Latest news with #NeilThomas
Wales Online
15-06-2025
- Politics
- Wales Online
We asked people in two communities in Wales why they voted Reform UK
We asked people in two communities in Wales why they voted Reform UK Lliedi resident Neil Thomas says he'll never vote Labour again (Image: Copyright Unknown ) Neil Thomas from Llanelli voted Labour at the UK General Election in 2024. "Never again," he said. He's one of the many converts to Reform UK who helped the party win a seat in Llanelli just over a fortnight ago and gain its first Carmarthenshire councillor. The 62-year-old had a few gripes to mention. He said he didn't expect to receive winter fuel allowance when he was eligible in a few years' time. Labour just this week did a u-turn on the payment, making millions more people on lower incomes eligible after previously restricting it to pensioners on certain benefits. He also felt aggrieved that he was turned down for a benefit he had been receiving called the personal independence payment following a medical assessment. Happily for him, he said his cousin appealed on his behalf and it was reinstated. But it seems like it's Reform UK leader Nigel Farage that's made the difference for him. "I voted Labour at the last general election and always voted Labour locally - never again," said Mr Thomas. "Next election I will be voting for Reform." Article continues below He said he liked what he'd seen of Reform UK and Nigel Farage on television. "He's straight-talking. He speaks his mind," he said. "He would be a good Prime Minister. The one we've got now, we don't know what the hell he's doing." Would the Reform UK leader and MP for Clacton have Wales' interests at heart, we asked? "We've got to wait and see," said Mr Thomas. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here Two years ago Reform was bumping along the bottom of the UK polls, trading blows with the Greens to be one of the least popular national political parties in the country. Labour was at its zenith, tracking in the mid 40 per cents with the Tories stumbling along in the mid-20s. Then, towards the end of 2023, something changed. Reform began picking up support, soaring above the Greens and Lib Dems and slowly eating into the Tories' lack of popularity relative to Labour. Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, speaking in Port Talbot (Image: WalesOnline/Rob Browne ) There were no great gains for Reform at the 2024 General Election which was won decisively by Labour, with Mr Farage's party picking up five seats, but the party won sweeping gains at the local elections in England earlier this year, taking 677 of the 1,600 seats and is now leading in the polls, with Politico's most recent poll of polls putting Reform on 30%, Labour on 23% and the Conservatives on 17% The Senedd elections take place on May 7, 2026, the next big electoral test for all political parties in Wales. A poll in May this year suggested Labour could lose control of the Welsh Government and drop to third, with Plaid Cymru taking the most seats, followed by Reform in third. In the meantime, the only clue we get as to what might be happening on the ground in Wales is by-elections. Just over a fortnight ago Reform UK's Michelle Beer won a vacant Lliedi seat by a stretch, defeating Welsh Labour in what has been solid Labour territory going by the 2022, 2017 and 2012 council elections. She is Reform UK's first Carmarthenshire councillor. Michelle Beer (centre), who is Reform UK's first county councillor in Carmarthenshire (Image: courtesy of Michelle Beer ) At last summer's general election Labour incumbent Nia Griffith held onto the Llanelli seat with 31.3% of the vote but Reform UK's Gareth Beer - Michelle's husband - wasn't a million miles away in second place with a 27.6% share. Reform UK, it seems, aren't going anywhere. When WalesOnline went to Lliedi to speak to voters, we caught up with Neil Thomas, mentioned earlier, and bellwether voter Stella Bartlett, who voted for Labour's Ms Griffith last July and for Reform UK's Mrs Beer on May 29. A residential street in Lliedi (Image: Copyright Unknown ) Asked about the switch, she said: "It was because of what's happening with Labour - they say one thing and do another. It was the way they took off money for winter fuel, and now they're going to put it back, but not all of it. "It's the cuts and putting National Insurance up for the workers which they shouldn't be doing. My granddaughter is a care worker and does a lot of overtime. When it comes to her pay, the tax is unbelievable." The 76-year-old added: "I met the Reform candidate (Mrs Beer) when she came to my door, and she was lovely. I also just happen to like Nigel Farage and what he is for. He seems down to earth, no airs and graces, like a normal person." Stella Bartlett with her rescue dog Buck (Image: Copyright Unknown ) Last autumn Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a rise in the level of National Insurance contributions paid by employers rather than employees to help plug what Labour claimed was a £22 billion black hole left by the previous Conservative Government. It came into effect in April this year, as did inflation-busting increases in the national living wage and minimum wage. However, more people are slipping into the income tax bracket because of a freeze on the amount you can earn - known as the personal allowance - before the 20% basic rate applies. All political decisions are trade-offs and the winter fuel hokey cokey seems to have left its mark on some voters. Craig Morgan, of Llanelli, voted for Reform UK last July after previously voting Conservative. He said he didn't feel the two traditionally strongest parties were "doing anything good" for people. "They're trying to do up Llanelli but it's taking years," said the 43-year-old. "I felt like a change was needed." He said people needed better access to housing. Mr Morgan added: "Nigel Farage is a character. He says things how they are, but thank God he's not like Donald Trump, yet." Craig Morgan (Image: Copyright Unknown ) Asked if he'd had any reservations about voting for Reform UK, he didn't say no but added that he didn't want to get into a discussion about immigration. Would he vote for Reform UK at next year's Senedd elections? "I will see at the time," he said. Richard Thomas, 73, is a Reform UK convert and said levels of legal and illegal immigration concerned him. However he said he didn't blame people for coming to the UK to seek work in the health and care sectors. "If we didn't have them our hospitals would be knackered," he said. "There are also a lot of them at my mother's care home - they're better than our own people." Many years ago Mr Thomas, of Pontyates, a few miles north-west of Llanelli, worked at the nearby Cynheidre colliery. He liked what he heard from the Reform UK leader when he visited Port Talbot on June 9, such as bringing blast furnaces back to the steelworks and allowing coal to be mined to power them. "He spoke well at Port Talbot," said Mr Thomas, who previously tended to vote for Plaid Cymru. "What's wrong with burning coal? It's the best heat we ever had in our house." Was he worried that Reform UK might over-promise and, if it were to hold sway in the Senedd or House of Commons one day, under-deliver? "It depends on how much money there is in the kitty then," he replied. But Lliedi is not the only community in Wales to turn to Nigel Farage's party. The drive through the village of Cefn Cribwr down to Kenfig Hill and Pyle is a roughly two mile stretch of road that shows Wales at its finest on a clear day. The View From Cefn Cribwr (Image: Copyright Unknown ) With scenic views of Bridgend county borough to the south, and a snap-shot of the coast to the west, with Port Talbot steelworks framed between rows of houses in the distance, it is one that almost seems to encapsulate this part of the world at a glance. However, while these views have become a soothing and consistent sight to many in the Bridgend communities over the years, in recent months the political outlook for the area has become slightly less clear. This was evident at a council by-election held in May, 2025, which saw a seat in the ward of Pyle, Kenfig Hill and Cefn Cribwr won by the authority's first Reform UK councillor, Owain Clatworthy. Successful Refoirm UK Candidate Owain Clatworthy celebrates his win in Pyle with supporters after beating Labour into second place. (Image: Copyright Unknown ) He took his seat after edging out the second placed Labour candidate Gary Chappell by only 30 votes, to join two sitting Labour members for the area- current deputy leader, Cllr Jane Gebbie, and Mayor for Bridgend, Cllr Huw David. It came just weeks before the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, visited the nearby town of Port Talbot to kick-start the party's Senedd election campaign, claiming they expected to not only win seats, but to also win enough to govern Wales. Speaking to locals in the ward of Pyle, Kenfig Hill and Cefn Cribwr, known historically as a Labour area, some feel a sense of anxiety over potential changes to the political status-quo, though for others they feel this small part of Bridgend has sent out a big message in the build up to 2026. Pyle Road in Bridgend (Image: Copyright Unknown ) Nigel Harris lives in the village of Kenfig Hill and said that when it came to politics, many people were frustrated with what they considered to be a lack of action in the area, with more needing to be done to help its communities. He said: "The problem with a lot of politicians is that they promise you everything, then when it actually comes down to it they don't do anything at all. "You only have to look outside at the grass in Kenfig Hill. It hasn't been cut for ages and it's coming to the point where its up to your knees in some places. "The roads are really bad with pot holes, there's a general lack of public toilets, and a lot of people are starting to get annoyed because, despite giving more, we seem to be going backwards. "The local high streets are dying in front of us, and everything you hear is just negative, so it doesn't surprise me to hear that people are looking for something different." Brian Smith said he felt that the latest by-election had also reflected frustrations with national problems, such as the cost-of-living crisis and the closure of the blast furnaces at the nearby Port Talbot steelworks site. He said: "People want change and I think there's going to be a big shock with how the votes go next year at the Senedd, with some moving away from the more traditional Labour or Conservative votes that we've seen in the past. "Of course, some of that will be because of local matters, but wider issues like the winter fuel allowance and the closure of the blast furnaces in Port Talbot will also play a big part in places like this. "The steelworks is a big one for me, as it always employed a lot of people in and around this area and they all saw the decision to save the Scunthorpe site while letting this one go." One resident who did not wish to be named said other national issues like securing the future of the NHS and tackling illegal immigration were also factors that would influence voters, stating: "Somebody's got to stop all these boats coming in. The National Health Service is on its knees at the moment and something has got to be done." For Ahmed Tezgel however, he felt that politicians across all parties needed to do more to engage with residents and live up to promises, adding: "I don't mind any party just as long as they are going to help the community." Speaking after his shock election win in May, 2025, which made him only the second Reform Councillor in Wales at the time, Cllr Owain Clatworthy, 20, said: "I'm incredibly humbled and it's a true honour to have been elected. "I ran a campaign based on people because many are fed up of being ignored and want to see change. The work begins now to build a better future for everyone in the ward and I will stand up for the community and put people first." Article continues below His work begins in that ward in one part of Wales, but the work of Reform and other parties is already well underway to convince people in wards and constituencies across the country to vote for them at the Senedd election next year. The future of Wales is at stake.
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Qlik Widens Interoperable Data Platform With Open Lakehouse
The people of Inle Lake (called Intha), some 70,000 of them, live in four cities bordering the lake, ... More in numerous small villages along the lake's shores, and on the lake itself. (Photo by Neil Thomas/Corbis via Getty Images) Software comes in builds. When source code is compiled and combined with its associated libraries into an executable format, a build is ready to run, in basic terms. The construction analogy here extends directly to the data architecture that the code is composed of and draws upon. Because data architectures today are as diverse as the software application types above them, data integration specialists now have to work across complex data landscapes and remain alert to subsidence, fragilities and leakage. These software and data construct realities drive us towards a point where data integration, data quality control and data analytics start to blend. Key players in this market include Informatica, SnapLogic, Rivery, Boomi, Fivetran, Tibco, Oracle with its Data Integrator service and Talend, the latter now being part of Qlik. Key differentiators in the data analytics and integration space generally manifest themselves in terms of how complex the platform is to set up and install (Informatica is weighty, but commensurately complex), how flexible the tools are from a customization perspective (Fivetran is fully managed, but less flexible as a result), how natively aligned the service is to the environment it has to run in (no surprise, Microsoft Azure Data Factory is native with Microsoft ecosystem technologies) and how far the data integration and analytics services on offer can be used by less technical businesspeople. As this vast marketplace also straddles business intelligence, there are wider reputable forces at play here from firms including Salesforce's Tableau, Microsoft's Power BI, Google's Looker and ThoughtSpot for its easy-to-use natural language data vizualizations. Where one vendor will tell us its dashboards are simplicity itself, another will stress how comprehensively end-to-end its technology proposition is. Generally cloud-based and often with a good open source heritage, the data integration, data quality and data analytics space is a noisy but quite happy place. Looking specifically at Qlik, the company is known for its 'associative' data engine, which offers freeform data analytics that highlight relationships between data sets in non-linear directions without the need for predefined queries. It also offers real-time data pipelines and data analytics dashboards. The organizations's central product set includes Qlik Sense, an AI-fuelled data analytics platform service with interactive dashboards that also offers 'guided analytics' to align users towards a standard business process or workflow. QlikView is a business intelligence service with dynamic dashboards and reports - and Qlik Data Integration (the clue is in the name) for data integration and data quality controls with a web-based user interface that support both on-premises and cloud deployments. Qlik champions end-to-end data capabilities, that means the tools here extend from the raw data ingestion stage all the way through to so-called 'actionable insights' (that term data analytics vendors swoon over), which are now underpinned and augmented by a new set of AI services. The company's AI-enhanced analytics and self-service AI services enable users to build customized AI models, which help identify key drivers and trends in their data. Not as historically dominant in open source code community contribution involvement as some others (although a keen advocate of open data and open APIs, with news on open source Apache Iceberg updates in the wings) Qlik has been called out for its pricing structure complexity. From a wider perspective, the company's associative engine and its more unified approach to both data analytics and data integration (plus its self-service analytics capabilities) are probably the factors that set it apart. 'Qlik's analytics-centric origins and methodical, iterative portfolio development has made it the BI platform for data geeks and data scientists alike, but thankfully hasn't made it overly conservative. The company has accelerated its product strategy in the past four years, adding data quality with the Talend acquisition and 'AI for BI' with the AutoML acquisition (originally Big Squid). These, plus modernization capabilities for customers who need it - Qlik Sense for accessibility to broader user bases, Qlik Cloud for an as-a-Service model… and the tools to migrate to them, make Qlik worth watching in today's increasingly data-driven and visualization-driven, AI-empowered enterprise market,' explained Guy Currier, a technology analyst at the Futurum Group. Looking to extend its data platform proposition right now, Qlik Open Lakehouse is a new and fully-managed Apache Iceberg solution built into Qlik Talend Cloud. As explained here, a data lakehouse combines the structure, management and querying capabilities of a data warehouse, with the low-cost benefits of a data lake. Apache Iceberg is an open source format technology for managing large datasets in data lakes with data consistency. Designed for enterprises under pressure to scale faster, the company says its Qlik Open Lakehouse delivers real-time ingestion, automated optimization and multi-engine interoperability. 'Performance and cost should no longer be a tradeoff in modern data architectures,' said Mike Capone, CEO of Qlik. 'With Qlik Open Lakehouse, enterprises gain real-time scale, full control over their data and the freedom to choose the tools that work best for them. We built this to meet the demands of AI and analytics at enterprise scale and without compromise.' Capone has detailed the company's progression when talking to press and analysts this month. He explained that for many years, Qlik has been known for its visual data analytics services and indeed, the organization still gets customer wins on that basis. 'But a lot has happened in recent times and the conversation with users has really come around to gravitate on data with a more concerted focus. With data quality [spanning everything from deduplication to analysis tools to validate the worth of a team's data model] being an essential part of that conversation - and the old adage of garbage in, garbage out still very much holding true - the icing on the cake for us was the Talend acquisition [for its data integration, quality and governance capabilities] because customers cleary found it really expensive to cobble all the parts of their data estate together. Now we can say that all the component parts of our own technology proposition come together with precision-engineered fit and performance characteristics better than ever before,' said Capone. Keen to stress the need for rationalized application of technologies so that the right tool is used for the appropriate job, Capone says that the Qlik platform enables users to custom align services for specific tasks i.e. software engineering and data management teams need not use a super-expensive compute function when the use case is suited to a more lightweight set of functions. He also notes that the company's application of agentic AI technology pervades 'throughout the entire Qlik platform'; this means that not only can teams use natural language queries to perform business intelligence and business integration tasks, they can also ask questions in natural language related to data quality to ensure an organization's data model's veracity, timeliness and relevance is also on target. But does he really mean any data tool openness in a way that enables customers the 'freedom to choose the tools' that work best for them? 'Absolutely. If a company wants to use some Tableau, some Informatica and some Tibco, then we think they should be able to work with all those toolsets and also deploy with us at whatever level works for the business to be most successful. Obviously I'm going to tell you that those customers will naturally gravitate to use more Qlik as they experience our functionality and cost-performance advantage without being constrained by vendor lock-in, but that's how good technology should work,' underlined Capone. Freedom to choose your own big data tools and analytics engines sounds appealing, but why do organizations need this scope and does it just introduce complexity from a management perspective? David Navarro, data domain architect at Toyota Motor Europe, thinks this is 'development worth keenly watching' right now. This is because large corporations like his need interoperability between different (often rather diverse) business units and between different partners, each managing its own technology stack with different data architects, different data topographies and all with their own data sovereignty stipulations. 'Apache Iceberg is emerging as the key to zero-copy data sharing across vendor-independent lakehouses and Qlik's commitment to delivering performance and control in these complex, dynamic landscapes is precisely what the industry requires,' said Navarro, when asked to comment on this recent product news. Qlik tells us that all these developments are an evolution of modern data architectures in this time of AI adoption. It's a period where the company says that the cost and rigidity of traditional data warehouses have become unsustainable. Qlik Open Lakehouse offers a different path i.e. it is a fully managed lakehouse architecture powered by Apache Iceberg to offer 2.5x–5x faster query performance and up to 50% lower infrastructure costs. The company says that it achieves this while maintaining full compatibility with the most widely used analytics and machine learning engines. Qlik Open Lakehouse is built for scale, flexibility and performance… and it combines real-time ingestion, intelligent optimization and ecosystem interoperability in a single, fully managed platform. Capabilities here include real-time ingestion at enterprise scale, so (for example) a customer could ingest millions of records per second from hundreds of sources (e.g. cloud apps, SaaS, ERP suites and mainframes and plug that data directly into Iceberg tables with low latency and high throughput. Qlik's Adaptive Iceberg Optimizer handles compaction, clustering and 'pruning' (removing irrelevant, redundant and often low-value data from a dataset) automatically, with no tuning required. Users can access data in Iceberg tables using a variety of Iceberg-compatible engines without replatforming or reprocessing, including Snowflake, Amazon Athena, Apache Spark, Trino and SageMaker. 'Although clearly fairly proficient in across a number of disciplines including data integration, analytics and data quality controls, one of the challenges of Qlik and similar platforms is the limited scope for truly advanced analytics capabilities," said Jerry Yurchisin, senior data science strategist at Gurobi, a company known for its mathematical optimization decision intelligence technology. 'This can mean that users have to take on extra configuration responsibilities or make use of an extended set of third-party tools. Data scientists, programmers, analysts and others really want one place to do all of their work, so it's important for all platforms to move in that direction. This starts with data integrity, visualization and all parts of the analytics spectrum - not just descriptive and predictive, but also prescriptive - which is arguably the holy grail for data management at this level.' Director of research, analytics and data at ISG Software Research, Matt Aslett spends a lot of time analyzing data lakehouse architectures in a variety of cloud computing deployment scenarios. He suggests that products like Qlik Open Lakehouse, which use open standards such as Apache Iceberg, are 'well-positioned' to meet the growing demand for real-time data access and multi-engine interoperability. 'This enables enterprises to harness the full potential of their data for AI and analytics initiatives," said Aslett. 'As AI workloads demand faster access to broader, fresher datasets, open formats like Apache Iceberg are becoming the new foundation. Qlik Open Lakehouse responds to this shift by making it effortless to build and manage Iceberg-based architectures, without the need for custom code or pipeline babysitting. It also runs within the customer's own AWS environment, ensuring data privacy, cost control and full operational visibility. In line with what currently appears to drive every single enterprise technology vendor's roadmap bar none, Qlik has also tabled new agentic AI functions in its platform this year. Here we find a conversational interface designed to give users an evenue to 'interact naturally' with data. If none of us can ever claim to have had a real world natural data interaction, in this case the term refers to data exploration with the Qlik engine to uncover indexed relationships across data. The agentic functions on offer work across Qlik Cloud platform and so offer data integration, data quality and analytics. It's all about giving businesspeople a more intuitive visibility into data analytics for decision making. Also new are an expanded set of capabilities in Qlik Cloud Analytics. These include functions to detect anomalies, forecast complex trends, prepare data faster and take action through what the company calls 'embedded decision workflows' today. 'While organizations continue to invest heavily in AI and data, most still struggle to turn insight into impact. Dashboards pile up, but real-time execution remains elusive. Only 26% of enterprises have deployed AI at scale and fewer still have embedded it into operational workflows. The problem isn't access to static intelligence, it's the ability to act on it. Dashboards aren't decision engines and predictive models alone won't prevent risk or drive outcomes. What businesses need is intelligence that anticipates, explains, and enables action without added tools, delays, or friction. Discovery agent, multivariate time series forecasting, write table, and table recipe work in concert to solve a singular problem: how to move from fragmented insight to seamless execution, at scale,' said the company, in a product statement that promises to target 'critical enterprise bottlenecks' and close the gap between data and decisions. The data integration, data quality, data analytics and AI-powered data services market continues to expand, but we can perhaps pick up on some defining trends here. An alignment towards essentially open source technologies, protocols and standards is key, especially in a world of open cloud-native Kubernetes. Provision of self-service functionalities is also fundamental, whether they manifest themselves as developer self-service tools or as 'citizen user' abstractions that allow businesspeople to use deep tech… or both. A direct embrace of AI-driven services is, of course, a prerequisite now, as is the ability to provide more unified technology services (all firms have too many enterprise apps… and they know it) that work across as wide an end-to-end transept as is physically and technically possible. Qlik is getting a lot of that right, but no single vendor in this space can get everything absolutely comprehensively perfected it seems, so there will always be a need for data integration, even across and between the data integration space.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
'Young, fit' Pembrokeshire man opens up on shock cancer battle
A man has opened up about his testicular cancer battle and the importance of early detection ahead of Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. Neil Thomas, from Lawrenny, was living in Doha, Qatar, when he discovered a lump at the age of 35. The lump in his testicle was confirmed to be a tumour the day after he discovered it, in April 2019. Within seven days he had surgery to remove his left testicle. Neil said: "It was all very quick and they followed it (the surgery) up with two rounds of chemo due to a biopsy revealing it was the fast-growing cell and they were worried it had spread. (Image: Movember Institute of Men's Health) "There was trauma and worry for me, my wife and my family. "It was something we dealt with, not easily, but a positive outset helped - it was tough. "You don't forget it, particularly those first four weeks and I really struggled to process what was happening, I was worried all the time." His mother had encouraged him and his brother to do self-checks after she experienced breast cancer but Neil was unaware that testicular cancer tends to be a young man's disease. He said: "It effecting young men is super important as that was the biggest shock for me. "In my head, cancer was something that happens later in life and doesn't happen to relatively fit young men. (Image: Movember Institute of Men's Health) "I would advise people to get any concerns checked out ASAP. "Finding it early allowed it to be treated swiftly and not allow it to spread." Neil is not alone in his surprise, with Movember's 2024 survey showing that 61 per cent of young men claim not to know that their age group is at risk. The report also shows that 17 per cent of young men feel unsure about how to check their testicles, and 15 per cent never do. When asked why participants would not see a doctor if they found something abnormal, 18 per cent cited concerns it may be something more serious. Professor Simon Rice, global director of the Movember Institute of Men's Health, said: "Testicular Cancer Awareness Month is about taking control of your health. "The simplest action that young men can take is to get to know their nuts. "That way, if they notice any changes over time, they can get it checked by a doctor. "When caught early, testicular cancer is highly treatable." Movember is encouraging more men to 'Know Thy Nuts', a simple life-saving habit that helps men get familiar with what's normal and what to do if something feels off, so that they can act fast if something changes. A recent survey found that 84 per cent of visitors to the guide feel more confident about performing self-checks.
South China Morning Post
11-03-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
‘Two sessions' 2025 key takeaways: insights into China's economic strategy
Date and time: Thursday, March 13, 2025 | 8pm HKT Advertisement The webinar will be available on March 14, 2025, on this page and will be accessible to all logged-in readers. Please bookmark this page or add the event to your calendar to access it. The meetings of China's top legislature and advisory body opened on March 5 with the country facing economic uncertainty at home and heightened geopolitical tensions abroad. The annual gathering – collectively referred to as the 'two sessions' – provides an opportunity to gain critical insight into the nation's direction for the coming year and beyond. To give readers a better understanding of how China's leaders are addressing the country's challenges, the SCMP newsroom will partner with the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis to host a webinar delving into the key takeaways from the sessions and their impact on the economic landscape, politics and international relations, particularly with the United States. Joining us will be Neil Thomas, fellow on Chinese politics, and Lizzi Lee, fellow on the Chinese economy, both from the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis. Together with our moderator, SCMP Executive Editor Chow Chung-yan, they will discuss the significant aspects and outcomes of the two sessions. Advertisement Our panel will explore the following topics:
