News Round-up 24.03.2017

On 24/03/201727/03/2017 By JacIn Civil Service, Colonisation of Wales, Cymrophobia, Environmentalism, European Union, Greens, Local Government, Media, Plaid Cymru, Police, Public Funding, Scotland, Swansea, Third Sector, Welsh Government, Welsh Labour, Welsh Language, Welsh Media, Wind Turbines47 Comments

Swansea Labour Party

I have it on good authority that the all-conquering Swansea Labour Party is raring to go in May’s council elections. Well oiled, with palms greased and muscles flexed from Clydach High Street to Caswell Bay. Even as you read this leafleting teams – each member carrying a 90kg rucksack – will be training by racing up and down Kilvey Hill. Platitudes are being practised and – should honeyed words fail – brass knuckles polished.

Well, perhaps I exaggerate.

It is at this point I must apologise to whoever sent me interesting information about the line-up for May . . . information I’m afraid I’ve lost, sorry. The problem is that I’m still trying to get straight after my recent computer disaster. But never mind, I shall press on with what I’ve got.

It seems that things are not well for the bruvvers on my home patch, and even worse as we look around the Bay.

First, the Clays, Bob and Uta, have upped sticks and gone. They drifted into town a few years ago, he’s English and a former MP for Sunderland North, she’s Austrian. They were immediately accepted as candidates by the Labour Party, yet they’ve spent their brief time in the city playing left wing politics and plotting against ‘colleagues’, now they’re moving on having done sod all for Swansea, their only contribution being to keep up Labour numbers on the council.

One of those hoping to replace the Clays in the Llansamlet ward is Maureen ‘Mo’ Sykes, who has appeared in this blog afore, due to her connection with the YMCA. See here, here and here.

Like the Clays and so many of the city’s recent Labour councillors Sykes is not native to Swansea or to Wales. But what the hell! Labour is an internationalist party . . . or was until it realised that most Labour voters went for Brexit due to concerns over immigration. So if Labour don’t fall into line, then those voters will switch to Ukip (even if they remain sceptical about Paul Nuttall’s claim to have scored the winning goal in the 1966 World Cup Final).

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Plaid Cymru

‘But, surely’ you cry, ‘Plaid Cymru must be strong in Swansea, and putting up a raft of of inspiring candidates?’ I fear not. The last time the Jack electorate was offered credible Plaid candidates with whom they could identify was when me and my mates stood back in the ’60s and ’70s. You want to know why Plaid Cymru is almost invisible in Swansea?

First, there’s the widespread perception that Plaid is a ‘Cardiff party’. In other words, part of the ‘bubble’ that sees Cardiff get a disproportionate share of investment and everything else. This may be felt in other areas, but is more keenly felt in Cardiff’s only rival.

Second, and another reason that the party has difficulty connecting with ordinary people, is because of its obsession with ‘progressive’ politics and other bollocks that makes it hostage to single-issue obsessives and outright charlatans. Here’s an example.

The long saga of Mynydd y Gwair is drawing to a close. A windfarm will soon rise on an unspoilt landscape on the edge of Swansea. Local graziers – all Welsh – will lose out to the German energy company erecting the turbines, and the Duke of Beaufort, who owns the land, much of it acquired in confiscations from Welsh landowners (among them, it is suggested, Owain Glyndŵr). Yet Plaid Cymru has done nothing to help the people of the area.

Plaid Cymru may indeed be ‘the Party of Wales’ but in its pathetic attempt to avoid the ‘narrow nationalist’ slander it refuses to acknowledge the existence of a distinct, Welsh people, promoting instead something called ‘civic nationalism’ which, when used by Plaid Cymru, is just a cop-out.

On Mynydd y Gwair, Plaid’s desperation to avoid the slander, coupled with its support for environmentalist shysters, has led the party to support a German energy company and an English aristocrat against Welsh people.

What sort of a national party is this? Perhaps one for which ‘Wales’ is just a geographical expression.

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Plod, Plod, Plodding Along

Before leaving Swansea I must return to the case of Jenny Lee Clarke who, you may remember, was a colleague of Carolyn Harris, now the MP for Swansea East, and claims to have suffered a homophobic assault at the hands of Harris. (An incident that Plaid Cymru, opposed to bullying and homophobia, chose to ignore.)

In what was almost certainly a tit-for-tat move Clarke was accused of stealing money by somehow paying herself more than she was due. I’m not sure when she was initially charged (lost documents again) but I know that she was bailed, and that this initial bail period was extended until November 7th . . . when it was extended again to February 17th . . . now it’s been extended again to May 17th.

If the police have a case then they should take it to court, if they don’t have a case then they should give this poor woman a break and put an end to her worrying. I cannot believe that it takes so long to investigate a single allegation against one woman – it’s not as if we’re dealing with a complicated conspiracy involving offshore accounts used by Russian hackers.

The way the police have treated Jenny Lee Clarke makes them look incompetent. An alternative explanation, seeing as the allegation against Clarke comes from a Labour MP, one against whom she had made a serious allegation, and remembering that the South Wales PCC, Alun Michael, is a former Labour MP, might be that political influence explains this woman’s appalling treatment.

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Comrades Lost on the Port Talbot Front

Around the Bay, in Neath Port Talbot, there has been internecine blood-letting on a scale unrecorded since the Peloponnesian War. The ground in Port Talbot is said to be red with the blood of fallen comrades, knives protruding from their backs, with as many as half of the sitting Labour councillors deselected, and perhaps eleven of them planning to stand as Independents in May. This could get really nasty. (Rubs hands gleefully!)

A similar situation is reported from Bridgend council, especially up around Maesteg, and from other areas such as Caerfilli, and Cardiff. It would appear that in some local authority areas ‘Welsh’ Labour is fighting a – largely unreported – civil war.

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Llandovery YMCA

Hesitantly now, I cross the mighty Llwchwr into Carmarthenshire, but give Sosban a wide berth, for Cneifiwr is doing a grand job there in exposing the manifest shortcomings of the oddballs, dissemblers and grotesques collectively known as Llanelli Labour Party. I shall instead hie me away to Llandovery.

Intelligence reached me that the con trick going by the name of Llandovery YMCA had closed its doors. I call it a con trick because its greatest achievement has been to pull in hundreds of thousands of pounds of public funding to create non-jobs for good-lifers. I suggest you read Ancestral Turf and The Impoverishment of Wales (scroll down to ‘YMCA Wales’). There you will encounter in a previous incarnation ‘Mo’ Sykes, would-be successor to the Clays.

Of more immediate relevance could be that the driving force behind this scam, one Jill Tatman, is being prevented from returning to work by other trustees after a period looking after her ‘sick’ husband. I’m told that her husband is not sick at all, but perhaps keeping his own company while on bail for – it is alleged – offences involving children.

A great deal of public money has been poured into Llandovery YMCA for the benefit of a small group of recent arrivals. Given that the whole project seems to have folded there should now be an investigation of the accounts and the wider running of this good-lifers’ benefit fund.

In my Ancestral Turf post you will see a video featuring Gill Wright who branched out by taking over the old North Western Hotel, near the railway station, to run as the Level Crossing bunkhouse. Public funding was secured, but again, the venture collapsed, after just two years.

The old pile has now been bought again, this time to be run as a commercial venture, with no public funding involved. How know I this? Because the new owners sent a message to the contact box you’ll see in the sidebar.

I get some very interesting messages through my ‘Contact Me Directly’ box. Oh yes.

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Sweet Charity

News from the north, now.

Over the years I’ve dealt with countless examples of the ‘Welsh’ Government blindly throwing money around in the vain hope that this will be mistaken for an economic strategy. As we know, much of this money goes to Labour Party members and hangers-on in the Third Sector; Naz Malik and the family business AWEMA being a classic example.

When it’s not going to Labourites other ways are found to squander public funding, such as showering money on the grant grabbers of Llandovery and their counterparts across the land. I’ve often thought that this group seems to make up for the lack of a Labour presence in rural areas.

For the electoral map tells us that there are fewer opportunities to reward party loyalty when we travel west of Wrecsam and Llanelli, or north of Merthyr. But little outposts of bruvverdom can still be found. One such example would be the patch of Councillor Siôn Wyn Jones in Bethel, a village to the north east of Caernarfon on the B4366.

Now I’m sure that one-time estate agent Siôn is a conscientious councillor working hard for his community, for he never tires of telling people how hard he works and how much money he’s raised for that community. But questions are being asked about his running of the village hall, Neuadd Goffa Bethel.

Back in 2013 the Neuadd was given £294,811.88 in capital grants by the ‘Welsh’ Government for a revamp. Which gave Carwyn Jones the opportunity to venture into Plaid Cymru territory to remind locals how much ‘Welsh’ Labour was doing for them.

The revamped Neuadd is a fine asset for Bethel, but questions persist. Such as, why have no accounts or annual returns been filed with the Charity Commission for two years? And why is Siôn Wyn Jones the sole trustee of the Neuadd? Because the Charity Commission recommends at least three trustees. We know young Siôn is multi-talented, but is he serving as chairman, secretary and treasurer?

I’m sure there are simple answers to these questions and equally sure that Siôn Wyn Jones will ensure that everything is soon tickety-boo. For hark! I hear the returning officer call the candidates to the stage.

P.S. I should have mentioned that even though Gwynedd Council is controlled by Plaid Cymru the local funding agency, Mantell Gwynedd, is firmly under Labour Party control. Described to me as a “Labour closed shop”. Which means that even in an area where Labour is weak, ‘loyalty’ can still be bought and rewarded. An interesting insight into how ‘Welsh’ Labour manages to control the purse-strings even in those areas where it is rejected by the electorate.

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‘J Jones’

Those of us who spend too much time on the internet, and especially on sites that deal with Wales, will be familiar with ‘J Jones’, an exceptionally prolific writer whose mission in life seems to be proving that we’d all be eating caviare in the backs of our chauffeur-driven Rollers . . . if only we killed off the Welsh language.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I believe that ‘J Jones’ is our old friend, that son of the Balkans, Jacques Protic. I say that for a number of reasons. To begin with, over the years Protic has used many aliases, he may even have been Bilingo, for what really brings down the red mist for Protic is kids being taught Welsh, or worse, being educated through the medium of Welsh.

A further link is that ‘J Jones’ claims to be living on Ynys Môn, which, by a strange coincidence, is where Jacques Protic lives.

Until quite recently, Protic and ‘J Jones’ seemed to work as a team, appearing on the same blog or website feeding off each other. But we seem to be reading less from Protic nowadays and more from ‘J Jones’, who may be trying to explain the Protic reticence in the comment below, made in December to a Cardiff University blog by Professor Roger Scully.

Significantly, the police doing “nothing” to protect Jacques Protic from nationalist lynch mobs is a refrain we’ve heard from Protic himself. It has even been taken up by Labour blogger Phil Parry. To savour his take on the persecution of Jacques Protic – and my role in it! – work back from (takes deep breath), If Third-Rate Journalism Reliant On Endless Repetition Was A Crime Then Phil Parry Would Have Been Banged Up Long Ago.

‘J Jones’ of course shares the Protic obsession with education, to the extent that towards the end of 2015 he even commissioned a survey with YouGov into attitudes to Welsh language education. How much does it cost to have your own survey? How much of an obsessive do you have to be to arrange one? Or is someone else paying?

I suggest that newspapers, magazines, blogs and websites, take rather more care than hitherto when dealing with comments and other contributions from ‘J Jones’, if only because he doesn’t exist.

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Brexit

To finish, a little contribution from another source who tells me that Whitehall mandarins are in a tizzy because they fear May and her Three Brexiteers may be planning to do a runner so as to avoid the €60bn ‘divorce settlement’ and other punitive measures that Johnny Foreigner will seek to impose.

The scenario runs thus: Once the German elections are out of the way at the end of September a spat will be contrived that will see the UK raise two fingers to her erstwhile partners in the EU and walk away without paying anything.

I’m still trying to get my head around this, and figure out how it might impact on Scotland. Surely it would be a gift for the SNP? And what about us?

I’m sure my erudite and imaginative readers will have opinions on this and the other matters raised in this post.

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Updates & Tit-bits, November 21, 2016

On 20/11/201613/01/2017 By JacIn Cardiff, Colonialism, Colonisation of Wales, Corruption, Police, Public Funding, Social Housing, Swansea, Welsh Labour45 Comments

SWANSEA

Persecution

Where better to start than the old home town. (Which still ‘looks the same as I step down from the train, and there to greet me’ – is a welcoming committee from the local Labour Party. ‘Good old Jac’, they cry. Well, laff!)

As you may recall, I wrote a while back about the case of Swansea East MP Carolyn Harris and her alleged homophobic assault on Jenny Lee Clarke, when both worked in Labour’s Swansea East constituency office for MP Siân James. It even made the London ‘papers, here’s how the Telegraph treated it.

Meryl — This picture has nothing to do with the article . . . but I just can’t resist it! That hat!

Harris took over from James as MP in May 2015, the story about the alleged assault made the news in the second half of November then, on January 28, Clarke was dismissed from her job with immediate effect. I’ve seen the letter from Carolyn Harris; it’s one of those, ‘Clear your desk and sod off – now!‘ letters. We’ve all had them, I’ve got a drawer full. Things have not gone well for Clarke since then.

For not only did she lose her job, she was also accused of stealing money from her erstwhile employer (one C. Harris); and the most recent assault on her peace of mind, in September, was to be told by Swansea council that they’d stopped her housing benefit because someone had informed them she’d died! Naturally she reported this to the police, but they just messed her about a bit and refused to proceed with the case.

As for Labour-controlled Swansea council, you have to ask whose word they took that Jenny Clarke was dead. There was obviously no death certificate produced . . . or if there was then it was a forgery. But they are unable to explain how they came to accept that Jenny Clarke was demised. A third party points the finger at a close associate of Harris within the council – but who’s gonna investigate? This is Wales. This is the Labour Party.

As for the theft allegation, well this drags on . . . and on. The cops just keep extending her ‘Pre-Charge Conditional Bail’ (as it’s described on the form); the police bail was extended until November 7, and now it’s been extended again until February 17. I doubt if there will be charges; this is just the cops playing mind games.

This is a disgusting episode even for a corrupt and backward country like ours. The dominant political party engages in the kind of vindictive behaviour for which it is infamous, and yet what’s really worrying is that the police seem to be going along with this persecution of a woman whose only mistake was crossing the local political machine.

Persecution Complex?

Someone who may have good reason to be looking over his shoulder is the leader of Swansea council, Rob Stewart, one of the Morriston councillors. For the word echoing along the corridors is that conspirators are grouping around his ousted predecessor David ‘Il Duce’ Phillips, he of the red duffle coat (click to view).

As we speak, plots are being hatched, alliances formed, and positions of power allotted in the post-coup council. But back to the present.

One of the popular programmes on the Swansea Sound radio station is The Sunday Hotline presented by Kevin Johns. People phone in and have a moan about this and that, you know the sort of thing.

Any criticism of Swansea council is immediately answered by Stewart, who doesn’t phone in to defend himself, but sends an e-mail! – ‘And following that heartfelt complaint from Mrs Lloyd of Penclawdd about the council doing nothing to arrest and castrate Romanian cockle-pickers we’ve had an e-mail from council leader Rob Stewart, who argues . . . ‘.

Can’t you just picture him of a Sunday morning, still fizzy from too much lemonade the night before, in his marmalade-streaked pyjamas, trembling finger hovering over the keyboard as he listens to the bile spewing forth from his radio. It’s not a pretty sight, is it? But who knows, after next May, he might be able to cwtsh in under his duvet on a Sunday, unless of course he decides to put on strange voices and start phoning in complaints about his successor.

‘Good Night, John Boy’

Someone else I’ve written about more times than I wanted to is councillor John Charles ‘John Boy’ Bayliss, perhaps the last of the student councillors recruited by David Phillips and his wife Sybil Crouch, who works in Swansea university. Though I suppose there could be a few new ones in May.

Despite being a councillor for the Uplands ward, and despite living in Swansea, you wouldn’t be aware of that from his Twitter account; but ‘Uplands, Swansea’ or ‘Uplands ward in Swansea’ appeared on all his previous Twitter incarnations. (Two examples here and here.) And although it says “2017 local election candidate” it doesn’t say where. He’s certainly not standing for re-election in the Uplands (here’s Labour’s Magnificent Four for May, including the balding Lili Marlene), so where is he standing, is it even in Wales?

Maybe he’s standing in Bristol, where he works. Or is he going home to mummy and daddy in Sussex? Who cares? It looks like he’s leaving Swansea, and that’s the main thing. The only one who might miss him is Il Duce.

UPDATE 21.11.2016: A good source informs me that Bayliss may be standing for Cardiff council in May, either in Fairwater or Llandaff. Which makes sense, as he works in Bristol. But he was only recruited by the Remarkable Group because he was a Swansea Labour councillor and Remarkable was involved with the contentious Mynydd y Gwair wind farm. What use might a lobbying company like Remarkable have for him in Cardiff? P.S. Now confirmed by a second source.

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LLANELLI

The Invisible Man Moves

Sticking with the topic of Labour councillors on the move, we cross the tumbling waters of the mighty Llwchwr to Llanelli, where many people are asking why Rob James is moving there from Neath. At present James is the Labour councillor for the Bryncoch South ward . . . though you’d be forgiven for not knowing that, certainly if you were going by his attendance record.

For as Stan at the Neath Ferret tells us, between May and the end of October, James had attended 2/5 full council meetings; 0/3 meetings of the Environmental and Highways Scrutiny Committee; 0/4 Social Care, Health and Housing Scrutiny Committee; 0/1 Licensing and Gambling Acts Committee; 0/3 Registration and Licensing Committee: and as might be expected, he didn’t bother turning up for the council’s Annual Meeting in May either. Impressive, no?

rob-james — He may not bother turning up for meetings, but Councillor Rob James recognises a photo opportunity when he sees one. Look out, Llanelli – he’s coming your way!

What’s worse, to accommodate the Invisible Man from Neath Llanelli Labour has deselected Lliedi ward councillor Bill Thomas. Who’s he? Let Cneifiwr tell us, “Bill Thomas has ploughed his lonely furrow for 17 years, doing the sort of things which most people would like to imagine that all councillors do. For starters, he has a mind of his own, which marks him out from a good many of his colleagues. He has stood up for his ward through thick and thin, fought a long campaign to try to get justice for the cocklers whose livelihoods have been wrecked by releases of raw sewage into the Burry Inlet. He has fought an even longer and equally fruitless campaign to get justice for Mr and Mrs Clive and Pam Edwards, victims of incredible incompetence and an even more incredible refusal to put matters right by the council. He has banged on for years about the madness of building new homes on flood plains, and he played a key role in uncovering Mark and Meryl’s plans to flog off Parc Howard in Llanelli – while Labour was running the council.”

So it’s pretty obvious why Labour should want to remove a conscientious councillor and replace him with someone who’ll cause no problems, but that doesn’t explain why James is making the move. He could just as easily not turn up in Neath as Llanelli, so why go through the hassle of switching, filling in those forms and risking defeat?

In all seriousness, how does Llanelli Labour Party justify dumping a good councillor and replacing him with an outsider, especially an outsider with James’ attendance record? It really is taking the electorate for granted.

Now a Labour Politician Who Didn’t Move, Allegedly

Staying in Sosban . . . well, maybe, we look at the AM for the town, young Lee Waters. Now no one disputes that Lee was raised in Ammanford, but he’s spent recent years in the Cardiff area, and it’s being suggested that he still lives in the Vale, in Barry to be precise.

Which might be fine, had he not told the Turk electorate in May that his happy abode was in New Zealand Street, Llanelli. He pipped the Plaid Cymru candidate by 382 votes.

‘Poumista’

Another recently announced candidate for May’s county council elections is Gary Robert Jones. You’ll recognise the name from my posts on the ongoing campaign of bigotry against Welsh language education in Llangennech. No doubt ‘poumista’ is hoping to capitalise on his notoriety.

His Twitter handle is taken from the Spanish initials of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, an extremist party active in the Spanish Civil War, mainly in Catalonia. (It might even have the same initials in Catalan.) POUM seemed to be opposed to everybody else involved, on both sides. Here’s a short write-up from 1936, but don’t all rush to join, POUM was thankfully dissolved in 1980.

That POUM no longer exists seems not to bother Jones one bit. In fact, to judge by his Twitter account, I’m not sure he realises WWII is over either. If in the modern era we judge politicians by their tweets and re-tweets then there should be some concerns about @poumista. Here’s one re-tweet I salvaged, put out late last Saturday night; it’s of a female Russian sniper under a photo of one the biggest butchers in human history. Such taste!

I urge you to check out the Twitter account of the Labour hopeful for Llangennech and Bryn before he starts deleting. There are some very revealing tweets and re-tweets there. Including of course re-tweets of Lee Waters telling us of his occasional trips from Barry to Llanelli.

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To finish with Llanelli I must mention a curious message I received to my ‘contact me’ box in the sidebar. It named a very prominent individual in the Llanelli Labour Party and seemed to suggest that this person had – perhaps by questionable means – come into possession of a number of former council properties. Any further information would be appreciated.

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THE LEAVING OF LABOUR

It’s not just Labour politicians moving (or not, as the case may be), or putting themselves up for election, there are other movements with ‘Welsh’ Labour, and very encouraging they are too.

The first story I picked on was from Caerffili, where two Labour councillors resigned last month promising to set up their own party. One of them, Allan Rees, alleged that “nepotism and cronyism is rife” within the local Labour Party. Not just your local party, Allan, come and talk with Uncle Jac.

Then, a few days ago, we learnt that six councillors had been ‘de-selected’ (a term I’m sure the man in the photo would have approved of) by the Ogmore Constituency Labour Party.

On top of that, Labour has lost a couple of seats on Cardiff city council in recent by-elections. First, the Lib Dem candidate won in the Plasnewydd ward; then Plaid Cymru took one of the Grangetown seats.

But remember, these upheavals for Labour have nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn and his hard left supporters eliminating the hated ‘Blairites’ – that storm has yet to break in Wales! Labour has real problems, but this is no time to stand around gloating – put the boot in!

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OUR HOUSING ASSOCIATIONS

Link Holdings (Gibraltar) Ltd is, as the name might suggest, a secretive offshore company, one owning a great deal of property across southern Wales, from Llanelli eastwards. Here’s a list of Link’s properties compiled from the Private Eye database.

Offshore property ownership is disturbing enough of itself, but the reason I wrote Link Holdings (Gibraltar) Ltd was because I’d learnt that housing associations are leasing, and possibly renting, from Link. So naturally I wrote to the ‘Welsh’ Government seeking answers. Here’s a combined pdf of my original request, the reply, and my response to that reply. (Read it now or keep it for a rainy afternoon.)

I kept a number of politicians informed of my concerns regarding Link Holdings, and also with the bizarre – possibly unique – relationship between Pembrokeshire Housing and its offspring Mill Bay Homes. One of these politicians showed me the response received from minister Carl Sargeant. It’s worth sharing. Here it is.

You’ll note that in the first part of the letter, talking of the Social Housing Grant with regard to Pembrokeshire Housing, Sargeant, or whoever wrote the letter, is clear that SHG must be “spent on pre-determined developments and projects”. Which is what I would expect, because I’ve always regarded the SHG as a capital grant for new housing, creating jobs and putting money into an area.

Yet in the second part of the letter, when dealing with Link Holdings (Gibraltar) Ltd, we read, “An RSL (registered Social Landlord aka housing association) is able to purchase the leasehold title of a property, and is able to receive Social Housing Grant Money to do so”. How can a capital grant for “pre-determined developments and projects” be used to lease old properties from offshore companies?

As I’ve argued for years, housing associations are one the worst uses of public funding imaginable, but major change is on the horizon. Thank God!

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HAPPY DONKEY HILL

Regular readers will recall that some time ago now I had cause to write about a rather unpleasant woman named Kate Clamp living near Llandysul. She changed the name of her property – actually owned by her multi-millionaire father – from Faerdre Fach to Happy Donkey Hill.

In one of my posts I used this image from her Facebook page, but I’d assumed the use of ‘Lady’ was a joke. (As would ‘lady’ be in this case.) But not so, for a series of messages I’ve received to my Facebook page tell me that Clamp and her current consort have taken to styling themselves ‘Lord and Lady Clamp’ in earnest.

My contact has been in touch with Burke’s Peerage, Debrett’s and various other sources and is assured that the duo has no claim to any title. So have they bought one off some website? Or maybe they splashed out a few thousand on one of those ‘Lord of the Manor’ titles that allows you to make a nuisance of yourself. (I used to vaguely know a bloke who collected such ‘titles’.)

But the point is – as my contact was keen to stress – the Clamps are in a competitive business, and if they’re gaining an unfair advantage over their competitors by falsely claiming to be aristocrats, then surely they’re breaking some law? If nothing else, shouldn’t the local Trading Standards office be involved?

My contact also had something to say about a ‘missing’ donkey, and police involvement, but that can keep for another post, because I’m sure I’ll be writing about ‘Lord and Lady’ Clamp again in the near future.

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It’s 1988 in Totalitarian Wales

On 04/08/201606/10/2016 By JacIn Civil Service, Media, Police, Welsh Government, Welsh Labour45 Comments

LAWYERS

It’s been an interesting few months here at Jac o’ the North Towers, what with solicitors’ letters, getting mentioned in the London dailies, and generally pissing off those who so richly deserve it. So let’s recap.

The solicitors’ letters were, one to me, two to S C Cambria (which hosts my blog), and one to a third party who had suffered at the hands of Mill Bay Homes, the company on whose behalf the signatory of three of the letters, Ms Tracey Singlehurst-Ward of Hugh James Legal, was working.

The second letter received by S C Cambria was from Capital Law, and on a different matter. (A rotund and blustering ex-AM.) But four solicitors’ letters in the space of a week is some going. To get a better understanding of what occasioned this deluge I suggest you read and .

CIVIL SERVANTS

My initial suspicion was that the spivs running Pembrokeshire Housing and Mill Bay Homes had gone to Hugh James demanding that their reputations be desullied, but after thinking about it, I wondered whether it might not have been initiated by the ‘Welsh’ Government.

Because Hugh James does very well out the public purse, having received over twenty million pounds in the past five years. Significantly, £4.34m of that was in March this year from the Housing Supply Division. (And we can assume there have been further payments in the current financial year.)

Another reason for suspecting those working for the ‘Welsh’ Labour Government is that having dealt with them for a number of years I, and others, have reluctantly concluded that they’re a bit ‘slippery’. This is because those involved with funding Registered Social Landlords (housing associations) have a vested interest in pretending everything’s hunky-dory in order to protect themselves.

Just think about it – you’re a civil servant who gives Cwmscwt Housing Association £20m to build accommodation for anticipated Mongolian refugees, fleeing mad yak disease. The sons of Genghis Khan do not materialise (yaks have calmed down), which leaves Cwmscwt Housing Association in grievous danger of going belly-up and, more importantly, embarrassing you. To avoid this calamity, you either pour in more money in a desperate attempt to save Cwmscwt Housing Association or you have it quietly taken over by another RSL, with the details forever hidden from the public gaze.

Sometimes the attempts at obfuscation are just laughable, but again, it’s a case of doing anything to avoid having to say, ‘Oops, we made a mistake’. Here’s another recent example concerning the aforementioned spivs down in Pembrokeshire and the protection given by civil servants.

In our investigations into Mill Bay Homes we (i.e. Wynne Jones, A. E. and myself) soon realised that this outfit – an Industrial and Provident Society – had filed nothing after the accounts for y/e 31.03.2013. The FCA confirmed more than once that this was the case.

Yet an e-mail I received from Simon Fowler of the ‘Welsh’ Government on July 18th declared: “We have had sight of a confirmation from the FCA that Pembrokeshire Housing and Mill Bay Homes submitted all their regulatory returns by the given deadline.” Had we got it wrong? Should I give up blogging and go back to my former career as a bingo caller?

After a few days scouring local charity shops for my purple jacket and bow tie I was saved further traipsing when, on July 21st, Wynne Jones was told by Nazmul Ahmed of the FCA (‘Supervisions – Retail and Authorisations’) that the accounts for the two missing years (2014 and 2015) had finally been received by the FCA – on June 2nd. Remember the date.

I relayed this news to Simon Fowler, who responded thus: “We are satisfied that the evidence we have seen from the FCA corroborates Pembrokeshire Housing’s story. Pembrokeshire Housing have kindly allowed us to forward you a copy of the letter of apology received from the FCA.” Here’s the ‘evidence‘.

You’ll see that it merely tells us that Pembrokeshire Housing, the parent company of Mill Bay Homes, sent two e-mails on June 8th and 15th – because given the lateness of the returns it was desperate to see them shown on the public register as quickly as possible. But nothing changes the fact that the returns were not received until June 2nd. So the returns were eventually made, 19 months late, and 7 months late.

When I suggested to Mr Fowler that his ‘evidence’ exonerating Mill Bay Homes was nothing of the sort, he replied: “We now consider the matter of closed, and will not respond to any further queries regarding PHA’s submission to the FCA.” Which is par for the course. Catch them out in a lie, or prove them wrong, and one guaranteed response will be the shutters coming down.

And if you thought that was bad . . .

To understand how far civil servants will go to avoid admitting that they, or anyone funded by them, has made a mistake, or broken the rules, then the next example I’m going to give is almost unbelievable. Breathtaking in its contempt for us, the public.

There is a scheme running now called Help to Buy, it’s a UK scheme but known here as Help to Buy – Wales. During our investigations into Mill Bay Homes we learnt that Nick Garrod, a head honcho at MBH, had built a bespoke house for a very good friend of his named Adam Uka. Not only that, but Mr Uka also availed himself of Help to Buy. All here in the title document from the Land Registry.

So A.E. wrote to those administering the Help to Buy scheme pointing out that according to their website, under the Builder Registration tab and the secondary tab FAQs, it says that builders, or ‘Providers’ – in this case Mill Bay Homes and Nick Garrod – “cannot sell to friends and family”.

More questions were asked and a great deal of side-stepping, flim-flam and bullshit came from those entrusted with administering the Help to Buy scheme, but we were assured that no rules had been broken. Which was perplexing. Because the facts seemed indisputable. (And to top it all, Adam Uka had even grabbed a bit more land after the property was completed!)

So what do you think happened next, boys and girls? Did the ‘Welsh’ Government send down to Pembrokeshire a highly-trained team of finger-waggers and tut-tutters to tell naughty Mill Bay Homes they were breaking the rules?

No. What they did was change the rules to remove the reference to ‘friends’ and change it to something much vaguer. So that it now reads:

Isn’t it reassuring to know that hundreds of millions of pounds are poured every year into social housing, that this is overseen by our wonderful civil servants, and spent by bodies like Mill Bay Homes, using public funding to build bespoke, four-bedroom, detached homes for friends of the company’s bosses?

‘WELSH’ LABOUR

It would be wrong to think of ‘Welsh’ Labour as being just another political party, like the Conservatives, or Plaid Cymru, because it’s so much more than that.

Having run Wales for decades the Labour Party can reasonably be compared to the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It controls the funding and the patronage, it makes the political appointments, and then there’s Labour’s private army in the Third Sector, which provides the party with foot soldiers, mouthpieces and candidates, and into which deposed or disgraced politicians can be absorbed.

Labour being in control of the gravy train predictably attracts those who view the party as ‘the way to get on’. This explains why ‘Welsh’ Labour has always had its Brown Envelope Faction and its Troughing Tendency.

But just as with their counterparts in the old USSR these shysters can be relied on to unquestioningly toe the party line and mouth the slogans because they are not really interested in ideology or policies. It’s all about the gravy train. In fact, from the perspective of those running the show, the brown envelope brigade is less trouble than those who might actually believe in something.

Over the decades Labour has built up a formidable system of nepotism and patronage. And whereas that influence was in many ways restricted to areas or regions where the party was strong, devolution has given us national organisations over which Labour can exercise its baleful influence, and reach those areas previously protected by their rejection of Labour at the polling booth. Devolution, which promised so much, has merely served to strengthen Labour’s stranglehold on Welsh life and, paradoxically, this has been happening while Labour’s support among the electorate dwindled.

If you want to know why support for Labour is dwindling, then consider Swansea. The party there has been wracked by in-fighting and factionalism for years, it has attracted carpet-baggers and single-issue obsessives, to the point where it has almost become a world unto itself carrying on its feuds with neither regard nor concern for the city it is supposedly running. Here’s my most recent post on this shower, Swansea Labour: The Farce Continues.

The latest news is that the Clays, a Trotsyite couple, both councillors for the Llansamlet ward, he English, she Austrian, are stepping down ahead of next May’s council elections. The word is that he – possibly both – have been offered some position by Jeremy Corbyn. Bob Clay certainly seems to be running Momentum in the city. So who’s replacing them?

One is a young woman named Jordan Elizabeth Pugh (aka Jordan Elizabeth), who graduated from Swansea University this year in Social Work. I’m told she’s a single mother, 24-years-old, and originally from the Valleys. Whether she lives in the Llansamlet ward is not known, but even if she does, she can hardly know it well.

The other replacement is Mo Sykes, of whom I have written more than once. (Here, here and here.) Two years ago she left her job with the YMCA in rather mysterious circumstances. Many thought there’d be a court case, but apparently not. Sykes is from the Six Counties, and so she’s another with minimal knowledge of the city.

But that’s not the point, because Sykes and Pugh, ‘Len’ Summers in the Uplands, the student-councillors, the Clays and all the others are not there to serve Swansea – they’re there to keep Labour in power! But as Labour’s support evaporates, and the party gets more desperate, Labour’s representatives take on the appearance of a freak show.

As with similar regimes, ‘Welsh’ Labour must have control of the media, and in Wales this is just so easy.

UPDATE 06.10.2016: I am now informed that, following her appointment as a social worker in the city, Jordan Elizabeth Pugh will not be standing for the council next year. So Labour found her a job by another route.

‘OUR’ MEDIA

It goes without saying that the BBC, the state broadcaster, is a disseminator of all things British and – outside the sphere of sport – regards Welshness as a subordinate or regional identity. To understand how bad BBC Wales has become just think Jason ‘Jase’ Mohammad.

As for ITV, I can only repeat what I wrote in Wales Colony of England, last November: “ITV Wales continues to plod along, a curate’s egg of a channel ranging from the engaging Adrian Masters to reporters and newsreaders who look and sound as if they’d have trouble locating Aberystwyth if they were dropped on top of Constitution Hill”.

The immediate threat to S4C seems to have passed, but with the language’s heartlands being destroyed and no one defending them the language and S4C are doomed. A glorious colonialist irony at work here: those with access to the means of exposing and combating the destruction of the Welsh language are funded by the same power that directs the destruction.

In radio, for Radio Cymru read S4C. Radio Wales is Radio West Britain, which leaves only ‘local radio’, most of the output being about as local to Wales as it is to East Anglia.

If that’s not bad enough, then the print media is a true disaster area. We have just a few daily newspapers, most of them very local in their circulation. The biggest-selling Welsh-based newspaper is the South Wales Evening Post, covering the Swansea region. The others are the South Wales Echo (Cardiff and the central valleys), South Wales Argus (Newport and the Gwent valleys), the Wrecsam (or Chester) edition of the Leader, and the Daily Post, a morning ‘paper covering northern and central parts of the country.

The only newspaper available all over the country (if you can find it) is the Western Mail. Now I’ve said a lot about this rag down the years, I’ve referred to it as ‘The Wasting Mule’, ‘Llais y Sais’ (voice of the English). Much of my criticism has been almost good-natured but I now believe we’ve passed that stage, and the time has come to view it for the malevolent influence on Welsh life it really is.

There have been worrying incidents in recent years that have seen the Western Mail go out of its way to defend the Labour Party, or attack Labour’s critics (including me), and one of the worst incidents came to light very recently, and concerned that scion of a famous Labour House, Stephen Kinnock.

Following a tip-off from ‘Stan’, I wrote about it first in, Labour: The End is Nigh (scroll down to ‘The Kinnock Family and Friends’). Then the baton was passed to ‘Anon’ and ‘Stan’, who delighted us with chart-topping A Fairytale Princess and a Web of Golden PR, following it up with, Stephen Kinnock: Another Clear-cut Clarification.

The bottom line is that Stephen Kinnock was selected as the Labour candidate for Aberavon in March 2014 by 106 votes to 105 because he withheld the truth about his daughter’s private education at Atlantic College. By deliberately asking the wrong questions, Martin Shipton of Llais y Sais was complicit in that deception.

This trickery was almost certainly done to please those multi-pensioned socialists and party legends, Baron Kinnock of Bedwelly and Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead.

If ‘Welsh’ Labour can be compared to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union then the Western Mail is surely its Pravda.

HOW FAR DOES THE INFLUENCE SPREAD?

I’ll finish with another example of how vindictive ‘Welsh’ Labour can be . . . though this case throws up deeply concerning possibilities. I shall have to tread carefully.

Back in April I wrote about the intriguing case of Carolyn Harris, the Labour MP for Swansea East and her reported assault on Jenny Lee Clark, in November 2014. The case made the London dailies, here’s the Sun‘s account of the incident, here it is in the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and, finally, Wales Online.

Note that the London ‘papers came out with the story on March 7. Unable to ignore it the Western Mail ran it a day later – but with a totally different slant. It is now less about an assault, or a hate crime, and more an allegation against the victim of the assault. And who wrote this piece – why! it’s Martin Shipton again.

Without I hope complicating this story too much, here’s the background. The (alleged) assault took place on 24 November 2014, when Clark and Harris were both working for the MP for Swansea East, Siân James. In May 2015 Harris succeeded James as MP. But the incident wasn’t reported to the police until 27 January 2016. The following day Lee was dismissed by Harris.

The police did not pursue the assault complaint because it was made outside the six-month time limit for common assault allegations. Or rather, no prosecution took place due to someone’s decision to class the incident as common assault. A more serious charge could have been laid and the six-month time limit would not have applied.

A charge of fraudulently increasing her salary then appeared against Jenny Lee Clarke. This offence is alleged to have been committed in August 2015, but no one heard of it until March 2016, when ITV phoned Carolyn Harris MP about the assault on Lee.

What is more worrying than Swansea Labour Party in-fighting is the possible role of the police. For example . . . Just after posting Swansea Labour: The Farce Continues, I e-mailed Jenny Lee Clarke to check on something.

Her reply, timed at 01:52 on July 24, said: “I’ve also still not had 1 phone call nor a visit from anyone remotely related to south wales police +their so called investigation against me. 6months +nothing.”

But then, in an another e-mail, timed at 17:55, she wrote: “How coincidental now I’ve just been contacted by Bethan Bartlett who is on her way 2 pick me up 4 questioning.” (Bethan Bartlett is a police officer.)

Jenny Lee Clarke was taken to Swansea Central police station, interrogated for an hour and, despite having gone voluntarily, was kept in the cells for five hours, getting home at 01:30 and is now on bail until September 19.

Which strikes me as a rather crude attempt at intimidating a middle-aged woman with little experience of dealing with the police, and none of being banged up. Or maybe the message was for somebody else.

It was obviously pure coincidence that Jenny Lee Clarke was whisked downtown after I had been in touch with her for the first time in months. I mean, no one’s reading my e-mails, are they?

Equally coincidental is the fact that I had just broken the news about Stephen Kinnock’s daughter being privately educated, forcing him to respond with his July 23 Statement in response to Jac o’ The North blog.

A coincidence, just like four solicitors’ letters arriving in a matter of days . . . none before, none since.

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‘Welsh’ Labour corrupts everything it comes into contact with because it is a totalitarian party that must hang on to power at all costs. Power for its own sake, rather than exercising power for the public good.

Internally, Labour is a party held together – if that’s the right word! – by bullying and harassment, misogyny and anti-Semitism, nepotism and favouritism, plus all manner of corruption.

The price the party pays is in falling support at the ballot box and failing to recruit, or hold on to, decent representatives. The latest example came a few days ago in Cardiff, where councillor Gretta Marshall left “vicious” and “divided” Labour to join Plaid Cymru.

The price Wales pays is inefficiency and corruption resulting in deprivation. Money is squandered on white elephants by civil servants and Third Sector apparatchiks who are above the law, given free rein by ‘Welsh’ Labour politicians who are too busy engaging in feuds, or fighting each other on the greasy pole.

Thankfully, all is not doom and gloom. The Labour Party is splitting, and cannot survive in its present form. Before long, and for the first time in almost a century, we shall be able to breathe the clean air of a Wales no longer dominated by Labour.

Prepare for the fall-out!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ END ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Feudalism Thriving in Powys

On 03/07/201604/08/2016 By JacIn Environmentalism, EU Funding, Media, Police, Royalty, Welsh Government48 Comments

I don’t think I’ve ever done this before (as the actress said to the bishop), but this post is all about another post, on a faraway blog I was unaware of until a couple of days ago. To explain.

I received an e-mail from an anonymous source providing a link to a blog post said source thought might interest me. It certainly did, though I have to admit that the subject matter was beyond my normal interests.

Essentially, the story is about the deliberate poisoning of hawks and ravens on the Glanusk Estate using Bendiocarb, all done to protect the ‘game birds’ reared there. These have been ‘protected’ from their natural predators in order that they might be killed by Hoorays paying handsomely for the privilege.

Mark Coleman rates — killing birds don’t come cheap

Apart from the obvious wildlife crimes there are also safety concerns for those visiting the estate and, perhaps especially, those attending the Green Man Festival held there in August.

Before going any further I suggest you read the article I’m talking about. It’s to be found on the Raptor Persecution Scotland website and the post Mass Raptor Poisoning in Wales: Location Revealed.

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The facts, certainly those that jumped out at me, are as follows:

1/ The poisonings took place in 2012/13 and the birds killed were ravens, buzzards and red kites, the latter having become almost the national bird of Wales since its recovery from near extinction was engineered in central Wales.

2/ As stated, the killings were committed on the Glanusk Estate of the Legge-Bourke family near Crughywel. I quote from the Raptor Persecution Scotland website:

“Shan Legge-Bourke was appointed lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne in 1987, was High Sheriff of Powys in 1991, has been the Lord Lieutenant of Powys (the Queen’s personal representative) since 1998 and became Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in the 2015 New Year Honours.

Shan Legge-Bourke’s daughter, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, was nanny to Princes William & Harry and worked as a personal assistant to Prince Charles between 1993-1999.

Shan Legge-Bourke’s son, Harry Legge-Bourke, is a partner in the management of Glanusk Estate and served on the Board of Natural Resources Wales (the Welsh statutory conservation agency) between 2012-2015 (the same time the mass poisoning of raptors was taking place on Glanusk Estate).”

3/ The ‘sport shooting’ element of the estate’s business is run by Mark Coleman Sporting & Game which also has involvement with the Stoke Edith estate just over the border in Herefordshire.

Though it’s not clear exactly what the arrangement is between Coleman and the owners of either estate. Is he employed directly? Does he lease land at Glanusk? While his relationship with the estate may be opaque the article I’m using as my source says that the gamekeepers are employed by Mark Coleman. Again, I quote from the original piece:

“Stoke Edith is a close neighbour of the Sufton Estate. Some of you may recognise that name. In 2010, an under-gamekeeper from the Sufton Estate was convicted of 17 wildlife crime offences, including the use of Bendiocarb to poison raptors (see here, page 25). In the same year, the Sufton Estate Head gamekeeper was convicted of running a cannabis factory on the estate and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (see here).

Amazingly, according to this article published in Fieldsports magazine: glanusk fieldsport article-1, the Head gamekeeper now at Glanusk Estate, employed by Mark Coleman, is someone with the same name as that convicted Head gamekeeper from Sufton Estate. Imagine that! It surely can’t be the same person, because, as we’re so often told, criminal gamekeepers are not tolerated by the shooting industry, right?

But Mark Coleman employs another gamekeeper who also has a familiar name. According to this Fieldsports magazine article: stoke edith fieldsport article-1, a gamekeeper employed by Mark Coleman on the Stoke Edith Estate shares the same name as a gamekeeper convicted of killing raptors and badgers on a shooting estate in Herefordshire in 2008. Imagine that! It surely can’t be the same person, because, as we’re so often told, criminal gamekeepers are not tolerated by the shooting industry, right?”

I think it’s important to know the relationships between the Glanusk Estate and Mark Coleman if we are to establish the chain of responsibility and culpability. According to the panel above, taken from the Glanusk website, the shoot has been “passed” to Mark Coleman, but what the hell does that mean? I guarantee he doesn’t own the land.

UPDATE 04.07.2016: I am indebted to ‘STaN’ at the Neath Ferret for drawing my attention to the fact that Mark Coleman’s company is not in the best of financial health. The company’s net worth is over three hundred thousand pounds the wrong side of zero. Read the latest accounts for yourself.

4/ There was a statement put out by Dyfed Powys Police in March which read:

“Dyfed Powys Police take allegations of wildlife crime very seriously and investigates all incidents reported to us. Following information received in 2012 and 2013, relating to the deaths of raptors in Powys, a full investigation was carried out in partnership with the RSPB, the National Wildlife Crime Unit and the Wildlife Management Team in the Welsh Government. During the investigation a number of search warrants under the Wildlife and Countryside Act were executed and two people were arrested in connection with the incidents. A file of evidence was subsequently submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service who advised that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a prosecution.”

This statement claims that arrests were made but the Crown Prosecution Service decided against proceeding with a prosecution. We can only speculate as to why there was no prosecution.

5/ Irrespective of whether there were prosecutions there can be no doubt that crimes were committed, so why has the ‘Welsh’ media remained silent over “the most significant wildlife poisoning incident in Wales”, according to the RSPB? Would our hawk-eyed and diligent journos ignore a murder because there had not yet been a prosecution?

6/ And what of the ‘Welsh’ Government? Apart from doling out grants it doesn’t seem to take a great deal of interest in the Glanusk Estate. Grant funding in which Natural Resources Wales is involved, the same Natural Resources Wales of which Harry Legge-Bourke was a Board Member.

Otherwise, Harry seems to be involved in the world of intelligence and security, with the Chelsea Group, Box-It and something given on his LinkedIn profile as Seven Partners, a name under which I can find nothing other than this company in Lyon. He seems to be cashing in on the rise in global terrorism and concerns for security . . . for which shooting some of the stupidest creatures known to Nature may be ideal preparation. (Myself, I prefer fish in barrels.)

Soon after the original post was published the Glanusk Estate made a statement that you can find here, accompanied by a pretty comprehensive demolition by Raptor Persecution UK.

The Estate obviously felt they hadn’t said enough because a further statement was issued on July 3rd. Here it is, again with a robust response from RPUK. In this statement blame for the poisonings is attributed to “a third party” and assures us that there was never any risk to public health.

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To sum up . . .

First off, you mustn’t think there’s anything unusual – other than the scale – about the poisonings at Glanusk, they happen all the time. That’s because there’s serious money in shooting game birds, and wherever we find an area of human activity where there’s big money to be made we’ll find persons ready to cut corners and break the law.

The reason for my interest in this case is due to the status and connections of those involved and the responses, or rather, the total disinterest, of officialdom and others.

Now I am not for one minute suggesting that any member of the Legge-Bourke family laid poison to kill hawks and ravens. And I believe it’s perfectly possible for these crimes to have taken place on their land without their knowing. I suggest we need to start our search for the guilty parties lower down the food chain, with those who had both the motive and the opportunity.

But I am not suggesting that Mark Coleman himself laid poison to kill raptors or carrion feeders. I use the term ‘carrion feeders’ because a poisoned pheasant or raven could become food for badgers, foxes and smaller animals, perhaps even a domestic cat. Poisoning is indiscriminate.

But what of those gamekeepers we are told already had police records over the border and, according to Raptor Persecution UK, were brought to Glanusk by Mark Coleman? Would it be reasonable to assume that these were the two arrested by Dyfed Powys Police? Though it may be significant that the police statement makes no mention of them actually being charged.

Do these gamekeepers still work on the Glanusk Estate?

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Even though the Legge-Bourkes didn’t lay any poison they are the indirect beneficiaries of that act because whoever did it acted to protect the shooting run by Mark Coleman who, we can be sure, pays the family a tidy sum to arrange his £11,000+ a day shooting parties.

The poisonings being first noticed in 2012 suggests they may have been done to ensure the successful launch of the venture after shooting re-started at Glanusk in 2010. Also significant may be that Glanusk offers mainly driven pheasant shooting, with limited ‘walk up’ grouse on offer; yet it is suggested that the hope is to expand the enterprise to a driven grouse venture (the only one in Wales). This would allow Mark Coleman to charge his punters even more. And as I said earlier, we are talking big bucks here.

So even though I am not for one minute suggesting that Mark Coleman laid down poison, he too would have benefited indirectly from greater numbers of birds surviving natural predators for him to offer to high-paying shooters.

Then there are other considerations, such as visitors who come and stay but not for the shooting. And how can we ignore the Green Man Festival, which must be another nice little earner for the Legge-Bourkes, and great publicity for Glanusk. Yet this is the kind of event attended by hippies and Greens. (My kind of people!) I can imagine some malodorous and dreadlocked shit-stirrer starting an online petition to move the Festival somewhere else if these killings of buzzards, ravens and red kites had received the publicity they deserved.

The simple and inescapable fact is that a prosecution, and the resultant publicity, could have cost the Glanusk Estate, and the well-connected Legge-Bourke family, a great deal of money. This is why there was no prosecution.

This case is a damning indictment of Wales in 2016. We have a Labour government down Cardiff docks telling us it’s fighting for ‘equality’ and practicing ‘openness’ and yet here we have an example of privilege, deference and feudalism straight out of the medieval period.

If a story about the killing of birds can be kept out of the public domain to protect persons with connections to the English royals what else is being kept from us?

P.S There’s more to come on this story so I suggest you keep up with developments on the website https://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/

Seeking a Latter-day Waldorf T. Flywheel!

On 19/01/201521/01/2015 By JacIn Police15 Comments

Regular readers may recall my October 21st post WalesEye, Jacques Protic and North Wales Police. This was a follow-up to my September 11th offering of WalesEye and Jacques Protic – A Marriage Made in Hell, written soon after becoming aware that the WalesEye blog had quoted from what appeared to be police documents about an investigation into me or my blog, as a result of complaints made against me – oui! moi! – by Jacques Protic. I suggest you read both posts before proceeding otherwise what follows may not make a great deal of sense.

As might be expected, I contacted North Wales Police. Let’s start with this document dated 15.10.2014 which contains both the substance of my Freedom of Information request of 12.09.2014 and the NWP response. This letter came as an attachment to an e-mail and although the e-mail had a name to it the letter itself had neither name nor signature. Basically, what this says is, ‘Because you are the subject of this information we can’t give you this information’. Which I suppose has a certain kafkaesque logic. I responded with this letter addressed to the Chief Constable on 22.10.14 and e-mailed to North Wales Police’s Professional Standards Department.

On the same day I e-mailed the Police and Crime Commissioner for North Wales Police. This I did by filling in the online form. The first response – within hours – said that my complaint had been passed to the Chief Constable’s office, and the second response, shortly afterwards, said that my complaint had been passed to the North Wales Police’s Professional Standards Department – to which I had already written! – as this section investigates complaints against the police. Read it all here (from the bottom up). I found this rather confusing because I’d complained to the PCC believing it was independent of the police, and yet my complaint was immediately handed over to the police. If the police retain control of investigating complaints against them then what is the point of the PCC?

Around the same time I filled in a SA1 form to find out what information North Wales Police held on me, as suggested in the response to my FoI request, paid my £10 and sent it off. This is the acknowledgement of receipt of that form dated 24.10.2014, and this is the response. Although dated 11.11.2014 I did not receive this response until 17.12.2014, after I telephoned North Wales Police querying its non-arrival. You will also note that this is another letter without a name or a signature. I don’t know whether to attribute this to bad manners or to our police thinking ahead.

Though in fairness, my next communication from NWP dated 17.11.2014 was signed, by Chief Inspector D. Roome. This was the response from the Professional Standards Department. The letter talks of “an action plan” and tells me that my complaint has been passed to the “Chief Information Officer” and that I can shortly expect to hear from a “local manager” assigned to my case. And so it came to pass. On November 19th I was telephoned by an Ian Davies . . . but I was out that day taking some US visitors around Pembrokeshire before bringing them chez nous. I tried ringing him the following day before we went out again, but no one answered.

We eventually spoke on November 24th, and a weird conversation it was. Ian Davies assured me there had been no investigation by North Wales Police into anything I had written on my blog. Consequently he had no idea how the WalesEye blog could have written what it did. Nor could he offer any explanation as to how WalesEye could name two serving NWP officers has having been involved in an investigation that didn’t take place. I got the impression that Ian Davies was choosing his words very carefully. He promised to send me a letter stating what he had just told me.

I waited for the promised letter, and after leaving a few messages on his answering machine, I eventually spoke again with Ian Davies on December 17th. He claimed that after speaking with the department that sends out such letters mine was “eleventh in the queue”. On January 10th I eventually received the promised reply. It contained four documents. First, a covering letter from Detective Chief Inspector David Roome. (In the previous letter signed by him he was ‘Chief Inspector’.) Next was the report I’d been waiting for. To give it it’s full title, North Wales Police Local Proportionate Investigation Report. Finally, there was another copy of the response to my Subject Access Application of November 11th and another copy of the October 15th reply to my initial request for personal information. Let’s look at the first two a little more closely, see what they say, or don’t say, as the case may be.

The covering letter from DCI Roome tells me that “Untrue or inaccurate published comments about individuals is covered under the Deformation (sic) Act 2013 . . . ” (thankfully things have not gone that far in this case). DCI Roome goes on to advise me that I could bring “legal actions against the author(s)”. He ends by thanking me for bringing the matter to the attention of North Wales Police. Wasn’t that a nice letter, boys and girls? . . . well, apart from the suggestion that I might have been deformed by the experience.

Now we move on to the main course, the report itself. This was, I assume, compiled by Ian Davies, for his name is at the foot of the document. The report breaks my complaint up into three parts, which are:

Complainant has made a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the information but has been refused.
Complainant alleges that information concerning him has been released by the Police to other persons and has appeared in a public forum – the Wales Eye blog which has caused him distress.
Complainant believes that as the Police did not ask for the article to be removed from the WalesEye blog, it constitutes approval or collusion by the police.

The response to Complaint 1 is basically a rehash of what I’d already been told in other documents – ‘you can’t have information about yourself’. This section concludes with “I have subsequently instructed the system administrators to search our databases, and can confirm that Mr Royston JONES has not been investigated, nor is a suspect in this matter. I can neither confirm nor deny that the existence of any complaint, as this would not be Mr Royston Jones’ personal information.” Which means, what, exactly? “Not a suspect” in which matter? If this means what he told me verbally on November 24th then I and my blog were never under investigation as a result of a complaint made by Jacques Protic. But on the other hand, Ian Davies cannot confirm or deny the existence of any complaint.

Complaint 2 is answered with an assurance that no information (about me and any investigation into my blog?) was ever released into the public domain.

Complaint 3 deals with my suggestion that as North Wales Police did not insist that the WalesEye post be taken down, this could be interpreted as “approval or collusion by thePolice”. The report says, “I have found no evidence to suggest that NWP was aware of the article on the WalesEye blog . . . “. In fact, North Wales Police was made aware of the offending blog post in my original FoI request to the Chief Constable on September 12th, 2014. A letter NWP acknowledged receipt of in their letter of September 17th. A letter that says: “The content of your letter has been noted and logged”. It is now January 19th, four months on, and ‘Don’t Call the Boys in Blue’ is still available on the WalesEye blog, naming serving police officers and referring to a (non-existent) investigation into something I had written on my blog. Leaving me to conclude that NWP has no problem at all with this article.

Elsewhere in the response to Complaint 3 Ian Davies mentions telephone conversations with me on 24/11/14 and 04/12/2014. We can agree on the first, and while I have no log of the second I won’t quibble, but we most definitely had another telephone conversation on December 17th, which Ian Davies does not mention.

So what have we learnt? If I had to sum up what I’ve been told by North Wales Police it would be, ‘There was no investigation into anything you might have written on your blog following a complaint by Mr Jacques Protic . . . but even if there was we wouldn’t tell you’. Which advances us not at all, leaving me with little more than my original suspicions.

The post that appeared on WalesEye clearly stated that I had been investigated by North Wales Police following a complaint by Jacques Protic. The post (available here in PDF format) even names the officers involved, and claims one of them was disciplined for not doing his job properly. Yet Ian Davies assured me in a telephone conversation on November 24th that there had been no investigation into anything I had written on my blog. And this appeared to have been confirmed in the Local Proportionate Investigation Report. So where did WalesEye get the information? Was it all a fabrication? Unlikely. (And it’s not as if this post was the first; just eight days earlier WalesEye had taken another pop at poor old Jac with this post.)

I see no reason to change my initial suspicion that Protic complained about me to North Wales Police and they went through the motions before fobbing him off with some story about a botched investigation . . . which he then took to WalesEye and they ran with it because – and for reasons I cannot fathom – I am not universally loved in that quarter. (Yes, I know, it’s difficult to believe.) Why do I suspect this is what happened?

Largely because of what Protic was writing under his own name at around this time. On September 9th, the day before the piece appeared on WalesEye, Protic put out this example of his state of mind on his Glasnost blog. (Here in PDF format.) He rails against “cybernats”, and talks specifically of damage to his car, claiming that North Wales Police is “doing nothing tangible” to protect him. Later he refers to “the ongoing erosion of policing standards”. The article also deals with another complaint he’d made to North Wales Police about Conwy Education Authority illegally forcing children to learn Welsh. Read the piece, especially the highlighted sections in the PDF version, and you’ll see that here is a man who sees enemies everywhere and feels let down by North Wales Police, the local Police and Crime Commission (who is a Welsh speaker!) and even the IPCC, that Protic says “effectively said, ‘Bugger Off'”. This man’s hatred for everything Welsh, but especially the language, has affected his reasoning and sense of proportion. How detached from reality does one need to be to believe that Rhodri Morgan and Carwyn Jones belong to some nationalist conspiracy – because they are “Welsh speaking Celts”?

In this shocking episode I have been both lied about and lied to, and now I want the truth. So I am looking for a lawyer to advise me on a possible case of harrassment / slander / defamation (mercifully not ‘deformation’?) / and whatever charge(s) might attach to the wrongful release or misuse of police data. I need some leonine figure to bound from the jungle of jurisprudence to take up my case, an exemplar of his profession comparable to my hero, Waldorf T. Flywheel, shown in the picture. (Moustache, cigar and funny walk all optional.) Said paragon will be expected to offer advice gratis and to take any case on a No win, No fee basis. Offers to: admin@jacothenorth.net.

WalesEye, Jacques Protic and North Wales Police

On 21/10/201421/11/2014 By JacIn Police19 Comments

Just over a month ago my attention was drawn to another attack on me by the WalesEye blog, this one bizarre in the extreme as it claimed, to begin with, that something I’d written had resulted in death threats against noted anti-Welsh bigot, Jacques Protic; before quoting from what was claimed to be a North Wales Police document relating to an internal inquiry – even naming the officers involved! Maybe you should read the post before continuing.

As I suggested I would in my September 11 reply to WalesEye, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to GogPlod in the hope of finding out if Protic had indeed made a complaint about me, whether there had been an investigation, and – while I was at it – I thought I might as well ask if anyone else had it in for poor old Jac. A name I just plucked out of the air was Nathan Gill, the Ukip MEP, doss house proprietor and tyre exporter.

After a number of phone calls querying its non-arrival, and to cut a long story short, I finally received GogPlod’s response by e-mail this afternoon. Basically, it says ‘Dear Mr Jones – Piss off!‘ It seems that because I’m asking for information about myself I can’t have it! Though it does suggest in the final paragraph that I can use form SA1 to find out what they hold on me, though no ‘third part’ (sic) information can be released. I shall also have to pay a fee of £10. You can read it for yourself in this pdf document. It also helpfully sets out the wording of my request.

To reprise: the situation as I now see it is that Jacques Protic did make a complaint about me to North Wales Police. They either took it seriously, or else pretended to take it seriously in order to use Protic’s complaint against me. Either way, Protic then received a report into how his complaint had been handled that even named the officers involved. This information he (or someone) passed on to fellow Labourite, Phil Parry, of WalesEye, who used it in a blog post.

And so it came to pass – as planned – that an innocent man was publicly vilified, but was then denied sight or knowledge of the accusations against him, or the names of his accusers, making it very difficult for him to defend himself. I know the word is over-used, but this is kafkaesque.

How does Mark Polin, the head of GogPlod, feel about documentation produced by his force, naming his officers, discussing an investigation into police negligence, being used in this way? The fact that the police have raised no objections to WalesEye using a police document to slander me suggests collusion. Which is no surprise when it comes to the police, but it provides further evidence that WalesEye is not just another blog. It is somebody’s tool. (And I speak not of Phil Parry with the mention of ‘tool’.)

I was particularly struck by the passage in the GogPlod e-mail (left, click to enlarge) banging on about “personal data” and how it’s wrong to disclose information about an individual. It even talks of the information being used for “lawful purposes”, which prompts a few questions. How come protecting identities only becomes important when I’m asking for information, but can be ignored when it’s information about me? And is the WalesEye blog a “specified and lawful purpose” for police information about a third party? And has GogPlod released information about me to anyone else, maybe a casual enquirer?

There remain many other questions to which I want answers. This story ain’t over yet. Evenin’ all!

UPDATE 22.10.14: I have this morning reported the matter to the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for North Wales. I have also written to the chief constable of North Wales Police. Next step is to write to the Information Commissioner.

WalesEye & Jacques Protic – A Marriage Made in Hell!

On 11/09/201421/10/2015 By JacIn Cymrophobia, Police19 Comments

Well I never, WalesEye is being nasty to Jac, again. You may recall that the first attack from that quarter came on September 2nd, and to believe the hysterical rantings it contained, I was about to be shipped off to Devil’s Island for being an absolute rotter. Unless, that is, you read the piece carefully, for it was all ifs, buts, maybes; quoting ‘police sources’, ‘An observer’, bloke down the pub, and others, all of them expressing ‘deep concern’, interspersed with statements of mine taken out of context, and vague talk of legislation regarding internet libel. In fact, there was very little specific to me, and nothing concrete about any offence I might have committed. It was, as we experienced bloggers are wont to say, a load of old bollocks. I let it pass without comment, apart from one to a blog post by Y Cneifiwr.

Other than that, my only reaction to this nonsense was to remove WalesEye from my blogroll. So I didn’t pick up on the latest attack on me, or rather, what claimed to be a report about a “botched” police investigation into me and / or my blog . . . an investigation of which I was blissfully ignorant until informed by WalesEye, for North Wales Police have made no contact. It seems that I, and I alone, am responsible for threats on the life of our old friend Jacques Protic, and damage to his property. The source for all this is – wait for it! – Jolly Jacques himself.

Now if I understand this rambling piece correctly, it is being alleged that threats were made to Protic’s life following the publication of this piece, Cymrophobia and the Many Identities of Jacques Protic on August 14th last year. Or possibly this piece, Cymrophobia 2: The ‘Reverse Midas’ from August 21st.

Yet Jacques Protic has his own blog, Glasnost, he also comments on countless other blogs; he writes letters to newspapers, and in any other way he can think of puts out his hatred for all things Welsh, especially the language. And as I have stated previously, he uses a number of pseudonyms. Yet, despite all this those who (it is claimed) threatened his life did so after reading something I had written. Presumably they phoned and said, ‘Oi! Protic, I have been reading Jac o’ the North, and he has persuaded me to take your life. Be absolutely clear on this – it was Royston Jones aka Jac o’ the North who put the idea into my head’. When you think about it, or read it out loud, you realise what absolute nonsense it is.

Yet according to WalesEye North Wales Police carried out an investigation into these ‘threats’ to Protic’s life and alleged damage to his property. Further, this investigation was “bungled” by a police constable that WalesEye actually names! This police constable was, we are told, disciplined; we are also given the name of the inspector who (presumably) disciplined him. Is it fair to name and humiliate someone on a blog using what is claimed to be information from an internal police report? Is GogPlod now giving out its internal reports to interested bloggers? If so, where’s mine? If not, then from where did WalesEye get this information?

The likely source is Protic. I suspect he did make a complaint, perhaps about me, and it was treated with the ridicule it deserved. He then submitted a Freedom of Information request and he was fobbed off with some story about a botched enquiry, for remember, the police have not been in touch with me, as they would have been if they’d taken Protic seriously. But even if this is what happened, why did they name the constable?

Anyway, I don’t fancy wasting much more time on Protic or WalesEye, but I can’t resist drawing your attention to the glaring contradiction between reality and the fantasy presented by WalesEye. To believe WalesEye (and to quote Protic) I am the “ugly face of Welsh nationalism”, a frothing-at-the-mouth loony (even without the Argie red!) attacking a decent and rational chap simply trying to express his perfectly reasonable views. Make up your own minds. The panel on the right is from Protic’s blog, here’s a link. A Welsh LEA is accused of ethnic cleansing . . . by a Serb! Couldn’t make this up, could you? (Incidentally, Part II never appeared.)

Having mentioned Protic’s Serb background, let me take the opportunity to clear up another matter. WalesEye quotes me, from my blog, saying: “I was hoping to avoid this, but it has to be said – Protic is a Serb”. I’m not sure what WalesEye hoped to suggest with this incomplete phrase, but here is the full paragraph: “Finally, and I was hoping to avoid this, but it has to be said – Protic is a Serb. Now many of you will know that over the years I have defended the Serbs against their many detractors, but I was never blind to the atrocities committed – by all sides – in the Balkan wars. So, tell us, Jacques; would a Croat, or an Albanian, or a Bosnian Muslim, have the freedom, in Serb-controlled territory, to mouth hatred of Serbs in the way that you spew out your hatred for us Welsh?” When you have it in full it says something entirely different to what WalesEye is trying to infer. And as for the Chetniks, I was attempting to explain recent Serbian history, but I never suggested that Protic or his family were “extreme right wing Serbians”, as ‘J Jones’ states.

So what’s it all about, why am I suddenly so popular with WalesEye? The answer may lie, again, with Protic; for in his latest post he bemoans the evil of ‘cybernats’. The opening paragraph is pure Protic, though I wonder if he can give us any examples of the ” . . . horrendous instances of Scottish nationalism and its hatred of anything English”? Probably not; but then, truth, verifiable examples, rational discussion, facts and figures, have never been Protic’s strong points, exemplified by his post accusing a Welsh local authority of ‘ethnic cleansing’. WalesEye seems to have taken up Protic’s ’cause’, they’ve certainly been exchanging information and opinions about me, each trying to out-‘bastard!’ the other, so I hope they’ll be very happy together, for they deserve each other.

The obvious thing for me to do now is submit my own FoI to Gogplod, and see if I ever was investigated. Stay tuned!

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 12: For the past couple of days Protic has been spouting his evil on David Cornock’s BBC Wales political blog, but most of his comments have either been removed or “referred for further consideration”! Wise up, Parry, this guy’s got more chips on his shoulder than even you. I know you both hate me, but I’m still going to give you some friendly advice – avoid Protic like the pox, because he’s an obsessional bigot. In his world EVERYTHING that’s wrong with Wales can be attributed to the Welsh language.

Dressing On The Right

On 28/07/201318/04/2014 By JacIn Colonialism, Corruption, Police9 Comments

This post was originally intended as a follow-up to my post earlier this month on the Welsh Livery Guild. In the post I’d planned I was going to mention that The Welsh Livery Guild is not alone in being an outfit of the costumed Brit Unionist royalist Right. I intended mentioning two other organisations that have made an unwelcome appearance – or reappearance – in Wales, the Orangemen and the Legion of Frontiersmen.

I shouldn’t have to explain about the Orange Order and the part it’s played in Irish – and to a lesser extent, Scottish – history, but maybe a bit more needs to be said about the Frontiersmen. Formed in 1904, in the wake of the Second Boer War, and in imitation of the admired Boer mounted infantry, the Frontiersmen enjoyed a brief popularity, even respectability, before the death-blow fell – Western armies stopped using cavalry except for ceremonial purposes. To which might be added the disappearance, or diminishing acceptance, of the ‘gentleman adventurer’. From then on it was a struggle for the Frontiersmen to justify their existence. With the result that in recent decades, certainly in the UK, this outfit has increasingly attracted sad buggers who enjoy dressing up. (Here is the ARRSEPedia entry.)

Here’s what purports to be the official website of the Legion of Frontiersmen GB. As you’ll see, there’s a homepage, and, er, that’s about it. Though note that they describe themselves as being made up of ex-military, ex-police, even ex-civil service(!), who collectively form “an organisation of Civil Defence volunteers”. Bear that in mind, for it will help explain the circumstances in which they see themselves operating. There’s even a Twitter presence @FrontiersmenGB which seems to be nothing more than retweets. As I write this, the most recent of them is about a launch of the Mumbles lifeboat! Finally, there is also an Independent Overseas Command.

Normally, this penchant for dressing up and playing soldiers would be harmless enough, laughable even. But then, as I started making a few enquiries into the recent activities of the Frontiersmen in Wales I ran into a name I’d recently seen linked with the Welsh Livery Guild. And I saw others, who should have known better, also lending credibility to these Walter Mitty types. But of greater worry to us should be that Wales is specially favoured, with Countess Mountbatten’s Own Frontiersmen Welch Co mma nd. Though, confusingly, there may be another Frontiersmen outfit in Wales, the Welsh Auxiliary Corps of Volunteers.

You’ll note that the ARRSEPedia entry (above) is made by the ARmy Rumour SErvice or ARRSE. Here’s a link to an interesting thread on ARRSE from which I have plucked the piece on the left, though whoever posted it does not give the source. (Click to enlarge and read carefully.) Here’s a further thread from ARRSE.

Now if we read the extract on the left, it refers to a big get-together – or “Investiture” – for Frontiersmen and friends at All Saints Church, Penarth on March 5th, 2006. Among the good and great we see the name of “Commander John Curteis the Vice Lord-Lieutenant of South Glamorgan”. This can only be Commander J M D Curteis RD FCA DL who went on to become Master of the Welsh Livery Guild in 2009/10. The Brigadier Alun Thomas-Evans referred to seems to be the same man as this Freemason. Maybe readers will recognise other names from the host in attendance.

Among them Earl Kitchener, the mayors of Penarth and Barry, the local sea cadets, Gorseinon College band, and the ghost of Queen Victoria. (OK, I made up that last one.) What were these people thinking of to lend ceredibility to this bunch of inadequates! Or maybe they view the Frontiersmen differently. Just look at who was involved. The British Legion, the Freemasons, various Jugend groups, the Welsh Livery Guild, Unionist political parties . . . and it all takes place – where else! – in an Anglican church. If you want to find the underpinnings of the British State, and the interconnectedness of the different strands, here they are for you. How many more organisations are there like the Welsh Livery Guild and the Frontiersmen?

For all I know, these clowns in the Frontiersmen may be legally entitled to own and train with weapons. It’s a worrying thought. Especially when we put it into the wider picture. Going back to the Welsh Livery Guild for a moment, I note that Brigadier R E L Jenkins CBE DL, Master in 1998/99, (and another Deputy Lieutenant) is, or very recently was, Director of Movements for the British Army. Which fits with my rather disturbing theory.

Forget ‘civil defence’ and ‘natural disaster’, what I fear we have here is a network of like-minded groups organised to step into the breach if the great unwashed get too stroppy, or if events in Scotland or Wales take an unacceptably un-Unionist tack. These paramilitary and semi-secret groups are linked by an adherence to an extreme variant of the ‘Queen and Country’ outlook. Which means that no matter how many Welsh symbols they choose to use, no matter how much of the Welsh language they employ, these bastards are our enemies. They may be little more than a secret army-in-waiting. At least, that’s how I believe they see themselves.

Dennis Coslett, portrait — Commandant Dennis Coslett FWA

I note that on its website the Welsh Auxiliary Corps of Volunteers ” . . . offers support to the Welsh Assembly Government in Wales”. Was such an offer ever formally made? If so, what was the official response? Funny when you think about it, isn’t it . . . I can recall back in 1969 Cayo Evans and the Free Wales Army boys getting arrested and banged up for (among other things) wearing unauthorised uniforms. There were other arrests in 1990(?) of the Meibion Glyndwr Colour Party for a similar offence. So why can some in Wales wear contrived or illegal uniforms with impunity?

There can only be one answer. Despite the bollocks about us all being equal before the law, in practice, it all comes down to which side you’re on. If you support the English monarch, the Union, and all that goes with it – including the colonial status of Wales – then you can ponce about in a uniform that would bring tears to the eyes of the most emotional costume designer for a Ruritanian operetta. You can also give yourselves ludicrous ‘ranks’ (even impersonate military officers), award yourselves pretty medals, and nobody’s gonna touch you cos you’re on-side. Making Britain not a lot different to a third world country or a totalitarian state.

Footnote: I should explain, for those perhaps too young to know, that in the old days, when a young man about town (such as I once was) went to measure for a bespoke suit, the tailor, when taking the inside leg measurement, would ask, “Which side does Sir dress?” In other words, ‘Which side do you prefer to have them hang?’ It seemed an appropriate title for this piece considering the pricks I’ve been dealing with.

Flag of Wales is Just “Other Bits”!

On 18/12/201222/01/2014 By JacIn Cymrophobia, PoliceLeave a comment

I have now received the case documents requested from the North Wales Police regarding the Tywyn flags incident last year. (Click to enlarge.) I gave a progress report with this post last month. Unfortunately, the information now tohand adds little to what we already knew.

The police reports sent to me have been so heavily redacted as to make them almost worthless. Just about the only thing they add to what I told you last month is that in addition to receiving cautions, the culprits also made financial restitution to the council of £270 each. Which, if nothing else, clarifies that the council is the owner of the poles (even though it is claimed they were paid for by another body.) The redacted documents also tell us that the culprits wrote a letter of apology to the council. Ah! bless.

Though one intriguing curiosity from the police documents is that the culprits were charged with damaging only the flagpoles, not the flags. Yet the newspaper report from just after the incident made it clear that ” . . . Welsh flags had been ripped in half”. And according to Mike Stevens, chairman of Tywyn Coast Protection Group, “It’s also a disgrace to de-face the sovereign flag of Wales . . .”. In fact, it was being suggested that the damage to the poles was almost incidental, the real targets were the Welsh flags. So why are the flags not mentioned in the police documents?

Tywyn Promenade — Cambrian News 19/05/2011 (click to enlarge)

I think the answer to that question lies in part of my original request to Gogplod. I asked if this offence had been recorded as a hate crime. By ignoring the flags that question becomes almost irrelevant in what is now a straightforward case of criminal damage against flagpoles. This, I believe, explains why the police chose to ignore the desecration of our national flag, but not why Cyngor Gwynedd – or whoever owned the flags – didn’t ask for compensation.

The police attitude towards the flags may have been revealed in the Cambrian News report from May last year. There they were quoted as saying, “Eight people were arrested on 7 May on suspicion of causing criminal damage to two flagpoles and various other bits in (sic) the seafront”. So it looks as if the North Wales Police regards our national flag as nothing more than, “other bits”.

Jac o' the North

Category: Police