This is an unplanned ‘quickie’ that I want to get out while the humour is on me and before I lose the details. It also needs to be said before the ‘Welsh Government’s campaign goes any further.
◊
‘FAR RIGHT’ SUPPORT
I’m going to start by looking at a piece from the BBC Wales website a few days ago. Written by an S4C reporter it worried that the farmers’ campaign against the ‘Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) was being exploited by far right elements with hidden agendas.
The article even provided a photograph of the ogress Katie Hopkins. Whatever one may think of her (and I don’t think about her at all) I suggest she’s rather too public to have anything hidden.
But just mentioning her name is guaranteed to get the comrades hyperventilating, and finger-pointing. Though providing a picture as well may have got a few spluttering to a point where their mams would have been seriously concerned.
(Unless of course they were out. Then it might be a three-day wait for an ambulance.)
As I say, the report was written by a journalist from state-funded S4C. And by pure coincidence, one of the two farmers quoted has a gig with the same broadcaster! The other farmer had a beef with something Price had said about the Welsh language.
The farmer with the S4C job was quoted:
A responsible government will listen. Because no government’s role is to make the life of its citizens more difficult
But this is Wales. The ‘Welsh Government’ only listens to, and is then directed by, pressure groups and other fanatics. If S4C wants to find ‘hidden agendas’ then that’s where it needs to look.
If you want proof just look at who’s on the Active Travel Board, plotting to get private cars off the roads of Wales – three cycling organisations, plus Sustrans!
Which of those lycra-clad wankers is supposed to speak for me?
I don’t believe that ‘farmers’ fear the wrong kind of support. They’re sensible enough to spot it. What I know a number of them really fear is a black propaganda campaign being mounted against them using ‘far right’ accusations.
And that’s exactly what this story was all about. It was a contrived and distasteful attempt to discredit the farmer’s protests using the most tenuous connection with somebody the left despises.
◊
LE PETIT TRIANON SUR ELWY?
The next report I’m going to use came out last night. Again, on the BBC website, and it actually says ‘climate change’ in the headline. (So there’s no arguing, right!)
There were two journalists involved. Erin Sharrocks Lister is yet another English journalist taken on by BBC Wales, with Eirian Jones presumably serving as her native guide on this assignment.
(Unnecessary doubling up, and you’re paying for it.)
On a superficial level this story was about a farming family – Alex and Sam Kenyon – that had coped, in a very nature-friendly way, with increased flooding of their land caused by climate change. But so many buttons were being pressed in this story that it soon became a dizzying whirl of digits.
For example, we read:
With advice from Natural Resources Wales and the Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN), Sam discovered a method to preserve the riverbanks
Can you not see the cavalry coming over the hill and splashing through the flood plain? What a sight it was!
Sam then consulted her notes from Lesley Griffiths, and we read:
Sam said she was very determined to show nature-based solutions were practical and can benefit farmed landscapes and their biodiversity, especially in the face of climate change
And on consulting the instructions he’d received from Lesley (and Gary?), Phil Carson, head of policy at NFFN, said:
We need government schemes that reward farmers to take these actions, alongside the right training, advice and support for farmers to embrace them with confidence
You know me, I got to wondering about Alex and Sam Kenyon.
I quickly found the website for Glanllyn farm. On it, Sam Kenyon describes herself as a “goat servant“. I don’t know any genuine Welsh farmer that would use a phrase like that. Come to that, I don’t think I know any genuine Welsh farmers that keep goats.
After starting the business in 2016, she built the farm up from scratch on land that her husband, Alex, inherited from his family
I don’t wish to be too critical, for I see the name Hanmer in Alex’s bloodline. But the fact remains, the Tyrell-Kenyons are not representative of Welsh farmers.
Perhaps a generous interpretation might be the one I allude to in the section heading. That of Marie-Antoinette playing a shepherdess at her ‘cottage’ in the grounds of Versailles.
Whether Sam Kenyon knew she was being used to push a policy deeply unpopular with real farmers, I just don’t know. But we’ll leave it there.
◊
‘PSST, WANNA HEAR SOME MISINFORMATION?’
Not a lot of people know this, but the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ uses a private company as a propaganda unit, to push its message and slander its opponents. And of course, this is done with your money.
The company I’m referring to is Lynn. It seems to have begun with Lynn Group Ltd. Though another company formed more recently is Lynn Global Ltd. The deadline for submitting the first accounts for Lynn Global is March 20.
The sole director of both companies is Shayoni Sarkar Lynn.
‘BS’ in the make-believe world of ‘nudge’ units stands for ‘behavioural science’. And that, in practice, means getting people to accept what their better judgement tells them is the other kind of BS.
In other words, and as George Orwell put it in 1984:
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command
Which means that Lynn Global serves as the ‘Welsh Government’s Ministry of Truth. But instead of a questioning Winston Smith we find an enthusiastic Stefan Rollnick.
Though since he starred on this blog, Stefan’s presence on Linkedin has disappeared. Fortunately, I saved it ere it drifted off into the ether, for both posterity and your delectation. Here it is.
The briefest perusal of Rollnick’s background makes it clear that he’s Labour through and through. Which makes his job of defending the shower in Corruption Bay and slagging off their opponents almost instinctive.
What’s striking is that the term “far-right” is used a dozen times in this relatively short article. “Conspiracy” is there six times. But nowhere do we see ‘far-left’. What does this tell us . . . apart from the fact that it’s a bit of a leftist rant?
Well, on one level, we have a website funded by the ‘Welsh Government’ putting out BS from another outfit funded by Drakeford and his crew. (Will you miss him?) So no surprises there.
But as I suggest, there is a dangerously ideological – and therefore divisive – edge to everything put out by the ‘Welsh Government’, or by Lynn, BBC and other mouthpieces.
◊
CONCLUSION
The message we are being force-fed is that the ‘goodies’ of the Globalist-Green-Left are trying to save the planet, but are being opposed by the wicked ‘far-right’, and these villains are now manipulating farmers protests.
Come on, this is pure pantomime.
Why would I, a creature of the rational and reasoning right, a man who has loved nature all his life; who has children, grandchildren (and soon, great-grandchildren), want to destroy nature and the planet on which we all live?
It makes no sense.
What does make sense is a man who’s been around a bit, studied human nature, known quite a few con men (friends, some of them), many liars, a few sociopaths, understands how politics and control operate, and recognises a dirty campaign when he sees it.
And so I’ve put out this unplanned and rather hasty post to warn people that there are dangerous and unscrupulous actors pushing the ‘Welsh Government’s message.
They are prepared to lie, to vilify decent people, and to do just about anything to promote their agenda. So be warned!
And remember! Behavioural science and bullshit have the same initials, and they amount to the same thing.
And that’s where you’ll find the true ‘hidden agendas’.
In this piece I’ll explain that the ‘Welsh Government”s Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) is just the latest in a long series of attacks on the Welsh family farm, and all that that means.
The SFS demands that 10% of every farm be given over to trees, with a further 10% to ‘habitat’. Many farms will become unprofitable. Which is the whole point of the SFS – to release more land for other uses.
Today’s piece is bigger than others I’ve put out recently, some 3,400 words; but it’s broken up into sections, so take it a chunk at a time.
◊
2008: ONE WALES: ONE PLANET
I’ve chosen to start in May 2008 with the publication One Wales: One Planet. Sub-titled, ‘The Sustainable Development Scheme of the Welsh Assembly Government’. You’ll find a revealing extract below.
Let’s look at the first bullet point. Who decides Wales’s “environmental limits“? Who calculates our “fair share of the Earth’s resources“? Who measures our “ecological footprint“? (I’m a size 9.) And how can anyone work out, “the global average availability of resources“.
This is the kind of gobbledegook you can only get away with when you live a very sheltered life, mixing only with others in your bubble.
The final paragraph (below, my emphasis) leaves us in no doubt that everything that’s done in Wales from now on will be predicated on the belief that human beings are killing the planet.
To achieve this, sustainable development (the process that leads to Wales becoming a sustainable nation) will be the central organising principle of the Welsh Assembly Government, and we will encourage and enable others to embrace sustainable development as their central organising principle.
But as I’ve explained, there’s something more sinister behind it all. Which is not to say that those pushing the nonsense don’t believe it, I’m sure many of them do. But there are also many who go along with it because it’s become the accepted wisdom of the circles in which they mix.
Before I forget, chapter 8 is headed: ‘The Wellbeing of Wales’. (Now there’s a clue!)
The administration at the time was a Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition, and to jog your memory, here’s a cabinet group photo. The minister for environment and sustainability was Jane Davidson.
◊
2010: TECHNICAL ADVICE NOTE 6, ONE PLANET DEVELOPMENTS
July of 2010 brought joy unbounded with the announcement that hippy encampments, thrown up illegally (but with a nod and a wink from Corruption Bay), were now to be legitimised
Making TAN 6 little more than a general amnesty, or granting retrospective planning approval.
Dressed up as ‘sustainable living’, ‘self-sufficiency’, and God knows what else, they were in reality just a way around planning regulations for hippies and others to build ugly shacks in open country.
There were conditions attached, of course, not least, being able to prove that these impositions were to some degree self-sufficient . . . but nobody ever checks.
Interestingly, OPDs came to the notice of the World Economic Forum, which exposed the fundamental contradiction by urging people to move to Wales.
For OPDs were justified by arguing they’d reduce Wales’ carbon footprint. But this could only happen if local people moved out of traditional dwellings into OPD shacks. That never happened.
Instead, people moved from England to previously unused land . . . where they kept farting animals, burned wood, and drove old diesel vehicles; so that by these and other means increased Wales’ carbon footprint.
In a recent publication I noticed that DEI had been added to the chicken entrails in the voodoo stew. This news came from Sophie Howe herself, just before she stepped down as Future Generations Commission in 2022:
I am pleased to see the emphasis given to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, a key component of sustainability . . .
But despite the posturing, OPDs remain exclusively English, White, middle class.
◊
2011 OCTOBER: ALUN DAVIES AND ORGANIC ARABLE FARMING
Then there was the plan to help farmers go organic.
Alun Davies, deputy minister of agriculture, announced that priority would be given to arable farmers, and those converting to arable farming . . . in a country where climate and topography dictate that livestock farming will dominate.
But let’s not be picky, for I’m sure this news was welcomed in the pomegranate groves of Pembrokeshire and the broccoli orchards enhancing the Vale of Clwyd, but it offered sod all to most Welsh farmers.
This initiative might reveal the growing vegan influence. For these had been brought in from the fringes to serve the Globalists’ plan to eliminate livestock farming and take control of the land and the food supply.
◊
2013 DECEMBER: ALUN DAVIES AND HIS TWO-PILLAR TRICK
The above date was when Alun Davies, now farm minister, announced that funding from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Pillar 1 (direct payment to farmers) would be moved to Pillar 2 (‘other rural activities’).
Davies could have transferred anything up to 15%. Almost inevitably, he opted for the full whack. Defending the decision by saying Pillar 1 should not be seen as a “never-ending subsidy“.
To understand Alun Davies, and the socialist attitude to farming, here’s an outburst from him in October 2014.
The former minister in the Labour ‘Welsh Assembly Government’ (for he was sacked in July 2014) rails against ‘subsidies’; yet his administration had built up a vast third sector of cronies – all living off public funding!
And things have got worse, for now the ‘Welsh Government’ throws millions of pounds at Sustrans, Stonewall, wildlife trusts, and other pressure groups.
Clearly, in the eyes of Labour politicians there’s nothing wrong with subsidies per se, it all depends who’s getting them.
2015: WELL-BEING OF FUTURE GENERATIONS (WALES) ACT
This legislation was a long time in the planning, but we know who wrote it.
For this article from Sustainable Brands (scroll down) tells us it was Jane Davidson, who we met earlier as the minister for environment and sustainability in the 2007 – 2011 Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition.
The article also says Davidson, ” . . . had her damascene moment at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992“. But I don’t buy that.
For at the time she was a researcher for Labour MP for Cardiff West, Rhodri Morgan, who of course went on to become first minister of the Assembly. So was she representing him, or the Labour party, at Rio?
I think she’d already had her ‘damascene moment’, and she was there as one of the converted.
When she became Assembly Member for Pontypridd in 1999 Ponty was her ticket to more power and influence to push the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) narrative.
The significance of the Well-being Act is that, as was hinted in One Wales: One Planet in 2008, all other considerations must be subordinated to fighting the so-called ‘climate crisis’.
And this being the socialist hell that is Wales, the Act introduced yet more pointless bureaucracy and more opportunities for virtue signalling, with Public Services Boards for each of our 22 local authorities. (Yes, that’s right, 22 local authorities for a country of 3.2 million people.)
Perhaps the real lesson Wales could teach the world is how to bring a country to its knees. For this is the Globalist plan for the West.
The politicians and their pet parasites who achieved this resent giving money to farmers and others, who actually work, and produce necessities.
◊
2016 SEPTEMBER: START OF NVZ ‘CONSULTATION’
A Nitrate Vulnerable Zone (NVZ) is, according to the ‘Welsh Government’, “an area of land draining into ground or surface waters that are currently high in nitrate, or may become so if appropriate actions are not taken“.
It had always been accepted there was a problem, but it had also been understood that the problem was very localised, and seemed to be associated with dairy cattle.
The map above, produced by Natural Resources Wales (NRW), shows that Water Framework Directive (WFD) catchment areas covering some 90% of the country reported 0 – 4 incidents in the period 01.01.2010 to 01.01.2016.
The problem was clearly very localised.
Which is why NRW suggested increasing the area covered by NVZ legislation from 2.4% (750 farm holdings) to 8%. But, and here I quote from:
The (now) Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs, Lesley Griffiths, responded to the consultation replies a year later, in December 2017. She said she was “minded to introduce a whole Wales approach”.
Truth is, that had been the plan all along.
As an example of politicians going out of their way to make life more difficult for farmers – because of course there would be more expense and increased form-filling – the handling of NVZ legislation would be difficult to surpass.
This is how NFU Cymru described it:
As things stand, the ‘Welsh Government’ has been forced to be marginally less vindictive. With slightly less punitive measures being introduced in stages, the next due in August.
Wales voted to leave the European Union 23 June 2016.
That is, the people voted to leave. The political class was outraged at the stupidity of the hoi polloi. The media agreed. While the ever-multiplying legions of third sector parasites were aghast at the thought of losing such a lucrative funding stream.
In response the ‘Welsh Government’ produced ‘Brexit and our Land‘. Wherein we read (page 3) what was to replace the CAP.
But how can it talk of “food production” when we know Labour’s attitude towards farmers? While the reference to timber did not mean developing a genuine timber industry, it referred to what I’m now going to highlight.
Idly flicking through the annual accounts of Stoke engineering firm Goodwin Plc the other night I found this, on page 17.
The site of this enviro-colonialism is north west of Llanwrtyd. But it’s happening all over Wales.
This is how it works: Land is bought and trees are planted by investors like Goodwin, who will own the land, the trees, and the carbon they capture. This carbon can not be included in Wales’ carbon inventory.
Which means that outside investors could buy up 50% of Welsh land, make billions from carbon capture, none of which would contribute to Wales’ national figure (or economy) – and the ‘Welsh Government’ would pay them to do it!
The rest of rural Wales, and the post-industrial areas, will be surrendered to foreign-owned wind farms whose owners will dole out beads and blankets to the desperate inhabitants of doomed communities.
And it’s all built on a scam, for carbon is no threat to the environment.
As for “Public Goods“, this is a phrase picked up from the bad company Welsh politicians keep. It can mean whatever the person using it wants it to mean.
Just think of it as bollocks; usually delivered in Estuary English.
◊
2018 AUGUST: SUMMIT TO SEA
This project links with Brexit, and the publication you read about in the previous section. It’s ‘environmentalists’ seeking to capitalise on the new reality to grab a huge swathe of Welsh land.
The project began before the date I’ve just given, but I used that date because it’s the first time I mentioned the project on this blog. Click here and scroll down to the section ‘Re-wilding’.
In essence, a number of individuals and organisations came together and hatched a plan to requisition 10,000 hectares, from Pumlumon up to the Dyfi estuary, and out to sea for a few miles.
Below you’ll see two maps. The one on the left was produced by those behind the project; the one on the right tells us who’s really behind it. But I’m not sure who produced the second.
Admittedly, this was not a ‘Welsh Government’ policy . . . but I believe those involved had discussions with politicians and civil servants, and had been assured that Brexit could be the excuse used to withhold or ‘redirect’ farm subsidies.
Those involved were so confident of success, so arrogant, that they saw no need to engage with those whose land they wanted to appropriate. For it was a done deal.
Among the partners with Rewilding Britain was the Woodland Trust (WT). Here is Natalie Buttriss of the WT being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today in October 2018. And she plays the admonishing memsahib for all she’s worth.
Summit to Sea met its Waterloo at a public meeting in Talybont, north of Aberystwyth on 31 July 2019, when locals made their feelings unmistakably clear to even the thick-skinned individuals involved.
Partners such as Ecodyfi and Rewilding Britain soon withdrew, and the project was then taken over by the RSPB. The organisation that cares so much for birds, but has no issue with bird-killing wind turbines. (I wonder how much that silence costs.)
The Woodland Trust is still taking over Welsh land to plant trees and profit from the carbon capture scam you read about earlier. But all done of course to save the planet.
Summit to Sea was an attempt by ‘environmentalists’ and ‘conservationists’ to grab Welsh farmland using the threat of subsidy withdrawal. So it’s no surprise to learn that many see the Sustainable Farming Scheme as Summit to Sea repackaged.
◊
LATE 2018: TIT-BITS
In September, Lesley Griffiths, Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs, was in Frisco, at a UN bunfight giving business leaders a chance to impress politicians from the sub-national level.
A month later the Daily Post produced this article in which farmers accused wildlife groups of lying about bio-diversity loss in order to grab farm funding. I include it because it introduces an important new tactic into the ‘Welsh Government’s war on farmers.
Hoping to hide the source of the attacks the Corruption Bay establishment was now funding wildlife trusts and other groups to do the dirty work. I wrote about this just last month, in Wildlife Trusts, Crazy Money, Hidden Agendas.
Quoted in the DP article was Katie-Jo Luxton of the RSPB:
Writing in today’s Daily Post, RSPB Cymru director Katie-jo Luxton said it was in farming’s interest to work with wildlife groups – and take what’s being offered.
Only by doing this can the industry justify its receipt of taxpayers’ money, she said. Otherwise the industry risks losing out in the post-Brexit scramble for public funding.
That sounds like dialogue from a very bad Mob movie! “Dis is da best deal ya gonna get, Louie, take it – if ya knows what’s good for ya!”
Also note, another reference to “taxpayers’ money“, and “the post-Brexit scramble for public funding“. They’re all reading from the same script.
Having pissed off many, many people, Luxton left the RSPB towards the end of 2021 and joined BirdLife International.
In four years between 2018 and 2022 BirdLife’s income shot up from £22 million to over £40 million. Another indicator of how governments and corporations are using wildlife groups and conservationists to undermine agriculture globally.
Wildlife trusts here saw their income more than double between 2019 and 2022. But income from ‘Welsh Government’ grants and contracts rocketed from £769,310 to £6,821,800 in the same period.
As might be expected, planting trees and making life even more difficult for farmers figured big in this mercifully short document.
The reality is that despite all the grandstanding, no other country on this doomed planet has allowed OPDs, created the useless post of Future Generations Commission, or declared a climate emergency.
There’s a message there.
◊
2019 OCTOBER: ‘WALES MAY BE A SMALL NATION . . . ‘
Among the world-renowned climate experts attending was “ITV weather presenter Ruth Wignall“. Further down we read:
For every attendee at the conference a tree will also be planted in Mbale, Eastern Uganda, as part of the Welsh Government’s Wales for Africa programme.
Farmer Nimrod Wambette, from Mbale, will speak at the conference about how his home region is already feeling the impacts of climate change.
After enjoying an expenses-paid trip to Cardiff and a bit of pocket money Nimrod could be guaranteed to stick to the script.
It’s just more of the same, a rather sad and desperate combination of hyperbole and hysteria for which, in kinder and saner times, people would have received treatment. But what really caught my eye was this sentence:
Representatives from Extinction Rebellion will be attending to share some of their ideas about how we should be responding to the climate emergency
This new legislation is designed to increase the influence of ‘environmentalists’ and ‘conservationists’ over Welsh farming. How do I know? Because the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) takes credit for influencing it.
We launched and led a successful campaign to help put the climate and nature emergencies at the core of the new Agriculture (Wales) Bill. Through a survey of rural Wales, an open letter signed by more than 50 organisations, a petition and more, WWF Cymru’s Land of Our Future/Gwlad Ein Dyfodol campaign advocated for agroecology to be central to the bill
Those experts on Welsh farming, the British Mountaineering Council, signed the WWF petition . . . but our farming unions did not.
And so we come to the Sustainable Farming Scheme, for which ‘consultations’ end on Thursday. Though I suspect that, as with NVZ and other proposals, it’s a done deal.
To leave us in no doubt about Labour’s hatred for farmers Anna McMorrin, (former?) partner of Alun Davies, called hard-working Welsh farmers extremists, climate deniers, and conspiracy theorists in the House of Commons last week.
I could have introduced other examples of the ‘Welsh Government’s contempt, such as the refusal to do anything about bTB . . . other than to order the killing of cattle.
But I’ve given enough clues for you to guess how I see the big picture.
∼
Wildlife and environmental groups, and more recently the ‘Welsh Government’, tell us that 80/90% of Wales’s land is taken up by farming. There’s a reason for that.
By ‘farming’ they mean livestock farming. But it’s not really about farming, it’s about the land used by farming. The talk of farting cows, dirty rivers, biodiversity loss, etc, are the excuses used to destroy farming and to facilitate a land grab.
Land that’s wanted for carbon capture trees and rewilding. Which go together. Can’t have beavers without trees. And almost all the critters planned to be re-introduced are forest dwellers.
UPDATE 05.03.2024: I’ve been sent a pro forma letter that English ‘environmental’ groups have asked members and supporters to submit to the SFS consultation.
In the first line of the second paragraph: ” . . . upwards of 84% of land in Wales managed for farming”. It really chokes them, all this land – and they want it!
This also explains the involvement of vegans, and the backing for organic arable farming. Meat will be an imported luxury item that most of us will be unable to afford. (We’ll be offered insects, and factory-made ‘meat’.)
The countryside of the future will belong to an elite that will justify its advantages, and the restrictions placed on the rest of us, car-less in our 15-minute, constantly-surveiled cities, as being necessary to save the planet.
Having submitted to this cult-agenda, Labour politicians will destroy Welsh farming as we know it. And with it, a culture, a language, and a way of life.
This is a follow-up to last week’s piece on the enviro-shysters blaming farmers for everything wrong with our rivers, and those behind them hoping to get their corporate claws into farmland.
◊
MERGERS
First, let’s make sure you know where our five wildlife trusts are located. On the image below you can also see the difference in the sizes of the areas they cover.
Given the other mergers that have taken place over the years it might be worth asking why Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire didn’t join with Breconshire to form a Powys trust? For until 2018 there was a Brecknockshire Wildlife Trust, but then it merged with the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales.
What had been the Welsh umbrella outfit may even have joined the English body as a separate and individual trust. Certainly, that’s what the website seems to tell us.
When the end came for WTW, the funds were distributed to the five trusts, which makes sense. But I was surprised to see an inrush of grants in the final year.
Why was that, and why couldn’t the money have been given directly to the individual trusts? Finally, what the hell is a ‘Strategic Allocation Grant’?
Anyway, that’s how we got to where we are now, Wales has five wildlife trusts. Also, Wildlife Trusts Wales, existing is some kind of limbo.
◊
WILD THINGS
Let’s stick with finances, which suggest to me that wildlife trusts have recently been ‘repurposed’. Let me try to explain . . .
There seem to be three main sources of income for wildlife trusts: One is donations or legacies, and a bequest of £1,000,000 in 2003 must have helped keep Brecknock afloat for a while.
The others sources are, either the Lottery (which is little more than disguised UK government funding), and grants and contracts from our ‘Welsh Government’. The table below might help.
Amazing figures. While total income for the five trusts increased by 133% between 2019 and 2023, for the same period ‘Welsh Government’ funding went up by 760%.
In fact it was more. I didn’t include Radnorshire because I wasn’t sure how to express that increase as a percentage. Should it be 579,620%?
The big jumps in funding are clearly in Radnorshire and the north. In percentage terms Radnorshire really stands out. But why?
One reason may be that the local trust now has a farm, Pentwyn, which is planned to become ‘Wilder Pentwyn‘. The Trust is well-favoured in Corruption Bay, and gets visits from Minister for Rural Affairs Lesley Griffiths (and Gary?), helping her promote the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS).
The SFS demands that all Welsh farms give over 10% of their land for trees, and a further 10% for ‘wildlife habitat’. Farmers are, understandably, resisting. And things may be coming to the boil.
But it could get worse, for in its latest annual report the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust (RWT) demands that by 2030: ” . . . 30% of land and water in Radnorshire is managed in a way that creates extensive natural habitats for a wide variety of species”.
How will RWT achieve that target in just six years, considering it owns only one farm?
And how much input did RWT have to the Sustainable Farming Scheme?
Here’s an interesting group photograph. Unfortunately, I don’t have a date, but it can’t be that old. We’ll work left to right:
Far left is Martin Wilkie, another environmentalist who’s come to tell us how to look after the country we’ve been looking after for over 2,000 years. Wilkie was with the RWT but has now branched out on his own with Wild Borders Ecology.
Next to him of course is Lesley Griffiths.
In the centre is James Hitchcock, RWT CEO.
To his right is Jenny Chryss, an investigative journalist. I’m told she broke with RWT when the Trust became, as my source put it, “corporate shills“. Chryss now fights Bute’s wind farm plans.
Far right is Rachel Sharp, CEO of Wildlife Trusts Wales (WTW). No friend of farmers, that one.
And talking of WTW, let’s not forget Tim Birch. A few years back he was virtually run out of Derbyshire for his extreme views . . . so he came to Wales, where he was welcomed with open arms by the ‘Welsh Government’.
These are the people deciding the future of rural Wales.
They don’t give a toss about us. For them our country is just one big experiment to see how many of their lunacies our idiot politicians will implement.
What we’ll see with Radnorshire Wildlife Trust at Pentwyn (and with others elsewhere), is that nature reserves will have a few sheep, a couple of cows, a rescued donkey for kiddies to pet – and they’ll be hailed as “the future of farming in Wales“.
In fact, that’s exactly what it says on the website: “A new model farm for the future“.
I believe Radnorshire has been chosen by the ‘Welsh Government’ for a number of ‘initiatives’, and it’s been thrown open to all-comers.
For example, a source drew my attention to Protect Earth, a charity that’s applied for a grant to plant 14,000 trees at Goytre wood, near Knighton. No matter how it’s dressed up, this is just another carbon sequestration scam – and we’ll pay for it!
Rachel Sharp’s LinkedIn page confirms she’s still with WTW, and we know Tim Birch works with her. How many more work for this non-existent outfit?
Seeing as Sharp and Birch serve as the ‘Welsh Government’s attack dogs I’m beginning to wonder if WTW is now ‘in-house’, funded by Lesley Griffiths and her gang.
Here are three questions for The Wildlife Trusts Wales:
What is the legal status of Wildlife Trusts Wales?
Where does the money to run it come from?
Where can I examine the accounts?
◊
WHAT BORDER?
A few years back I was surprised to learn that the Shropshire Hills AONB might be extended into Wales. Here’s one reference from 2019. The article also suggests that the current AONB might be elevated to National Park status.
But if it were to cross the border, where would it go?
To help answer that question I’ve been busy on Photoshop. And when you fit the pieces together it makes a lot of sense, it even ties in with what I described earlier.
On the right in the diptych below we see a tourist map of Shropshire with the AONB shaded in darker green, in the south west. While on the left, I have fitted that map into the wildlife trusts map I used earlier.
Any extension into Wales would affect both Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire, but more so the latter.
Which I’m sure would make Trust CEO James Hitchcock ecstatic. For he is on record as saying: “We’re in the Welsh Marches. The Marches is a mindset and a cultural identity. Nature does not heed boundaries.”
And let’s remember that before crossing the border Hitchcock was CEO of Herefordshire WT. Which presents a puzzle.
When Hitchcock left Herefordshire that trust was pulling down an average of £1.6m a year. By comparison, Radnorshire wasn’t scraping together a third of that. So it could be argued that Hitchcock took a step down when he started his new job 1 February 2021.
Two months after Hitchcock laid out his pens on the CEO’s desk Wildlife Trusts Wales decided to dissolve itself, with the individual trusts joining the English body. Is that just a coincidence?
No.
I believe Hitchcock was recruited to promote the ‘Welsh Government’s agenda. (Maybe a bigger agenda.) And this explains why he and the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust are feted by Lesley Griffiths and other denizens of the Bay.
Yes, I’m flying a kite by theorising on why Hitchcock came to Wales, but extending the Shropshire Hills AONB into Wales came from somewhere else. And it all ties in perfectly with the ‘Wilder Marches’ project.
But plans for new National Parks and AONBs do not end with a cross-border extension of the Shropshire Hills.
You must be aware of the decision to make the Clwydian Range and Dee Valley AONB into Wales’s fourth National Park. Here are some details from Natural Resources Wales.
An argument I’ve heard used to justify the new NP is that the south east has one with Bannau Brycheiniog; the south west has the Pembrokeshire Coast; the north west, Eryri; so it’s only fair that the north east should also have a National Park.
But if the ‘geographical fairness’ argument has been accepted, then there’ll be just one area without a National Park – central Wales. And why not make it a cross-border National Park?
Co-operation, innit? ‘Hands across the Dyke’ an’ all that.
UPDATE: A comment to this blog reminds us that the area covered by the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust and it’s Montgomeryshire neighbour is almost the same as the area of Severn Trent Water.
Given that environmental groups and river ‘saviours’ in other parts of Wales have been used (and funded) to blame farmers, in order to cover up for Dŵr Cymru’s spillages and other misdemeanours, might that also be happening in Powys?
◊
CONCLUSION
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with National Parks, AONBs, wildlife trusts and nature reserves. But they’re no longer just about protecting landscapes, nurturing flora and fauna. They have been politicised, and funded, to serve other agendas.
She brings Brexit into a truly weird conspiracy theory. Most absurdly she seems to believe that putting our farmers out of business somehow guarantees food security. What do these people have between their ears?
And what “nature catastrophe“? Things have never been better. Hasn’t she heard that ospreys are nesting on the farm her government bought for £4.25m?
Though we won’t know if they’re coming back, or not, until Vaughan Gething is safely installed as the new Labour leader. Phew!
But they were definitely there last year, oh yes . . . even though nobody saw them. And no photos or videos have emerged.
By “food security” what Rathbone means is an endless supply of free range radishes from the OPD that daddy bought for Guy and Clarissa.
She sits on the Senedd’s Climate Change Environment and Rural Affairs Committee. Her partner, John Uden, was given a no-show job by Bute Energy, the Scottish company wanting to throw up a few dozen wind farms in Wales.
How the other half lives, eh!
I was directed to another Saturday posting on X, this one from Jeremy Clarkson.
Other people have the same problem, Jeremy. And the explanation is that the ‘Welsh Government’ tells porkies.
Lesley Griffiths, Julie James, Jenny Rathbone et al say they’re saving the planet, fighting a “climate catastrophe“, but in reality they’re forcing farmers out of business so that big corporations can buy the land, and make yet more money, from carbon sequestration, wind farms, and other scams.
With ‘environmentalists’ disguising this land grab and hoping to be rewarded with vast acreages for rewilding and other anti-human activities.
‘Safety’ was just the pretty wrapping – it is ultimately about taking away our cars, and keeping us penned in 15-minute ghettos.
Environmentalism and restoring biodiversity are also pretty wrapping for something more sinister. And it’s not just farmers under attack.
The ‘Welsh Government’ is implementing the Globalists’ de-growth agenda. And among other targets this agenda wants to destroy traditional farming and food production because if they can control the food supply, then the Globalists will control the world.
Don’t let it happen. The farmers’ fight is your fight. Stand with the farmers!
This week’s piece links Globalist corporations, environmental groups, and politicians. What unites this unsavoury trio is their shared desire to destroy livestock farming.
◊
THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN
Last week there was a court case brought by the charity River Action UK against the Environment Agency (EA) for not dealing with the problem of chicken manure pollution on the river Wye. Even though the EA is responsible for England, the High Court case was heard in Cardiff.
Which encouraged a bunch of exhibitionists to turn up and piss people off with their ‘street theatre’. Even Morris dancing! Here’s the report from Llais y Sais last Thursday.
As you can read, the article itself reported: “A large amount of organic manure has been spread over the area . . .”
Yet it also reported: “River Action insists a loophole in the law is allowing poultry farming to poison the Wye“.
The first quote makes clear the problem is caused by arable farms using chicken manure as organic fertiliser. Yet River Action UK chooses to blame chicken farms.
Of course, most of these arable farms are on the English side of the border, which makes the nonsense in Cardiff last week even more misplaced.
But why would River Action want to blame chicken farmers when they know the run-offs causing the pollution are coming from arable farms? Stick with me and I’ll explain.
First, let’s see what we can learn about River Action UK.
Though new, it’s expanding, and the most recently filed accounts, for year ending 31.03.2023, showed a healthy income of £485,398 (previous year, £278,080), ‘Cash at bank and in hand’ £249,786 (£48,202), and three employees (none).
That’s quite impressive. So who’s running this outfit?
Well, according to the website, there is a veritable host involved, none of whom seem to be Welsh. Unless we include a Vietnamese woman named Bic Jones, who is said to live in that mythic realm, ‘North Wales’.
Among the others listed I see Jeremy Wade, who is often on the telly, filmed in exotic locales wrassling with big ugly fish.
And of course George Monbiot is there, his icon-like countenance staring back at us planet-destroying sinners.
But we’re going to focus on James Edward MacPherson, who’s bio we find to the right of Wade’s.
Because according to the Charity Commission, MacPherson was the first trustee to be registered, which gives him a kind of founder status, I suppose. So why isn’t he playing a more prominent role in River Action?
Or to put it another way, why was he the founding trustee? Come to that, who is he?
At the foot of MacPherson’s Linkedin profile we see a kind of ‘Jimmy loves Larry’.
However you look at it, that’s an impressive CV. But it also suggests MacPherson sees the great outdoors as an investment opportunity.
At the time he became founder-trustee of River Action UK MacPherson was a director of The Investor Forum. And if you want to know the meaning of ‘vacuous’, then just turn to ‘What we do‘.
It seems to be a collection of commercial entities burnishing their environmental credentials by investing in Green stuff. MacPherson ceased to be a director just two weeks after becoming the original trustee of River Action UK.
The Rathbones are a wealthy Liverpool family, and family members still get their cut from associated companies. And that includes Jenny Rathbone MS.
She sits on the Senedd’s Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee. Her partner, John Uden, was given a no-show job by Bute Energy, the Scottish company wanting to throw up a few dozen wind farms in Wales.
◊
WHO’S WHO: CHARLES BASIL LUCAS WATSON
Described as “founder and chair” is Charles Watson, who you can see in the mercifully short video below. Charles also has an interesting background in the world of business, which we’ll look at in a mo’.
Also in the video is Nicola Cutcher, who made the Rivercide video with Monbiot. Which is of course about the Wye. Delivered with the balance that so delights Monbiot’s fans.
I’m sure that most appearing on the website have only a tenuous connection with River Action. So what do the filings with the Charity Commission tell us?
As we can see above, the trustees other than MacPherson, are: Charles Basil Lucas Watson, who we just saw in the video, and Marina Gibson, who appears on the Advisory Board next to fish-wrassler Jeremy Wade.
Like MacPherson, Watson has a fascinating business background. According to Companies House these are the companies he’s been involved with. Though I can only see one active company where he’s still on board.
The third company that Watson left, in May 2020, is Blue Rubicon (Holdings) Ltd. Another part of the Teneo setup. Specialising in ‘PR and Communications’.
Most of the companies Watson has been involved with have had a US presence on the board. Sometimes more than one American director.
◊
WHO’S WHO: MARINA GIBSON
Ms Gibson is the third of the trustees named on the filings with the Charity Commission. Here’s her Linkedin profile.
And here’s a clip from the River Action website.
Seeing as Marina Gibson knows her fish, and was taken on as trustee a year after MacPherson and Watson, I guess she was recruited to give River Action some credibility.
Her Linkedin profile says she is a ‘brand ambassador’ for YETI, a big company making ‘outdoor’ stuff. So it would make sense to team up with Marina Gibson. And yet . . .
YETI came knocking at the very time Gibson joined River Action, which was at the beginning of 2021. And YETI is another big US company, headquartered in Austin, Texas. But it does have a UK presence, registered with Companies House.
And YETI UK must be doing something right, because turnover leapt from £901,389 at the end of December 2019 to £18,712,613 31 December 2022.
◊
WHO’S WHO: THE LOST BEATLE
According to this River Action website article, from two days before Christmas 2021, another trustee was to have been James Wallace. Instead, he became CEO.
Now I can’t tell you much about Wallace except that he’s keen on rewilding, especially re-introducing beavers. His bio on the River Action website makes him sound like Indiana Attenborough:
James is Chief Executive of River Action. He is a naturalist, archaeologist and social entrepreneur and has established enterprises ranging from renewable energy, regenerative agriculture and green finance to ecotourism, nature restoration and deep sea exploration. Prior to helping Charles Watson develop River Action into a national charity, James was CEO and Co-founder of Beaver Trust where he led the coalition to protect and live alongside native beavers.
In the filings with the Charity Commission I noticed a mention of the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust. So I wondered what it was about.
Looking at the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust accounts two possibilities present themselves. (Highlighted in green.) First, the Trust is being paid to host a ‘beaver project officer’, and we know that River Action CEO James Wallace is into beavers.
Another possibility is that the payments were connected with a ‘Save the Wye’ petition put out by the Trust. Which, of course, targets chicken farmers.
But if so, why couldn’t River Action have put out that petition itself?
Talking of money, and as you can see from the panel above, Radnorshire Wildlife Trust received £1,862,146 in y/e 31.03.2023, and its property portfolio qualifies for farming grants and funding from just about everywhere.
By my calculations, in y/e 31.03.2023, Radnorshire Wildlife Trust received £666,103 from ‘Welsh Government’ sources alone. (Highlighted in pink.) Here’s one example.
That’s the state of Wales in 2024. Those who’ve farmed the land for centuries are being driven off, while environmentalists and investors are showered with money to take over the cleared land.
◊
THE GREEN MONSTER DEVOURING WALES
In case you haven’t already guessed, I’ll spell out for you why (and despite evidence to the contrary) River Action UK chose to blame chicken farmers for the pollution in the Wye.
In 1971 the Club of Rome issued an apocalyptic vision of the future dreamed up by a few scientists using ‘models’ from primitive computers. In 1991 the ‘threat’ was re-framed to replace the collapsed Soviet Union.
Globalists have used that ‘threat’ to bend politicians and populations to their will. Corporations like BlackRock, Vanguard and the rest, want to take over farmland in order to capitalise on that scam.
The land can be used in a number of ways; such as planting trees to grab the carbon offset and other grants they’ve fooled politicians into offering; or putting up wind farms and solar farms, then raking in the exorbitant profits from these unreliable forms of electricity generation.
Here is Wales we see the problem manifest itself in many ways, and in many different places. In Carmarthenshire, a company called Foresight is buying up farms to plant trees.
So unless we believe in Damascene conversions it’s obvious to me that River Action is just another environmental group fronting for Globalist investors seeking to undermine livestock farming in order to grab the land.
The same applies to many other bodies. In Wales we have a constantly growing number of ecological and river groups funded by the ‘Welsh Government’ and other bodies for no reason other than to tell lies about farmers.
And it has to be livestock farming rather than arable farming (for now), because the Globalists have been clever in recruiting vegans.
A few years ago vegans were cranks that nobody paid much attention to, but now fanatical vegans are found leading the fight against livestock farming – and it has nothing to do with pollution, or the loss of biodiversity.
This is why Wales is especially at risk.
Earlier we read that the first trustee of River Action, James Edward MacPherson, works for the giant US bank and investment house J P Morgan.
Last year top man of J P Morgan, Jamie Dimon, came straight out and said private property should be confiscated in order to meet the net zero targets he and the other Globalists had set!
And he wasn’t talking about Auntie Megan’s back garden.
Outfits like the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust know the score; they accept that the major landowners in a post-farming world will be Globalist corporations, even governments, but these will – they believe – allow window dressing in the form of rewilding and other fantasies.
That’s the deal they’ve struck.
But what of the politicians?
If the politicians we suffer in Wales have genuinely fallen for the Globalists’ climate / net zero scam, then they’re too stupid to hold public office.
If they know it’s a scam but still push on with it because they’re too weak to resist those directing them, then they deserve nothing but contempt.
But if they enjoy the power enforcing the scam gives them over people fighting for their livelihoods and their way of life, then they are, “lower than vermin”.
Yes, I know . . . I said I wasn’t putting anything out this week, but the work doesn’t start until tomorrow, and something I put out earlier on Twitter / X has grown too big to continue with on that platform.
But don’t worry, this is still a quickie.
◊
JANE DAVIDSON
For those new to the dystopian world of Welsh politics, Jane Davidson is a privately-educated memsahib who turned up in Wales some years ago and quickly grasped that the Labour Party is the key to pushing your agenda.
So she joined, became a Cardiff councillor then, with devolution, was handed the safe Labour seat of Pontypridd, An area she hardly knew.
Her rise was immediate. First serving as Minister for Education, Lifelong Learning and Skills. Then, from 2007 until 2011, she was Minister for Sustainability and Rural Affairs.
Davidson left the Assembly in 2011 to take up a non-job at Lampeter university wailing about the ‘climate crisis’. Again, paid for from the Welsh public purse.
In January this year Jane Davidson was appointed to lead the Wales Net Zero 2035 Challenge Group. What’s that? you ask. Well, stripped of the bullshit, it’s yet another group of carefully-selected individuals who will tell the so-called ‘Welsh Government’ exactly what it wants to hear.
This ‘advice’ will then be branded ‘impartial’, having come from ‘independent experts’, and used to justify Drakeford and his brainwashed clowns intensifying their offensive against farmers, motorists, and all others deemed – in Davos – to be obstacles to the Globalists achieving their objectives.
The group contains a number of the usual suspects, all of whom have fallen for the Club of Rome’s climate scam, and most, like Davidson, believe that we indigenes must be told what to think, and who to believe.
Invariably, them.
◊
‘OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB . . . ‘
In September, someone in regular contact with me, having read that Julie James, Minister for the Environment, was to receive quarterly briefings from the Group, submitted a Freedom of Information request to the ‘Welsh Government’ asking for a copy of the briefings.
Within hours, my contact had a reply from the ‘Welsh Government’. I’m not saying that this unprecedented example of bureaucratic celerity was due to the attention my tweet was getting, but the timing is a wee bit suspicious.
The response confirmed that no record is kept of the briefings, but that there are “records of the meetings in the form of minutes“.
The confusion is not helped by the Group’s Terms of Reference mentioning briefing the Minister for Climate Change, Julie James. (The ‘Designated Member’ is Plaid Cymru’s Siân Gwenllian.)
Because in the minutes for the meetings of April, July, Octoberwe clearly see that the attendees are those mentioned in the Terms of Reference relating to briefings.
What’s more, if we look at the original response from October 13 we see two dates mentioned for the verbal and unrecorded briefings, 24 April and 5 July.
Which are the same dates as the meetings – for which we have minutes!
Are there minuted meetings and unrecorded briefings held on the same day? That’s what’s being suggested with, “As was stated in past Welsh Government responses there are no written record of these briefings, however, there are records of the meetings in the form of minutes“.
Or is someone getting confused? I think I am.
Another question might be, why aren’t these minutes available on the website of the Wales Net Zer0 2035 Challenge Group? It has its own ‘Secretariat’. What does Stan Townsend do other than scoff Hobnobs with Jane Davidson and Julie James?
UPDATE 14.11.2024: Here’s a bit more info on young Stan. It seems he may be new to Wales! (I bet you’re surprised.) Here’s his Linkedin bio and here’s his blog. I’m sure that like Stan you too have wondered, ‘What is the role of a cyclist in addressing climate change?’ It certainly keeps me awake at night. Or is that heartburn?
Though I also noticed what you see below in the Terms of Reference. So maybe Jane Davidson didn’t want these minutes made public.
And if so, then I can understand why. For they aren’t exactly evidence of much activity, other than Davidson meeting with a woman she already knew and would probably have met with anyway.
And then, the other strange thing is that the metadata for the pdf documents sent today, the minutes of the three meetings, are all dated today. If the minutes are genuinely contemporaneous with the meetings, then I would expect to see them carry the same dates as the meetings, or a date shortly afterwards.
Then again, maybe it was a copy and paste job, which I suppose would explain the metadata dates. Though if that’s the case, then why couldn’t the original minutes have been sent?
◊
IN CONCLUSION
There is no sensible or logical reason for the ‘Welsh Government’ to have ever set up the Wales Net Zero 2035 Challenge Group, though it gives Jane Davidson something to add to her strangely uninformative Linkedin bio.
It’s just another group of hangers-on and like-minded individuals who’ll tell Julie James exactly what she wants to hear. It’s window-dressing.
It makes me laugh how people like me are accused of being conspiracy theorists, reinforcing our paranoia by only interacted with others like us. And yet this is exactly what the ‘Welsh Government’ does, and what the groups it sets up do.
What I mean is, will Jane Davidson and her Group consult a ‘climate sceptic’? Or someone who isn’t a vegan?
But the real worry in this episode is that whatever Davidson’s gang come up with will be used by Corruption Bay to enact legislation that will make the things we need more expensive, and make our lives more difficult.
That being so, everything must be above board. There must be total transparency. No secret briefings.
Let’s start with the ‘Welsh Government’ bringing clarity to the confusion it has created through talking about both minuted meetings and unrecorded verbal briefings.
And if there have been unrecorded verbal briefings, then let’s have assurances that there will be no more of them.
The previous post got considerable attention and it also unlocked fascinating new information. And that explains this follow-up. Which I hope will result in further revelations.
◊
WHERE ARE WE?
In the previous post I dealt with the Bryn Cadwgan wind farm planned by Galileo Green Energy. This is a Swiss company that set up a UK operation a few years ago to cash in on the Welsh wind turbine rip-off.
Different rules in England mean that complaints from local communities must be listened to which, in practical terms, means that no onshore wind farms get built. This sees Wales and Scotland increasingly used to supply electricity to England from a source the English don’t want.
Even to the extent of electricity from wind farms off Scotland’s west coast coming by undersea cable to Bangor, then down to Swansea, where it can connect with the main transmission lines from Pembroke power station to England.
Here in Wales, every project of 10MW or above is classed as a Development of National Significance (DNS), which means locals, and their elected representatives on local councils, will always be over-ruled by politicians in Corruption Bay who’ve declared war on a people they regard as racist, climate-denying, car-driving, transphobes.
It’s succinctly explained here. The chronology is intriguing.
In addition to the Galileo proposal I also knew that Bute Energy, a Scottish firm that rents a cupboard in Cardiff to fool us into thinking it’s Welsh, had a plan for an installation they were calling Blaencothi. Though details were scarce.
But true to form, Bute has again recruited a local to proselytise on its behalf. This one is Cilycwm community councillor Jamie Pickup. We can no doubt expect Pickup to be speaking up for all three projects.
But the third project, Waun Maenllwyd Wind Hub, being pushed by Belltown Power of Bristol, was a bit of a surprise. Possibly because it had previously been known as ‘Bryn Brawd’, and I’d perhaps assumed it had fallen though because I’d heard no more of it by that name.
Anyway . . . since putting out last week’s piece I have been told that the companies behind these three projects are combining to share a route to the plateau that forms the southern end of the Cambrian Mountains of central Wales.
The proposed access route to the site for abnormal indivisible loads (such as blades, hub, nacelle and tower sections) will be from the port of origin (which is likely to be Swansea) via the M4, A48 and A40. Loads would turn off the public highway at Pumsaint and travel north for approximately 14km on a combination of existing commercial forestry tracks and new tracks to reach the wind farm location. No significant traffic flows will be associated with the operational phase of the site.
Who could argue with that? A motorway and nice wide trunk roads all the way. Problem is, the route as given is sort of incomplete. Let me explain.
As written, deliveries will turn off the A40 at Pumsaint . . . but the A40 goes nowhere near Pumsaint. Which makes what Belltown says misleading, if not dishonest. And if they could get this so wrong, what else might they have got wrong?
The truth is that after leaving Llandeilo the huge low loaders will turn onto the B4302 and head for Talyllychau (Talley). Then on to Crugybar and the Bridgend Inn (where I sank a few pints in the good old days), where they’ll join the A482 to reach Pumsaint.
Using my bestest crayons I’ve conjured up this map that might explain it better.
For those of you unfamiliar with this road, take my word for it, it will struggle to accommodate massive low loaders carrying huge turbine blades and tower sections.
Below is a capture from Google Maps showing the B4302 just after leaving Talyllychau on its way to Crugybar. Those hedgerows will have to go. And so will many other trees and hedgerows on the 13 miles from the A40 to Pumsaint.
Now we’re going to move on to Stage 2 of the environmental vandalism associated with these projects. The section that involves the National Trust (NT) and the ‘Welsh Government’.
With the Foresight reputation damaged locally Belltown may be fronting for Foresight. Questions need to be asked. And answers demanded.
UPDATE 10.11.2023: It was learnt last night that Belltown will be taking the A482 from Llanwrda to Pumsaint. Galileo will take the Talyllychau route suggested above. No information yet on the Bute route, but it doesn’t really matter. Because there will now be two roads suffering expensive damage.
◊
DON’T TRUST THE NATIONAL TRUST
Once the huge low loaders reach Pumsaint, or just outside the village, they’ll take a right turn onto National Trust property.
This is the Dolaucothi estate, home to the famous ‘Roman’ gold mines, once owned by the Johnes family, who also owned the Hafod estate, to the north. Hafod fell into the clutches of the National Trust last year. With a 99-year lease and £700,000 gift from the ‘Welsh Government’.
In other words, the ‘Welsh Government’ paid an organisation worth billions £700,000 to take over a prime Welsh estate.
Despite the excuse given by Corruption Bay for this generosity it might have been due to the involvement of Dawn Bowden MS. As Deputy Minister for Arts and Sport the Hafod deal should have had nothing to do with her. But Tourism’ has since been added to her portfolio. Fancy that!
I wrote about it in this post, scroll to the section ‘Bristol Fashion’. And then in this post, in the section, ‘”Welsh Government” funds National Trust’.
It’s instructive to consider the organisation of the National Trust in Wales, and what happened at Hafod. Not least because it might provide clues as to why the NT would be a willing party to this planned environmental disaster.
It was early June last year when we learnt that the Trust was taking over the Hafod estate. Which seems to be owned by the ‘Welsh Government’ through Natural Resources Wales, and had until then been run by the Hafod Trust.
Just three months earlier, in March, Lhosa Daly of Bristol, had taken on the role of NT’s Acting Director for Wales, and was appointed to the post officially in September. I mention Bristol because that’s where she lives.
If we look at her career background we see that in the past seven or eight years Daly’s been chair of the Bristol branch of the Institute of directors, vice chair of the Bristol Law Centre, and she is still a business ambassador for the Western Gateway.
These positions would have brought her into contact with the glitterati of Bristol’s business community. Including, perhaps, the directors of Belltown Power, the company planning to desecrate our country with Waun Maenllwyd Wind Hub.
With Belltown, Bute and Galileo hoping to reach the site by traversing land owned or managed by Lhosa Daly’s National Trust and the ‘Welsh Government’.
The mystery of Dawn Bowden representing the ‘Welsh Government’ last year, despite it being beyond her responsibilities, could be accounted for by her also being from Bristol. She and Daly might have already known each other.
And if that’s too fanciful an explanation for you, then try this: Bowden should have known Lhosa Daly through her being Deputy Minister for Arts since May 2021 and Daly being an advisor to the Arts Council of Wales since April 2019.
Come to that, how did Bristol-based Daly get that gig with the Arts Council of Wales?
◊
FINAL THOUGHTS
I’m told deals have been done with farmers and other landowners along the route between Llandeilo and Pumsaint to cut corners, destroy hedges, and in places widen the B4302, and even perhaps the A482.
This will cost a considerable amount of money. So who’ll pay for it? Will it be the ‘developers’? The county council? The so-called ‘Welsh Government’? Or will there be a whip-round in the Dolaucothi Arms?
And then there’s the question of how the National Trust squares being a conservation body with the damage it’s helping inflict on the Welsh landscape by these wind farms. What would NT members say, if they knew?
Not just in the road ‘improvements’ I’ve just described, but also on the 14km journey to the sites after the low loaders turn off the A482. And then the on-site destruction.
There’ll be the vast concrete bases to support these huge turbines, the access roads, the deep trenches for the cables. How many trees will be felled? How much peat bog damaged? And let’s not forget the pylons.
I ask about the trees because I’m told new populations of red squirrels and pine martens are establishing themselves. Will they adapt to climbing pylons and turbines?
I suggest that even if they stick around they’ll be so traumatised by what’s being done to their habitat they might stop breeding.
As if that wasn’t enough, someone then tells me . . .
We also have two breeding maternity colonies of soprano pipistrelle bats on my land, they will love the sonic signature of wind turbines of course.
Don’t worry – once the poor little buggers are disorientated enough the blades will finish them off pretty quickly. (If they’re turning!)
Them and the kites, and other birds. And insects by the million.
Nothing here really surprises me, because I’ve always regarded the National Trust as a very commercial organisation and, in Wales, rather colonialist. Lhosa Daly playing the memsahib is entirely in keeping.
Not only that, but there’s something of the vulture about the NT in Wales, picking up land and estates as old Welsh families die out. Or more recently, acquiring property from the ‘Welsh Government’ or Natural Resources Wales.
Porthdinllaen once belonged to the Jones-Parry (Madryn) family. Sir Love Jones-Parry MP, was very supportive of the Patagonia settlement. Which explains why a town over there is called Puerto Madryn; and is twinned with Nefyn, I believe.
Another example of this sad phenomenon is located not far from me, a place I love to visit. I’m directing you now to Llynnoedd Cregennan.
Major C L Wynne-Jones lost both his sons in WWII, so in 1959 he handed over this 285-hectare estate to the National Trust.
As I hope I’ve made clear, I’m not surprised by the National Trust’s behaviour with these wind farms, and the damage they’ll cause . . . what really pisses me off is that the National Trust is still operating in Wales.
Devolution should have brought Wales a new organisation to replace the colonialist parasite that is the National Trust. We should by now have a Welsh body conserving our heritage and our history, safeguarding our landscapes.
But to set up such a body would have required political leaders with vision and courage, rather than the grubby, ishoo-of-the-month puppets Wales is cursed with.
The title is a nautical reference to wind, and a change of direction, which I’m entitled to use cos I was in the Sea Scouts. Right! And what I’m alluding to will, I hope, become clear before the end.
◊
TWM SIÔN CATI
We start in the wild and beautiful uplands between Lampeter and Llanwrtyd, once home to Thomas Jones, known to us all as Twm Siôn Cati, or Twm Shôn Catti.
In the centre of the map I have pinpointed Bryn Cadwgan; Twm’s cave is to the west, and to the south east we see Ystradffin, where Twm took a fancy to the widowed heiress, Joan, and eventually married her.
Last year I wrote about a plan for wind turbines at nearby Bryn Brawd, which you can see to the north west of the pin. It was in this post, just scroll down to the section ‘Local benefits (well, local to somewhere)’.
A company mentioned in that piece, Awel Newydd Cyf, recently issued 43,659,462 shares. Which suggests there may be something in the wind. (Geddit?)
But I wouldn’t get carried away by the company’s Welsh name, for it’s ultimately owned by Elm Trading Ltd, which has being issuing shares like they’re going out of fashion.
We’re switching our attention to Bryn Cadwgan because another wind farm is planned there, and it should go without saying that the plan comes from yet another gang of foreign investors.
So who is it this time?
◊
GALILEO GREEN ENERGY
This company launched in early 2020, and is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. Set up with . . .
Galileo Green Energy Wales was set up in April 2021, and was originally known as GGE Machynlleth Ltd (until 4 June 2021). Why ‘Machynlleth’ should appear in the name is a mystery, seeing as the original address was in Bristol, and the first directors lived in Italy (2), France, and Ireland.
Was the original plan to bless the Dyfi valley with yet another wind farm?
All 10,000 shares for Galileo Green Energy Wales are held by GGE Nordics Ltd, who can now be found at the North St. David Street address. But until January this year was up on the fourth floor of 115 George Street in Edinburgh.
The majority shareholder in GGE Nordics is Empower Renewables Ltd, also of 7 – 9 North St. David Street. When we look at Empower’s UK registration we see that apart from a Dane (who lives in Killarney) all the directors are Irish, with control exercised by Diarmuid Anthony Twomey of Castleknock, Dublin.
I bet like me you’re excited by all the Welsh involvement in these projects!
◊
MYNYDD TY-TALWYN ENERGY PARK
“So where are we now?“, you’re wondering. Well, Mynydd Ty-talwyn, or Mynydd Ty Talwyn, is just to the north west of Bridgend. Outlined in red on the map.
Other than Bryn Cadwgan it’s the only Welsh site I’m aware of. Though the website tells us (scroll down to the ‘About Galileo’ section): ”
Mynydd Ty-talwyn Energy Park is one of a pipeline of our new renewable energy projects in development across Wales.
So where are the others?
Never mind that for now, because I want to concentrate on a worrying claim and a serious untruth, on the Mynydd Ty-talwyn website; and I also want to highlight a major drawback with Bryn Cadwgan.
Under ‘Specifications’ ‘Wind’ we read,
Approximately 64,643 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions saved per annum.
We don’t normally see this calculation given, so why do we see it here? One possibility must be that the calculation has been made for the purposes of carbon offsetting.
Just as medieval evil-doers would pay the Church to be forgiven their sins, and carry on sinning, carbon offsetting is a twenty-first century version of the scam.
Immediately below we read, “Up to 50-year lifetime“. If that’s the projected lifespan of the Mynydd Ty-talwyn Energy Park then Galileo must plan to replace the turbines at least once. For few turbines last 20 years.
On the other hand, if Galileo is saying that the turbines they hope to erect at Mynydd Ty-talwyn will last 50 years, then that statement is an outright lie.
Another issue is that Mynydd Ty-talwyn is home to a . . .
Cluster of nationally important medieval house platforms and settlement remains.
And they’re shown clearly on the OS map for the area. Though just one is shown on the map supplied by Galileo (above) there are at least three around Mynydd Ty-talwyn.
We saw Irish control of Empower Renewables Ltd up at North St. David Street, Edinburgh, and Coriolis Energy, the company behind Y Bryn, is also Irish. The other company involved at Y Bryn is ESB UK, the UK face of a further Irish company.
Mynydd Ty-talwyn is not far off the beaten track, but even so, there will be environmental damage caused hauling huge turbine blades and towers to a relatively unspoilt area.
And let’s not forget the vast concrete bases for each turbine, and the access roads gouged out of the earth, the trenches for cables . . . and then there’ll be the pylons . . .
We can take it for granted that the blades and towers will not be manufactured locally, which will probably see them shipped into Swansea docks and then taken along the M4, before the final four or five miles of their journey to the site.
But the problems that’ll be encountered there are nothing compared to what will need to be overcome at Bryn Cadwgan. From Swansea docks the loads can take the M4 west, and then perhaps the A483 up past Llandovery, but then what?
Once you leave the A483 and head for Rhandirmwyn, and the closer you get to Bryn Cadwgan, the more you’ll realise that you’re really out in the sticks.
To reach the site itself, new roads will have to be laid. The environmental damage caused will be immeasurable . . . unless of course those clever people at Galileo can get their calculators out again.
◊
WHO’S WHO AT GALILEO
Let’s start by going back to the main Galileo website. In particular, to the ‘Our People‘ section where, yet again, we see a complete absence of Welsh involvement. Whereas in Scotland, those involved all seem to be Scottish.
Let’s look first at Rob Paul and Joe Winton, both described as ‘Development Manager’. These two are also directors and shareholders of One Wind Renewables Ltd of Truro, a dormant company.
We find these two, along with Simon Edward Coles, at a number of renewables companies. They’ve been knocking around the sector since they were callow youths, and both seem to have started out with Ecotricity.
Next we turn to Leslie Walker, Senior Project Manager. Very interesting, Ms Walker. Here’s her Linkedin page to give you a clue as to where we’re going. (Scroll down to her ‘Interests’.)
On that Linkedin page you’ll see that she works for Dutch company Arcadis Consulting. And has done for over 30 years.
I’d never heard of Arcadis, maybe I should have, because it gets a lot of work in Wales. Much of it from the so-called ‘Welsh Government’.
I’m not for one minute suggesting that Leslie Walker is not good at what she does, but if I was in the position of Galileo, hoping to get approval for major contracts in Wales, I’d be looking for somebody who knew their way around the Bay.
And recruiting Walker might be less controversial than taking on Matt Enoch who, after 13 years as Project Manager and then Project Director with the ‘Welsh Government’, joined Arcadis in October 2019 as Project Director.
I could go higher up the food chain to people like Ingmar Wilhelm, CEO at Galileo Green Energy, but it wouldn’t tell us much more than we already know. We’re dealing with foreign individuals, foreign companies, foreign money.
Our contribution is our country – and most of us don’t even know we’re making it.
◊
FINAL THOUGHTS
Earlier I mentioned that GGE Nordics Ltd, which owns Galileo Green Energy Wales, had been based at 115 George Street, in Edinburgh’s New Town. When I wrote it, I thought to myself, “Jones, that address rings a bell“.
Bute is a Scottish company that’s appeared on this blog many times. It has insane plans to turn our country into a vast open-air electricity generator for England. And like Galileo, Bute employs people familiar with the denizens of the Swamp.
The connection between Bute and Galileo seems to be by association, via CIP. Then again, the link could be Vistra, with companies using it as their address. Which might explain the original Bristol address for Galileo Green Energy Wales.
Food for thought.
We may have missed the public meetings for Mynydd Ty-talwyn, but those for Bryn Cadwgan are being held next week; Llanddewi Brefi on Wednesday, and Pumsaint on Thursday.
I suggest that people turn up to these meetings and demand answers to all sorts of questions. Here’s what I might ask . . .
How much environmental damage will be done transporting the turbines to and and erecting them at Bryn Cadwgan?
Where are Galileo’s other Welsh projects?
How many local jobs will be provided at Bryn Cadwgan?
Is Galileo claiming that wind turbines last for 50 years?
How much of Galileo’s business model is carbon offset ‘greenwashing’?
Is there any connection between Galileo Green Energy and Bute Energy?
And finally, always remember! wind turbines are not built to save the planet. They’re built to make a few people a lot of money, and to make our lives more difficult through an increasingly expensive and unreliable electricity supply.
In this piece I shall look at what might be a renewed attempt to promote OPDs, or perhaps it’s just another bit of ‘affordable housing’ flim-flam. Maybe a bit of both.
For newcomers . . . the OPD system is unique to Wales; it allows people to build a dwelling in open country as long as they promise to worship the sun, name their sprogs Earthworm and Beelzebub, and grow a couple of carrots to prove they’re ‘farmers’.
I’ve written about OPDs many times. Just type ‘OPD’ in the search bar.
◊
GARRISON OPD
Three years ago I introduced Garrison Farm CIC, you’ll find it in this post, scroll down to the relevant section. The two principals were Ross Edwards and Chris Carree. Carree left the company in June 2021 but Edwards is still there.
I assume Garrison Farm is still a going concern because three new directors have joined since Carree left. Let’s look at them in the order they joined.
Finally, we have Michael Paul Smith, 05.08.2023, who is Senior Facilities and Project Officer for Swansea council, and has worked for the council for over 20 years. Swansea council contributing?
The plan is to set up – possibly in Swansea, or maybe Carmarthenshire – a kind of OPD community for former military personnel. That’s the impression I get in this video from February last year. (Watch from 38:00.)
Thorpe was clearly recovering from a stroke, which he attributed to ‘climate anxiety’.
Thorpe has crossed my path a few times over the years as I’ve researched OPDs. And the idea of a community of OPDs is not new. As this tweet of Thorpe’s from January 2018 makes clear.
Though I don’t know what project was being discussed, or even if there was a specific project mooted. So much OPD discussion is little more than pipedreams.
But to return to Swansea, where there was certainly a project launched that could plausibly be called a community. This was Killan-Fach Eco-farm on the Gower side of the city. (Marginally more attractive than the Port Talbot side.)
I wrote about it in June 2020 in One Planet Developments, just scroll down to the section ‘Farmlets’.
The council knocked it back for a number of reasons. One being that . . .
There is also no evidence of how the development would meet local affordable housing needs
Which tells me that ‘affordable housing’ was one of the angles used in the hope of getting planning consent for an OPD project. This is interesting, because you’ll be reading more about affordable housing, and ‘co-operative social housing’, in a minute.
But before that it might be worth focusing on Ross Edwards a little.
From his Linkedin profile we learn that since January this year he’s been Business Development Manager for Rouute. Here’s the website. It describes its product as a, “road-based energy harvesting system“.
If I understand it . . . pads or sensors are placed on the road surface and vehicles driving over them generate electricity. Even if it works, we’re unlikely to see this technology in Wales because we’re heading towards a vehicle-free future.
There’s another military connection here at Rouute. For CEO is Antony Edmondson-Bennett, a former army officer who, according to his now disappeared Linkedin bio, is trained in ‘close protection’. (It was there last week when I was researching this.)
The Rouute website announces a link-up with a firm called Carma. Here’s a very short video starring the founder of Carma, Jim Holland.
I found the Carma website easily enough, but there is no company of that name registered with Companies House. It was only by scrolling down to the small print at the bottom that I found, “Carma is a trading name of Rewards.Earth LTD 13315107“.
So let’s see what else we can learn.
◊
‘I THINK THAT I SHALL NEVER SEE . . . ‘.
The arrangement between the two, as spoken by Jim Holland of Carma, is that . . .
Rouute Technologies Ltd will be planting trees for every single unit they sell in the UK or abroad.
On the ‘Meet the Team‘ page of the website we see: “Our target is to plant tens of millions of trees in the next five years“. That is some ambition!
Rooting around for more information I naturally looked up Holland’s Linkedin page, where we see that he was in the Royal Navy for 13 years. So another military connection.
In this rooting around ‘South Wales’ appeared more than once.
This March, ten members of the Tillo team will be making their way to South Wales for a day of tree planting in partnership with Carma.
Despite the nonsense about saving the planet, what we’re looking at here is greenwash; and it must be bracketed with outfits like Stump Up For Trees, and investment vehicles like Foresight, buying up Welsh farms.
Too much of Wales is being lost in this way. We don’t need any more of it.
Drakeford was responding to a completely unrehearsed and piercing question from Huw Irranca-Davies MS. Here’s the transcript.
Seeing ‘Mike Hedges’ and ‘fascinating’ in the same sentence is quite hilarious.
But here’s where I want to focus, on this section referencing “co-operative social housing managed and owned by the people who live in them“:
And the good news is, Llywydd, that we have a new wave of initiatives being led in different parts of Wales: the Solva community land trust, the Gower community land trust, the Taf Fechan Housing Co-operative in Merthyr—all of them initiatives designed to develop housing that will be run and managed by the people who live in them.
In his ‘question’ Irranca-Davies makes reference to “international youth leaders” in attendance, though God knows why anyone would travel to listen to those clowns. Let alone travel any distance.
◊
THE EXAMPLES DRAKEFORD QUOTED
Drakeford mentioned three examples of co-operative social housing. These were, to quote him verbatim: “the Solva community land trust, the Gower community land trust, the Taf Fechan Housing Co-operative in Merthyr”.
Let’s look at them, working backwards.
Taf Fechan looks like an offshoot of housing association Merthyr Valley Homes. I guess it takes over or runs MVH properties. If so, then it’s not a group of locals coming together afresh to build and manage their own community.
Now let’s turn to Solfa.
The Solva Community Land Trust was launched under the direction of, or with the help of, Planed in September 2019. “Planed delivers sustainable outcomes for communities by a collaborative, people-led approach“.
But I’m not sure what if anything’s happened since.
An internet search turned up this from March this year, which suggests the properties are still not built.
The third project mentioned by Drakeford was in Gower. And I assume he was referring to Gŵyr Community Land Trust. Here’s the website.
Though it’s registered with Companies House as Gower Land Trust CIC, launched May 2021. And with just a few hundred in the piggy-bank it’s also difficult to see where this is going without a major injection of funding.
But it seems to have a rival in the Gwyr Community Land Trust Ltd, launched August 2023. This is a one-man band run by a local, Roger Brace.
I mention that Roger Brace is local because, looking at those involved in Gŵyr Community Land Trust, I see that a number of them are newcomers to Wales.
Director Adam Jefferson Land was not long ago pushing a similar venture over in Devon. (Fellow-director Niaomh Convery came to Swansea with him.) Another of the three directors, Emily Robertson, came to Wales a few years ago after working for Solace Women’s Aid in London.
Going by the bios and other evidence, this crew is sure to appeal to ‘progressive’ politicians. An impression strengthened by the image used in this WalesOnline report in November 2021.
◊
THE BIT AT THE END WHERE I PULL IT ALL TOGETHER
OPDs, as originally conceived, never really took off. While throwing up a shack in the countryside might appeal to many, needing to prove that you were living a largely self-sufficient lifestyle seems to have put many off the idea.
To make things worse, the idea was highjacked by unscrupulous, often unsavoury individuals and groups, buying land, often tracts of forestry, then selling or renting plots for people to put up cabins or bring in mobile homes.
The examples below are from Llangynog, Carmarthenshire, and they were sent to me a couple of years back. They’re not OPDs, and they don’t have planning permission.
But those who live in them will employ the OPD defence against council planners.
I’m not suggesting that Wade William Heames is either unscrupulous or unsavoury, but his Edible Forest projects have come in for a lot of criticism. Much of it from people who’d been tempted to buy in, or even had bought in.
Which brings me back to Ross Edwards and Garrison Farm. I might accept this project if it was home to Welsh ex-service personnel. But if it’s nothing more than a smokescreen for greenwashing, then I would object.
The video you saw earlier, starring Ross Edwards and David Thorpe was produced by Cwmpas. (Formerly, Wales Co-operative Development & Training Centre Ltd.)
Income of £6.5m from “‘Welsh Government’, European funding, other grants and sources of income“. With two-thirds of that income going on the 100 staff.
And I bet you’d never heard of Cwmpas until you read this. How many more such beasties are out there, lurking in the shadows, devouring unwary maidens and feasting on public funds?
You’ll see that the Cwmpas accounts were signed off by the then secretary, D Walker. Now Derek Walker – for it is he! – is the Future Generations Commissioner. Does he plan to breathe new life into OPDs in his new role?
Whatever Walker may have planned, Drakeford was talking about more conventional housing. But to understand why we are where we are, you need some background information.
It was always my belief that the left wing administration in Corruption Bay wanted rented housing to be the sole preserve of housing associations . . . with these in turn funded and controlled from the Bay.
But the close relationship that developed led the ONS to decide that Welsh housing associations were, effectively, public bodies. This resulted in them being privatised. Explained here from a ‘Welsh Government’ perspective.
Welsh housing associations are now building many fewer homes for rent. Some are building none at all. They, and their subsidiaries, are focused almost exclusively on private, open market housing.
This helps explain why some councils are trying to make up the shortfall.
Finally, and especially in rural areas, we have the issue of holiday homes, also retirees and others buying property and moving in permanently.
So . . . fewer housing association properties for rent; private landlords quitting the business; councils spending money they may not have trying to fill the gap; politicians tickling rather than tackling the rural housing crisis; to a backdrop of recession, a ‘de-growth’ agenda, and increasing economic hardship enforced by following the lunacies of Net Zero.
There could be a perfect storm approaching . . . and this storm will have bugger all to do with any imaginary ‘climate crisis’.
Which is why I would hope to see official support for local people getting together to help themselves. But the examples quoted by Drakeford do not inspire confidence.
One thing for sure – a government making major expenditure cuts, and councils that are also feeling the pinch, should not be funding good-lifers hoping to settle in scenically attractive areas with which they have only the most tenuous connection.
The only real solution is a comprehensive and national housing strategy. But it would need joined-up thinking and hard work – from a ‘Welsh Government’ that prefers soundbites and virtue signalling!
Now that we’ve had three weeks of living with the 20mph speed restrictions I think it’s time to put this measure into its wider context, make a few connections, and introduce some new faces.
I apologise for this piece being a bit long, but it’s still less than 2,800 words. And worth sticking with.
◊
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Much of the background to this new legislation was covered a few weeks back in ‘20mph, A Disaster Unfolds’.
What’s absolutely clear now is that 20mph did not suddenly appear, it’s been hatching for a while. To explain what I mean, here’s a table I’ve drawn up, though I’m sure it’s incomplete, so if you can add to it . . . .
And it’s failed her on almost every count. But then, grand gestures done for dramatic effect rather than to deliver lasting benefits will invariably fail.
Next, we look at the Wales Act 2017. There, in Section 26, we see that power to vary or regulate speed limits is now conferred on the ‘Welsh Ministers’.
Consideration should be given to lowering speed limits in a CAZ from 30mph to 20mph, which some research suggests would deliver overall benefits27. Safety benefits from reduced road speed can also encourage modal shift from private cars.
Perhaps, state-owned, chauffeur-driven cars are OK?
The call was taken up by Sustrans who, in a publication dated 1 January 2019, called for 20mph speed limits across the UK, quoting Public Health Wales. Does this also show Wales being used as a testing ground?
Another example of pearl-clutching theatricality was Wales declaring a climate emergency. This happened in April 2019, just before Environment Minister Lesley Griffiths (and Gary) met with Scottish and UK counterparts.
Here’s the plan for funding the responses deemed necessary to combat this ’emergency’, produced by Future Generations Commissioner and Labour party insider, Sophie Howe. From which I’ve extracted the graphic for ‘Transport’ below.
Those who compiled that table obviously view increased car ownership as something deplorable, which must be reversed. Yet for me, and I suspect for most people, those figures represent progress and increased prosperity.
Finally, we see 20mph again in Labour’s 2021 manifesto ahead of the Senedd elections. The original manifesto seems to have disappeared, so I can only link to the update put out following the agreement with Plaid Cymru.
It’s a pity the original’s disappeared because I’m told it proposed risk-based approaches to assessing trunk road speeds. Basically, ‘Welsh Government’, or an individual minister, wanted lower speed limits on A and B roads.
Perhaps Plaid Cymru, a party of rural areas with sparse traffic on open roads, realised this would not go down well in Trawsfynydd or Nant y Caws.
So we see that the call for 20mph, and associated demands, goes back at least 5 years, and probably further. We’ll briefly consider associated issues before turning to an unattainable fantasy.
One of the associated matters is 15- 0r 20-minute cities / neighbourhoods. Which can be viewed in two ways.
The optimist might say: ‘Wow! everything I need will be within easy travelling distance; Waitrose, Pilates, accountant, Skivvyhire, Green Party constituency office, ballet class, tattooist, florist, saddler, doctor, dentist, plastic surgeon . . . .’
(Dentist? In Wales!)
The cynic might ask: ‘Yes, but is that 20 minutes there, or 20 minutes there and back? And what if I want to travel for longer than 20 minutes . . . and just keep going, into the wide blue yonder?’
Make no mistake, Sustrans is an anti-car organisation. And Waters himself is said to be a cycling and walking “fanatic“. Which is fine with me. Veganism is fine with me. It’s when zealots and fringe outfits are allowed or encouraged to push their beliefs onto the rest of us that I object.
Labour-controlled Cardiff council was also on board with the “20-minute neighbourhood or 15-minute city“, as this motion from March 2021 puts it. Even crediting Sustrans.
Erm, let’s think about that for a minute. A city is made up of neighbourhoods. So obviously a city is bigger than a neighbourhood. That being so, how can a city be traversed, and its services accessed, quicker than those of a neighbourhood?
I’ll touch briefly on three more elements of the grand design.
First Minister Drakeford has described ULEZ charges as the “last resort“. But he hasn’t ruled them out. Labour’s experience in London, with people fighting back, might explain his hesitancy.
We will develop a framework for fair and equitable road-user charging in Wales and explore other disincentives to car use, taking into account equality issues including the needs of people in rural areas, people who share protected characteristics and people on low incomes
“ . . . and explore other disincentives to car use“.
Something I found odd about this was that it said, “in Wales“. But this was produced by the ‘Welsh Government’, so which other country would it refer to? Or was it written by someone else, perhaps not based in Wales?
The reference to “protected characteristics” I assume means that women with penises won’t have to pay. (Where’s my wig?)
To achieve this result the Welsh Roads Review Panel was created with orders to deliver the desired ‘findings’. And to guarantee that outcome the group was chaired by Dr Lynn Sloman. Who wrote ‘Car Sick‘, which rather gives away her position.
‘Vision Zero’ seems to have appeared in September 2012. In the ‘Welsh Government’s Road Safety Delivery Plan. Explained here in a written statement from the late Carl Sargeant, then Minister for Local Government and Communities.
But then, just a year or so later, on page 24 of the Manifesto for the 2019 UK general election, we read that Vision Zero has become a plan to eliminate road deaths and injuries entirely!
Let’s give a little more thought to this idea of Vision Zero.
It should be obvious that Vision Zero can only be achieved by banning all vehicles, whether powered by the internal combustion engine, battery, or hydrogen.
But with more bicycles and pedestrians on the roads – as is hoped – there will still be fatalities and injuries. Either cyclists crashing or cyclists colliding with pedestrians. It happens now. With more cyclists, and with cyclists having freedom of the highways, some will be even more reckless and inconsiderate than they are now.
With vehicular transport banned – and that must also mean public transport – then people will spend far more time at home.
But most accidents happen in the home, so spending more time at home will result in more accidents. Don’t take my word for it, read what RoSPA says on the subject. So how is transferring death and injury from the highway to the home an improvement?
It’s not an improvement at all. It only makes sense if the real goal is to ban cars.
More people spending more time at home will create other problems. I can predict with certainty there’ll be more cases of domestic violence, and murder. There will be more children physically and sexually abused. Even more cruelty towards domestic pets.
Also, more suicides, due to the stress of being cooped up at home. It will be a kind of lockdown. And it will be done despite us knowing the social and psychological damage inflicted by Covid lockdown.
But then, it may be dressed up as climate lockdown. And if so, then we must accept that chasing each other round the house with meat cleavers is an acceptable price to pay for saving the planet.
Think about what you’ve just read. Put it all together and tell me it’s not a war on cars, on private transport, and the freedom the car gives us.
◊
RULE FROM THE SHADOWS
I’m returning to the idea of Wales being used as a testing ground. With most people unaware of it, and the lack of awareness even extending to the ‘Welsh Government’.
But testing ground status is easy to achieve when our politicians are controlled by pressure groups. These often directed and / or funded by individuals and organisations making up the Globalist network.
The bigger picture only makes sense when you remember how it started.
With the end of Communism a new threat was needed. And so in 1991 the Club of Rome adopted ‘global warming’. Explained in this video (less than 5 minutes long).
Klaus Schwab, founder and chairperson of the World Economic Forum (WEF), makes an appearance. Schwab is also a member of the Club of Rome.
This programme of control was easy to sell to third-rate leftist politicians in Wales because socialism is fundamentally anti-human; viewing us as classes or identities, even “protected characteristics“, rather than gloriously varied individuals.
And of course, socialists love imposing “Can’t do that!” restrictions.
Now for the new faces I promised.
◊
NORTH STAR TRANSITION
This company was formed just over three years ago by Jyotir Banerjee. The website is full of silly phrases interspersed with impenetrable jargon: “multi-capital metrics” . . . “radical reframing and holistic transformation” . . .
It’s not often one encounters so much bullshit on a single website. Thankfully.
The clue to North Star’s real purpose comes in a piece written a few weeks ago by Banerjee himself. We are told that “biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change” can all be remedied – by “large-scale investment funding“.
Now you know me, when a chancer crosses my path I like to know more about him or her. Did I really say, “chancer“? (Inner voice: “Yes you did, Jac.”)
First stop was Companies House, to see what our boy has been up to over the years. There are a number of companies to his name, which are either dissolved, dormant or, if still trading, then none too buoyant, to judge by the accounts submitted.
The address currently used for Banerjee’s empire is 1 Pembroke Villas, The Green, Richmond. And a very nice gaff it looks too. But according to the Land Registry this property is leased to a firm of accountants.
Since October 2020, a group of 35 thought leaders across Wales have listened to each other and imagined a country that future generations could thrive in.
“Listened to each other“! I see a gang of interlopers discussing the future of our homeland without consulting us. This is often called colonialism.
Topham continues . . .
Why Wales? With a population of 3m people, Wales is the right size for such a living laboratory.
Now she’s gone full-on memsahib. For her and her ‘thought leaders’ our Wales is just a testing ground. With us indigenes as guinea-pigs? Or are we to be removed?
Despite this clique being anonymous one name found on the North Star website is, inevitably, Jane Davidson, who seems to serve as a kind of chatelaine to that demi-monde where enviroshysters have the ear of politicians and civil servants.
After claiming to have initially been reluctant to get involved Banerjee eventually joined Davidson’s Wales Net Zero 2035 Challenge Group. (How many different target years do these people use?)
In his homage to La Davidson Banerjee writes: “Olivier Boutellis and I set up North Star Transition to tackle the climate emergency . . . “.
My cue to introduce Olivier Boutellis and explain what I think is really happening.
Despite what Banerjee says, Boutellis was not there at the start (unless he was keeping his head down). For North Star Transition was launched 10 June 2020 and the company Olivier Boutellis-Taft SPRL climbed aboard 3 February 2021.
The capture below from the European Parliament tells us he’s a lawyer and an economist. And this tells us he’s been a magistrate and a lecturer. Also, CEO of Accountancy Europe.
But it’s his Linkedin profile that I found fascinating. The screen capture below will explain why.
It tells us Olivier Boutellis-Taft joined the Club of Rome EU Chapter at exactly the same time he got involved with Jyotir Banerjee and North Star Transition.
There is also a Linkedin page of the most elementary kind. But it claims the Club of Rome EU Chapter has 11 employees and that its focus is on “sustainability” and “environmental services“.
But understandable doubts to one side, let’s accept Banerjee and Boutellis-Taft at face value. I believe they’re promising to find ‘investors’ looking to buy Welsh farmland for carbon offsetting, or in other ways take land out of agricultural production.
Which fits perfectly with the Globalist agenda to destroy small- to medium-sized farms so that corporations can take control of the food supply. Because if you control the food supply then you control the people.
This Globalist agenda is welcomed by the environmental pressure groups because it destroys farming, especially livestock farming, and most of these activists seem to be vegans.
They also anticipate getting some of the grabbed land for their rewilding fantasies.
Because of course there’ll be fewer people living in the countryside. Take out the main industry and the decline begins. Impose travel restrictions, run down public transport and impose other obstacles and rural living becomes even less attractive.
At the top and the bottom both Globalists and environmental activists know what they want, and are guaranteed to benefit. It’s those in the middle of the scam who, along with the people, will lose out.
Because politicians don’t seem to realise that in the New World Order they are surplus to requirements. As Klaus Schwab explains in this very short video – in the future we won’t need elections.
“Can you imagine such a world?“, he asks. Yes, I can; and while losing politicians has its attractions . . .
Without elections we won’t need politicians, except to serve as ‘managers’ for their Globalist masters. Which is not a lot different to what they’re doing now.
Our politicians have been fooled into thinking they’re saving the planet when what they’re really doing is sacrificing Wales and other countries to the psychotic ambitions of the Globalists.
And this explains dreamers, chancers, shysters and con men flocking to Wales.
◊
CONCLUSION
As I hope I’ve explained, 20mph speed restrictions should not be viewed in isolation. They are part of something much, much bigger.
You’re free to dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist. It’s a free world. For now. But before you go . . .
Justify Vision Zero transferring deaths and injuries from highway to home without admitting it’s a plan to do away with cars. Do you think Jyotir Banerjee’s “large-scale investment funding” is designed to save the Welsh family farm? And why does Klaus Schwab talk about abolishing elections?
Well, here we are, on the eve of a great experiment. Are you excited about 20mph speed limits? Enthused? Or do you just roll your eyes skyward in the way that typifies modern Wales?
I suppose I could have gone about this post differently, by looking at the costs, and examining the various claims more closely, but I leave that to others, confident that I’ll return to this subject once the excrement starts moving upward.
And so what I’ll do in this post is expose the propaganda campaign (that we’re paying for); then give the local history of this 20mph madness; before explaining where I believe it’s taking us.
What we learnt was that Lynn was being paid to push the ‘Welsh Government’s 20mph restrictions for Welsh roads. And it paid well. For Tory leader Andrew R T Davies was told that Lynn had received £738,593 from ‘Welsh Government’ since 2021.
The figure for ‘2023-24 (to present)’ is £185,164. But is that figure for the calendar year or the financial year? I suspect it’s the financial year, beginning April 6, and I say that because Lynn received almost half a million pounds last year, and with the 20mph roll-out taking place this year, I think it’s reasonable to assume that 2023’s figure will be close to, or in excess of, last year’s figure.
Bumping up the costs will be Lynn’s ‘Misinformation Fact Sheet‘ for the ‘Welsh Government’. This attempts to anticipate and refute the objections raised to 20mph speed limits.
This is odd. When I wrote this on Thursday the online Linkedin page was available, but on Friday it seems to have disappeared. Fortunately I saved a pdf version last month.
So if you’re plagued by fake news, misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, flatulence or scurvy, then Steff is the boy to contact. For having worked for Labour in London and Cardiff he knows all there is to know about bullshit.
In fact, Rollnick tells us he was . . .
Assisting the Office of the First Minister with its preparedness for misinformation outbreaks and developing a broad, proactive strategy for bolstering the spread of good information, with a specific focus on tackling anti-vax misinformation.
Ah! “good information“. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?
The terminology used by these people is superficially reassuring, but anyone who’s studied history, particularly totalitarianism, knows exactly what’s being said. And it’s sinister.
‘We have a monopoly on the truth. Accept what we say, or suffer’.
Then, having dutifully carried out the orders of ‘Dr’ Bill Gates, in September 2021 Rollnick transferred his devious talents to Lynn . . . but still working for Drakeford’s clown troupe.
But enough background on a propagandist masquerading as a purveyor of truth, let’s get back to the origins of 20mph.
For Lynn was recruited to push the 20mph nonsense, but the story doesn’t begin there. So where do we need to go to find its origin?
◊
THE LONG MARCH
One culprit might appear to be the pressure group, 20’s Plenty for Us; which has quite a presence in Wales, and may even have sent ‘missionaries’. Such as Fiona Andrews, who moved with her partner Piers Graham Partridge to Llandudoch from Bristol in 2018.
One being Llandudoch, to which Andrews had so recently moved!
The other, was St Brides Major, in the Vale of Glamorgan. This video, released last Thursday by the ‘Welsh Government’, features a few brainwashed kids and a couple of other well-rehearsed locals.
If you’re convinced by that then contact me about some beans.
The Wales 20mph Task Force Group was formed on the direction of Lee Waters, the Deputy Minister for Economy and Transport, in May 2019.
We aren’t told the individuals who sat on this panel, just the organisations they represented. (Appendix A, page 36.) Among them I noticed Sustrans, of which Lee Waters used to be boss-man for Wales.
The whole tone of the procedure and the report screams ‘Done deal!‘.
But can we go back any further in tracing the genesis of the 20mph restrictions?
In fact, it was available on the ‘Welsh Government’ website on the first day of August, so it must have been available as soon as it was officially released. Perhaps before?
In Appendix A, which lists papers quoted by Davis, we see a reference to, ‘Twenty miles per hour speed limits: a sustainable solution to public health problems in Wales‘. Authored by Sarah J Jones and Huw Brunt.
Though I was amazed by the claim that imposing 20mph limits will aid the fight against obesity. Surely driving slower gives fat people more time to get out of the way?
But if driving slower makes us slimmer, then what about hair loss? And flatulence?
20mph is beginning to sound like snake oil.
The main conclusion arrived at in 2016, that bringing the speed limit down to 20mph would save 6 – 10 lives per year, and 1200 – 2000 casualties, is now being repeated verbatim by the ‘Welsh Government’.
So who are the authors of that 2016 report, Sarah J Jones and Huw Brunt?
Chairing the group is former Labour Assembly Member, mastermind of the Future Generations legislation, and mother of the OPD, Jane Davidson. Who does more work for the party and the ‘Welsh Government’ now than when she sat in Corruption Bay.
Cardiff University, that partner with ‘Welsh Government’ in so many quixotic ventures, has two representatives. Possibly a third with Sarah J Jones.
She has worked assiduously for ‘Welsh Government’ and Dŵr Cymru in blaming farmers for everything in our rivers that shouldn’t be in our rivers. No surprise then to learn that she also sits on Welsh Water Independent Environment Advisory Panel.
Which seems to be another secret society; for when I asked Dŵr Cymru for the names of panel members I was refused and, as with The Wales 20mph Task Force Group, told to scroll down the page to the logos of the organisations represented.
Though we are told that the panel is chaired by “Mari Arthur, director of Cynal Cymru”. But she was secretary of Cynal, not director . . . and she left in July 2018.
It looks a bit of a shambles.
Here’s how I see it. The anti-car, restrict human movement element of the Globalist agenda, takes root in the Bay. ‘Welsh Government’ insiders Sarah J Jones and Huw Brunt are told to knock out something in support of introducing 20mph speed limits.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Davis supports 20’s Plenty, Just Stop Oil, and the UN’s climate liars at the IPCC. Not only that, he also dreams of re-joining the EU, and he’s 100% opposed to fossil fuels.
What we have with Adrian Davis is an archetypal member of Globalists’ Woke-Green-Left. Yet in the FoI response just mentioned he is the sole authority quoted by the ‘Welsh Government’ in support of imposing 20mph restrictions.
In whose universe is Davis an impartial and unbiased scientific authority?
But this kind of ‘Tell us what we want to hear‘ behaviour is all too familiar, as I’ve tried to explain on this blog over and over. Let’s just close this section, and jog your memories, with one recent example.
A few weeks before that article appeared the ‘Welsh Government’ announced that all new road projects were ‘paused’. This report from Llais y Sais told us the decision had been made by the Welsh Roads Review Panel headed by Dr Lynn Sloman.
I made enquiries about Dr Sloman and this is what I wrote at the time.
Well, she lives in London, where she’s a board member of Transport for London. The bio I’ve linked to tells us she has a holiday home near Machynlleth. (To be exact, in Cwm Einion aka ‘Artists Valley’.)
So a cycling zealot who lives in London, and hates cars – but has a holiday home in Wales, to which she presumably drives – is allowed to dictate ‘Welsh Government’ policy.
This is how the ‘Welsh Government’ operates. It recruits people it calls ‘independent’ to undertake studies guaranteed to come to the desired conclusion. Then it employs propagandists like Lynn Global, or uses the tame media, to push that message.
There is never an independent voice, nor genuine public consultation.
◊
WHERE IT ENDS
Before I start, let me make it clear that I’m sure there are people who genuinely believe 20mph restrictions will get mamgu on her bike, zooming ’round the neighbourhood frightening animals and knocking kids over.
Just as there are people who believe the planet is doomed unless we get rid of human beings. Or that men can have babies, and women have todgers. That White people are evil. And that every criminal who lands in Europe in a small boat must be looked after cos he is a ‘refugee’.
Such people are fools. But more dangerous by far are those who know these things to be lies, but promote them for other reasons. Which brings us to the Great Manipulators.
For perhaps more than any other administration and political establishment of which I know, Corruption Bay has surrendered itself to the Globalist agenda. And by so doing it is prepared to sacrifice us, the Welsh people.
This sacrifice means imposing restrictions in the name of public health, or saving the planet, or to promote inclusivity / diversity, and generally protect us from ourselves. For we are both stupid and evil.
Wales is now being subjected to the most odious form of paternalism. Odious, as it claims to be done for our benefit, but it’s not.
Because if you understand what I’ve been saying then you’ll realise that making us drive at 20mph has absolutely nothing to do with road safety, or air quality.
This legislation is part of a wider strategy against the private motor car. Or rather, it’s to deny private transport to poorer people. For Net Zero is a war against the poorest in society waged by the middle class on behalf of an elite seeking global domination.
Just think how insane that is. They want to take away your car, on environmental and health grounds, but there’s no public transport, so you’re effectively stuck at home.
So wise up,
20mph legislation is part of the same package as ditched road-building projects, 15-minute neighbourhoods, compulsory injections with untested vaccines, the assault on livestock farming, and CBDC to keep check on every penny you spend.
If Wales had more devolution, giving Labour and Plaid Cymru the power (God forbid!), they’d introduce legislation such as we see proposed in Ireland, where there’s a Bill to impose a ‘Hate Speech Act’ . . . that fails to even define hate!
It’s censorship pretending to be something virtuous.
Should that law be introduced then a grifter from a protected group will just need to say they feel offended (or that great favourite, ‘unsafe’), and the Guards will be kicking somebody’s door down in no time.
They will even be encouraged to feel offended, and have explained to them the most lucrative ways to be ‘offended’, and ‘unsafe’, by the shysters in NGOs and pressure groups currently wreaking such damage on Ireland.
Wales would also see legislation against ‘misinformation’ and its even more evil twin ‘disinformation’. Which in practice could mean the ‘Welsh Government’ employing Lynn to police us all.
Even me!
Not a welcome prospect for those of us who believe in freedom of movement, and freedom of expression. But somehow, ‘progressives’, acting as shouty foot-soldiers for Globalist totalitarianism have convinced themselves they’re engaged in a noble struggle against fascism!
At some point in the near future historians and political commentators will marvel that, having alienated the working class, the left then shot itself in the other foot by attacking the poorest and most vulnerable in society on the orders of the world’s biggest corporations and richest individuals.
An encapsulating irony with which to end might be that those who now fight to protect animals we breed to eat, especially perhaps battery hens, have sided with those wanting humans to live in a very similar fashion.
The ‘Welsh Government’s 20mph legislation is a step in that direction. Only a fool would see it for anything else.
This quickie begins with the response to a Freedom of Information request. It concerns ‘Welsh Government’ dealings with an outfit called Lynn, which former Future Generations Commissioner, Sophie Howe, joined in May as a ‘Global Strategic Partner’.
‘Global Strategic Partner’! Has she ever lived outside of Cardiff?
The sole director and shareholder of Lynn Group Ltd and Lynn Global Ltd – the latter formed just a month after Howe joined – remains Shayoni Sarkar Lynn. She studied at Cardiff University (where else?) and is married to a Welshman.
So let’s turn to the FoI mentioned at the top, and the reason I’m writing this piece.
◊
TOO MUCH TO HANDLE
This FoI request, dated 27 July, simply asked for . . .
a copy of all correspondence, digital or otherwise, both internal and external (including time sent) that reasonably relate to Welsh Government’s use of communications consultancy Lynn to promote the 20 MPH zone law, from 1 July 2022 to date.
It seems straightforward enough, and surely a request easy enough to satisfy, covering just a year, and a single topic.
But the response, as you can read below, makes clear that there was a lot of traffic between Lynn and the ‘Welsh Government’ in that period. For a quick shufty turned up over 2,000 documents!
The number of employees went up from 5 the previous year to 12 in y/e 31 March, 2022, and money in the bank went up from £199,227 to £1,650,756. I’ll repeat that for the hard of reading. Cash in hand, for a small company, went up by £1.45m in a single year.
Yes, creditors account for £1,172,195, but most of that figure is covered by ‘accruals and deferred income’. This probably means income from the previous year, but it’s not money owed to anybody.
And remember, that previous year, ending 31 March, 2021, was the first year in business for the Lynn Group (originally Lynn PR). Which tells us that Shayoni Sarkar Lynn hit the ground running. Dare we assume the work was already promised and all she had to do was set up the company?
How much did Lynn earn in year ending 31.03.2023, the period largely covered by the FoI request, and how much of it came from ‘WelshGovernment’?
Did Lynn have any other clients, or was it just the ‘Welsh Government’? The Spartan website certainly mentions no clients. There are a few campaigns listed, but no claim that Lynn was involved in them.
Come to that, what exactly does Lynn do? What does it offer clients? Here’s Shayoni Lynn to tell us.
Well, whaddya know, it’s “behavioural science“. Which is getting people to believe in things they wouldn’t readily believe in. A kind of brainwashing. Or coercion.
The kind of thing politicians do when trying to push unpopular policies, like, er . . . oh I don’t know, maybe 20mph zones. Which is of course what the FoI request was about.
And she makes no secret of her admiration for the MS for Llanelli (resident in Penarth). Though given the money that association has brought her I can understand why she’s delighted to support Lee Waters and 20mph.
But we are still no nearer to understanding exactly what she did for that money.
The Twitter / X account I grabbed the above image from contains a number of gems that leave us in no doubt as to how Shayoni Lynn operates. It’s the “Scare them shitless” UN-WEF strategy used to get people to believe in the ‘climate crisis’.
Lynn describes it as, “impactful fear appeals“. Yeah, like I said – “Scare ’em shitless“.
From what I can see, the wonderful and universally respected ‘Welsh Government’ is paying this woman – and others – to frighten us into accepting their Globalist agenda.
Is this a proper use of public funding? And how much are we talking about?
◊
SOPHIE HOWE
Now we have to consider where and how Sophie Howe fits into the picture.
After leaving her sinecure as the Future Generations Commissioner in February Sophie Howe was soon putting herself about.
She started her own company, Sophie Howe Associates Ltd . . . with her as the only associate. In June she became a trustee of Coleg Soros. And a Scottish source tells me she’s also got a seat aboard the Bute Energy gravy train.
And of course she joined Lynn. But why?
It couldn’t be because Shayoni Lynn needed influence in Corruption Bay, for she was already living high on the hog of Welsh public funding. There had to be another reason.
Being an aficionado of Mafia movies I know there’s often a scene when the local kingpin insists on a job for a relative. Just think of The Godfather, when young Vito Corleone loses his job in the grocery store to Don Fanucci’s nephew.
Alternatively, the Mob moves somebody into a business they’ve invested in in order to protect that investment.
Which is it with Lynn and Sophie Howe?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not for one minute doubting Sophie Howe’s talents; but let’s be honest, we’re dealing here with ‘Welsh’ Labour, and as political parties go, this lot comes bloody close to being a criminal enterprise.
(Though mentioning ‘enterprise’ in their company might get you whacked!)
◊
CONCLUSION
I’ve written a lot about those clowns down in Corruption Bay, and the system of third sector spongers, funded pressure groups, and assorted cronies, that serves as an echo chamber protecting them from the reality of an increasingly restless population.
But with Shayoni Sarkar Lynn we have entered new and dangerous territory. For we are being manipulated and frightened into accepting policy decisions over which we were never consulted and with which the majority of us do not agree.
This is a form of totalitarianism. And yet we are paying for it!
And it comes with a failing NHS; with our poorest kids going without meals this summer; with a community in Llanelli on edge as it waits for ‘refugees’ every man and his dog knows are not refugees; as rural Wales is turned into an open-air power station with turbines and pylons – to supply England; and as the no roads, ‘degrowth’ agenda demanded by demented Globalists is imposed.
I therefore call on opposition politicians to demand that this Freedom of Information request be answered properly. Because we are entitled to know how much public money has been paid to Shayoni Lynn and her Lynn Group Ltd to lie to us, and to frighten us.
Because if opposition politicians don’t oppose, and the will of the people can be ignored by a cult-like minority that’s persuaded itself we, the common herd, are stupid and bigoted (and they have), then democracy is as good as dead.
UPDATE: A good source directs me to this Sell2Wales entry (22/12/2021) seeking tenders for: “NPS Media Buying, Integrated Marketing Campaigns and Public Relations Services Framework”. Of 16 applications 12 were accepted.
The 12 were approached for what was now the, “20 mph National Campaign” (17/08/2022), only 5 tendered, and if we click on the tab ‘Full Notice Text’ we see Lynn PR was successful. For some reason, ‘Estimated Total Value’ is left blank.
My source points out: a) Lynn was competing with more experienced and better resourced competitors; b) tenders are not accepted from companies with less than 3 years experience, which should have ruled Lynn PR out.
That Lynn PR got the 20mph contract suggests that someone in Corruption Bay smiled on Shayoni Lynn. That Sophie Howe, the ultimate Labour insider, has joined Lynn, would seem to confirms this suspicion.
But that still leaves the mystery of the work Lynn PR was doing that paid so well before being awarded the 20mph contract.
♦
I promised a piece on Bute Energy, its links with the ‘Welsh Government’, and a few associated snippets, but it’ll have to wait until next week.
Another article begins with an apology . . . and I can’t even blame the drink! But the fact is that I have more information on Extinction Rebellion (XR), including its Welsh roots. Well, not really Welsh, just in Wales, like so many of these buggers.
I was also sent something by a regular reader who’s been invited to a conference in Cardiff next month so he can sit for six hours being told that deep down he’d really like to be in the Ku Klux Klan. (I suspect he will not be attending.)
At less than 2,200 words this is quite a bit shorter than recent offerings.
♦
EXTINCTION REBELLION, AGAIN
In the previous episode I told you that ER was officially launched on October 31, 2018. But I didn’t tell you where, or by whom. The driving force behind the launch was Julian Roger Hallam, and at the time he was living on a smallholding in Carmarthenshire.
This WalesOnline report from September 2019 is headlined, “The Welsh farmer who became the mastermind of Extinction Rebellion“. Mmm. He may regard himself as a farmer, and he might live (part-time) in Wales, but if he’s a “Welsh farmer” then I’m a Chinese astronaut.
The second paragraph says, “His small 10-acre farm near Llandeilo sounded like something out of a John Steinbeck novel”. If the journalist is referring to The Grapes of Wrath then I must assume she hasn’t read the book.
But let’s not be too picky.
Hallam seems to have been elbowed out of XR when the others realised what an Olympic standard narcissist he is, who’ll say and do anything to draw attention to himself. And that includes trivialising the Holocaust.
Others have darker suspicions about Hallam, and XR. Touched on in ‘Roger Hallam – Extinction Deception‘, a long read but worth it for the insights it gives into the lunatic fringes of the environmental movement.
Here’s a taster.
Hallam is gone to Just Stop Oil or wherever, but Extinction Rebellion is still with us, hardly less extreme, and with its claws firmly into the so-called ‘Welsh Government’.
You’ll remember that Extinction Rebellion e-mailed Climate Minister Julie James July 13, 2022, and the message was headed: “URGENT REQUEST FOR A MEETING”. (Here’s a pdf version.)
There may have been no response because another e-mail was sent on August 1, and re-sent the following day. It’s worth picking out some points. (Here I may indulge in a little imaginative paraphrasing)
First paragraph. “OK, so we know you’re on holiday, and you’re probably surfing down Rhossili, but we gotta meet”.
Second paragraph: “This glorious summer weather gives us the perfect opportunity to scare people shitless by exaggerating the temperatures and pretending people are keeling over in Llandudno from sunstroke. We were appalled to hear your boss Starmer talk about ‘Growth’! Bloody hell! that’s the last thing we want on our Long March to turnip-munching medievalism”.
Third paragraph: “So get your skates on or Wales will not achieve the nirvana we just tantalised you with. Because if we can achieve it, then important people will flock here in private jets to fly over and admire Welsh people singing in close harmony as they work the collective turnip patch”.
In case you find some of the images I’ve just conjured up a little unsettling we’ll quickly move on to this document. Which was almost certainly influenced by XR.
It’s important for a number of reasons, not least because, as it runs from 2022 to 2026, it’s happening now. Or rather, and despite having ‘Public Engagement’ in the title, it’s a period in which others are making decisions for us, and around us.
For as it says at the foot of page 13 (and top of 14), in the section headed ‘Audience’, what the ‘Welsh Government’ is seeking is a partnership with pressure groups to spread the gospel of Net Zero to tackle ‘climate change’.
Though I’m not sure who else is on “Team Wales“.
I was also struck by the term “trusted messengers“. Which cropped up again on page 24, and again, with “Team Wales partners“.
But what really intrigued me about this section was the admission, at the end, that there is little public support for Net Zero. And that the ‘Welsh Government’ believes it must rely on it “partners“, like Extinction Rebellion, to push the message.
In fact, Julie James makes a very similar admission in her introduction, on page 7. (My emphasis.)
Delivering technology and infrastructure solutions to some of the key barriers to public action on climate change is also urgent. We know that households across Wales need affordable tools and solutions to make the change, and we know that many of these are out of budget-reach for many households.
XR doesn’t just have access to politicians, it also pokes its collective finger in the chests of civil servants. From reading XR”s own output I get the impression that these extremists can access all areas of Corruption Bay.
But the fundamental problem for politicians, civil servants and envirogrifters remains – saving the planet don’t come cheap. And when ignorance, apathy or half-hearted acceptance are replaced by outright hostility, when Dai Public realises how much it’s gonna cost him, then the whole scam is in serious trouble.
We are witnessing the first real signs of that with the growing resistance to the 20mph speed limit – even before it’s introduced. There will almost certainly have to be a big and face-losing climb-down.
I have more information on XR but much of it is in the form of screenshots which are out of context and undated. If I can put them into some kind of order I’ll return to the subject.
Though one thing that shines through clearly from the exchanges between the ‘Welsh Government’, Extinction Rebellion and others is that they’re desperate to give the impression of having consulted the public, and enjoy public support for their lunacies . . . without ever consulting the real Welsh public.
As I’ve suggested, it’s done by ‘consulting’ colleagues and sympathisers, assorted pressure groups and carefully selected ‘panels’, in order to give the required outcome.
It’s called ‘consultative democracy’. The term is misleading, and the process is undemocratic.
♦
SENEDD INSIGHT / THE KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE
I was surprised to receive a rather curious document that had been sent to a regular reader, inviting the recipient to attend a conference in Cardiff. (Here it is in pdf format.) You’ll see that it originates with summat called Senedd Insight.
Given the name, I naturally assumed that this outfit is in some way connected with our wonderful, talent-packed Senedd. But no.
Further perusal of the available information revealed that “Senedd Insight is a division of The Knowledge Exchange Group Ltd“.
Hold on for the ride!
The Knowledge Exchange Group has a website, and the company of that name is registered with Companies House. The address given, 1 Northumberland Avenue, off Trafalgar Square, sounds impressive. But we’re in the realm of “flexible office space“.
The latest accounts reveal a deficit of £96,089 and a debt with HSBC.
Until 2018 The Knowledge Exchange Group was known as Knowdata Ltd, and used an address at 18 The Ropewalk, in Nottingham. Which has a number of brass plaques, including one for an accountant.
So who’s behind Senedd Insight? Well, I can tell you it’s a one-man band, and that one man is named Neil Kamal Kharbanda.
Kharbanda had another company called Government Knowledge Ltd, formerly Government Knowledge Training Ltd. Which could have been the precursor to The Knowledge Exchange Group.
After it too relocated to Northumberland Avenue Government Knowledge went down the Swannee owing a lot of money. Over a hundred grand to HMRC. Disregard the “Intercompany Loans“, these are often imaginative attempts to salvage something from the debris. The ‘loans’ themselves may be entirely fictitious.
Neil Kharbanda had yet a third company, this was The Public Service Directory Ltd. It departed this Vale of Tears in May 2017, some £76,000 in the red.
At the risk of sounding unkind, that is not a business record to inspire confidence. But let’s give him a chance, what else can we learn?
Turning back to the invitation sent out, I have to say it looks quite impressive . . . if you don’t think about it too much. There’s certainly a lot of speakers, the usual mix of academics, third sector / pressure group chisellers and others reliant on the public purse.
There are one or two who don’t fit that description, such as, “Amari Smith-Samuel, Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Network Rail Wales & Western“.
But still, most of those attending will have their fees paid from the public purse. I mention this again because attending this festival of chip-on-shoulder ranting don’t come cheap. Here are the rates.
And, remember, it only runs from 9:30 to 3:30, with perhaps an hour for lunch.
Let’s average it out at £350 a head and say 200 attend, that’s £70,000. Even taking out fees for the speakers that’s not bad for a day’s work.
Of course the venue will need to be paid for, which raises another interesting point, because in the invitation received by my source the venue hasn’t yet been booked. It just says: “The full-day conference will take place in a centrally located conference venue in Cardiff. The venue will be confirmed shortly.”
That brings back memories, for I used to go to meetings like that back in the ’60s, often after a summons like this:
“We are meeting in Carmarthen on Saturday. Be in Nott Square at 11:07, with a folded copy of the ‘Ferret Fanciers Monthly’ in your left hand. There you will be approached by an Oriental female who will whisper the location of the venue into your right ear. Pay close attention because her English is poor and she has a lisp.”
Ah! but happy days!
Returning to the Knowledge Exchange Group . . . the latest accounts report a deficit of £70,000, yet it claims 17 employees at the “flexible office space” off Trafalgar Square. Can that be right?
Maybe they aren’t in London, for I think Neil Kamal Kharbanda of Northumberland Avenue is also Neil Kamal Kharbanda of GroData Solutions LLP in Delhi, India.
I believe they are the same man because Knowledge Exchange Group shows on the very basic GroData Linkedin page.
But there remains so much we don’t know, which is why I have a list of questions addressed to no one in particular. And in no particular order.
Given the name, most people would assume a connection between Senedd Insight and Senedd Cymru. Is there a link?
If so, what is that link?
If there’s no link, how does the Senedd feel about its name being used in this way, for after all it is the only ‘Senedd’ in the world?
How does the ‘Welsh Government’ feel about paying so much in fees, either directly or indirectly, to a man with a worrying business record?
If asked, would the Senedd provide facilities for a Senedd Insight conference?
Are all those speakers really signed up?
Will the money made from this conference in September be used by Mr Kharbanda to pay off his debt to HMRC?
How many conferences are there every year at which we, the Welsh people, will be excoriated by those whose salaries we pay?
If I had the time I’d contact the organisations for which the speakers work and ask why they’re supporting an event promoting ethnic differences and racial antipathies.
♦
FINAL THOUGHTS
I hate to be bringing more bad news, but come on, this is Wales. Where’s the good news?
Wales, where those who claim to run the country are clowns, and those who really run the show are fanatics like Extinction Rebellion. And then, feeding off this shit-show we have people like Neil Kamal Kharbanda.
Who, as we know, is not alone. Wales has more parasites than the mangiest, most flea-bitten creature on Earth. If Wales was a dog it would be put down.
There’s so much material here for Franz Kafka or Dario Fo if they were still alive. But they’re gone and so there’s no one to tell the world this tragi-comedy of leftist fuckwits given money every year and making a country worse than it was the year before . . . or the year before that . . . or the year . . . .
Think about that – more money yet they make things worse! There’s a special talent in play here. It should be studied by anyone wanting to run a country into the ground.
Because, unfortunately, that’s what’s happening to Wales.