‘Welsh’ Labour – The True ‘Nasty Party’

On 12/05/201614/05/2016 By JacIn Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, Third Sector, Ukip, Welsh Assembly, Welsh Government, Welsh Labour112 Comments

As you know, I detest the Labour Party in general and its ‘Welsh’ branch with a special vehemence. My contempt for Labour is due primarily to the damage Labour has done to Wales over the past century, summed up in my post Why I Detest The ‘Welsh’ Labour Party.

But my contempt is also attributable to the self-serving scumbags drawn to Labour because it controls Wales and therefore has the power of patronage and funding. These creatures can end up as elected representatives or Third Sector parasites sucking billions of pounds from the Welsh public purse. Often both, for there is a constant to-ing and fro-ing between these sectors.

Inevitably, my criticisms of the Labour Party draw attacks from that quarter. One famous incident occurred just over a year ago when the leading reporter of the Wasting Mule, a known Labour supporter, got a blogger friend to publish attacks on me which he then repeated in his rag.

You can follow this despicable episode here with the following posts: I Must Be Doing Something Right! (Jan 28, 2015); Now I KNOW I’m Doing Something Right! (Feb 3, 2015); Helping A Man In A Hole (Feb 5, 2015); OMG! I Have Offended The ‘Progressives’! (Feb 10, 2015); Where Is Franz Kafka When You Need Him? (Mar 1, 2015). In this final post I published the apology I extracted from Trinity Mirror, the owners of the Mule, published both online (shown below) and in the rag itself on February 27th.

Over the years, in this blog and the previous blog, I have highlighted corruption within the Third Sector by people with strong Labour Party connections, I reminded people that Naz Malik of AWEMA fame began his political career in the race relations racket by regularly attacking ‘racist Welsh nationalists’ for his Labour funders.

I have enjoyed laughing at the Labour group on Swansea council, led by a preening prat from Liverpool reliant on immature students who are also strangers to the city!

Small wonder then that I have made an enemy of ‘Welsh’ Labour, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. For I understand better than most – and better than many in Plaid Cymru – that the real obstacle to achieving a better Wales is the Labour Party. It must be smashed as the SNP has done in Scotland.

This approach inevitably results in regular attacks on me in social media and elsewhere by Labour’s defenders, but rarely as frontal and crude as the Parry-Shipton assault last year. Though some try, such as a woman I’d never heard of until she opened up on me with both barrels.

It all started when @DilysDavies tweeted me a link to an article on the Grauniad website by Michael White. White wondered why Neil Hamilton had been elected to the Assembly and mused, “What could Wales . . . have been thinking of when it elected him on Thursday? Probably of immigration and job security”. To which I responded:

I urge you to note that I say “many” of UKIP’s votes come from English people who have moved to west Wales. That is, “many”, not ‘most’, and certainly not ‘all’. As far as I was concerned, that was it.

This tweet of mine prompted a response from @CwmniDB, a David Bullock, reminding me of UKIP’s support “in old coalfield seats where there’s little immigration from England”. Very true, I have written about this phenomenon more than once.

Here, for example, is my post on the 2014 Euro elections. For other posts in which I search for the answer to UKIP’s appeal in Wales just type UKIP or Ukip (I’m never sure) in the search box.

The next contribution came from the person hinted at earlier, a clearly outraged @RosemaryEmery. She is a member of the Labour Party in Llanelli. She was “shocked”. (In my experience, Labour people are very easily ‘shocked’.)

We exchanged a number of tweets – God! it was fun – and it became clear that what ‘shocked’ her was my use of the term immigrant to describe English people who move to Wales. (The fact that David Bullock had also used the term seemed not to bother her at all.)

I argued that anyone moving from one country to another was an immigrant to the country he or she moved to, and that this spat she had engineered depended on whether one believed that Wales and England are different countries. To which she responded, ” . . . we are all citizens of Britain and there are no border controls.”

In an attempt to explain that it’s quite possible to have different nations and countries in the same state, I used the example of Tibet . . . which is when it got a bit weird.

Now I don’t deny that I’m partial to the odd allusion, the well-chosen analogy, but I used Tibet in order to vividly explain the suffering that can befall a minority identity in a multinational state, I was certainly not arguing that there is a valid comparison between Tibet and Wales. Rosemary Emery had other ideas, and clearly another agenda.

A few more tweets were exchanged then we were joined by @poumista, who is Gary Robert Jones, another Labour Party member from Llanelli. I was fairly sure that his handle referred to a Spanish communist party from the Civil War days, I remembered that from Homage to Catalonia. Just to be sure I asked him, you can see his response below.

How reassuring to know that the Labour Party in 2016 contains class warriors still fighting the Spanish Civil War. Jesus!

Anyway, I eventually tired of Dozy Rosie and Señor Jones and ended the illuminating exchange. After which I got a message with the rather sinister hashtag #WeWillBeWatching, which I could only interpret to mean that I was being monitored by deranged members of ‘Welsh’ Labour.

So I decided to complain to their party headquarters, confident of redress, and reassurance . . . or something. As yet, I have had no response, perhaps they’re busy with something.

I wouldn’t have bothered you with Dozy Rosie and Comrade Jones were it not for the fact that this is all of a pattern. Just as with the Parry-Shipton comedy duo last year I was again accused of saying things I hadn’t said, thoughts were ascribed to me that I don’t hold, and there was always the lurking suspicion that there was someone ‘further back’ controlling these people.

And of course my exchange with the delusional duo in Llanelli came soon after the Assembly elections, during which Labour behaved so badly. Perhaps the worst example was the trade union Unison putting out lies about Plaid Cymru’s policies. I’m not surprised by that, Labour tells lies, that’s how it hangs on to power in Wales.

What did surprise me is that Plaid leader Leanne Wood is a member of Unison. For fuck’s sake, when are these people going to wake up and see Labour and its subsidiary organisations for what they really are?

Well, after the shenanigans on Wednesday, when the other parties challenged Labour’s divine right to rule by supporting Leanne Wood for First Minister, and the Labour lie machine went into overdrive, perhaps those in Plaid Cymru who had a lingering affection for ‘fellow-socialists’ will finally have woken up.

I suspect that a debilitating spell may finally have been lifted.

Carwyn vote — Photo courtesy of BBC Wales

‘Welsh’ Labour is rattled, its share of the vote is down to a third, it has no allies other than a desperate and lonely woman who has made a tragic miscalculation, and it can see the Scottish scenario approach. Wonderful!

Labour has become a sickness from which Wales has suffered for a century, a synonym for corruption and cronyism, patronage and waste. Labour in our country is a party that serves a different country. It’s time to cure Wales of Labour and make her healthy.

Last year, during my tussle with Parry and Shippo I was accused of calling Labour vermin. Yes, I did call Labour vermin. My one regret is that in using that term I was being unfair to rats and other creatures whose company I would prefer to any verminous bastard connected with the Labour Party.

UPDATE 13.05,2016: I now know a little more about Rosemary Emery and Gary Robert Jones.

Emery is of course English, possibly from Yorkshire, and her Facebook page tells us that she is a supporter of the England rugby team which, as ‘Sosban Fach’ commented, might explain why she has never stood for elected office in Llanelli.

Jones is a community councillor in Llangennech, and seems to be one of those Labourites who believes that the Welsh language is a nationalist conspiracy, and as such it must be fought tooth and nail. To this end he has been going around Llangennech stirring things up and dividing the community by arguing how divisive it would be for the council to meet the demand for Welsh language education.

Jones got involved with an online petition opposing Welsh language education. The comments make interesting reading, especially as so many of them come from people who cannot possibly be parents with children at Llangennech school. Comments come from Loughor, St Clears, Carmarthen, Swansea, even England! I hope nobody’s paying too much attention to this bigoted tripe!

Something else I found online linked to Jones is a picture of Dennis Coslett’s grave, one of a number of his photographs on the americymru website. Draw your own conclusions.

Returning to England-supporting Emery, she is, as she promised, watching me, and picked up on a tweet I put out earlier about yet another English sex offender turning up in rural Wales. Her tweet reminds us how the Labour Party operates – lies, distortions, non-sequiturs and ascribing views and opinions to opponents that they know to be wrong. (The most popular one at the moment being that Plaid Cymru is in “coalition” with Tories and UKIP.)

Rather than worry about sex offenders being dumped in Wales she uses my tweet to suggest that I don’t mind Welsh sex offenders! On the one hand such tactics are obviously devious and distasteful, but they’re also silly, and on an intellectual level that would almost certainly be surpassed in the playground of Llangennech school . . . in both languages.

So there you are, two fine examples of anti-Welsh Labour. Carwyn Jones must be so proud of them. It’s sad really, because I’m old enough to remember when the Labour Party in Llanelli was Welsh, and a party of the people, led by men of the people like Jim Griffiths.

Now it’s just a refuge for bigots and chancers, dilettantes and poseurs, crooks and wankers, who regard politics as a game, with the purpose of the game being to beat the opposition and keep control of the gravy train, rather than to serve the people and improve their lives.

UPDATE TO UPDATE

As if to prove my point, Emery has just put out the tweet below. “Substitute English for Polish”, says Emery. Why not Bolivian, or Ugandan, or fucking Martian? I couldn’t have asked her to perform better, to prove me right, if I’d written it myself.

1/ She refuses to address the facts as reported by the BBC.

2/ I did not say ‘Polish’ because the man is not Polish, he’s English. (I know this is difficult for Labourites, but it’s called sticking to the facts.)

3/ Rather than address the issue of yet another English sex offender ending up by some route, with the help of some agency, in a small Welsh town, she uses it to link me with UKIP!

Carry on like this, Emery – and this applies equally to your dilettante-revolutionary friend – and I might conclude that you’re too stupid and / or too dishonest to bother with.

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Welsh Poverty And ‘Welsh’ Labour’s Third Sector Money Pit

On 18/06/201519/06/2015 By JacIn Colonisation of Wales, Labour Party, Third Sector13 Comments

A report just produced by the ‘Welsh’ Labour Government, Inquiry into Poverty in Wales: Poverty and Inequality tells us, among other things, that 23% of the population still lives in relative poverty, and while the situation is improving in England and Scotland there is no sign of improvement in Wales. In response, the ‘Welsh’ Government protests that it has “committed £323m to tackling poverty this year alone”. I shall return to this ‘commitment’ anon.

This latest report merely reinforces other reports, and evidence from a host of sources, telling us that our land is poor and becoming – relative to Scotland and England – poorer. For example, earlier this year the Wales TUC produced a report on the Living Wage, with its findings published on a constituency basis. It found that in Cardiff North just 11.4% of jobs pay less than the Living Wage, but in Gower the figure rises to 45%, while Dwyfor Meirionnydd gives the worst figure, at 51%. In both of these areas tourism undoubtedly plays a role in depressing wage levels.

The statistics already dealt with tie in with other findings that tell us Wales has the lowest levels of working-age employment and the highest rates of economic inactivity to be found on this island. But what can you expect? In my previous post I dealt with a non-working, benefit-dependent population being deliberately brought in to Dyffryn Teifi – and the same thing is happening all over Wales. Housing associations and others are importing from England white trash that England is more than happy to be rid of. While in the post before that I dealt with the unsustainable numbers of elderly people moving into Wales, and the inevitable effect this is having on the NHS and other services.

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Another piece that caught my eye today concerned Rhondda Life Ltd. Plaid Cymru – for once doing something right – finally got hold of a report from December 2012 that the party claimed the ‘Welsh’ Government had refused to release. (Though much of the information was already in the public domain by 2012, soon after the funding plug was pulled.) The report made it clear that RLL was yet another disaster of the kind we have become so familiar with in Wales: Labour Party hacks and hangers-on receiving obscene amounts of public money for doomed projects in desperate efforts to be seen to be doing something, and failing miserably to achieve anything other than secure tidy salaries and good pensions for themselves.

Running the Rhondda Life show in Ferndale was Travers Merrill. An optimist, our Travers, for while RLL was hurtling, out of control towards the buffers he reassured passengers that it was merely keeping to schedule. For just three months before an auditors’ financial review found liabilities of £106,555 Merrill was insisting, “RLL is solvent for the following reasons. It has detailed cash flow forecasts; robust internal accounting procedures; detailed financial records; budgetary and corporate plans; no continuing loss-making activities; excess assets over liabilities; no loan or interest defaults on payments; rigid and regular financial activity monitoring; no unpaid tax liabilities; strong governance and management.” Nice try, Trav.

Travers Merrill is married to Rose Mutale Nyoni Merrill OBE (or combinations thereof) who is CEO of BAWSO, a well-funded Third Sector outfit catering for ~~Mrs Merrill and her friends~~ ethnic minority women in need of help. In addition, she was involved with MEWN, another ethnic minority women’s charity based in Swansea, which has also breathed its last. Though before it took ill and expired I – impetuous fool that I am! – suggested that MEWN might reasonably be viewed as a replacement for AWEMA – as if anyone could replace Naz Malik! How much Argie plonk had I drunk when I wrote that?!

Mr and Mrs Travers Merrill are known to have strong – if almost covert – Labour connections, but what is perhaps more interesting about them is that they also have a private company. This is ABESU, which, to quote the company’s website, is “a UK charity working in partnership with the ABESU Women’s Housing Co-operative in Zambia to self-build houses and establish sustainable livelihoods”. Zambia is of course Mrs Merrill’s homeland. The latest accounts lodged with the Charity Commission, or rather, the ‘Unaudited Financial Statements’, tell us that the charity “employs no staff in the UK and the administration is provided pro bono (by whom?) with minimal office expenses”. Which is one way of putting it.

Though a few years ago I was approached by a BAWSO insider telling me that much of ABESU’s administrative and secretarial work was being done in the BAWSO office, using equipment and facilities provided for BAWSO out of public funds. Clearly not right. Though of course this explains why ABESU’s “administration is provided pro bono with minimal office expenses” – it’s because it’s provided by us, via the ‘Welsh’ Government and its funding agencies.

But ‘Welsh’ Labour’s generosity doesn’t end there. For the Unaudited Financial Statement for the period ending March 31st 2014 tells us that the ‘Welsh’ Government gave ABESU £2,000 in that year. (Page 12 of accounts.) Confronting us with the obvious question, why is the ‘Welsh’ Government giving £2,000 to an organisation that, by its own admission. employs no staff in the UK? This has echoes of AWEMA operating, with Welsh public funding, in Kenya and Pakistan. And me, cynic that I am, I can’t help wondering – as I do with all charities – how much of the money donated ever reaches those it was given to help.

Whatever the answer, and however you look at it, the Merrills are the perfect Labour-Third Sector family; neither of them Welsh but happily spending millions of pounds of Welsh public funding on others, most of whom are not Welsh either. And with the curious and suspect overlap with a private company that may also be benefiting from our generosity. Well, we know it’s getting at least £2,000. And for those tempted to say, ‘Oh, two thousand pounds isn’t a lot’, how many other organisations are receiving Welsh public funding for projects outside of Wales?

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Wales is a poor, post-industrial country that has never replaced the heavy industry it lost. With the inevitable result that ours is now a country with unacceptable levels of poverty, suffering a flight of the bright and an ageing population. Yet the ‘Welsh’ Government funds housing associations and others to import more poverty, while also encouraging elderly people to move to Wales! Then, due to the emasculating Left-Green mindset that has reduced Plaid Cymru to an object of ridicule, the party that should be exposing and attacking this truly wondrous strategy that both colonises and impoverishes Wales, actually applauds it! Believing, in its pathetic, socialistic distortions of reality, that Wales is somehow acting as a ‘beacon’ in ‘helping those in need’ . . . bring on the fairies!

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the money that is given to the ‘Welsh’ Government by the EU and the UK government to alleviate that deprivation is wasted on a Third Sector that is nothing more than the Labour Party funding careers for its otherwise unemployable supporters, and guaranteeing their loyalty; supporters who will then shout down opponents and commission surveys that always conclude – the ‘Welsh’ Government should give them more money! This is where the £323 million pounds will be spent this year, not on “tackling poverty” as the ‘Welsh’ Government claims, but on its Third Sector cronies, and on projects and schemes that no Welsh community would miss if they ceased tomorrow.

As I was finishing off this piece, and thinking it couldn’t get any worse, I noticed a tweet from @johnsouthwales telling of a ‘community embankment‘ built in Ammanford as part of the Communities First programme. Tell me this is not real. Tell me I’ll wake up tomorrow and realise that this country I think I live in is really just a bad dream.

The Family Malik and the Lynks that Bind it to the Labour Party

On 31/03/201530/03/2016 By JacIn Corruption, Third Sector, Welsh Government, Welsh Labour55 Comments

I AM INDEBTED TO ‘STAN’ OF THE NEATH FERRET FOR HELP IN WRITING THIS PIECE

The name Malik will be familiar to regular readers of this blog if only because of Naz Malik, former boss of race relations charity and Labour agitprop outfit the All Wales Ethnic Minority Association (AWEMA). I have written about Naz Malik more than once, so to refresh your memories you might care to work back from this post of September 8th, 2014, published shortly after the end of Malik’s trial.

One of the major issues exposed by the AWEMA scandal was that of nepotism, though of course this is no crime. Indeed, it’s the cornerstone of the family business; but beyond that sphere the favouring of relatives will be judged on the company’s performance, and investors or shareholders will demand changes in the management if it is felt that nepotism is responsible for declining performance and falling profits. Yet in a publicly-funded body, where the money just keeps rolling in, and with no criteria by which to judge performance, it becomes almost inevitable that nepotism will flourish unchecked.

Nepotism goes some way to explaining what went wrong with AWEMA. At CEO was Naz Malik; then there was daughter Tegwen, whose salary shot up from £20,469 in January 2008 to £50,052 in August 2011 for no apparent reason; while another who worked for AWEMA was Naz Malik’s daughter-in-law Ourania Chatsiou who, along with her sister-in-law, was, bizarrely, among the creditors when the funding plug was pulled early in 2012. Though the major creditor, the ‘Welsh’ Government, recently wrote off most of the £300,000 it was still owed by AWEMA. Naz Malik’s wife, Bronwen, and son, Gwion Iqbal, were also involved with AWEMA, as ‘volunteers’.

Another thread in the AWEMA saga is the Malik family links to the Labour Party. The patriarch himself had entertained hopes of standing for the party, and could be relied on to use the public profile he’d gained from Labour-funded AWEMA to regularly attack ‘racist’ Welsh nationalists. The aforementioned scion of the House, Gwion Iqbal, stood for the party in the elections to the Notional Assembly of 2011. (There used to be a photo available on the internet of Gwion Iqbal canvassing with First Minister Carwyn Jones, but unsurprisingly it seems to have disappeared.)

Something else that always troubled me about AWEMA was the bland statement made on the Charity Commission website that, in addition to operating in Wales, AWEMA had a presence in Kenya and Pakistan! Remember, we were dealing here with EU and UK money allocated to Wales, and yet no one thought to question why AWEMA claimed to be using that money overseas. One answer of course is that Naz Malik had been born in Nairobi to parents of Pakistani, or pre-Partition Indian, heritage. As had Naz Malik’s sister, Fahro. Or rather, that explains the family’s background; while the lack of concern in official quarters can probably be explained by the Labour Party connection.

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I first became aware of Fahro Malik when I saw a link to a charity called Lynk Reach Ltd (Charity No: 1104188) on the AWEMA website. (Lynk Reach Ltd was removed from the Charity Commission Register on January 14th this year.) Its charitable objective was “To advance the education of children and young people 0 – 25 (sic), primarily but not exclusively in London”. There was also a company called Lynk Reach Ltd (Company No: 04678217) Incorporated on the 25th of February 2003. Strangely, Fahro Malik seems not to have been a director of this company, though among the founders was an Anthony Malcolm Finch, a headmaster, who was Fahro Malik’s husband. Finch wrote an internet restaurant guide and died suddenly in February 2007. Someone who joined the company later was Zoe Samia Malik-Kemp. Lynk Reach Ltd is now dissolved.

A connected company was Lynk Ray Ltd (Company No: 04261595) which pre-dates Lynk Reach Ltd, having been Incorporated on July 30th 2001. The founding directors were Anthony Malcolm Finch and Fahro Malik. This company is also dissolved. Finally, we have Lynk Write Ltd, Incorporated June 19th 2003 (Company No: 04804457). The only two directors were Fahro Malik and Anthony Malcolm Finch. This company is also dissolved. The most recent mention I can find for Fahro Malik is on the London Writers’ Café website, from where the photograph comes.

Fahro Malik has escaped the notoriety of brother Naz and the Swansea branch of the clan, but still leaves behind a failed charity and dissolved companies owing money to some poor bugger. Fahro may also regret involving her other brother, Munir, with Lynk Ray Ltd as a director and company secretary from August 3rd, 2007 until the company dissolved, probably towards the end of June, 2013. That’s right, another brother, of whose existence I was unaware until it was brought to my attention by Stan of Neath Ferret. So what’s Munir’s story?

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Munir Malik is another Labour Party stalwart, and has served a couple of non-consecutive terms as a councillor in Bexley, south east London . . . though since his brush with fame he has been deselected from his Thamesmead East ward. To explain . . .

In addition to the Labour Party, for which he also stood as a candidate in the London region Euro elections of 1999 and 2004, Munir Malik was involved with the Co-op Group, serving as a regional representative before being elevated to the National Board. His wife, Kathryn Smith, another Labour councillor in Bexley, was herself on the National Board of the Co-op Group from 1997 to 2008 and on the Board of the Co-op Bank from 2001 to 2009, where she worked with Paul Flowers, the drug-taking Methodist minister and former Co-op Bank chairman. (Also known as ‘the Crystal Methodist’.) Kathryn Smith left the Co-op Bank in 2009 to stand as Labour & Co-operative candidate for Gravesham in the 2010 General Election. A seat that the Tories had won in 2005 by just 654 votes became a safe Tory seat in 2010, with a majority of 9,312. Labour’s loss of votes may have been connected with Smith being done for drunk driving just days before the poll.

Misfortune continued to dog the Malik-Smith household when Munir Malik was forced to resign from the Co-operative Group Board for telling fibs about his qualifications. To be specific, when running for election to the Board he claimed to be a chartered accountant . . . ‘Oh no he’s not!’ said the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, ‘and only members of the ICAEW are allowed to call themselves chartered accountants’. Munir sought to explain away this little inconsistency by arguing that what he meant to say was that he had been a chartered accountant . . . until he was struck off for bankruptcy in 1991, and had simply forgotten to prefix his qualification with ‘former’. Something of a habit, apparently, for the ICAEW claimed to have previously warned him to stop claiming to be a chartered accountant. Though Malik countered with: “All my working life has been spent as a former chartered accountant”. Um, yes . . . exactly!

All so predictable, and familiar, for as this Daily Mail piece on the Malik / Flowers fiasco puts it, “Malik belongs to what one insider described as a closed group who have come to dominate the Co-op despite its democratic structure of elected boards” and later, “Former City Minister Lord Myners was appointed to assess the Co-op Group’s system of elections and appointments. He resigned last week in the face of bitter resistance from board members but plans to complete his review”. Sound familiar? Of course it does, for this is another dysfunctional and undemocratic element of the great ‘Labour Movement’, another that preaches democracy but has never seen any need to practice it, especially for its internal procedures. We could be talking here about ‘Welsh’ Labour . . . and we soon will be!

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So where are they now? Well, it seems that the Malik womenfolk have retreated to academia and scholarly pursuits. Fahro Malik, as she told the London Writers’ Café website, is probably researching the family’s journey from the Punjab village of Rohtas via Kenya to Wales and England. Tegwen Malik, Naz’s daughter, is carrying out research in biomimetics (don’t ask me!) at Swansea University, while Naz’s daughter-in-law, Ourania Chatsiou, is also at Swansea Uni, doing post-graduate work. Which serves to remind us, yet again, of the close links between the Labour Party and higher education in Wales, and the mutual back-scratching.

Some of you reading this may be ‘uncomfortable’ with the fact that so many of those dealt with belong to ethnic minorities. Get over it! I’m writing about the Maliks not because of their race, colour or religion but because a) they’ve done wrong, b) they all seem to have Labour Party connections, c) despite the shit they get themselves into, they seem to come up smelling of roses, which, d) allows me to expose, yet again, the squalid relationships between the Labour Party, the Third Sector, academe and other spheres of our national life.

So you mustn’t think that nepotism is confined to persons of Pakistani origin from East Africa, no, no, no, no, no. This is a Labour Party problem, something encountered wherever Labour has power and, more importantly, where Labour has control over funding. For we don’t need to leave Swansea Bay to find celebrated current examples of nepotism encouraged or condoned by ‘Welsh’ Labour where the principals are all of impeccably white and Christian backgrounds.

Let us return to Swansea University, and this time the School of Management. There, the Dean, one Nigel F. Piercy, has appointed his son Niall as Pro-Dean for Research, and his love interest, Nikala Lane, as a Reader in Marketing and Strategy. Partly as a result of this blatant nepotism, and partly by being a bit of an arsehole, Piercy has contrived to alienate just about everybody he is supposed to be working with. Yet his position seems secure.

From the Mumbles Road campus one can look across the bay to Port Talbot where, on May 7th, the electors of the Aberavon constituency will be expected to put on their blinkers, empty their minds, and troop like zombies into the polling stations, there they will grasp the stubby brown pencil on a string and come momentarily to life when they see on the ballot paper the magic name KINNOCK. Tears of gratitude will flow as they recall how young Stephen was not parachuted in – as malcontents allege – but walked all the way from his Copenhagen home to vie for the honour of representing Aberavon (‘it is Aberavon, is it?’) and was chosen only after an open and keenly-contested selection process that lasted months.

Because, boys and girls, that’s how the Labour Party operates, and don’t let anybody tell you different. The Labour Party is, to the best interests of Wales . . . what the Ku Klux Klan is to good race relations, what Japanese cuisine is to whales, what the conquistadors were to the civilisations of Mesoamerica, what the iceberg was to the Titanic, what the driving maul is to modern rugby, what the CIA is to privacy, what Rhyl is to Welsh cultural identity, what the Sinclair C5 was to motoring, what China is to Tibet . . . In short, a disaster.

White Water Up Shit Creek

On 13/01/201515/01/2015 By JacIn Colonisation of Wales, EU Funding, Third Sector, Welsh Government21 Comments

Some of you may recall that I recently put out a message on social media asking if anyone had any information on the National White Water Centre on Afon Tryweryn, at Frongoch, near Bala. (Two names there resonant of England’s imperialist past, Tryweryn and Frongoch.)

My reason for asking is that the Centre’s website gives neither Charity Commission number nor Company number; there is no indication of how the centre is run, for not a single individual’s name appears on the website for management, staff, trustees, or anyone else. I searched both the Companies House website and the Charity Commission website but could find nothing for the National White Water Centre. Then I noticed that the e-mail address is info@ukrafting.co.uk so I searched for ‘UK Rafting’, but I drew another blank. (Interestingly, the Centre’s website address is ukrafting.co.uk.) The only conclusion I could draw was that there is a third entity, other than UK Rafting and the National White Water Centre involved, which is nowhere named on the website.

So on Monday morning, bright and early, before driving the missus to work (car not whip), I e-mailed the Centre asking four questions:

1/ You are called the ‘National White Water Centre’. Is that the ‘Wales / Welsh National White Water Centre’, the ‘UK National White Water Centre’ or the ‘England / English National White Water Centre’?

2/ No management is listed, nor is there any mention of trustees, so how is your Centre run?

3/ Are you registered with the Charity Commission, if so, what is your number? Are you registered with Companies House, if so, what is your number?

4/ How are you funded?

Within a few hours I received a telephone call from a suspicious Scotsman named Mark Williamson who apparently works at the Centre but was phoning me from somewhere in “south Wales”. In answer to my e-mailed questions he was able to tell me that the Centre is not a charity but a commercial enterprise, run by “C W Sales and Services”. When I asked what C W stood for, he told me Canoe Wales. So the Centre, on Afon Tryweryn, would appear to be a commercial arm of Canoe Wales. Yet on the Canoe Wales website I could find no mention of the Bala Centre until I used the search facility, and this page came up. On funding. Mr Williamson was rather vague, and when it came to which nation the ‘National’ element in the name refers to, even vaguer. Saying that when the Centre opened (in 1986) it was the only one of its kind in the UK, so presumably it is the UK National White Water Centre.

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So, by Monday afternoon, I had something to get my teeth into, C W Sales and Services. The Companies House website told me that this PLC was Incorporated 06.11.2012 and its Company Number is 08282630. On the Companies House website I also found, Canoe Wales (Incorporated 09.03.1990, Co. No. 02478971) and Canoe Wales (Commercial) Ltd (Incorporated 02.11.2012, Co. No. 08278776). All three have their registered office at ‘Canolfan Tryweryn, Frongoch, Bala, Gwynedd LL23 7NU’.

Next stop was DueDil for financial and other information that I might have to pay for on the Companies House website. First, CW Sales and Services Ltd., to which Mr Williamson had directed me. Without getting bogged down in figures, the company is not healthy with, at 30.03.2014, net current liabilities of £164,131. The current directors are David William Wakeling and Andrew Jeremy Booth, and the company is wholly owned by Canoe Wales.

Moving on to Canoe Wales itself, the accounts are overdue at Companies House but the most recent figures, at 31.03.2013, show net worth at £199,786, down from a high of £542,036 at 31.03.2008. (The net worth may in part be attributable to property or land as Canoe Wales has two outstanding mortgages.) The current directors are David William Wakeling, Glyn Royston Stickler, Alan John Baker, Emma Aldridge, Andrew Jeremy Booth and Paul Donovan. (More info available here.)

The most recent filed accounts confirm what Mr Williamson told me, “As at 1st April 2013, commercial trading activities and the operation of the white water centre at Canolfan Tryweryn were transferred to CW Sales and Services Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary”. The accounts also showed that two of the directors had made loans to Canoe Wales, David Wakeling £45,000 and Emma Aldridge £10,000. “Government grants” amounted to £222,736. Despite the white water canoeing and the educational angles promoted on the website and elsewhere the accounts show that the largest source of income is “rafting”, which I suspect is little more than stag parties, supermarket middle management on beery ‘bonding’ courses, and Islamist terrorists having fun, which makes the White Water Centre at Frongoch little more than another insulting ‘Playground Wales’ tourist business. The SW of course refers to Sport Wales, public money, yours and mine. (Click on panel above to enlarge.) The DueDil pages for Canoe Wales also suggest there is an adverse credit report available. I don’t feel the need to pay the £11.99 requested to tell me that Canoe Wales is heading up Shit Creek.

Finally, Canoe Wales (Commercial) Ltd. The only directors are Wakeling and Booth and the company is 100% owned by Canoe Wales. I was unable to get financial figures as, according to DueDil, the company did not trade during year ending 31.03.2013 and the most recent accounts, for y/e 31.03.2014, are still being processed.

When looking through the information on Canoe Wales I noticed that there was another company mentioned as being part of the group. This was Rescue 3 (UK) Ltd, Registered at a Manchester address with the Company Number 04613689 and Incorporated 10.12.2002. The directors at the time the liquidators were appointed in August 2013 were Paul Eamon O’Sullivan, Philip Blain, David William Wakeling and Ashley James Charlwood. Familiar names such as Baker, Aldridge and Stickler abandoned the sinking canoe 31.03.2013. The lack of white water facilities in Manchester meant that Rescue 3 (UK) Ltd took advantage of the Frongoch Centre and other facilities in Wales. The company’s website is closed but the company almost certainly had some connection with Rescue 3 Europe. The folded company had a share issue of 50,000 £1 shares and was wholly owned by Canoe Wales, which obviously took the hit when Rescue 3 (UK) Ltd folded. Explained in the CW accounts thus (click to enlarge):

Let’s recap. Canoe Wales started life in 1990 as the Welsh Canoeing Association, explained here in the Document of Incorporation. Its purpose to represent canoeists in Wales. Though I couldn’t help noticing that this first document lists among its objects: “To act as the Association governing the sport and recreation of canoeing in Wales on behalf of the British Canoe Union“. How often have we read something like that? Then, at a meeting held on October 5th 1996, at the Welsh Institute of Sport in Cardiff, it was decided that henceforth the Management Council would be known as the Board of Directors with Council Members becoming Directors and all the other attendant changes. (Click here for details.) The Chairman at this meeting, also the Chairman of the Association, was a Mark Charlton. Blain was elected Vice-Chairman and Wakeling Treasurer. I suspect that the name was changed to Canoe Wales in November 2008. One question someone may be able to answer is, if the Welsh Canoeing Association wasn’t formed until 1990 who opened the White Water Centre at Frongoch in 1986?

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What we have with Canoe Wales is a model I have encountered many times before. To begin with, there is the parent body, all fluffy and lovable, doing wonderful things with kiddies, the disabled and the disadvantaged, run by frightfully nice people with silly names and rings in assorted orifices. This set-up relies for its very existence on hefty dollops of public funding, for Wales is a wealthy country with money to spare. Problems start when those running these Third Sector outfits see themselves as entrepreneurs (a word for which there is no equivalent in Welsh, by the way), and they set up ‘trading arms’ and branch out in other ways. A good example would be the one and only Naz Malik, who was not only operating in Wales but also, as this Charity Commission page tells us (click to enlarge), in Kenya and Pakistan! Why was he allowed to operate outside of Wales with Welsh public funding? Was I the only one to notice this? But as I say, it doesn’t really matter because Wales is so wealthy.

The status of these offshoots can vary. Some will be wholly owned by the parent company, others will be free-standing private companies, with any profits going to the directors who, in a parallel dimension, are also the officials of the publicly-funded body. These private offshoots will invariably use facilities and equipment owned by the parent body and paid for out of the public purse. I was introduced to this angle a couple of years ago when told about a women’s ethnic minority charity in Cardiff, I believe the name began with the letter B. The problem was that the husband of the woman running the show had a private company doing very similar work, and they saw no problem in him using the equipment and facilities of the charity that had been bought with grants from the ‘Welsh’ Government and other sources. But they were both well connected in the Labour Party and so nothing was done about it. In fact, the husband was ‘promoted’ to run another charity in the Valleys.

The next problem encountered is entirely predictable. It invariably transpires that our Third Sector grant-grabbers are not the next Richard Branson (unless they’re replicating Beardie’s success in space tourism). This results in spin-offs hitting the rocks, with considerable sums of money having to be written off, as in the case of Resue 3 (UK) Ltd. So who covers these losses? Are they paid for out of grants to the parent body? Perhaps the bigger question is, who keeps track on behalf of the funders of where the money goes, and how it’s used, especially when the body to which the grant is given has spawned a number of offshoots that do not themselves qualify for grants? The question is partly rhetorical, because I am one hundred per cent certain that there have been many examples of funding being misused in this way. But as with Malik’s ‘Today Swansea, tomorrow the world’ approach, no one seems to care. It would be too embarrassing for those giving out the grants to have all these cases exposed.

Something else I noticed while wading through the Canoe Wales paperwork is that they’ve changed their auditors four times, or rather, the auditors have resigned. It happened in 1999, 2002, 2013 and 2014. It may be nothing, but losing two auditors in the past couple of years may suggest something more than carelessness. Were I a funder I would certainly be asking questions.

In conclusion, I suspect that Canoe Wales is breaking up on the rocks of mismanagement and over-ambition, kept afloat only with public funding (and loans from the directors!). This funding from Sport Wales is presumably given because it’s believed Canoe Wales fulfils some educational or other worthy role. But as the accounts make clear, the bulk of the punters come for the fun and games of rafting (as the website URL suggests) – so why are large amounts of Welsh public funding being used to keep open a water ride for drunken jollying that probably employs no Welsh people and lies so close to Capel Celyn? Insult piled upon insult. Canoe Wales is an expensive failure that should not receive another penny from the Welsh public purse. Pull the plug!

*

FOOTNOTE: One reason I enjoy doing posts like this is that once you start digging there’s just no telling what you’ll unearth. This case being a perfect example. For when I started digging into the background of David Wakeling, to find out what his day job was, and how he could afford to loan Canoe Wales £45,000, I discovered that he owns Toucan Systems of Abertillery, Company No 02068869, which manufactures high-spec electronic components. Another director is Mark Williamson, the Scotsman I spoke with on the telephone. Mr Williamson is also a director of Beaufort Tenants Management Ltd of Monmouth, Company No 02847525. So was Williamson recruited into Toucan because Wakeling knew him through Canoe Wales, or vice versa?

Perhaps even more interesting was another name on Toucan’s list of previous directors (April 2001 – May 2003) – a Ms Pippa Bartolotti, self-styled leader of the equally self-styled ‘Wales Green Party’. What a small world! Some Greens suggest that Ms Bartolotti is not what she seems, that she is persona grata with the Israeli authorities and that she has been involved with companies connected with the military. Toucan is such a company. The woeful ‘protests’ she organised for the NATO summit in Newport last September did nothing to lift the cloud of suspicion hanging over that head of wild, abundant hair.

All of which raises the possibility that Canoe Wales is indeed a dead duck financially, but is being kept open for reasons that cannot be stated.

Naz Malik and Awema: The Real Charges

On 08/09/201429/03/2016 By JacIn Third Sector, Welsh Labour, Welsh Media5 Comments

On August 28th at Swansea Crown Court Naz Malik, former CEO of race industry charity Awema, was found not guilty on two charges of fraudulently paying the charity’s cheques into his own account. A third charge, that he used Awema money to pay a life insurance policy, was not proceeded with.

The real issue never was that Naz Malik might have had his hand in the till, consequently this misguided prosecution was, at best, a distraction, with the danger that Malik’s acquittal will be interpreted as a vindication of Awema and the system that has created so many Awemas. This would be both wrong and dangerous.

I first encountered Naz Malik back in the late 1990s before his ambitions went national. He was then running the Swansea Bay Racial Equality Council. I was struck by the fact that he regularly came out with silly statements that had little to do with racism and everything to do with politics. Specifically, he would suggest that Welsh nationalism – and presumably Plaid Cymru – was inherently racist. A little checking soon revealed that Malik was a Labour Party stalwart, and even hoped to be a candidate at either Assembly or Westminster level, as did his children. Leading me to believe there was a quid pro quo arrangement that saw the local authorities on the Bay (Swansea, Neath Port Talbot) fund Malik in return for him putting the boot into them wicked nashies.

*

As regular readers will know, I have, for many years, been a consistent critic of Malik, Awema and the system that gave birth to Awema. Unfortunately my pre-2010 posts are now lost due to Google pulling the plug on my old blog for no good reason. (So avoid Google Blogger unless you want the same fate to befall you!) Even so, I have enough information to ask the following questions.

After warnings in 2003 and 2007 that things were not right at Awema, why did the ‘Welsh’ Government continue funding the organisation? (In fact, there were 19 warnings from the Wales Audit Office!)

What justified Malik increasing his daughter Tegwen’s annual salary from £20,000 to £50,000 in the space of three years? Or rather, why did those funding Awema not ask this question at the time?

Did Naz Malik ever have the authority to unilaterally increase his own salary and benefits package?

Why did no one in the ‘Welsh’ Government think it strange that they were funding a ‘Welsh’ charity that, on the Charity Commission website, claimed to also be operating in Kenya and Pakistan, using EU funding allocated to be spent within Wales?

Given the known problems with the Malik family’s running of Awema was it wise for Labour to have Naz Malik’s son, Gwion Iqbal Malik, as a candidate in the May 2011 Assembly elections, and for First Minister Carwyn Jones to be seen canvassing with him? (Surely this should have been vetoed?)

Why did no one wonder what the link might have been between Awema and Malik’s sister Fahro’s (now defunct) charity Lynk Reach Ltd? Or whether that connection was right and proper? (I’m told she was born in the same city, Nairobi, and in the same month, as Peter Hain. Funny old world!)

Well over seven million pounds of largely EU funding was squandered on Awema. As part of a wider system of Labour Party patronage that then enables local clients beholden to the party, like Naz Malik, to oversee their own systems of self-enrichment, patronage and nepotism. A veritable pyramid of corruption. So lucrative is this racket that once it became clear late in 2012 that Awema’s days were numbered a replacement sprang up, just a few streets away, in the form of Race Council Cymru.

*

I’m afraid my home town is getting a bad reputation for third sector corruption. In June this year I had to report on the charity MEWN. In more recent posts, The Impoverishment of Wales and Ancestral Turf, I have dealt with another Swansea-based charity, YMCA Wales. There had been rumours for a few years that this was a disaster waiting to happen. In fact, and with my – ahem – customary perceptiveness, I wrote about YMCA Wales in July last year in YMCA ‘Wales’: Another Trojan Horse At The Trough.

YMCA Cymru’s chief executive, Mo Sykes, went missing in July, the trustees placed the organisation in receivership, while the ‘Welsh’ Government – perhaps hoping to appear decisive for once – called on DePlod to investigate.

Yet the problem isn’t with Swansea, the fault lies with a system that if it’s not designed to attract peripatetic third sector parasites will inevitably have that effect. For the word will quickly spread in their magazines, on their websites, and through the channels of the Guardian readers’ very own freemasonry, Common Purpose, that Wales is a soft touch, money is being showered on any shyster who can deliver a persuasive spiel.

*

In the dock at Swansea Crown Court should have been ‘Welsh’ Labour, not its creature, Naz Malik. It should have been charged with squandering EU and other funding on professional grant-grabbers in order to buy support, while turning a blind eye to how that funding was used, and abused, lower down the food chain. Also in the dock – for this system could never have flourished without it – should have been the self-styled Welsh media, fearful of upsetting the Labour Party and, as a result of that cowardice, betraying the Welsh people.

The real worry is that Wales now has a system that blatantly mis-uses grant aid to fund political patronage, and that this inevitably leads to nepotism, self-enrichment, corruption of all sorts – and yet no one seems to care! This is the real problem with the third sector in Wales. In fact, this sums up the third sector in Wales. And we shall all suffer while this pernicious system endures.

Miscellany: MEWN, Oxbridge, Nathan Gill

On 19/06/201421/06/2014 By JacIn English Nationalism, Swansea, Third Sector, Welsh Labour15 Comments

MEWN: ANOTHER THIRD SECTOR EMBARRASSMENT FOR ‘WELSH’ LABOUR

Another Swansea-based ethnic minorities charity is being investigated by police. This one is Mewn, the Minority Ethnic Womens Network. Funded mainly by EU money dished out by the Welsh European Funding Office (WEFO) this charity is now in liquidation. As it is a charity (No. 1082587) there are a number of documents available on the Charity Commission website. Where we learn, among other things, that the most recent accounts were received on May 6, 95 days late, and that the MEWN secretary is Yvonne Jardine, a Labour councillor in Swansea. UPDATE JUNE 20: Within 24 hours of the original post I learnt that another Labour councillor, Erika Kirchner, resigned as director on May 6. Lucky Erika! Not there when the excrement came into contact with the air-circulatory appliance! Update ends. In fact, there seems to have been a rather curious relationship altogether between the Labour council in Swansea and MEWN.

For example, and I quote now from a document issued by Swansea council: “MEWN have had their Payroll run through the Council for a number of years. The arrangement is that the Council pays their staff through our Payroll system, and MEWN reimburse the Council. Therefore due to MEWN going into administration the Council is now one of the Creditors.” How common is such an arrangement? MEWN is also registered with Companies House, Number 03965481. From a ‘Welsh’ Government letter to AMs we learn that MEWN was gazetted on June 16th, but there is no word on who initiated the liquidation.

One entry in the accounts that caught my eye was the piece about staff costs (panel, click to enlarge). You will see that between 2012 and 2013 staff costs increased from £129,479 to £235,570. I suppose this massive increase in workload is attributable to the Swansea race riots and the subsequent pogroms (which went largely unreported outside the city).

UPDATE JUNE 20: Things are becoming a little clearer, though no clearer on what exactly happened to bring about the downfall of MEWN Swansea. What I’ve now learnt is that until last year there was another outfit, based in Cardiff, called Minority Ethnic Womens Network Cymru (Mewn Cymru) which operated “throughout Wales” . . . as did, according to the Charity Commission, the Swansea-based outfit. Were they in competition?

According to the Companies House website (click on panel to enlarge), the Cardiff crew was dissolved on January 14 this year. But it was in reasonable financial health so I assume that what happened was that someone pointed out that having two organisations with the same name, doing the same work, was a pretty obvious example of the kind of duplication for which the Third Sector is rightly condemned, and so some time last year the two merged. This would account for the increase in staff and associated costs of MEWN Swansea. Update ends.

The fate of MEWN will inevitably bring back memories of AWEMA, another Swansea-based, Labour-linked outfit in the business of ~~milking EU funding~~ promoting ethnic minorities. It may be worth starting the long trawl through what I’ve written on AWEMA from this post of November 2012, which mentions MEWN. I should warn you that these posts come from my old Google blog, and may be incomplete due to Google denying me access to transfer them to my new blog.

I earlier mentioned Councillor Yvonne Jardine, a Labour councillor for Morriston. Councillor Jardine is a BME activist of Afro-Caribbean origin, and yet another Labour councillor with no local roots. I have written many times about Swansea’s non-local Labour Party councillors . . . the Scouse leader (and his wife); the students; the English ex-MP Trotskyite and his Austrian wife; the West Brom fan with responsibility for the Swans’ Liberty Stadium, and many others. (Just type ‘Swansea council’ into Search at the top of the sidebar.) There will come a time in the not-too-distant future, when the veterans of the genuinely local Labour Party, Byron Owen, Robert Francis Davies et al, will have retired and Swansea Labour Party will be just a weird and dangerous collection of drifters, chancers, political opportunists, entryists, kids fresh out of college and single-issue nutters – running a city they know nothing about! My city!

I tell you, boys and girls, the Labour Party in Wales is an empty shell waiting to be cracked. It cannot find local candidates in Swansea and other areas; it relies for votes on folk memory and convincing the stupid that everything wrong with Wales is the fault of the Tories; many of its heartland seats almost went to Ukip in the recent Euro elections . . . all we need to crack the shell is a nationalist party more loyal to Wales than some laughable belief in socialist solidarity . . . or environmental agendas . . . or keeping Wales GM free . . . or sucking up to the metropolitan left-liberal-Green ‘consensus’ . . . In other words, a party nothing like Plaid Cymru.

THE OXBRIDGE CHIMERA

(No, that is not a statue of Huw Lewis at Oxford or Cambridge. That’s just how it came out in the still from the BBC clip)

I see that another non-issue has been revived by the ‘Welsh’ media and the ‘Welsh’ Labour Party (in many respects, one and the same). This time it’s the national shame of so few Welsh youngsters going to Oxford and Cambridge. Read all about it here in this load of bollocks on the BBC Wales website telling us that Paul Murphy MP and one-time Secretary of State to Wales was appointed our ‘Oxbridge Ambassador’ by the ‘Welsh’ Government. Did you know Wales has an Oxbridge ambassador? Nor me. Sad, isn’t it; really sad.

What we have here is yet another example of what Labour does so well – telling us that ‘Everything’s better in England’. (Which of course it is, with Labour running Wales.) Designed to make us see everything English as superior . . . thereby making anyone wanting to put distance between Wales and England a complete fool. In order to amplify this blatantly political message the ‘Welsh’ Government is prepared to subsidise a brain drain while ignoring 99% of Welsh youngsters. It reminds me of my schooldays, when the headmasters of certain local schools were in competition to see who could get the most pupils to Oxbridge every year, as if the rest of their charges were unimportant. God knows I’m no socialist, but there was something distasteful about that back in the ’60s, and ‘Welsh’ Labour promoting the same exclusivity today is equally distasteful. Shame on you!

Here’s an alternative strategy. Improve the higher education sector in Wales; start promoting quality rather than quantity. Treat our universities as places to educate the future of the nation rather than businesses, making loot from piling high third-rate English students and flogging degrees in Asia to anyone with the requisite folding.

NATHAN GILL MEP

Unless you’ve been asleep for the past few weeks you will be aware that our new Ukip MEP has been making the news. (Scroll down to recent posts.) This publicity has generated much interest and prompted a few people to start their own enquiries, I’m glad to say.

Among these is someone who was as intrigued as I was by Gill’s company, Burgill Ltd, having a planning application approved by Hull city council on May 6, 2009 when the company’s petition for liquidation was heard on November 26 the previous year, and the liquidation registered by Companies House on February 12. He suspects laws may have been broken if a) Hull city council was not informed that Burgill had been liquidated or b) if someone was still trading with a liquidated company.

Another mystery for which I would appreciate clarification is the fire on November 5, 2001 (also reported in the posts below). The fire – described by my informant as “suspicious” – was at the disused (possibly converted) Plane Street Methodist Church off Anlaby Road in west Hull. The Hull Daily Mail account describes Nathan Gill as having responsibility for the building in his capacity as “general manager of Kingston Care, based in Holderness Road, east Hull”.

There was certainly a company called Kingston Care extant at that time, but based in York, not Hull. It was in the business of providing ‘lodgings’, and seems to have been run, from their home, by a middle-aged couple named Morris with no other business involvement. Which is odd, because people with a bent for business usually have more than one company to their name; some fail, some succeed. Kingston Care had liabilities of £211,938 in September 2001 which had reduced to just £4,981.00 by August 30, 2002. An insurance pay-out, perhaps?

There cannot be two companies with the same name trading at any one time. So Nathan Gill was either working for the middle-aged couple in York, or else Kingston Care was his (or his family’s) company and the Morrises were allowing themselves to be used as a front. What’s the story?

YMCA ‘Wales’, Another Trojan Horse At The Trough

On 08/07/201322/06/2015 By JacIn Colonialism, Third Sector24 Comments

This post, and my interest in the YMCA, was kicked off by a piece in my local weekly, the Cambrian News. (Click to enlarge.) YMCA Wales wants to build four houses on land it claims it owns in Penrhyndeudraeth; land the locals believe was given to the community in 1918. After reading it I asked myself a couple of questions. By what route did land in Gwynedd become the property of an organisation based in Swansea? But even if the YMCA owns the property, since when has this organisation been involved in property development? No obvious answers presented themselves so I made enquiries into YMCA Wales.

First stop, the YMCA Wales website, and the Annual Report for 2005/6, the earliest available. The most recent being the Report for 2010/11. Now I’m no accountant or auditor, but a few of the figures drew my attention so I extracted them from the Reports to make this little table. (Click to enlarge.) I’d be interested to hear how others interpret these figures, and indeed, the full Accounts. Before leaving the Reports I must say that as we’re in the second half of 2013 the 2011/12 Report should have been available on the website a long time ago. In fact, I get the impression that the website has not been updated for quite some time.

Using the 2011 Report, I tried to find out about the people running YMCA Wales. It wasn’t easy. What quickly became clear is that the staff is overwhelmingly English. Though there seem to be fewer of them listed on the website than in the 2010/11 Report. Most noticeably, the 2011 Report lists four “Housing and Training” Officers, but none are shown on the website. Among those who do appear is Greg Woolley, in the modestly monikered job of “Global Youth Worker”. (Today Swansea, tomorrow the world?)

The composition of the Trustees displays the same bias – one of them, Stephen Harrison, even lives in England. Another, Peter Joig nant, is the man to see about “private housing development”. (Useful for projects like Penrhyndeudraeth.) Though in fairness, and in contrast to the Trustees named in the 2011 Report, the website suggests the YMCA has recruited a couple of indigenes to give some local colour. In addition, the YMCA has had the sense to use the old trick of having a Welsh figurehead, in the ample form of Sir Roger Jones OBE.

So what does YMCA Wales do? Well, it does a lot of things. Some predictable, others not so, and some downright worrying. Let’s start with the holiday business . . . yes, I did say holiday business, outdoor pursuits to be exact. In 2006 the YMCA bought from the Youth Hostels Association Penycwm outdoor centre in Pembrokeshire. The first thing the YMCA did was change the name to ‘Newgale YMCA Outdoor Education Centre’. Predictably, this being the outdoor pursuit business in Wales, the staff at Newgale is almost all English. And to judge from the testimonials on page 10 of the 2011 Report those attending Newgale also come from England. Typical ‘Welsh’ tourism.

The way in which Newgale is used reinforces the suspicion that YMCA ‘Wales’ is yet another Englandandwales outfit that uses Wales in a blatantly colonialist manner: to provide jobs for its English employees, holidays for English delinquents, housing for English criminals (see below) . . . with much of this funded by the Welsh public purse. The suspicion of an England focus was strengthened by a reference on page 9 of the 2010/11 Report to Ofsted. This is the Office for Standards in Education . . . an England-only body. In Wales we have Estyn. Why would a supposedly Welsh organisation be quoting a body that only operates in England?

Young tearaways from Wolverhampton enjoying themselves on the Pembrokeshire coast is bad enough, but I was more concerned to read “YMCA Wales has a partnership with East Jerusalem YMCA and Lebanon YMCA for the past three years”. (Report 2005/6.) What business is it of YMCA Wales to be sticking its nose in a very fraught political situation? Returning to Wales, my worst fears were confirmed when I read about the YMCA’s “partnership” with the National (Englandandwales) Probation Service. “We accommodate those with no local connection, have exhausted most supported housing projects due to their offending behaviour / support needs, and provide move-on from hostels to ensure continuity for those seeking bail or parole”. (Page 7, 2005/6 Report.) The only way to interpret this is that the YMCA is bringing dangerous criminals with no Welsh connections into Wales.

Finally, just how much of Wales does YMCA Wales cover? On the website there is a drop-down list of ‘Local Associations’, but other than a tin shed in Trawsfynydd, none of those listed is north of Aberystwyth. (And nothing in Aberystwyth.) So what about Aberystwyth, Holyhead, Bangor, Llandudno, Rhyl, Wrecsam? I Googled ‘YMCA Rhyl’ and ‘YMCA Wrexham’. These are what came up. (Click to enlarge.) It suggests that the YMCA associations in the north are affiliated to YMCA England! If so, what is the point of YMCA ‘Wales’? And why does the ‘Welsh’ Government fund YMCA branches that are so contemptuous of Wales that they choose to affiliate to YMCA England?

The bottom line is that most of those working for YMCA ‘Wales’ are Third Sector grant-grabbers who moved to Wales when they realised how much public funding was on offer. Claiming to help ‘young people’, the ‘homeless’, people with ‘problems’, etc., etc. In other words, duplicating the work of a dozen or more similar bodies claiming to do the same work with the same funding. Now that the ‘Welsh’ Government has been told by the EU that the next round of Structural Funds must not be wasted on the Third Sector, let us hope that the next few years sees these and all the other carpetbaggers making their way home.

The YMCA Wales empire is – as you might expect – run from the YMCA building on Swansea’s Kingsway. This same building was home until very recently to Awema. So how could the ever-alert Naz Malik, tireless campaigner against ‘racism’, not see the discrimination, exploitation, misuse of public funds, taking place under his very nose? O tempora! O mores!

FOOTNOTE: I’m no nearer understanding what’s going on in Penrhyndeudraeth, but I know quite a bit more about YMCA ‘Wales’. And now, so do you.

UPDATE July 9: I am indebted to Y Cneifiwr for directing me to the Charity Commission website, where he’d found the 2011/2 Report, lodged with the Commission on March 7th. (So why hasn’t it been put up on the YMCA Wales website?) I leave it to others, better qualified, to interpret it.

Though one thing I did investigate was the Flint connection. YMCA Wales has just nine full-time employees. Two in Swansea, one in Cardiff, four at the Newgale YMCA Outdoor Education Centre in Pembrokeshire, and two in Flint. So what do they do in Flint? The answer seems to be that the YMCA is working with an evangelical church providing accommodation for (and doubtless proselytising to) the homeless of Merseyside. Though despite having only nine full-time staff and six part-time, the wage bill for 2011/12 came to £441,174, up from £413,185 in 2010/11 when there were more staff!

Looking at the bigger picture, the YMCA is, as a comment to the original post says, a one-trick pony. Its only real asset, major income stream, and security for bank loan and overdraft, is the Newgale Centre. Other than that it relies on grants, mainly from the Welsh Government, and income from Probation and Bond schemes. So, like a few dozen other Third Sector outfits in Wales, the YMCA uses Welsh public funding to provide holidays for young English delinquents and accommodation for their criminal elders.

It’s a good job Wales is a wealthy country, and can afford this generosity!

Genesis and Demise

On 18/03/201322/01/2014 By JacIn EU Funding, Third Sector, Welsh Government3 Comments

Around the middle of 2010 the Welsh Management launched its Genesis Cymru Wales 2 programme. Yet another ‘back to work’ scheme, this one aimed at female single parents, NEETS and others; the programme partly funded by the European Social Fund and administered by local authorities. Here’s a link to the scheme in Pembrokeshire. Reading the blurb brings on an attack of deja vu because I’ve read it so many times before: the usual mix of pious hopes, unattainable objectives and Third Sector jargon designed solely to justify ~~wasting~~ spending EU funding.

Genesis never delivered what it promised and so it was no surprise when, in January, it was announced that the scheme was closing early after failing to meet its targets. This brought on a Freedom of Information request in which I asked:

How many groups, bodies, schemes etc in Wales are being funded by the Welsh Government or other bodies to ‘help people back into employment’?

How many people are employed by these organisations?

How many of these running and employed by ‘back to work’ agencies are Labour Party members?

The reply may be found below (click to enlarge). In the 2007 – 2013 Programme the Welsh European Funding Office (WEFO) funded no less than 30 schemes across Wales. Genesis was targeting: “females”, “lone parents (male and female)”, “individuals who find it difficult to find or access work due to health problems”, “16 – 18 olds who are not studying, training or working”, “individuals over the age of 50”, and “black and ethnic minority groups”. Fairly comprehensive – so who were the other 29 schemes targeting? And why do we pay taxes for Jobcentres and other government agencies to do the same work?

In fairness, I didn’t expect an answer to question 3 (though I bet it could quite easily be calculated). But the answer to question 2 is rather worrying. We are dealing here with large amounts of EU funding administered by the Welsh Management. This money has to be accounted for. The EU will want to know how it was spent; this I know from having dealt with WEFO myself. Yet I’m being told that, ” . . . the Welsh Government does not hold information on how many people are employed by these organisations . . . If this cavalier approach to using someone else’s money is typical of how things are done then it explains a lot.

First, it helps us understand the chronic duplication in these ‘back to work’ schemes, and explains their abject failure to deliver. Next, distributing funding after the manner of an inebriated seafarer is why Wales is so attractive to charlatan brothers and sisters from over the border. Then, after reading this, doesn’t it become easier to explain Awema and other rip-offs? Finally, what the Genesis episode shows us yet again is how EU funding has been squandered on Labour’s cronies and Leftist or New Age ‘schemes’ that have done nothing to improve the condition of of our people.

Footnote: Consider also this scheme, targeting exactly the same groups as Genesis. Is it a successor to Genesis, or was it running simultaneously? And is this the same group in an earlier incarnation? If so, how did a bunch of holistic ‘healers’, helping victims of sexual abuse, graduate to the big time and the ‘back to work’ racket?

AWEMA Reborn?

On 23/11/201218/06/2014 By JacIn Third Sector, Welsh Labour3 Comments

The news that AWEMA probably has a successor was dropped into my lap today by a combination of ennui and serendipity. Well, when I say ‘successor’, what I mean is, we have a new all-Wales anti-discrimination body representing the black and minority ethnic population (BME). It couldn’t really be a new AWEMA, could it? I mean, Naz and the gang are irreplaceable . . . God! I miss ’em! Will we ever see their like again? (Almost guaranteed, given how the Labour Party and the Third Sector operate in Wales!)

The new outfit of which I speak is Race Council Cymru (RCC) and, like AWEMA, it is based in Swansea. In fact, just a few streets away from Castell Malik. (Though according to the website Swansea is in ‘West Glamorgan’ . . . which went out of existence in 1995.) The website suggests RCC is a somewhat new organisation, for it’s very light on information and almost devoid of history. Which should be no surprise if it is replacing AWEMA. Because this might mean it was formed in a bit of a hurry. Anyway, what does the website tell us?

Well, for a start, RCC seems to be run by a ‘Volunteer CEO’, Mrs Uzo Iwobi CBE, a Nigerian with a background in the police, the Commission for Racial Equality, and academe. The profile given on the website does not say if she’s a Labour Party member. If ‘Volunteer’ means unpaid then this suggests an attempt to avoid the, er, ‘misunderstandings’ of the recent past. But if Mrs Iwobi isn’t being paid, then how does she earn her crust, and does she have staff to help her run RCC? (Worth asking of course because AWEMA gave staffing arrangements and salary levels the attention they deserve. Old Naz was firm about that.) Nor could I find information about funding. For even if Mrs Iwobi is giving her time for nothing, there must be expenses; if only hers, plus office rental, website, and other incidentals.

Information was provided on the Board of Trustees. These are: Judge Ray Singh CBE (Chair); ‘Chief'(?) Mel Jehu, retired career cop (Vice Chair); Mrs. Norma Glass MBE (General Secretay); and Mr. Richard Davies (Treasurer). How nice to see a member of our Jewish community represented on the Board. The following have been co-opted to the Board: Mrs. Mutale Merrill OBE (CEO, BAWSO); Ms Rocio Cifuentes (Director, EYST); Mrs Sujatha Thaladi (Director, MEWN Cymru); Mr. Martin Jones JP (Adviser to the Board of Trustees).

As an example of the slipshod nature of the RCC website, under the photo for each Trustee we are invited to ‘Read More’, but no further information is provided for either Ms Cifuentes or Mr Jones; and for a couple of the others it merely repeats what’s on the main Trustees page. But some of these names rang bells. Rose Mutale Nyoni Merrill is the wife of Travers Merrill, Chief Executive of the troubled Rhondda Life Ltd, mentioned recently in this post. Ms Cifuentes has also caught my eye. Unsurprisingly, Mrs Thaladi’s outfit, MEWN Cymru, has also been mentioned on this blog. It begins to look like just another round of BME / Third Sector musical chairs.

I only found out about RCC through an item today on the BBC Wales website (which disappeared completely, even from the regional page, soon after I tweeted about it!). Anyway, this story concerned a report compiled for RCC by Professor Heaven Crawley, Director of the Centre for Migration Policy Research at Swansea University. Think about that for a minute – an organisation wanting certain ‘findings’ asks an academic who also stands to benefit from those same findings to conduct research on its behalf. And guess what? Prof. Crawley found that there is indeed a lot of racism in Wales. (Example: People ‘looking’ at women wearing the hijab. Or, “My friend, right . . .”.) Cue filling out grant application forms and smooching politicos.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pissed off with people moving to Wales, often getting red carpet treatment, or being given lucrative and prestigious publicly-funded posts – only for them to turn on us. It doesn’t matter whether they are ranting bigots or retiring academics; too many seem determined to portray us Welsh in the worst possible light, because it serves a certain agenda. Given away by the enthusiasm with which the Labour Party, the anti-Welsh Labour Party – often using the Third sector – joins in the attacks.

Don’t dismiss what I’m saying out of hand because you happen to be on the Left, and perhaps view me as a reactionary oddball. Just give some thought to the intellectual continuum that allows ‘respectable’ academic research such as that done by Professor Crawley to give succour to creatures like this (play video). For isn’t it a proven fact that we Welsh are intolerant and racist! (Not forgetting, “ignorant bastards”.)

That’s how it works: some drunken Jack makes an out-of-order remark to a Muslim woman and this and similar incidents are amassed and inflated by Labour’s Third Sector and supportive academics into a damning corpus of evidence against a whole nation; done in order to reduce resistance to further English colonisation and to undermine demands for more control over our national life. I can see it, which is why I will speak out. But it seems to be a bit of a blind spot for our patriotic Left.

Naz Malik, AWEMA: Not Over Yet?

On 19/10/201222/01/2014 By JacIn Third Sector3 Comments

The Wales Audit Office (WAO) has produced its report into the calamity known as AWEMA, or the Malik family business, that swallowed up £7.15m of public funding. Here is the BBC website account of the saga, together with a contribution from the Assistant Auditor General, Anthony Barrett. The WalesOnline account can be found here.

Both accounts agree the WAO has dismissed allegations of political interference, or protection, that had been made due to the Malik family’s links with the Labour Party. So I hope this now puts the matter to rest. I don’t expect anyone to make this scurrilous suggestion again. Moving on . . . An interesting reference in the WalesOnline account (absent from the BBC version) was to the “equalities unit”. Using the search engine on the Welsh Government website I could only find references to the ‘Welsh Local Government Association’s Equalities Unit’ in reports such as this.

From which it would appear that the Equalities Unit is an arm of the (Labour Party controlled WLGA) yet funded by the Welsh Government, to do . . . what exactly? Well, one of its roles appears to be informing, or, in the case of Jane Hutt, misinforming, Welsh Government Ministers. This strikes me as a bloody odd set-up, what do readers think?

Whatever the arrangement, the Equalities Unit seems to be answerable to, or otherwise connected with, Jane Hutt, the bubbly and vivacious Minister for Finance. Staying on the Welsh Government website I poked around (as is my wont) to see what else I could turn up. This (left) was one of the first rib-ticklers. It talks of bisexual people as if they have a problem. I have bisexual friends who would find that funny. Possibly insulting. And how many transgender people are there in Wales? But look at the wording – “large gaps in the equalities evidence base . . . prioritise the filling of those gaps . . .”. In other words, Look for a ‘problem’ to keep the funding flowing.

Elsewhere I found other gems. Such as this load of old bollocks (right) which seems to suggest that gender, religion, age, even being married, are further ‘problems’ that can only be solved by big dollops of lucre to those in the Equalities Unit . . . for how else are they to fill the gaps in the equalities evidence base? Human nature being what it is I can understand the shysters of the Third Sector trying it on with nonsense like this. What I can not understand is politicians accepting and funding this deception. Still wondering I moved on and encountered another vein of politically correct enlightenment.

Take Objective 1. What the hell are “protected characteristics”? I’ve got a big nose – can I get it protected? Will the Equalities Unit take up my case? Objective 6 is an absolute – though doubtless unappreciated – insult. The ‘needs’ being prioritised are in reality those of the people producing this rubbish, those who have created an industry out of identifying and capitalising on ‘differences’ that most of those with these ‘differences’ did not realise qualified as ‘protected characteristics’ – and could therefore be exploited – until told by those who had built up a cottage industry of identifying these ‘problems’ – and all sustained with public funding. The prize though must go to Objective 3. We all want to see fewer youngsters – NEETs (Not in Employment, Education or Training) – doing absolutely nothing. But the way to do it is not by pumping money into the Third Sector to rent some place, then fill it with pool tables and computer games to keep these kids off the streets, but by creating real jobs for them to do! But then, that would remove part of the the justification for funding the Equalities Unit. Giving the Equalities Unit, and similar Third Sector leeches, a vested interest in undermining the creation of genuine employment. Funny old world innit!

Obviously I haven’t yet read the WAO report, but one thing I found worrying in both the press reports I’ve used here is that neither mentioned the source of the money squandered on AWEMA. Anyone reading these reports might therefore conclude that the funding came from the Welsh Government, probably from the block grant received from London. Wrong. The bulk of the funding given to the Malik family came from the EU. As is shown by the clip (below) taken from the Wales European Funding Office (WEFO) website. The clip is dated February this year, when WEFO stopped funding AWEMA.

So the Wales Audit Office report might not close the book on AWEMA after all. For if I was working for the EU, in say, regional funding, then I might start taking an interest in how the money we had given to Wales to create jobs had been wasted. Obviously the money created and sustained jobs for the Maliks, but I think the EU would have expected more. And this becomes more important seeing as next year we are to be surveyed again in order to prove that we are now poorer than Slovakia, and so qualify for another tranche of top-whack funding. Not all of Wales, obviously . . . just those areas that voted Yes in the 1997 devolution referendum.

And who knows, maybe some continental cynic who doesn’t need to show respect to the Labour Party might conclude that the comrades do not emerge blameless from this scandal. Anyone wishing to ensure that the facts reach the right man should write to Johannes Hahn the Commissioner responsible for Regional Funding. I have.

In conclusion, let me assure you that I am not the callous, reactionary, sexist, bastard some would paint me. But surely, the Third Sector is now ready for scrapping; with the money saved used to provide real jobs. Because this ‘equalities’ racket is nothing more than people making a publicly-funded career out of their skin colour, their religion, their sexuality . . . or exploiting these “protected characteristics” when they appear in others. I mean, just think . . . if Naz had gone for “gender re-assignment” he could have ticked yet another box. And made himself almost untouchable!

Jac o' the North

Tag: Awema