case as to the practical reasons why we it would not be possible to drop any of our digital formats. It should have been self-evident that reducing the number of pages, or of issues, or reducing the quality of design or contents would lead to loss of sales income and thus be self-defeating financially. Throughout the report we made a clear case that we had the optimum business model for our needs in our application for £75,500, detailing how this model would be sustainable financially and (as a minimum) in terms of working conditions, reaching the standards our readers expect, while also being very cost- and time-effective. It of course was later revealed that the ‘level of funding available’ within the budget was far higher than £75,500.

The points outlined earlier BCW termed ‘the full extent of the sub-committee’s feedback’ regarding panel criticism of Planet. We challenged them with the arguments above (and others) giving detailed evidence within their internal complaints procedure, demonstrating that their arguments were inaccurate, unfair, illogical and would likely be defamatory if disseminated further. BCW were unable to provide what I would consider any kind of coherent come-back, let alone any counter-evidence. Needless to say, having investigated themselves, they didn’t uphold our complaint, but say they noted the points we made, and reassured us that they would keep details of the Planet funding decision confidential. We thought it would be futile to escalate our complaint to the next stage (directing our case to BCW’s CEO) in light of our lack of faith in the process, and in view of all the time pressures we were under to close the magazine.

If another publisher had submitted a stronger application than us to the 2023 tender, which performed better against the tender priorities than ourselves, and consequently there was not enough money in the pot to support all publishers adequately and we had simply lost our funding as a consequence (and if there had been no unfair or untrue feedback about us) we wouldn't have contested the decision at all. However, the key thing here of course is that this wasn't the case.

Was the fact that Planet and NWR were at the forefront of a campaign to reform the funding system a factor in us both losing funding? We’ll likely never know for sure, as BCW is a charity and so doesn’t accept FOIs; nor would we ever be fully aware of any informal conversations between individuals at the organisation that might be relevant. However, it is legitimate to be concerned that our role in this campaign combined with the lack of coherent rationale for the grant cut may have a chilling effect on other organisations and their workers raising such concerns in the future, which would be very unhealthy for the sector.

Beyond our immediate situation, there are wider issues with regard to the current funding environment that would need addressing before it would be feasible to consider relaunching the magazine, that there is not space to critique here. It’s our hope that the open letter campaign can evolve into a platform for constructive analysis of present problems with the system and proposals for how these can be overcome, to benefit all publishers in both languages.

It’s important to note that of course BCW is not a monolith. We have also experienced genuine kindness, support and expertise in various contexts from many within the funding body that we remain grateful for, with particular mention of our grants officers who have so often battled conscientiously for the future of Welsh magazines. In light of longstanding (and sometimes ongoing) positive contributions to the Welsh public sphere from BCW, it’s tragic that recent experience has been so disappointing and demoralising for a number of publishers.

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Why independent political-cultural-literary magazines are so vital

There are also concerns that BCW may potentially no longer substantially fund political coverage in English. Small amounts of funding had been granted to Poetry Wales, and to Nation.Cymru and Welsh Agenda (run by the Institute for Welsh Affairs) for ‘cultural content including book reviews and providing a digital free at the point of use platform for the publishing sector in Wales’, with a tiny amount for The Paper. By far the largest amount of funding has been put aside for a future literary magazine. Any narrowing of the parameters of English-language magazines and websites would not only mean a lack of parity with Welsh-language magazines and websites, but would have far more profound effects.

It is inherent to Welsh identity, democracy and internationalism for politics and culture to be seamlessly enmeshed. Periodicals like Planet are in an unbroken radical tradition reaching back to the eighteenth-century ‘revolutionary pamphlets’ celebrated by Robert Minhinnick in this issue, via titles such as the Red Dragon and Welsh Outlook. This was upheld by everyone from Richard Price to Raymond Williams, and latterly through, for example, literary activism for Palestine from our National Poet Hanan Issa. Through hybrid forms that animate political issues – such as the English-language equivalent of the ysgrif and more recent developments in creative non-fiction – and through juxtaposing together conventional current affairs articles with cultural and literary features within the pages of an issue, this montage continues to be vital. Now that earlier platforms for radical politics and self-taught education such as chapels and working men’s institutes are largely defunct, periodicals are key contributors to a secular, post-industrial public sphere. In small yet indispensable ways they collage together a collective conscience through their debate on culture and current affairs, far more meaningfully than via social media and click-bait.

It’s also important for reflecting the periodical’s place in Welsh culture that grant provision for the written media in Wales doesn’t become overly split between professional news journalism on the one hand and cultural content and creative writing on the other, so that only those with particular training can be adequately funded to write on political issues. Features offering unique angles on current affairs should continue to be widely written by everyone from historians to poets, to community activists, artists and those who have no qualification apart from writing something to the highest standard (which is different again to, and no less important than, citizen journalism).

Our hybrid political-cultural-arts-literary publications also surely need to be funded as print periodicals alongside online media – both are vital, and complement each other. Among all generations print magazines are still appreciated as a medium for writing and visual material of lasting value, and an immersive, memorable reading experience, as artefacts that can be kept in personal and institutional collections for posterity. Print’s qualities as a counterpoint to the more ephemeral and sometimes toxic nature of online media are only becoming clearer as time goes on; and the building up of collective memory through such collections is an essential contribution to safeguarding the fragile nation-building process in Wales. It's also surely vital for our fractured nation that such periodicals include those that unite all different demographics as well as those aimed at a particular group within Welsh society.

To truly uphold the Welsh radical tradition, Planet’s experience is that there needs to be a funding environment where there are sufficient grant levels to enable small, ‘indie’ publishers to actually be independent: to own themselves, and be largely run by their employees (alongside some external expertise and scrutiny), rather than being under pressure to be owned, run by or subject to undue influence from larger organisations, sponsors or high-status individuals. This was not only essential for staff retention and morale, but also the ability (in a small nation beset by myriad conflicts of interest) to have the confidence to publish content that critiqued powerful interests in all sectors.

Since we heard the news about our grant decision, small amounts of funding have been granted through BCW’s New Audiences Fund a year at a time to some very promising looking projects in the English language, including a few (for example the excellent online publication Cwlwm) which are able to reflect a number of the qualities discussed above. However, for such projects to develop to their full potential in terms of amount of content and reach, for all the above qualities and fields to be reflected within a publication (and for staff to be adequately renumerated), there would surely need to be core funding at a grant level and franchise duration that at least matches that which is due to be granted to a literary magazine with narrower remit this summer.

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Are Welsh magazines doomed post devolution?

Why did a number of readers on social media express their dismay at the funding decisions in terms of ‘the failure of devolution’? We are not so self-aggrandising to believe that the demise of a small magazine represents the height of disillusionment with the devolved professional-managerial class and its associated bodies. However this was just one sad and wretched example of the contradictions between neoliberalism and social democracy that beset our institutions, as discussed in relation to magazine funding strategy in my editorial in issue 248, and which require further analysis elsewhere in light of the latest decisions.

Part of the answer is that so many organisations that were once part of the fabric of a civil society that took an oppositional approach to the British state – campaigning for and incubating a different, better kind of polity – have post-devolution become co-opted into a state that increasingly resembles the neoliberal one it was devolved from, and are tasked with enforcing its austerity (with a veneer of progressivism and Welsh cultural specificity). This tugging at the communal fabric is often experienced as a painful tearing within institutions, and indeed within the consciences of many of those who work for them.

What now for Planet? There is a compulsion to retreat to the grassroots, to abandon hope in our devolved institutions, to gather round a campfire of funding paperwork, and start zines from garden sheds, crowdfund for podcasts, go rogue as renegade pamphleteers. The maverick spirit of the grassroots lights up this whole issue (as do numerous fires – spot them!): salvaging human agency and self-expression from AI, building bridges at community level as peace activists; and answers to the crises of our time from folklore, radical anthologies, Danish notions of egalitarian ‘enlightenment’, and everyday ‘structures of feeling’.

However, not only would periodicals be financially unsustainable without public funding, it would be premature to give up on the prospect of radical, independent media being adequately supported arms-length via the state, as it once was. The open letter campaign not only exposed the blatant contradictions between the current funding regime and the Welsh Government’s Fair Work and media deficit agendas, but garnered support from influential figures including politicians. Furthermore, institutions evolve, and values are often deeply contested within them. Alternatively, funding responsibilities can shift to other institutions.

The NUJ are lobbying for a Wales Media Institute to fund our media, and for public interest journalism to be redefined as a public service to receive adequate funding, and to end the punishing pretence that this activity could be commercially viable in a small nation. This proposal emerged partly in response to another BCW debacle that also reflects the increasingly neoliberal – and dysfunctional – nature of their funding strategy. In 2022 the outcome of the Welsh Digital News Service grant franchise was that Golwg 360’s funding was halved, with the other 50% being granted to Corgi Cymru, which was owned by media giant Newsquest (itself a subsidiary of US-based Gannett Media, which is listed on the New York stock exchange). Newsquest already had a track record in taking public money from Wales and then pulling the plug on the funded project. Predictably enough, after a few months Newsquest decided to close Corgi Cymru.

The creeping marketisation of Welsh periodicals is not inevitable – indeed is increasingly anachronistic, against the tide of so many other European nations who achieve sustainable media subsidy for their indigenous enterprises: for example the Irish government recently started funding a far greater number of cultural magazines, with significantly higher grants to each.

Until we can go back to the future, Planet goes dormant. We’ve been here before: shutting down in 1979 and re-launching in 1985, and we dearly hope that we can one day land on your doormats again.

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Postscript

Thanks to everyone’s efforts via our crowdfunder, we raised enough money to go dormant as a company rather than winding up. This means we have retained our intellectual property rights, which makes a re-launch in the future much more feasible. We’re enormously grateful to everyone who contributed.

Following going to press with the original editorial at the end of January, I intended on having a break from pursuing issues surrounding our loss of grant, as there were so many administrative tasks to finish in order to close the magazine. However, in February I was alerted to a letter sent to the Senedd’s Culture Committee in December 2023 from BCW CEO Helgard Krause and published on the Senedd’s website that contained untrue, easily refutable and potentially damaging points about Planet (and New Welsh Review) and the decision process, in response to a letter from the Committee’s Chair. This was the first in several published interventions from BCW demonstrating what I would characterise as increasingly desperate corporate-style double-think. Myself and New Welsh Review editor Gwen Davies each wrote a response to the Committee correcting the record and challenging these points. I made additional points about issues including a lack of transparency and consultation with publishers, authors and readers with regard to a confidential internal review that contributed to a set of funding decisions that were met with such outcry from the reading public. My letter can be read here and Gwen’s can be read here. We are extremely grateful to be supported this year by individuals and organisations including the NUJ, and for our concerns to be considered in detail by the Senedd’s Culture Committee. You can watch these issues being discussed in this video of the Committee’s meeting on 15 May 2024. The Committee Chair Delyth Jewell MS and her colleagues have been particularly conscientious in following up the issues regarding magazine funding with BCW and also in correspondence with the Cabinet Secretary for Culture and Social Justice Lesley Griffiths MS which Sarah Murphy MS responded to in her capacity as Minister for Social Partnership. In June 2024 Helgard Krause wrote a letter in response one from the Committee Chair which contains the most ludicrously untrue claims yet, which I redressed in my response here. This letter is followed in the link by another letter from the Committee Chair to Sarah Murphy MS reiterating the Committee’s concern at the impact of reductions in Welsh Government funding for BCW on magazines and their workers. The campaign for a fairer funding system for all publications continues.

On a happier note, this summer we had a party in Y Cwps in Aberystwyth to celebrate Planet, and thank those who have supported us as the magazine enters dormancy (with hope of a future relaunch). It snowballed from something that was initially supposed to be a small, informal gathering into something akin to an issue of Planet improvised down a microphone, with music from former editor John Barnie’s blues band Hollow Log, readings from Mike Parker, Mary-Ann Constantine and Shara Atashi, plus an extraordinary story from the US and Wales – a forthcoming Planet-article-that-never-was – told by Peter Stevenson with the aid of an Appalachian-inspired crankie. It was a joyful, irreverent and memorable night, and it was wonderful to re-gather among our staff, former editors, writers, patrons, advisors and readers. It was a reminder too of how much fun it could be to work for the magazine – it has been a huge privilege to edit Planet for eleven years.

There’s plans afoot longer term for the hibernating magazine to stir periodically during our wilderness years with activities permissible for a company that has ceased trading – if you'll forgive the slightly messianic pretensions of being a once-and-future magazine à la Mab Darogan, or a sleeping dragon.

If you would like to be kept updated with any future developments, please see this link with information about how you can stay in touch: https://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/planet-closing My apologies in advance for any delay in responding.

Diolch o galon,
Emily Trahair
July 2024