A slightly different Welsh independence thread from me. I’m genuinely open-minded on independence. I’ve read many of the arguments put forward by the nationalist community and, so far, I haven’t found the economic case particularly convincing. I do, however, completely understand and respect the emotional and cultural case. So I decided to try something different. Rather than arguing against independence, I asked myself: Could I build the strongest possible case FOR it? Not slogans. Not history. Not “Westminster bad”. A serious, economically credible case that could persuade someone like me. Think of it as an academic exercise in challenging my own assumptions and staying true to something I value enormously: follow the evidence, even when it takes you somewhere unexpected. And bugger me, it started revealing some genuinely interesting possibilities. So this is simply my journey down that rabbit hole. 🧵 1/

Welsh politics gets far too hung up on tribes. My test is simpler. Will it make Wales more prosperous? Will it improve health and education? Will it give the next generation better opportunities? If yes, show me the evidence and the plan. I genuinely don’t care whose idea it is.

I think I’m less tribal now than I’ve ever been. Probably because the older I get, the less interested I am in who said something and the more interested I am in whether it actually makes sense. I can be Welsh and British. I can admire people I disagree with. I can change my mind. I can think devolution has been good in principle and still demand much better delivery. I can be open to more autonomy for Wales and still want to see the bloody business case. None of that feels contradictory to me. It just feels grown up. I’m increasingly suspicious of politics that requires you to pick a team first and think second.

I’ve now read YesCymru’s Independence in Your Pocket properly. It’s much more substantial than I expected. Serious, referenced and it tackles most of the obvious questions. But for me it’s the start of a business case, not the finished one. It makes a decent case that independence is possible. The next stage has to show the numbers, transition plan, currency, trade, pensions, debt, institutions, risks and, crucially, what happens if the preferred assumptions don’t come off. That’s not an argument against independence. It’s an argument for doing the next bit properly.

Something slightly odd has happened to me. A few years ago I’d have dismissed Welsh independence almost out of hand. I don’t anymore. But if anything, becoming more open to it has made me MORE demanding, not less. I want the numbers. I want the economic plan. I want to know what happens to pensions, currency, borders, trade, defence and the NHS. I want to know what happens when the spreadsheets meet reality. And before we start obsessing about referendums, I want to see Wales demonstrate that we can run the powers we already have really bloody well. That isn’t anti-Welsh. It isn’t anti-independence either. It’s what you should demand before fundamentally changing the constitutional future of a country. Win me over with competence. Win me over with evidence. Win me over with a plan that survives contact with a calculator. Then we can have a very interesting conversation. 🏴

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XRP is getting interesting again. Momentum is strong, but short term it’s also starting to look a bit stretched. That doesn’t mean “crash incoming”. It means after a decent run, sensible investors start watching support, volume and whether the move can actually hold. I still want XRP to do very well. I just refuse to confuse bullishness with fantasy. Strong is good. Overheated is different. And $100 because “banks are coming” is still being a very silly Billy..

Wales does not need another decade of politicians explaining who is to blame. Today we have a new Programme for Government. Waiting lists. Jobs. Cost of living. Schools. Child poverty. Fine. Now comes the bit that actually matters. DELIVERY. I genuinely do not care what colour rosette the person responsible is wearing. If NHS waiting times fall, our schools improve, better-paid jobs are created and public money is spent intelligently, I’ll say so. If they don’t, I’ll say that too. That’s increasingly where I am politically. Less tribalism. Less performative outrage. Less treating political parties like football teams. Evidence. Outcomes. Competence. Wales is far too small, and has far too much potential, to spend another generation shouting at each other while the scoreboard tells a different story. I want Wales to succeed. Whoever governs it gets credit when they earn it and criticism when they don’t. That shouldn’t be radical. It should be the minimum standard.

The older I get, the less interested I am in whether an idea sounds impressive and the more interested I am in what happens on Monday morning. Who does what differently? What does it cost? What improves? How will we know? I’ve spent much of my working life around plans, strategies and business cases. The difficult bit is rarely writing the ambition. It’s connecting ambition to delivery. That’s increasingly the test I apply to almost everything.

Now for some honesty about xrp and apologies to the moon community; Ripple keeps signing banks & institutions, but most deals use their software, custody, or RLUSD — not XRP itself. Only a minority of volume goes through ODL (the product that actually uses XRP), and even then high velocity limits price impact. The old thesis that banks would need to hold large XRP inventories as the global bridge asset has weakened significantly. Price is still ~$1.40 and remains more dependent on broader crypto cycles + ETF flows than pure utility. Reasonable 12-month ranges: Bull $3.50–6+ | Base $1.80–3 | Bear $0.90–1.40 Not dead, but the path is narrower than many hoped.

Well, this is bizarre. TikTok removed this video for “Hate Speech and Hateful Behaviour.” It’s a bit of gentle political satire about me changing my own political views and, heaven forbid, developing a growing affection for Plaid Cymru. No race attacked. No religion attacked. No protected group attacked. Nobody attacked, actually. The automatic appeal failed. I then tried TikTok’s complaints process and ended up in the same circular online loop again. I’ve now made a formal complaint and asked for an actual human being to tell me precisely what in this video constitutes hate speech. So I’ll put it here. Watch it and make your own mind up. @TikTokSupport @TikTokComms @Ofcom @OfcomCymraeg #TikTok #ContentModeration #OnlineSafety #HateSpeech #FreeSpeech #Wales #WelshPolitics #PlaidCymru

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Kai returns. An AI-generated fictional character offering satire, humour and commentary. For entertainment and discussion. #AIGenerated #AISatire #AICharacter #Kai

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Interesting little wrinkle in the latest Welsh polling. Plaid 32%. Reform 27%. Support for independence… 20%. Whatever your politics, that gap fascinates me. It suggests a fair chunk of Wales is quite capable of separating “who do I want running the Welsh Government?” from “do I want Wales to leave the UK?” Maybe that’s where the really interesting debate is now. Not flags. Not tribes. Not endless constitutional shouting. Can Welsh Government actually shift the dial on health, education, productivity and living standards? And if it does… does that change how people think about Wales’ constitutional future? Genuinely interested in views.

My XRP thesis, minus the moonboy nonsense. I remain invested in XRP, but I think holders need to separate three things that are constantly conflated: Ripple succeeding. XRPL succeeding. XRP itself accruing value. They are related. They are not the same thing. There is a genuine bull case. The long-running SEC litigation is substantially behind Ripple. US spot XRP ETFs have attracted around $1.7bn of net inflows since launch. RLUSD has grown to around $2.4bn in circulation. Tokenised assets and institutional activity on XRPL have increased markedly. Ripple is building a serious payments, custody, treasury, stablecoin and prime-brokerage infrastructure business. None of that is imaginary. But here’s the uncomfortable bit. XRP has had much of the news its supporters spent years saying would send it into orbit... and the token has still massively underperformed those expectations. That matters. The question therefore isn’t whether Ripple is succeeding. It increasingly is. The question is: Does that success create sufficient unavoidable demand for XRP itself? RLUSD is a perfect example. Its growth is good for Ripple and XRPL. But a dollar transaction using RLUSD does not automatically require somebody to accumulate a large position in XRP. XRP can potentially capture value through liquidity, bridging, collateral, settlement and institutional markets. But that value-capture mechanism still needs to be demonstrated at scale. Supply matters too. Ripple reports about 62.3bn XRP distributed, with a further 32.6bn in escrow. So do the arithmetic. On 62.3bn XRP, roughly: $5 = $312bn valuation $10 = $623bn $25 = $1.56tn $100 = $6.23tn That’s why I largely ignore the “$50 next month” and “$100 is inevitable” crowd. Anything is possible in crypto. But extraordinary valuations require extraordinary evidence, not capital letters, rocket emojis and screenshots of anonymous banking rumours. My own thesis is much more mundane. $5: entirely credible in a strong XRP cycle. $7: a serious bull case. $10: achievable only if XRP demonstrates much stronger value capture and establishes itself as a genuinely huge financial asset. $20+: moonshot territory until the evidence changes. The thing I’m watching now isn’t another Ripple partnership announcement. It’s whether ETF demand, XRPL institutional growth, RLUSD, tokenisation and payment infrastructure actually translate into sustained demand and liquidity for XRP itself. If they do, the investment thesis strengthens enormously. If Ripple and XRPL keep thriving while XRP value capture remains weak, holders need to have the intellectual honesty to recognise that too. I remain bullish enough to hold XRP. I’m just no longer religious about it. Hope isn’t an investment thesis. Neither is a 🚀 emoji.

I keep coming back to a simple question about Welsh nationalism. Is independence the destination in itself, or is it simply one possible means of making Wales more prosperous, healthier, better educated and more confident? Because those are very different propositions. I have little interest in independence for independence’s sake. Flags, identity and nationhood matter, but they don’t pay wages, shorten NHS waiting lists, improve schools or create productive businesses. But if a credible, properly costed case could demonstrate that independence would materially improve life in Wales, protect public services, grow the economy and leave future generations better off, then I would absolutely support that argument. That is where I think the debate needs to shift. Not: “Do you love Wales enough to support independence?” But: “What problem does independence solve, what would it cost, what are the risks, and what evidence suggests Welsh people would be better off?” If nationalists can answer those questions convincingly, they won’t just win me over. I’ll become one of their biggest evangelists. The prize should not be independence for its own sake. The prize should be a better Wales. Prove that independence is the best route to that, and I’m in. @Plaid_Cymru @RhunapIorwerth

I’ve dug further into the CTM health visitor dispute and the Agenda for Change detail makes this much more interesting than “Band 6 v Band 7”. AfC does not grade a post simply on qualification or job title. It evaluates the whole role across 16 factors — including knowledge/training, analytical judgement, responsibility for patient care, policy/service development, staff and resources, freedom to act, and the physical, mental and emotional demands of the job. Band 6 covers 396–465 points. Band 7 starts at 466. Here’s the important bit: in July 2025, the NHS Staff Council Job Evaluation Group archived the national Band 6 Health Visitor profile because the new NMC master’s-level entry requirement moves the Knowledge, Training & Experience factor from level 6 to level 7. JEG explicitly said that simply making that change would mean the old profile no longer sat solely within the Band 6 scoring range. That does NOT automatically make every health visitor Band 7. The remaining factors still have to be evaluated against the actual job. But it does mean “they’ve always been Band 6” is no longer an adequate answer. So after six months of industrial action and thousands fewer contacts with babies and vulnerable families, why are we still arguing about this? Agree an accurate JD. Undertake a properly constituted independent AfC evaluation. Publish the factor scores and rationale. Accept the outcome — Band 6 or Band 7 — and sort any backpay accordingly. Agenda for Change was designed precisely so we shouldn’t have to determine job value through a six-month strike. At some point the process itself becomes the governance failure.