I was warned on Monday . . . someone had seen a tweet by Phil Parry who runs the Wales Eye blog, that home to ‘exclusives’ and ‘revelations’ that are so exclusively revelatory that you must pay to read them. There was to be yet another piece on that poor, persecuted soul Jacques Protic, still living in fear of assorted assassination squads. (I can scarcely believe I’m writing this crap, but it’s what Parry and Protic want you to believe.) Read it for yourself, here or below:

This latest offering is obviously a re-heating of what has previously been served up, more than once, with Parry now hoping to disguise just how stale and overcooked the whole thing has become by adding thimblefuls of fresh ingredients. It hasn’t worked. (For those unfamiliar with this epic, here’s a recent post of mine from which it can be traced back.) 

The first ‘thimbleful’ is the news that “A critic of Welsh language education has been assigned police protection after his life was threatened, Wales Eye can reveal. Jacques Protic, who lives in North Wales, was given a dedicated police officer to monitor possible law-breaking. Threats on Mr Protic’s life are constant and in one recent incident a telephone caller said: “I’m going to do your fucking head in”.

So Parry wants us to believe that Protic now has his very own copper, though there’s a contradiction in the opening sentences. The first, with its reference to “police protection”, conjures up an image of 24-hour armed guards. Yet the second deflates that effect with, “a dedicated police officer to monitor possible law-breaking”. In other words, some unlucky sod who’s been given the thankless task of returning Protic’s phone calls.

Something else that’s very odd about this ‘news’ is that the alleged threat against Protic was made – as Phil Parry himself has previously told us – after a post of mine in August 2013, so this is not “a recent incident”, as Parry now wants us to believe. And there have obviously been no further ‘threats’, for if there had been then Parry would have regaled us with every detail . . . in a revelatory and paywalled ‘Exclusive!‘ So why has it taken North Wales Police a year and a half to respond to this single, alleged, ‘threat’? Jacques Protic could have been dead and buried by now, lynched by a mob of crazed Eisteddfodwyr, or maybe shot by a Day of the Jackal-style hit-man hired by Cymdeithas yr Iaith. The fact that no one has said ‘Boo!‘ to Protic for eighteen months also undermines Parry’s hyperbolic “Threats on Mr Protic’s life are constant”. He just can’t help being a journo, can he?

Parry then goes on to remind his readers (there must be some!) what a frightful fellow I am, supporting the Free Wales Army, and using my blog to show 50-year-old photographs of men who are all now dead. Perhaps worse, I’ve called Parry and his friend Shipton, chief reporter over at Llais y Sais (who doubles as Parry’s researcher), all sorts of horrid names. I am also condemned for promoting this petition on social housing. Though he neglects to remind us that Llais y Sais was forced to issue a correction on February 28th after repeating some of his earlier lies about me. How could this fact have slipped the mind of such a meticulous and conscientious journalist?

Apart from the ludicrous suggestion that Jacques Protic now has his own police protection unit there are just two other ‘thimblefuls’ in Parry’s latest outgushing that differentiate it from his earlier ventures into character assassination. First, he tells us that I have now been placed by the police on a “security watch-list”. If this actually means anything then I’d be grateful to have my new status explained. Second, in previous Wales Eye posts Parry has not hesitated to name the unfortunate young copper who was, allegedly, reprimanded for not properly investigating the Protic complaint, but now Parry has come over all coy and refers to the officer as “Pc xxx”! (Yes, ‘Pc’.) Has somebody had a word in Parry’s shell-like?

Though as ever when I’m dealing with these people there is unintentional humour. Protic is quoted in the latest Wales Eye post referring to North Wales’ finest as “buggers” for not taking him seriously, for not believing in the bogeymen he sees all around. Now for all I know, ‘buggers’ may be Serbo-Croat for fine upstanding fellows, then again, it might not. If it means what I think it means, and if it typifies his attitude when dealing with the police, then I’m not surprised they’re loath to take Protic seriously.

Though if Protic is no longer “involving the (police)”, how come they have just given him, according to Parry, “a dedicated police officer”? This suggests Protic is either lying or else he is being given protection without his knowledge. But if Protic is ignorant of what’s being done on his behalf, how does Parry know – does he have a hotline to GogPlod HQ in Bae Colwyn? Or is he making this up as he goes along? You know, I feel quite ashamed of myself for even thinking such a thing. (Slaps wrist.)

No matter what the answer, I shouldn’t even be writing about Protic, because these attacks on me from Wales Eye and the Wasting Mule are not really in defence of Jacques Protic, and something I wrote going on two years ago? Parry and Shipton couldn’t give a toss about Protic, he’s just an excuse to get at me. So why am I a target? Because I attack the Labour Party, its sponging cronies in the Third Sector, and all the other manifestations of colonial Wales. The system Parry and Shipton support and defend.

So I confidently expect more attacks in future, because when it comes to putting the boot into the Labour Party, and exposing the system of sham devolution that ‘Welsh’ Labour is happy to front, I’m just getting warmed up.

UPDATE 26.03.2015: I am indebted to D I for leading me to the Samizdata blog, previously unknown to me, and a posting entitled, ‘What do the Maori and Welsh languages have in common?’ by Essex girl ‘Natalie Solent’. According to Natalie, and to most of those commenting, what the two languages have in common is that both are being forced down people’s throats using lots of public money. Sound familiar?

It should come as no surprise therefore to learn that among those commenting is Jacques Protic. I have collected up his comments and present them here for your judgement. (Click to enlarge or right click to open in a new window.) Among the lunacies flying from the Protic keyboard is that, “Everything that matter (sic) or should matter in Wales, Education, NHS, Economy and so on is in terminal decline and largely down to the Welsh language imposition”.

He goes on to tell Samizdata of the death threats against him, how it is almost impossible for anglophones to get public sector jobs in Wales, how Cardiff is “under siege” from Welsh speakers, how his little girl “was got at by few Y Fro arrogant parents”, etc., etc. Protic also tells us his 16-year-old son is a pupil of Ysgol John Bright in Llandudno, but D I tells me that on his Facebook page Protic says that his son is a pupil at Ysgol David Hughes.

To fully appreciate the almost unique combination of ignorance and bigotry on show in both the article and the comments you have to read it for yourself. Here’s the link again. When you do, you’ll run across a number of comments from ‘J Jones’. Now I am 99.9% certain that this is Protic by another name. If not; if there is a J Jones (sometimes Jon Jones), then he and Protic must be telepathic, for they always turn up on the same blog, and are always in full agreement, quoting from and complimenting (and complementing) each other, as we see on Samizdata.

The more I think about Protic, the less sure I am who and what he is. He lives on Ynys Môn, almost certainly in Porthaethwy. We know this from him standing for the Aethwy ward in the council elections of May 2013. Yet I am told that he works over the border and drops his children off at school in Llandudno, Conwy, in the hope of them escaping the Welsh language education systems of Ynys Môn and Gwynedd. Which must make for a long day, leaving home well before 8 am and getting home at around 6 or 7 pm. Yet he still finds time to submit his odious opinions to countless blogs, using God knows how many names, and most of them timed during the working day! In addition to which he has time to seek out information he thinks useful from countless sources, just look at the links he provides in his comments to Samizdata, to the BBC and even Hansard (from an obscure House of Lords debate in 1958!).

It’s almost as if attacking the Welsh language and those who speak it is his full-time job, and even that he has assistance. Don’t laugh! because it doesn’t matter what we think of him; when he makes his contributions on Samizdata and countless other blogs and outlets we know nothing about there will be many reading them who’ll believe his insane distortions. Then we have Phil Parry and others playing their part, depicting him as a martyr, and that “Threats on Mr Protic’s life are constant”. There could be more going on here than we realise.

UPDATE 02.04.2015: Realising that his previous post on ‘under-threat’ Jacques Protic was just regurgitated nonsense Phil Parry knew he had to come up with something more recent. It arrived in his post of March 31st (though it would have been more appropriate if he’d left it for a day).

It seems that someone commenting on the Samizdata blog (see above, Update 26.03.2015) ‘threatened’ Protic, and this resulted in North Wales Police assigning 30 armed detectives to the case! OK, I’m exaggerating, but the lone copper Parry claims is one too many. Read the thing for yourself. The ‘threat’, from someone signing as ‘Arrango’ says, “As for you Jacques, your time is coming”. Now as threats go, this one is rather ambiguous – and it doesn’t even end with an exclamation mark! It could even be predicting a Lottery win or some other piece of good fortune. If GogPlod has really chosen to interpret this as a threat on Protic’s life, and is wasting police time and public money on it, then somebody needs to have a word.

As for Parry himself, well, I’m almost beginning to feel sorry for him, especially as I understand now how Wales Eye works. It was started in order to run propaganda against opponents of the Labour Party and also to put out stories that Parry’s friends in the Cardiff media bubble are afraid to break themselves, from fear of legal action or of alienating the powerful. Once Parry has put these stories ‘in the public domain’ this allows Shipton and others to run with them, now quoting Parry. It’s all there in the early postings. And the Wales Eye Twitter timeline also gives plenty of clues as to the nature of the beast.

Such as the great WRU scoop stopped by the threat of legal action. Neither the Beeb nor Llais y Sais would dare be first to use such a story . . . but if Parry could oblige by breaking it for them then that would let them off the hook. Rhun ap Iorwerth was another who came in for a lot of attention around the time he was leaving the BBC to stand for Plaid Cymru in the Ynys Môn by-election of August 1st, 2013. Much of what Parry wrote about the Plaid candidate could only have come from inside BBC ‘Wales’. (Though it also betrays a certain personal animus.) Some of it was crude and racist, but it’s what we expect from ‘Welsh’ Labour and those who push its message. Then, in researching my most recent post, about nepotism and the Labour Party, I noticed that Parry had written about the Business School at Swansea University, then, making it obvious how the relationship works, Shipton wrote up the same story in the Wasting Mule.

Phil Parry is no more than a kept man, reliant for his ‘exclusives’ on what his friends feed him, these being stories they prefer – for whatever reason – not to use themselves, or not until he has put them in the public domain. Or else attacking Labour’s political opponents – Plaid Cymru more than others – in ways that the mainstream media could not get way with, not least because of the crude racism, and blind hostility to the Welsh language. All very squalid, but no more than we have come to expect from the Labour Party in Wales and the Cardiff media bubble.