This week’s piece links Globalist corporations, environmental groups, and politicians. What unites this unsavoury trio is their shared desire to destroy livestock farming.
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THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN
Last week there was a court case brought by the charity River Action UK against the Environment Agency (EA) for not dealing with the problem of chicken manure pollution on the river Wye. Even though the EA is responsible for England, the High Court case was heard in Cardiff.
Which encouraged a bunch of exhibitionists to turn up and piss people off with their ‘street theatre’. Even Morris dancing! Here’s the report from Llais y Sais last Thursday.
As you can read, the article itself reported: “A large amount of organic manure has been spread over the area . . .”
Yet it also reported: “River Action insists a loophole in the law is allowing poultry farming to poison the Wye“.
The first quote makes clear the problem is caused by arable farms using chicken manure as organic fertiliser. Yet River Action UK chooses to blame chicken farms.
Of course, most of these arable farms are on the English side of the border, which makes the nonsense in Cardiff last week even more misplaced.
But why would River Action want to blame chicken farmers when they know the run-offs causing the pollution are coming from arable farms? Stick with me and I’ll explain.
First, let’s see what we can learn about River Action UK.
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WHO’S WHO: JAMES EDWARD MACPHERSON
River Action UK registered as a CIO-Foundation 29 June, 2021. Though as you’ll see in a minute, it existed in some form from 01 January 2021.
Though new, it’s expanding, and the most recently filed accounts, for year ending 31.03.2023, showed a healthy income of £485,398 (previous year, £278,080), ‘Cash at bank and in hand’ £249,786 (£48,202), and three employees (none).
That’s quite impressive. So who’s running this outfit?
Well, according to the website, there is a veritable host involved, none of whom seem to be Welsh. Unless we include a Vietnamese woman named Bic Jones, who is said to live in that mythic realm, ‘North Wales’.
Among the others listed I see Jeremy Wade, who is often on the telly, filmed in exotic locales wrassling with big ugly fish.
And of course George Monbiot is there, his icon-like countenance staring back at us planet-destroying sinners.
But we’re going to focus on James Edward MacPherson, who’s bio we find to the right of Wade’s.
Because according to the Charity Commission, MacPherson was the first trustee to be registered, which gives him a kind of founder status, I suppose. So why isn’t he playing a more prominent role in River Action?
Or to put it another way, why was he the founding trustee? Come to that, who is he?
His Linkedin profile tells us that he’s a big shot in the world of finance and investment. Having worked for Warburg Pincus, Merrill Lynch, and BlackRock.
To bring us up to date . . . he became a non-executive director of J P Morgan Global Growth & Income Plc in April 2021, and since March 2023 has also been a senior advisor at Hambro Perks Environmental Technology.
At the foot of MacPherson’s Linkedin profile we see a kind of ‘Jimmy loves Larry’.
However you look at it, that’s an impressive CV. But it also suggests MacPherson sees the great outdoors as an investment opportunity.
At the time he became founder-trustee of River Action UK MacPherson was a director of The Investor Forum. And if you want to know the meaning of ‘vacuous’, then just turn to ‘What we do‘.
It seems to be a collection of commercial entities burnishing their environmental credentials by investing in Green stuff. MacPherson ceased to be a director just two weeks after becoming the original trustee of River Action UK.
Before moving on, I’d like to point out that among the Investor Forum Members we see Hambro, J P Morgan, Rothschild, and Rathbones.
The Rathbones are a wealthy Liverpool family, and family members still get their cut from associated companies. And that includes Jenny Rathbone MS.
She sits on the Senedd’s Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee. Her partner, John Uden, was given a no-show job by Bute Energy, the Scottish company wanting to throw up a few dozen wind farms in Wales.
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WHO’S WHO: CHARLES BASIL LUCAS WATSON
Described as “founder and chair” is Charles Watson, who you can see in the mercifully short video below. Charles also has an interesting background in the world of business, which we’ll look at in a mo’.
Also in the video is Nicola Cutcher, who made the Rivercide video with Monbiot. Which is of course about the Wye. Delivered with the balance that so delights Monbiot’s fans.
I’m sure that most appearing on the website have only a tenuous connection with River Action. So what do the filings with the Charity Commission tell us?
As we can see above, the trustees other than MacPherson, are: Charles Basil Lucas Watson, who we just saw in the video, and Marina Gibson, who appears on the Advisory Board next to fish-wrassler Jeremy Wade.
Like MacPherson, Watson has a fascinating business background. According to Companies House these are the companies he’s been involved with. Though I can only see one active company where he’s still on board.
Two that he left in May and June 2020 were companies in the Teneo group. And among Teneo’s ‘People’ we find Lord Davies of Abersoch and Lord Hague of Richmond, but resident in Powys.
In 2019 Teneo sold a majority stake to CVC Capital Partners, which has assets of $140 billion (2022).
The third company that Watson left, in May 2020, is Blue Rubicon (Holdings) Ltd. Another part of the Teneo setup. Specialising in ‘PR and Communications’.
The only active company that Watson is still with is The Conduit Connect Ltd.
Most of the companies Watson has been involved with have had a US presence on the board. Sometimes more than one American director.
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WHO’S WHO: MARINA GIBSON
Ms Gibson is the third of the trustees named on the filings with the Charity Commission. Here’s her Linkedin profile.
And here’s a clip from the River Action website.
Seeing as Marina Gibson knows her fish, and was taken on as trustee a year after MacPherson and Watson, I guess she was recruited to give River Action some credibility.
Her Linkedin profile says she is a ‘brand ambassador’ for YETI, a big company making ‘outdoor’ stuff. So it would make sense to team up with Marina Gibson. And yet . . .
YETI came knocking at the very time Gibson joined River Action, which was at the beginning of 2021. And YETI is another big US company, headquartered in Austin, Texas. But it does have a UK presence, registered with Companies House.
And although the company’s address is in London, the two US directors give a Bristol address. River Action UK is also based in central Bristol.
And YETI UK must be doing something right, because turnover leapt from £901,389 at the end of December 2019 to £18,712,613 31 December 2022.
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WHO’S WHO: THE LOST BEATLE
According to this River Action website article, from two days before Christmas 2021, another trustee was to have been James Wallace. Instead, he became CEO.
Now I can’t tell you much about Wallace except that he’s keen on rewilding, especially re-introducing beavers. His bio on the River Action website makes him sound like Indiana Attenborough:
James is Chief Executive of River Action. He is a naturalist, archaeologist and social entrepreneur and has established enterprises ranging from renewable energy, regenerative agriculture and green finance to ecotourism, nature restoration and deep sea exploration. Prior to helping Charles Watson develop River Action into a national charity, James was CEO and Co-founder of Beaver Trust where he led the coalition to protect and live alongside native beavers.
He’s also concerned with London going short of water. And while the Independent may say this is due to, “over-abstraction, over-use and wastage through leaking pipes“, we know from where, in the long-term, London hopes to get its water.
Was it not foretold by Boris Johnson?
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SUB-CONTRACTING
In the filings with the Charity Commission I noticed a mention of the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust. So I wondered what it was about.
Looking at the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust accounts two possibilities present themselves. (Highlighted in green.) First, the Trust is being paid to host a ‘beaver project officer’, and we know that River Action CEO James Wallace is into beavers.
Another possibility is that the payments were connected with a ‘Save the Wye’ petition put out by the Trust. Which, of course, targets chicken farmers.
But if so, why couldn’t River Action have put out that petition itself?
Talking of money, and as you can see from the panel above, Radnorshire Wildlife Trust received £1,862,146 in y/e 31.03.2023, and its property portfolio qualifies for farming grants and funding from just about everywhere.
By my calculations, in y/e 31.03.2023, Radnorshire Wildlife Trust received £666,103 from ‘Welsh Government’ sources alone. (Highlighted in pink.) Here’s one example.
That’s the state of Wales in 2024. Those who’ve farmed the land for centuries are being driven off, while environmentalists and investors are showered with money to take over the cleared land.
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THE GREEN MONSTER DEVOURING WALES
In case you haven’t already guessed, I’ll spell out for you why (and despite evidence to the contrary) River Action UK chose to blame chicken farmers for the pollution in the Wye.
In 1971 the Club of Rome issued an apocalyptic vision of the future dreamed up by a few scientists using ‘models’ from primitive computers. In 1991 the ‘threat’ was re-framed to replace the collapsed Soviet Union.
Globalists have used that ‘threat’ to bend politicians and populations to their will. Corporations like BlackRock, Vanguard and the rest, want to take over farmland in order to capitalise on that scam.
The land can be used in a number of ways; such as planting trees to grab the carbon offset and other grants they’ve fooled politicians into offering; or putting up wind farms and solar farms, then raking in the exorbitant profits from these unreliable forms of electricity generation.
Here is Wales we see the problem manifest itself in many ways, and in many different places. In Carmarthenshire, a company called Foresight is buying up farms to plant trees.
It should surprise no-one that Foresight is working with BlackRock. Foresight may even be owned by BlackRock.
So unless we believe in Damascene conversions it’s obvious to me that River Action is just another environmental group fronting for Globalist investors seeking to undermine livestock farming in order to grab the land.
The same applies to many other bodies. In Wales we have a constantly growing number of ecological and river groups funded by the ‘Welsh Government’ and other bodies for no reason other than to tell lies about farmers.
And it has to be livestock farming rather than arable farming (for now), because the Globalists have been clever in recruiting vegans.
A few years ago vegans were cranks that nobody paid much attention to, but now fanatical vegans are found leading the fight against livestock farming – and it has nothing to do with pollution, or the loss of biodiversity.
This is why Wales is especially at risk.
Earlier we read that the first trustee of River Action, James Edward MacPherson, works for the giant US bank and investment house J P Morgan.
Last year top man of J P Morgan, Jamie Dimon, came straight out and said private property should be confiscated in order to meet the net zero targets he and the other Globalists had set!
And he wasn’t talking about Auntie Megan’s back garden.
Outfits like the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust know the score; they accept that the major landowners in a post-farming world will be Globalist corporations, even governments, but these will – they believe – allow window dressing in the form of rewilding and other fantasies.
That’s the deal they’ve struck.
But what of the politicians?
If the politicians we suffer in Wales have genuinely fallen for the Globalists’ climate / net zero scam, then they’re too stupid to hold public office.
If they know it’s a scam but still push on with it because they’re too weak to resist those directing them, then they deserve nothing but contempt.
But if they enjoy the power enforcing the scam gives them over people fighting for their livelihoods and their way of life, then they are, “lower than vermin”.
♦ end ♦
© Royston Jones 2024
Off Topic
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2024/pilgrimage-north-wales
“Seven celebrities take emotional Pilgrimage through North Wales following in the footsteps of Celtic saints for brand new BBC Two and iPlayer series”
Remarkably, the seven “celebrity pilgrims” (as the BBC calls them) are indeed diverse — but not so diverse that there is a Welsh person amongst them.
Not a Great British Pilgrimage?
Great to see so many farmers and supporters along the A48 yesterday. Most at nearly or below 20 mph. Waters, Drakeford & co were delighted, orgasms of joy all round, well among those that could muster anything !!
The people are stirring. I hope.
Completely off-topic. Are you happy for this video clip with Rishi Sunak being questioned to be available on your blog Jac ?
https://rumble.com/v4d0xkb-vaccine-injured-to-prime-minister.html?mref=6zof&mc=dgip3&ep=2
Nae bother.
You wasn’t at the Brecon Baroque Festival last year when they did their Willie Nelson tribute evening or their early afternoon Charley Daniels progressive country set performed by visiting folk from the western slopes of the Appalachians. I’m told there’s some dissent in the camp over a decision to perform a John Lee Hooker tribute at the next festival. No pleasing some of their more socially disorientated followers.
I put my blue suede shoes on to go Baroquing Around The Clock.
You hang on to those good ol’ blue suede shoes. I doubt whether you could get a decent pair at a fair price these days.
Back to the parallel universe which is getting accepted as the new reality these days I was mildly surprised to see so many names of do-gooders all residing in a fairly small patch of Powys. That area must now be pretty close to 100% colonised by an array of useless “thought leaders” and their followers. No wonder house prices in that area got driven up.
Aka ‘brothel creepers’.
Wow. If I was an IT expert like Jac, I could also provide a photo of my blue suede shoes! In the meantime, you will all be left guessing.
I thought you was a buckled winklepicker man !
https://www.georgecoxfootwear.com/products/strummer-gibson-navy-suede
Nearly 300 a pair! I’ll cruise around the charity shops for awhile
How many coffees will it take Jac to show the corruption, name your price.
Next time some AA “I told you I was” Gill sort takes the piss out of the Welsh alphabet tell them we run from Dee to Wye.
I’ll see myself out.
When the sickness in the Wye first became evident, cattle farmers further up the catchment were first accused, even mentioned by Lesley Griffith MS the minister in the Senedd in her unfounded imposition of the all-Wales NVZ.
It was only via some locals doing samples and getting it analysed did find the real culprits. Dwr Cymru and mega poultry farms. We are now told that farmers are buying the guano and spreading too much on their fields. Why would they do that? Whilst it’s possible for a dairy farmer to overload pasture from his own lagoon, being naughty, but it’s nonsense that he’d pay a poultry farm which he has no business connection with, or responsibility for, and spend time and money over-spreading. Also, the chickens are fed soya meal, grown elsewhere, often imported. Guano is most suited to fertilise fruit and root crops (potash), not livestock pastures (requires nitrates).
Can only conclude that these international banking spivs are after land, to sit on solid assets, even better if they get a green payout from the taxpayer. Greenwash the balance sheet. They don’t care about the environment, no more than they care about farmers which they hope to evict.
Plaids youngest Peer and Bute Energy etc (sorry it’s the Mail)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13075921/Ex-Plaid-Cymru-chief-staff-lost-vote-new-peer-House-Lords.html
No need to apologise.
That article in the Daily Mail dated 12th February 2024 was ‘lifted’ from the original report by Nation Cymru dated 5th December 2023.
https://nation.cymru/news/plaid-cymru-row-over-house-of-lords-nominations/
The Plaid Cymru argument they need to send peers to the lords because of the role of legal scrutiny of legislation that affects Wales is blown out of the water. The winner of the internal party poll was Elfyn Llwyd, not only a former MP in the Westminster House, but a qualified and practiced barrister.
Yet they appoint someone who has neither quality purely on the basis that she is a woman and on the payroll of the energy company.
I know nothing of the politics behind this, or any of the pressure groups or individuals, just some of the science
A quick trip to the garden centre will show you that fertilisers always specify the NPK – the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium content. And dried chicken litter is a popular, and powerful, organic fertiliser. The N comes from proteins, and chickens have quite inefficient digestive tracts with about 25% of the ingested protein passing straight through them (once upon a time there was an idea to feed it back to them)
The protein (in fact all the NPK) comes from the chicken feed, mainly imported things such as maize and soya and maybe U.K. grown grains, grown on huge arable farms
The chicken industry takes NPK from thousands of acres (in Europe, north and south America), processes it through chicken sheds in Powys, then spreads it on hundreds of acres in England that drain into the Wye. It’s no surprise that the rivers cannot cope with the nutrient overload
If the chickens were fed on only feeds produced on the English arable land there wouldn’t be an issue, but there would be far fewer chickens, as the amount of land isn’t enough to feed the amount of chickens currently produced. So focusing on chicken sheds is right, there are too many for the amount of land available to spread the fertiliser on (within an economic transport distance … wet chicken waste is heavy)
It’s interesting to consider the relationship between the chicken industry and the multinational grain corporations (Cargil etc). Welsh farmers are just being used to own the liability of the polluting part of the supply chain of turning grain into meat, and are allowed to do so by lax policy and regulation
Cargill trades in grain and other processed animal feeds but is also a major converter of poultry for retail and other catering markets. Seems like its got its beak in several stages of this food chain but avoids direct contact with chicken shit. I guess that’s deliberate although they would soon be into it if they found some innovative way of turning it into other “second life” waste products
You have hit the nail smack on Jac! Having attended Carmarthen Livestock Market on last Thursday evening, in support of my in danger industry of agriculture.
The evening was well organised, and most of the speakers sincere in their opinion. However, the throng was given soothing and reassuring promises by two Plaid Cymru politicians. As Chief Stting Bull once said: “White man speaks with forked tongue”!
After the event ended I bumped into them near the canteen, where I asked about their stance on Net Zero – baring in mind that Plaid is fond of the odd cuddle by Labour at the Bay.
I was told that agriculture has an important part to play in ‘saving the planet’, with planting trees in a way that is less arbitary than the government’s… ‘What about the four biggest emitters, I asked’? For they are all increasing emissions! “We must lead by example to help prevent wildfires and floods,etc”. I was told.
I’m afraid that many a Conservative MS and MP are just as gullible on the ‘Saving the Planet’ cult! With over 70 million souls by now living in the UK, and with 20% less productive land around in Wales – yet! What are our poor people going to eat? Grey sqirrel and fruits of the forrest!
I’m beginning to wonder what Labour, Plaid and the others mean when they talk of “agriculture” and “farming”. Because I’m beginning to suspect they don’t mean the kind of farming you do, the farming most of us are familiar with.
Take Radnorshire Wildlife Trust, which I mentioned; they have one farm and I know they’re looking to buy others. And they’ll probably get the funding they need. Farming for them is secondary, but they will still be classed as working farms by WG. Then there’s One Planet Developments – they’re classed as farms.
And if the term currently used, ‘farming and forestry’, can be merged, or if ‘agriculture’ means growing things, then planting trees will also become ‘agriculture’.
They can do away with the traditional Welsh family and still claim rural Wales is built on ‘agriculture’.
Worrying. You mentioned Foresight Group in your piece about tree planting. This asset management firm ( based at the Shard in London) is also financing a wind farm in Llanddewi Brefi.
This perticular project is for seven 740ft high machines! However in the last few weeks, Bute Energy has revealed a project of 40 machines, of equal enormity, on land which adjoins Foresight’s investment at Llanddewi?. With Bute as good as penniless, could Bute, Foresight, Blackrock be the same shadowy monster?
Bute had no money, no experience (not a single turbine to their name), yet they turn up in Wales, out of the blue, with plans for over 20 wind farms and other facilities, plus miles of pylons. It never made sense.
As only something like 5% of Welsh lamb is consumed in Wales, and 60% in the U.K. I don’t think we’re running short of food
Surely, for the sake of ballance, we cannot eat lamb every day! That is why we have trade to give us variety of diet. We sell to other coutries what we are good at growing and the they sell back to us what they are good at growing. Simples! Everyone happy ☺. Also, we are only 60% self sufficient with food in the Uk – and that is before trees and scrub consumes the best land – coupled with an ever increasing population! Result – misery!
“Last year top man of J P Morgan, Jamie Dimon, came straight out and said private property should be confiscated in order to meet the net zero targets he and the other Globalists had set!”
As I understand it, Compulsory Purchase Powers are included in the Infrastructure {Wales} Bill now under scrutiny by Welsh Parliament.
As you have waved your magic IT wand Jac, hope this message gets through!
We’re heading into a kind of totalitarianism for which the only justification is an increasingly discredited ‘climate crisis’. Making it increasingly difficult for the puppet-politicians to do what they’re ordered. They must either get even more authoritarian or see their plans fall apart.
The Infrastructure Bill is pretty much a carbon copy of the Planning Act 2008 which has compulsory purchase provisions for things like purchasing assess rights to land on which to build pylons
Jac, Just scanned your article and will examine in more depth later. However you are reinforcing my long held view that Big Finance ( banks, institutions, hedge funds, seriously wealthy, personal trusts etc) pose as much of a threat as the major industrial and commercial corporates.
I guess the original suspects were the military-industrial complex and they remain one wing of the present threat. However the low level threats caused by pollution, over extraction of minerals and raw materials, and latterly Covid have presented spectacular opportunities for exaggeration and drawn a broad spectrum of greed driven businesses and individuals to mount attacks wherever they see a “weakness” by inflating the real extent of those threats. Europe (EU) & UK in general presents such weakness and here in Wales we have a Senedd full of people who have sucked up the messages with enthusiasm.
The very apex of capitalism acting like the Bolsheviks in confiscating private property, talk about two cheeks of the same arse, and additionally so in the sense of their ‘global’ vision.
Just testing as I’ve had complaints from people who can’t leave comments. Don’t understand how yours came through.
Anyway, I’ve been out today, now I’m back I’ve unconnected wpDiscuz and gone back to Jetpack comment form. So let’s see if it does the trick.
I did notice as much myself, it was as though I was signed in as you, and when I clicked submit was prompted for ‘my’ password. I managed to comment by spoofing the Android mobile version of Chrome using the F12 web developer tools, to pull up a variant of the site without all this gubbins.
Got to sort it out.
I was even given the option to edit your text!!!
Shit! Will look into it.
There is still a password prompt when anything ‘internal’ is clicked on, so it’s not quite the open barn door. Still it’s a bit of a red rag to those with less than honourable intentions…
I’m now checking out some alternative comment plugins, so things will change.