Going on the record

At a time when political parties are recruiting former senior police officers as candidates it is something of a challenge to decide the possible eligibility of ex-South Wales chief constable Barbara Wilding following her reported comments to Jane’s Police Review about valley life.

Wales on Sunday recounts Wilding as stating, “I have worked in some of the worst inner city areas in London and the deprivation here is different. There is generation upon generation with no hope or aspiration.

“The girls’ aspiration is to get pregnant as quickly as possible and get a council property, one that is probably at the top of the valley, where the bus runs once a week.

“The Co-op (supermarket) runs at a loss because if it closed there would be no shops, and it does not sell fruit because no one buys fruit and poverty is of an entirely different kind. It is just dire. It makes you want to weep. And the area is just grey, because they are wet, concrete jungles. There is nothing.”

Regardless of the reaction on the WoS article - gained by providing individuals with a reporter’s verbal shorthand down the phone - it has to be remembered that her evocative account is essentially a policing perspective without the "we're all in this together" rhetoric that the uniform demands. It would be even more impressive if she can claim to have formed this powerful and provocative view as a first-hand witness.

Wilding was in post during the 18 months when 24 teenagers killed themselves in the South Wales area and told Welsh Assembly Government officials that they had to intervene, saying “If this many horses had died in strange circumstances, you would have cordons and protection and we would be calling it an epidemic.”

With that kind of perspective to offer, she might be just what Welsh politics needs at the moment.

(Sid)