Plaid Cymru councillors to boycott King’s visit – branding it undemocratic and won’t “fawn at an unelected head of state with seven mansions”

Plaid Cymru councillors say they have chosen not to attend the city status celebration featuring King Charles.

Wrexham.com understands all councillors on Wrexham Council received an invite to the civic event tomorrow.

As we reported earlier King Charles III and The Queen Consort will attend a short service led by Revd. Jason Bray in St Giles’ , during which The King will formally mark the conferral of City status on Wrexham and make a short speech.

Plaid Cymru group leader Marc Jones said: “Our focus right now is supporting local people and small businesses through this difficult cost-of-living crisis. We didn’t feel that an elite celebration of city status, which many people locally did not support, featuring a man with enough personal wealth to pay everyone’s rip-off energy bills was the right focus now.

“We have a housing crisis in Wrexham and beyond, yet we’re expecting to fawn at an unelected head of state with seven mansions. Sorry, we cannot be hypocrites.

“It’s a massive distraction at a time when we need a laser-like focus on the real problems facing the people of Wrexham. There has also been a secretive approach to this royal visit with opposition councillors not being informed while Tory councillors were kept in the loop. That’s not democratic, but then nothing about this event is democratic.

“We’ll continue to work to improve things locally and make sure the council focusses on providing good services, value for money and improving the county borough.”

Cllr Jones added that one of Plaid’s group was attending due to his role in the voluntary sector: “As a group, we were united in our opposition to attending as councillors and we’re fully behind the excellent work done by Cllr Pete Howell as chair of AVOW, the umbrella organisation for the voluntary sector.”

Top pic: St Giles’ is the venue for the event tomorrow.