Apart from a brief couple of weeks when we were ordered to celebrate Black Lives Matter last year, Pride Month which started in June 2013 has been celebrated every month since. This week it is Pride Week in Ottawa, capital of the woke Socialist hell hole that is Canada. I am delighted to read in the must subscribe newsletter, the Ottawan – prop my pal D Atwater Esq – that “the Ottawa Tool Library presents the Free Pride Week Sewing Circle, for 2SLGBTQIA+ makers of all levels of sewing experience. Tickets are free.” Radical! Stonewall Riot v2. But what on earth is 2SLGBTQIA+ – I bet even President Castro-Trudeau cannot tell us what that stands for. But as a Welsh taxpayer there is something else bringing me even more joy.
I see that the Welsh Government is co-sponsoring the Canadian première of Donna, a documentary about transgender rights activist Donna Personna, a 75 year old who has lived her whole life in California. What, you may ask are my taxes going on sponsoring this gig in Ottawa?
It turns out that the film Donna was funded by Ffilm Cymru, a body which gets nearly all its income from the Arts Council Wales (i.e. the taxpayer) and the lottery. The films it produces generate sod all. Donna, for instance, screened for a grand total of three weeks across three small cinemas in Wales plus a week at an arthouse cinema just across the border in Oswestry. It would be suprising if more than 300 Welshies saw this flick at a movie theatre.
To say that this film funded by the Welsh taxpayer and by the mugs who play the lottery has almost no appeal or traction in Wales would not be unfair. The tedious oaf Will Carling droning on about the glory days of English Rugby would have more pulling power.
I would not care about that too much if the film was about something to do with helping Welsh culture or our language to thrive but this is a film about life thousands of miles away in California which almost nobody in Wales can relate to or cares about one iota. For the Welsh Government, always bleating about how little cash it has, to then chuck more taxpayer cash at a glitzy Pride week premiere in Canada of all places, just adds insult to injury.
Can anyone in Government tell the people of Wales why every cent spent supporting this film should not have been spent on tackling something like bulging NHS waiting lists here in Wales, fuel poverty or mending the frigging potholes in the road leading to my house?