Matt Wright: It's time to cap the interest rates charged by doorstep lenders

Cllr Matt Wright is a ConservativeHome regular and our candidate in the Vale of Clywd.

Every year the Government number crunches a set of socio-economic factors and comes up with a financial league table of wards. The Vale of Clwyd spans the full economic spectrum from grand mansions with long gravel drives to pockets of grinding poverty sadly unchanged for over a decade. As the economic malaise bites more people are feeling the pinch. The west ward of Rhyl has the unfortunate label of being the most deprived ward in Wales and one of the most deprived wards in Britain. On paper the figures look worrying, on the ground the human story can be worse.

Now there are many reasons for the problems experienced in such wards and the work facilitated by Iain Duncan-Smith and undertaken by the Centre for Social Justice has highlighted the issues and some of the solutions. What I would like to address is an issue that I believe casts a shadow on one of the key values we all share about our nation - a sense of fair play. We are all aware of the growth of debt and the pressures it has put on the majority of us. Yet too many are unaware of a much darker side to debt.

Some of the fastest growing and most profitable financial companies today are doorstep lenders. In this country they are entirely legal and yet morally they are barely one step from being described as "loan sharks". They swim in seas that are spreading wider than the most deprived wards and they prey on misery. Currently door step lenders can legally charge massive interest rates that would be illegal in other parts of the world except it seems under the current UK Govt of 2008.

Cllr Matt Wright: South Africa's difficult democratic journey

Cllr Matt Wright, PPC for the Vale of Clwyd, comments on recent political developments in South Africa following a visit to the region.

Our trip to the austere and evocative Apartheid Museum in Jo'burg was delayed by the increasing number of power cuts which cause traffic chaos and exasperate businesses. I strongly recommend anyone to visit the musuem (funded as a planning gain arrangement with a casino of all things) if they wish to understand the diverse currents that flow through the South African psyche. Africa is about huge contrasts, something you see in the scenery, the society and the politics. The struggle for freedom expressed in the museum is very moving and challenging and it highlights just how apartheid was a doomed way of thinking. There are also diverse currents that run through this story and much that the centre-right can draw from it. I was struck by the central importance of individualism, normally scorned by the left here in Europe but to those denied rights, so obviously at the core of their human identity, dignity and freedom. At the other end of the scale there were the huge international power shifts that created the backdrop to the story. Less obvious elements emerged from this as critical turning points, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall - with the communist threat beginning to dry up in Africa there was a window of opportunity for change.

Matt Wright: Localism as a new Unionism?

Cllr Matt Wright, candidate for Vale of Clwyd, argues that England should learn from Wales and devolve more powers to a local level rather than having national or regional assemblies.

Any assessment of what we should do next with the botched state of the Union should begin with the people of the Union. The debate goes far beyond just the West Lothian question or the Barnett formula. We have a duty as a responsible party to rise above the partisan games that characterised Labour devolution plans and ultra-nationalist responses.

Nurses, teachers and policemen are weighed down by state interference and target chasing; councils and their constituents are both, paradoxically, frustrated - subject to the same Stalinist control from the centre, as nurses, teachers and bobbies. Communities feel powerless to do quite simple things and voters are increasingly alienated. These conditions exist across the Union and in each constituent parts of the Union under London, Cardiff and Holyrood. The great irony is the degree to which all levels from Community Councillors, County Councillors, AMs, MPs through to MEPs, are all running around chasing similar issues and feeling frustrated that they can't really deliver the solutions they would like to see.