Wales, Idiots And Envirogrifters

On 28/07/202329/07/2023 By JacIn Colonialism, Environmentalism, Globalism, Greens, Welsh Government41 Comments

Yes, I’ve postponed the piece on the Globalists, again, but it’s a story with no real deadline. Whereas what I’m offering below is a kind of follow-up to a piece I put out in June: Wales: Ruled By Pressure Groups. And I want to get it out before this year’s Show in Llanelwedd becomes a distant memory.

This is another biggie, but it’s segmented. So, as Buddy Holly sang, Take Your Time.

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EXTINCTION REBELLION, AN UPDATE

In the piece I just linked to I established that the so-called ‘Welsh Government’ (‘WG’) has been meeting with the extremists of Extinction Rebellion since at least May 2019.

I can now confirm that first minister Drakeford himself met with Extinction Rebellion in July 2019. Did he meet them even earlier, because the letter below doesn’t say it was their first meeting?

I can’t take it back further (unsurprising seeing as XR didn’t launch until October 31, 2018), but I can reinforce the point that XR and WG are close, and establish beyond any doubt that the pressure group is giving orders to our elected representatives.

Exhibit A, M’lud: An e-mail from XR Cymru to Julie James, who’d been re-elected in the May 6 Senedd elections and made Minister for Climate Change. Basically, the message says, ‘You’re not going far enough or fast enough’.

The message ends with a reference to, ” . . . the good relationship with Welsh Government developed in the last few years”. On the right you’ll see Julie James’ response.

The next communication I have is from XR Cymru Political Circle and it’s to Julie James and Llyr Gruffydd, Plaid Cymru chair of the Senedd’s Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee, and it’s dated December 7, 2021.

I should add that the highlighting is not mine. And I was unable to locate the attachment referred to. (Yes, you’re welcome to try.)

Extinction Rebellion, with nary a vote to their name, tell the ‘Welsh Government’: “Of course there are areas where we want to see more action and faster responses“.

I’d tell them to fuck right off . . . but then, that’s me.

The next billet-doux was sent on July 13, 2022, at 7:26 in the morning! From XR Cymru Political Circle to Julie James, and the subject matter, in upper case, read: “URGENT REQUEST FOR A MEETING”.

This is an interesting (and amusing) communication. For it might suggest that Julie James was not giving XR the personal attention they thought they deserved. In fact, it reads as if she fobbed them off with her deputy Lee Waters, and they weren’t impressed.

There is the usual ‘Must do better! reprimand, but what I really want to focus on is the reference, in bold type, to “Behaviour Change Strategy“. Also, the introduction of Claire Chappell, who is said to be ” . . . working as quickly as possible with substantial resources . . . “.

So who is Claire Chappell?

Her Linkedin page (here in pdf) describes her as, ‘Head of Brand Performance’ at the ‘Welsh Government’, and she’s been in the job for more than 8 years. But what is the job? And what is ‘brand performance’?

Well, I found this explanation, and if the definition below is to be believed, then Clair Chappell and her employer are dismal failures.

Brand performance marketing, also known as brand purpose marketing, focuses on improving your brand’s reputation and of course, its performance.

Finally, we’ll read this e-mail from December 13, 2022. From XR Cymru Political Circle to Julie James and Lee Waters, cc Mark Drakeford and Llyr Gruffydd.

Again, that reference to “behaviour change“. How exactly are we supposed to change? And change into what – mugs taking orders from Extinction Rebellion channelled through the ‘Welsh Government’?

Here endeth the chapter on Extinction Rebellion. I’m hoping the ‘Welsh Government’ and Plaid Cymru now remember that we are judged by the company we keep.

Though I suppose that advice could also be given to Extinction Rebellion.

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MISCELLANEA

In this chunk of the opus I want to deal with stories that either made it into the news recently, or else came to my attention by some other route. Some of these broke at the Show, others lead on from things that broke at the Show.

That make sense?

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RULE OF SIX

I’m referring to the Six Principles, and Extinction Rebellion was also involved in this nonsense from before the May 2021 Senedd elections. It’s in the form of an appeal to politicos to sign up to six principles somebody’s dreamed up at their Pilates class.

Here’s a composite of the appeal, the six principles set out, and a list of the signatories.

One of the six organisations involved is Whale and Dolphin Conservation. Which I was delighted to see, for we really must stop the annual slaughter of dolphins at Abergele, and scupper the Aberaeron whaling fleet.

Also among the signatory bodies is CAFOD, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development. When did Wales become ‘overseas’? Or why does CAFOD keep cropping up in these envirogrifter pronunciamentos?

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THE ENVIROGRIFTERS’ MILITIA

Now we’re expected to fall into line with the National Nature Service, and I bet you didn’t even know we had one. Neither did I.

I just can’t keep up with all these new bodies, overlapping, duplicating each other’s work, the same people popping up wearing different hats, and all in receipt of public funding and / or time that politicians and civil servants should be spending on real problems.

Clearly following the third sector model.

And just like the third sector envirogrifters will identify a ‘problem’, and demand funding to solve said problem; but never actually solve the problem because that would mean the end of the funding. That’s how this scam works.

I described this plan on Twitter as a militia for hobby farmers and hippies, and I see no reason to change that view. With perhaps XR providing the commissars. Just scroll down here and see who’s involved in this latest scam.

Now think about it, here we have an organisation promising to revitalise rural Wales, and yet the two farming unions are not involved, and neither is the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales.

What we see instead, are the usual suspects. Envirogrifters, Swamp dwellers, and ‘Welsh Government’ departments.

Which makes this capture from the militia website dishonest. Unless of course it refers to hippies and hobby farmers. Which I suppose makes a certain sense, given that the ‘Welsh Government wants these to replace traditional Welsh farming.

The website is very basic and uninformative, giving it a work in progress feel but, unsurprisingly, we read that the previous Future Generations Commissioner had a big hand in its production.

Though the Commissioner is only the Welsh agent for a bit of UK-wide silliness, as we read below. The links will tell you more.

The process is being organised by the Wales Inquiry of the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission, with support from the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner, under the auspices of the Green Recovery Task Group – a cross sector group convened to act quickly and creatively in response to the impacts of the pandemic.

The Future Generations Commissioner for Wales included the proposal to create a national nature service in her Fit for the Future Programme for Government

Envirobollocks piled so high it’s in danger of blocking out the sun . . . Hang on! – is that the cunning plan?

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NFU REJECTS ‘WELSH GOVERNMENT’ TREES PLAN

One of the big stories of the Show was NFU Cymru rejecting ‘Welsh Government’s demand that farmers set aside 10% of their land for tree planting. Hedgerows do not count, but possibly trees in hedgerows do count!

The proposal might work on some farms, but not others. Which is why the ‘Welsh Government’s blanket approach reveals the failing of inflexibility that we see time and time again.

We saw it with the NVZ legislation, brought in to tackle a very localised problem, yet the politicians adopted a sledgehammer and nut approach and made the legislation both national and unreasonably strict. Though the ‘Welsh Government’ has subsequently backed down a couple of times.

But then, Labour politicians in Wales know little about farming or the countryside. Theirs is a party of cities, post-industrial areas, chip-on-shoulder minorities, and agitators with useless degrees and colourful hair.

To compound the problem Labour politicians are advised by civil servants – like Lesley Griffiths’ former paramour Gary – who’ve been shipped in from England to run down Welsh agriculture.

Further, the draconian NVZ rules were based on the false premise that farmers are solely responsible for poor water quality. Because, for reasons given elsewhere, it suited a number of agendas to give Dŵr Cymru / Welsh Water a free ride.

Among the agendas served was that of environmental / river groups, in receipt of public funds and, in many cases, seeking to appropriate farmland.

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FUTURE GENERATIONS COMMISSIONER LOOKS INTO THE, ER, FUTURE

Now we turn to one of my favourite sites, Nation.Cymru. Though the unkind among you dismiss it as just another ‘Welsh Government’ propaganda outlet.

And after reading ‘We need a new long-term vision for food in Wales‘ I can see why.

This little gem was penned by Derek Walker, the new £95,000 a year Future Generations Commissioner; and just like his predecessor, Sophie Howe, he got the gig not because of any particular talent, but because he’s a trusted Labour insider.

Not only that, but Derek worked for Stonewall. In fact, he helped Stonewall set up in Wales. How much more of an insider can you be?

So what did Derek have to say?

“High food prices mean one in five people in Wales are hungry, disproportionally affecting more disabled people, Black, Asian and minority ethnic people.”

Mmm. Does that mean Derek thinks it’s OK for able-bodied White people to starve? Is this another example of ‘inclusivity’ that discriminates against the majority?

But let’s give the boy another chance. Carry on, Derek . . .

“Agricultural waste pollutes our rivers” Oh dear, that may be the party line, but I was expecting better. But alright, one more chance.

And the boy comes good with: “Farmers are critical to our nation’s health, rural communities and a thriving Welsh language – they helped maintain the food chain through the pandemic, play a leading role in restoring nature and reducing emissions, and should be a vital part of this long-term food plan.”

But it raises the obvious question – if you think our farmers are so important, Derek, why is your government making life so difficult for them?

Finally, we read:

This autumn, I will publish my priorities for my role for the next seven years, and the long-term questions I’m exploring include – how can we involve communities to shift diets to meet the nature and climate emergencies and create green jobs?

What does “shift diets” mean, Derek? Because I suspect it means away from meat. I suspect that because you link it with “the nature and climate emergencies”, which I further suspect alludes to farting cows.

In a country of livestock farming you want people to stop eating meat?

And as for “green jobs” this often means hobby farmers, OPDs, etc., which don’t create many jobs. Or cheap food. It’s also used to describe greenwashing . . . often on land that was previously productive farmland.

All in all, Derek, your piece shows the confused if not contradictory thinking we’ve come to expect from Corruption Bay. Which resulted in it being cliched and vacuous.

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DEVELOPMENTS OF NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE

I’ve had occasion to commend the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales (CPRW) recently and I am delighted to do so again. On Monday we saw the release of a map compiled by the CPRW showing Developments of National Significance.

Here’s a link to the press release, and here’s a link to the map. Understandably, the map is big, and detailed; so set aside some time to make sense of it. And remember, these are just the projects where planning applications have been submitted.

There are many more in the pipeline, including quite a few of Bute Energy’s 23 known projects.

This was a useful exercise by the CPRW because the ‘Welsh Government’ seems unable or unwilling to produce such a map. But also because it exposes the hypocrisy of those we are dealing with.

It’s become obvious in recent years, and perhaps especially in Wales, that as the threat of ‘climate crisis’ loses its power to frighten people the message has linked with ‘biodiversity loss’ or ‘habitat loss’. This coupling is clear in all the documents I’ve linked with and organisations I’ve mentioned.

Taken at face value it says there has been a depletion or degradation of the natural habitat, with a resultant loss of species or of numbers within a species. And yet . . .

Those who now trumpet climate crisis and biodiversity / habitat loss refuse to criticise tens of thousands of acres of pristine upland being ruined by wind farms, or fertile lowland by solar arrays.

For example, the RSPB refuses to acknowledge the problem despite birds being killed by turbines, especially larger birds, often belonging to rare or endangered species.

And there are wider issues. Such as China’s near-monopoly of the rare earth metals needed to produce turbines and solar panels. Transporting materials and finished products vast distances by ship. Finally, the fact that neither wind turbine blades nor solar panels can be recycled.

How environmentally friendly is all that for intermittent and very expensive power!

It’s clear that for environmentalists biodiversity loss is restricted to farmland. Explained, again, by support and funding they receive in order to follow Labour’s anti-farming agenda and thereby grab farmland for themselves.

An agenda the envirogrifters are increasingly dictating!

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CONCLUSION

We are lumbered with a bunch of third-rate politicians elected in the main for no better reason than, “My nanna would turn in her grave if I didn’t vote Labour”. Blind loyalty allowing Labour to win with the support of just 20% of the electorate.

Being third-rate they tend to be impressionable. Not only did they buy in early to the Globalists’ Fear = Control agenda but went for broke by implementing legislation to prove that, “Wales can show the world . . . ” . . . how a country can impoverish itself by adopting a Green policy of degrowth.

In the early days, this idiocy came from within the administration, from people like Jane Davidson, Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing from 2007 – 2011, and now chair of Wales Net Zero 2035.

But as word spread others took notice. By 2018 the principal Globalist organisation, the World Economic Forum, was advising envirogrifters to move to Wales!

But let’s go back to the trees for a minute. The 10% of farmland for trees demand is a condition of ‘Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme, a replacement for EU funding.

Speaking last year, just ahead of the Llanelwedd Show, Mark Drakeford said that subsidies to Welsh farmers must be justified to Bangladeshi taxi drivers in Cardiff.

To suggest that the views of a small immigrant community are more important than the views of thousands of Welsh farmers looks like another example of ‘inclusivity’ at the expense of the indigenous majority.

Ask yourself – would Drakeford suggest consulting Ceredigion farmers if taxi drivers in Cardiff wanted to increase their charges?

Wales, a country being run into the ground by clowns who prioritise feelings above biological reality, preach economic gibberish, practice discriminatory ‘inclusivity’, and have been suckered by a global power grab calling itself “the climate crisis”.

How much more of this are you going to take? How much more can Wales afford?

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Bute Energy, Update, 30.06.2023

On 30/06/202319/07/2023 By JacIn Colonialism, Environmentalism, Welsh Government, World Economic Forum38 Comments

This piece has been off / on for a while, due to other matters cropping up to grab my attention. But in the end, it worked out, because new information is emerging all the time.

To avoid going over too much old ground I shall devote most of this piece to what’s new. Those wanting more information on what’s gone before can type ‘Bute Energy’ in the search box atop the sidebar.

The whole article, including quoted passages, is roughly 3,000 words, so rather than gulp it down in one you can take it a piece at a time. You know it makes sense!

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BUTE ENERGY, A SHORT RÉSUMÉ

In recent years I’ve written a lot about Bute Energy and the various companies under that umbrella. This ever-expanding empire began life in London, at 20 Primrose Street, otherwise known as the Broadgate Tower in the City.

Then it used an address in Edinburgh’s New Town (above Gant), probably because the principals, Oliver James Millican, Stuart Allan George and Lawson Douglas Steele, seem to be Scottish, or resident in Scotland.

But over the past year we’ve seen use made of an address at Hodge House in Cardiff. This being a desperate but unconvincing attempt to suggest that Bute is a Welsh company.

“Pass the bara brith, Blodwen, indeed to goodness, look you!”

This change of address simply means that the invitations to meet ‘Russian brides’, the 50p off! at Tesco vouchers, and the Vote for Dai Scroggins election leaflets get delivered to Sir Julian’s old gaff.

And let’s not forget the overseas investment, for Bute is in partnership with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The name says ‘Copenhagen’, but the money could be coming from anywhere.

Bute Energy, through a host of companies, many carrying the name of a specific project – such as Bryn Glas Energy Park Ltd – wants to build ‘Energy Parks’ the length of Wales; twenty-three at the latest count. These locations may also include solar arrays, and even hydrogen whatsits.

The map below is my best guess of where these wind farms are. I may have mis-located one or two.

Opposition has been mounting for some time to Bute’s grand designs, but resistance has tended to be localised, confined to areas immediately affected by one of the few projects for which Bute has revealed its plans.

But most of the sites remain little more than Companies House entries offering the bare minimum of information.

Resistance increased a while ago when news broke that Bute wanted to bring power from its ‘Nant Mithil’ (Radnor Forest) site along 60 miles of pylons to link up with the grid running east from Pembroke power station.

If we accept the route map produced by Bute, then the connection with the grid is to be made somewhere south of Carmarthen town.

Though when asked exactly where the connection is to be made, at a ‘Have Your Say’ meeting in the RWS showground, Llanelwedd, Bute head honcho, Millican, was unable to answer.

So let’s see if I can fill in any gaps.

What follows will be in some kind of chronological order; which means I’ve tried to present the fresh evidence in the order it became known to me.

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LAND USE CONSULTANTS AND OTHERS

This first item takes us back a couple of years, but it seems to have been overlooked. It cropped up in this tweet from April 2021. (The link is broken.)

Land Use Consultants was formed by Edward Max Nicholson in 1966. Five years earlier, with Sir Peter Scott and others, he set up the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). I guess LUC has been recruited in another attempt to burnish Bute’s environmental credentials.

Bute and LUC were together at the ‘inception meeting’ last December with ‘Welsh Government’s Planning & Environmental Decisions outfit to discuss the ‘Nant Mithil Grid Connection Project‘ (page 6).

Intriguingly, LUC has been involved with the so-called ‘Welsh Government’ since at least 2010. As shown by this report, Research: Planning Implications of Renewable and Low Carbon Energy.

Though for other projects Bute seems to employ different planning consultants. For the Nant Mithil site itself it’s David Bell Planning, of Edinburgh; for Llyn Lort it seems to be Carney Sweeney, of Birmingham; and for Rhiwlas it’s RSK, of Cheshire.

LUC also seems to be picking up other work in Wales. I know it’s working with Natural Resources Wales on the Dark Skies project.

Which makes perfect sense. Because with the Corruption Bay Clown Show determined to switch to Unreliables it won’t be long before we shan’t need to travel to darkest Powys to escape ‘light pollution’.

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TWO NEW ‘ENERGY PARKS’

Orddu is one of the new sites. As you can see on the map above, the nearest town is Bala. To be more precise, Orddu is north east of Bala and sits above the smallholding of Cwm-cywen in Cwm Main, where my father-in-law was born and raised.

A company has been formed with the usual three directors. Here’s the Companies House entry.

The other new energy park, Moel Chwa, is across the A5 and just to the east of another Bute site at Mwdwl-eithin. At the time of writing there is no company bearing the Moel Chwa name, but there is a website mention.

Moel Chwa seems to be very close to an earlier project by Clean Earth Energy Ltd called Nant Bach. Are they related?

The Companies House entry for Nant Bach Turbine Ltd suggests Clean Earth erected just a single turbine. Which the filed accounts value at £2,273,106, giving some idea of the kind of money we’re talking about.

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GRIDS & NETWORKS

As I mentioned, opposition to Bute’s ambitions got a boost with news of the plan for 60 miles of pylons from Nant Mithill (Radnor Forest) to the west-east grid connection near Carmarthen.

This has been linked with Bute’s Green Generation Energy Networks Cymru Ltd.

It’s also being suggested that, in a belated attempt to make up for the past two decades in which they encouraged foreign companies – many government owned – to exploit Wales with no local returns, ‘Welsh’ Labour is now pretending it can create something like a Welsh national grid.

The announcement I just linked to came a few days after the Commons’ Welsh Affairs Committee produced ‘Grid capacity in Wales’.

And while neither document mentioned Bute Energy, many observers believe that Bute Energy is heavily involved. Some believe Bute will build Julie James’ ‘Welsh grid’.

For naked corruption would be the only other interpretation for the very close, and financially lucrative, links between Bute and a number of ‘Welsh’ Labour insiders.

From the Green Gen Cymru Network video. “Endless potential” is quite chilling. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

But then, confusion abounds on the subject of networks, with Julie James, Minister for Climate Change, as confused as anyone, according to a knowledgeable contact. For this source suggests she doesn’t understand there are two different types of grid.

My source explains the difference here.

We know that Bute wants new pylons from the Radnor Forest to somewhere in the vicinity of Carmarthen, and to then take that power to Usk and over the border. This it calls “Phase 1“.

It’s suggested Phase 2 (and another line of pylons?) will start somewhere near Eisteddfa Gurig, close to the A44, inland of Aberystwyth, and run to (and here I quote my source) “Chirk Grid Supply Point’ (as yet unbuilt)“.

Although Phase 2 is still a bit hazy, there would appear to be confirmation out there. According to the documents reproduced below, Bute projects in west central and northern Wales will run to the as yet unbuilt Chirk GSP.

References to ‘Chirk’ obviously cause confusion because Chirk GSP doesn’t exist. But what does exist is not far away at Lower Frankton. The problem here being that Lower Frankton is in Shropshire.

On this OS map the border is in purple, it shows Chirk as just about the nearest point, in Wales, to Lower Frankton. So is Lower Frankton being called Chirk to pretend it’s in Wales, and therefore boost Wales’ Net Zero credentials?

Further evidence of grid ambitions came a few weeks back with the Infrastructure (Wales) Bill. You’ll see it talks of making it easier for the James Gang to give consent for “overhead electric lines”.

There are also links with Ireland. One comes up near Bodelwyddan, inland of Abergele. Then there’s the Greenlink Interconnector, ensuring that “Excess power can be shared between Ireland and the UK”.

Finally, let’s look at a link from Scotland. Nation.Cymru reported this last November, and parroted the National Grid’s press handout about it being to “upgrade Wales’ electricity network and take advantage of offshore power“.

In fact, and to get technical, I hear work has started on the Bangor (Pentir) to Swansea (North) 400kv double-circuit pylon line.

Let Uncle Jac explain this one . . .

England needs more electricity . . . but not the turbines and the pylons. So the turbines are in Scotland, the cables carrying the electricity run under the Irish Sea, come ashore near Bangor, go overland to Swansea, where they join the west-east line from Pembroke, and then on to England.

As my well-informed source put it, “The two grid connections out of south Wales into England currently have no constraints so it appears as if Wales is being used as a ‘transmission corridor’ from Scotland to England”.

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NEWS FROM SCOTLAND

A couple of weeks ago I had an e-mail from Glasgow. As you know, I get lots of e-mails, but this is worth mentioning because it suggests that this source is keeping an eye on Bute’s operations in Scotland.

Before I tell you what it says, I’d better identify some of those mentioned.

Erik Bonino was an oil executive who joined Bute in July 2020 but left early this year due to alleged naughtiness by Bute in Senghenydd. Or that’s how I heard it.

The story made it into Llais y Sais, where Shippo covered it.

David James Taylor was spad to Rhodri Morgan, Peter Hain and Carwyn Jones. He has profited greatly from being Bute’s entry to ‘Welsh Government’.

You’ll see that the source suggests Taylor has been replaced by the fragrant Sophie Howe, the former Future Generations Commissioner. This would fit well with her new job with Lynn. (Until May last year, ‘Lynn PR Ltd’.)

Sophie Howe has landed on her feet, again, due to her manifest and dazzling talents. Her raking it in, again, is completely unconnected with knowing everybody worth knowing in ‘Welsh Government’, ‘Welsh’ Labour, and civil service.

Happy to clear that up.

By “Reece Emmett” I think my source means Reece Emmitt. (Here in pdf format.) Though I can’t see any obvious connection with the Labour party. But after 5 years in Cardiff University that can be almost guaranteed.

There have been big divisions in Bute management. Chairman Erik Bonino lost a power struggle with Oliver Millican, the majority shareholder, now Bonino and his allies have been cleared out.

Team Millican: Stuart George, Lawson Steele, Gareth Williams.

Team Bonino: Mark Vyvyan Robinson, Gemma Hamilton, David Taylor.

Bonino was known to be nervous and raised concerns about unethical practices regarding securing land and some of the heavy legal agreements and gagging orders Bute were trying to impose on landowners and residents. He was concerned only about his own image and reputation though not about the welfare of the landowners and communities. He was also nervous about all the bad publicity Bute were getting generally and how it was impacting on him.

Bonino recruited Mark Vyvyan Robinson from EDF (where he had been for 20 years) as CEO but he left shortly after a few months. Gemma Hamilton (development director) David Taylor (comms director) were both in same camp and left soon after along with Bonino. and some junior staff.

Millican made himself chairman and installed his sidekick Stuart George as Managing Director. Both are woefully inexperienced and the whole operation is now considered a joke in the industry.

They brought in Derek Hastings from SSE to replace Gemma Hamilton. They basically are paying people 3x what they get elsewhere which is how they recruit people.

They are throwing money around and recently brought in two people to replace DT: Sophie Howe as an “adviser” to help with Welsh govt / Labour link. And Aled Rowlands a former aide to Nick Bourne to try and sort the Tories. Obviously that is failing badly cos the Welsh Tories hate Bourne.

Also Reece Emmett ex Welsh Labour apparatchik is in the comms team.

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ANTZ CYMRU

I suppose we’d better start this section with the ANTZ Cymru website’s announcement of the link-up with Bute Energy. Which prompts a few comments.

First, there is no entity called ANTZ Cymru, it’s a flag of convenience for ANTZ UK Ltd of Manchester. Realising there’s money to be made in Wales ANTZ is another company that has adopted a faux Welsh identity.

A good source in Powys, sees parallels between ANTZ and something called the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). Which says of itself, “We are the original Nudge Unit”. BIT is an international outfit with its UK office in Manchester.

Here’s a BIT website page to which I was directed called ‘How to build a Net Zero society’. I was also nudged (geddit!) in the direction of, ‘A Manifesto for Applying Behavioral (sic) Science’.

And then, from 2010, we have ‘Mindspace‘, focusing on “influencing behaviour“.

This all begins to sound like getting people to think the way you want them to think. To accept that black is white. Dare we say – brainwashing?

Will we see people stumbling out of village halls repeating, “Wind turbines are nice . . . I love pylons . . . Mark Drakeford is the most gifted and accomplished politician of his era”.

An exaggeration, I confess, but we are talking of mind games here. Getting people to think a certain way, and then there’s the careful use of language. Here’s a couple of gems from the page announcing the partnership.

We read: “ANTZ Cymru is developing a bespoke person-centred, Social Value monitoring system on behalf of Bute Energy that tracks the individual.”

Tracks the individual! What the hell does that mean?

Then there’s this, “The renewable energy team at Bute Energy is planning to deliver a family of wind and solar farms across Wales”. A family!

“Oh look, children – there’s Daddy wind turbine, and there’s Mammy wind turbine, and all the little – 820ft! – baby wind turbines”.

Did you ever read such bollocks?

How much is Bute paying ANTZ? To judge by what my Scottish contact told us, it’s probably well over the odds.

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CPRW COMPLAINT

As I’ve explained, Bute goes to great lengths in attempts to prove it’s a Welsh company serving Wales. As I hope I’ve made clear, what Bute and others are actually doing is exploiting the complicity of the Corruption Bay buffoons to turn Wales into a vast open-air power station for England.

If the wind farms planned and mooted ever get built, then Wales, apart from national parks and built-up areas, will be covered in turbines and pylons. All happening in a country that already produces more electricity than she needs!

I was encouraged therefore to read that the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales (CPRW) has reported Bute to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for making misleading claims.

Point 1 of the complaint (below) sums it up. Electricity produced in Wales goes into the UK national grid and thence to wherever it’s needed. Bute therefore cannot promise to supply Welsh homes with green energy.

Well done, Ross Evans and CPRW. And the very best of luck.

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CONCLUSION: THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER

What you’ve read might make you despair, but that’s because you’ve been reading about Wales. Elsewhere, things seem to be looking up.

But perhaps not in Germany. Or not yet.

Though Siemens has taken a hit recently due to component problems in Siemens Gamesa wind turbines. But many believe the problems are more widespread. Not least because the components used by Gamesa are used by other manufacturers.

More on Siemens, linking with Bute Energy. And on ‘Creaky Wind Turbines’.

In fact, the German economy is in trouble. Over-reliance on Russian gas – which NATO sabotaged – closing its last three nuclear power plants, and going hell-for-leather on ‘Renewables’ hasn’t helped.

But the Germans aren’t stupid. They’ll soon realise their mistake.

Which is what appears to have happened in Sweden, where the news is much more encouraging. The government there has turned its back on the unattainable goal of 100% renewable energy. What will Greta say!

While next door, in Norway, we read . . .

The fact is that Western governments, under pressure from the public and the dictates of common sense, are starting to reject the Globalists’ degrowth agenda and their stooges’ insistence on Net Zero.

Yet as some countries wake up to the cost of Net Zero others continue to sleepwalk towards disaster. Unfortunately, we live in one. And it has consequences.

Just before last Christmas Tata put out a press release saying it would ‘pause’ operations at its Port Talbot steel plant, the largest in Europe, and its tinplate operation at Trostre, in Llanelli, “to reduce strain on grid”.

As we are forced to depend more and more on Unreliables the electricity supply will become more erratic; and that means jobs paying good wages, like the thousands at Margam and Trostre, will be lost.

An absurd price to pay for the unattainable goal of 100% of electricity from ‘renewables’ – in order to fight a ‘climate crisis’ that’s not happening! The only beneficiaries are the governments, corporations, and investors owning the wind turbines on our soil.

And so every wind farm and pylon run should be treated as another Tryweryn. For they mean Cymru being exploited to satisfy the greed of strangers. And to keep the lights on in England.

♦ end ♦

Wales: Ruled By Pressure Groups

On 12/06/202319/06/2023 By JacIn Colonialism, Corruption, Environmentalism, Globalism, Planning, Public Funding, Third Sector, Welsh Government40 Comments

Some of you may find what follows, especially the Conclusion, troubling. But I had to write it because the level of lobbying, coupled with contempt for our people, is now at unacceptable levels.

And while I still see the third sector as a gravy train for otherwise unemployable Labourites, and remain convinced that senior civil servants are Westminster’s fifth column, the role of environmental pressure groups has become impossible to ignore.

Or maybe I should have said, what started out as environmental groups, or are regarded as environmental groups. For they have moved beyond environmentalism.

Hopefully, my use of italics gives a clue as to what you’re about to read.

♦

THE MORE THINGS FALL APART THE MORE DESPERATE THEY BECOME

Those I’m discussing, have, in my lifetime, moved beyond individual species, like the whale or the panda, and identifiable environments like the Amazon rainforest, to go global. Not only that, but they now argue that to save the planet many things become necessary, most importantly, controlling human behaviour.

Even human movement. The focus is now on us humans. For we are the problem. All of us, collectively, simply by existing.

To deal with ‘the people problem’, the caring souls I’m writing about have agreed to serve as foot-soldiers for an elite that sees itself as an unelected world government.

Climate hysteria bullshit. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

But I sense the campaign by the former panda cuddlers on behalf of the would-be totalitarians is not going well. Maybe I should clarify that by saying things are faltering on the global level but still progressing rather well in Wales.

Globally, those things they’ve demanded we believe in look less and less credible. This results in people questioning the propaganda, and wondering what lies behind it.

After 50 years of preaching climate disaster, rising sea levels, polar ice loss, and polar bear extinction, you can’t be surprised that the public gets a wee bit sceptical when things stay the same . . . except that the Great Barrier Reef has never been healthier, the ice sheets are expanding in both Arctic and Antarctic, and there are now more polar bears than ever.

When the facts so obviously contradict the propaganda the propagandists are in trouble.

And so I think this exposing of the lies explains what I see as a certain change of tack from the environmental lobby, coupled with an increasing desperation on the part of those pulling their strings.

By a change of tack, I mean that the emphasis has shifted from the global Armageddon believed in only by the brainwashed, to more nuanced and local issues under headings like, “biodiversity“, “habitat loss” and “environmental degradation“.

Because in addition to there being no climate catastrophe most people have trouble thinking in global terms. But persuade them things are bad on their patch, and then say, “It’s the same all over “, and you might still fool them.

An accepted environmental tactic known as ‘Think globally, act locally’.

In practice, it means we’re told there are fewer wild flowers than our parents knew. Or that land can be ‘improved’ if handed over to such-and-such a group. Or that our rivers are being destroyed. In fact, to believe George Monbiot, the Wye is now just an open sewer.

I’ve dealt with these issues recently in Clear Water, Poisoned Debate (08.11.2022) and The Alliance Against Livestock Farming (16.11.2022).

But just as with the death cult predictions the remedy is the same – radical changes in human behaviour that require restrictions on movement and other freedoms we and our ancestors have taken for granted.

As I just suggested with one of those links, an obvious connection between puppets and puppet-masters is them putting a disproportionate amount of the blame for the world’s ills on farmers. Especially livestock farmers.

More climate hysteria bullshit. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Not that that makes any sense in the real world. But taking control of the world’s farming is a central ambition of the Globalist agenda. And it’s already happening.

In the Netherlands, the government plans to implement orders from the World Economic Forum, channelled through the European Union, to forcibly buy 3,000 farms (the most efficient farms in the world), and EU legislation will prohibit the displaced Dutch families from farming anywhere else in the EU!

And now, in Ireland, the government recently announced that the country ‘needs’ to cull some 200,000 cows to meet its Net Zero targets.

All because someone decided it would be a good idea to pretend that methane is at dangerous levels, and that CO2 is a threat to the planet.

The truth is that cows belching and farting make little or no difference to methane levels, while life on Earth would be impossible without CO2, which has been at much higher levels many times in the past.

This ’emissions’ nonsense is about control of energy and the food supply. Control these – as the Globalists want – and you control the people.

These attacks on farmers originate with those who operate behind the scenes; but they get bodies like the EU, national governments, and sub-national administrations to implement their instructions.

With ‘environmental’ organisations doing the close up and dirty work.

Wow! We’re in a warm period.. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

With more and more people becoming aware of the WEF, and how it operates through local political establishments, there is something of a panic in Davos to promote The Agenda before too many politicians get elected on anti-WEF platforms.

Which also explains why the growing rejection of the Globalist agenda is described in the mainstream media – now funded and controlled by major WEF backers – as “right wing“.

For those of us who oppose climate hysteria, the butchering of confused teenagers, open borders, and the other elements of The Agenda must be described this way to smear us and deter others from listening.

◊

HOW DOES THIS SYSTEM OPERATE IN WALES?

Let’s kick off with a subject causing a great deal of debate, and anger, across Wales right now – 20mph speed limits.

It was obvious all the way through that this measure was being pushed onto our self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ by agencies originally external to Wales. Principally, an outfit called 20’s Plenty for Us.

A good source drew my attention to this report on the BBC Wales News website. Where we can read:

Fiona Andrews, member of the “20’s Plenty” campaign group, told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast the speed limit was “more human, friendlier” and better for the environment.

Ms Andrews, who lives in St Dogmaels, Pembrokeshire, which has been trialling the speed limit for two years, said it had made a big difference.

It should go without saying that Fiona Andrews is not native to Llandudoch. My source suggests that she and her partner, Piers Graham Partridge, moved from Bristol in 2018.

Andrews also appears in this report from July 2021. The image of Andrews used is even credited to her partner. So she’s not new to the game of influencing politicians to push the Globalist agenda. Or, it would seem, to using the media.

In addition to being a photographer, Partridge is a businessman, with an old family firm called Cardigan Mercantile Company Ltd.

And when he’s not photographing his wife, or running his business, it seems he likes to hang out with thigh-slapping, latte-sipping, Anglo-Saxon volk; and someone wrapped in a gaudy flag. (Partridge is in the blue shirt.)

They also dance. Calling themselves the Traditional Turf Dancers of Santa Dogmales. Is this their idea of Welsh culture? Or are they just taking the piss?

North Pembrokeshire and south Ceredigion must be delighted with this cultural enrichment. Not to mention, being told what they’ve been doing wrong all these centuries.

But Llandudoch is doubly blessed. Not only to have Andrews and Partridge come to enlighten them but, as I mentioned in Clear Water, Poisoned Debate, Jessica McQuade is another recent arrival.

Her Linkedin page (pdf version) reveals that her career path has been: ‘Welsh Government’, WCVA, WWF Cymru, WWF UK (even though she’s based in Wales).

Since January this year, McQuade has been WWF UK’s Wholescape Programme Manager, with a focus on food. (And we are not talking here of bamboo shoots for pandas.)

She also busies herself with the Save the Teifi campaign. Any problems with the Teifi will be mainly blamed on farmers.

I say that because when I researched last November’s pieces the suspicion grew that an understanding had been reached between the ‘Welsh Government’, Dŵr Cymru / Welsh Water, and the environmental / water groups that resulted in public money passing to the savers of the planet in return for them giving the water company an easy ride and concentrating their attacks on livestock farmers.

An arrangement that served a number of agendas.

Which might explain how, in defiance of common sense, English water companies seemed to be in the news almost every day for polluting rivers and seas while our own water company was, apparently, above reproach.

Recently I’ve learnt of other organisations operating behind the scenes. So hold your nose and we’ll dive a little deeper into the swamp that is government and public life in Wales.

And we’re going to focus on another group making the headlines at the moment, Extinction Rebellion (XR). I introduce this lot because another source found info telling us that the ‘Welsh Government’ has been in cahoots with XR, since at least May 2019. As this FoI response makes clear.

The May 2019 notation refers to:

Correspondence between the Minister for Rural Affairs,
North Wales & Trefnydd (MinRANWT) and Extinction Rebellion.

At that time, the minister was Lesley Griffiths, but I doubt if many of you reading this had even heard of Extinction Rebellion four years ago. I certainly hadn’t.

Griffiths is a long-standing enemy of farmers. So was it XR that advised her (and Gary) to introduce the insane and punitive all-Wales NVZ legislation designed to put farmers out of business?

It might get a bit messy now, because I was sent a load of stuff in the form of (often incomplete and undated) screenshots. Even so, what I have is fascinating, and damning.

For not only does it tell us that the ‘Welsh Government’ is sitting down for tea and Hobnobs with extremist groups to discuss how Wales should be run, those groups are even dictating to the ‘Welsh Government’ what its priorities should be.

The first complete minutes I have are for a meeting in January 2021. (Available here in pdf format.)

These minutes pose many questions. Not least, why was a representative of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) at a meeting discussing internal Welsh matters?

What next – will the Orange Order be invited?

The ‘JO’ referred to is almost certainly James Owen, the former ‘Welsh Government’ Deputy Director, Land Management

While ‘SL’ is, I suspect, Sue Lewis, of Wrecsam. When she’s not laying down the law to the ‘Welsh Government’, she’s telling local authorities what to do.

From that report it’s clear that Extinction Rebellion and Friends of the Earth are working together, but how close are they?

Anyway, I now want to focus on Extinction Rebellion’s Political Engagement Team. The purpose of this little gang is quite simple – to get politicians and governments to do its bidding.

Here’s an example.

And in Wales, that’s easy.

Now, unfortunately, I don’t have a date for the XR correspondence below, but the ‘FM’ referred to is not another gang of environmental shriekers but our very own First Minister, Mark Drakeford, of high renown.

The highlighting is mine.

In addition to what I’ve highlighted, I’m intrigued by the final paragraph. Would there be some way other than legislation for, “mandating fossil fuel divestment from public sector investments“.

This, remember, is our money, much of it paid in council tax; but Extinction Rebellion wants to dictate how that money is invested. Are we ever consulted?

The issue crops up again in this screenshot involving Llyr Gruffydd, Plaid Cymru regional member for north Wales, and interim leader.

I could go on, but I’ll just introduce one more ‘campaigner’ who has come to live among us. This is Paula Renzel, who describes herself as “German-French” but now resides in Llanberis in Eryri.

Paula has quite an interesting background. Here’s her Linkedin page. (Here in pdf.)

She arrived in Cardiff in April 2018 to work for The Ramblers. Interestingly, someone who has always been involved with The Ramblers is former minister, Jane Davidson, mother of the OPD, and driving force behind the Future Generations legislation.

Then, in October 2020, Paula Renzel joined Sustrans. Another pressure group with a ministerial connection. This one still in government. I’m talking now of Lee Waters, who represents Llanelli (from his home in Penarth) and is Deputy Minister for Climate Change. As his official bio tells us:

He previously ran the sustainable transport charity Sustrans Cymru where he led the campaign for the Active Travel Act

So many connections!

Since February 2022 Paula Renzel has worked for the Transport Action Network. She is almost certainly the “new Welsh worker” mentioned in the May 2022 clip (above) from XR’s Political Engagement Team.

Below is her entry on the TAN website. You’ll see that among her battle honours she lists closing Cardiff’s Castle Street to private vehicles.

In fact Sustrans gets involved in all sorts of things. This publication from the ‘Welsh Government almost a year ago is titled: ‘Evolving approach to gender budgeting in Wales‘.

Not only does the WEF get a mention, but also Sustrans.

Active travel is a key part of the Welsh Government’s vision for the Welsh transport network. A gender budgeting pilot is specifically focused on the Wales E-Move programme, which operates low-cost community-based e-bike hire and loan schemes in five areas in Wales – most with high levels of deprivation. The Welsh Government is working alongside Sustrans Cymru, who are delivering the scheme, to better understand how a gender budgeting approach could add value and inform future delivery.

So the ‘Welsh Government’ is working with Sustrans to provide electric bikes, for women living in deprived areas, and this somehow links with ‘gender budgeting’? Is that what this convoluted bullshit is trying to say?

Who writes this stuff?

And will these bikes have crossbars?

I ask because ‘Welsh Government’ takes orders on matters sexual from Stonewall. Which means that if you want a good, long laugh, just ask a Welsh Labour politician to give you a definition of a woman.

As I said earlier, I could go on, but it gets depressing after a while. So I’ll just skip to my concluding thoughts.

◊

CONCLUSION

After reading what I’ve written here it should be obvious to anyone where the idea for 20mph speed limits now being imposed on Welsh communities originated.

We can also see who was behind Lee Waters’ announcement in February that there would be no new roads in Wales.

In fact, they boast about these ‘victories’ . . . over us.

But that’s the norm in Corruption Bay. If Stonewall can dictate Welsh education policy why be surprised that followers of the global death cult are allowed to decide on 20mph speed limits, and no bypass for Llanbedr?

No doubt those I’ve written about argue they’re saving a planet facing an existential crisis. Which is absolute nonsense because there is no looming climate disaster. What they’re really doing is forcing on Wales the Globalists’ de-growth, anti-people, restrict and control agenda.

But what does it say about Welsh democracy? We elect politicians to serve the best interests of our communities and our country, but then they are taken over by pressure groups and told to implement the agendas of those groups.

To all intents and purposes the ‘Welsh Government’ is serving Extinction Rebellion, Sustrans, Greenpeace, 20’s Plenty for us and the other pressure groups. But not us.

What’s worse, the word is obviously out that Wales is the place to come to get your agenda implemented. Just look at the activists who’ve moved here in recent years.

Are they here on secondment? Have their moving costs been paid?

Whatever the answer, we have people who know bugger all about Wales framing legislation for Wales. But Wales doesn’t matter to them. Our country is just an easy place for them to implement their agendas. Thanks to ‘our’ politicians.

And because the pressure groups are now in control, things can only get worse.

Whatever you want to call this system, it’s not democracy.

And it’s not a form of devolution worth keeping.

♦ end ♦

Wales, Slavery, The Truth

On 18/05/202318/05/2023 By JacIn Colonialism, History, Welsh Government20 Comments

This piece was unplanned until, on Tuesday morning, I woke, bleary-eyed, to find a DM waiting from a regular source alerting me to a piece in the Spectator (PDF version) connecting our village with slavery! This followed an earlier piece in the Telegraph (PDF version).

It all links with the UNESCO Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales project. I was involved locally in that project, and following the recent unwanted publicity I feel it’s time to give an alternative view.

And this is my own, and very personal, view.

◊

A BIT OF HISTORY

The first exploitation of the slate reserves at Bryneglwys was undertaken by John Pughe, when he took out a lease with local landowner Lewis Morris. Pughe, from Aberdyfi, already worked a few mines in the area.

Among these enterprises was the famous Dylife lead mine, in the high, empty country between Machynlleth and Llanidloes. Dylife attracted a number of workers from the Cardiganshire mines.

There’s little left in Dylife today, just scars of its industrial hey-day, plus a few houses and the Star Inn. But at its height, almost 200 years ago, it was a community of some 1200 people.

From the road near Dylife looking south west towards Nant y Moch. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

My wife tells me she recalls reading that Pughe died relatively young and his widow then sold the business. It passed through a few hands before being bought by the McConnel family of Manchester in 1863. I shall return to this period of the Bryneglwys quarry later.

The third chapter belongs to Henry Haydn Jones, who was born in Rhuthun, in the same year the McConnels bought Bryneglwys quarry. His father died when he was 10, which led to his mother returning to Tywyn.

Young Henry worked for his uncles J and D Daniel in their ironmongery business on Tywyn High Street. He obviously prospered, because in 1911 he bought the quarry and much of the village.

Sir Henry Haydn Jones, Liberal MP for Merioneth 1910 – 1945. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

The year before, 1910, he had been elected Liberal Member of Parliament for Merioneth. And was to remain the local MP until 1945, when he stepped down as Sir Henry Haydn Jones.

Sir Henry kept the quarry open long after it was economically viable. Perhaps because he had a greater affinity with the community than the previous owners.

◊

THE MCCONNELS

The previous owners were of course the McConnel family, three of the sons of James McConnel, cotton mill owner of Ancoats, Manchester.

The reason the McConnels bought Bryneglwys quarry in 1863 was because the Union blockade of Confederate ports meant that little or no cotton was reaching Manchester.

So let’s state this clearly. The American Civil War meant that the McConnels had to find other ways to make money. They did not come to Wales as philanthropists.

They came to an area they already knew because, in 1859, one of the brothers, William, seems to have entertained dreams of setting himself up as squire, with the purchase of Plas Hengwrt at Llanelltud.

Plas Hengwrt. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

The tenure of the McConnels saw a major expansion of Bryneglwys quarry, and they built most of the older houses in today’s village. But again, this was done for sound economic reasons.

It was difficult recruiting workers in a sparsely-populated rural area, and so many people had to be persuaded to move to Abergynolwyn. They could not move without somewhere to live.

The McConnels therefore built and owned their workers’ houses, for which the workers paid rent. A common enough arrangement.

And seeing as we’re discussing slavery . . . plantation owners also built accommodation for their slaves.

The McConnels laid the railway line we know today as the Talyllyn Railway, done to get the slate out to their customers. By taking it down to the coast, from where it would either be transported by rail from Tywyn or by ship from Aberdyfi.

The line also brought supplies to Abergynolwyn. With a local network taking those supplies, particularly coal, around the village. The train also brought beer for the pub!

Sir Henry Haydn Jones kept the railway open as a passenger service after the quarry closed in 1947/48.

◊

‘SLAVERY’

I’m writing this because Abergynolwyn is the village in which I’ve lived for many years, where my children were brought up, and where my wife was born and raised. Her taid, Richard ‘Dic Bêch’ Humphreys, worked in the quarry.

But now the village is getting very unwelcome publicity due to being unfairly associated with slavery.

Here’s the Telegraph headline (29.04.2023).

And here’s the headline from the Spectator article (14.05.2023).

I don’t really feel particularly “embroiled“, but let’s be quite clear about this . . .

The community of Abergynolwyn has no connection with slavery other than a tenuous link provided by the McConnels, who came to Abergynolwyn when the American Civil War cut off their supplies of raw cotton.

Though it could be argued that the link between Abergynolwyn and slavery is even more tenuous seeing as the McConnels did not own slaves or plantations themselves.

Using the reasoning of extended culpability could it be argued that a baby wearing a garment made from McConnel cotton was also complicit in slavery?

And would guilt extend to someone living in a property roofed with Abergynolwyn slate?

Come on, let’s get real – this slavery accusation is just Woke bollocks. Heading in the direction of, “All White people are guilty!“.

You’ll note that the Telegraph headline mentions an “explanatory plaque“. Well, here it is, as it now appears on our Canolfan wall.

So who’s responsible for the wording on the plaque? Is it Cyngor Gwynedd? Cadw? Someone working for the so-called ‘Welsh Government’?

UPDATE: I now learn that the text on the plaque was written by the National Slate Museum, and knocked up by Headland Design, of Cheshire. How could a Welsh institution have got it so wrong? And why did an English company get the contract?

But it doesn’t end there for David Martin-Jones, the writer of the Spectator piece – who claims roots in the area – for he thinks he’s found another issue.

But McConnel is English and a capitalist to boot. Such a background is anathema to those who currently run Wales and micro-manage the Welsh version of the cultural revolution. From this perspective, McConnel’s achievements must be re-defined to fit an ideology that reduces history to melodrama, where brutal and rapacious English capitalists despoil the Welsh landscape and immiserate its people.

He sees the McConnels as victims of “the Welsh version of the cultural revolution”. And while I won’t argue with anyone putting the boot into our hyper-Woke ‘Welsh Government’, I will take issue with the suggestion of an anti-English motivation.

Listen, Dai, try reading that plaque again. Yes, there’s a silly reference to slavery, but apart from that where’s the criticism of the McConnels?

The real problem is the exclusive and fawning focus on the McConnels.

The McConnels took over an established Welsh business and the quarry ended its working life back in Welsh ownership. But that plaque is all, “McConnel, McConnel, McConnel . . . Manchester, Manchester, Manchester”.

◊

CONCLUSION

The plaque on our Canolfan insults the community with its unnecessary and misleading reference to slavery; while also being historically inaccurate in not mentioning the Welsh ownership.

Yet it could have been even worse.

For I understand that someone involved in designing the plaque was so keen to glorify the role of the McConnels that an earlier draft even tried to credit them with building the old village hall in 1947 – a full 36 years after they’d severed their ties with the area!

That plaque must be removed, and re-written. With the new plaque giving a more accurate resumé of the quarry’s history, and without any references that insult the memories of decent people who can no longer answer for themselves.

Because with the tourist hordes about to descend I’d hate to be approached by someone who’s read the plaque and then asks me if I’m suitably ashamed of the village’s links to slavery.

In such a situation I might let slip a naughty word. Perhaps a few naughty words.

♦ end ♦

Weep for Wales 20

On 30/01/202330/01/2023 By JacIn Colonialism, Colonisation of Wales, Corruption, Demographics, Ethnic Cleansing, History24 Comments

Well, here we are again, with the latest instalment in this saga, and the first since Weep for Wales 19 in November 2021. As that title tells you, there were 18 previous instalments (and a few updates scattered about), so set a day aside if you want to catch up with it all.

For this latest chapter I’ve had to buy quite a few documents from the Land Registry, so why not help out by making a contribution? Just click on the ‘Donate’ button in the sidebar. (Believe me, you’ll feel better for it!)

I should add that WfW 20 contains, inevitably, a considerable amount of update; because without understanding the past it’s difficult to make sense of the present, and impossible to make informed assessments of what lies ahead.

Though I’m hoping this contribution ends the saga; and that the current owners, and future owners, give me no reason to return to Plas Glynllifon.

♦

BACKGROUND

Let’s start with the location. Plas Glynllifon is an impressive old pile found just outside the village of Llandwrog, on the A499, a few miles south west of Caernarfon.

That said, it’s not that old, having been built in the decade after 1836 for Spencer Bulkeley Wynn, third Baron Newborough. But on the site of at least three earlier houses. (The eighth baron can now be found at the Rhug Estate.)

By one route or another the Glynllifon estate passed to Caernarvon County Council, then its successor authority, Cyngor Gwynedd, before it became the responsibility of Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor, which merged in 2012 with with Coleg Llandrillo and Coleg Menai to form Grŵp Llandrillo Menai.

But soon after the handover in 2001 – maybe even before – it became clear that while a further education college could certainly use the other buildings it had no need of the mansion, and so it was put up for sale.

Which saw the mansion being sold in 2003 to Glynllifon Ltd.

Though I find it odd that this company was set up as early as 7 November, 2000, by pharmacist Dr Devendra Shah. For this was even before the site was officially handed over to Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor.

Such foresight!

But it was two and a half years after its formation when Glynllifon Ltd bought the mansion for a stated £500,000. Though by then Shah was long gone, and the only director at the time of the purchase was Pravin Gabhubha Jadeja.

Their company is still alive, with four outstanding charges. The long-departed Welsh Development Agency is owed an unspecified amount from March 2004, and Cyngor Gwynedd £130,000 from a month later. (The two may be linked.)

All the various purchases and Land Registry titles involved can be found in this table I’ve drawn up for you. (Available here in pdf format with working hyperlinks.)

The way this 2003 transfer was done, or perhaps the way it wasn’t done, has caused confusion for many people over the years, myself included.

I say that because if we consult the original Land Registry title number CYM 8531 we see that ‘The Mansion House and Glynllifon Estate, Glynllifon, Caernarfon’, is still shown as belonging to Grŵp Llandrillo Menai. Which is obviously not the case.

Confusion added to by the real title document for the mansion, CYM127981, referring to ‘land adjoining Glynllifon College, Clynnog Road, Caernarfon (LL54 5DU)’.

The separation is explained in this document. (Scroll down.)

I’m sure this mess could be tidied up without too much trouble or expense.

Despite liabilities pushing two million pounds Glynllifon Ltd hoped to give out an impression of liquidity by valuing the mansion at £2,245,053 and claiming a share issue of £400,000.

No one was fooled. And so the company was voluntarily liquidated in April 2016 with the mansion, Plas Glynllifon, now ‘Estimated to realise’ £720,000. A third of the valuation.

What I found strange was that, despite the charges still being outstanding, neither the Welsh Development Agency nor its successor body – the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ – was listed among Glynllifon Ltd’s creditors.

Had the debt been written off?

◊

THE ERA OF THE CRIME FAMILIES

Now we enter the glorious chapter when Paul and Rowena Williams appear on the scene. And what a splash they made. Without going into too much detail, the Gruesome Twosome were (among other things) mortgage fraudsters.

They operated like this . . .

Step 1: Buy a property – maybe from a liquidator – for, say, £200,000.

Step 2: Set up a company to ‘buy’ that property, from yourself.

Step 3: Get a qualified (but bent) valuer to say the property is worth £1,000,000.

Step 4: Ask a bank to loan the new company £500,000 to help buy the property.

The bank is happy to lend the money in the belief that even if the company goes bust it can recoup its ½ million loan because it has first call on a property worth £1m.

The most outrageous example would be the Radnorshire Arms in Presteigne. It was claimed that Leisure & Development Ltd, in August 2015, paid £3,487,049 for this modest pub with a restaurant and a few rooms.

(After the collapse it sold, in April 2020, for £240,000.)

By the time Paul and Rowena Williams bought Plas Glynllifon for £630,000 in April 2016, their property empire was in big trouble; the Radnorshire Arms and the Knighton Hotel had both closed suddenly.

With the closures explained by those and other properties having been sold for £11m to their associate, convicted fraudster Keith Harvey Part(d)ridge.

Leisure & Development Ltd went under with 12 outstanding charges against it for various properties, owing millions to the National Westminster Bank. And more again to Together Commercial Finance Ltd.

The panel below, from the Administrator’s report of July 2020, tells us that of £6.2m loaned to Leisure & Development Ltd by the NatWest, only £1.7m was repaid (realised from the sale of the properties against which the loans had been secured), leaving a shortfall of £4.5m.

But spare a thought for the unsecured creditors, owed £306,961.36, who got sod all; these were the employees, the tradesmen, the suppliers, and all the small people who lost out to Paul and Rowena Williams, and their equally crooked associates.

Plas Glynllifon was bought through a new company, Plas Glynllifon Ltd. Which soon racked up debts with the ever-obliging Together Commercial Finance. Eight charges in all, unpaid when that company went into liquidation in January 2022.

Before liquidation, with the whole scam now being exposed, help arrived in the form of Myles Cunliffe, described at the time, by Paul Williams, as a “finance guy”.

Which would be one way of putting it. For Cunliffe and his mentor, Jon Disley, were certainly involved in money, and on an international scale.

One of their specialities was targeting companies in trouble. How this might have operated, with more on Cunliffe and Disley, in Weep for Wales 11 – 19. They even advertised for struggling businesses through their stable of ‘Goldmann’ companies.

One of the ‘Goldmann’ companies was Goldmann and Sons (Thailand), which became The European Clothing Company Ltd, run by Danish con man Benny Falk. Being a con man it was inevitable that Benny would get involved in ‘Green’ energy.

The link to the article may be broken. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Eventually it all turned to dark comedy, especially after Paul and Rowena Williams fell out with Cunliffe and Disley, with each pair suggesting the other was dishonest. Well, laff!

But the poor buggers working for the new management saw no real change. For just like those the Williamses had abandoned in Powys and elsewhere, the staff at Seiont Manor were left high and dry, unpaid, just before Christmas 2019.

From the Daily Post. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

This hotel was owned by Rural Retreats & Development Ltd, another Williams family venture, with Cunliffe also on board for a while. Although over three years behind with its accounts it’s still active on the Companies House register. Perhaps kept from liquidating itself by creditors.

◊

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

We left off with the media telling us the new owner of Plas Glynllifon was David Savage of Dragon Investments Ltd. But as I explained, that was not true.

David Savage and Dragon Investments were simply a front for David Russell and his Property Alliance Group Ltd.

The first development to report is that Seiont Manor and its ‘gatehouse’ property, Llwyn y Brain Lodge, which were owned by Paul and Rowena Williams and then the Disley-Cunliffe gang, have now been separated from Plas Glynllifon. These properties are situated just outside the village of Llanrug, north east of Caernarfon.

They remain in the possession of David Russell, through Caernarfon Properties Ltd. Which is owned by Dragon Investments Ltd. With Dragon in turn owned by Russell’s Property Alliance Group Ltd.

Though the ever-loyal front man David Savage is the only director of both Caernarfon Properties and Dragon Investments.

As I explained in the table I drew up, the mansion itself was owned by Cowm Top Properties, a company launched by David Russell in September 2014.

He was relieved of his post by Savage in July 2020, and Savage left two years later to be replaced by Christopher Stephen Nedic. Which means that Nedic is now the owner of Plas Glynllifon.

So who is he? Well, the Nedic family, headed by Christopher Stephen Nedic, seems to have a few different lines of business.

On the one hand, they have a heavy haulage operation in Wolverhampton, with Nedic Transport & Plant Hire. Here’s the Companies House entry. But then there’s Shadwell Park Estates, which is a quarrying company.

And there are a few of what appear to be caravan / chalet sites, such as Cotswold Grange. Perhaps also Nedic Park Estates Ltd. Though the two Nedic sons seem to have behaved irresponsibility on at least one occasion.

Finally, there are the film companies. Arcade Films 4 LLP, Chelmer Films LLP, and Swale Films LLP, all of which Christopher Stephen Nedic has been involved with for over a decade.

The address given for these companies is, ‘The Khyber, Holyhead Road, Kingswood, Albrighton, Wolverhampton’. I couldn’t find that establishment, but I did find an Indian eatery on Waterhouse Lane, off Holyhead Road, named The New Khyber. A successor?

I have no idea what the Nedic family’s plans are for Plas Glynllifon, but last June they set up a new company, Glynllifon Estates Ltd. So, given their established interest in caravans and chalets, maybe this is the future planned for Plas Glynllifon.

Watch this space?

God knows, the old pile has suffered enough indignities in recent years, often at the hands of television. Also social media. The latter culprit includes this 37 minutes of faux terror and bullshit by some silly buggers with American accents making money out of videos for even sillier buggers.

We can but hope that the future for Plas Glynllifon is an improvement on the recent past. But this cynical old bastard is not optimistic.

And the problem is not limited to Glynllifon, for there are big, unloved old houses all over Wales.

One in the news of late stands where once stood a house that Glyndŵr knew. For Nannau is the estate where legend says the great man killed his traitorous cousin Hywel Sele, and stuffed the body into a hollow oak.

But Nannau is owned by somebody in England who doesn’t care, or doesn’t have the money to save it, and so it’s falling down.

It Nannau had belonged to Horace FitzLandgrabber, and if he had killed and cleared the Welsh off the land, no doubt our ‘Welsh Government’ and Cadw would be throwing money at it.

Maybe if the name was changed to ‘Gilestone‘ . . .

◊

DIGRESSION-CONCLUSION

We have a problem in Wales that too many people would rather ignore. That many have never even thought about. I’m referring to the ownership of domestic property and smaller commercial buildings, also farms and land.

So many issues could be resolved by addressing that problem with a simple piece of legislation. Legislation that has been introduced in other countries.

A recent example is the Balearic Islands, part of Spain with a devolved administration. This interesting article cites both independent states and sub-national territories where such legislation exists.

There is a system in the Channel Islands that divides the housing market into ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’ sectors. A majority of domestic properties is in the ‘Closed’ sector, which is restricted to local buyers.

To qualify for ‘Entitled status’, ‘You must live on Jersey for a combined period of 10 years before you’re 40’. Which seems designed to rule out retirees.

By restricting ownership of domestic property and smaller commercial property to permanent residents of Wales, with a qualification period of 10 years, we could, in one fell swoop, solve a number of current problems. Such as . . .

The ‘Welsh Government’ has empowered councils to increase council tax on holiday homes to 300%. But even if raised to 300% these new provisions will only reduce the numbers of holiday homes not eradicate them altogether.
A bigger obstacle to Welsh people being unable to buy a home is those moving to Wales as permanent residents. With too many of these falling into the older age brackets, with the inevitable strain on our NHS and other services.
Thanks to climate hysteria and the scams it encourages we see Welsh farms bought by hedge funds for ‘greenwashing’. Welsh farms now owned by money-shufflers who can’t even pronounce the names of those farms!

I can already hear the Conservative and Unionist Party, and other defenders of England’s hegemony, tut-tutting and dismissing the very idea. One argument I guarantee we’d hear would be that the property market would collapse.

But it wouldn’t. Because its effects would be gradual. And in some areas of the country the impact would be minimal.

What’s more, in the early stages few would notice because no one would be thrown out of their home, or off their land. And we could allow properties to be passed on to (inherited by), but not sold to, non-residents.

Flexibility would be one of the keys to making the policy work. Flexibility without losing track of the objective.

Obviously, domestic property prices would fall, allowing many Welsh families to buy a home. Perhaps their first home. Who could object to that?

Just think, Gwent could be saved from degenerating into the outer suburbs of Bristol. And the north would be spared any more commuter communities linking to the A55.

But legislation such as I’m advocating would obviously have its greatest impact in our rural areas, where the indigenous Welsh population is on the point of becoming a minority. In some areas it’s passed that point.

Whereas in our cities, major towns, and post-industrial areas, where property is more affordable, and incomes generally higher, there would be less impact because there’s less cross-border ownership.

I’m open to suggestions, even criticism; but let’s at least debate the idea.

If nothing else, it would mean that I wouldn’t have to write about any more of the con artists, money launderers and other crooks I’ve written about over the years. I could instead turn my hand to embroidery.

Which is what I’ve always wanted to do . . .

♦ end ♦

Clear Water, Poisoned Debate

On 08/11/202208/11/2022 By JacIn Colonialism, Colonisation of Wales, Corruption, Environmentalism, Greens, Plaid Cymru, Third Sector, Welsh Government, World Economic Forum24 Comments

For decades we’ve been hearing that water is a diminishing commodity, and with an ever-expanding global population we’ll soon be fighting over water resources.

Though these predictions often came from the same people who at different times – or even simultaneously – could predict icebergs in Swansea Bay and no snow on Yr Wyddfa.

It was the usual nonsense from the usual sources.

And yet, in Wales now, water is being used as a weapon. Not by us against our village-drowning neighbours but by politicians and others, supposedly serving Wales and Welsh interests, against a section of the Welsh population.

If that necessitates twisting the facts, and taking control of certain bodies, either through funding or placement of personnel, then so be it.

∼

This is another big one, so I’ll say what I always say: Don’t rush it, take your time, savour it, and you’ll enjoy it far more.

♦

BULLSHIT FOR WHICH BULLS ARE BLAMELESS

It’s been accepted for many years that there might be a problem with nitrate discharges, from some dairy farms, mostly in the south west. This highly localised problem explained why Natural Resources Wales classified just 2.4% of Welsh farmland as ‘vulnerable’.

When asked to revisit the issue NRW produced a report in September 2016 that (on page 13) suggested, ‘Adoption of the targeted approach would mean an increase in the total area designated from 2.4% to approximately 8% which includes those areas newly identified by NRW’.

A targeted approach was obviously the sensible and fair way to go, but then the politicians got involved. One politician in particular.

The elections of May 2016 saw Lesley Griffiths re-elected for Labour in Wrecsam. Her Senedd bio then tracks her meteoric rise to voodoo doll status in farmhouses across the land. (Soon to be accompanied by Gary.)

First, she was made Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs. In November 2017 the job title changed to Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs. Then, 0n 13 December 2018, she was handed her baton as Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs.

Despite the facts of the matter, and the sensible proposal from NRW, just before Christmas 2017 Lesley Griffiths declared that the whole of Wales was at risk of NVZ pollution. Using this to announce an all-Wales regime.

After a year of being fed a diet of undiluted pollution La Griffiths announced in November 2018 that her mind was made up and she would introduce what she considered to be the necessary legislation.

After a slight delay due to Covid the implementation date was set for April 1, 2021.

But then things started to go awry for the so-called ‘Welsh Government’.

Despite an (unsuccessful) appeal by NFU Cymru the debate was noticeably widening as others took an interest, and could see how disproportionate to the scale of the problem Cruella de Griff’s proposals were.

For in addition to the all-Wales approach the acceptable nitrogen level in Wales was to be 170kg/ha, compared to 250kg/ha in England and Scotland. This was so obviously unfair, in a country where farmers are, on average, less affluent than their English and Scottish counterparts, that it tended to give the game away.

Because there would of course be a financial burden for farmers. Though I’m sure that those trying to put livestock farmers out of business knew exactly what they were doing

The backtracking had begun. With Plaid Cymru taking the credit. For despite being Labour’s partner in a coalition that dare not speak its name, the reaction from Plaid’s large rural vote was giving the party’s leaders serious concerns.

‘A Plaid Cymru source said their party had pushed Labour ministers to act‘.

Some cynics – not me! – might wonder what Plaid has offered in return.

The NVZ proposals couldn’t withstand scrutiny from any fair-minded observer because they had little to do with pollution. NVZ was a stick with which to beat livestock farmers, hopefully putting many out of business to release land for other purposes. Land coveted by many in the offstage chorus influencing our Lesley.

To support and legitimise this attack on livestock farming we were expected to believe that only farmers are responsible for polluting our waterways and seas.

Which meant that Dŵr Cymru (Welsh Water), the worst culprit, got a free pass. How did that come about?

All will be explained later in this piece.

♦

THE MEMSAHIBS OF KNIGHTON AND CONSIDERATIONS OF CHICKENSHIT

This section is part digression, part lead-in.

A group that has figured on this blog a few times is a coven of Green-Left-Woke crones who’ve imposed themselves on the border town of Knighton. There are a few men associated with them, perhaps even more unhinged than their female comrades.

Catch up with them in Colonialism in microcosm, or Knighton.

They perform the full far left agenda:

Rather than doing the honest thing and just staying away altogether on Remembrance Sunday they insist on making a nuisance of themselves by placing wreaths of white poppies on the war memorial. (Dressed à la mode Michael Foot.)

Are they reprising a scene from a horror movie? Click to open enlarged in separate tab

You will not be surprised to learn that these biddies have formed a Knighton and District Refugee Support Group. Reluctance to welcome with open arms complete strangers from far-off lands will see you labelled a ‘racist’.

An epithet also hurled at those not condemning the fascists of the Israeli state.

The gang’s environmental credentials are on extravagant display with Sustainable Food Knighton. Which, in practice, is little more than a vendetta against a local chicken farm.

The attack is mounted on two fronts. One, it’s cruel to the chickens. Two, intensive chicken farms are a big, big source of river pollution.

Without being able to consult the chickens it may be impossible to address the first point. The second is more relevant to this article because it’s used over and over again by environmental Non-Governmental Organisations (eNGOs).

Especially those that allege chicken farms in Powys are severely damaging the rivers Usk and Wye.

But what are the facts?

Well, for a start, there are more, and bigger, chicken farms in Shropshire and Herefordshire, as the map below shows. So if chicken shit is a problem in Wales then it could well be coming from over the border.

Then again, it might not be a problem at all. Or, it’s a problem that’s being exaggerated.

Knighton is circled in green. Note on which side of the border the chicken farms south of the town are to found. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

For anecdotal evidence suggests there are even more chicken farms in the Severn catchment area, the Trent catchment area, etc. But there are far fewer complaints from these areas.

Which could mean that either shit from Welsh chickens is particularly toxic – in which case every one of the little buggers should be killed immediately! – or there’s a purpose behind the lying.

It’s the latter.

A suspicion reinforced by the Environment Agency recently concluding that the bigger culprit in the Wye catchment is arable farmers, who are mainly found on the England side of the border.

Confirmed by this graphic released by the Environment Agency relating to the Wye in England. Note the section I’ve highlighted in the second level. The tributaries mentioned are also in England.

Something also worth contributing here is that arable farmers use chicken manure as a fertiliser.

So even if chicken shit is the problem, it’s more likely to come from over the border; either directly from chicken farms or indirectly from arable farms.

And there’s yet another consideration to take into account. Certain interests are pushing us towards a meat-free diet, and in this scenario many view arable farmers as part of the solution. Which might explain them also getting a free pass.

The suspicion of an anti-livestock farming agenda being served was strengthened last month by a ‘report’ on BBC Wales about pollution on the Wye. One of the most biased pieces of television journalism I have ever seen.

Let me explain why I say that:

Passing references were made to sewage, but we were left in no doubt that the real culprits are farmers.
But only livestock farmers, with the programme focusing on one particular chicken farm.
There was no reference to the fact that the Wye is a cross-border river.
Despite being fronted by Wyre Davies the star of the show was Gail Davies-Walsh, who became CEO of Afonydd Cymru Cyf on February 22 2021, and secretary on March 11.
Afonydd Cymru (Rivers of Wales) serves as the umbrella body for the more local river groups.
Her Linkedin profile (here in pdf) tells us that until September she was Head of Natural Capital for the Wye and Usk Foundation‘. ‘Natural Capital’ seems to be code for, among other things, greenwashing. Certainly tree planting.
Revealingly, Linkedin also tells us that Gail Davies-Walsh worked for Dŵr Cymru for almost 14 years, up until January 2020.

Gail Davies-Walsh. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Gail Davies-Walsh took the idea for the programme to the BBC. Which would raise more concerns about linkages, and influence.

Another who joined Afonydd Cymru recently is Harriet Alvis, (Linkedin in pdf) CEO at West Wales Rivers Trust, and co-editor of FISH, the magazine of the Institute of Fisheries Management.

Gilestone: Thinking Outside The Box

On 26/10/202207/11/2022 By JacIn Colonialism, Corruption, Welsh Government16 Comments

In this post I’ll be setting out my thoughts as to what I believe lies behind the purchase of Gilestone farm. To some extent I’ll be launching a kite, but I believe it flies.

If you disagree, then feel free to tell me. Just click on the ‘Comments’ tab.

♦

QUICK RECAP

Earlier this year the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ paid £4.25m to buy Gilestone farm, near Talybont-on-Usk, in south Powys. The reason given was to provide a permanent base in Wales for the Green Man Festival.

This music festival currently holds its events on the Glanusk estate, a few miles down the river near Crickhowell, but is said to want a place of its own, to diversify ‘the brand’.

Lacking the finance to buy a place of their own it is also claimed that GM boss Fiona Stewart demanded that her friends in the ‘Welsh Government’ buy a place for her. And she does have many friends in Corruption Bay.

My first post on the subject was, Green Man, Red Herring?, back in May. And as the title suggests, even then, I was not entirely convinced by the official story about the farm being bought for the music festival. Something didn’t add up.

So I did some digging.

And I shall begin this latest post by taking you back to where my earlier digging took me – the Catskills of New York State. The area from where New York City draws its water. I dealt with this relationship in that first Gilestone piece.

This Catskill-Delaware Watershed is supplemented lower down the Hudson River by the smaller Croton Watershed.

Following contact by Dŵr Cymru (DC) a visit was made to Wales in March 2018 by representatives of the Watershed Agricultural Council. This visit was reciprocated in October 2019, when a party from the Beacons visited the Catskills.

One result of these trans-Atlantic jollies was the formation in May 2020 of the Beacons Water Group CIC (BWG). That the one was the inspiration for the other is made clear in the company’s Certificate of Incorporation.

In the panel above you’ll see mention of ‘BBMC’. This is Dŵr Cymru’s Brecon Beacons Mega Catchment. This Dŵr Cymru video tells a little more.

But it makes little sense. OK, so the Beacons supplies southern Wales with water. That is understood. But what was to be learnt from linking up with the New York City Watershed Agricultural Council?

◊

HANDS ACROSS THE SEA

We are expected to believe that the BWG and BBMC, both inspired by the US link-up, exist solely to ensure cleaner water from the Beacons for DC’s existing customers.

The problem I have with this interpretation is – if true, then what has Dŵr Cymru being doing up until now? And did DC need to go to the USA to learn about water quality?

Which is why I suspect these new bodies might serve some purpose other than simply improving water quality, or some purpose additional to that objective.

Let’s look again at the US exemplar.

As the pre-internet flyer below makes clear, the reason for introducing the Watershed scheme was to impose stricter regulations on farmers in the Catskills.

To some extent, this was understandable, everybody wants clean drinking water. It’s a global human necessity that too many are still going without. Also, irresponsible farmers can be a source of pollution.

That was what lay behind the Watershed Agricultural Council. (Here’s a brief history.) Farmers were cajoled, persuaded, and paid, to keep the water clean. I’ve found nothing to make me suspect there was a hidden agenda.

But I do believe that on this side of the Atlantic some looked at the Catskills and saw a model to be replicated; with others welcoming a model that could be adapted to enforce local observance of Globalist diktats.

And so, what we see emerging in the Beacons is, up to a point, about water quality; but also about using water quality to make life difficult for farmers, done in order to facilitate the ‘Welsh Government’s implementation of the UN’s Agenda 2030 and The Great Reset of the World Economic Forum.

Which, among other demands, insist on reducing the numbers of livestock farmers.

But what I believe is planned for the Beacons goes beyond the ‘Welsh Government’s war on farming, and owes more to the principal aim of the Catskills model.

◊

QUI BONO?

As we’ve read, one of the most important aspects of the whole Watershed project is the claim that it enjoys the co-operation of farmers.

In the hope of reprising that bucolic camaraderie the Brecon Beacons Mega Catchment will play the role of the Watershed Agricultural Council, with the Beacons Water Group serving to demonstrate farmer involvement.

I’d like to give you more information about the BBMC but it seems to be pretty sparse. There is a Twitter account, that hasn’t posted for months, and the same applies to the Facebook page.

With very little information on the Dŵr Cymru website.

Though I did turn up this picture, from February, of what is said to be the BBMC steering group. The picture comes from the Twitter account of Dave Ashford.

Ashford works for the ‘Welsh Government’ but was, from May 2020 to April 2022, seconded to Dŵr Cymru as ‘Brecon Beacons Mega-Catchment Programme Manager’.

He is now back with the ‘Welsh Government’, as ‘Stakeholder Engagement Manager to help develop a future Sustainable Farming Scheme for Wales’. Here’s his Linkedin page. (Here in pdf format in case you can’t access it.)

Didn’t Dŵr Cymru itself have anyone who could have done this job, for water is its business after all? Couldn’t Natural Resources Wales have provided someone?

Is secondment like this a common practice? Because if nothing else, it gives the impression that the Catchment project is pushing a political objective rather than promoting an environmental agenda.

In the photo above, Dave is fifth from the left. Third from the right is Richard Roderick, of Newton Farm, next door to Gilestone. Richard is a local National Farmers Union chief, and chairman(?) of the Brecknockshire Agricultural Society.

Now the thing about Richard Roderick is that he is also a director of Beacons Water Group CIC. Another director is Keri Howell Davies, who made the trip to the USA with Roderick in October 2019.

Someone else we find among the BWG directors is Charles Weston, the man who sold Gilestone farm to the ‘Welsh Government’. Fancy that!

Talking of whom, I’m going to push the boat out and suggest that . . .

The purchase of Gilestone for a very generous £4.25m might have been a reward for the seller, Charles Weston, as much as, or rather than, a favour for the Green Man Festival. If that’s right, then what did Weston do to deserve such generosity?

Might it have anything to do with Weston’s principle company, CWW Farming Ltd, being previously known as Sharpness and Severn Transport Ltd, a company having nothing to do with farming?

Sharpness being a small town and port on the Severn in Gloucestershire. From where the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal runs to Gloucester docks. Just before reaching Gloucester this canal links with the Thames & Severn Canal which, as the name suggests, connects the Severn with the Thames just west of Oxford.

Why am I telling you this? My thinking will be explained in the next section. (If you haven’t already guessed!)

Let’s conclude this section by reiterating that it looks very much to me, and to farmers in contact with me, that the leadership of the NFU, both in Wales and at Englandandwales level, has signed up to Agenda 2030 and The Great Reset.

Here we see Minette Batters, NFU president, proudly wearing her Agenda 2030 badge. And who’s that with her? Why! – it’s the WEF’s new man in No 10!

The top brass at the NFU have the sense – and the political nous – to realise that livestock farmers, especially in Wales, are to be culled. They, the chiefs, will look after themselves, and then it’s every ‘Indian’ for himself.

In Wales that means complying with, perhaps even pretending to agree with, the ‘Welsh Government’s hysterical responses to an imaginary climate disaster.

Nothing to do with saving the planet, it’s pure self-interest.

◊

THE BIG PICTURE

Let’s accept that the trans-Atlantic trips make no sense whatsoever if Dŵr Cymru is simply going to look after water in the Brecon Beacons for its existing customers. In other words, the ‘day job’.

There has to be more to it than that. (Now we come to the ‘kite’ I mentioned earlier.)

Let’s start with a few established and incontestable facts.

Due to an expanding population, and rising living standards in recent decades, the demand for water has increased dramatically in southern England, resulting in a growing problem of water shortages.

Water will be have to be brought in from somewhere else.

That ‘somewhere’ is usually identified as Wales. The mayor of London in 2011 – a certain Boris Johnson – suggested it. And in August of this year Conservatives were even pushing the idea of a ‘Great Boris Canal’ to ‘transfer water from Wales to the south of England’, according to Nation.Cymru.

In the same month the GMB trade union was arguing for Welsh water to be pumped to England.

The subject of west to east (and north to south) water transfer has been discussed by various bodies, off and on, for decades. The difference now may be that ‘climate change’ can be used to push on with the proposed ‘national’ water grid.

The extract below comes from a debate in the House of Lords in March 2012.

My reading of the situation is that there is already a plan in place to move water to England from the Brecon Beacons.

Not only is it roughly the same distance from London as the Catskill watershed is from New York City but the infrastructure is largely in place, and what’s needed is either under construction or could be done relatively easily.

Also remember that Fiona Stewart told the BBC that the Gilestone purchase was the ‘Welsh Government’s idea. Claiming ministers “came to me” with the proposal.

As I suggested earlier, Fiona Stewart may have been pressing her friends in Corruption Bay to help her and the Green Man Festival, maybe even buy her a farm; but I don’t think she was asking for, and she didn’t expect, Gilestone.

Let’s now look at the OS map of Gilestone farm. In particular, look at the course of the river Usk and the Monmouthshire & Brecon canal. Nowhere do they come closer to each other than at Gilestone.

Transferring water from the Usk to the canal, and then on to England, would be fairly easy. Given that the Usk regularly floods Gilestone farm such engineering work could even be dressed up as a flood prevention scheme.

And the engineering work involved would expose the large and very valuable sand and gravel deposits that lie beneath Gilestone.

Also worth remembering is Gilestone’s proximity to both Llangorse Lake and Talybont reservoir. Shown below in the image from Google Earth.

So many water resources so close to Gilestone: river, canal, lake, reservoir.

Llangorse is the largest natural lake in central and southern Wales. Talybont reservoir is the largest stillwater lake in the south, and owned by Dŵr Cymru.

And to end this section, let’s remember the skulduggery that preceded Weston’s purchase of Gilestone.

I have spoken with Gilestone’s previous owners, and I am in no doubt that they were forced out. Instrumental in the campaign to get them to sell to Weston was a solicitor named Julie James. She was elected to the Welsh Assembly in 2011 and is now Minister for Climate Change.

She is still deeply involved with Gilestone.

◊

CONCLUSION

The plan to transfer water from the Brecon Beacons to England has been hatching for a considerable time.

In addition to the River Usk and the Monmouthshire & Brecon Canal it may also involve the River Wye. Which would explain the hysteria from an ever-growing number of conservation groups on these rivers – always blaming Welsh livestock farmers for anything less than crystal-clear water.

Though the Environment Agency (England’s equivalent of Natural Resources Wales) points the finger at arable farmers, who are almost all on the English side of the border. While poultry units, targeted by colonialist ecowhiners, get an almost clean bill of health.

Charles Weston may have bought Gilestone of his own volition, but I’m inclined to believe there was some agency involved. If so, which agency might that be?

I concede that my theory hinges on various facts being part of a coherent whole rather than just coincidences. Anyway, here are the facts, interpret them as you will:

For many years there have been influential voices calling for water to be transferred from Wales to southern England.
Charles Weston, has a background in transport and shipping, and long-established links to Sharpness, from where there is a direct waterway to London.
For some reason Weston moved to Wales and started buying land, including Gilestone, the previous owners having been hounded out by a campaign involving a lawyer who is now a ‘Welsh Government’ minister.
Gilestone seems ideally placed for any scheme for transferring water from Wales to London.
For no obvious reason a link was forged between Dŵr Cymru and the Watershed Agricultural Council in New York State. The WAC exists solely to guarantee a regular supply of clean drinking water to New York City.
This US link gave us the Brecon Beacons Mega Catchment and the Beacons Water Group. The justification for these two groups has been ‘explained‘ in terms that are risible and vague to the point of being utterly vacuous.
The ‘Welsh Government’ bought Gilestone farm from Charles Weston for an inflated sum. We were told the purchase was made for the Green Man Festival’ – but Fiona Stewart says, “They (WG) came to me”!

I believe this kite flies!

And if I’m right, then Gilestone was ‘secured’ for future use when Weston bought it; and now, the ‘Welsh Government’s purchase could signal that things are moving on to the next stage.

Of course the ‘Welsh Government’ might be ignorant of the bigger picture. This would explain why it cannot give a plausible explanation for buying Gilestone farm.

This ignorance could also be attributed to the Drakeford Gang acting under orders. Perhaps the project is managed by civil servants, working in Wales but answering to their bosses in Whitehall.

Though I find it difficult to believe that Julie James is wholly in the dark.

Supplying water to London would certainly explain the Catskills connection, which otherwise makes no sense at all. For it’s the perfect template if the plan is for a hilly and largely agricultural area to supply a city of 9 million people roughly 100 miles away.

With the ‘Welsh Government’ seizing the opportunity presented by the water transfer project to make life even more difficult for our livestock farmers.

Two birds with one stone. And two blows against the interests of the Welsh people.

♦ end ♦

Chisellers From Chislehurst

On 13/10/202207/04/2023 By JacIn Colonialism, Corruption, Local Government, Third Sector, Welsh Government39 Comments

I’m returning to a couple of devious characters involved in running retirement and care homes in Wales. Both appeared in the previous ‘Miscellany‘ posting; in the section, ‘The Old Folks At Home’.

Reminding us that the care home sector is a bit of a mess, and will inevitably attract grifters like Mohanananthan Kuhananthan and Raqia Bibi.

And I warn you now, it’s worse than I originally thought. Then again, it’s a modus operandi we’ve encountered in the recent past with another crook.

So stay tuned!

♦

Since that post appeared on September 28 there have been developments. A piece appeared in WalesOnline last Friday telling of more problems in homes run by Bibi and Kuhananthan.

Followed by the article below in last Saturday’s Western Mail.

Two care homes were mentioned that I hadn’t found in my research for the earlier piece: Manor Park Care Centre, in Wrecsam, run by Manor Park Residential Home Ltd; and Plas-y-Bryn, near Cross Hands, run by Comfort Care Homes (Plas y Bryn) Ltd.

Though Manor Park is owned by Manor Park Property Company Ltd. Here’s the title document. The only director is Mohanananthan Kuhananthan. But the accounts – for a dormant company – show assets of only £100. So where’s the property being hidden?

I had considered making up a table of the companies with which the Gruesome Twosome are or have been involved, but there are just too many. Another problem is that they’ve also been involved in companies where they were not shown as directors on the Companies House website.

UPDATE 14.07.2022: What the hell! I trawled the Companies House website and found 57 companies one or both of them has been involved with. Here’s the list, most recent at the top, each name is a hyperlink that will take you to the relevant CH entry.

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To explain what I mean by that suggestion of the ‘hidden hand’, let’s look at a care home in Newport, which got a mention in the earlier post and then an update.

I’m referring to the Danygraig Nursing Home on Quantock Drive, run by Comfort Care Homes (Danygraig) Ltd. This company received loans in June from the Development Bank of Wales.

It seems the first thing done with this new money was to pay off an earlier loan from posh banker Coutts & Co.

As I made clear in the update, Bibi has never been a director of this company, and Kuhananthan left in January 2020. However . . .

When we click on the ‘Persons with significant control’ tab we bring up Dreams Care Homes (RB) Ltd, launched December 3, 2021. And notified to Companies House as taking control of Danygraig on 24 August, 2022.

Not long after the DBW loans were secured.

The two registered directors of Dreams Care Homes are Bishwa Tara Ghimire and Basanta Nepal. Both were aboard 3 December, 2021 when the company was launched.

Nepal joined the Danygraig Company 17 May, 2022, and Ghimire followed on June 6, the very day of the DBW loans. Nepal is said to control the company. The DBW loan relates to this company also.

Even though there’s no mention of Raqia Bibi and Mohanananthan Kuhananthan I suggest that the ‘(RB)’ in Dreams Care Homes (RB) Ltd is a bit of a giveaway.

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So where might Kuhananthan have gone after ostensibly severing ties with the Newport home? Well, I was as surprised as you’re going be, to learn that in June 24, 2021, the imaginative Mr Kuhananthan launched MK Global Movie Production Ltd.

Like most of his companies, this venture is already heading for the rocks. And yet, what I found fascinating was that there was an initial issue of 1000 x £1,000 shares. Which works out at exactly £1,000,000!

I’m not for one minute suggesting it’s the same money, but just weeks after the Development Bank of Wales slipped the readies to the care home in Newport – where he’d been a director – our boy set up a new company with capital of one million pounds.

A company that I guarantee is planned to fold as soon as is decently possible. Which will effectively write off £1,000,000.

And look at the address for this imaginative departure from granny farming – ‘RB Management Consultancy, 1 Bromley Lane, Chislehurst Business Centre, Chislehurst, England, BR7 6LH’.

Again, I suggest we can all guess what the ‘RB’ stands for.

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The company providing that accommodation address is otherwise known as RBMC Global Ltd, set up by Raqia Bibi in February 2017. She was joined by Kuhananthan in April 2021. Though you have to wonder why he bothered, seeing as RBMC Global files as a dormant company.

Which means that Kuhananthan joined a dormant company just two months before he decided to become a movie mogul. (Was he inspired by The Producers?)

On the very same day as RMBC Global was launched, another Bibi-Kuhananthan epic was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. This being RB Care Homes Ltd. Which is also filing as dormant.

Contradicting its prone position I found a glossy sales brochure for RB Care Homes Ltd, which seems to trade as Luxury Property Global. Or should that read traded, for the website is defunct.

Whatever the answer, that brochure alone must have cost a few bob to knock up and to print. All 18 pages of it.

Getting the picture now? If not . . .

Bibi and Kuhananthan seem to be acquiring care homes and then leasing or selling the rooms in those homes. Described in the brochure as ‘Buy to let’.

They could be running any number of homes in Wales on this model, in many or most cases working through proxies and using companies unknown to local authorities, Care Inspectorate Wales, and others.

UPDATE: When I published what you see above, earlier today, I was unsure if Kuhananthan and Bibi had actually sold or leased any rooms. A bit more digging has turned up the evidence.

The Administrator’s report for Nant-y-Gaer Ltd, dated 30 June, 2022, from which the panel below is extracted, makes it clear that 26 rooms were leased, for 250 years, at the Wrexham Care Centre.

Those who bought the leases have formed a group, The RB Action Group(?), claiming £2,074,984.

If it was done at one care home, then it’s reasonable to assume that Kuhananthan and Bibi were pulling the same stunt at their other homes. In fact, the report I’ve linked to talks of ‘associated companies’.

Questions need be asked as to how ‘Welsh Government, Care Inspectorate Wales, and local authorities, allowed these shysters to operate for so long.

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Which fits with the curious arrangements I mentioned in the previous post, in which the company supposedly owning a business or property is, effectively, dormant, while an unknown entity actually owns the building and runs the business.

In the recent case in Pontypridd, the company mentioned as running things is RB Care Homes Ltd, which produced the brochure yet, as you’ve just read, files as a dormant company, and has nothing in the way of assets other than £1,000 in the bank.

The Land Registry title document tells us the property is actually owned by Pontypridd Care Home Ltd.

Both companies run by Raqia Bibi and Mohanananthan Kuhananthan.

It was a very similar picture in Wrecsam over 3 years ago. The report I’ve just linked to mentions ‘Wrexham Care Centre’. There was certainly a company of that name, but it also filed as a dormant company, with no assets beyond another £1,000 in the bank. It was Dissolved 24 May, 2022. Bibi was a director, but not Kuhananthan.

The property was in fact owned by Nant-y-Gaer Ltd (the former name of the home). Bibi was a director there at the death, but Kuhananthan had departed in October 2015.

Finally, there was also Nant-y-Gaer Hall Ltd, wound-up in March 2020, Bibi ceased to be a director 15 July, 2019, Kuhananthan 21 April 2017.

Yet the June 2019 report in the Leader says the home was run by Raqia Bibi and Mohanananthan Kuhananthan. But in June 2019 Kuhananthan was not a director of any of the three connected companies.

His involvement was limited to Nant-y-Gaer Hall Ltd where, after ceasing to be a director in April 2017, he remained in control until the bad publicity of June 2019 may have forced him out 18 July, 2019.

Nant-y-Gaer Hall Ltd is still in existence, with two outstanding loans, but has been without a single director since Raqia Bibi resigned in July 2019, also following the unfavourable publicity.

Were the council and Care Inspectorate Wales even aware of Nant-y-Gaer Hall Ltd?

Which, by a roundabout route, brings us back to RBMC Global and RB Care Homes, and the same questions – if both have been filing as dormant, who’s running the show, and what happened to the money attracted by that ‘imaginative’ sales brochure?

Bibi and Kuhananthan dabbling in the lease / buy-a-room business was not of itself illegal, but it offers great scope for criminality, including money laundering.

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I referred earlier to this being an MO we had encountered before, and indeed we have. Just think back to Gavin Lee Woodhouse, of Northern Powerhouse Developments, the self-styled ‘Wolf of Wharf Street’.

Grand lad, our Gavin . . . apart from being a lyin’, thievin’ little bastard.

Despite it all, not so long ago representatives of the ‘Welsh Government’ were fighting to shake Gavin’s hand. I treasure the image below. But what happened to little Kenny Skates? Did he disappear one moonlit night while dancing in the Flint Ring?

I do so miss him!

April 2017. What could possibly go wrong? Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Gavin took a great liking to Wales, buying up hotels from Llandudno to Tenby. Then leasing the rooms individually, a kind of timeshare arrangement. You lease a room from Gavin, then you get paid when someone stays in it.

‘Lubbly jubbly!’ Order your Ferrari now!

One of the properties Woodhouse bought was the Fishguard Bay Hotel. It was run by (and perhaps renamed) Wyncliffe House Hotel Ltd. Here’s the relevant Land Registry title document. Scroll down to see the 125-year leases of individual rooms.

At the time I was writing about Woodhouse I also bought a few of the lease documents from the Land Registry, and my suspicions were raised.

It seemed to me that not all the stated lessees were kosher. There were exotic addresses given that would have been difficult if not impossible for HMRC or anyone else to trace.

Then I remembered that the timeshare business, which is very similar to what we’re discussing here provided golden opportunities for money laundering.

You buy a run-down hotel or apartment block in some Mediterranean locale. Next, you form a timeshare company. Then, you tart up the building, get some glossy brochures printed. Finally, you start selling leases to genuine buyers. But you can also sell the same leases to entirely fictitious buyers and take in money you can’t otherwise account for.

Bingo! Money laundered.

And there are other ways of taking people’s money with timeshare. Some of those involved in such scams have appeared on this blog, mentioned in a long-running saga.

Buy a few hotels and you can defraud any number of people, and launder a hell of a lot of money. The same applies to care homes.

I’m not sure if Gavin Woodhouse went in for retirement homes in Wales, but as the video above makes clear, that was certainly his planned route to riches over the border. But he wasn’t interested in buying existing care homes like Bibi and Kuhananthan – Gavin was going to build new.

Well, no, he wasn’t. He had no intention of actually building the care homes, just in taking the money from investors he’d suckered.

Described by a high court judge as ‘thoroughly dishonest’. No shit, Sherlock!

The Wolf of Wharf Street had other plans to bring joy and prosperity to Wales, as we see in the image above of Woodhouse with Labour luminaries.

For he is said to have come up with the idea for the Afan Valley Adventure Resort. He even roped in no less a personality than Bore Grylls. (Who is probably in Ukraine right now stealthily and mercilessly dispatching Russian generals.)

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All joking aside, there are so many questions.

How many homes are Raqia Bibi and Mohanananthan Kuhananthan still involved with in Wales, directly or indirectly? How many of them are run on the ‘invest-in-a-room’ model?

Does anyone know? Is anyone asking?

What’s the legal situation if some old dear gets raped, robbed, or dies in an accident in a room where responsibility might be difficult to establish because ownership rests with a shady company in the British Virgin Islands?

Finally, let me suggest that it would be a good idea for ‘Welsh Government’, Care Inspectorate Wales, our councils, to establish exactly who ultimately owns each and every care home, if only to ensure they’re not dealing with shell companies.

As they have been too often in the very recent past.

♦ end ♦

Miscellany 28.09.2022

On 28/09/202228/06/2023 By JacIn Colonialism, Colonisation of Wales, Corruption, Gwlad, History, Welsh Government69 Comments

I hadn’t planned on putting out a post this week. But people contact me and say, ‘Have you seen this, Jac?’; and most of the time I can politely respond and let it pass. But now and again I get a clutch of reports or leads that are worth bringing together in a post like this.

It’s big, 4,500+ words, but as I always say, you can take it a section at a time.

And because it’s so big, and it’s taken so much work, don’t expect anything next week.

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SYCHARTH UPDATE

The previous post was about my visit to Sycharth on September 16, and my disappointment with state of the site. Which prompted a reader to write to Cadw, the agency responsible for conserving our heritage.

Here are the points he raised with Cadw:

The stile to Sycharth is in a poor condition.
Car parking is insufficient.
The whole site is in a mess. An hour with a strimmer would do wonders.
The information board does not mention much of Cymru’s history.
Its neglect is a travesty and an insult to our past and heritage.
Utterly shameful behaviour on your part.

To which Cadw responded with this. Which tells us the site belongs to the Llangedwyn Estate. More particularly, Nicholas Watkin Williams-Wynn.

A couple of phrases from the Cadw response are worth focusing on.

‘Sycharth . . . forms part of a working tenant farm under the Llangedwyn estate with permissive public access and parking at its discretion’.

‘Cadw installed the car park (four cars max) and access works (stile?) in 2010-2011 but their maintenance is again the responsibility of the owners.’

So it’s up to the Llangedwyn Estate whether people are allowed to visit Sycharth. And could, presumably, block public access. It’s also the Estate’s responsibility to maintain car parking and access. To judge by what I saw there, the Estate is doing its best to discourage visitors.

Is this some old dynastic feud being played out in the 21st century?

So I ask again: If the so-called ‘Welsh Government’ can find £4.25m to buy Gilestone farm for an English music festival, for purposes that are yet to be explained, why can’t it find the money to buy a site of national if not international importance and maintain it adequately and respectfully?

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FREELOADERS IN FREEPORTS

Freeports are back in the news. And it seems Wales is getting one. Either in Holyhead or Milford Haven and Port Talbot.

Let’s start in Holyhead.

Now the Conservative MP for Ynys Môn, Virginia Crosbie, is a big supporter of freeports, and has staked her reputation on turning a run-down ferry port into a beacon of global trade that will bring into Caergybi the riches of the Orient, the gold of the Indies, and of course – Guinness from Dublin.

Here she is setting out her ambition in a mercifully short video.

Though in truth, freeports rarely live up to their billing. And often involve very murky dealings. Private Eye has been following the evolution of the Tees Freeport in north east England. And produced the report below in the issue before last. (Available here in pdf format.)

N.B. Political donations are not to be confused with bribes and backhanders; and if friends of London politicians get juicy contracts then it can only be because their firms are best able to deliver.

Tees-side is a heavily built-up area, with a population pushing 380,000. And after the loss of its heavy industry – particularly steel – there is a widespread perception that the area is ‘owed something’.

Holyhead, by comparison, is a small town, with not much to speak about other than the ferry port to Ireland.

Until it closed in 2009, a major local employer was the Anglesey Aluminium smelter, with its private jetty. The plant received its electricity from Wylfa nuclear power station, some 15 miles away, another major employer that is now gone.

Roughly one thousand jobs paying good wages lost, but never mind, we’ll obey those who know best and stick in a few wind turbines and wave machines – plenty of jobs and unlimited cheap energy. Not.

The vacant site was taken over by Anglesey Aluminium Metal Renewables Ltd which in January 2016 became Orthios Power (Anglesey) Ltd. The site eventually being used for a plastics-to-oil operation.

But this folded earlier this year, with debts estimated at some £200m. And the end came suddenly, certainly for the staff. I’m told there was just a 10-minute warning not to start the next shift!

There are many Orthios companies listed with Companies House, none going back further than 2009 and most formed in the past three years. The ultimate holding company seems to be Orthios Operations Ltd, formerly Orthios Group (Holdings) Ltd.

So what happens now?

Well, the old smelter site has been bought by ferry operator Stena, and this is how a source on the island explains it . . .

‘Now of course they (Stena) can shift the dockside car parks elsewhere leaving nice waterside development plots. Just the sort of place to build a cable plant so they can load directly onto ships. The sort of cable company Virginia Crosbie MP was courting … the one owned by a Tory donor’.

He’s referring to Tratos, another local company hoping to benefit from offshore wind farms. Well, when I say ‘local’, it might be local if you were living in Italy. As the report makes clear.

From North West Wales Conservatives website. Click to open enlarged in separate tab.

This further report will explain a bit more of what’s going. Though you may not need to read beyond the headline: ‘Holyhead could get 300 cable jobs if area gets freeport status – says firm run by Tory party donor’.

Not much more to say really. Stena is leading the Freeport bid, and now Stena is pulling out the stops to get an ‘anchor’ company located in Holyhead. As is the local MP.

To finish this piece on Holyhead I have to mention Jake Berry MP. Now Jake is MP for a constituency in north west England, but he owns a number of properties on Ynys Môn. During the Covid lockdown it was rumoured that Virginia Crosbie was living in a property owned by Berry.

In addition to his post as party chairman, new Prime Minister, Liz Truss (I know you’re all impressed!), has made Berry Minister without Portfolio. Which may not sound much, but it kind of gives him a free hand.

That appointment was announced September 7. The day before the announcement, Berry resigned from the Northern Research Group Ltd (northern English Tory MPs), where he held the controlling interest. Also from Ford Bridge Farm Ltd.

Now why would he do that?

Ford Bridge Farm is of course an English rendering of his – or his wife’s – Rhyd y Bont farm at Rhoscolyn, on Holy Island. This is the smaller island, off the main island, and where Holyhead is located. Which means that Jake would be very close should the freeport materialise. A neighbour!

Rhyd y Bont circled. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Does Jake Berry anticipate benefitting in some way from a freeport at Holyhead? Or am I being too cynical? Cynical! Moi!

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By comparison, the southern rival seems far less well advanced. In fact, we could be forgiven for thinking it’s hardly off the ground. This report would suggest that it was launched as recently as last week.

Though this piece from November 2020 suggests the Port of Milford Haven has been thinking about a freeport for some time.

Milford Waterway. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

The more recent activity may be due to the fact that in May it was announced that the 45km limit (for the extent of freeport status) could be extended in Wales. This could certainly explain the southern bid combining Milford Haven with Port Talbot.

Which are 87km apart, as the fabled crow flies.

This somewhat bizarre combination is presumably justified by links between Milford Haven and Swansea Bay. As show in the image below. Which strikes me as being a wee bit desperate. For example, the Llandarcy refinery closed in 1998.

And would a freeport in Milford make the oil, gas, or electricity flow any faster?

My insular source believes that for all sorts of reasons the southern bid will win out. I’m not so sure. For with local boy Jake Berry working his magic behind the scenes, and his good friend Virginia Crosbie staking her political reputation on it, I would not be at all surprised to see the £26m freeport pot head up the A5 rather than down the M4.

But whichever direction the loot heads the lucky recipients will need to watch out for sharks circling – but these won’t be in the water. They’ll be arriving in Beemers and hoping to dazzle with PowerPoint presentations and insincere smiles.

And, dare I say it, ‘inducements’. There, I’ve said it.

And I say it because a freeport in either Holyhead or Milford / Port Talbot will attract grifters like the fresh laverbread stall in Swansea market draws discerning gourmets.

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NAILING THE VOICES?

This section is decidedly odd, and I wasn’t sure about using it, so please understand if certain details are withheld. (Especially towards the end.) But I do have the information and the relevant documents.

It started when someone got in touch, saying she had information on Gilestone, but what she offered was unconnected incidents jumbled up with snippets from hither and yon.

The long and winding road somehow took us to Ammanford. And Alan Delaney Tait. If the name rings a bell it’s because Tait claims to hear voices of women and children being abused, hurt, even killed. These sounds either come from beneath his property or from tunnels nearby.

Tait has turned his ‘voices’ into a cottage industry. With many videos on YouTube and other platforms. That said, they don’t get many views. This one, with 40k, is probably the most popular.

https://youtu.be/eQvcSSl2GJo

Most people, including the local police, dismiss Tait as a publicity-seeking crank. No tangible evidence of human trafficking has ever been found. In fact, there is nothing beyond Tait’s recordings; and as has been pointed out, these could have been made anywhere.

Doing a quick check for Tait on the Companies House website turned up some interesting stuff. Now I’m not sure from where Tait originates, but he’s been living in Ammanford in recent years.

And yet Companies House gives out eight companies for ‘Alan Delaney Tait’ with addresses in Ystalyfera, in the Swansea Valley.

With other companies where he drops the ‘Delaney’ and becomes plain ‘Alan Tait’.

Such as Alan Dee UK Ltd. (I love the way some use ‘UK’, hoping their enterprise will be mistaken for the local branch of a global empire.) Then there’s UKWide Contract Services Ltd, ADT UK Wide Ltd and, finally, Number Plates Online Ltd.

In recent years the focus of operations seems to have switched to Derbyshire, in the East Midlands. With The Three Boars Guesthouse Ltd and Chal Rentals Ltd.

For these Derbyshire-based companies Tait has as co-director the gloriously monikered Carlos von Gallo. Who has his own YouTube channel, where he puts out nothing but Tait’s Ammanford ‘recordings’.

‘Von Gallo’ is listed as the sole shareholder at the two companies’ deaths, but does he really exist?

What the 14 companies I’ve given here have in common is that after a short life – in some cases very short – they all went under. There are no survivors.

Something else I found intriguing was that for almost all Tait’s companies there was an issue of a single £1 share (if it was him alone) or £2 if there was another director (Tait’s wife or ‘von Gallo’). With two notable exceptions.

These were The Old Coal Store, with a share issue of £25,000, and Barlas Eren Sezer Ltd, with a share issue of £125,000.

I don’t wish to cast aspersions but, if I had money I couldn’t account for, then disguising it as a share capital in a company doomed to fail, might have its attractions.

In his ‘voices’ videos Tait points the finger at the nearby Sophia Nails. He further claims that the leaseholder was a Vietnamese woman named Trang Thanh Tran. She is now said to run T Nail Spa in the centre of Swansea.

There is a company of that name where she is listed as sole director. But the single £15,000 share is held by Thi Hai Nhung Nguyen who gives as his address another nail bar, this one on Chepstow Road in Newport.

Tran’s partner, or husband, Quang Lam, was the leaseholder in Ammanford and also at Heaven Nails in Llanelli. He was sent down for 5 years for belonging to a gang growing and distributing cannabis.

There are a number of ‘Heaven Nail’ companies, all but one run by Vietnamese nationals.

The Vietnamese connection may be significant because some comments to the YouTube videos claim to have heard Vietnamese being spoken by the ‘voices’.

But the problem with Tait is that even if he’s telling the truth about the voices, and the Vietnamese connection, one look at his business record tells us that he is, to put it generously, ‘unlucky’, with so many failed companies to his name.

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Despite Tait being so ‘unlucky’, I was still left wondering . . . and so, motivated by nothing beyond idle curiosity, I Googled ‘Sophia Nails’, the name of the Ammanford salon. What popped up was the Sophia Nail Spa in Porth, in the Rhondda.

At which point things got a bit strange.

For in February this year a company, Sophia Nail Spa Ltd, was launched. The only director is a 23-year-old Vietnamese named Thien Van Hoang.

And although the company uses 22 Hannah Street, Porth, as its correspondence address, the Certificate of Incorporation gives Hoang’s address as 31 Ridley Terrace, Sunderland.

At this point is might be worth suggesting a few things.

First, whoever’s running the Porth nail bar may know nothing about the company that’s using the same name.
Next, Thien Van Hoang may not even know he is named as director of Sophia Nail Spa Ltd. I have come across other examples of people being listed as company directors without their knowledge.
Finally, Thien Van Hoang may never have visited Sunderland.

But to find another Vietnamese connection is intriguing. Not least because it seems nail bars are used by Vietnamese criminals for exploiting women and girls, also for money laundering. The same gangs that are involved with cannabis. And not just in the UK.

Just type ‘Vietnamese nail bars trafficking’ into your search engine and you’ll bring up countless news reports. It’s big business.

Which may also explain Sophia’s Nail Bar at 9 Oxford Street, Mountain Ash. (Shown in image below.) Which more recently seems to have been known as New Star Nails. Which again is odd, because a company of that name folded in July 2018.

The secretary and the only director are both of Vietnamese extraction.

Returning to Porth, if we look at the building in which Sophia Nail Spa is located we see a block – 20-25 Hannah Street – with a second floor and, in part, a third floor.

Another company listed at this block was a sporting establishment (darts, snooker, etc), on the first floor, which in July changed its name and apparently became a bar. All the old directors left and a single new director arrived, a 22-year-old woman with an unmistakably Welsh name.

I’m not saying young Welsh women shouldn’t run bars, but . . .

For a start, ingress and egress to a bar on the first floor will only be possible by a flight of stairs from the street. Would a council – even Rhondda Cynon Tâf – grant a drinks licence to a place where people would regularly fall or be pushed down the stairs?

On a weekend a fleet of ambulances would be needed to carry away the injured. And as we know, Wales doesn’t have a working fleet of ambulances.

Something’s not right. The old Jac nose is all a-quiver.

From countless previous cases in Wales and across Europe, Vietnamese nationals owning or running nail bars should have aroused the suspicions of both local councils and the police.

Finally, the company that owns that 20-25 block on Hannah Street in Porth is based just a mile and a half, as the crow flies, from Gilestone Farm!

I am not suggesting anything. It’s just a small world and Wales is a small country.

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THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME

Someone contacted me suggesting I might be interested in the latest in a series of bad news stories about care homes. And this one really is bad.

Like so many of the care homes in Wales, Pontypridd Nursing Home is run by a company based outside of Wales. In this case, RB Care Homes Ltd, of Chislehurst in Kent. The RB stands, presumably, for director Raqia Bibi.

I can’t find a website but there is a Twitter account with nothing posted for three years. It’s a similar story with the Facebook page.

I suspect this company has gone under. Maybe not officially, but Companies House is still waiting for accounts that should have been submitted by November 30 last year. I don’t think they’re coming.

Despite the parlous state of RB Care Homes, and other companies of hers we’ll look at in a minute, Raqia Bibi was, as late as June this year, being held up as an exemplar of good practice in the sector!

Truly amazing!

Pontypridd Nursing Home wasn’t Ms Bibi’s first venture into care homes, nor her first foray into Wales. For she has a string of companies behind her, including you’ll notice, Wrexham Care Centre.

Where some three years ago she also made the news for the wrong reasons. You’ll see that her partner in Wrecsam was Mohanananthan Kuhananthan. With whom the story takes a bit of a twist. But be patient.

For a start, Wrexham Care Centre Ltd was always a dormant company, with money going through Nant-y-Gaer Ltd, which is also in administration.

Then, you’ll remember that the news report I linked to at the top of this section said that the Pontypridd Nursing Home is run by RB Care Homes Ltd, which may be true. But that company has also been filing as dormant since it was Incorporated in February 2017.

The report made no mention of Pontypridd Care Home Ltd, owned by Mohanananthan Kuhananthan. With Raqia Bibi as co-director. Which may be explained by the fact that it’s this company that actually owns the property on Maesycoed Road, for which it claims to have paid £1.5m in May 2012.

Which means that while local authorities and others go chasing dormant companies for money those companies don’t have, the assets themselves are owned by companies they may know nothing about. It’s a popular trick.

Maybe Wrecsam and Rhondda Cynon Tâf councils, or anyone else owed money from the collapse of nursing / care homes, should consult their lawyers about refocusing any claims.

Kuhananthan has other companies. Many companies. Four under the Comfort Care Homes brand suggest operations in Wales. With, in some cases, money owed to the Development Bank of Wales. These relate to the Danygraig Nursing Home, in Newport.

What I find extraordinary is that these DBW loans were made in June, when it would have been obvious, after the most cursory of enquiries, that not only are Kuhananthan’s companies in deep trouble, but that the man himself may not be entirely above board.

UPDATE 10.10.2022: It may be worth clarifying that Kuhananthan was no longer a director of Comfort Care Homes (Danygraig) Ltd when the DBW loans were made, and Bibi had never been a director. But this company is owned by Dream Care Homes (RB) Ltd, formed in December 2021. And while they’re not shown as directors of this company either, I suspect the ‘RB’ tells us something.

Kuhananthan’s Welsh involvement doesn’t end with the examples given.

Through the company Mufulira Ltd, which Kuhananthan joined in May 2018, and was followed by Raqia Bibi in July 2021, they own Ridgeway Care Centre in Pembrokeshire, which must be worth a few bob.

The entrance to the Ridgeway Care Centre, Llawhaden, Pembrokeshire. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

In fact, the latest accounts seem to value Ridgeway at just short of two million pounds. That said, while it might be owned by Mufulira – another company in trouble – Mufulira itself is owned by Comfort Care Homes Ltd, which we know is yet another Kuhananthan and Bibi company.

Maybe Pembrokeshire County Council should also be on alert, and realise who owns Ridgeway. But then, Kuhananthan-Bibi companies appear to have no assets beyond the buildings, all of which have loans or mortgages against them.

I didn’t have the time to go any deeper, but I suggest for anyone so inclined, that Kuhananthan and Bibi are worthy of further investigation.

Before finishing this section, here’s another interesting connection.

We earlier encountered Nant-y-Gaer Ltd, which I suggested was the Kuhananthan-Bibi company actually running the home of that name in Wrecsam. (Now ‘Wrexham Care Centre’.) But there’s also a Nant-y-Gaer Hall Ltd.

When going through the details for Nant-y-Gaer Hall Ltd I noticed that Kuhananthan gave as his address 83 Dyserth Road in Rhyl. Where we find Sandy Lodge Hospital, run buy Medirose Healthcare.

A company formed as recently as November 2020 and filing as dormant.

However, 83 Dyserth Road is owned by HuaTong Ltd, a company that somehow manages to make a loss every year. The directors and owners are Chinese citizen, Wang Liu, and Sharvanandan Arnold, who has cropped up before in connection with fellow Sri Lankan Mohanananthan Kuhananthan

I conclude that care for the elderly in Wales is an utter shambles. It’s attracting unscrupulous if not crooked operators. They’re drawn by easy money and the lack of adequate oversight.

As a start, and a show of intent, I would like the ‘Welsh Government’ and Care Inspectorate Wales to announce they will not register or deal with any care home, nursing home, or other facility, where Mohanananthan Kuhananthan and Raqia Bibi are involved.

To lighten the mood a little, though not too much . . .

I genuinely worry about the care of the elderly because I’m not getting any younger myself. Will I be properly taken care of when my kids dump me in the Uncle Joe Sunshine Home for Unrepentant Fascists and Incorrigible Transphobes?

♦

SOURCES

I had planned to have a section dealing with information I’d received from a source somewhere within the ‘Welsh Government’ detailing the nepotism and corruption all around.

And of the power wielded by those connected with housing associations, often in areas that have nothing to do with housing, and how the Wales Council for Voluntary Action is almost an arm of government.

Also some of the names I’m called in Corruption Bay. Some so bad he / she couldn’t even put them into print! Well, I was mortified. Mortified, I was!

But on reflection I feel it could be dangerous for this person if I was to go into details. So I’ll leave it there.

The information I’ve received thus far was posted anonymously to Gwlad and passed on to me. But I do wish to maintain contact.

So we need to think how this might be achieved.

♦

GLOBALISTS

In recent years it has become increasingly clear to me that much of what I report on is simply the ‘Welsh Government’ and various agencies in Wales adopting and promoting agendas dreamt up elsewhere.

‘London’, is only part of the answer. And an increasingly irrelevant part.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have been writing this, but the Covid ‘pandemic’ and the way it was seized upon by politicians and others opened my eyes, and it helped me see the bigger picture.

That bigger picture of unelected, supranational bodies imposing agendas on governments and other institutions that impact on just about everybody on Earth.

In particular, I’m referring to the World Economic Forum. Made up of politicians, bankers, and multi-billionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg. This self-electing elite – like almost all previous elites in human history – believes it is made up of essentially decent people, who are obviously smarter than the rest of us, and should therefore run the world.

Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

It reminds me of a couple of lines from Tom Paxton’s 1960s protest song, Daily News.

J. Edgar Hoover is the man of the hourAll that he needs is just a little more power

Just like J Edgar Hoover all the new global elite needs is a little more power. And then a little more. And then . . .

(Never agreed with his politics but I always thought Paxton was the best – certainly the most versatile – of the 60s folk / protest singer-songwriters. Love songs, political songs, humorous songs, kids’ songs, he could do them all.)

The principal tool the new elite uses to exert control and impose its agenda is climate disaster. Just like the Nazis they realise that to impose your will you need to frighten people with an imagined or overblown ‘threat’.

For the Nazis, it was the Jews, the Communists, Versailles; but for Klaus Schwab and his gang it’s global warming – and it’s all our fault. So we must change our behaviour to make up for the damage we cause, in ways that will be decided for us.

And it’s the West that must be targeted. Partly because the West is the richest and most advanced area of the globe, and also because concepts of individual liberty are more highly developed and valued in the West than most other parts of the world.

This explains the many-fronted attack on Western civilisation by the globalists and their foot-soldiers on the Left. With their initiatives denied / defended / promoted / hidden / (depending on requirements) by their allies in Mainstream Media and Big Tech.

It also explains much of what we see in Wales: the war on farmers, the lack of spending on infrastructure, the 20mph speed limit, our hills being ravaged by wind farms.

The crises we see approaching, food shortages due to the war on farmers, power cuts thanks to a campaign against fossil fuels and increased reliance on useless ‘renewables’, no petrol or diesel to run our vehicles, being locked out of your bank account for holding the ‘wrong’ views, political unrest resulting from these problems, unnecessary lockdowns and dangerous vaccinations justified by a virus with increasingly suspect origins, even the war in the Ukraine, have all been engineered, and could all have been avoided.

Because it’s all about control. Over us. By them.

Compared to forced chipping of children, and silencing those who challenge the WEF narrative, Lee Waters stuffing the National Infrastructure Commission with cronies representing housing associations, Sustrans / Deryn (Waters is ex Sustrans himself), and the M4 corridor, is small beer.

And no less than we have come to expect from Welsh politicians.

∼

I’ll end with a little history lesson cum allegory that might explain how I see things.

Carlos Marcello was the Mafia boss of New Orleans for many years, and one of the most powerful gangsters in the USA. Then in 1960 John F Kennedy became President; he appointed his brother Bobby as Attorney-General, and Bobby went after the Mob.

Predictably, many leading figures in organised crime wanted to whack Bobby Kennedy; but Marcello sagely observed that if you cut off a dog’s tail he can still bite you, so it was better to go for the head.

Which helps explain why Marcello is strongly suspected of being implicated in JFK’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He probably was involved, but this wasn’t a straightforward Mafia hit, and they didn’t act alone.

The point I’m making is that I’m spending too much time on a ‘tail’. And while I shall continue to report idiocy like Gilestone, in future I intend paying more attention to the ‘head’.

♦ end ♦

Sycharth: A National Treasure Neglected

On 16/09/202216/04/2023 By JacIn Colonialism, History, Tourism, Welsh Government44 Comments

I hadn’t planned on writing anything for a while, but after visiting Sycharth today, the home of Owain Glyndŵr, I am compelled to put a few thoughts into words.

Fortunately, I took a long way home, stopping here and there; which gave me time to cool down, reflect on what I’d seen, and think about what I was going to write.

♦

First, I’m going to provide a map, for anyone minded to visit. I’m doing this because you’ll see no directional signs of any kind for Sycharth . . . until you’ve found it! I’m not sure if SatNav can cope.

Sycharth is close to the border, on a narrow road south of the village of Llansilin, and once you’ve found it, you’d better hope you can park your car, for there are just four parking spaces. When I arrived today all four spaces were taken.

(My clutch then took a bit of a hiding as I engaged in some dextrous parking.)

Before heading to Sycharth proper I read the information board put up by Cadw, the ‘Welsh Government’ agency with responsibility for the site.

Talking of sites, and Cadw, I’m writing this on September 16, the day we celebrate the life and heroic deeds of Owain Glyndŵr; and yet the homepage of the Cadw website has not a single mention of him – it’s all Anglo-Norman castles.

The information board is very light on, well, information. Which results in this rather curious phrase: ‘ . . . yet by 1405 it (Sycharth) had become a burnt-out shell at the hands of Prince Harry (the future Henry V).’

Without the context of a brutal and bloody war of national liberation that reads as if this Harry bloke should have been banged up for being a pyromaniac.

The cars already parked in Sycharth’s miniscule car park seemed to belong to school teachers, up on the mound with a bunch of kids. Once I’d frightened them off I had the place to myself.

But before even getting to the hallowed ground I had to negotiate the stile. Now I’m six foot tall and reasonably fit, but many others would have struggled. One step was missing and the whole bloody thing looked as if it was about to collapse into firewood.

After negotiating the stile I had to traverse the ground to the remains of the motte and bailey, and that meant dodging cowpats. Yes, I appreciate that Sycharth is on the land of a working farm. But even so . . .

If the so-called ‘Welsh Government’ can find £4.25m to buy flood-prone Gilestone farm – ostensibly for the Green Man Festival – then I’m sure to God it can find a few thousand to buy the field containing the home of Owain Glyndŵr.

It certainly could if it wanted to.

I’m not suggesting that Sycharth be rebuilt, or that it needs a 500-space car park. (The local roads couldn’t cope.) But the site could be bought, and tidied up. With room for 15 – 20 cars. And it could definitely be better signposted.

The bottom line is that I believe we should show more respect for, and gratitude towards, Owain Glyndŵr. Because if it had all ended in 1283, then there might have been no Wales today.

One job that could be done immediately is to replace that completely uninformative information board! And put up a few bloody signposts.

Because at present the whole site carries an air of neglect, as if certain people wished they didn’t have to bother. As if they don’t really want anyone going to Sycharth.

Another example of this neglect would be the weeds crowning the mound.

I know Cadw is little more than English Heritage (West) and interested only in Anglo-Norman castles and the income they generate, but things need to change.

Cadw needs to be reminded that it is first and foremost a body celebrating and conserving Welsh history. And to us, as a nation, Sycharth is more important than Caernarfon castle.

It may be humble by comparison, but the princes that lived at Sycharth were our princes.

As I got back to my car a few other people were arriving. Pilgrims, by the look and sound of them. I hope their faith helped them overcome the disappointment I’m sure they felt at what they found.

Maybe I should have warned them about the stile, and the cowpats, but I was too busy thinking about those anglocentric crawlers at Cadw.

And also thinking about us as a nation, for tolerating what I’d just seen.

UPDATE 28.09.2022: By an amazing coincidence someone else visited Sycharth around the same time I did, drew attention to exactly the same issues I commented upon (even down to the broken stile), and also called for the site to be taken into public ownership. Amazing!

♦ end ♦

Back to the Land!

On 01/09/202201/09/2022 By JacIn Colonialism, Colonisation of Wales, Environmentalism, Hippies, Public Funding, Welsh Government30 Comments

After taking August off (and enjoying the break) I’m back to report on an event planned for later this month.

In fact, I enjoyed the break so much, and found writing this such hard going, that it might be a while before the next piece appears.

♦

HOW IT BEGAN

A couple of weeks ago someone sent me news of a gathering to be held in the Community Centre, Knighton, on September 17, when many of us will be nursing hangovers from celebrating Glyndŵr’s Day.

Knighton Community Centre has been mentioned on this blog before, after falling into the clutches of white settler Labour activists; who now wage war on local farmers, welcome refugees to an area where they themselves are not universally welcome, and generally play latter-day left liberal colonialists.

For no longer is it Bible and bullets, now it’s saving us through a combination of uplifting sermons from the Rev Monbiot and those organic thingeys they eat at Felicity’s aerobic knife-throwing class.

But I digress.

To expose the dishonesty behind this event I shall go through those named as being involved before concluding with . . . well, my conclusions. What else?

◊

CAMPAIGN FOR THE PROTECTION OF RURAL WALES (CPRW)

Let’s start with some background. The CPRW has been pootling along for almost a century as a charity, but now things are changing. Most significantly, with the formation of a company in late May this year.

Though I’m assured there’s no significance to this other than the trustees ensuring they are not personally bankrupted by legal action against the CPRW.

Which also means that, at the moment, the CPRW has two charities with the same name registered with the Charity Commission. One will soon be closed.

Previous CPRW presidents have included politician Megan Lloyd George and BBC broadcaster Wynford Vaughan Thomas. Clough Williams Ellis, of Portmeirion fame, was also deeply involved for many years as both chairman and president.

The current president of the CPRW is TV celeb Jules Hudson, who is believed to live in Herefordshire. Possibly Hertfordshire. But definitely not Wales. He’s famous for programmes like Escape to the Country and Countryfile.

In his favour, he has a Labrador called Iolo.

The chair of the Brecon & Radnor branch is Jonathan Halsey Luke Colchester, who has recently moved to Clyro. From where he runs his company, Courtenay Advisers Ltd.

I am informed by a very reliable source that the Brecon & Radnor branch of the CPRW is particularly hostile towards farmers.

That being so, why is the local CPRW branch organising a bash with the title ‘Welsh Food & Farming’? The answer to that question will become clear as you read on.

There are farmers, and there are farmers.

◊

THE FERTILE CRESCENT

One of the CPRW’s recent recruits is associated with another new outfit, Friends of the Upper Wye (FUW), registered with the Charity Commission in March this year. (Though I’m assured she’s an admirable and well-intentioned lady.)

This will no doubt complement the Wye & Usk Foundation (WUF) which is about a lot more than just angling. The WUF is based in Talgarth, close to Coleg Soros.

Over the years the WUF has received millions in funding from or via the ‘Welsh Government’, much of it handed over by an official whose attitude to money might have been compared by my dear mamgu to that of an inebriated seafarer.

An amazing episode, with apparently no oversight whatsoever. It is even suggested that some favoured bodies didn’t even need to make an application – it was a case of, “Would you like some more money?”

OK, so it’s not exactly a crescent, but did I ever claim to be an artist? Click to open enlarged in separate tab

For the Fertile Crescent formed by the Usk and the Wye is something of a magnet for those seeking to save us benighted natives from ourselves. And for others with even less noble intent.

There’s yet another organisation, formed last year, in the Welsh Rivers Union (WRU), based on the Usk at Llanvihangel Gobion. This claims to be a collective of ‘citizen-funded’ community groups defending our rivers.

If it gets airborne it will be made up of the usual ‘community groups’ composed of people who were living somewhere else not so long ago.

Though as yet, it’s not registered as either a company or a charity. It may be just a website, and a Twitter account.

Oh, I almost forgot Afonydd Cymru Cyf, also based in Talgarth. Where income from government grants leapt like a returning salmon from £10,000 in 2018 to £894,704 in 2020.

Afonydd Cymru’s chair is Viscount Christopher Mills, of Kensington, who served as regional director of the Environment Agency in Wales (before the creation of Natural Resources Wales). Among the trustees is Joe Pimblett, CEO of the Severn Rivers Trust, based in Worcestershire.

When it comes to the Fertile Crescent even the Blesséd Monbiot has made a film, Rivercide (what a wit!), in which one of the supporting cast was Lesley Griffiths (sans Gary), and she reminded us that no matter what the facts may say, it’s always farmers wot we must blame.

St George thought the culprits were chickens, which appear at number 2, after humans, in his forthcoming opus, ‘Species To Be Exterminated If We Are To Save The Planet’. (Chickens have apparently deposed sheep in Monbiot’s demonography.)

Why this obsession with the Usk and the Wye? Is it because they’re close to Bristol? Or is their cross-border nature, demanding ‘co-operation’, the attraction?

Of course, there are rivers within Wales in far worse condition than the Wye and the Usk, so why are these ignored? Three reasons, perhaps.

First, these other rivers run through more populated areas with few stretches of open country attractive to those in search of a rural idyll, or intent on ‘habitat restoration’ (aka ‘rewilding’).

Second, while there may be areas meeting the criteria further west, there the Welsh language would be a consideration. And after the resistance to Summit to Sea the land-grabbers are wary of getting another bloody nose.

Third, they are entirely within Wales.

Never lose sight of the fact that for many, water quality is a stalking-horse, used against farmers so as to free up their land for other purposes. And the ‘Welsh Government’ wholeheartedly supports this agenda.

UPDATE: Here’s a recent example of pollution on the Wye that clearly has nothing to do with farmers.

◊

LOCAL GROWERS AND FARMERS

A source informs me that the ‘local grower’ is the bloke from the organic food shop in Knighton, where you buy the knobbly carrots and the misshapen parsnips. Ach y fi!

(Though there may be others attending, more deserving of the billing.)

As for the ‘local farmers’, it seems these will both come from Herefordshire, which may be fairly local to Knighton (/Tref y Clawdd) but are not, unless we want to be irredentist about this, Welsh.

More pragmatically, whether we view Herefordshire as the ‘lost lands’ or not, the area will not be affected by any legislation or initiatives emanating from Corruption Bay.

Even so, to help give a fuller flavour of the event, I’ll tell you who they are.

One is ‘RegenBen’, of Townsend Farm, near Ross-on-Wye. Which, as the name suggests, is on the River Wye. Ben is a director of the Oxford Farming Conference, an organisation I’m told represents big landowners, yeoman farmers and the like.

(I was also told that a famous Welsh farmer went there to speak a few years ago, and has never felt more out of place.)

The makeup of the Oxford Farming Conference probably explains why a rival was set up in 2010 called the Oxford Real Farming Conference.

From what I can see the older body caters for those with inherited land while the upstart is more attractive for Greens looking to get their hands on someone else’s land. I wouldn’t be comfortable with either.

The other ‘local farmer’ is from ‘Wild by Nature’, of Lower House farm, just over the border from Llanthoney, close to Llanveynoe. (These corrupted spellings!)

Looking at a map I see that both of them are close to the border, but neither is particularly ‘local’ to Knighton. The first is roughly 45 miles away, the second almost 50.

I suspect that both have been invited because they are well-connected, and have diversified into ‘artisanal’ food produce and other activities.

The Rhug Estate model, if you like.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve stopped many times at the Rhug restaurant and shop, and like some urchin from a Dickens novel gazed at goodies I can’t afford.

Rhug Estate shop. Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Though ‘farm shop’ really is a misnomer. It suggests Mrs Evans in a shed at the bottom of the farm drive selling goods cheaper by cutting out the middle man. In reality it’s a place where the price of everything is marked up.

Few locals can afford to shop there. That’s why the Rhug ‘farm shop’ is on the A5.

Even so, I’m sure a farm shop can be a nice little earner, and so I wasn’t surprised to learn that ‘Wild by Nature’ already has one. While RegenBen’s website tells us: ‘Our plans are to share the fruits of our labour by opening a farm shop’.

There are of course some excellent farm shops in Wales. One is Bargoed Farm / The Moody Cow, near Aberaeron, run by the former owners of Gilestone Farm, and visited very recently by Conservative Senedd leader Andrew R T Davies MS.

But how many farm shops can Wales support?

◊

SOIL ASSOCIATION

The Soil Association, headquartered in Bristol, is another of those English organisations that recognises the existence of Scotland, but not Wales. We, presumably, are part of England.

The Soil Association is registered as both a company and a charity. And with an annual income of over £23m it is no shoestring outfit. Of course the Scottish Soil Association is registered separately in Scotland.

In addition, there is The Soil Association Land Trust ‘established to acquire and maintain farmland sustainably’. Which might be worth bearing in mind, and could explain The Soil Association’s interest in Wales, a country I’m sure it will quickly recognise if the ‘Welsh Government’ offers to buy it a farm.

◊

NATURE FRIENDLY FARMING NETWORK

The company of that name was launched in July 2018. Though there has been quite a turnover of directors in the four years since then. Of the eight original directors, five have left, including two who were obviously Welsh.

NFFN has an impressive website, telling us of a Welsh Steering Group, with two group members serving as directors.

Here’s a page giving some responses from the Welsh Steering Group to the ‘Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme that emerged in July.

Hilary Kehoe, the Chair, mentions the ‘changing climate’. Rhys Evans thinks the ‘devil will be in the detail’. But Hywel Morgan was ecstatic. I was not surprised to learn that Hywel is involved with the ‘Welsh Government’s Farming Connect scheme.

The Nature Friendly Farming Network is looking to hire a £29,000 a year Communications Officer. Having recently recruited a Farmer Engagement Officer on the same salary. But who’s funding these posts?

For the financial situation is not impressive. I appreciate that it’s a company limited by guarantee, but even so, I would have expected to see more than £69 in the kitty. Which is what the latest accounts (to y/e 30.06.2021) show.

Yes, NFFN has assets of £199,317, but this sum is exceeded by money owed to creditors.

On the ‘Nature Means Business‘ page we read: ‘Right now, farm businesses are facing a multitude of challenges: climate change, unpredictable weather patterns, changes to future farm payment schemes and adjusting to new consumer demands’.

To prioritise ‘climate change’ (when it’s becoming clear that climate change has been – at the very least – exaggerated), and then virtually repeat it with ‘unpredictable weather patterns’, before mentioning farm payments, is revealing.

With no mention at all of the threat from mandatory afforestation, farms being bought for greenwashing, and restrictions applied by politicians and administrations that are blatantly anti-farming.

These priorities are evident throughout the website. The image below is from the Fund Us page. And again it’s ‘climate in crisis’, ‘wildlife declining’, ‘habitats being lost’.

The Nature Friendly Farming Network seems to be an environmental organisation that recruits farmers. There’s nothing wrong with that, farmers care deeply about the environment that provides livelihoods for them and their families.

But it’s a question of priorities. The first of which has to be supporting farmers – who will then look after the environment.

◊

STUMP UP FOR TREES

This organisation has appeared on this blog a number of times, so I won’t dwell on it again.

Based in Abergavenny Stump up for Trees is a greenwash outfit. It’s registered as a charity, and one of the three trustees is Richard James Roderick, who farms next to Gilestone.

By ‘greenwashing’ I mean that SUFT ‘saves the planet’ by planting trees in order for companies to offset their perceived ‘carbon footprint’, which allows them to go on putting out carbon. Its major partner seems to be Utility Warehouse.

Nonsense predicated on there being a ‘climate emergency’ (there isn’t); carbon being damaging to the environment (it’s not); and replacing agricultural land with sterile, monoculture pine forests making sense (it doesn’t).

Even so, Stump up for Trees seems to be well-regarded in Corruption Bay among the connoisseurs, practitioners and dispensers of flim-flam, bullshit, propaganda and other means of deceiving poor old Dai Public.

◊

ABATTOIR SECTOR GROUP

This is yet another organisation based in Bristol and set up as recently as 2020. Though it’s not registered as either a company or a charity because it’s an offshoot of the Sustainable Food Trust.

The ABS is dedicated to keeping smaller, rural abattoirs open, and what carnivore (bares fangs!) could argue with that?

Parent body, the Sustainable Food Trust, is an international organisation with a wider remit to support ‘sustainable farming’. By which I assume that it seeks to avoid the wrath of the swivel-eyed with a modified kind of farming that’s less damaging to Mother Earth.

It is, as I say, based in Bristol, and I see no mention of Wales on the website. The only Welsh connection I can find is founder Patrick Holden, an organic dairy farmer from the Lampeter area.

Holder is a founder of Sustainable Food Trust and current CEO. He was a former director of the Soil Association.

◊

OUR FOOD

You may need to pay attention with this one. For just as with the previous section we have an organisation operating under a different label. There’s even a third label.

Let’s start with the Our Food website. Scroll down and you’ll read: A project of the Conservation Farming Trust Company Number 10823532′. Which the Companies House website confirms as the number for Conservation Farming Trust.

On the Our Food website we also read: ‘This website was built with support from Monmouthshire County Council, the Brecon Beacons National Park, and the Welsh Government. It is part of a process to build a new campaign in the region to secure 1200 acres for regenerative horticulture for local markets.’

The Our Food 1200 website confirms that the figure refers to the acreage the new organisation hopes to be given. At the time of writing 24 acres had been donated. Though, in fairness, Our Food 1200 was only launched in January. It’s registered as a Community Benefit Company.

Let’s go back to the parent organisation, Conservation Farming Trust. The registered office address is in London, and the three directors live in Ireland (1) and England (2). So no Welsh connections there.

And yet, it seems the only funding Our Food gets is from Welsh sources.

This funding is presumably justified because Our Food 1200 is looking for Welsh land to be donated. This looks very much like One Planet Developments rebranded. (I’m sure I read a reference to ‘OPD’ on the website.)

As with OPDs, those we’ll find on these over-sized allotments are unlikely to be local. So why are we funding it?

And is it a safe bet? I ask because a driving force behind it all seems to be Duncan Mark Fisher, who serves as both secretary and a member of Our Food 1200. Companies House suggests Fisher’s business record is ‘patchy’, to say the least.

The Conservation Farming Trust may have no connection with Wales, but Our Land, and certainly Our Land 1200, are trying to put down roots. Maybe they’re hoping someone will buy them a farm!

More planet-savers promoting climate hysteria, with the ‘Welsh Government’ and others happy to go along with this exploitative, colonialist nonsense.

◊

LANDWORKERS’ ALLIANCE

What you’ve read thus far has been unadulterated, unsubstantiated and unconvincing bullshit (however sincere some of those promoting it), but this final section outdoes it all. For we are now with the horny-handed sons of toil, straight out of The Grapes of Wrath.

Or those who would imagine themselves so to be.

For I now direct your attention to the Landworkers’ Alliance. Scroll down and you’ll see that this crew aligns itself with the International Peasants Movement. (I’m afraid I let my membership lapse.)

When you join you get given a pitchfork and the addresses of local landlords. (Bastards!)

When Dominic and Eugenie re-imagine themselves as peasants you know you’ve gone so far down the rabbit-hole that you run the risk of being shot by an Australian farmer.

And doesn’t it count as cultural appropriation?

The Landworkers’ Alliance was formed in 2015, and has its registered address in Dorset. Here’s the Companies House entry.

The ‘accounts’ – as with all the outfits I’ve dealt with here – are vague, being little more than unaudited statements. Though I can tell you that the latest such statement (y/e 30.09.2020) gives assets at £151,507 (previous year £66,523). But with no indication of where the money came from.

It would also appear to be a Woke organisation. For which we should be thankful, because trans peasants are never far from my thoughts. (I hope it’s the same for you!)

The directors are resident in England and Scotland with the exceptions of Katharine Anne McEvoy and Gerald Davies Miles, both residents of Pembrokeshire. The former seems to live in Newport, with the latter to be found at Caerhys Organic Community Agriculture (COCA), near St David’s.

I feel a tear well in old Jac’s eye, for we may finally have found a genuine Welsh farmer! Though whether he’ll be in Knighton is another matter.

Looking briefly at the ‘accounts’ for COCA, or rather, the ‘statement of financial position’, we see a paltry £3,154 for y/e 31.03.2022.

I suspect that COCA is a virtue-signalling side-line, with Caerhys farm itself run as a commercial – if organic – agricultural business, including bed & breakfast.

But the irony.

We have sought for centuries to escape being peasants, in our own country; now we face an invasion of land-hungry Green-Left-Woke carrot-growing poseurs wanting to play at being peasants . . . in our country.

◊

CONCLUSION

The sad truth is that farmers have been badly treated under devolution. And it’s happened in identifiable stages.

It began in 1999 with Labour taking control of the new Assembly. A Labour Party in which too many saw farmers as landowners, and therefore capitalists. Though anyone who can lump together a struggling Welsh hill farmer and the Duke of Westminster really does have a problem.

This encouraged others to join in. I’m thinking now of the environmentalists, the planet savers. Though all too often it was their own interests, and the interests of their cronies, that were being served, not those of the planet.

Chief among them was Jane Davidson, Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing from 2007 to 2011. When her Labour Party was in coalition with Plaid Cymru.

Davidson, a wealthy and privately-educated Englishwoman, was determined to impose her will on us, for the benefit of others like her, no matter what the cost. To us.

Thanks to Davidson we saw TAN 6 in July 2010, the ‘Hippies’ Charter’, which allows English drop-outs to build what they like, where they like.

In January 2014, Alun Davies, the Minister for Natural Resources and Food, announced that 15% of CAP funding would in future be transferred from Pillar One (i.e. farmers) to Pillar 2 (rural development projects).

‘Rural Development Projects’ means those self-serving ‘community’ schemes dreamed up by Jane Davidson’s friends that benefit no one else.

Wales was further blessed, just a year later, with the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. Here you see the Act’s objectives, with my comments.

This legislation is another example of the Left window dressing a looted store (after inciting the looters with talk of ‘victimhood’ and ensuring the police didn’t get involved.)

Bullshit dreamed up to please enviroshysters and pressure groups. Which has achieved nothing for us Welsh. But it allows the ‘Welsh Government’ to say: ‘We were the first government in the world . . . ‘.

And that, for our politicians, is all that really matters.

More recently, we saw Lesley Griffiths (and Gary), introduce legislation to curb pollution of Welsh waterways. This problem is localised, and there are many culprits, including water companies.

But Lesley (and Gary) pretended to believe that the problem is national, and that farmers are solely to blame.

If you believe that traditional farming methods contribute to anthropogenic global warming, then the sensible approach would have been to sit down with farmers and work out a better way forward.

Instead, and from the outset, Labour politicians chose vilification, lies, confrontation, punishment.

An approach that becomes inconsistent, even sinister, when we think again about Knighton on the 17th. Where ‘Welsh Government’ representatives will be rubbing shoulders with lots of . . . well, farmers.

Clearly, the ‘Welsh Government’ has no problem with farmers as such, so perhaps the problem is only with Welsh farmers.

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Miscellany 27.07.2022

On 27/07/202227/07/2022 By JacIn Cardiff Bay, Colonialism, Colonisation of Wales, Englandandwales, Public Funding, Ukraine, Welsh Government, Wind Turbines68 Comments

This week’s offering kicks off with assorted musings from here and there before returning home to focus on issues that have caught my eye. And if these have a theme then it’s assorted companies and individuals pretending to be what they’re not. In this case, Welsh.

This is another biggie, just over 4,000 words, but you know the spiel – ‘nourishing, easily-digestible chunks, etc., etc‘.

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First stop, England, where the Conservatives have committed electoral suicide by getting rid of Boris Johnson and now have to make the choice between Sunak and Truss! Like having to choose which foot to shoot yourself in.

I don’t know the minds of Tory politicians and strategists but I do know that among the working class – male and female – there’s always been a guilty liking for a roguish toff.

And that’s what Johnson is. Nobody ever accused him of having his hand in the till or anything heinous; it was a bit of bullshitting here, a few drinks there, and an over-fondness for the ladies.

Those ‘failings’ might mean some tosser needing to be fanned with a copy of the Guardian in Islington, but they wouldn’t have lost BoJo many votes in Scunthorpe, St Helens, or Sunderland.

“Grand lad is Boris”.

The only ray of sunshine for the Tories comes in the soporific form of Labour leader Keir Starmer.

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Now across the Pond, to where Joe Biden – after two injections and two boosters – has caught Covid. Oh dear, what a pity, how sad.

Sleepy Joe is, without a doubt, the worst US president of my lifetime. And I remember Gerald Ford, of whom it was said that chewing gum and tying his shoelaces at the same time was too intellectually demanding.

Though in fairness, Ford could be relied on to do as he was told. Which explains how he got to serve on the Warren Commission looking into the JFK assassination.

Joe Biden clearly has dementia or a similar condition, and looming ever larger over his presidency are the multiple horrors contained in his son Hunter’s laptop.

Many of you will be unaware of this because the left-leaning mainstream media has largely ignored the story. They can’t deny it, because they’ve all read the e-mails and seen the videos. (And laughed along with the rest of us.)

In a nutshell, crack-smoking, sex-addicted Hunter saw himself as an international businessman. Making deals in China, Russia, Ukraine and other places by trading on his father’s name when dad was Obama’s VP.

Joe Biden’s brother James was certainly getting a cut and it looks increasingly likely that Joe himself was also in on it.

The problem is that Hunter just had to keep records. And they were all stored on a laptop he took to be repaired in Wilmington, Delaware, then forgot to collect it, and so the laptop became the property of the repair shop owner.

The only questions now are: 1/ How much longer can Sleepy Joe last? and 2/ What method will his party use to get rid of him?

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Finally, in Ukraine, the war grinds on with Russian forces advancing slowly and steadily on all fronts. It seems likely that the whole of the Donbass will soon be in Russian hands, and so will large swathes of territory across the south, perhaps even lovely Odessa.

Basically, those areas where a majority of the population identify as Russian. Areas where the population was treated abominably by Ukrainian forces – often Nazi units – for protesting against the US-engineered Maidan coup of 2014.

This outcome could have been achieved by a plebiscite, but certain interests in the West were determined that corruption-ridden Ukraine, generously supplied with weapons and money – which will never be accounted for – should wage a proxy war.

Jugoslavia all over again; with Russia in the role of ‘baddie’ Serbia, and Ukraine playing the white hat parts of Croatian Ustaše fascists, Bosnian Muslims and their Jihadist allies, and the organ-harvesting, gun-running, drug-smuggling gangsters of the (Albanian) Kosovo Liberation Army

On the plus side . . . it looks like Russia turning off the gas taps has killed Net Zero.

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EAT YOUR HEART OUT, ELON MUSK!

An announcement last Thursday from the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ told of an exciting development hoping to overcome the problem of reliance on China for supplies of rare earth elements for electric car batteries.

Followed by a word-for-word ‘article’ in the Wasting Mule on Friday.

What most people don’t realise (because the media prefers not to tell us), is that electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels, all need rare earth elements, and we are too reliant for these on China.

Being an expansionist Communist country China is obviously a potential enemy. Then there’s the fact that extracting these metals is dirty and dangerous work, which might be done by members of religious or ethnic minorities undergoing ‘re-education’.

The pieces linked to say the project is being funded by the Ford Low Carbon Vehicle Transformation Fund and uses fewer of the rare earth elements.

Naturally, I got to wondering about the company involved in this exciting venture, named as, ‘Caerphilly-based Deregallera’. And that was the first disappointment, for the company seems to be based near Bradford, in West Yorkshire.

Though in fairness, it was at one time using a Caerphilly address. So let’s put that into its contextual timeline.

Deregallera began life in 2011 in Southampton. Then it was Pontypridd. Then in March 2013 it was down to Cardiff. September 2019 saw a move within Cardiff. In December 2020 it was over to Bristol. Then in April this year it was up to Bingley.

Getting further and further away from the claimed base in Caerffili.

The driving force behind Deregallera is Martin Hugh Boughtwood. His Linkedin profile modestly describes him as a ‘visionary leader’. He has a host of US patents.

So it should go without saying that he’s been involved with a number of companies. Quite a few using the ‘Deregallera’ name. Here they are in a table.

Among them we see D G Innovate PLC. Which last year was taken over by Path Investments for £32m in a ‘reverse merger transaction’, according to the Annual Report and Financial Statements for Deregallera Ltd (March 2021).

D G Innovate was known by that name between 29.01.2021 and 05.04.2022. Before that it was Deregallera Holdings Ltd (from formation 26.11.2009). And now, since April 5, it’s Deregallera Holdings again!

God, this is confusing! With all the name changes, all the comings and goings of directors, do those involved know which company is which any more?

Talking of directors, D G Innovate PLC seems to have recruited a few this year.

Worth a mention are, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, former governor of Jersey; Dr Patrick Bruce Reith Symonds, formerly of Williams Grand Prix Engineering; and Trevor Gabriel, managing director at Monaco Villas. (Monaco Villas!)

I’m sure they’ll be very happy together in what is obviously another great Welsh venture.

As far as I’m concerned, the jury is out on this one. Those involved have got their hands on money from a fund administered by the ‘Welsh Government’ (which often spells disaster), but how much of that money Wales will see is another matter.

One to watch.

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‘WE’RE WELSH, HONEST!’

Another company desperately trying to prove it’s Welsh is our old friend, Bute Energy. Which began life in London, then used an Edinburgh address, but now most Bute companies also use a broom cupboard in Hodge House, Cardiff.

Named of course after Julian Hodge, banker to the Labour Party. Friend and confidante of PM Jim Callaghan and George “Order, Order!” Thomas.

Remember George, Lord Tonypandy? Even by the standards of the ‘Welsh’ Labour Party George Thomas was one of the most odious bastards ever to draw breath.

Not content with a Cardiff address to prove how Welsh it is Bute has recruited Dafydd Williams as a project manager to traverse the land addressing community councils and concerned locals, promising they’ll hardly notice 250 metre tall wind turbines . . . 36 here, another 30 there . . .

Is Dafydd a replacement for David George Taylor? For more on Taylor, and Bute’s Welsh Advisory Board, click here and scroll down to the section ‘Labour Party Freedom of Information Request’.

In search of enlightenment I joined a Zoom meeting of New Radnor community council a few weeks back, where I managed to put some questions to Dafydd Williams, but all I got in return was waffle.

One Bute site now threatened with 250m (to tip) turbines is Moelfre, inland of Abergele. To put that into perspective, the turbines put up 15 – 20 years ago were rarely more than 100m (often less), the turbines at Pen-y-Cymoedd are 145m.

But locals are fighting back. The image above is taken from a protest leaflet they’ve produced. Read the full leaflet here.

Another area threatened is to the east of Llandrindod. This being Bute’s Nant Mithil site. Here’s the briefing paper produced by Bute.

Bute has set up a company for each of its 20 planned wind farms, or as they now prefer to call them, ‘Energy Parks’. Here’s a map to help you locate them. And here’s more information on the various companies and individuals involved.

The proposal for Nant Mithil is for 36 x 220m (to hub) turbines, with ‘solar energy and battery technology’ not ruled out.

In both the Moelfre protest leaflet and the Bute briefing paper for Nant Mithil you will have seen reference to these being in a ‘Pre-Assessed Area for Wind Energy in Future Wales: The National Plan 2040’. Here’s a link to that document.

On page 94 you’ll find the map you see below. The areas bordered in black have been given over to wind farms. Planning permission is virtually guaranteed. Local resistance will prove futile. (Certainly, that’s the hope in Corruption Bay.)

Moelfre is in area 1, and Nant Mithil in area 4. Though sources tell me that as much as 75% of Bute’s 200 hectare Nant Mithil site is outside area 4. It’ll be interesting to see how that pans out.

Progress is also being made on other sites. Here’s the Scoping Report for Rhiwlas, near Llangurig. Compiled for Bute Energy by RSK of Bristol.

Other news is that new directors, Forrest, Gruescu and Parkhouse, have joined the gang in certain companies. Aberedw Energy Park Ltd being one. These new boys represent the interests of Bute’s Danish investors.

I covered this development in February, in ‘Bute Energy Selling Wales For Danegeld?’.

Everybody’s ripping off Mam Cymru, thanks to those assholes in Corruption Bay and their obsession with a non-existent ‘Climate Emergency’.

Maybe it’s time the old girl’s sons stirred themselves again, and put a stop to this abuse and exploitation taking place before their eyes.

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GILESTONE, REVISITED, AGAIN

To recap: The ‘Welsh Government’ paid £4.25m for Gilestone farm near Talybont-on-Usk which it says will be leased to the Green Man Festival.

I’ll try to avoid some of the rumours I’ve been hearing . . . oh, what the hell!

One has Green Man boss Fiona Stewart telling Minister for Economy – ‘economy’! – Vaughan Gething that if the ‘Welsh Government’ didn’t buy her a farm she would move the Green Man Festival to England.

Another wanted me to believe that the Green Man will move to Gilestone farm in 2026 because current host, Harry Legge-Bourke of the Glanusk Estate, is getting a divorce. Which seems rather protracted. And why should a divorce make any difference?

Finally, some believe there has long been a relationship between Fiona Stewart and former Gilestone owner, Charles Weston. I had to confirm that this was a business relationship not, er . . . well, you know.

I could find nothing linking them. To help my enquiries I drew up a table of Fiona Stewart’s companies. Which makes strange reading.

Throughout this saga we’ve been told that the ‘Welsh Government’ has been dealing with the Green Man Festival. Yet the company, Green Man Festival Ltd, formed September 2015, has always filed as a dormant company. The only director, Fiona Stewart.

What’s more, Green Man is controlled by Tree Trunk Ltd. Formed May 2012, this also files as a dormant company. And it’s behind with its filings to Companies House.

There are two directors. Stewart and Paul Abraham Betesh of Manchester. Betesh has been involved with a number of companies.

The other company using the Green Man label is the Green Man Trust Ltd. You’ll note that it receives funding from the ‘Welsh Government’, the Arts Council of Wales, and Arts Council England.

As well as being a company registered with Companies House it’s also registered with the Charity Commission.

Two of the four directors / trustees are Stewart and long-time business associate, Ian Myers Fielder, with these two exercising control. The other directors / trustees are Natasha Hale, and Joanna Owen, a solicitor working for Commission for Equality and Human Rights in London.

Flicking through the accounts I was struck by some of the other funders, Performing Rights Society Foundation, Ashley Family Foundation, and Cardiff University.

Then, a few days ago, a secretary was appointed, Joana Margarida Martins Rodrigues. Clearly Portuguese, perhaps one of the many Lusitanians to be found in Crughywel.

If we look at the total income for the Green Man Trust we see that it’s risen from £152,643 in year ending 31.12.2020 to £347,417 in y/e 31.12.2021. Which means that the income more than doubled, and is perhaps more than the Trust knows what to do with.

I suggest that because the latest accounts show £266,835 as ‘cash at bank and in hand’.

An interesting contribution to the Gilestone saga came a couple of weeks back from senior civil servant Andrew Slade. To give him his title, Director General, Economy, Skills and Natural Resources.

Here’s the article, in which Slade says that Gilestone may not be a done deal, but also describing the Green Man Festival as the “jewel in Wales’ crown”. A curious remark, and an indicator of Slade’s ignorance of Wales.

Most of those who attend come from England. Many more Welsh people go to the National Eisteddfod, then there’s ‘The Show’ (which was on last week), and even Dolgellau’s Sesiwn Fawr. I wouldn’t expect Slade to know much about the first or the third, but he’s been to Llanelwedd a few times.

It wouldn’t be stretching it to describe the Green Man Festival as an event for the English middle classes, for less than a quarter of the attendees live in Wales.

I even found a photo of Slade with a bunch of young farmers. (He’s right centre.) Next to him, carefully coiffed, is Gary Haggaty, looking as if he’s about to go on stage to give Mr and Mrs Gripe of Wisbech the chance to win a week for two in sunny Scunthorpe.

Both Slade and Haggaty have appeared on this blog before. They are civil servants with Defra backgrounds, sent down to keep the natives in check and do whatever damage they could to Welsh farming.

In The Welsh Clearances from October 2018 I used an image from January 2014 of Slade alongside Alun Davies, then Minister for Natural Resources and Food, as Davies announced taking EU funding from farmers and turning it over to ‘Rural Development Projects’. (And we all know what that means!)

Haggaty eventually shacked up with his boss, Lesley Griffiths.

I quote from her official bio: ‘Lesley was appointed Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs on 3 November 2017. On 13 December 2018 Lesley was appointed Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs. On 13 May 2021 Lesley was appointed Minister for Rural Affairs, North Wales and Trefnydd’.

Enough of digression, back to Fiona Stewart and her companies.

The only company I can find that seems to have any serious money is Plantpot Ltd; originally GMF Festival Ltd, before changing into Pot Plant Ltd. This is also controlled by Tree Trunk Ltd.

And let’s remind ourselves that Tree Trunk Ltd is a dormant company behind with its Companies House filings.

At the end of 2020 Plantpot had £1,179,096 ‘cash at bank and in hand’. Up from £656,213 the previous year. Not bad considering the Covid ‘pandemic’. But most of this money is owed to unidentified creditors. Who are they?

With £169,900 owed to ‘group undertakings’. So does this mean it’s owed to other companies in the Tree Trunk group?

Another concern is that there’s no indication of where the £1m+ in cash came from. What we have instead of audited accounts for Plantpot Ltd is an ‘Unaudited Financial Statement’ made out by Ms Stewart herself.

I’m not suggesting dishonesty, but I am saying there’s a lack of clarity. Which might not matter had the ‘Welsh Government’ not paid £4.25m for Gilestone farm.

Because if the Green Man is the major event it’s said to be, then it must take in millions of pounds, so where is that money accounted for? It certainly doesn’t go through any company using the Green Man name. Is there a company I’ve missed?

If we go back to the table of Fiona Stewart’s companies we see that the newest is Cwningar Ltd, formed in February this year, with its formation almost certainly linked to the purchase of Gilestone farm.

Which is why I suspect that talk of an agreement between the ‘Welsh Government’ and the Green Man Festival is misleading. Fiona Stewart is the Green Man. I believe the farm was bought for Fiona Stewart herself. And for some new venture loosely connected with the Green Man.

I suggest that because Ms Stewart is nothing if not well connected in Cardiff.

This article from May 2017 says, ‘Cardiff University and Green Man will build upon their existing partnership’. Fiona Stewart gushed . . .

“Green Man works with world class talent and Cardiff University is one of the most respected universities on the planet, so it’s definitely top of the bill with me.”

(Pass the sick bag!)

Then think back to the item about the electric car motor, telling us that ‘academics at Cardiff University’ are involved. Dafydd Williams of Bute Energy ‘holds a BSc and MSc from Cardiff University’s School of City and Regional Planning’.

Cardiff University is almost an extension of the ‘Welsh Government’. If you’re well in with Cardiff Uni then doors – and cheque books – open for you in Corruption Bay.

And if, like Fiona Stewart, you’re also connected to Coleg Soros Talgarth, then you can write your own cheque. Which may explain how she acquired Gilestone.

Apart from its location there’s nothing Welsh about the Green Man Festival – just look at the line-up for this year. If Stewart wants to move to England, let her go.

Seeing as the great majority of the visitors come from England moving to that country would be the environmentally sensible thing to do.

Then sell Gilestone and put the money from the sale back into the public purse. Where it belongs. And don’t do the bidding of any other pushy memsahibs.

In conclusion, it’s worth remembering that a great deal of bullshit is talked about the Green Man Festival. Take this June 2019 submission from UK Music to the Senedd’s Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee. (Page 7.)

Does anyone really think there are 1,500 jobs created on site? If so, there must be almost as many people working at the festival as there are attending!

And no matter what the figure is, those are very, very temporary jobs.

Like I say, bullshit!

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CHILD PROTECTION

We live in dangerous times.

Obviously, there’s a war in Ukraine. But then we have supranational organisations like the World Health Organisation and the World Economic Forum trying to impose themselves as some kind of unelected global government.

And recently we’ve had to put up with the swivel-eyed who got really swivelly because of a few fine days – in July! You could sense their disappointment when the bodies weren’t piling up in the streets; their ‘We warned you!’ taunts dying on their lips.

All joking aside, one threat, a very real threat, is shaping up under our noses, with the full support of the ‘Welsh Government’ and the Corruption Bay establishment. Because both have been infiltrated, indoctrinated, or intimidated into supporting Stonewall.

For Stonewall, which started out defending and promoting the interests of gays and lesbians, is now nothing more than a group getting ever more extreme in its promotion of ‘trans rights’ and other issues.

Stonewall is favoured in Corruption Bay, we know that from the amount of funding it’s received from the ‘Welsh Government’.

Seeing as the Wales Council for Voluntary Action is also funded by the ‘Welsh Government’ the total comes to £241,781. Only UK government departments gave more to Stonewall in the period covered.

Being so favoured Stonewall also has influence in Wales. Influence over legislation. Even to the extent of deliberately misrepresenting existing legislation.

Specifically, the Equality Act 2010. There are 9 protected characteristics under the Act, and this is how the ‘Welsh Government’ interpreted them. They’re correct apart from the one I’ve highlighted.

What the Act protects is gender reassignment. That is, someone who has undergone surgery. Stonewall would like it to promote ‘chicks with dicks’, and give free rein to male sexual predators pretending to be women.

The ‘Welsh Government’ chose to accept Stonewall’s wishful thinking over the law. And then desperately tried to explain its mistake as being in ‘the spirit of the law’.

The spirit of the law can be elusive, a difficult thing to pin down. But there can be no mistaking the letter of the law. In this case it is quite unambiguous. (Doesn’t the ‘Welsh Government’ have lawyers?)

The ‘Welsh Government’ got it wrong because it listened to Stonewall. That’s because Stonewall has allies in the Bay among Labour insiders.

Which helped Stonewall influence the new curriculum for Welsh schools. But the fightback has started. There will now be a judicial review of the ‘Welsh Government’s proposals.

Here’s a rather long video (almost 2 hours) of a meeting in Bethel, near Caernarfon, where opposition is being organised to the imposition of certain elements of the curriculum.

But it doesn’t end there, for Stonewall also wants to corrupt pre-school children. Those who attend playgroups. Here’s a tweet put out by Stonewall last week.

When asked to produce the ‘research’ referred to, Stonewall was unable to do so.

Make no mistake, Stonewall wants to push its vile agenda that results in mutilating confused kids into every sphere of our lives, and certain elements on the Left will give all the assistance they can.

Of course, many nursery or pre-school groups in Wales are run by Mudiad Meithrin. Which has, unfortunately, also been infiltrated.

When I look at the Mudiad Meithrin board of directors I can see a few possible advocates for this dangerous nonsense. One in particular, who was deeply involved in attempts last year to turn YesCymru into TransCymru.

Another, who has recently left the Mudiad Meithrin board, also did great damage to YesCymru before moving on to other things. I’m told he played a big part in turning Cymdeithas yr Iaith Woke.

Stonewall has walked into a trap of its own making. When you argue there is an ever-expanding universe of genders you will inevitably attract the exhibitionists and the unhinged, and the general public will stop taking you seriously.

Start talking about the sexuality of children and you’ll draw the perverts and the paedophiles. And then the general public will start seeing you as a threat.

An organisation in Stonewall’s position has two options:

- Paddle back and regain some credibility.
- Keep paddling furiously for the rapids and prove your critics right.

Stonewall seems to have chosen the second option. Which is bad news for them, but I won’t be shedding any tears.

We must protect our kids from discredited and dangerous beliefs promoted by a few influential individuals who decided those beliefs were ‘progressive’, then bullied others into accepting Stonewall’s lunacies.

It’s time for the ‘Welsh Government’, Mudiad Meithrin, and others, to paddle back, and to root out the influence of Stonewall from all areas of Welsh life.

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August is normally a slow month for news so, unless the Gorsedd starts an insurrection, the ‘Welsh Government’ announces major investment outside of Cardiff, or Powys is invaded by enviroshysters (damn! too late for that one!), I’ll be back, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, in September.

Jac o' the North

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