Interview by James Roberts

Neil McEvoy you’ve been around in Cardiff politics for a long time. I suspect many of our student listeners probably don’t know who you are. So, in your own terms, could you introduce yourself?

Yeah. God, I’m ancient now. 
I’m 56. I’ve been in politics for 41 years. Started off when I was 15. 
I’ve always been a community activist, and I sort of fell into elected politics through my community activity.

I first got elected in 1999. Probably one of the most experienced politicians in Wales. I was deputy leader of Cardiff, 2008 to 2012. I froze counsellor allowances. I took half the allowance available to me as well as deputy leader, and I got rid of most of the salaries over £100,000. That didn’t make me very popular with some people.

In 2016, I was elected to the Welsh Parliament. I was there five years and got into a whole load of trouble, mainly because I was investigating corruption, I was told not to to it and then I was expelled by Plaid Cymru.

The first scandal, which broke involved a Plaid politician, I was suspended for the first time, 10 days after, it became public knowledge. Plaid told me beforehand, either stop looking into it, or they would throw me out. So, I told him to throw me out, and they did. The upshot of it was, we set Propel. We weren’t allowed to set up properly until the second of March 2021. So, we had absolutely no chance of winning the election.

I’m very diligent with casework, always have been. Thus when I wrote to everyone who I was doing casework for, that I could no longer do their cases. People got in touch with me and said they wanted me to do their cases. I said, “look, I can’t, because I have to go and get a job. and pay the mortgage”, and some of them said, “We’ll pay you to do our cases”, which was interesting. 


Some of them involve family law, children’s services. I did those cases, and started putting them through court. Suddenly I had a load of cases on my books and was working privately with a barrister in family courts, who was being directly instructed by the clients. I set up my own legal services company and did work privately for some time. I’ve ended up as a paralegal consultant, and I do lots of legal aid work, challenging local authorities.

We’ve stopped 7 adoptions.
I have contributed by running the cases under supervision, and instructing barriers through my supervisor, and we’ve stopped seven adoptions, in the last three years. We’ve stopped kids going into care, got kids out of care.

I’ve kept the politics going. I’m big on social media. In terms of the outstanding things of my work in Cardiff, the Welsh language and Welsh culture, saw the biggest investment ever in the history of Cardiff, whilst I was deputy leader. We opened up a whole load of Welsh schools. Cosmetically, the flags along High Street and St. Marys street are down to me personally. I made sure they went up.

Was that using EU funding?

No, just telling people to get a Welsh flags out. They would put Union Jacks up and Iwas walking through, I’m always hands on, and they were putting up union jacks! And I was like, “Oh, my God, this is not London!” I said “guys, what are you doing?”

And they said “oh, Neil we have been told to put these up”.

I said, “listen guys, take them down, just get them down, go back to the office and get the Welsh flags up”.

“If you put them up, and there are any issues, tell them to come and see me”. So as Deputy Leader, that was quite easy. I was a teacher for over 20 years, teaching modern languages, French and Spanish. I learnt Welsh as an adult, taught Welsh up to A level. I ended up teaching children who couldn’t go to school because they had additional learning needs.

So that’s a passion of mine. It’s a really neglected area, privatised by Labour in Wales, by the way. And I stopped that in 2015 packing in work a year before the election. So, I wanted to get elected. As I said Propel is a new start which began in 2021. I was successful in getting elected to the council again in 2022, which is quite remarkable with my 3rd brand. I was Labour. I left over the Iraq war.

Third time lucky?

Well, no, a 4th time I was workers revolutionary party when I was 15. Only for a couple of weeks, I thought those guys were bonkers. I was never a Trotskyist, so I left them and joined labour in 1987. I realised by 2003 that the Labour Party had gone; it was no longer a “labour party”.

At what point did you convert to Welsh nationalism if we may use those words?

I don’t really define myself as a nationalist. I’m a sovereigntist.

The parliament would be sovereign, right? So, it would be de-facto an independent country. Therefore, you could reasonably called a nationalist in that sense.

I don’t know, but then I don’t use the term for myself really. I have done the past slightly, but a sovereigntist, a human being. I used to call myself mixed race, but I don’t any longer because there is only one race, and it’s a human race. Rosa Parks said that.

My grandfather came from Yemen, on my mother’s side. The other side of the family is English, of Irish extraction, hence a surname, Hell of a mixture, DNA wise. Genetically Irish, as you can possibly see, with my skin colour.

Not! I was the 1st Welsh born person of colour elected to the Welsh Parliament, which is ignored by the Woke, because they hate that because I don’t fit into their box. And I grew up in a society which was very racist, extremely racist.

I remember in year 3 in school, it was called Standard 1 in those days. I had a fight every day in school, every single day I was fighting. And that was a result of where I grew up, on a council estate. You either fought or you died really.

That was that in Fairwater?

Fairwater and Pentrebane, yeah. You either fought or you died as a person. So, I used to stand and fight. I’ve always done that.

As I said, Propel’s a new start we’re anti-corruption. We’re not part of the status quo. You’ve got the “uni-party” in this election, which includes Reform, by the way. What we have is a settled election as well. They’re lying to you. The lying to everyone. The election is settled. It’s going to be a coalition with Labour and Plaid Cymru. Plaid Cymru will be leading it, and they may possibly fit the Greens in. So, you’ve got the “uni-party” there.

The other side of the coin is Reform, who are being used as the bogeymen and bogey women to frighten people. So, the Greens are saying, in my area, “oh, it’s us or Reform”. They are lying. It’s either me, for Propel, brand new, breaking through or the others. If we get in that Parliament, it will not be the same. I am one of the most experienced politicians in Wales and I have made executive decisions. I have been in the Parliament once. So I know how corrupt things are. 
The first debates that I’m going to put down, because I will be able to put debates down, will be on corruption in the Welsh public sector. I’ll name names.

Maybe this is a new chapter in your career, because of the redistricting, you hope to represent a student area.
So how are you going to apply the history that you have in terms of casework to student issues, which at times are similar. You’ve highlighted bad landlords, bad living conditions, which is a constant theme in the student experience. Maybe some of the sort of family issues are not as salient in the Cathays area. In this kind of new chapter that you hope to go into, what are you going to achieve for students? And how are you going to best represent this kind of demographic?

Yeah, I think… We’ve got policies, particularly for young people, in Propel. 
If you’re a medical student, for example, we don’t think we don’t think you should pay fees. We think you should be sponsored. Within 15 years, we can solve our NHS recruitment crisis.

We can export doctors, export nurses, instead of bringing them in into the country, from often from the Third World. 
Although Wales is second world we’re no longer First World, in my opinion. If you look at health, it’s a disaster. And I’ve got quite a lot of personal experience, actually, of a disastrous health system here.

The staff on the ground do their best, but with great difficulty. In terms of the student demographic, I think if you look at Cathays you know, they’re no different to anybody else, students were not consulted regarding the packing changes, which was outrageous. 


We want to get rid of the control parking zones. I think they’re very unfair. It’s very expensive. The current people running the council just don’t have a clue how to run things. They’re officer led, they’re run by the officials, and what I want to do is get elected in three weeks’ time, whenever this goes out. The plan is to get elected, be completely different.

I’m Wales’s first social media politician. If people have not seen me on social media, please follow me. It’s Neil J. McEvoy. Take a look at my TikTok, take a look at my Facebook, I’m doing a bit of Instagram as well. YouTube’s not great, we’re trying to upgrade YouTube. But what you’ll see there is a record of work outside of elections. I work. 24/7. There’s a record of work there.

I mean, you have been contentious at times. 


Absolutely, yeah.

Outside of the memory of maybe our readers is the fact that you caused the Commissioner of Standards of the Senedd to resign, and they said you had bugged a meeting with recording devices.

They swept the whole of the Welsh Parliament it was like MI5. They came in, they went to every single office, every nook and cranny. It cost thousands to sweep it. What was happening was, I was exposing the culture of corruption in Welsh public life.

That’s key to say “public life”. There are, all kinds of corruption in Wales, which I hope to debate in the near future. In particular, there was one contract, which involved a lobbying firm called Deryn, which was then owned by the former advisor to Labour’s First Minister.

It was also owned by a Plaid Cymru politician, who will be a member again after the next election, in three weeks. They had a public sector contract with Ofcom. That nobody else could apply for. I didn’t believe it. I thought, no, that can’t happen. Anyway, so I put a few questions in, and then suddenly, I’ve got Mr. Rhun ApIorwerth on the telephone.

When I was on holiday, actually, and he wanted to know what I was doing, asking questions about Deryn, and his friend Nerys Evans. And he told me to, I suppose, to watch my step really. 
 And he told me I shouldn’t have been asking questions.

You were also accused during your last term of abusing a care worker?

Yeah, please. Please, yeah. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to come to that. But let me just finish with this one. 
 Ask me any question you want. I’m a firm believer in free speech. When I grew up in the 80s, a flagship policy of the left was free speech. And for some reason now, the authoritarian left, basically of Leninist culture, is very anti free speech.

They’ve given it over now to people who call themselves right. For me, the difference between right and left is gone. It’s more right and wrong, and it’s more authoritarian vs freedom.

It was interesting to me because speaking to people before this interview, someone did make the comparison between you and George Galloway. In a sense, there’s a big difference. He’s obviously represented many constituencies. You basically have your stronghold in Fairwater. And now moving into Cathays. But, how do you respond to that, comparison? Or the idea that maybe you’re a one-man band? Some might even say in it for yourself.

You can deal with that one, please. If I wasn’t involved in politics, I’d be mortgage free now. And I’ve invested a hell of a lot of money into politics over the years. When I was Deputy, I made decisions and I took half the deputy’s allowance I was entitled to.

When I was in the Senedd, I donated my counsellor allowance to good causes, because I didn’t think it was right to have two salaries. That’s not the activity of somebody who is in it for themselves. Working in law now I could earn more money through the law than I can in politics.

So, I’m into politics now because my son is 6 years of age and I can’t really live with myself if I don’t try and change the dreadful country that we live in right now.

Let me just go back to the lobbyist stuff. When I started asking questions, it became apparent that Deryn did, in fact, get the contract. Two of the Deryn directors were on the advisory board to Ofcom. That made it even worse. Plaid told me to back off and shut up.

I had to attend a meeting without my mobile phone. 
I wasn’t allowed to have anybody in with me, so they’re really good trade unionists. And they read me the riot act, the paedophile Simon Thomas was in the meeting with Leanne Wood. We used to call him “the German porn star” because he was…

We might have to edit that out for legal reasons..

No, no, it’s not actionable. Our office had a nickname for him before he was convicted as a paedophile. And his nickname was “the German porn star”. It was sort of like light-hearted. But there was something serious behind it, because he wasn’t right. There was something wrong. And we said that he shouldn’t be going to schools, and that made us the bad guys. He was the education spokesperson. And he was later convicted of the most dreadful crime of paedophilia.

I said he should have gone to prison. Digressing here now, but when I said he should have gone to prison, and I wrote to the Attorney General to get his sentence reviewed when he was convicted, Plaid Cymru said I brought them into disrepute. By saying he should have gone to prison. And they put me on a disciplinary, emotionally for me, that was the end.

So, just, um, to recap, how many disciplinary procedures did you actually have like numerically? 


If you want to go right the way back, I was first suspended in 2011 for telling the truth. I’m not going into all of that now, but I told the truth, go hammered for it. 


Um, and I remember Plaid Cymru’s largest donor. I was summoned to this disciplinary. And the largest donor gave me a ring, he said “look Neil I know you’re telling the truth and I’ve told them, if they throw you out, I’m not giving them a penny more”.

I realised then that I was off the hook, really. So instead of going to the disciplinary, I went to Las Vegas.
So I quite enjoyed picking the phone up, saying “listen, guys, you know the disciplinary on Saturday? Yeah, I can go. I’m going to Vegas.”

So they reinstated me, but I was unforgiven by some people. But to fast forward, the second suspension was in March 2017, allegedly for some ombudsmen stuff. I was first called a bully because I was defending a family, being evicted, unfairly. Officials lied about the family. They weren’t the biggest debtors in the city, and it was very unfair.

What I said was, we needed to make sure that didn’t happen again. We needed to look at the structure of the council to make sure that didn’t happen. “Restructure the council” was the phrase, and I’ve been branded a bully ever since, for saying I wanted to restructure the council.

The 2nd suspension was in September 2017. They wanted me out by that point, an the excuse was, Deryn were found that they shouldn’t have had the contract. 
They lost the contract. The person who gave him the contract, lost his job, or resigned,

let’s say. He then went on to be chair of S4C , and the whole litany of scandals followed there it was an unhappy organisation with him being chair. It was quite funny, really, the second Senedd suspension from the group.

I was still a member of the party at the time. And there was a debate on housing, and I had a bit too much spare time on my hands that afternoon. So, I started looking at the interests of labour politicians, and their property interest in particular. They were trying to be already left wing like class warriors and working classes. And I thought, you know what? “You’re all frauds because, you know, you own X amount of houses. “You own this, you own that”. They were landlords.

I got up, and I did a quick speech, and I thanked the Labour politicians for doing their bit for the housing crisis. Everybody looked at me and sort of smiled and thought, “oh, that’s nice of him”. And I said…by renting out all your houses.

Are you on speaking terms with anyone from your Senedd days?

I didn’t really speak much of them when I was there, to be honest. I’ve always liked…

Maybe the Llywydd?

Oh, God. Well, the Llywydd who wouldn’t let me speak in the racism debate. I was the only person of colour they’re able to put forward amendments to the debate. And a white person, a middle class white person, denied me as a person of colour, the opportunity to put amendments to policies on racism.
It was absolutely disgusting. If you Google it, I went into the chamber with a tape across my mouth, and with the word racism written on it. The Senedd is the most racist institution I’ve ever been involved with.

The Plaid Cymru group was dysfunctional. I mean, completely dysfunctional. I think in a group of 11, four people wanted to be leader, not including me. I never wanted to be leader. They misinterrupted that. I just wanted to win Cardiff West.

When I left the Senate in 2021, I just had no desire to stay in touch with any of them. Because I grew up in Fairwater and you meet all kinds of people, some of whom end up in prison, some have very difficult lives. They’ve had difficult childhoods. You grew up in that kind of environment. It is a good social education, and when I think of these people who have had difficult lives being in prison and so on, in and out, they’re far more decent people than the people I met in the Welsh Parliament.

I absolutely mean that. And so, I had no desire to stay in touch with them.

Of course, you’ll have to go back and say you’re elected, you’ll have to go and work with those people. Let’s say first 100 days as representative for this area. What’s the priorities? And how are you going to go about it? 
Will we see a repeat of, you know, the mics being turned off in the Senate? Maybe politely a bit of drama, you know?

Oh, there’ll definitely be drama. Okay. And if you want a bit of drama, vote for me. But it’s real drama. The first debate I put down will be corruption, and I’ll be naming names. I’ve got evidence, I can just recite…

Using Parliamentary privilege? 


Absolutely yeah. If I do it out here, then I’ll have to spend about 300 grand on lawyers, just to prove what I’m saying is correct. So, I’m not going to do that. But in the parliament, I will be naming names, and I’ll be exposing corruption. It’ll be a series of debates as I see it.

I’ll be exposing all kinds of corruption because Wales is, for me, one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. It’s my honest opinion, based on my life experience. And I want to change that, I want to expose it, so there are people who have vested interests, who want to stop me.

I hope, on the 7th of May, that I get a mandate to do the politics full time, I don’t really intend spending much time in the Parliament. I’ll be voting online, if I can, which you’re able to do. If I have a speaking opportunity, I will be in there. If I don’t have a speaking opportunity, I have no interest in socialising with those people.

I’m interested in being in opposition. Wales has never had an opposition. Politically what we will be is a complete opposition, and I’m going to spend most of my time in the communities, building up our Propel movement. We’ve got members in every Welsh constituency.

What would you say to people, though, who might be a bit concerned by that? Because the Senedd has gained powers gradually over the twenty years of its existence. And members do have an increasing role in the nitty-gritty of public services. Do you not feel that people might feel a bit concerned that you’re saying that you’re not going to be in the Senedd. 


No you misunderstand. You missed the first part, absolutely not.

You didn’t understand me If you thought that. Let me just restate what I’m saying. Unless I have a speaking opportunity I don’t intend on spending much time there. If I’m moving an amendment, I’ll be there. I’ll make sure I’m there as many votes as possible. I’m probably going to vote online if I’m not in the chamber. I’ll be in that ballot to be able to ask questions of ministers and hold them to account. I want to hold them to account.

I think what I don’t want to engage in is the social side of things. Right. I have no interest in going through reception after, you know, the plenary on a Tuesday, having a bottle of white free or samosas and sandwiches. Talking to people, going out on down the bay doesn’t interest me.

Perhaps that’s the way that you get real influence, though, for your ideas?

What influence?

Well, I mean, every political establishment has the social side of it. You know, it’s the same in Parliament at Westminster, they all socialise on the balcony over the Thames. 


Yeah, okay.

Maybe you need a bit more of a congeniality with other members.

No, I disagree because I want rid of all of them.

They would say, oh, well, we’ve got a mandate just as good as you.

They’ve got a mandate, but my mandate will be to hold them to account. In Caerdydd Penarth I’m going for number 6 only.
We’ve got an opportunity, possibly, in Caerdydd Fynnon-Taf for number 6 as well. At best, there’ll be 2 of us in the Welsh Parliament, could possibly just be one. If I was a betting man, I’d put money on me to get elected. My job is to represent people to the best of my ability. If it means speaking to people, I’ll do so on a professional level. So, don’t misinterpret that, but I’ve no interest in getting drunk with lobbyists. No interest at all. I want lobbyists controlled because what happens in Wales is, there are no controls.
I think we’re probably the only democracy in Western Europe. Possibly the whole of Europe, where there are no controls on lobbying.

You can meet a minister. you can discuss things with a minister and there’s no record. If you want to change policy here in Wales, get 30 grand, give it to a lobbyist, and they’ll put you before a decision maker.

Well, we have experience with that. We had a complaint from, I won’t name them, but we had a complaint from a lobbyist. Regarding Darren Miller and off-record meetings that he’d had with people from, let’s say, another country, for the purposes of this meeting

I’m there to represent people. So rather than have a glass of wine with, Conservatives and Labour and Plaid politicians, I’ll be walking about Grangetown. I’ll be walking around Cathays, I’ll be walking in Fairwater. I’d be speaking to people. I’d be doing “lives” on social media.

Going back to university issues then. You’re probably aware, our university is in turmoil, to greater or lesser degrees, depending on who you read. At some point you may meet the management of Cardiff University. What are you going to say to them?

Well, first thing I would ask them would be why they protected Mark Drakeford in 2011, when they refused to answer my submit access request, that’d be an interesting one. I think senior people in the public sector in Wales, earn way too much money.

And do you extend that to the management of Cardiff University?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what we need in Wales is control of salaries in the public sector. And I’m not just talking to talk here.

When I had decision making ability, I restructured Cardiff Council, and we got rid of most salaries over 100,000 pounds. 
You do not need to pay these people that kind of money. And I know they say its “market rates”, but I’m sure that you’ll get people to do a really good job for less money. In America, the culture’s different.

You earn your money in the private sector, and you serve in the public sector and earn less money.
There may be connections with investments and so on, if you look at the how politicians become rich over there.

But here, people get rich in the public sector, and it’s not right. They should be there
to serve, that’s what I think. We should be investing in education. It’s a scandal.

Maybe it’s because of where you represent, but from the research I’ve done, you don’t typically talk about university issues, even though of course students are a massive part of the Cardiff population.

I think… 
One of the things I learned from 2016 to 2021, was probably doing too much. In terms of doing too many topics, too many issues.

My agenda for 2026 to 2030 is pretty defined. I want a people’s inquiry into the scandal of children’s services and additional learning needs. There’s a crossover on both. I’ll run a people’s inquiry into the dumping of nuclear mud.

The Hinckley Mud? 


Your listeners probably won’t know this, but they dug up mud from outside Hinckley Point nuclear power station. There was evidence that plutonium had leaked into the estuary for decades. It was so bad, they stopped testing in 1984, we had the documentation from the British government, provided by very eminent academics. And the Welsh government decided to dump the mud a mile outside of Cardiff
without testing for Plutonium. Unbelievable. How did that happen?

Again you’ve got it almost a sort of a soft kind of corruption. It should have been headline on BBC Wales, every single day and it wasn’t. We were classified as some kind of conspiracy theorists. We were called conspiracy theorists by, Plaid Cymru.

Your office?

No, the campaign. The campaign. And they were insulting the most eminent academics in the UK. With expert knowledge of nuclear physics, of weapon grade plutonium, and they’ve written so many papers on this stuff, and they were dismissed by Simon Thomas the paedophile! 


He called us conspiracy theorists. I don’t believe any of them [The Senedd members] actually, read the papers. I don’t believe they did, because they were given the evidence that it could have contained plutonium. I was the only politician in the Senedd to respond to the campaigners. And I thought, if I’m honest, I hope I’m not insulting them here. Initially, I thought they were bonkers, and I didn’t really look up their qualifications.
I just thought nobody would dump plutonium.

Is that still an active campaign now? 


It’s over now. It was successful in the sense that they dumped 120,000 tons and they came back to dump another 200,000. However, because of the fuss that we made, we took them to the high court, everything, they dumped it, unfortunately, on the English side, which is slightly better for us, but it’s not good for the environment.

But it was never tested for alpha radiation, which is scandalous.

They would say that the amount of radiation was negligible in that mud.

But if it contains hot particles, and you breathe it in you’re dead. So, if the mud is washed up on the shoreline and dries out, and is blown inland, and you breathe it in, then you’re going to get cancer, and it’s going to kill you. I want an inquiry as to how they did it, because to go back to the point about the campaigners, there was Professor Barnum, for example, really expert person. And then I was introduced to the many more of the campaigners, and I met the person in charge of decision the decision making. And he came in my office.

I said “cup of tea? Yeah, sit down”.

He said “oh, I got these letters off the campaigners, yeah”.

And he’s going, “oh, oh, oh it’s totally safe”.

Right, I said some questions, and I’m sure it was 10 minutes, you know, then we called it a day. “So where is the mud, where’s the mud from in the estuary” I said.

“Uh, I don’t know” he said.

I thought, well, that’s a bit concerning.

“What testing has been done?”

“Well, it’s safe”, he said.

“Yeah, but what testing has been done?”

“It’s safe”, he said.

“Yeah ,but what testing has been done?”

“Oh, well, we haven’t got the results, but…”

Excuse me? So, you can’t tell me what testing’s been done. You’re not sure. Okay, fine. “Who in Natural Resources Wales”, I said, “has experience with the nuclear industry?” 
Response. “Nobody”.

This was when I started getting concerned. “So what depth was the testing done? You can’t see what kind of testing it was, but to what depth did you test the mud?”

“I don’t know”. He said.

“Where’s the mud going to end up after this dump?”

“I don’t know”, he said.

And I said to him, “I find you very disrespectful because you’ve come to my office. You’re the person responsible for issuing the license and you don’t know anything.”

And of course, he can’t reply to what you’re saying in this interview. He may dispute that.

I’ve said it so many times, I asked a lot of questions. I never got answers. And I realised then that they were relying on poor science, because what they said was, well, it was tested for beta radiation. So, therefore, there wasn’t much beta there, so there won’t be any alpha.

That was the science. So Professor Barnum showed me a graph of the testing of the discharge into the estuary from Hinckley Point. And from 1972 onwards, it was like a graph up and down, up and down. In one part, beta, was very, very low, and the plutonium was through the roof. So, there was no correlation between beta and alpha. On that graph I saw. What we said was, look, just test for alpha. And we’re happy.

We’ll end the campaign. They refuse to do that and they refuse to do it, and they never did it.

What year would that have been?

2018.

It’s quite interesting because the green policies that you’re kind of espousing with the environmentalism, green policies with a lowercase G. This will maybe resonate with students. Polling suggests that Zach Polanski will win a lot of support with students across the country and indeed here he spoke at the Union the other day.

The person who was supporting the conservative coalition.

Some listeners might resonate with…

That’s not his name. No issues changing his surname, going back to his original family name. Wasn’t his name David.

It was David Paulden.

It just seems really strange. I understand the family part of it, if he wanted to go back to his heritage. But I just find it really strange to change your first name. It just smacks of being a fraud. I was watching footage of him last night. The Lib Dems are coming back after their disastrous campaign. Sorry, disastrous coalition with the conservatives. You had Polanski, supposedly left wing. He’s not left wing, right? As far as I’m concerned, they’re just… 


I mean, you’ve disavowed left and right at the start of this interview. So maybe that’s not fair.

Well, no, that’s a good point. 
I’ll pick up on that because he’s not left wing. In my mind, I think I know what left wing is. The problem with it nowadays is that you get people like him who say they’re left wing, and they’re branded as left wing.

I can call myself left, because he’s not my kind of left. For me, the paradigm is gone, really, because those that espoused so called leftism are not left wing. He was defending the liberal Democrats, conservative coalition.

They’re the ones that brought in fees. And you got him on the stage, literally embarrassing,
embarrassing himself years ago.

People change their opinions, I’m sure you’ve changed your opinion on many things.

I’ve not changed my values. I wouldn’t be a conservative.

But the parties have shifted the Overton window has changed. He might say, well actually, do you know what, I have these values I don’t associate with liberal Democrats anymore. That’s why I’ve gone to the Greens. That’s probably what he would say.

Well, so he was defending the most disgusting, I mean, disgusting cuts in public services. That’s a values call. He was an actor at the time, right? So he probably didn’t have that much to do with it. No, he wanted to be a politician. He was on the stage, literally prancing around, singing about how the liberal Democrats are going to come back after the coalition.

So he’s just another green Tory, really. You got the Labour red Tories , he’s a green
tory.
 But the greens are all over the place. I mean, abolished landlords. Hasn’t their MP got a policy properly portfolio? Am I right?

I’m not aware.

There’s the one around here as well. The gardener. Ask him about his job if you do an interview, ask him. He’s a landscape architect, isn’t he? It’s a bit of a difference being a gardener. But anyway, I think they’re fake.

It’s kind of interesting, the use of the phrase prancing because it speaks to your method of communication and we’ve talked about what does left wing mean. I noticed on your TikTok that you explicitly says no pronouns.

Yeah, absolutely.

You put a post out, which people would say that’s TERF supporting or it’s, excluding transgender people, which given the kind of demographic that we’re appealing to in this interview, people might be offended by that.

It’s important to have the right to offend. I favour free speech. There’s things that I listen to when I hear, I’m unhappy with. I can be quite offended by certain things, but I will defend somebody’s right to say it.

What we have now are these woke authoritarians, in universities, and they’re basically the sort of liberal, middle-class whites, your listeners should read what Malcolm X said about those kind of people, and they exist in Wales today. 


The most basic racism that I’ve bumped up against in life, in latter years, has been from the white liberal elite in Wales. But if people are offended by me saying that a man with a beard, who identifies as being a woman, is somehow [not] a woman, I find that ridiculous.

But is there not an element of charity or of respect for their life story, their journey, which I think anyone in public office might need to express?

Just live your life. I sort of slagged off the liberal elite there, but I’m very liberal. So just do what you want, live your best life. But when you then start impinging upon other people’s lives…


How was the person who you reposted a picture of in Central Square, how are they impinging upon other people’s lives?

Well shouting at women, for example. 


Did you have any evidence that they were doing that, though?

I’ve listened to them speak enough. I got called a Nazi for being anti-lockdown. Can I throw a question at you?

Yeah.

You’re a lot younger than me. What is a trans woman? I’m confused.

I’m not really qualified to answer that and it’s very clever because now I’m on trial.

If any of your listeners can tell me what a trans woman is, because nobody ever has. And there are people who struggled with gender dysphoria. They struggled with their feelings; they went through a whole journey of transitioning. Right. For me, I think of a person in particular who’s been helping me with the selection, actually. And for me, their gender was settled, and I wouldn’t refer to them as a trans woman. I wouldn’t call that individual anything else other than she and her. And I’m confused by men who sort of want…

Do you not understand the confusion, then, because you’ve also said in the past, I think it was, I used to beat people up for homophobic language, or… 


No, I never said that no. You’ve been reading so many headlines.

But on the one hand, you’ve got this sort of the liberal side of what you say, you’re very into of class issues. I think many of them are very legitimate issues. I think the comments you made about the one mow policy were really interesting.
But on the other hand, there is a sort of reactionary-ness to some of what you go about.

I wouldn’t call myself reactionary, to me that smacks of am I allowed to say right? I’m not sure if I’m allowed now given what I said earlier! So I give you a real example, a human example. And this is when I was young, because I grew up in a culture in the 80s where, as a as a male, growing up where I grew up on the council estate you had to be homophobic.

It was just expected of you. So 14-15 people would say homophobic words, and I wouldn’t object because I wanted to fit in at that young age. And then I got to 18, I started to think about things a lot, and I decided that it was wrong to be around that language. It was wrong to be around people behaving in an unfair discriminated way.

So, I used to challenge that behaviour. One example. I was in a fairwater pub. It was a Saturday afternoon, we’re all having a few pints, and you got this one person going on about “effing queers”.

And I just found it objectionable. And I said, “look listen, mate, do you mind?”

“you’re gay, are you?” he said.

And I’m thinking “well, I’m not gay I am straight”.

But I was objecting to him coming out with homophobic language around me. I didn’t want it. I’ve been called the P word my entire life. If you think of any racial slur you can think of, I’ve been called it. So, there’s a bit of empathy there with another minorities, I just thought, no.

I made a quip, and I said something like, “Don’t knock it till you try it”. With the inference being, I haven’t tried it, but I’m not knocking it, all right.

“Then he started screaming at me. He shouted “The thought of it, the thought of it!”

“It’s absolutely disgusting. It’s disgusting.” He said, almost frothing at the mouth. And
I looked at him off, and I said, “What”.

At this point there was a big crowd around in the pub.

And I said to him, “What, you think about it, Anthony, mate?” I tell you what, I don’t think about that.

And he went absolutely ballistic, and he wanted to punch me.

People had to jump in, and, you know, calm it all down, and he was a homophobe, and I believe, probably a secret homosexual. In my opinion I think that’s where lots of the homophobia comes from. I’m not reactionary. I just challenge things, don’t think you’re going to sit around me, and use language which is disgusting.

I challenge it if I’m at the football match, and it doesn’t really happen now, but if somebody would call somebody a racist term from the terraces, I would challenge it. I would say “What do you mean, mate?”

That probably would have been about 1993, that incident around that time.
And I was the odd one out, for challenging back then. Yeah, I was the odd one out. If you fast forward to now, they were all in those days, homophobic. If we fast forward to not many years ago, around two, three years ago, it was a very similar crowd of us in the same pub years later. All grey. Some lost their hair, many
divorces later, from some of the boys. Somebody made a homophobic comment. And I didn’t even have to say anything.

Everybody picked up on it. I said, “what are you doing?, What do you mean? Why are you saying that?” I found it really interesting, because if you’d gone back 30 years it was only me saying that. So, I’m not a reactionary.

I am an educator. I was a teacher for 20 years. In sort of a spontaneous, confrontational, piss take kind of way, I would challenge homophobia. 
And it did land me in trouble sometimes.

Moving on from the social stuff then. What can Propel do materially for young people in Cardiff?

I think we can do lots because the key point is, is getting the foot in the door. We’re going to be out of gas by the 7th of May, because every one of us is part time. We volunteer, and it’s got to the point where we’re so overstretched that we have to win. We have to win on May 7th. We’ve got a good chance of doing it, as well. So, we win. We have a base. within the Parliament, we have a voice, we have a
nuanced opposition. 


In terms of opposition, I know what I’m doing. There’s a lot of politicians in Wales, none has grown votes like me, from scratch. I have doubled the vote, trebles my votes. Winning the seats from nowhere. Yeah, no one’s ever done that. That’s matter of record. I organised play Plaid Cymru’s victory in 2008, for
example, taking over Caerphilly. I organised that. Got no credit for it, but I organised it.

I got us selected in Cardiff. I organised that. I’m organising propel, and what we all desperately need is time, so that we can maybe take our foot off the gas with our day jobs, and put everything into the politics again. What we offer, I think, is hope for the future.

We’ve got a small policy there with medical students. If you look at us in terms of values wise, I don’t think people should have to pay for their education.

Do you believe in “Mickey Mouse” degrees narrative that is pushed by some people?

I think some people are badly advised in doing degrees, because you need to set yourself up for life. I think there was a whole load of… misguided advice really, in terms of rushing people into university courses, putting them through, and then other sectors, the economy, are missing people going into work a bit earlier, or maybe having more manual jobs or more vocational jobs. So I think we need to give people opportunity.

We need to have a really good conversation with people, as well, at a young age asking, where do you go in life? What do you want to do? What are your skills? And maybe university is not the right
route for everybody. 
 

But I think those people who wanted to be educated intellectually have an absolute right to go to university, and they should be free, actually, because you…

For everyone, including people from England? 


If you’re from England, I think it’s a bit different because..

I’ve caught you out there!

Good question. No. Welsh Students only

And what about Welsh students who go to England?

You can’t go paying for everyone first of all. We’ve got a Welsh taxpayer’s pot and there’s only a certain amount of money in Wales. If we become a sovereign nation, as I would like to see, in the future, we can’t go paying for another country’s students, sorry, maybe a few scholarships, to bring people into Wales. So maybe a few people. To experience the delights of Cardiff nightlife, and if they’re really high flyers, bring them in, pay for them. But as a general rule, no.

That’s something that may be concerned some people, Cardiff’s got this mixed population, lots of people from England and other places moving around and the university has benefited from that. However the kind of sovereigntist, maybe trajectory, which you would take Wales into, might cut that off?

No, God. I’ve got cousins in Manchester, in Warrington.

Well, we’re one country at the moment, right? 


No, no, no, no, no, we’re not, actually. No, no, no. We’re several countries in a unified in state, a Uk state.

I’m using those words interchangeably. But you see the point? At the moment people move and maybe if, you know…

No, but if they’re going to pay, like they’re paying now, they’re welcome. What we’re saying is we’ll give students in Wales the opportunity to be educated. I’m not making a promise on this, just talking philosophically because the figures, because they’ve ruined education so much for me.

The figures have to stack up. We would never go into an election, saying “we’re going to do this”. No, we would like to. In the future, I would love education to be free again. like it was for me. I think it’s scandalous that people have to go into so much debt now, just to study.

And I’d like education to be lifelong as well. I think what really hurts me about Wales is the lack of life opportunities for young people growing up. And I remember graduating in 1992. I wrote 100 job applications, and it was during another sort of depression, another recession.

I think people might resonate with that.

Yeah, I got about two replies. I ended up working in the doing council tax stuff. It was boring. But I was grateful for the job. It was funny how I got the job, actually. So maybe this is a lesson about how to be proactive. I was 22 and I went through an interview. I turned up suits, polished tubes, very important. Along with a portfolio of all my work, and the interview probably took about 45 seconds.

And I was very upset by that, I was in and out in less than a minute. And later over the phone he said, he said, “Listen, mate”, he said, “The problem is, we had so many applicants”. By the time you came in, the last afternoon we already knew who we were having. He said, “I’d like to apologise”.

And I had a go with him, to be honest I told him exactly how I felt. I remember saying, at the end of it,

“Well, anyway listen, mate, you got my CV anyway. All right?”, because I didn’t have so much self-control on those days.

I think he felt bad. So, they had another job in about a month’s time. He phoned me up and invited me in, and I got the job.

Jobs are obviously a massive issue for students.

I think the key point which we don’t talk about in Wales is, unless we have a successful economy, then we’re not going to give people the opportunity to succeed, and there are so many ways we can improve the Welsh economy. What annoys me about the politicians in Cardiff Bay, none of them really are interested in the economy, because we’re a, it’s a dependency culture. 
It’s a begging ball culture. You go to London, give us some money. Oh, we want more like Oliver Twist. “Give us some more. Give us some more. Give us some more”. There’s no responsibility taken, but they like the status of ministerial cars and
so on.

What we need to do is make the Welsh economy work. There’s some really simple things we could do.
Award public sector contracts to Welsh companies. That would create 60,000 jobs.

We could set up community banks with the permission of the Bank of England, because we’re not sovereign. And we could create new money in the economy.
They could be anchored with £20 million, and they could lend up to…

You mean create new money? Do you mean printing money? 


You set up a community bank. You get it okay-ed by the Bank of England. You anchor it with £20 million and then you can lend. So, in effect, there is a money tree. And then that bank then finance small businesses. I believe, in a circular economy, we should be using public sector pension funds to invest in housing.

The housing crisis is scandalous. It’s artificial, it’s created, because people make so much money from a housing crisis. If we had the Welsh pension funds invested in housing, there’s an immediate rate of return with rent and the pension funds would be looked after. The properties accrue in value. Therefore, the pension fund is looked after.

If people want to buy their properties, I’d allow them to buy the properties at market rates. So, the pension plan gets a huge boost. What you’re doing there, with a very simple, simple solution, is housing more people.

We could see the biggest expansion of public sector housing since the Second World War. If we used public sector pension funds. So, I’ll tell you what, Cardiff and Vale Pension Fund, get your money out of Israel, right? And invest in housing. 113 million pound we can start with, that’s one thing we could do.

What else is there we could do in the economy? Massive, massive knowledge economy, massive online economy.

Might that economy be slightly more pertaining to students?

Yeah, I mean, I want to see people given opportunities to start businesses. I want to see people given free office space in the city centre. We’ve got loads of empty offices, right? Broad band them to hell and get people in there with ideas to start new businesses.

We’ve got the online market. It’s huge eBay rips people off. If you look at these online sales platforms, they rip people off. Let’s set up a Welsh alternative, a worldwide sales platform, put government money behind it to promote it, and start making some money.

So instead of taking 30% off sellers, take 5%. We make a fortune. You know, another one is, um, Diff taxis beat me to it, so I’m sick of Uber, taking 48% off their taxi drivers. There’s a new company set, called Diff Taxis, based in Cardiff, obviously. They charge 8% of their drivers. What they’ve done is an app. So, what we should be doing is in giving people the opportunity to invest, in putting investment into such
things. 


Will the DIF taxis be affordable for students?

Why not? I tell you what, let’s do a deal! Why don’t I make representations on behalf of the student community for the discount with Diff taxis?

That would be interesting You may not know, there’s a growing kind of political momentum within student culture, I think. And there is a need for representation.

Yeah. I’ll do that. So, when this interview stops, remind me and I’ll message them. I’ll ask them, will they do a student discount?

That might be a vote winner!

I think with me, what you’ve got is direct access and direct action. I think that’s where I offer more…

I would agree that because unlike when I go to Paid or Labour I called you directly. It was an unusual experience, maybe, to encounter a politician who isn’t filtered through many layers. Although that might change!
I mean, you did have one of the biggest offices in the Senate when you were there.

Yeah, absolutely.
Do you want to know why? What I did was, my staff were promoted quicker than anybody else. Most of the politicians made their staff wait 12 months to get a pay increase. What I did, I looked at the rules, and if they made a special case to me, and I agreed, I could fast track their pay increase fast tracking my staff’s pay increases after six months.

Nobody else did that. At the end of the year, when we were coming up to budget, I’d have money in the budget, and I’d employ generally people who were not working regularly, single parents and people on benefits. And they would get 10 to 12 hours a week off of me.

Yeah, so I would burn the budget, and those people would do valid, really useful work for me. And they would have a boost of their benefits for a month or two. So… 


You could say it was representative, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was a lovely experience, because I needed the stuff doing, and it was great just to be able to pick the phone or put a tweet out or whatever it was, and just employ people, and I knew the people who were struggling for a couple of months had a boost, and that gave me a lot of satisfaction. But I could only do it for a certain time.

When I became an independent, the money which would have gone to Plaid Cymru’s office came directly to my office. The political group’s monies, the individual members’ monies was hidden because it was funding their party groups, because I had no party group. It came to me directly. I employed a social worker with that money. It was a great thing to do.

For me, it was useful because I had so many social cases, that the media never looked into because they weren’t interested in telling the truth. I was investigating for fraud as well.

For example some poor builder came in. He did about 10 grand’s worth of work, got £5000 for it, and he ended up being interviewed under caution. I mean, it was, he lost money on it. And they said that I’d paid my friend too much rent as my landlord, right? I’d never met my landlord. 
He wasn’t a friend. I hadn’t even had a drink with him. And I was paying the market rates.

Also, Mark Drakeford was paying double while I was paying, because he had an office with Kevin Brennan nobody investigated him. Because you had Brennan’s rent, his rent together. Nobody knew who owned the office. It wasn’t listed with the land registry, but the BBC weren’t interested in that. They just wanted to hammer me ’cause the bottom line was, I was being a pain and I was looking at things. 


Goldstone Hilton. Right? That was me. I uncovered that. Unfortunately, the Conservatives took credit for it, ’cause Plaid Cymru wouldn’t let me run with it back then. But he was given a suite in the top of the Hilton. Paid for by the Welsh government. Listen no “he did it all from the goodness of his heart, for Wales” they said.

You’ve got a sense of mission, I think that comes across in this interview.

You definitely speaking more forthright, although they may get you in trouble.

Just coming to the end of the interview then. Some final thoughts and maybe aiming towards answering the question. Why should students vote for you? 


We mean business, and we do mean business. And if anyone out there has any kind of issue, we’re gonna have a High Street office, and we’re going to have transparent windows again. The door is always going to be open, and it’s going to be staffed. 
And if there’s anyone out there that’s got any concerns, any issues, we’re going to be ready, you know, we be there.

And we’ll have professional staff dealing with so much case work. I’m looking forward to that. 
I’m looking forward to the personal contact. As I said, we’re going to expose things in Cardiff Bay. But I think more than anything else, my ambition for the next four years is to be the best constituency member of the Senate in Wales. That’s what I really want to be. And there’s so many people out there struggling, so many people that have got issues, mental health issues.

People used to just call into our office, and we’d sit down and have a cup of tea with them. 
 We did suicide training in our office. After we did it, I recommended the Sened did it, and they did it as well. Just to give you an idea of the diligence we had, if somebody had come in and our staff were worried about them, it would be flagged with me. It’s a policy.

And then we would text them after hours, or if we were really concerned, I’d phone them. Two people came to me after the election, when I lost my seat and told me they were going to kill themselves. And it was our intervention, which stopped them committing suicide. 


There was one other person that told me that as well, but that wasn’t through the office. I met him in a pub. I was on her way home from the Senedd. People said going and see and so down the end. I Went to see him. And I helped him out, that’s all I’ll say. He’d been having a really tough time, and he needed someone to fight for him, so I did that. And I bumped into him a year ago. In the same pub, and he came up to me, shook my hand, hugged me, bought me a pint, and explained where he was that night. He had decided to leave the pub and kill himself. He was sleeping in his car. He then explained how my little intervention, just a little bit of customer care, if you like, I call them customers. Because they should be classified as such. 
They’re not always right, but you always got to try your best for them.

That’s always been my attitude. And after a little intervention, he went on to work on cruise ships, and has had a lovely life the last few years. He’s back in Cardiff now, having a different life, happy, and it was just wonderful to speak to him. I want to do that again.

Neil McEvoy, thank you very much