Gold medal winning hypocrisy

Paralympic legend Tanni Grey-Thompson has appeared in The Independent, giving answers to a few questions. The questions range from boring hardly newsworthy ones on Scottish independence to topical question about Tom Daly's sexuality, real hard hitting journalism. What caught my eye though was what Cardiff born Tanni said about devolution.

"It doesn’t make sense to do something differently in England to the other home countries."

In other words, devolution doesn't make sense to Tanni. My hypocrisy alarm did buzz slightly because Tanni had already answered a question about Cymraeg and she sounds quite pleased that children are learning Welsh in Wales. Now since they don't learn Welsh in England, Scotland or the six counties you might naturally start to question if Tanni really does believe that it doesn't make sense to do things differently. But then we did things differently before devolution so I decided to have a little google.

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The exact search phrase I used was "tanni grey thompson devolution", which any hard hitting journalist could have typed in. About the 12th link down the search results was a (.pdf) from a Sport Wales group in which Tanni chaired.

On page 5 of the report the following statement is made.

"the development of devolution has offered a massive opportunity to look forward, and to offer something different, visionary and transformational which would help Wales’s ambition to be a world-leading nation in sport and physical activity."

So here we have the hypocrisy, on one hand we have a Tanni led group outlining the "massive opportunity" that devolution offers us in order to be a "world-leading nation". And on the other hand "It doesn’t make sense to do something differently in England to the other home countries."

It's also worth pointing out that Tanni's official title is "Baroness Grey-Thompson, of Eaglescliffe in the County of Durham", I've looked on google maps and I can't find that anywhere in Wales. It must be one of those places in that UK nation that doesn't have devolution.

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