Lord Crickhowell had joined the ABP board the year before.The sites were being excluded from compulsory purchase, it was announced, in return for ABP contributing to the development corporation’s infrastructure costs.However, a new £135m underground road, linking the M4 with the bay area and passing right by Roath Basin, opens shortly, with none of its cost, or of that of any of the bay infrastructure, having been paid by the company. They were 100 acres at Roath Basin, a plum, central waterfront area – estimated to be worth £50m when the development is advanced – and 60 acres at Ferry Road on the west of the bay.Both sites belong to ABP. In a Parliamentary committee last week Mr Morgan said that in one deal in particular in Cardiff Bay, an ABP subsidiary was “an example of government sleaze of the kind with which we have become all too familiar”.
The then Mr Edwards himself signed the order setting up the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation to breathe life into 2,700 moribund acres south of the city in January 1987, six months before he retired from Parliament and was made a peer.The regeneration scheme is second only to London’s Docklands in size and scale, and the corporation was given the power of compulsory purchase over all the land within its boundaries.However, in May 1989, the corporation announced that two valuable parcels of land were, uniquely, being excluded from compulsory purchase. Associated British Ports, (ABP), the privatised docks operator, has been given special advantages potentially worth many millions of pounds – according to Cardiff West MP Rhodri Morgan – because one of its directors is Lord Crickhowell, who as Nicholas Edwards was Margaret Thatcher’s Welsh Secretary from 1979 to 1987. And that, they say, is what the Americans tend to overlook.Leading article, page 22..

ONE OF the key companies in the £1bn scheme to regenerate Cardiff Bay has received favourable treatment because of the presence on its board of a former Conservative Secretary of State for Wales, according to a Labour MP. Labour likes all the discussion of community – “it’s territory the Tories do not know how to fight on.” Blairites tend not to mind tough talk on social issues as Blair was famously “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”.But they reject the odder ideas from America and says that being tough on the causes of crime means taking poverty seriously. It offers no remedy to the most pressing problem in Britain: how to deal with the quango state and create new institutions and ways of distributing power.”Is the Labour Party communitarianism?Up to a point, say Tony Blair’s advisers privately. It is moved by nostalgia, authoritarianism and moralism, which is inevitably linked to American religious fundamentalism.

The emphasis on morality means that little account is taken of economic deprivation which forces both husbands and wives to work.Dr John Gray, fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, who switched from supporting to opposing Thatcherism, says: “Communitarianism is not a movement which looks at the real world. It says that they blame too many social problems on individuals and cop out of challenging corporate power. In particular the communitarians fail to understand modern women. We have no constitutional guarantees for freedom of speech and assembly.The left points out that, in the US, the communitarians’ target is not big business but the American Civil Liberties Union. While Americans argue about citizens having too many rights, the problem in Britain is the opposite.

Alan Ryan, the British philospher, now based at Princeton University, argues that the British enthusiasts betray confusion. Parents in Arkansas can be fined $50 for missing a parent-teacher meeting. Across America, there are proposals to make welfare dependent on single mothers training for work and limiting the size of their families.What do the critics say?Many British academics regard it as a parochial American idea. But communitarian ideas in practice in America can be punitive. In Wisconsin mothers on benefit have their welfare payments docked, if their children miss school. This makes it hard for Europeans to understand the passions the arguments create.