Great....but 9 years late

_{^{Cymru .com}}

If you wait long enough in politics, dreams come true.

When Alun Michael was Secretary of State for Wales I sent him a suggestion that Wales should have its own domain name on the internet. He wrote back on the 23rd March 1999 saying there might be a problem because Wales was not recognised as a independent country,

At the time, there were tiny islands that had their own unique identifiers – including Jersey, Christmas Island and the Isle of Man. Privately, Alun confessed to me that he did not understand a word of my request but he promised to do the business. Obviously the time was not right.

Nine years later, there must be at least a hundred times more websites registered in Wales. Better late than never, the Welsh Assembly is riding to the rescue. They have coughed up £20,000 for a CYM brand. Sadly changing over existing addresses will be messy and the real advantage was there to be grasped nine years ago.

Nevertheless, the initiative is deserving of a couple of rousing cheers for the Assembly.

Tough love

Coaxing the sick back to work is not a flashback to the Victorian Workhouse as some of my respected correspondents suggested. I repeat, work is the best medicine. Breaking out of the dependency culture is the best path to a good life for a million Britons.

Proof positive comes today from York University who found that the number of workers on long term sickness and incapacity benefits could be cut by up to 60%.

Those with mental health issues who talked about their condition at work found colleagues to be positive and constructive. The report said having a job may actually help their recovery.

The Government's proposal is to double the amount of money� available to employers to adapt the workplace to accommodate employees with specific needs. The other side of the coin is boosting benefits to create full lives for those to whom work is not a choice.

When I think of those who can be helped, I see faces not figures. If successful, those faces will do more smiling in future.

Forward to futility

"The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for with the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. That is another part of their regime that we should seek to destroy." Tony Blair 2 October 2001

“Time for an adult debate on drugs.” David Blunkett 8 July 2001

Seven years on, the government’s anti-drugs “strategy” - whether in Afghanistan or the UK – is no further forward, in fact it can be argued it has failed abysmally, despite billions of pounds spent on attempting to reduce supply, reduce demand and reduce the harm the trade causes.

The latest report* from researchers at King’s College London concludes

• The size of the UK illicit drug market is estimated to be £5.3 billion, and is considered to pose the single greatest organised crime threat to the UK.

• The market is fluid and very adaptable to market conditions. It operates at international, national and “retail” (street) level and the UK market is resilient to enforcement, ie police and court, activity

• About one-quarter of the total cost of delivering the drug strategy has been dedicated to reducing supply (£380 million in 2005/06).

• While the availability of controlled drugs is restricted by definition, it appears that additional enforcement efforts had had little adverse effect on the availability of illicit drugs in the UK.

• The authors were unable to locate any comprehensive published UK evidence of the relative effectiveness of different enforcement approaches. They were also not able to identify any published comparative cost-benefit or value-for-money analysis of anti-drug policies

• The impact of asset recovery and anti-money laundering operations is marginal.

So that seven years of futility in Afghanistan, 10 years of futility in the UK Drugs Strategy since 1998, and 37 years of futility since the Drugs Misuse Act 1971.

Why has no major party noticed?

*’Tackling Drug Markets and Distribution Networks in the UK’ by� Tim McSweeney, Paul Turnbull and Mike Hough of King’s College London, on behalf of the UK Drug Policy Commission, August 2008

Comments

[Gareth]

I can understand that Welsh businesses that have 'Welshness' as a key message may be interested in a '.cwm' domain.

However...

Is there an argument that for Welsh businesses that work in a UK-wide and global market, this smacks a little of small man syndrome?

Maybe others see it as a necessary tick-box trinket: if we have it, 'they' will take us seriously.

Look, the Olympics are just around the corner. Just because I have a tracksuit and trainers, it doesn't mean the UK coach is going to take me seriously. I get THAT respect by being the best, and not merely telling him that I look the part.

A .cwm domain defines and identifies us first and foremost, by geography or national pride. It is the 21st century version of slapping a dragon's logo on everything.

In business, my geographic location or national pride is irrelevant. I do not go up to potential clients and tell them I am Welsh.

So why would I do so online?

"Well, don't do it then," I hear you say.

Absolutely. I run a private business and succeed/fail by my own choices.

But I do foresee the time when leading Welsh brands will be quietly bullied into using a .cwm domain to 'prove' their Welshness.

If this happens, the campaign to promote professional and serious Welsh business will have taken one step forward and 42 back.

[Huw O'Sullivan]

.com .net and .org will remain the domains that most will want
but it is nonetheless important to any people and any country that their sense of self is not undermined by the lack of very basic identifiers and symbols and .cym is as important in that respect as .fr , .ie and even .co.uk
I remember a good few years ago now how miffed americans would get, who on noticing country domain suffixes of others would bemoan not having one of their own.
Of course they actualy did have .us for a very long time(appx 1985), before the web, but were generally unaware of it as the tld's they were familiar with were the first 3 I mentioned.

.cym is a long long way away from being the most important symbol of Wales or any Welsh identity, but the lack of it would always have had a negative impact on the national psyche.

The big question is, will Paul be taking one up?

Gareth has some valid points and it is likely that while non Welsh customers would not care, nor would they search under .cwm in general, Welsh customers could well be irritated by Welsh companies or with companies with what we might call a Welsh presence, not taking up their national domain along with any other.
I however do not see this as causing any problems for Welsh business and so doubt it would count as 42 steps back, not even an infamous 39 steps back, it seems unlikely that it would amount to any steps back at all.
There may be a demand for the domain from abroad, at least with people of Welsh descent, although a long way from the lucrativeness as Tuvalu's.

[paulflynn]

Thanks. I do feel under some pressure to adopt the Cym. but I am very reluctant because my present .co {which should probably be .org} is known to those who regularly visit my site.

Tuvalu was the example quoted in 1999. It was in that brief period when Alun Michael was Secretary of State as the Assembly was being set up. cym.is a sign of more self confidence as a nation and has some value for new sites.

What is dispiriting is that cym. would have been the natural choice of the 99% of Welsh sites that have come into existence since then.

One of the characteristics of blogs is growing traffic. When this one began 16 months ago, there were a minute number of hits per day. Yesterday was a new daily high of 2200 plus. These were from the Ben Goldacre's Bad Science site (that gave me a plug} and a hyperactive thread on the Smoking Ban. But there is strong cumulative build-up of interest that could be halted by any change.

[John]

Paul you ask the very pertinent question "Why has no major party noticed?" It really is barely credible that when MP's were challenged on this report they just suggested more of the same "lets get tough on drugs"
As you have said in the past I think many MP's privately see the failure of the War on Drugs and the damage it causes in far greater proportion to the drugs themselves. But Politics as I grow older seems to ignore the obvious and the truth of a situation but rather prefers to be based on ideals and principles no matter how misguided and couterproductive these are. There is no logic whatsoever in our current drug Policy and succesive Governments have blood on their hands persuing it yet persue it they do.
I am heartened by the level of debate I have with my friends and members of public contributing to debate on this issue in the media. With the rise of the internet they are very well informed and the majority see the failure of Prohibition and would seek its end.
I think that Politicians are behind the Public on this issue lets hope they catch up soon.
I notice that some S American Countries notably Argentina are moving to decriminalising illegal drug possesion as they recognise the harm the present situation causes toits citizens. Even in the USA there is a bill (Ron Paul et al) to decriminalise cannabis for medical use federally and personal possesion of less than 100gms. I doubt the USA bill will see much light but it certainly is a step forward. by the way according to one senator the support from his constituents was 80/20 in favour, there again as in the UK the public is miles ahead of their representatives.

[Huw O'Sullivan]

Paul there is no need for you to make a change as such, you could simply get yourself a .cym , keep your current one also and have the .cym point to the same place.
When ready then you could perhaps prepare a separate landing page for .cym in Welsh if that should take your fancy.

The same could/would apply to any business or other entity, presumably being partly Gareth's complaint, as it is unlikely that .cym will replace peoples domains but be an additional expense of no particularly practical benefit.
Just like having 2 different phone numbers causing the same phone to ring to be answered by the same person.

[Huw O'Sullivan]

John, in many ways I agree with you and outright prohibition is indeed not only a failure for drug control but a massive success for organised and violent criminals.
Just as US alchohol prohibition gave financial strength, reach and real power to the mafia, the US and the rest of the world have been spending a fortune breeding narco criminals for the last few generations.

But I do not believe that political representatives are behind their constituents. Legalisation and control of narcotics would be a relatively easy give for politicians, it would save money, reduce crime and please the voters.
That is, it would please the voters if the voters actually wanted it.
Whereas even people I know who use or have used for example, marijuana, on a fairly regular basis have a dispiriting tendency to not be in favour of its legalisation.
There is also a factor of what people are willing to say privately and what they would in fact vote for or against.
I think perhaps and I am sure that politicians in general believe that very few of them would survive if they were to start campaigning for sensible drug legislation.
There are more votes in taking a hard albeit pointless and counterproductive line.
When voters start clamouring for it, the politicians will do the necessary.
After all they spent a lot of time and effort banning the utterly unimportant fox hunting because there was a clamour for it and there were votes in it.

[PaulFlynn]

Thanks Huw. Clearly you know more about the Cym. than I do. I will certainly add it.