Though this is not quite the piece I originally promised. Perhaps I’ll return to the sweat lodges and other joys in the ‘Bhutan of Wales’ (“ample parking space“) at some later date.
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ABOUT MUCH MORE THAN NEWTS
What you have to understand about modern environmentalism, certainly in Wales, is that it’s no longer fleece-jacketed innocents protecting red squirrels or tagging birds. It is now intensely political. And financially lucrative.
Lucrative, as long as it promotes a certain interpretation of the world.
Which means, in practice, that environmentalists work for BlackRock and other Globalist corporations; Bill ‘jabs and bugs’ Gates, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum.
And even if environmentalists don’t realise it, if they’re just useful idiots, then that don’t matter none – what matters is that they do what they do.
And as I suggested, they’re getting paid handsomely for it. Here’s one example.
Total income for the North Wales Wildlife Trust went up from £1.83m in 2019 to £6.17 in 2023, a rise of 237%. But in the same period, funding from the ‘Welsh Government’ rose from £309,480 to £3,760,000, an increase of 1,115%.
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Similar increases in the funding awarded to the other wildlife trusts, river groups, etc, correlates with the ramping up of the ‘Welsh Government’s war on farmers.
Which meant blaming just about anybody other than Dŵr Cymru for river pollution.
But environmentalists weren’t confining themselves to persecuting cows, and matters scatological; for they were also pushing the anti-car agenda.
Which is fine with me because that’s the raison d’être of environmental groups. But if opposing M4 improvements was ‘Welsh Government’ policy, and if ‘WG’ funded various groups to support that policy, then that puts a different complexion on things.
. . . of climate change and transport specialists . . . led by Dr Lynn Sloman MBE, a transport consultant based in Wales
Despite what the ‘Welsh Government’ wanted us to believe, Dr Lynn Sloman is not ‘based in Wales’; she actually lives in London, where she sits on the Transport for London board, headed by mayor Sadiq Ulez Khan.
Dr Lynn Sloman is, predictably, an anti-car fanatic. And her connection to Wales is a holiday home in Cwm Einion, near Machynlleth. To which she presumably drives.
This impacted on just about every part of the country, and deprived communities of long-awaited and much-needed, improvements. It meant no third crossing of the Menai, no by-pass for Llanbedr, no by-pass for Llandeilo.
This was of course welcomed by both Rachel Sharp, CEO of the officially defunct Wildlife Trusts Wales; and her trusty henchman, Tim Birch, of Extinction Rebellion.
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But there is one issue on which environmentalists could and should be more vocal.
We’ll ignore the energy consumed in manufacturing wind turbines, then the damage inflicted on the environment from shipping them to Wales; widening roads, felling trees, ripping out hedgerows to get them to where they’re being erected.
Instead’ let’s just focus on the damage they cause in situ.
Wind turbines destroy peat deposits. They scar hillsides with access roads and cable trenches. Hundreds of pylons are needed to carry whatever’s generated in Wales to England. The turbine blades kill birds, bats, and all manner of insects.
There are also threats to human health from infrasound, flicker, and worrying over your home losing value due to its proximity to wind turbines.
Yet environmentalists have little to say against wind turbines. That’s because their ‘outrage’ can be switched off and on, as required, by their paymasters.
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THE ‘FOXES’ OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
We often hear: “Farming occupies around 90% of ‘our’ land“, as if it’s something undesirable. It’s very revealing, because those who say it seem genuinely horrified that so much of Wales belongs to hairy-arsed peasants.
Smith wants us to believe that carbon emissions increase global temperatures when there is no link whatsoever, and then rather gives away his own position on SFS with:
Trees, it seems, aren’t welcomed by most farmers.
This obsession with the amount of land held by farmers seems most prevalent among politicians and middle class enviro-grifters who want Welsh farmers off the land they and their corporate patrons covet.
I say that because no one has ever come up to me in a pub, a supermarket, or any other setting, grabbed me by the lapels and shouted – ‘Isn’t it bloody awful that farmers have so much land?‘
Nobody. Honestly!
Which makes the support these spivs get from Welsh socialists difficult to fathom. And the support from those socialists who claim they want independence inexplicable.
Maybe this subservience can be explained by something I read last week. Someone was trying to explain why Sinn Féin has fallen for the Globalist-Woke-Left agenda.
It is a lingering symptom of what Ruairi Ó Bradaigh once described as the intellectual inferiority complex of men who were absurdly impressed by . . . bourgeois lefties and liberals
I think that explains a lot of what we see in Wales. Particularly the insecure among us, who can’t resist a bit of flannel delivered in a ‘posh’ accent.
What Ruairi Ó Bradaigh called “the intellectual inferiority complex” always lurks in the Welsh psyche. And it seems to afflict socialists far more than it affects those of us on the political right.
Welsh leftists like to see themselves as ‘progressive’, which then leaves them wide open to the blandishments of the ‘foxes’ Malcom X refers to here.
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ANOTHER WARNING FROM IRELAND
For some time now I’ve been paying closer than usual attention to what’s happening in Ireland, where the uniparty establishment has enthusiastically signed up to the Globalist agenda. It’s been open borders, war on farmers, and recently, referendums that hoped to re-define ‘woman’ and ‘family’.
Both referendums were heavily defeated, and the preening, obnoxious, Varadkar soon resigned in the hope of salvaging his political reputation. Because he fears there’s worse to come as the people wake up and fight back. (Something the Irish have a history of doing.)
And the Irish people are waking up. And demanding a return to sanity. Especially when they look around and see who’s been allowed into their country.
For example, one result of open borders is that Ireland is now home to the Nigerian Black Axe gang, which deals in romance fraud and other online scams . . . with a little murder, drugs, and extortion thrown in.
Just think about that. A Nigerian criminal network is actually based in Ireland. How the hell was that allowed to happen!
Well, as I just mentioned, because the Irish establishment obeys the Globalist agenda; and no-questions-asked immigration is an integral part of that agenda, designed to destabilise western societies.
You can read the whole publication if you like. But the opening paragraph tells you exactly where it’s going. And how it’s justified.
Moving Together . . . a commitment in the Climate Action Plan 2023 . . . to alleviate the impacts of car-dependency
Someone wants the Irish countryside emptied, and populations concentrated in urban areas. Now why should that be?
Wales may be heading in the same direction.
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THE WAR ON CARS II
I say Wales may be headed in the same direction because the ‘pieces’ are already there, we just need to put them together to see the bigger picture.
Earlier, we looked at environmentalists, funded by the ‘Welsh Government’ or Globalist corporations and multi-billionaires, campaigning against road improvements. In league with former Sustrans rep in Wales, and until so very recently, chauffeur-driven deputy minister for climate change, Lee Waters.
Waters welcomed the halt on new road projects with:
As the review points out the by-pass that was demanded to relieve congestion often ends up leading to extra traffic, which in time brings further demands for extra lanes, wider junctions and more roads
I suggest Waters and his allies stand for half an hour one summer day outside the ‘Vic’ in Llanbedr, or The Castle in Llandeilo; and ponder that the shit forming a skin on their iced tea, the shit they’re also inhaling, comes from cars and trucks in low gear inching their way through a traffic bottleneck.
And it could all be avoided with a by-pass!
Consider this, gentle reader: the man who can ignore the effects of low-gear emissions on human health – because it serves an element of the agenda – can also impose 20mph speed limits, guaranteed to increase harmful emissions – and justify doing so on health and safety grounds!
But when it can be used to serve another element of the agenda, air quality becomes a consideration. For Nicola Lund recently reminded us in ‘Message to Wales – On Yer Bike (Part 2)‘ that the Welsh Government’ is also promising air quality legislation, and a ‘national road user charging framework’.
So where might that lead, if we put it all together?
Let’s look at Llanbedr, which sits on the A496 running up the coast from Barmouth. A busy road, and especially so in summer.
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With a combination of no by-pass, air quality legislation, and a ‘national road user charging framework’ in place, many people will give Llanbedr a miss. Some will avoid that road altogether.
The map above shows that travellers between north and south will still have the A470, so the effects would be very localised, but highly damaging.
There’s one more consideration I want to throw into the mix.
I have consistently supported plans to raise council tax on holiday homes and restrict numbers of holiday lets*. And I will continue to back measures that might return domestic properties to local use. But . . .
Tourism means cars, camper vans, etc. So are the measures against the worst excesses of tourism doing the right thing for the wrong reason? By which I mean, are they just part of the bigger plan to restrict car journeys in Wales?
Putting it all together – and irrespective of the stated justifications – what we’ve just looked at will result in a seriously damaged rural economy, and could lead to the kind of rural clearances being talked about in Ireland and elsewhere.
Yet it all fits perfectly with the Globalist-environmentalist agenda.
Where the Globalists have been clever is in funding or promoting ideas, organisations and lobbies that push their agenda.
This includes, cyclists, vegans, renewable energy enthusiasts, advocates of CBDC, and of course, environmentalists.
We’re at a stage now where an environmental lobby is waging war on our farmers while also working with the ‘Welsh Government’ to make us view cars as something evil, to be done away with.
But what’s being targeted is not really farmers and motorists, but land and freedoms. Which is the essence of the Globalists’ power grab – promote fear and confusion in order to seize assets, restrict freedoms, and exert control.
As I said earlier, ‘environmentalists’ are no longer fleece-jacketed innocents. So see them for what they really are. Who they work for. And treat them accordingly.
This is a follow-up to last week’s piece on the enviro-shysters blaming farmers for everything wrong with our rivers, and those behind them hoping to get their corporate claws into farmland.
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MERGERS
First, let’s make sure you know where our five wildlife trusts are located. On the image below you can also see the difference in the sizes of the areas they cover.
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Given the other mergers that have taken place over the years it might be worth asking why Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire didn’t join with Breconshire to form a Powys trust? For until 2018 there was a Brecknockshire Wildlife Trust, but then it merged with the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales.
What had been the Welsh umbrella outfit may even have joined the English body as a separate and individual trust. Certainly, that’s what the website seems to tell us.
When the end came for WTW, the funds were distributed to the five trusts, which makes sense. But I was surprised to see an inrush of grants in the final year.
Why was that, and why couldn’t the money have been given directly to the individual trusts? Finally, what the hell is a ‘Strategic Allocation Grant’?
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Anyway, that’s how we got to where we are now, Wales has five wildlife trusts. Also, Wildlife Trusts Wales, existing is some kind of limbo.
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WILD THINGS
Let’s stick with finances, which suggest to me that wildlife trusts have recently been ‘repurposed’. Let me try to explain . . .
There seem to be three main sources of income for wildlife trusts: One is donations or legacies, and a bequest of £1,000,000 in 2003 must have helped keep Brecknock afloat for a while.
The others sources are, either the Lottery (which is little more than disguised UK government funding), and grants and contracts from our ‘Welsh Government’. The table below might help.
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Amazing figures. While total income for the five trusts increased by 133% between 2019 and 2023, for the same period ‘Welsh Government’ funding went up by 760%.
In fact it was more. I didn’t include Radnorshire because I wasn’t sure how to express that increase as a percentage. Should it be 579,620%?
The big jumps in funding are clearly in Radnorshire and the north. In percentage terms Radnorshire really stands out. But why?
One reason may be that the local trust now has a farm, Pentwyn, which is planned to become ‘Wilder Pentwyn‘. The Trust is well-favoured in Corruption Bay, and gets visits from Minister for Rural Affairs Lesley Griffiths (and Gary?), helping her promote the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS).
The SFS demands that all Welsh farms give over 10% of their land for trees, and a further 10% for ‘wildlife habitat’. Farmers are, understandably, resisting. And things may be coming to the boil.
But it could get worse, for in its latest annual report the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust (RWT) demands that by 2030: ” . . . 30% of land and water in Radnorshire is managed in a way that creates extensive natural habitats for a wide variety of species”.
How will RWT achieve that target in just six years, considering it owns only one farm?
And how much input did RWT have to the Sustainable Farming Scheme?
Here’s an interesting group photograph. Unfortunately, I don’t have a date, but it can’t be that old. We’ll work left to right:
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Far left is Martin Wilkie, another environmentalist who’s come to tell us how to look after the country we’ve been looking after for over 2,000 years. Wilkie was with the RWT but has now branched out on his own with Wild Borders Ecology.
Next to him of course is Lesley Griffiths.
In the centre is James Hitchcock, RWT CEO.
To his right is Jenny Chryss, an investigative journalist. I’m told she broke with RWT when the Trust became, as my source put it, “corporate shills“. Chryss now fights Bute’s wind farm plans.
Far right is Rachel Sharp, CEO of Wildlife Trusts Wales (WTW). No friend of farmers, that one.
And talking of WTW, let’s not forget Tim Birch. A few years back he was virtually run out of Derbyshire for his extreme views . . . so he came to Wales, where he was welcomed with open arms by the ‘Welsh Government’.
These are the people deciding the future of rural Wales.
They don’t give a toss about us. For them our country is just one big experiment to see how many of their lunacies our idiot politicians will implement.
What we’ll see with Radnorshire Wildlife Trust at Pentwyn (and with others elsewhere), is that nature reserves will have a few sheep, a couple of cows, a rescued donkey for kiddies to pet – and they’ll be hailed as “the future of farming in Wales“.
In fact, that’s exactly what it says on the website: “A new model farm for the future“.
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I believe Radnorshire has been chosen by the ‘Welsh Government’ for a number of ‘initiatives’, and it’s been thrown open to all-comers.
For example, a source drew my attention to Protect Earth, a charity that’s applied for a grant to plant 14,000 trees at Goytre wood, near Knighton. No matter how it’s dressed up, this is just another carbon sequestration scam – and we’ll pay for it!
Rachel Sharp’s LinkedIn page confirms she’s still with WTW, and we know Tim Birch works with her. How many more work for this non-existent outfit?
Seeing as Sharp and Birch serve as the ‘Welsh Government’s attack dogs I’m beginning to wonder if WTW is now ‘in-house’, funded by Lesley Griffiths and her gang.
Here are three questions for The Wildlife Trusts Wales:
What is the legal status of Wildlife Trusts Wales?
Where does the money to run it come from?
Where can I examine the accounts?
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WHAT BORDER?
A few years back I was surprised to learn that the Shropshire Hills AONB might be extended into Wales. Here’s one reference from 2019. The article also suggests that the current AONB might be elevated to National Park status.
But if it were to cross the border, where would it go?
To help answer that question I’ve been busy on Photoshop. And when you fit the pieces together it makes a lot of sense, it even ties in with what I described earlier.
On the right in the diptych below we see a tourist map of Shropshire with the AONB shaded in darker green, in the south west. While on the left, I have fitted that map into the wildlife trusts map I used earlier.
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Any extension into Wales would affect both Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire, but more so the latter.
Which I’m sure would make Trust CEO James Hitchcock ecstatic. For he is on record as saying: “We’re in the Welsh Marches. The Marches is a mindset and a cultural identity. Nature does not heed boundaries.”
And let’s remember that before crossing the border Hitchcock was CEO of Herefordshire WT. Which presents a puzzle.
When Hitchcock left Herefordshire that trust was pulling down an average of £1.6m a year. By comparison, Radnorshire wasn’t scraping together a third of that. So it could be argued that Hitchcock took a step down when he started his new job 1 February 2021.
Two months after Hitchcock laid out his pens on the CEO’s desk Wildlife Trusts Wales decided to dissolve itself, with the individual trusts joining the English body. Is that just a coincidence?
No.
I believe Hitchcock was recruited to promote the ‘Welsh Government’s agenda. (Maybe a bigger agenda.) And this explains why he and the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust are feted by Lesley Griffiths and other denizens of the Bay.
Yes, I’m flying a kite by theorising on why Hitchcock came to Wales, but extending the Shropshire Hills AONB into Wales came from somewhere else. And it all ties in perfectly with the ‘Wilder Marches’ project.
But plans for new National Parks and AONBs do not end with a cross-border extension of the Shropshire Hills.
You must be aware of the decision to make the Clwydian Range and Dee Valley AONB into Wales’s fourth National Park. Here are some details from Natural Resources Wales.
An argument I’ve heard used to justify the new NP is that the south east has one with Bannau Brycheiniog; the south west has the Pembrokeshire Coast; the north west, Eryri; so it’s only fair that the north east should also have a National Park.
But if the ‘geographical fairness’ argument has been accepted, then there’ll be just one area without a National Park – central Wales. And why not make it a cross-border National Park?
Co-operation, innit? ‘Hands across the Dyke’ an’ all that.
UPDATE: A comment to this blog reminds us that the area covered by the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust and it’s Montgomeryshire neighbour is almost the same as the area of Severn Trent Water.
Given that environmental groups and river ‘saviours’ in other parts of Wales have been used (and funded) to blame farmers, in order to cover up for Dŵr Cymru’s spillages and other misdemeanours, might that also be happening in Powys?
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CONCLUSION
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with National Parks, AONBs, wildlife trusts and nature reserves. But they’re no longer just about protecting landscapes, nurturing flora and fauna. They have been politicised, and funded, to serve other agendas.
She brings Brexit into a truly weird conspiracy theory. Most absurdly she seems to believe that putting our farmers out of business somehow guarantees food security. What do these people have between their ears?
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And what “nature catastrophe“? Things have never been better. Hasn’t she heard that ospreys are nesting on the farm her government bought for £4.25m?
Though we won’t know if they’re coming back, or not, until Vaughan Gething is safely installed as the new Labour leader. Phew!
But they were definitely there last year, oh yes . . . even though nobody saw them. And no photos or videos have emerged.
By “food security” what Rathbone means is an endless supply of free range radishes from the OPD that daddy bought for Guy and Clarissa.
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.
How the other half lives, eh!
I was directed to another Saturday posting on X, this one from Jeremy Clarkson.
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Other people have the same problem, Jeremy. And the explanation is that the ‘Welsh Government’ tells porkies.
Lesley Griffiths, Julie James, Jenny Rathbone et al say they’re saving the planet, fighting a “climate catastrophe“, but in reality they’re forcing farmers out of business so that big corporations can buy the land, and make yet more money, from carbon sequestration, wind farms, and other scams.
With ‘environmentalists’ disguising this land grab and hoping to be rewarded with vast acreages for rewilding and other anti-human activities.
‘Safety’ was just the pretty wrapping – it is ultimately about taking away our cars, and keeping us penned in 15-minute ghettos.
Environmentalism and restoring biodiversity are also pretty wrapping for something more sinister. And it’s not just farmers under attack.
The ‘Welsh Government’ is implementing the Globalists’ de-growth agenda. And among other targets this agenda wants to destroy traditional farming and food production because if they can control the food supply, then the Globalists will control the world.
Don’t let it happen. The farmers’ fight is your fight. Stand with the farmers!
For those of you wondering where Llanbedr is, it’s a village in Eryri, just to the south of Harlech. There is a small airfield between the village and the coast.
Llanbedr has made the news in recent years due to it being cursed by a 17th century bridge carrying the A496 road through the heart of the village. The so-called ‘Welsh Government’ promised the area a bypass, but reneged in November 2021.
Then, in April this year, the Transport Minister, Lee Waters, told locals the ‘Welsh Government’ would now support “sustainable transport measures“. Which seems to have been the 20mph restrictions introduced across Wales a couple of months ago.
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As I went through the previous offerings on Llanbedr I realised what a complicated story it is. So rather than deal with peripheral characters, like the alleged money-launderer of Venezuela and Miami, and various dead-ends, I shall instead focus on the main players, ownership and leasing arrangements, and recent developments.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, I shall proffer a possible explanation for what is reported to be happening at Llanbedr airfield now. And if I’m anywhere near right, then this poses questions for officialdom, especially our ‘Welsh Government’.
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AIRFIELD PURCHASE AND THE FIRST LEASE
The story so far . . .
The airfield was originally a military site, but bought for £700,000 in March 2006 by the Welsh Development Agency, and then passed to the Welsh Assembly. (Here’s the freehold title document.)
The site was leased for 125 years in July 2012 to Llanbedr Airfield Estates LLP (since renamed Snowdonia Aerospace LLP) with the lessee getting loans from the Secretary of State for Defence and the Welsh Assembly Government. (The leasehold title document.)
The first named director of Llanbedr Airfield Estates LLP / Snowdonia Aerospace LLP, in July 2008, was Putney Investments Ltd, registered on the Isle of Man in 1991, and also giving a desirable Gold Coast property as an address.
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A few days later Putney Investments was joined at Llanbedr Airfield Estates LLP by others, including Lee John Paul. But for some reason there’s a four-month gap between the company being launched and the first directors being appointed. Very odd.
Paul had been involved with another Welsh airfield in Pembrokeshire. He joined Brawdy Business Park Ltd in September 2003 and it went belly-up in April 2013, but the writing must have been on the wall before the collapse
Brawdy Business Park collapsed with a number of outstanding debts, one with the Welsh Development Agency. Yet the last accounts filed with Companies House suggest almost four hundred thousand pounds in the kitty, so where did that go?
At the end, all the Brawdy shares (see here) were owned by Solutions For Storage Ltd (since renamed Ocean Park Investments Ltd), and this company is ultimately owned by another Lee John Paul company, Inspired By Ltd.
From a filing made with Companies House just last month we know that seventy of the Inspired By shares are owned by the Paul family, with the remaining 30 with a family called Lane, who I suppose could be related.
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As I’ve said, Putney Investments was registered in the Isle of Man. The early directors of the company seem to have been a mixture of local agents and businessmen favouring arrangements even more opaque than what Companies House offers.
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PUTNEY INVESTMENTS AND GUNMEN IN SIBERIA
Among these ‘businessmen’ is Philip Mark Croshaw, who gets a big mention on the Offshore Leaks website. Another is Simon Peter Elmont, who also favours jurisdictions with relaxed attitudes to regulation. Such as Cyprus. He too gets mentioned by Offshore Leaks.
Below you’ll see Croshaw and Elmont linked in the November 1997 IoM Annual Return for Putney Investments Ltd. The third name is Gillian Norah Caine. We’ll see her name again in a minute.
The directors listed for Putney Investments in the Annual Return of November 20, 1997. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
On this same Annual Return (full document available here), the two shares are split between Aston Corporate Trustees Ltd and Susan Christine Cubbon, both giving the same IoM address.
We shall also see Ms Cubbon’s name again in a minute. In fact, we’ll see Croshaw, Elmont, Caine and Cubbon named in US court documents.
Another company where Croshaw and Elmont would have been found together was International Securities Investments Ltd. They joined and left on the same dates. That said, they’re not Siamese twins; for both men have been separately involved with many hundreds of companies. Croshaw more than Elmont.
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Though there seems to have been a break around 1998/9. Did it have anything to do with a Siberian oilfield and Kalashnikov-wielding thugs working for a couple of oligarchs?
Or could it be Croshaw being disqualified. This certainly explains why Croshaw ceased being a director of Putney on 26 January 1999. (Though not why Elmont should also resign on that day.) Ms Cubbon was left holding the fort.
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Did Croshaw give up the excitement of wheeler-dealing in exotic locales to devote himself to good works? I think not. I believe he carried on, perhaps operating in the IoM through proxies and fronts.
Philip Mark Croshaw is clearly a bit of a lad, and all will be revealed in a tick . . . Of course, this does not reflect well on those with whom he associates. And certainly not on Putney Investments Ltd.
What I was referring to by introducing Kalashnikovs and US courts is a case brought by Canadian oil company Norex against, primarily, two Russian oligarchs named ‘Len’ Blavatnik and Victor Vekselberg. Here’s how CBC reported it in July 2001.
I introduce this fascinating episode because of the IoM reference. And although the court papers (page 2) do not mention Putney Investments, we know that those named were all involved with Putney. And one of them, Philip Croshaw, had by then been barred from holding directorships on the Isle of Man.
Under the names Croshaw, Elmont, Caine and Cubbon we read what each is accused of or is said to know. Scroll down and you’ll see that a few of the other defendants gave addresses on the tiny island of Sark. What does it mean?
Croshaw, and probably Elmont, sign up as directors of companies in order to hide the true identities of those involved. It’s reasonable to assume this is what they did with Putney Investments, so who is really behind Putney at Llanbedr?
And what happened to Putney after Croshaw and Elmont left in 1999? Well, in January 2002, the shares passed from Ms Cubbon and Aston Corporate Trustees Ltd to Garwood Ltd and Tanwood Ltd. Though Ms Cubbon was still involved, signing for Premier Secretaries Ltd. Gillian Norah Caine works or worked for the same company.
In the Annual Return of November 2008 we see that the Putney shares passed in April of that year to Michael Cole and Christine Cole, resident in Spain. But the Annual Return for 2012 tells us that the Coles are now living on Queensland’s Gold Coast, at the bonzer little property shown in the previous section.
The Coles remained the shareholders of the IoM Putney Investments until April this year, and then, after a brief interval, Putney passed to the Kean brothers at Eximia. A company set up 2 February 2021.
I believe the Coles were also involved in the ‘Sark Lark’. Fronting for others and getting paid handsomely for it.
Anyway, I’m all Manxed out. I’m going to leave it here . . .
Putney Investments on the Isle of Man was a vehicle for Philip Mark Croshaw and Simon Peter Elmont to represent others who wished to remain anonymous.
But what did those wishing to remain anonymous have to hide?
The IoM company and the ‘other’ Putney Investments, linked to Michael Cole, were the same scam registered in different jurisdictions, which is why Cole and his wife became directors of the IoM Putney.
And this indirectly connects Croshaw and Elmont (and God knows who else) with Llanbedr Airfield Estates LLP / Snowdonia Aerospace Ltd.
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PUTNEY INVESTMENTS, THE SECOND LEASE, ENDGAME?
So let me don my Columbo disguise and try to sum it all up.
Putney Investments was formed on the Isle of Man in 1991. We know that two very colourful characters, Philip Mark Croshaw and Simon Peter Elmont, of the ‘Sark Lark’, were involved, and implicated in a strange affair in the howling wastes of Siberia.
Then, Putney Investments appears, using an Antipodean address, as the first director of Llanbedr Airfield Estates LLP (later Snowdonia Aerospace LLP), a company that leases Llanbedr airfield from the ‘Welsh Government’. We know it’s the same company as the IoM manifestation because it uses the same IoM registration number, 54168C.
Since 1 October 2020 control over the new outfit has been exercised jointly by Putney Investment (sic) Ltd and Lee John Paul.
As we just read, the funding for the second lease came from Compass Point Estates LLP. But the ultimate owner, and therefore the lender, is Inspired By Ltd, which we also met earlier. A company in which the Paul family holds a majority of the shares.
Which means that by a convoluted mechanism Lee John Paul is lending himself money, pretending that the loan comes from an unrelated source. Now why would he do that?
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The loans made to the original company, Llanbedr Airfield Estates LLP / Snowdonia Aerospace LLP have been paid off, but that company still holds the lease on the airfield until 2137.
But now there’s a sub-lease, for 30 years, to Snowdonia Aerospace Estates LLP.
Yet it’s the same people – Lee John Paul and Putney Investments Ltd – holding both leases, and controlling both companies. So what’s the point of this arrangement?
I suggest that the second lease, the sub-lease, gives Putney and Paul far more freedom to do as they wish at Llanbedr. Even to the extent of stripping the place bare and flogging off the assets. Which is what I’m told is happening.
And indeed, this paragraph in the ‘Details of Charge’ from Companies House would seem to support that theory. Putney and Paul, as lenders, could get heavy with their borrower selves – and clear the site of ‘chattels’.
It may already be happening, for I’m assured that the bowsers (fuel tanks) from Llanbedr are now at Shoreham (Brighton). The cabling for the runway lights and other facilities has been dug up and is ready for sale. With the trenches they came from now filled.
It seems Llanbedr airfield is being stripped of its transportable and saleable assets.
Which should make us ponder the legality of the sub-lease. Something I was reminded of when I saw the paragraph below in the title document.
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Which serves to remind us that the airfield is still owned by the ‘Welsh Government’ – and that’s us. So do the terms of the first lease between ‘Welsh Government’ and Llanbedr Airfield Estates LLP / Snowdonia Aerospace LLP allow for sub-leasing?
And if it’s not allowed, then what will those clever people in Cardiff do about it?
But if Corruption Bay did give permission, then why didn’t they realise that it was the same people who already leased Llanbedr airfield taking out that second lease while pretending to be somebody else?
Is anybody going to ask the awkward questions? Or are they afraid of the answers?
Now that we’ve had three weeks of living with the 20mph speed restrictions I think it’s time to put this measure into its wider context, make a few connections, and introduce some new faces.
I apologise for this piece being a bit long, but it’s still less than 2,800 words. And worth sticking with.
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THE BIGGER PICTURE
Much of the background to this new legislation was covered a few weeks back in ‘20mph, A Disaster Unfolds’.
What’s absolutely clear now is that 20mph did not suddenly appear, it’s been hatching for a while. To explain what I mean, here’s a table I’ve drawn up, though I’m sure it’s incomplete, so if you can add to it . . . .
And it’s failed her on almost every count. But then, grand gestures done for dramatic effect rather than to deliver lasting benefits will invariably fail.
Next, we look at the Wales Act 2017. There, in Section 26, we see that power to vary or regulate speed limits is now conferred on the ‘Welsh Ministers’.
Consideration should be given to lowering speed limits in a CAZ from 30mph to 20mph, which some research suggests would deliver overall benefits27. Safety benefits from reduced road speed can also encourage modal shift from private cars.
Perhaps, state-owned, chauffeur-driven cars are OK?
The call was taken up by Sustrans who, in a publication dated 1 January 2019, called for 20mph speed limits across the UK, quoting Public Health Wales. Does this also show Wales being used as a testing ground?
Another example of pearl-clutching theatricality was Wales declaring a climate emergency. This happened in April 2019, just before Environment Minister Lesley Griffiths (and Gary) met with Scottish and UK counterparts.
Here’s the plan for funding the responses deemed necessary to combat this ’emergency’, produced by Future Generations Commissioner and Labour party insider, Sophie Howe. From which I’ve extracted the graphic for ‘Transport’ below.
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Those who compiled that table obviously view increased car ownership as something deplorable, which must be reversed. Yet for me, and I suspect for most people, those figures represent progress and increased prosperity.
Finally, we see 20mph again in Labour’s 2021 manifesto ahead of the Senedd elections. The original manifesto seems to have disappeared, so I can only link to the update put out following the agreement with Plaid Cymru.
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It’s a pity the original’s disappeared because I’m told it proposed risk-based approaches to assessing trunk road speeds. Basically, ‘Welsh Government’, or an individual minister, wanted lower speed limits on A and B roads.
Perhaps Plaid Cymru, a party of rural areas with sparse traffic on open roads, realised this would not go down well in Trawsfynydd or Nant y Caws.
So we see that the call for 20mph, and associated demands, goes back at least 5 years, and probably further. We’ll briefly consider associated issues before turning to an unattainable fantasy.
One of the associated matters is 15- 0r 20-minute cities / neighbourhoods. Which can be viewed in two ways.
The optimist might say: ‘Wow! everything I need will be within easy travelling distance; Waitrose, Pilates, accountant, Skivvyhire, Green Party constituency office, ballet class, tattooist, florist, saddler, doctor, dentist, plastic surgeon . . . .’
(Dentist? In Wales!)
The cynic might ask: ‘Yes, but is that 20 minutes there, or 20 minutes there and back? And what if I want to travel for longer than 20 minutes . . . and just keep going, into the wide blue yonder?’
Make no mistake, Sustrans is an anti-car organisation. And Waters himself is said to be a cycling and walking “fanatic“. Which is fine with me. Veganism is fine with me. It’s when zealots and fringe outfits are allowed or encouraged to push their beliefs onto the rest of us that I object.
Labour-controlled Cardiff council was also on board with the “20-minute neighbourhood or 15-minute city“, as this motion from March 2021 puts it. Even crediting Sustrans.
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Erm, let’s think about that for a minute. A city is made up of neighbourhoods. So obviously a city is bigger than a neighbourhood. That being so, how can a city be traversed, and its services accessed, quicker than those of a neighbourhood?
I’ll touch briefly on three more elements of the grand design.
First Minister Drakeford has described ULEZ charges as the “last resort“. But he hasn’t ruled them out. Labour’s experience in London, with people fighting back, might explain his hesitancy.
We will develop a framework for fair and equitable road-user charging in Wales and explore other disincentives to car use, taking into account equality issues including the needs of people in rural areas, people who share protected characteristics and people on low incomes
“ . . . and explore other disincentives to car use“.
Something I found odd about this was that it said, “in Wales“. But this was produced by the ‘Welsh Government’, so which other country would it refer to? Or was it written by someone else, perhaps not based in Wales?
The reference to “protected characteristics” I assume means that women with penises won’t have to pay. (Where’s my wig?)
To achieve this result the Welsh Roads Review Panel was created with orders to deliver the desired ‘findings’. And to guarantee that outcome the group was chaired by Dr Lynn Sloman. Who wrote ‘Car Sick‘, which rather gives away her position.
‘Vision Zero’ seems to have appeared in September 2012. In the ‘Welsh Government’s Road Safety Delivery Plan. Explained here in a written statement from the late Carl Sargeant, then Minister for Local Government and Communities.
But then, just a year or so later, on page 24 of the Manifesto for the 2019 UK general election, we read that Vision Zero has become a plan to eliminate road deaths and injuries entirely!
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Let’s give a little more thought to this idea of Vision Zero.
It should be obvious that Vision Zero can only be achieved by banning all vehicles, whether powered by the internal combustion engine, battery, or hydrogen.
But with more bicycles and pedestrians on the roads – as is hoped – there will still be fatalities and injuries. Either cyclists crashing or cyclists colliding with pedestrians. It happens now. With more cyclists, and with cyclists having freedom of the highways, some will be even more reckless and inconsiderate than they are now.
With vehicular transport banned – and that must also mean public transport – then people will spend far more time at home.
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But most accidents happen in the home, so spending more time at home will result in more accidents. Don’t take my word for it, read what RoSPA says on the subject. So how is transferring death and injury from the highway to the home an improvement?
It’s not an improvement at all. It only makes sense if the real goal is to ban cars.
More people spending more time at home will create other problems. I can predict with certainty there’ll be more cases of domestic violence, and murder. There will be more children physically and sexually abused. Even more cruelty towards domestic pets.
Also, more suicides, due to the stress of being cooped up at home. It will be a kind of lockdown. And it will be done despite us knowing the social and psychological damage inflicted by Covid lockdown.
But then, it may be dressed up as climate lockdown. And if so, then we must accept that chasing each other round the house with meat cleavers is an acceptable price to pay for saving the planet.
Think about what you’ve just read. Put it all together and tell me it’s not a war on cars, on private transport, and the freedom the car gives us.
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RULE FROM THE SHADOWS
I’m returning to the idea of Wales being used as a testing ground. With most people unaware of it, and the lack of awareness even extending to the ‘Welsh Government’.
But testing ground status is easy to achieve when our politicians are controlled by pressure groups. These often directed and / or funded by individuals and organisations making up the Globalist network.
The bigger picture only makes sense when you remember how it started.
With the end of Communism a new threat was needed. And so in 1991 the Club of Rome adopted ‘global warming’. Explained in this video (less than 5 minutes long).
Klaus Schwab, founder and chairperson of the World Economic Forum (WEF), makes an appearance. Schwab is also a member of the Club of Rome.
This programme of control was easy to sell to third-rate leftist politicians in Wales because socialism is fundamentally anti-human; viewing us as classes or identities, even “protected characteristics“, rather than gloriously varied individuals.
And of course, socialists love imposing “Can’t do that!” restrictions.
Now for the new faces I promised.
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NORTH STAR TRANSITION
This company was formed just over three years ago by Jyotir Banerjee. The website is full of silly phrases interspersed with impenetrable jargon: “multi-capital metrics” . . . “radical reframing and holistic transformation” . . .
It’s not often one encounters so much bullshit on a single website. Thankfully.
The clue to North Star’s real purpose comes in a piece written a few weeks ago by Banerjee himself. We are told that “biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change” can all be remedied – by “large-scale investment funding“.
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Now you know me, when a chancer crosses my path I like to know more about him or her. Did I really say, “chancer“? (Inner voice: “Yes you did, Jac.”)
First stop was Companies House, to see what our boy has been up to over the years. There are a number of companies to his name, which are either dissolved, dormant or, if still trading, then none too buoyant, to judge by the accounts submitted.
The address currently used for Banerjee’s empire is 1 Pembroke Villas, The Green, Richmond. And a very nice gaff it looks too. But according to the Land Registry this property is leased to a firm of accountants.
Since October 2020, a group of 35 thought leaders across Wales have listened to each other and imagined a country that future generations could thrive in.
“Listened to each other“! I see a gang of interlopers discussing the future of our homeland without consulting us. This is often called colonialism.
Topham continues . . .
Why Wales? With a population of 3m people, Wales is the right size for such a living laboratory.
Now she’s gone full-on memsahib. For her and her ‘thought leaders’ our Wales is just a testing ground. With us indigenes as guinea-pigs? Or are we to be removed?
Despite this clique being anonymous one name found on the North Star website is, inevitably, Jane Davidson, who seems to serve as a kind of chatelaine to that demi-monde where enviroshysters have the ear of politicians and civil servants.
After claiming to have initially been reluctant to get involved Banerjee eventually joined Davidson’s Wales Net Zero 2035 Challenge Group. (How many different target years do these people use?)
In his homage to La Davidson Banerjee writes: “Olivier Boutellis and I set up North Star Transition to tackle the climate emergency . . . “.
My cue to introduce Olivier Boutellis and explain what I think is really happening.
Despite what Banerjee says, Boutellis was not there at the start (unless he was keeping his head down). For North Star Transition was launched 10 June 2020 and the company Olivier Boutellis-Taft SPRL climbed aboard 3 February 2021.
The capture below from the European Parliament tells us he’s a lawyer and an economist. And this tells us he’s been a magistrate and a lecturer. Also, CEO of Accountancy Europe.
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But it’s his Linkedin profile that I found fascinating. The screen capture below will explain why.
It tells us Olivier Boutellis-Taft joined the Club of Rome EU Chapter at exactly the same time he got involved with Jyotir Banerjee and North Star Transition.
There is also a Linkedin page of the most elementary kind. But it claims the Club of Rome EU Chapter has 11 employees and that its focus is on “sustainability” and “environmental services“.
But understandable doubts to one side, let’s accept Banerjee and Boutellis-Taft at face value. I believe they’re promising to find ‘investors’ looking to buy Welsh farmland for carbon offsetting, or in other ways take land out of agricultural production.
Which fits perfectly with the Globalist agenda to destroy small- to medium-sized farms so that corporations can take control of the food supply. Because if you control the food supply then you control the people.
This Globalist agenda is welcomed by the environmental pressure groups because it destroys farming, especially livestock farming, and most of these activists seem to be vegans.
They also anticipate getting some of the grabbed land for their rewilding fantasies.
Because of course there’ll be fewer people living in the countryside. Take out the main industry and the decline begins. Impose travel restrictions, run down public transport and impose other obstacles and rural living becomes even less attractive.
At the top and the bottom both Globalists and environmental activists know what they want, and are guaranteed to benefit. It’s those in the middle of the scam who, along with the people, will lose out.
Because politicians don’t seem to realise that in the New World Order they are surplus to requirements. As Klaus Schwab explains in this very short video – in the future we won’t need elections.
“Can you imagine such a world?“, he asks. Yes, I can; and while losing politicians has its attractions . . .
Without elections we won’t need politicians, except to serve as ‘managers’ for their Globalist masters. Which is not a lot different to what they’re doing now.
Our politicians have been fooled into thinking they’re saving the planet when what they’re really doing is sacrificing Wales and other countries to the psychotic ambitions of the Globalists.
And this explains dreamers, chancers, shysters and con men flocking to Wales.
◊
CONCLUSION
As I hope I’ve explained, 20mph speed restrictions should not be viewed in isolation. They are part of something much, much bigger.
You’re free to dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist. It’s a free world. For now. But before you go . . .
Justify Vision Zero transferring deaths and injuries from highway to home without admitting it’s a plan to do away with cars. Do you think Jyotir Banerjee’s “large-scale investment funding” is designed to save the Welsh family farm? And why does Klaus Schwab talk about abolishing elections?
Well, here we are, on the eve of a great experiment. Are you excited about 20mph speed limits? Enthused? Or do you just roll your eyes skyward in the way that typifies modern Wales?
I suppose I could have gone about this post differently, by looking at the costs, and examining the various claims more closely, but I leave that to others, confident that I’ll return to this subject once the excrement starts moving upward.
And so what I’ll do in this post is expose the propaganda campaign (that we’re paying for); then give the local history of this 20mph madness; before explaining where I believe it’s taking us.
What we learnt was that Lynn was being paid to push the ‘Welsh Government’s 20mph restrictions for Welsh roads. And it paid well. For Tory leader Andrew R T Davies was told that Lynn had received £738,593 from ‘Welsh Government’ since 2021.
The figure for ‘2023-24 (to present)’ is £185,164. But is that figure for the calendar year or the financial year? I suspect it’s the financial year, beginning April 6, and I say that because Lynn received almost half a million pounds last year, and with the 20mph roll-out taking place this year, I think it’s reasonable to assume that 2023’s figure will be close to, or in excess of, last year’s figure.
Bumping up the costs will be Lynn’s ‘Misinformation Fact Sheet‘ for the ‘Welsh Government’. This attempts to anticipate and refute the objections raised to 20mph speed limits.
This is odd. When I wrote this on Thursday the online Linkedin page was available, but on Friday it seems to have disappeared. Fortunately I saved a pdf version last month.
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So if you’re plagued by fake news, misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, flatulence or scurvy, then Steff is the boy to contact. For having worked for Labour in London and Cardiff he knows all there is to know about bullshit.
In fact, Rollnick tells us he was . . .
Assisting the Office of the First Minister with its preparedness for misinformation outbreaks and developing a broad, proactive strategy for bolstering the spread of good information, with a specific focus on tackling anti-vax misinformation.
Ah! “good information“. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?
The terminology used by these people is superficially reassuring, but anyone who’s studied history, particularly totalitarianism, knows exactly what’s being said. And it’s sinister.
‘We have a monopoly on the truth. Accept what we say, or suffer’.
Then, having dutifully carried out the orders of ‘Dr’ Bill Gates, in September 2021 Rollnick transferred his devious talents to Lynn . . . but still working for Drakeford’s clown troupe.
But enough background on a propagandist masquerading as a purveyor of truth, let’s get back to the origins of 20mph.
For Lynn was recruited to push the 20mph nonsense, but the story doesn’t begin there. So where do we need to go to find its origin?
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THE LONG MARCH
One culprit might appear to be the pressure group, 20’s Plenty for Us; which has quite a presence in Wales, and may even have sent ‘missionaries’. Such as Fiona Andrews, who moved with her partner Piers Graham Partridge to Llandudoch from Bristol in 2018.
One being Llandudoch, to which Andrews had so recently moved!
The other, was St Brides Major, in the Vale of Glamorgan. This video, released last Thursday by the ‘Welsh Government’, features a few brainwashed kids and a couple of other well-rehearsed locals.
If you’re convinced by that then contact me about some beans.
The Wales 20mph Task Force Group was formed on the direction of Lee Waters, the Deputy Minister for Economy and Transport, in May 2019.
We aren’t told the individuals who sat on this panel, just the organisations they represented. (Appendix A, page 36.) Among them I noticed Sustrans, of which Lee Waters used to be boss-man for Wales.
The whole tone of the procedure and the report screams ‘Done deal!‘.
But can we go back any further in tracing the genesis of the 20mph restrictions?
In fact, it was available on the ‘Welsh Government’ website on the first day of August, so it must have been available as soon as it was officially released. Perhaps before?
In Appendix A, which lists papers quoted by Davis, we see a reference to, ‘Twenty miles per hour speed limits: a sustainable solution to public health problems in Wales‘. Authored by Sarah J Jones and Huw Brunt.
Though I was amazed by the claim that imposing 20mph limits will aid the fight against obesity. Surely driving slower gives fat people more time to get out of the way?
But if driving slower makes us slimmer, then what about hair loss? And flatulence?
20mph is beginning to sound like snake oil.
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The main conclusion arrived at in 2016, that bringing the speed limit down to 20mph would save 6 – 10 lives per year, and 1200 – 2000 casualties, is now being repeated verbatim by the ‘Welsh Government’.
So who are the authors of that 2016 report, Sarah J Jones and Huw Brunt?
Chairing the group is former Labour Assembly Member, mastermind of the Future Generations legislation, and mother of the OPD, Jane Davidson. Who does more work for the party and the ‘Welsh Government’ now than when she sat in Corruption Bay.
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Cardiff University, that partner with ‘Welsh Government’ in so many quixotic ventures, has two representatives. Possibly a third with Sarah J Jones.
She has worked assiduously for ‘Welsh Government’ and Dŵr Cymru in blaming farmers for everything in our rivers that shouldn’t be in our rivers. No surprise then to learn that she also sits on Welsh Water Independent Environment Advisory Panel.
Which seems to be another secret society; for when I asked Dŵr Cymru for the names of panel members I was refused and, as with The Wales 20mph Task Force Group, told to scroll down the page to the logos of the organisations represented.
Though we are told that the panel is chaired by “Mari Arthur, director of Cynal Cymru”. But she was secretary of Cynal, not director . . . and she left in July 2018.
It looks a bit of a shambles.
Here’s how I see it. The anti-car, restrict human movement element of the Globalist agenda, takes root in the Bay. ‘Welsh Government’ insiders Sarah J Jones and Huw Brunt are told to knock out something in support of introducing 20mph speed limits.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Davis supports 20’s Plenty, Just Stop Oil, and the UN’s climate liars at the IPCC. Not only that, he also dreams of re-joining the EU, and he’s 100% opposed to fossil fuels.
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What we have with Adrian Davis is an archetypal member of Globalists’ Woke-Green-Left. Yet in the FoI response just mentioned he is the sole authority quoted by the ‘Welsh Government’ in support of imposing 20mph restrictions.
In whose universe is Davis an impartial and unbiased scientific authority?
But this kind of ‘Tell us what we want to hear‘ behaviour is all too familiar, as I’ve tried to explain on this blog over and over. Let’s just close this section, and jog your memories, with one recent example.
A few weeks before that article appeared the ‘Welsh Government’ announced that all new road projects were ‘paused’. This report from Llais y Sais told us the decision had been made by the Welsh Roads Review Panel headed by Dr Lynn Sloman.
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I made enquiries about Dr Sloman and this is what I wrote at the time.
Well, she lives in London, where she’s a board member of Transport for London. The bio I’ve linked to tells us she has a holiday home near Machynlleth. (To be exact, in Cwm Einion aka ‘Artists Valley’.)
So a cycling zealot who lives in London, and hates cars – but has a holiday home in Wales, to which she presumably drives – is allowed to dictate ‘Welsh Government’ policy.
This is how the ‘Welsh Government’ operates. It recruits people it calls ‘independent’ to undertake studies guaranteed to come to the desired conclusion. Then it employs propagandists like Lynn Global, or uses the tame media, to push that message.
There is never an independent voice, nor genuine public consultation.
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WHERE IT ENDS
Before I start, let me make it clear that I’m sure there are people who genuinely believe 20mph restrictions will get mamgu on her bike, zooming ’round the neighbourhood frightening animals and knocking kids over.
Just as there are people who believe the planet is doomed unless we get rid of human beings. Or that men can have babies, and women have todgers. That White people are evil. And that every criminal who lands in Europe in a small boat must be looked after cos he is a ‘refugee’.
Such people are fools. But more dangerous by far are those who know these things to be lies, but promote them for other reasons. Which brings us to the Great Manipulators.
For perhaps more than any other administration and political establishment of which I know, Corruption Bay has surrendered itself to the Globalist agenda. And by so doing it is prepared to sacrifice us, the Welsh people.
This sacrifice means imposing restrictions in the name of public health, or saving the planet, or to promote inclusivity / diversity, and generally protect us from ourselves. For we are both stupid and evil.
Wales is now being subjected to the most odious form of paternalism. Odious, as it claims to be done for our benefit, but it’s not.
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Because if you understand what I’ve been saying then you’ll realise that making us drive at 20mph has absolutely nothing to do with road safety, or air quality.
This legislation is part of a wider strategy against the private motor car. Or rather, it’s to deny private transport to poorer people. For Net Zero is a war against the poorest in society waged by the middle class on behalf of an elite seeking global domination.
Just think how insane that is. They want to take away your car, on environmental and health grounds, but there’s no public transport, so you’re effectively stuck at home.
So wise up,
20mph legislation is part of the same package as ditched road-building projects, 15-minute neighbourhoods, compulsory injections with untested vaccines, the assault on livestock farming, and CBDC to keep check on every penny you spend.
If Wales had more devolution, giving Labour and Plaid Cymru the power (God forbid!), they’d introduce legislation such as we see proposed in Ireland, where there’s a Bill to impose a ‘Hate Speech Act’ . . . that fails to even define hate!
It’s censorship pretending to be something virtuous.
Should that law be introduced then a grifter from a protected group will just need to say they feel offended (or that great favourite, ‘unsafe’), and the Guards will be kicking somebody’s door down in no time.
They will even be encouraged to feel offended, and have explained to them the most lucrative ways to be ‘offended’, and ‘unsafe’, by the shysters in NGOs and pressure groups currently wreaking such damage on Ireland.
Wales would also see legislation against ‘misinformation’ and its even more evil twin ‘disinformation’. Which in practice could mean the ‘Welsh Government’ employing Lynn to police us all.
Even me!
Not a welcome prospect for those of us who believe in freedom of movement, and freedom of expression. But somehow, ‘progressives’, acting as shouty foot-soldiers for Globalist totalitarianism have convinced themselves they’re engaged in a noble struggle against fascism!
At some point in the near future historians and political commentators will marvel that, having alienated the working class, the left then shot itself in the other foot by attacking the poorest and most vulnerable in society on the orders of the world’s biggest corporations and richest individuals.
An encapsulating irony with which to end might be that those who now fight to protect animals we breed to eat, especially perhaps battery hens, have sided with those wanting humans to live in a very similar fashion.
The ‘Welsh Government’s 20mph legislation is a step in that direction. Only a fool would see it for anything else.
Yes, I’ve postponed the piece on the Globalists, again, but it’s a story with no real deadline. Whereas what I’m offering below is a kind of follow-up to a piece I put out in June: Wales: Ruled By Pressure Groups. And I want to get it out before this year’s Show in Llanelwedd becomes a distant memory.
This is another biggie, but it’s segmented. So, as Buddy Holly sang, Take Your Time.
♦
EXTINCTION REBELLION, AN UPDATE
In the piece I just linked to I established that the so-called ‘Welsh Government’ (‘WG’) has been meeting with the extremists of Extinction Rebellion since at least May 2019.
I can now confirm that first minister Drakeford himself met with Extinction Rebellion in July 2019. Did he meet them even earlier, because the letter below doesn’t say it was their first meeting?
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I can’t take it back further (unsurprising seeing as XR didn’t launch until October 31, 2018), but I can reinforce the point that XR and WG are close, and establish beyond any doubt that the pressure group is giving orders to our elected representatives.
Exhibit A, M’lud: An e-mail from XR Cymru to Julie James, who’d been re-elected in the May 6 Senedd elections and made Minister for Climate Change. Basically, the message says, ‘You’re not going far enough or fast enough’.
The message ends with a reference to, ” . . . the good relationship with Welsh Government developed in the last few years”. On the right you’ll see Julie James’ response.
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The next communication I have is from XR Cymru Political Circle and it’s to Julie James and Llyr Gruffydd, Plaid Cymru chair of the Senedd’s Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee, and it’s dated December 7, 2021.
I should add that the highlighting is not mine. And I was unable to locate the attachment referred to. (Yes, you’re welcome to try.)
Extinction Rebellion, with nary a vote to their name, tell the ‘Welsh Government’: “Of course there are areas where we want to see more action and faster responses“.
I’d tell them to fuck right off . . . but then, that’s me.
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The next billet-doux was sent on July 13, 2022, at 7:26 in the morning! From XR Cymru Political Circle to Julie James, and the subject matter, in upper case, read: “URGENT REQUEST FOR A MEETING”.
This is an interesting (and amusing) communication. For it might suggest that Julie James was not giving XR the personal attention they thought they deserved. In fact, it reads as if she fobbed them off with her deputy Lee Waters, and they weren’t impressed.
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There is the usual ‘Must do better! reprimand, but what I really want to focus on is the reference, in bold type, to “Behaviour Change Strategy“. Also, the introduction of Claire Chappell, who is said to be ” . . . working as quickly as possible with substantial resources . . . “.
So who is Claire Chappell?
Her Linkedin page (here in pdf) describes her as, ‘Head of Brand Performance’ at the ‘Welsh Government’, and she’s been in the job for more than 8 years. But what is the job? And what is ‘brand performance’?
Well, I found this explanation, and if the definition below is to be believed, then Clair Chappell and her employer are dismal failures.
Brand performance marketing, also known as brand purpose marketing, focuses on improving your brand’s reputation and of course, its performance.
Finally, we’ll read this e-mail from December 13, 2022. From XR Cymru Political Circle to Julie James and Lee Waters, cc Mark Drakeford and Llyr Gruffydd.
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Again, that reference to “behaviour change“. How exactly are we supposed to change? And change into what – mugs taking orders from Extinction Rebellion channelled through the ‘Welsh Government’?
Here endeth the chapter on Extinction Rebellion. I’m hoping the ‘Welsh Government’ and Plaid Cymru now remember that we are judged by the company we keep.
Though I suppose that advice could also be given to Extinction Rebellion.
♦
MISCELLANEA
In this chunk of the opus I want to deal with stories that either made it into the news recently, or else came to my attention by some other route. Some of these broke at the Show, others lead on from things that broke at the Show.
That make sense?
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RULE OF SIX
I’m referring to the Six Principles, and Extinction Rebellion was also involved in this nonsense from before the May 2021 Senedd elections. It’s in the form of an appeal to politicos to sign up to six principles somebody’s dreamed up at their Pilates class.
Here’s a composite of the appeal, the six principles set out, and a list of the signatories.
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One of the six organisations involved is Whale and Dolphin Conservation. Which I was delighted to see, for we really must stop the annual slaughter of dolphins at Abergele, and scupper the Aberaeron whaling fleet.
Also among the signatory bodies is CAFOD, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development. When did Wales become ‘overseas’? Or why does CAFOD keep cropping up in these envirogrifter pronunciamentos?
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THE ENVIROGRIFTERS’ MILITIA
Now we’re expected to fall into line with the National Nature Service, and I bet you didn’t even know we had one. Neither did I.
I just can’t keep up with all these new bodies, overlapping, duplicating each other’s work, the same people popping up wearing different hats, and all in receipt of public funding and / or time that politicians and civil servants should be spending on real problems.
Clearly following the third sector model.
And just like the third sector envirogrifters will identify a ‘problem’, and demand funding to solve said problem; but never actually solve the problem because that would mean the end of the funding. That’s how this scam works.
I described this plan on Twitter as a militia for hobby farmers and hippies, and I see no reason to change that view. With perhaps XR providing the commissars. Just scroll down here and see who’s involved in this latest scam.
Now think about it, here we have an organisation promising to revitalise rural Wales, and yet the two farming unions are not involved, and neither is the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales.
What we see instead, are the usual suspects. Envirogrifters, Swamp dwellers, and ‘Welsh Government’ departments.
Which makes this capture from the militia website dishonest. Unless of course it refers to hippies and hobby farmers. Which I suppose makes a certain sense, given that the ‘Welsh Government wants these to replace traditional Welsh farming.
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The website is very basic and uninformative, giving it a work in progress feel but, unsurprisingly, we read that the previous Future Generations Commissioner had a big hand in its production.
Though the Commissioner is only the Welsh agent for a bit of UK-wide silliness, as we read below. The links will tell you more.
The process is being organised by the Wales Inquiry of the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission, with support from the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner, under the auspices of the Green Recovery Task Group – a cross sector group convened to act quickly and creatively in response to the impacts of the pandemic.
The proposal might work on some farms, but not others. Which is why the ‘Welsh Government’s blanket approach reveals the failing of inflexibility that we see time and time again.
We saw it with the NVZ legislation, brought in to tackle a very localised problem, yet the politicians adopted a sledgehammer and nut approach and made the legislation both national and unreasonably strict. Though the ‘Welsh Government’ has subsequently backed down a couple of times.
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But then, Labour politicians in Wales know little about farming or the countryside. Theirs is a party of cities, post-industrial areas, chip-on-shoulder minorities, and agitators with useless degrees and colourful hair.
To compound the problem Labour politicians are advised by civil servants – like Lesley Griffiths’ former paramour Gary – who’ve been shipped in from England to run down Welsh agriculture.
Further, the draconian NVZ rules were based on the false premise that farmers are solely responsible for poor water quality. Because, for reasons given elsewhere, it suited a number of agendas to give Dŵr Cymru / Welsh Water a free ride.
Among the agendas served was that of environmental / river groups, in receipt of public funds and, in many cases, seeking to appropriate farmland.
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FUTURE GENERATIONS COMMISSIONER LOOKS INTO THE, ER, FUTURE
Now we turn to one of my favourite sites, Nation.Cymru. Though the unkind among you dismiss it as just another ‘Welsh Government’ propaganda outlet.
This little gem was penned by Derek Walker, the new £95,000 a year Future Generations Commissioner; and just like his predecessor, Sophie Howe, he got the gig not because of any particular talent, but because he’s a trusted Labour insider.
Not only that, but Derek worked for Stonewall. In fact, he helped Stonewall set up in Wales. How much more of an insider can you be?
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So what did Derek have to say?
“High food prices mean one in five people in Wales are hungry, disproportionally affecting more disabled people, Black, Asian and minority ethnicpeople.”
Mmm. Does that mean Derek thinks it’s OK for able-bodied White people to starve? Is this another example of ‘inclusivity’ that discriminates against the majority?
But let’s give the boy another chance. Carry on, Derek . . .
“Agricultural waste pollutes our rivers” Oh dear, that may be the party line, but I was expecting better. But alright, one more chance.
And the boy comes good with: “Farmers are critical to our nation’s health, rural communities and a thriving Welsh language – they helped maintain the food chain through the pandemic, play a leading role in restoring nature and reducing emissions, and should be a vital part of this long-term food plan.”
But it raises the obvious question – if you think our farmers are so important, Derek, why is your government making life so difficult for them?
Finally, we read:
This autumn, I will publish my priorities for my role for the next seven years, and the long-term questions I’m exploring include – how can we involve communities to shift diets to meet the nature and climate emergencies and create green jobs?
What does “shift diets” mean, Derek? Because I suspect it means away from meat. I suspect that because you link it with “the nature and climate emergencies”, which I further suspect alludes to farting cows.
In a country of livestock farming you want people to stop eating meat?
And as for “green jobs” this often means hobby farmers, OPDs, etc., which don’t create many jobs. Or cheap food. It’s also used to describe greenwashing . . . often on land that was previously productive farmland.
All in all, Derek, your piece shows the confused if not contradictory thinking we’ve come to expect from Corruption Bay. Which resulted in it being cliched and vacuous.
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DEVELOPMENTS OF NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE
I’ve had occasion to commend the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales (CPRW) recently and I am delighted to do so again. On Monday we saw the release of a map compiled by the CPRW showing Developments of National Significance.
Here’s a link to the press release, and here’s a link to the map. Understandably, the map is big, and detailed; so set aside some time to make sense of it. And remember, these are just the projects where planning applications have been submitted.
There are many more in the pipeline, including quite a few of Bute Energy’s 23 known projects.
This was a useful exercise by the CPRW because the ‘Welsh Government’ seems unable or unwilling to produce such a map. But also because it exposes the hypocrisy of those we are dealing with.
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It’s become obvious in recent years, and perhaps especially in Wales, that as the threat of ‘climate crisis’ loses its power to frighten people the message has linked with ‘biodiversity loss’ or ‘habitat loss’. This coupling is clear in all the documents I’ve linked with and organisations I’ve mentioned.
Taken at face value it says there has been a depletion or degradation of the natural habitat, with a resultant loss of species or of numbers within a species. And yet . . .
Those who now trumpet climate crisis and biodiversity / habitat loss refuse to criticise tens of thousands of acres of pristine upland being ruined by wind farms, or fertile lowland by solar arrays.
For example, the RSPB refuses to acknowledge the problem despite birds being killed by turbines, especially larger birds, often belonging to rare or endangered species.
And there are wider issues. Such as China’s near-monopoly of the rare earth metals needed to produce turbines and solar panels. Transporting materials and finished products vast distances by ship. Finally, the fact that neither wind turbine blades nor solar panels can be recycled.
How environmentally friendly is all that for intermittent and very expensive power!
It’s clear that for environmentalists biodiversity loss is restricted to farmland. Explained, again, by support and funding they receive in order to follow Labour’s anti-farming agenda and thereby grab farmland for themselves.
An agenda the envirogrifters are increasingly dictating!
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CONCLUSION
We are lumbered with a bunch of third-rate politicians elected in the main for no better reason than, “My nanna would turn in her grave if I didn’t vote Labour”. Blind loyalty allowing Labour to win with the support of just 20% of the electorate.
Being third-rate they tend to be impressionable. Not only did they buy in early to the Globalists’ Fear = Control agenda but went for broke by implementing legislation to prove that, “Wales can show the world . . . ” . . . how a country can impoverish itself by adopting a Green policy of degrowth.
In the early days, this idiocy came from within the administration, from people like Jane Davidson, Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing from 2007 – 2011, and now chair of Wales Net Zero 2035.
But let’s go back to the trees for a minute. The 10% of farmland for trees demand is a condition of ‘Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme, a replacement for EU funding.
To suggest that the views of a small immigrant community are more important than the views of thousands of Welsh farmers looks like another example of ‘inclusivity’ at the expense of the indigenous majority.
Ask yourself – would Drakeford suggest consulting Ceredigion farmers if taxi drivers in Cardiff wanted to increase their charges?
Wales, a country being run into the ground by clowns who prioritise feelings above biological reality, preach economic gibberish, practice discriminatory ‘inclusivity’, and have been suckered by a global power grab calling itself “the climate crisis”.
How much more of this are you going to take? How much more can Wales afford?
Some of you may find what follows, especially the Conclusion, troubling. But I had to write it because the level of lobbying, coupled with contempt for our people, is now at unacceptable levels.
And while I still see the third sector as a gravy train for otherwise unemployable Labourites, and remain convinced that senior civil servants are Westminster’s fifth column, the role of environmental pressure groups has become impossible to ignore.
Or maybe I should have said, what started out as environmental groups, or are regarded as environmental groups. For they have moved beyond environmentalism.
Hopefully, my use of italics gives a clue as to what you’re about to read.
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THE MORE THINGS FALL APART THE MORE DESPERATE THEY BECOME
Those I’m discussing, have, in my lifetime, moved beyond individual species, like the whale or the panda, and identifiable environments like the Amazon rainforest, to go global. Not only that, but they now argue that to save the planet many things become necessary, most importantly, controlling human behaviour.
Even human movement. The focus is now on us humans. For we are the problem. All of us, collectively, simply by existing.
To deal with ‘the people problem’, the caring souls I’m writing about have agreed to serve as foot-soldiers for an elite that sees itself as an unelected world government.
Climate hysteria bullshit. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
But I sense the campaign by the former panda cuddlers on behalf of the would-be totalitarians is not going well. Maybe I should clarify that by saying things are faltering on the global level but still progressing rather well in Wales.
Globally, those things they’ve demanded we believe in look less and less credible. This results in people questioning the propaganda, and wondering what lies behind it.
After 50 years of preaching climate disaster, rising sea levels, polar ice loss, and polar bear extinction, you can’t be surprised that the public gets a wee bit sceptical when things stay the same . . . except that the Great Barrier Reef has never been healthier, the ice sheets are expanding in both Arctic and Antarctic, and there are now more polar bears than ever.
When the facts so obviously contradict the propaganda the propagandists are in trouble.
And so I think this exposing of the lies explains what I see as a certain change of tack from the environmental lobby, coupled with an increasing desperation on the part of those pulling their strings.
By a change of tack, I mean that the emphasis has shifted from the global Armageddon believed in only by the brainwashed, to more nuanced and local issues under headings like, “biodiversity“, “habitat loss” and “environmental degradation“.
Because in addition to there being no climate catastrophe most people have trouble thinking in global terms. But persuade them things are bad on their patch, and then say, “It’s the same all over “, and you might still fool them.
An accepted environmental tactic known as ‘Think globally, act locally’.
In practice, it means we’re told there are fewer wild flowers than our parents knew. Or that land can be ‘improved’ if handed over to such-and-such a group. Or that our rivers are being destroyed. In fact, to believe George Monbiot, the Wye is now just an open sewer.
But just as with the death cult predictions the remedy is the same – radical changes in human behaviour that require restrictions on movement and other freedoms we and our ancestors have taken for granted.
As I just suggested with one of those links, an obvious connection between puppets and puppet-masters is them putting a disproportionate amount of the blame for the world’s ills on farmers. Especially livestock farmers.
More climate hysteria bullshit. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
Not that that makes any sense in the real world. But taking control of the world’s farming is a central ambition of the Globalist agenda. And it’s already happening.
In the Netherlands, the government plans to implement orders from the World Economic Forum, channelled through the European Union, to forcibly buy 3,000 farms (the most efficient farms in the world), and EU legislation will prohibit the displaced Dutch families from farming anywhere else in the EU!
All because someone decided it would be a good idea to pretend that methane is at dangerous levels, and that CO2 is a threat to the planet.
The truth is that cows belching and farting make little or no difference to methane levels, while life on Earth would be impossible without CO2, which has been at much higher levels many times in the past.
This ’emissions’ nonsense is about control of energy and the food supply. Control these – as the Globalists want – and you control the people.
These attacks on farmers originate with those who operate behind the scenes; but they get bodies like the EU, national governments, and sub-national administrations to implement their instructions.
With ‘environmental’ organisations doing the close up and dirty work.
Wow! We’re in a warm period.. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
With more and more people becoming aware of the WEF, and how it operates through local political establishments, there is something of a panic in Davos to promote The Agenda before too many politicians get elected on anti-WEF platforms.
Which also explains why the growing rejection of the Globalist agenda is described in the mainstream media – now funded and controlled by major WEF backers – as “right wing“.
For those of us who oppose climate hysteria, the butchering of confused teenagers, open borders, and the other elements of The Agenda must be described this way to smear us and deter others from listening.
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HOW DOES THIS SYSTEM OPERATE IN WALES?
Let’s kick off with a subject causing a great deal of debate, and anger, across Wales right now – 20mph speed limits.
It was obvious all the way through that this measure was being pushed onto our self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ by agencies originally external to Wales. Principally, an outfit called 20’s Plenty for Us.
Fiona Andrews, member of the “20’s Plenty” campaign group, told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast the speed limit was “more human, friendlier” and better for the environment.
Ms Andrews, who lives in St Dogmaels, Pembrokeshire, which has been trialling the speed limit for two years, said it had made a big difference.
It should go without saying that Fiona Andrews is not native to Llandudoch. My source suggests that she and her partner, Piers Graham Partridge, moved from Bristol in 2018.
Andrews also appears in this report from July 2021. The image of Andrews used is even credited to her partner. So she’s not new to the game of influencing politicians to push the Globalist agenda. Or, it would seem, to using the media.
In addition to being a photographer, Partridge is a businessman, with an old family firm called Cardigan Mercantile Company Ltd.
And when he’s not photographing his wife, or running his business, it seems he likes to hang out with thigh-slapping, latte-sipping, Anglo-Saxon volk; and someone wrapped in a gaudy flag. (Partridge is in the blue shirt.)
North Pembrokeshire and south Ceredigion must be delighted with this cultural enrichment. Not to mention, being told what they’ve been doing wrong all these centuries.
But Llandudoch is doubly blessed. Not only to have Andrews and Partridge come to enlighten them but, as I mentioned in Clear Water, Poisoned Debate, Jessica McQuade is another recent arrival.
Her Linkedin page (pdf version) reveals that her career path has been: ‘Welsh Government’, WCVA, WWF Cymru, WWF UK (even though she’s based in Wales).
Since January this year, McQuade has been WWF UK’s Wholescape Programme Manager, with a focus on food. (And we are not talking here of bamboo shoots for pandas.)
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She also busies herself with the Save the Teifi campaign. Any problems with the Teifi will be mainly blamed on farmers.
I say that because when I researched last November’s pieces the suspicion grew that an understanding had been reached between the ‘Welsh Government’, Dŵr Cymru / Welsh Water, and the environmental / water groups that resulted in public money passing to the savers of the planet in return for them giving the water company an easy ride and concentrating their attacks on livestock farmers.
An arrangement that served a number of agendas.
Which might explain how, in defiance of common sense, English water companies seemed to be in the news almost every day for polluting rivers and seas while our own water company was, apparently, above reproach.
Recently I’ve learnt of other organisations operating behind the scenes. So hold your nose and we’ll dive a little deeper into the swamp that is government and public life in Wales.
And we’re going to focus on another group making the headlines at the moment, Extinction Rebellion (XR). I introduce this lot because another source found info telling us that the ‘Welsh Government’ has been in cahoots with XR, since at least May 2019. As this FoI response makes clear.
The May 2019 notation refers to:
Correspondence between the Minister for Rural Affairs,
North Wales & Trefnydd (MinRANWT) and Extinction Rebellion.
At that time, the minister was Lesley Griffiths, but I doubt if many of you reading this had even heard of Extinction Rebellion four years ago. I certainly hadn’t.
Griffiths is a long-standing enemy of farmers. So was it XR that advised her (and Gary) to introduce the insane and punitive all-Wales NVZ legislation designed to put farmers out of business?
It might get a bit messy now, because I was sent a load of stuff in the form of (often incomplete and undated) screenshots. Even so, what I have is fascinating, and damning.
For not only does it tell us that the ‘Welsh Government’ is sitting down for tea and Hobnobs with extremist groups to discuss how Wales should be run, those groups are even dictating to the ‘Welsh Government’ what its priorities should be.
These minutes pose many questions. Not least, why was a representative of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) at a meeting discussing internal Welsh matters?
What next – will the Orange Order be invited?
The ‘JO’ referred to is almost certainly James Owen, the former ‘Welsh Government’ Deputy Director, Land Management
While ‘SL’ is, I suspect, Sue Lewis, of Wrecsam. When she’s not laying down the law to the ‘Welsh Government’, she’s telling local authorities what to do.
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From that report it’s clear that Extinction Rebellion and Friends of the Earth are working together, but how close are they?
Anyway, I now want to focus on Extinction Rebellion’s Political Engagement Team. The purpose of this little gang is quite simple – to get politicians and governments to do its bidding.
Here’s an example.
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And in Wales, that’s easy.
Now, unfortunately, I don’t have a date for the XR correspondence below, but the ‘FM’ referred to is not another gang of environmental shriekers but our very own First Minister, Mark Drakeford, of high renown.
The highlighting is mine.
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In addition to what I’ve highlighted, I’m intrigued by the final paragraph. Would there be some way other than legislation for, “mandating fossil fuel divestment from public sector investments“.
This, remember, is our money, much of it paid in council tax; but Extinction Rebellion wants to dictate how that money is invested. Are we ever consulted?
The issue crops up again in this screenshot involving Llyr Gruffydd, Plaid Cymru regional member for north Wales, and interim leader.
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I could go on, but I’ll just introduce one more ‘campaigner’ who has come to live among us. This is Paula Renzel, who describes herself as “German-French” but now resides in Llanberis in Eryri.
She arrived in Cardiff in April 2018 to work for The Ramblers. Interestingly, someone who has always been involved with The Ramblers is former minister, Jane Davidson, mother of the OPD, and driving force behind the Future Generations legislation.
Then, in October 2020, Paula Renzel joined Sustrans. Another pressure group with a ministerial connection. This one still in government. I’m talking now of Lee Waters, who represents Llanelli (from his home in Penarth) and is Deputy Minister for Climate Change. As his official bio tells us:
He previously ran the sustainable transport charity Sustrans Cymru where he led the campaign for the Active Travel Act
So many connections!
Since February 2022 Paula Renzel has worked for the Transport Action Network. She is almost certainly the “new Welsh worker” mentioned in the May 2022 clip (above) from XR’s Political Engagement Team.
Below is her entry on the TAN website. You’ll see that among her battle honours she lists closing Cardiff’s Castle Street to private vehicles.
Not only does the WEF get a mention, but also Sustrans.
Active travel is a key part of the Welsh Government’s vision for the Welsh transport network. A gender budgeting pilot is specifically focused on the Wales E-Move programme, which operates low-cost community-based e-bike hire and loan schemes in five areas in Wales – most with high levels of deprivation. The Welsh Government is working alongside Sustrans Cymru, who are delivering the scheme, to better understand how a gender budgeting approach could add value and inform future delivery.
So the ‘Welsh Government’ is working with Sustrans to provide electric bikes, for women living in deprived areas, and this somehow links with ‘gender budgeting’? Is that what this convoluted bullshit is trying to say?
Who writes this stuff?
And will these bikes have crossbars?
I ask because ‘Welsh Government’ takes orders on matters sexual from Stonewall. Which means that if you want a good, long laugh, just ask a Welsh Labour politician to give you a definition of a woman.
As I said earlier, I could go on, but it gets depressing after a while. So I’ll just skip to my concluding thoughts.
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CONCLUSION
After reading what I’ve written here it should be obvious to anyone where the idea for 20mph speed limits now being imposed on Welsh communities originated.
In fact, they boast about these ‘victories’ . . . over us.
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But that’s the norm in Corruption Bay. If Stonewall can dictate Welsh education policy why be surprised that followers of the global death cult are allowed to decide on 20mph speed limits, and no bypass for Llanbedr?
No doubt those I’ve written about argue they’re saving a planet facing an existential crisis. Which is absolute nonsense because there is no looming climate disaster. What they’re really doing is forcing on Wales the Globalists’ de-growth, anti-people, restrict and control agenda.
But what does it say about Welsh democracy? We elect politicians to serve the best interests of our communities and our country, but then they are taken over by pressure groups and told to implement the agendas of those groups.
To all intents and purposes the ‘Welsh Government’ is serving Extinction Rebellion, Sustrans, Greenpeace, 20’s Plenty for us and the other pressure groups. But not us.
What’s worse, the word is obviously out that Wales is the place to come to get your agenda implemented. Just look at the activists who’ve moved here in recent years.
Are they here on secondment? Have their moving costs been paid?
Whatever the answer, we have people who know bugger all about Wales framing legislation for Wales. But Wales doesn’t matter to them. Our country is just an easy place for them to implement their agendas. Thanks to ‘our’ politicians.
And because the pressure groups are now in control, things can only get worse.
Whatever you want to call this system, it’s not democracy.
I hadn’t planned on putting out a post this week. But people contact me and say, ‘Have you seen this, Jac?’; and most of the time I can politely respond and let it pass. But now and again I get a clutch of reports or leads that are worth bringing together in a post like this.
It’s big, 4,500+ words, but as I always say, you can take it a section at a time.
And because it’s so big, and it’s taken so much work, don’t expect anything next week.
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SYCHARTH UPDATE
The previous post was about my visit to Sycharth on September 16, and my disappointment with state of the site. Which prompted a reader to write to Cadw, the agency responsible for conserving our heritage.
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Here are the points he raised with Cadw:
The stile to Sycharth is in a poor condition.
Car parking is insufficient.
The whole site is in a mess. An hour with a strimmer would do wonders.
The information board does not mention much of Cymru’s history.
Its neglect is a travesty and an insult to our past and heritage.
Utterly shameful behaviour on your part.
To which Cadw responded with this. Which tells us the site belongs to the Llangedwyn Estate. More particularly, Nicholas Watkin Williams-Wynn.
A couple of phrases from the Cadw response are worth focusing on.
‘Sycharth . . . forms part of a working tenant farm under the Llangedwyn estate with permissive public access and parking at its discretion’.
‘Cadw installed the car park (four cars max) and access works (stile?) in 2010-2011 but their maintenance is again the responsibility of the owners.’
So it’s up to the Llangedwyn Estate whether people are allowed to visit Sycharth. And could, presumably, block public access. It’s also the Estate’s responsibility to maintain car parking and access. To judge by what I saw there, the Estate is doing its best to discourage visitors.
Is this some old dynastic feud being played out in the 21st century?
So I ask again: If the so-called ‘Welsh Government’ can find £4.25m to buy Gilestone farm for an English music festival, for purposes that are yet to be explained, why can’t it find the money to buy a site of national if not international importance and maintain it adequately and respectfully?
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FREELOADERS IN FREEPORTS
Freeports are back in the news. And it seems Wales is getting one. Either in Holyhead or Milford Haven and Port Talbot.
Let’s start in Holyhead.
Now the Conservative MP for Ynys Môn, Virginia Crosbie, is a big supporter of freeports, and has staked her reputation on turning a run-down ferry port into a beacon of global trade that will bring into Caergybi the riches of the Orient, the gold of the Indies, and of course – Guinness from Dublin.
Here she is setting out her ambition in a mercifully short video.
Though in truth, freeports rarely live up to their billing. And often involve very murky dealings. Private Eye has been following the evolution of the Tees Freeport in north east England. And produced the report below in the issue before last. (Available here in pdf format.)
N.B. Political donations are not to be confused with bribes and backhanders; and if friends of London politicians get juicy contracts then it can only be because their firms are best able to deliver.
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Tees-side is a heavily built-up area, with a population pushing 380,000. And after the loss of its heavy industry – particularly steel – there is a widespread perception that the area is ‘owed something’.
Holyhead, by comparison, is a small town, with not much to speak about other than the ferry port to Ireland.
Until it closed in 2009, a major local employer was the Anglesey Aluminium smelter, with its private jetty. The plant received its electricity from Wylfa nuclear power station, some 15 miles away, another major employer that is now gone.
Roughly one thousand jobs paying good wages lost, but never mind, we’ll obey those who know best and stick in a few wind turbines and wave machines – plenty of jobs and unlimited cheap energy. Not.
The vacant site was taken over by Anglesey Aluminium Metal Renewables Ltd which in January 2016 became Orthios Power (Anglesey) Ltd. The site eventually being used for a plastics-to-oil operation.
Well, the old smelter site has been bought by ferry operator Stena, and this is how a source on the island explains it . . .
‘Now of course they (Stena) can shift the dockside car parks elsewhere leaving nice waterside development plots. Just the sort of place to build a cable plant so they can load directly onto ships. The sort of cable company Virginia Crosbie MP was courting … the one owned by a Tory donor’.
He’s referring to Tratos, another local company hoping to benefit from offshore wind farms. Well, when I say ‘local’, it might be local if you were living in Italy. As the report makes clear.
From North West Wales Conservatives website. Click to open enlarged in separate tab.
This further report will explain a bit more of what’s going. Though you may not need to read beyond the headline: ‘Holyhead could get 300 cable jobs if area gets freeport status – says firm run by Tory party donor’.
Not much more to say really. Stena is leading the Freeport bid, and now Stena is pulling out the stops to get an ‘anchor’ company located in Holyhead. As is the local MP.
To finish this piece on Holyhead I have to mention Jake Berry MP. Now Jake is MP for a constituency in north west England, but he owns a number of properties on Ynys Môn. During the Covid lockdown it was rumoured that Virginia Crosbie was living in a property owned by Berry.
In addition to his post as party chairman, new Prime Minister, Liz Truss (I know you’re all impressed!), has made Berry Minister without Portfolio. Which may not sound much, but it kind of gives him a free hand.
That appointment was announced September 7. The day before the announcement, Berry resigned from the Northern Research Group Ltd (northern English Tory MPs), where he held the controlling interest. Also from Ford Bridge Farm Ltd.
Now why would he do that?
Ford Bridge Farm is of course an English rendering of his – or his wife’s – Rhyd y Bont farm at Rhoscolyn, on Holy Island. This is the smaller island, off the main island, and where Holyhead is located. Which means that Jake would be very close should the freeport materialise. A neighbour!
Rhyd y Bont circled. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
Does Jake Berry anticipate benefitting in some way from a freeport at Holyhead? Or am I being too cynical? Cynical! Moi!
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By comparison, the southern rival seems far less well advanced. In fact, we could be forgiven for thinking it’s hardly off the ground. This report would suggest that it was launched as recently as last week.
Though this piece from November 2020 suggests the Port of Milford Haven has been thinking about a freeport for some time.
Milford Waterway. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
The more recent activity may be due to the fact that in May it was announced that the 45km limit (for the extent of freeport status) could be extended in Wales. This could certainly explain the southern bid combining Milford Haven with Port Talbot.
Which are 87km apart, as the fabled crow flies.
This somewhat bizarre combination is presumably justified by links between Milford Haven and Swansea Bay. As show in the image below. Which strikes me as being a wee bit desperate. For example, the Llandarcy refinery closed in 1998.
And would a freeport in Milford make the oil, gas, or electricity flow any faster?
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My insular source believes that for all sorts of reasons the southern bid will win out. I’m not so sure. For with local boy Jake Berry working his magic behind the scenes, and his good friend Virginia Crosbie staking her political reputation on it, I would not be at all surprised to see the £26m freeport pot head up the A5 rather than down the M4.
But whichever direction the loot heads the lucky recipients will need to watch out for sharks circling – but these won’t be in the water. They’ll be arriving in Beemers and hoping to dazzle with PowerPoint presentations and insincere smiles.
And, dare I say it, ‘inducements’. There, I’ve said it.
And I say it because a freeport in either Holyhead or Milford / Port Talbot will attract grifters like the fresh laverbread stall in Swansea market draws discerning gourmets.
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NAILING THE VOICES?
This section is decidedly odd, and I wasn’t sure about using it, so please understand if certain details are withheld. (Especially towards the end.) But I do have the information and the relevant documents.
It started when someone got in touch, saying she had information on Gilestone, but what she offered was unconnected incidents jumbled up with snippets from hither and yon.
Tait has turned his ‘voices’ into a cottage industry. With many videos on YouTube and other platforms. That said, they don’t get many views. This one, with 40k, is probably the most popular.
Most people, including the local police, dismiss Tait as a publicity-seeking crank. No tangible evidence of human trafficking has ever been found. In fact, there is nothing beyond Tait’s recordings; and as has been pointed out, these could have been made anywhere.
Doing a quick check for Tait on the Companies House website turned up some interesting stuff. Now I’m not sure from where Tait originates, but he’s been living in Ammanford in recent years.
For these Derbyshire-based companies Tait has as co-director the gloriously monikered Carlos von Gallo. Who has his own YouTube channel, where he puts out nothing but Tait’s Ammanford ‘recordings’.
‘Von Gallo’ is listed as the sole shareholder at the two companies’ deaths, but does he really exist?
What the 14 companies I’ve given here have in common is that after a short life – in some cases very short – they all went under. There are no survivors.
Something else I found intriguing was that for almost all Tait’s companies there was an issue of a single £1 share (if it was him alone) or £2 if there was another director (Tait’s wife or ‘von Gallo’). With two notable exceptions.
I don’t wish to cast aspersions but, if I had money I couldn’t account for, then disguising it as a share capital in a company doomed to fail, might have its attractions.
In his ‘voices’ videos Tait points the finger at the nearby Sophia Nails. He further claims that the leaseholder was a Vietnamese woman named Trang Thanh Tran. She is now said to run T Nail Spa in the centre of Swansea.
Tran’s partner, or husband, Quang Lam, was the leaseholder in Ammanford and also at Heaven Nails in Llanelli. He was sent down for 5 years for belonging to a gang growing and distributing cannabis.
The Vietnamese connection may be significant because some comments to the YouTube videos claim to have heard Vietnamese being spoken by the ‘voices’.
But the problem with Tait is that even if he’s telling the truth about the voices, and the Vietnamese connection, one look at his business record tells us that he is, to put it generously, ‘unlucky’, with so many failed companies to his name.
∼
Despite Tait being so ‘unlucky’, I was still left wondering . . . and so, motivated by nothing beyond idle curiosity, I Googled ‘Sophia Nails’, the name of the Ammanford salon. What popped up was the Sophia Nail Spa in Porth, in the Rhondda.
At which point things got a bit strange.
For in February this year a company, Sophia Nail Spa Ltd, was launched. The only director is a 23-year-old Vietnamese named Thien Van Hoang.
And although the company uses 22 Hannah Street, Porth, as its correspondence address, the Certificate of Incorporation gives Hoang’s address as 31 Ridley Terrace, Sunderland.
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At this point is might be worth suggesting a few things.
First, whoever’s running the Porth nail bar may know nothing about the company that’s using the same name.
Next, Thien Van Hoang may not even know he is named as director of Sophia Nail Spa Ltd. I have come across other examples of people being listed as company directors without their knowledge.
Finally, Thien Van Hoang may never have visited Sunderland.
But to find another Vietnamese connection is intriguing. Not least because it seems nail bars are used by Vietnamese criminals for exploiting women and girls, also for money laundering. The same gangs that are involved with cannabis. And not just in the UK.
Just type ‘Vietnamese nail bars trafficking’ into your search engine and you’ll bring up countless news reports. It’s big business.
Which may also explain Sophia’s Nail Bar at 9 Oxford Street, Mountain Ash. (Shown in image below.) Which more recently seems to have been known as New Star Nails. Which again is odd, because a company of that name folded in July 2018.
Another company listed at this block was a sporting establishment (darts, snooker, etc), on the first floor, which in July changed its name and apparently became a bar. All the old directors left and a single new director arrived, a 22-year-old woman with an unmistakably Welsh name.
I’m not saying young Welsh women shouldn’t run bars, but . . .
For a start, ingress and egress to a bar on the first floor will only be possible by a flight of stairs from the street. Would a council – even Rhondda Cynon Tâf – grant a drinks licence to a place where people would regularly fall or be pushed down the stairs?
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On a weekend a fleet of ambulances would be needed to carry away the injured. And as we know, Wales doesn’t have a working fleet of ambulances.
Something’s not right. The old Jac nose is all a-quiver.
From countless previous cases in Wales and across Europe, Vietnamese nationals owning or running nail bars should have aroused the suspicions of both local councils and the police.
Finally, the company that owns that 20-25 block on Hannah Street in Porth is based just a mile and a half, as the crow flies, from Gilestone Farm!
I am not suggesting anything. It’s just a small world and Wales is a small country.
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THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME
Someone contacted me suggesting I might be interested in the latest in a series of bad news stories about care homes. And this one really is bad.
Like so many of the care homes in Wales, Pontypridd Nursing Home is run by a company based outside of Wales. In this case, RB Care Homes Ltd, of Chislehurst in Kent. The RB stands, presumably, for director Raqia Bibi.
I suspect this company has gone under. Maybe not officially, but Companies House is still waiting for accounts that should have been submitted by November 30 last year. I don’t think they’re coming.
Pontypridd Nursing Home wasn’t Ms Bibi’s first venture into care homes, nor her first foray into Wales. For she has a string of companies behind her, including you’ll notice, Wrexham Care Centre.
Where some three years ago she also made the news for the wrong reasons. You’ll see that her partner in Wrecsam was Mohanananthan Kuhananthan. With whom the story takes a bit of a twist. But be patient.
Then, you’ll remember that the news report I linked to at the top of this section said that the Pontypridd Nursing Home is run by RB Care Homes Ltd, which may be true. But that company has also been filing as dormant since it was Incorporated in February 2017.
Which means that while local authorities and others go chasing dormant companies for money those companies don’t have, the assets themselves are owned by companies they may know nothing about. It’s a popular trick.
Maybe Wrecsam and Rhondda Cynon Tâf councils, or anyone else owed money from the collapse of nursing / care homes, should consult their lawyers about refocusing any claims.
Kuhananthan has other companies. Many companies. Four under the Comfort Care Homes brand suggest operations in Wales. With, in some cases, money owed to the Development Bank of Wales. These relate to the Danygraig Nursing Home, in Newport.
What I find extraordinary is that these DBW loans were made in June, when it would have been obvious, after the most cursory of enquiries, that not only are Kuhananthan’s companies in deep trouble, but that the man himself may not be entirely above board.
UPDATE 10.10.2022:It may be worth clarifying that Kuhananthan was no longer a director of Comfort Care Homes (Danygraig) Ltd when the DBW loans were made, and Bibi had never been a director. But this company is owned by Dream Care Homes (RB) Ltd, formed in December 2021. And while they’re not shown as directors of this company either, I suspect the ‘RB’ tells us something.
Kuhananthan’s Welsh involvement doesn’t end with the examples given.
Through the company Mufulira Ltd, which Kuhananthan joined in May 2018, and was followed by Raqia Bibi in July 2021, they own Ridgeway Care Centre in Pembrokeshire, which must be worth a few bob.
The entrance to the Ridgeway Care Centre, Llawhaden, Pembrokeshire. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
In fact, the latest accounts seem to value Ridgeway at just short of two million pounds. That said, while it might be owned by Mufulira – another company in trouble – Mufulira itself is owned by Comfort Care Homes Ltd, which we know is yet another Kuhananthan and Bibi company.
Maybe Pembrokeshire County Council should also be on alert, and realise who owns Ridgeway. But then, Kuhananthan-Bibi companies appear to have no assets beyond the buildings, all of which have loans or mortgages against them.
I didn’t have the time to go any deeper, but I suggest for anyone so inclined, that Kuhananthan and Bibi are worthy of further investigation.
Before finishing this section, here’s another interesting connection.
We earlier encountered Nant-y-Gaer Ltd, which I suggested was the Kuhananthan-Bibi company actually running the home of that name in Wrecsam. (Now ‘Wrexham Care Centre’.) But there’s also a Nant-y-Gaer Hall Ltd.
When going through the details for Nant-y-Gaer Hall Ltd I noticed that Kuhananthan gave as his address 83 Dyserth Road in Rhyl. Where we find Sandy Lodge Hospital, run buy Medirose Healthcare.
I conclude that care for the elderly in Wales is an utter shambles. It’s attracting unscrupulous if not crooked operators. They’re drawn by easy money and the lack of adequate oversight.
As a start, and a show of intent, I would like the ‘Welsh Government’ and Care Inspectorate Wales to announce they will not register or deal with any care home, nursing home, or other facility, where Mohanananthan Kuhananthan and Raqia Bibi are involved.
To lighten the mood a little, though not too much . . .
I genuinely worry about the care of the elderly because I’m not getting any younger myself. Will I be properly taken care of when my kids dump me in the Uncle Joe Sunshine Home for Unrepentant Fascists and Incorrigible Transphobes?
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SOURCES
I had planned to have a section dealing with information I’d received from a source somewhere within the ‘Welsh Government’ detailing the nepotism and corruption all around.
And of the power wielded by those connected with housing associations, often in areas that have nothing to do with housing, and how the Wales Council for Voluntary Action is almost an arm of government.
Also some of the names I’m called in Corruption Bay. Some so bad he / she couldn’t even put them into print! Well, I was mortified. Mortified, I was!
But on reflection I feel it could be dangerous for this person if I was to go into details. So I’ll leave it there.
The information I’ve received thus far was posted anonymously to Gwlad and passed on to me. But I do wish to maintain contact.
So we need to think how this might be achieved.
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GLOBALISTS
In recent years it has become increasingly clear to me that much of what I report on is simply the ‘Welsh Government’ and various agencies in Wales adopting and promoting agendas dreamt up elsewhere.
‘London’, is only part of the answer. And an increasingly irrelevant part.
A few years ago I wouldn’t have been writing this, but the Covid ‘pandemic’ and the way it was seized upon by politicians and others opened my eyes, and it helped me see the bigger picture.
That bigger picture of unelected, supranational bodies imposing agendas on governments and other institutions that impact on just about everybody on Earth.
In particular, I’m referring to the World Economic Forum. Made up of politicians, bankers, and multi-billionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg. This self-electing elite – like almost all previous elites in human history – believes it is made up of essentially decent people, who are obviously smarter than the rest of us, and should therefore run the world.
Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. Click to open enlarged in separate tab
It reminds me of a couple of lines from Tom Paxton’s 1960s protest song, Daily News.
J. Edgar Hoover is the man of the hour All that he needs is just a little more power
Just like J Edgar Hoover all the new global elite needs is a little more power. And then a little more. And then . . .
(Never agreed with his politics but I always thought Paxton was the best – certainly the most versatile – of the 60s folk / protest singer-songwriters. Love songs, political songs, humorous songs, kids’ songs, he could do them all.)
The principal tool the new elite uses to exert control and impose its agenda is climate disaster. Just like the Nazis they realise that to impose your will you need to frighten people with an imagined or overblown ‘threat’.
For the Nazis, it was the Jews, the Communists, Versailles; but for Klaus Schwab and his gang it’s global warming – and it’s all our fault. So we must change our behaviour to make up for the damage we cause, in ways that will be decided for us.
And it’s the West that must be targeted. Partly because the West is the richest and most advanced area of the globe, and also because concepts of individual liberty are more highly developed and valued in the West than most other parts of the world.
This explains the many-fronted attack on Western civilisation by the globalists and their foot-soldiers on the Left. With their initiatives denied / defended / promoted / hidden / (depending on requirements) by their allies in Mainstream Media and Big Tech.
It also explains much of what we see in Wales: the war on farmers, the lack of spending on infrastructure, the 20mph speed limit, our hills being ravaged by wind farms.
The crises we see approaching, food shortages due to the war on farmers, power cuts thanks to a campaign against fossil fuels and increased reliance on useless ‘renewables’, no petrol or diesel to run our vehicles, being locked out of your bank account for holding the ‘wrong’ views, political unrest resulting from these problems, unnecessary lockdowns and dangerous vaccinations justified by a virus with increasingly suspect origins, even the war in the Ukraine, have all been engineered, and could all have been avoided.
Because it’s all about control. Over us. By them.
Compared to forced chipping of children, and silencing those who challenge the WEF narrative, Lee Waters stuffing the National Infrastructure Commission with cronies representing housing associations, Sustrans / Deryn (Waters is ex Sustrans himself), and the M4 corridor, is small beer.
And no less than we have come to expect from Welsh politicians.
∼
I’ll end with a little history lesson cum allegory that might explain how I see things.
Carlos Marcello was the Mafia boss of New Orleans for many years, and one of the most powerful gangsters in the USA. Then in 1960 John F Kennedy became President; he appointed his brother Bobby as Attorney-General, and Bobby went after the Mob.
Predictably, many leading figures in organised crime wanted to whack Bobby Kennedy; but Marcello sagely observed that if you cut off a dog’s tail he can still bite you, so it was better to go for the head.
Which helps explain why Marcello is strongly suspected of being implicated in JFK’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He probably was involved, but this wasn’t a straightforward Mafia hit, and they didn’t act alone.
The point I’m making is that I’m spending too much time on a ‘tail’. And while I shall continue to report idiocy like Gilestone, in future I intend paying more attention to the ‘head’.
PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR
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Yes, I promised there wouldn’t be anything until next Monday, but something came up and I thought, ‘Why not?’ And seeing as I’m spoiling you, next week’s offering might now be later than I’d promised.
You can have too much of a good thing!
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ESCAPEES ON THE DYFI
This story starts with a report on the North Wales Live website of beavers in Afon Dyfi. A similar report appeared in the Western Mail yesterday. These beavers shouldn’t be there, of course, but they are, and no one seems to know who put them there!
Which could happen, I suppose. Anyone can walk into a pet shop and buy a mating pair of beavers . . . then mislay them somewhere near Machynlleth. It must happen all the time.
The fact that there are people wanting to release beavers into Welsh rivers is pure coincidence. Equally coincidental is that the Dyfi is targeted by these people.
Another area being targeted by beaver lovers is in Carmarthenshire, where we find the Bevis Trust. The website tells us that the Trust, ” . . . manage wildlife on our 300 acre farm in Carmarthenshire and on other farms in the south west of Wales.”
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Are we dealing here with a Welsh farming family wishing to reintroduce species that have not been found in Wales for centuries?
No prizes for guessing the answer to that question, for we are now in the murky world of ‘rewilding’.
Companies House tells us that the Bevis Trust for Wildlife Management is based at Penllynin Farm, west of Carmarthen. Seemingly run by Dr Nicholas Christopher Fox and the woman I take to be his Swedish wife, Barbro Ingrid Margareta.
Financially, the most recent ‘Micro company’ accounts (y/e 31.12.2018) give fixed assets of £444,733 (the farm?), but a negative figure for ‘total net assets’. This being accounted for by ‘current liabilities’.
I wondered who owns the farm, but when I tried my luck on the Land Registry website I found that Penllynin farm is not registered. Which is odd. Has it recently changed hands, with perhaps new ownership details being processed, or is someone trying to hide something?
Though there are two charges against the company. One seems to be a bank loan for the purchase of Vowley farm, near Royal Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire. The farm probably contributes most of the £2,320,764 in fixed assets. There is also a newly-minted Vowley Management Company Ltd.
With almost six million pounds of ‘assets’ accounted for by ‘debtors’. Who might they be? On page 7 of the latest accounts we read:
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So – and not for the first time – we are dealing with linked or interlocking companies with money passing between them. Let’s see if we can figure out what’s what.
Wingbeat Ltd has “the same ultimate controlling party”. It never seems to have traded, with the one-time assets made up almost entirely of stocks, and the latest accounts showing a negative value of over one million pounds, accounted for by ‘creditors’. Presumably other Fox companies.
The other company mentioned in the capture above is Mickelbo Ltd, which is rather interesting. Not least because from its Incorporation in December 2003 until February 2007 it was known as International Wildlife Consultants Ltd.
I referred to money passing between the various companies owned by Nicholas and Barbro Fox. Go back to the 2004 accounts for Mickelbo Ltd (then International Wildlife Consultants Ltd) and you’ll read, in the final entry:
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It was the same in the following year’s accounts. Charging their company for use of their land. All perfectly legal.
The change of company name in 2007 is due to the complete change in business, from a wildlife consultancy to a buy-to-rent landlord. This explains 40 outstanding mortgages. A number of these mortgages refer to properties in Carmarthen, Whitland, St Clears.
All 100 shares in Mickelbo are owned by International Wildlife Consultants (UK) Ltd. Which is why we can read this in the latest Mickelbo accounts:
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Let’s recap. A couple of strangers decide Wales looks attractive. They start buying up land and property – then they rent it back to us! They have created not a single job. They now want permission to release beavers into Welsh rivers.
Because they’re curious to see what will happen. But unconcerned about the damage these animals might cause, and the livelihoods and leisure activities they could harm.
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MONEY ON THE WING
In addition to beavers the Foxes are also interested in hawks. As we see with The Festival of Falconry and The Falconry Heritage Trust. We find other directors at these two charities, with an eclectic collection at the second representing China, Italy, USA, Japan, Netherlands, Belgium and Mongolia. (There is of course no Welsh involvement.)
The Festival of Falconry is filing as a dormant company with debts of £1,587. The Falconry Heritage Trust is in much better financing shape, thanks to . . .
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This grant seems to have been sat on for a decade and explains the bulk of the one and half million pounds currently in the kitty.
The donor, “Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, colloquially known by his initials as MBZ, is the Crown Prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces”.
His official biography paints him as a liberal; no mention of chopped-up journalists or adulterers being stoned to death. But then, in the Gulf, these considerations are relative.
Compared to Hitler and Stalin Mussolini looked almost cuddly.
Though going through The Falconry Heritage Trust accounts I was surprised to read, “Dr N Fox, a trustee of the charity, is a director and shareholder of International Wildlife Consultants Ltd”.
This was the previous name for Mickelbo, the new company has ‘(UK)’ in the name. Can’t they keep up with their own name changes?
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BEAVERS EVERYWHERE!
So, we know there are beavers in the Dyfi, the Foxes want them in Carmarthenshire, while in Llandrindod we find yet another group with beavers straining at the leash. (Or however beavers express their deep yearning for liberty.)
I’m referring now to the Welsh Beaver Project, which is the umbrella organisation for a number of groups. Another umbrella organisation for local groups is Wildlife Trusts Wales (WTW).
From WTW we learn there is a single Trust for the whole of the north, another for ‘south and west Wales’, a third for Gwent; but instead of there being one for Powys, ‘Brecknock’, Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire have one each.
Now you might expect an organisation representing Welsh wildlife bodies to be located somewhere rural . . . but you’d be wrong. The registered office for Wildlife Trusts Wales is in Mount Stuart Square, in the black heart of Corruption Bay.
For Wildlife Trusts Wales is as much about lobbying politicians and influencing civil servants as it is about protecting wildlife. And of course, ensuring a steady flow of public moolah to create jobs . . . to employ people to lobby . . .
Just like George Monbiot and his Summit to Sea gang of ‘rewilders’, the WTW sees Brexit as a great opportunity. That’s because the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ will in future control the agricultural purse-strings. (Unless Westminster takes back that power.)
Just like the Monbiot gang the ‘Beavers Everywhere!’ crew believe they can persuade the ‘Welsh Government’ to re-label and divert farm payments to them.
It’s spelled out quite brazenly in the most recent annual report (top of page 2). We read that the ‘Welsh Government’ being in control of farm funding represents, “Significant opportunity to influence future payments”.
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And the enviro-colonists of WTW have every right to be optimistic. For the Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs is Lesley Griffiths, who is shacked up with ‘Game Show Gary’ Haggaty. He belongs to a clique of civil servants believing that all farmers – but especially Welsh farmers – are absolute bastards, and should be cleared off the land.
Their land.
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‘BEAVERS, WHAT BEAVERS?’
It seems clear that the runaway – swimaway? – beavers on the Dyfi have been there for a few years . . . without anyone doing anything about it. The agency that should have been taking an interest is Natural Resources Wales.
Now you know me, I don’t like twisting the knife, but NRW has not had a good press of late. Most memorably with the timber sales, something that was never properly explained. But that’s Wales – a colony run by a corrupt management team with neither an effective political opposition nor a media to hold it to account.
Deposed NRW chair, Diane McCrea, entered the revolving door from which popped her replacement Sir David Henshaw, who was, ” . . . born and bred in Liverpool”, but has “lived in North Wales for a number of years”. So he knows Wales like the back of his hand.
Then there’s CEO Clare Pillman who, in a different role, played her part in inflicting HMP Berwyn on us.
In fact, if you want to see ‘colonialism’ spelled out in thirty-foot-high neon letters you couldn’t do much better than the Board of Natural Resources Wales.
Though while the majority of the members are imports, there is also Geraint Davies described – because he’s the only one – as a “fluent Welsh speaker”. (Being a mere native, Geraint of course comes at the bottom of the list.)
At NAAONB we find office manager Amber Carter. Amber previously worked for Wildlife Trusts Wales and Environment Wales (the forerunner to Natural Resources Wales).
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Did I say cosy? It’s positively incestuous!
Another who caught my eye was Chris Blake, for he is also involved with the Simon and Garfunkel tribute act at the putative Black Mountains College. An institution that provides “planet-centric education”. So there!
I wrote about them here and here. (You will need to scroll down.)
His brief bio on the BMC website tells us that Blake is a director of Green Valleys CIC .
The Green Valleys (Wales) Community Interest Company is based in Crickhowell, which we need to be told is in Wales. The latest accounts show that on a turnover of £208,753 in 2019 it managed a gross profit of £147,119, which is nothing to scoff at.
Unfortunately, administrative expenses took £178,338, and the bottom line, with everything taken into account, was a deficit for the year of £235,023. Bank loans and overdrafts accounting for £120,000 of that.
Making me wonder if any green energy companies make money. Would any of them survive without grants and other hand-outs?
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Another member of the NRW Board worthy of mention is Dr Elizabeth Haywood, aka Mrs Peter Hain. Because for a woman with not a democratically cast vote to her name she plays a worryingly influential role in Welsh political and public life.
“Purely advisory roles, surely, Jac?”
Mmm. But when you consider how lazy and useless the Labour politicos of Corruption Bay are, and the fact that she’s the wife of a party heavyweight who outranks them all, then Haywood’s ‘advice’ will go a long way to determining policy.
Such as her Task and Finish Group into City Regions concluding that the best future for our north east is to be taken over and integrated with the north west of England.
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I could understand ‘advice’ like that coming from the English side of the border – “Let us take over Flintshire, Wrexham and Denbighshire for overspill housing in order to protect property values in Cheshire”, but from the Welsh side it sounds like surrender.
Or, more likely, it’s just stating the English position in a way that’s supposed to make it more palatable. It happens all the time.
As I said at the top of this section, I introduced Natural Resources Wales because it is the agency that should have taken action when it became known that beavers had been illegally released into the Dyfi catchment area.
A couple of days ago I put out a tweet that was answered by NRW and then taken up by @Cynfab3 who seems to know about the Dyfi beavers. The responses from NRW tell me they aren’t interested in taking any action.
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To cover their own negligence NRW even tries to pass the buck to Dyfed Powys Police!
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JAC AND THE BEAVERS
So what is the considered opinion of this august blog towards our furry, flapper-tailed friends?
Let me make it quite clear that I have nothing against beavers. They’ve done me no harm. So, in principle, I would have no real objection to them being reintroduced into Welsh rivers.
But that’s not the point is it?
My objection is based on the fact that this scheming – and law-breaking – is being done by alien groups with an unhealthy influence over civil servants and politicians, the latter elected to serve the Welsh interest. And being done against the wishes of those whose opinions should be paramount and decisive – the local, Welsh population.
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Which makes this latest furore contemporary Wales in a nutshell, where everyone’s interests are catered for, except us Welsh. Where you only have to scream “climate change” loudly enough to get what you want.
Resulting in Wales filling up with bullshitters and shysters who spend their time attending conferences, making self-promoting videos, lobbying politicians, milking the public purse – and contributing sod all to the health or wealth of the nation.
Simply creating conditions where you can – quite literally – throw up a shack in open country, just as long as you claim it’s a One Planet Development saving us from global warming. As this recent FoI response makes clear.
Nobody in officialdom cared about this unauthorised OPD, just as nobody cares about the unlawful release of beavers into the Dyfi because the authors are people with names like Guy and Cassandra rather than Gwilym and Cerys.
Am I exaggerating?
As I write, we have tourists dumping rubbish everywhere, blocking roads; Welsh communities are being destroyed by holiday homes and colonisation, yet the ‘Welsh Government’ prefers to sit on its hands, serving the interests of an alien and genocidal tourism industry.
We need a fresh intake of politicians to Corruption Bay prepared to prioritise Welsh interests. Make it happen next year!
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STOP PRESS: The latest ‘rewilding’ stunt is the suggestion that golden eagles be ‘reintroduced’ to Eryri. But will they survive saturation tourism, wind turbines and an absence of their natural prey?
Given the mess left by tourists in recent weeks maybe we should be thinking of vultures?
PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR
♦
I know I often start with an apology (I have a lot to apologise for), and this time is no exception. I’d toyed with the idea of writing about other subjects, but there really isn’t much point.
So I’m offering a second helping of Wales and Coronavirus, with perhaps an entertaining digression or twa.
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THE CASE OF THE MISSING TESTING KITS
Politicians have been under the spotlight in this crisis, which will return to haunt some of them. For many politicos are being exposed as liars, others as incompetents, while the worst of them are both, and more.
Let’s take the case of the testing kits that the ‘Welsh Government’ insists it ordered from Roche, an order that it’s alleged was cancelled by the Swiss pharma giant when the UK government got involved and put in a bigger order.
A few things strike me as odd about this incident. First, the ‘Welsh Government’ has produced no evidence of an order being placed, let alone accepted. Second, after an initial flurry of outrage London’s local management team seems to have fallen into line, leaving Drakewell looking increasingly like a compliant ‘regional leader’ in a totalitarian state.
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But let’s be generous, and assume that even if the order wasn’t actually placed, that negotiations were at least underway. That being so, was Whitehall tipped off about the ‘Welsh Government’ – for once! – looking up to the job, even upstaging BoJo’s gang?
This might explain why the deal between the ‘Welsh Government’ and Roche fell through. But if so, who tipped off Whitehall?
My money would be on civil servants, more specifically, senior civil servants of the type appointed by London and answering to their masters in the Great Wen. And when they’re not carrying clecks they’re implementing orders from London, often dressed up as ‘Welsh legislation’.
‘Prof Godkin, who leads the School of Medicine, said Wales has significant laboratory capacity to help ramp up the numbers of Covid-19 tests.
“It’s been deeply frustrating. We flagged up what was available about three weeks ago,” he said.
“We certainly have the capacity here and in Cardiff University to really offer… a considerable number of tests.”‘
Why hasn’t this offer, from an institution within miles of Corruption Bay, been taken up?
Whatever the truth about the testing kits from Roche, the ‘Welsh Government’ has clearly surrendered control to Downing Street. With the result that when it comes to testing kits, personal protection equipment (PPE), Wales will get whatever London decides.
And so, here we are, a month or more into this crisis, and front line staff in our health service are still waiting for tests and PPE. The conclusion I draw is that the ‘Welsh Government’ has chosen not to act contrary to London diktats, even when to do so would be best for Wales.
Which makes devolution rather pointless.
Though of course, it could all be a cunning plan worthy of Baldrick. For ‘Welsh’ Labour likes nothing more than to blame somebody else for anything that goes wrong. By surrendering control over the fight against coronavirus to London Cardiff Bay might be seen as getting itself off the hook.
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ANOTHER WEEKEND INFLUX
While it wasn’t as bad as the previous weekend there was still a sizeable influx of selfish idiots who just don’t care about risking other people’s lives. Liz Saville Roberts MP even reported that second home owners were sharing information on how to avoid police checks, like it was some game.
As that tweet from LSR suggests, the police seem to have been more proactive this weekend, stopping people and asking them where they were going, and why.
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The evidence popped up regularly on Twitter, with reports of vehicles also being stopped on Dyfi Bridge at Machynlleth (a boundary between GogPlod and Dyfed Powys), and also around Bala.
But this tweet put out on Friday evening by a councillor on Ynys Môn would suggest that nothing was being done on the bridges linking the island with the mainland.
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Perhaps his cri de coeur was answered, for the following day police were out, but getting in their way was the new MP for the island, Virginia Crosbie. For as we know, Tory politicians can’t resist a photo opp with police. (Though of course there are 20,000 fewer cops since 2010.)
Though you have admire her brass neck. To begin with, Conservatives love holiday homes, most Tory MPs have at least one. And I guarantee that Crosbie garnered quite a few votes from holiday home-owning families that live in safe Tory seats, and could afford to vote from their holiday homes in a marginal constituency like Ynys Môn.
Though the ultimate hypocrisy was her claim that it’s all being done to help the NHS. The health service would be coping a hell of a lot better with this pandemic if her party had put more money in over recent years.
If those clowns in London she regards as the government could just arrange for front-line health staff to be tested, and to have PPE, she’d look less like a politician exploiting global misery to promote herself.
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Though maybe I’m being a bit harsh, for we mustn’t use coronavirus to score political points, must we? Though if that’s the case, then someone should have told ‘Barry’ Lee Waters, Sosban’s AM.
Plaid Cymru put out a statement over the weekend urging people to stay at home, and when it was retweeted by ITV Wales’ Welsh political editor, Adrian Masters, Waters jumped in with both feet to infer that Plaid was being anti-English.
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Obviously the boy hadn’t read the full statement that Adrian Masters had so helpfully retweeted. (Quelle twat! as we used to say in Swansea.) Though Barry’s contribution reminds us of another political party that has problems with holiday homes. His own.
Which is strange, for we should expect any socialist or social democratic party to be opposed to holiday homes on a number of grounds, but not ‘Welsh’ Labour, which has tied itself up in all sorts of knots.
Lee Waters often gets confused over health matters. Here’s a pic from a couple of years ago, showing him with the Llanelli MP, Nia Griffith, protesting against hospital closures introduced by their own ‘Welsh Labour Government’ in Cardiff. No wonder they both look so sheepish. Click to enlarge
Mainly because from a ‘Welsh’ Labour perspective holiday homes is a ‘nashie’ issue, the kind of thing that people like me are supposed to get vexed about. Which is true, up to a point, I suppose, but it’s hardly an obsession with me, as you’ll realise from searching this blog.
But because that’s how Labour in Wales frames it, doing anything to discourage the growth in the number of holiday homes is seen as a concession to political opponents.
The collateral damage of hard-working local people priced out of the property market, and the destruction of Welsh communities and even Welsh identity, is acceptable because by and large the areas worst affected don’t vote Labour.
Which in practical terms, results in ‘Welsh’ Labour being as indulgent towards holiday homes as the Conservative and Unionist Party.
While Plaid Cymru’s request was for no one to travel unnecessarily, Visit Wales still has trouble telling tourists and holiday home owners to stay out, as this tweet put out on Saturday makes clear. They can’t quite bring themselves to say, ‘Don’t travel INTO Wales’.
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We’ve had two weekends of ignored lockdown and now we face Easter weekend, for which I’m sure the police are preparing. Though I would suggest that rather than random checks all over the country, or responding to tweets such as that from Councillor Carwyn Jones, checks on the border would be more effective.
Wales is a small country with a limited number of decent, cross-border roads, maybe a dozen in all. You’ll see that I’ve made three additions to the motorway and trunk road map reproduced below. All three cross the border into Powys, with the A44 being the only road into Aberystwyth from the east, the A489 links with the A470 heading north towards Snowdonia, and the A438 runs down to the Beacons.
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Just having a police presence from Friday morning on these roads where they cross the border would have an effect. Pulling over motor homes and towed caravans would obviously make sense, as would stopping anyone who looks a bit ‘touristy’.
And if such a tactic proves successful then we could make it permanent!
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PROFITEERING
We’ve all heard reports of coronavirus being used to bump up prices by shysters like Mike Ashley of Sports Direct, but it’s not just the usual suspects, as I found out last week.
I was looking for a new scanner/printer and after deciding on the model I wanted I went online to compare prices. To my surprise – as I’ve never bought from them before – John Lewis Partnership offered the best deal. So I ordered my machine, an Epson ET-7750 at £549.
I then had an e-mail telling me that the order was being processed. Before, bizarrely, receiving another e-mail saying that my contact details had been changed. Not by me they hadn’t! This was followed by, ‘We are unable to process your order’, and then a cancellation.
Read by numbers. Click to enlarge
Curious, I went to the John Lewis website. The machine I’d ordered was still there of course – but the asking price had gone up by £50 since I’d placed my order!
Obviously I had to find another supplier. I went to one I’d never heard of before, Box.
I paid just over £10 more than I’d originally paid John Lewis, but at least there was no nonsense about ‘changed details’, and it even arrived on Saturday, not on Monday as I’d expected.
But being the curious bugger I am, after placing my order I went back to the Box website – and saw that the price had increased by £30 in less than 24 hours!
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It seems obvious to me that with so many stores closed online retailers feel they can charge whatever they like. So if you’re shopping online – be careful!
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‘ALL PULLING TOGETHER’
In a number of ways it seems that the UK government is using the coronavirus crisis to override devolved administrations and possibly undermine devolution. How far this will go remains to be seen.
For coronavirus is now up there with World War II, the monarchy, World Cup 1966, the Falklands, the death of Diana, Only Fools and Horses, and the 2012 Olympics, as a ‘shared experience’. Something that we are expected to believe transcends national and regional differences, and makes distinctions of class, religion and of course, politics irrelevant.
Coronavirus will be milked for all it’s worth, and of course it explains why Her Maj made an address to the Commonwealth on Sunday. (You missed it!)
The problem is of course, that we aren’t ‘all in it together’.
Let us visualise a member of the Cheshire Set, with private health care, and let’s call him Dominic. Let’s further assume that he drives down in his Merc to spend a weekend in his holiday home, and while in Wales he infects old Mrs Roberts with Covid-19 then fucks off back to his big house in Wilmslow before Mrs Roberts dies.
Yeah, I suppose that could be a shared experience; cos Dom must have had coronavirus for him to infect Mrs Roberts. Stands to reason.
And just as Hitler had Versailles, those arseholes in London feel they too must have someone to blame, or a distraction. But with so much Chinese money sloshing about in London they can’t imitate their orange friend in Washington and call it the ‘Chinese Virus’ . . . so they pick on footballers!
Perhaps a case could be made for paying these players less because football, like all other sports, has been suspended until the crisis has passed. But if the issue is money, then a few hundred footballers taking a pay cut isn’t going to make much difference. And how would the money be collected? Or even assessed? If their clubs pay them less is Hancock planning to ask Liverpool and Manchester City and Arsenal for whatever they’re not paying Salah, de Bruyne, Lacazette and the rest?
But if money is the issue, then a hell of a lot more could be raised from the Tories’ tax-avoiding friends, with their tax haven companies, as Gary Lineker has suggested. (There’s no, ‘if they possibly can’ about it, Gary. They definitely can!)
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Staying with the beautiful game, why am I and millions of others still having to pay Sky, BT, Premier Sports and Amazon Prime for football that’s not being played? Will Hancock talk to Rupert Murdoch and others to get our subscriptions suspended until football resumes? Will he hell!
But it’s not a question of money. No amount of money collected now can make much difference in the fight against coronavirus. The problems in the NHS are structural and of long standing. The money should have been invested years ago, over the last few decades in fact.
Which makes having a pop at footballers a cheap publicity stunt from a cheap politician.
Another ‘national treasure’ recruited in the fight against coronavirus and for British unity is Florence Nightingale. The new emergency hospitals in England have been named after her, and of course the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, home to the Welsh Rugby Union, has followed NHS England’s lead.
But in Glasgow the emergency hospital was named after Louisa Jordan, a WW1 nurse from Maryhill, who died working in Serbia. She is still fondly remembered by the Serbs. (Serbia suffered more casualties per capita than any other country.)
This decision has outraged those who wear Union Jack underpants beneath their kilts and support a certain football club. One such was former Labour MP Douglas Alexander, who detected ‘small-minded nationalism’ at work.
To believe Douglas Alexander, naming a hospital in Glasgow after a woman from that city who lost her life helping others is wrong, but to name it after a woman who did a great job of self-promotion in one of Britain’s countless 19th century colonialist adventures, but who has no connections with Scotland, is the right thing to do.
Here, as with Barry Lee Waters, we see the BritNat mind at work. Scottish or Welsh nationalism (bad) is detected in the most harmless gesture, but it would be blind to British nationalism (good) if London sent in the tanks and started arresting people.
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WHAT NEXT?
Coronavirus is having strange effects. In this posting I’ve found myself defending Plaid Cymru and agreeing with Gary Lineker.
Regular readers will know that I am no friend to Plaid Cymru; but what is not so well known is that I was no fan of Lineker the footballer, I think he ruins Match of the Day with the faux mateyness, and I detest even more his liberal pontificating on social media.
But there you go, these are not normal times. And the worst is yet to come, in terms of deaths, and in disruption to what were our everyday lives.
Political leadership in both London and Cardiff has failed us. The economy is already severely damaged, house prices will collapse, savings and investments will suffer, and by this time next year our lives could be framed by very different political and economic paradigms.
There is no going back to things as they were pre Covid-19. That system has been found wanting. Once the worst of coronavirus is behind us Wales must have a fresh start. And that can only mean independence.
PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR
♦
In this post I want to pull together a number of threads without, I hope, complicating the story too much.
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TOWER COLLIERY
Let’s start by going back to this post I wrote last December and scroll down to the section headed ‘The left betrays Wales, again’. What I tried to explain was the recent history of the Tower Colliery site since deep mining finished in January 2008.
I wrote that the closure was followed by a short period of opencast mining, to extract some six million tons of anthracite coal. This began in May 2012 and ended in March 2017, when new environment regulations meant that Aberthaw power station could no longer take Tower’s coal.
Tower Colliery Ltd is ultimately owned by Goitre Tower Anthracite Ltd. The 488 Goitre shareholders are I assume former miners and the relatives of former miners. With the maximum individual holding apparently limited to 8,260 of the 2,164,075 shares.
With open cast mining finished, what is to become of this high and windy, but scenically attractive, area?
The answer would appear to be . . . zip wires!
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‘TOP O’ THE WORLD, MAM’
The title of this section is taken from that great film noir, White Heat, and the line spoken by Cody Jarrett, played by James Cagney, before the gas tank on which he’s standing explodes. (Obviously, in the movie, Jarrett says ‘Ma’, not ‘Mam’.)
I use it because Rhigos can give that top of the world feeling. And that’s where we are, on the A4061 that makes its way from the A465 Heads of the Valleys road down into the Rhondda. On the map below you’ll see, marked with a red cross, the Rhigos Viewpoint, a large lay-by giving superb views over the surrounding country.
Image courtesy of Google Earth. Click to enlarge.
Not only that, but in bad weather the Rhigos Viewpoint serves as a temporary depot for Rhondda Cynon Taf gritting lorries, allowing them to travel in both directions and avoid the climb up from their regular depots in the valley below.
Why then was the Viewpoint recently put up for sale?
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We see that the online sale document is dated 27 June and Lesley Griffiths’ letter to Lee Waters AM is dated 16 July. Between these dates concerned locals noticed the sale, someone living in Llanelli contacted his AM, Lee Waters, who wrote to Ken ‘Flint Ring’ Skates; the civil servants in Cardiff or wherever realised they’d been rumbled, pulled the advert, and Lesley Griffiths replied to Lee Waters denying any sale.
A little episode that does not reflect well on those who manage Wales for their bosses in London. Lesley Griffiths in particular is getting a bit of a reputation for being averse to the truth.
Returning to Rhigos . . . If we look at this image of the viewpoint and lay-by we see, centre right, Craig y Llyn, the jumping-off point for one of the three planned zip wires.
Image Courtesy of Google. Click to enlarge.
Maybe the real question is, if the Rhigos Viewpoint is to be included in the Zip World project, why was it advertised for sale clearly hoping nobody would notice? Was the plan for it to be bought by some intermediary who would then profit from selling it on to Zip World?
But that suggestion hints at corruption – naughty boy, Jac! – and this is Wales, where corruption is unknown.
And while the plans shown in the WalesOnline report for the car park, toilets and office accommodation clearly refer to the property owned by Tower Colliery (scroll down to the plan), I believe the Zip World project goes way beyond what is owned by the former miners and their families.
UPDATE 02.08.2019: A message reaches me saying that the advertisement was no ‘mistake’ but was in fact the ‘Welsh Government’ covering its arse by meeting its legal requirements. The land can now be handed over – to Zip World? – and the WG can say, ‘We advertised it, but no one was interested’.
But it’s not that straightforward, for at the foot of the final page of the most recent accounts we read that, “Due to the shareholdings in place at ZWPV Limited, the directors consider Sean Taylor to be the ultimate controlling partner”. That is, Sean Wallace Taylor.
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So, if not a one-man band, then the Zip World companies would certainly appear to be under the control of a single individual. And it gets a little more complicated when we look at this new parent company, ZWPV Ltd.
There are six other directors, who all give as their address, ‘Zip World Base Camp, Denbigh Street, Llanrwst, Wales, LL26 0LL’. But for head honcho Taylor, the address given is, ‘8th Floor, One Central Square, Cardiff, United Kingdom, CF10 1FS’.
And among the directors giving the Llanrwst address is Giles Alexander Thorley, who joined the company 21 February 2019. This is odd, because Thorley is CEO of the Development Bank of Wales. So either he’s moonlighting or else he’s there in an official capacity. I hope it’s the latter, which probably means Thorley’s there representing the ‘Welsh Government’.
But let’s return to Taylor’s Cardiff address. Seeing as parent company ZWPV has its address in Llanrwst like everything else and everybody else, why would Taylor’s individual address be in Cardiff?
Or to put it another way, who else might we find on the 8th Floor at One Central Square to explain Taylor using it as his address? Well, the whole floor is the domain of solicitors Blake Morgan, a company that of course has many clients, including the ‘Welsh Government’ and its various agencies.
Which makes a certain sense, and other pieces are falling into place as I write this to support that presumption.
Before moving on to consider what might really be happening up at Rhigos I want to go back to ZWPV. (What does the ‘PV’ stand for?) It was Incorporated 24 October 2018 with Sean Taylor holding the only share. On St David’s Day there was an allotment of over 14 million shares, including 92,500 preference shares.
Companies using the term ‘Nominees’ have, or find, investors who remain anonymous.
So if I’m following this thread properly: the main Zip World companies are now huddled under the umbrella of ZWPV Ltd controlled by Sean Wallace Taylor who, through an agreement with LDC Parallel (Nominees) Ltd, is looking to sell shares to investors who will remain anonymous.
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There are a number of other companies bearing the ‘LDC Parallel’ name, numbered I to VIII, with all but the last of them based in Aberdeen.
Finally, we learnt earlier this month of another interesting figure who has joined the Zip World board. This being Greg Evans, who, as this blurb tells us, is . . .
“A former US Navy Petty Officer and Centrica Energy Director of Nuclear and Renewables, he is recognised as a thorough leader in safety leadership in both nuclear and renewable power generation.
His work in renewables saw him leading major infrastructure project (sic), including the design, development and commissioning phases of the £1.2 billion Lincs Wind Farm.”
Intriguing. Though like me, I’m sure you’re wondering why a man with a background in nuclear and renewable energy has joined a tourist operation like Zip World.
I think the answer lies in: ” . . . to strengthen the management team and take the business to the next level”. With the emphasis on ‘next level’. Which might be another way of saying diversification.
One disturbing possibility pulls together Evans’ background in the nuclear industry and the fact that Zip World uses quarries and mines. Could this be about the storage of nuclear waste?
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HOW MIGHT IT ALL FIT TOGETHER?
OK, so what’s the big picture?
A company that has been well favoured by the ‘Welsh Government’ in its northern ventures has decided to move south. Details were announced in February this year and probably accounts for the reorganisation in the Zip World group.
Also, in October last year, both Zip World Ltd and Zip World Fforest Ltd cleared charges with Finance Wales Investments (10) Ltd. Seeing as Giles Alexander Thorley, CEO of the Development Bank of Wales, is also a director of FWI (10) Ltd, maybe these charges had to be cleared before he could join the revamped set-up in February this year.
Though note also the involvement of Blake Morgan.
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Let’s take another look at the layout of the land at Rhigos. It will help explain what I believe is planned.
The picture below is taken from the Viewpoint looking looking west. It shows the ridge of Craig y Llyn, from where one of the zip wires will start, and below it lies the lake to which the name refers, Llyn Fawr. (There’s a Llyn Fach further over.)
You’ll notice that one side of the lake is straight, and that’s because it’s a reservoir, as is Llyn Fach, they both supplied Tower Colliery.
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It’s time now to introduce someone you’re probably familiar with. Someone else who can be found on the eighth floor with Blake Morgan.
So is he involved at Rhigos, has Sharrock’s gaze been distracted from Mumbles? Of course, sharing the Cardiff address with Sean Taylor of Zip World could be pure coincidence, but I think not.
For while we all associate Mark Shorrock with tidal lagoons, he is a man with fingers in many pies. There’s quarries, for a start, such as Dean Quarry in Cornwall, from where he hoped to get the stone for the Swansea lagoon wall.
Another ‘pie’ is renewable energy; solar, wind and pumped storage. And companies such as Shire Oak Pumped Storage (Llanddulas) Ltd, which was struck off in April. This is a fate that befalls many of Shorrock’s companies. The boy’s had some bad luck.
Which may be why the ‘Welsh Government’, in the form of Carwyn Jones (remember him?), promised to chip in with £200m when the UK government shafted his plans for Swansea Bay.
Not only that, but he got quite comfy down in the City of my Dreams, and was well regarded by Swansea University. Where the Uni had the third floor of the Civic Centre on Oystermouth Road all to themselves, for their Centre for Regional Innovation, under recently departed Marc Clement.
A local source tells me that at one time there were no fewer than seven Shorrock companies on the third floor. Though getting information on them from either the council or the university proved futile, they always had an excuse.
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WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR RHIGOS?
Whether Shorrock has teamed up with Zip World or not at Rhigos I’m certain that the ‘Welsh Government’ is involved because, through Natural Resources Wales, it owns so much of the land up there; including the two lakes, the escarpment and the forests.
But even if Shorrock is not involved, if his being at the same Cardiff address as Sean Wallace Taylor is pure coincidence, then whatever is planned for Rhigos still goes way beyond zip wires.
The clues are there:
There’s the reorganisation of the Zip World group towards the end of last year.
Then the new company linked up with LDC Parallel (Nominees) Ltd to find secret investors.
We have the CEO of the Development Bank of Wales becoming a director of the new Zip World parent company. (To look after ‘Welsh Government’ interests, in the form of land and assets to be handed over?)
Then there’s the curious aborted sale of a prime piece of property in the form of the Rhigos Viewpoint that saw a ‘Welsh Government’ Minister misleading us.
Finally, a new director joins Zip World very recently who has no experience in tourism, but whose field of expertise is nuclear and renewable energy.
To understand what I think is happening at Rhigos you have to remember that the ‘Welsh Government’ has massive assets in publicly-owned land, much of it held by Natural Resources Wales, which of course took over Forestry Commission land. Forestry managed by NRW accounts for 6% of the total area of Wales.
There is pressure from various quarters to ‘monetise’ these assets, and if that can be done behind a green smokescreen then so much the better. We see it all over Wales in forests where thousands of trees have been felled to make way for wind turbines and the roads serving them. More damage is done in building, transporting and erecting wind turbines than they ever recoup in their short working lives.
From Natural Resources Wales website. Click to enlarge
The high ground at Rhigos provides the perfect opportunity to ‘monetise’ some NRW assets. There may indeed be zip wires, but they won’t come alone. There will be cabins, maybe a hotel and other facilities, perhaps wind turbines and some scheme involving Llyn Fawr and Llyn Fach. Perhaps even the storage of nuclear waste.
With the package dressed up as an ‘adventure resort’ such as Gavin Woodhouse promised for the nearby Afan Valley. For, remember, with the M4 and the Heads of the Valleys road providing access, plus almost two million people within 40 miles of Rhigos, there is a much bigger customer potential than for any venture in the north.
Whatever is planned for Rhigos, the ‘Welsh Government’ should pause and ask itself what it’s getting involved in, and with whom. For example, is there any concern over ZWPV’s anonymous backers?
If Shorrock’s involved, then is he being thrown a bone for losing out on the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon? And if so, do we owe him anything?
And if we’re going to give honesty a romp in the summer sunshine, then maybe we can also have explained to us the relationship between the ‘Welsh Government’ and its assorted agencies on the one hand, and certain favoured Cardiff legal firms and people like Sean Wallace Taylor and Mark Christopher Shorrock on the other?
How do it all fit together, innit?
To conclude; my reading of the Rhigos situation is that deals are being struck in the background, with our assets; and this will result in some people making a lot of money, yet once again, we, the Welsh people, will lose out.
But this is unavoidable in a colonialist environment when the local political class can be dictated to by their colonial masters and also wound around the fingers of the money men.
An independent Wales run by such people – or those hoping to replace them – would see us receiving food parcels from Venezuela. And they’d probably celebrate such shows of ‘solidarity’.
Just over six months ago, in early November, the world must have looked a very pleasant place to Carwyn Jones, First Minister of Wales.
For he’d reached the top of the pile; he was leader of Labour Party in Wales, the Assembly and, by extension, Wales itself, which he managed on behalf of the London government.
This allowed him to puff and posture – at which he is most adept – as if he was the beloved leader of some newly emerged country. It may not have been carpets of rose petals greeting every public appearance but most people thought him a decent enough fellow even if they disagreed with his politics.
Plaid Cymru certainly trusted him enough to continue the coalition it had negotiated with his predecessor Rhodri Morgan and, when that coalition ended in 2011, to continue supporting the Labour Party on almost all crucial votes.
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For was he not a worthy successor to Rhodri Morgan, and a trusted custodian of Ron Davies’s ‘process’? Did he not inherit the mantle of Aneurin Bevan and yet also represent twenty-first century Labour? Was he not known to the Cymric masses simply as ‘Carwyn’? Did he not love his rugby, and a good pint? Was he not therefore a ‘Tidy bloke, mun’.
So assured of his authority was this master mariner on the clear red water, so cloudless was his horizon, that one day, and quite suddenly, he broke off from thinking of names he might adopt when he was ennobled (as he most assuredly would be).
For under malign influences he decided to exercise his authority with a reshuffle of his cabinet. Which is when the clouds started gathering for Carwyn Jones.
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CARL SARGEANT
On Friday November 3rd the reshuffle was announced, and among those dumped from the cabinet was Carl Sargeant, until then Secretary for Communities and Children. Sargeant was also suspended from the party over allegations of improper behaviour towards women. Allegations that were never explained to the accused man. Four days later Sargeant was found dead at his Flintshire home. It was suicide.
Soon the news emerged that politicians and journalists had known of Sargeant’s removal before the man himself was informed. These leaks were due to the incestuous relationship Carwyn Jones’s staff has with public affairs agency Deryn Consulting and others.
As I made clear in an earlier post, Sargeant was, like us all, a flawed human being, but the allegations that got him sacked were concocted within a loose network of wimmin extending from Cardiff Bay into the third sector and other poisonous environments wherein may be found self-styled ‘progressives’. These creatures, of assorted sexual proclivities and identifications, call themselves feminists, but this is just a cover to play mind games, mess up people’s lives, and destroy careers.
Many of them are the same females responsible for similar lies told about AM Neil McEvoy.
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In the Alyn and Deeside by-election held on February 6th Carl Sargeant’s son, Jack, unsurprisingly retained the seat for Labour. Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labour leader, visited the constituency, but not Carwyn Jones, who had been warned by Sargeant’s family and friends to stay away.
Since then Carwyn Jones has fought to keep the evidence from emerging which would prove that a) the allegations providing the excuse to sack Sargeant were without foundation, and b) the news of Sargeant’s sacking was leaked from his office.
The inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Carl Sargeant’s death is proceeding very slowly, and if things go according to plan, then the findings will be made public after Carwyn Jones stands down at the 2021 elections, and Labour is returned to power.
Jones has already announced his retirement as leader of the party with a leadership contest now under way that, if nothing else, exposes the paucity of talent in Plaid Tlodi (Poverty Party).
The conspiracy that led to the death of Carl Sargeant and the subsequent cover-up have reminded us what a repulsive milieu devolution has created in Cardiff Bay.
A little world unto itself in which unelected and unaccountable people influence politicians and policy making; where people flit between politics, third sector bodies and PR companies as if they are moving between different parts of the Welsh body politic. Which unfortunately they are.
And yet, politicians, especially of left-leaning parties, delight in this arrangement, they relish the advantages of having allies beyond the Assembly chamber who can be used to attack anyone they want attacked, even in their own party. Carl Sargeant was a victim of this system.
Carwyn Jones has sat, like a big fat spider, at the heart of this web of whispers and back-stabbing, enjoying its benefits, for almost a decade. We can but hope that justice will now be served, for Carl Sargeant and for Wales.
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PRINCE OF WALES BRIDGE
The first most of us knew about the decision to rename the Second Severn Crossing the Prince of Wales Bridge came on April 5th with an announcement from our small but perfectly formed Secretary of State, Alun Cairns.
The reaction was swift and almost universally hostile. A petition was started which raised over 38,000 signatures. But what did Carwyn Jones have to say on the matter?
When pressed, the response from a ‘Welsh’ Government spokesman was: “Alun Cairns wrote to the FM about the naming of the bridge last year and we didn’t raise any objections.” So we were asked to believe that Carwyn Jones had simply gone along with the idea, perhaps reluctantly accepting it as a fait accompli.
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But then, in response to a FoI request from BBC Wales, we learnt that far from merely acquiescing to this squalid bit of sycophancy he had replied to Cairns: “I welcome the idea to rename the crossing the Prince of Wales Bridge . . . I stand by to be involved in the official renaming ceremony . . . I would be grateful if your officials could liaise with my Diary Secretary on the arrangements for the ceremony”.
The fat spider was jumping up and down with excitement!
(Should he call himself Lord Prince of Wales Bridge? Or had that little bastard Cairns booked the title for himself? Never mind . . . it would be a wonderful day, the sun would shine, thousands of people would turn out to wave and cheer. Then he could wind down to a cushy retirement, Father of the Nation status, peerage, memoirs, film rights . . . )
With this episode, the reputation of Carwyn Howell Jones unravels a little more. It exposes him yet again as a scheming, self-serving, two-faced politician.
But so quintessentially Labour.
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BREXIT DEAL
One of the fall-outs from the June 2016 vote to leave the EU was that the UK government sought to hang onto powers that would be ‘repatriated’ from the EU, powers that should be devolved to Scotland and Wales. Initially, there was united opposition to this move from Scotland and Wales.
Carwyn Jones swore to be Nicola Sturgeon’s bestest friend and staunchest ally. Though as a great admirer of Sturgeon I’m sure she realised early on that once he’d had his little fit of bravado, once he could claim to have won ‘concessions’ from London, he would do what everyone knew he’d do before the curtain went up – surrender.
‘Nae fond kiss, and then we sever’
For Carwyn Jones is good at showboating, good at sniping and bullying; but beneath it all he’s a lazy, thin-skinned man of straw.
Even so, Carwyn Jones might have got away with his surrender to London were it not for the fact that his boss, UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, fatally undermined him by supporting Scottish Labour’s support for the SNP Government against what Corbyn quite unambiguously described as a “Whitehall power grab“.
Added to the egg from the bridge disclosure Corbyn’s intervention now gave us the makings of a family-sized omelette on the Jones visage.
And not for the first time we have the Labour Party in different parts of the island saying different things. Reminding us that Labour is often vociferous and principled on certain matters . . . when it’s in opposition. When in power it tends to forget the promises it made when in opposition.
For example, it’s official UK Labour policy to do away with zero-hour contracts, but in Wales Labour has refused seven times to implement Labour Party policy. The word is hypocrisy.
So quintessentially Labour.
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CONCLUSION
Plaid Tlodi might seem to be in a very strange place at the moment, and yet, there’s nothing really strange about it when you realise this is how it must be when a devolved system of government is managed by a party unenthusiastic about devolution and unwilling to make it work lest it stirs unwelcome passions.
Which leaves Labour in the impossible position of telling us it’s ‘defending Wales’ while opposing anything that might make Wales a better country, for that would involve legislation that would make Wales too different from England.
Then there is the added incentive that the poorer Wales is the more votes that are piled up for Labour – but only for as long as enough voters are stupid enough to blame the Tories for all Wales’ woes.
It’s all done to confuse, but lately Labour seems to be confusing itself.
Which might explain why we were recently treated to the bizarre spectacle of Labour MP for Llanelli Nia Griffith and her AM counterpart Barry Lee Waters protesting against the downgrading of the town’s hospital – in other words, protesting against their own party!
‘Will they fall for it?’
But there can be no confusion about the general direction of travel since Brexit made it clear to Labour that a majority of its supporters are, to varying degrees, xenophobes, and that these greatly outnumber the combined hard left, ‘Islington’ and ethnic minority votes. Resulting in a split party.
Without stretching things too far a comparison can be made with the Democratic Party in the USA in the 1960s and ’70s. Embittered Southern whites had voted Democrat for a century after the Civil War because Lincoln had been a Republican; which found them in the same party as liberals, ethnic minorities, hippies and others many of them would willingly have lynched.
Them old Southern Democrats, them good ole boys. Happy Days!
I’m not sure if Carwyn Jones is a fan of the Marx Brothers, but one of Groucho’s quips seems so appropriate, both for him and for his party: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others”.
Carwyn Jones’ semestris horribilis has left him discredited and his party floundering. The rest of us laughing. Can he really hang on until 2021? Personally, I don’t much care whether he hangs on or steps down, for he has damaged his party badly, while his own reputation is irrevocably tarnished.
So I can’t see publishers fighting to give him an advance on his memoirs now, and as for the blockbuster with George Clooney playing, ‘Carwyn! – the man who shat on everybody!’ well, it’s a non-starter. A guest appearance on Jonathan is about the best he can hope for now.
That said, he’s probably improved his chances of a peerage. Which for him, is probably a good result.
What more do you need to know about Wales, and our relationship with England? Or about the Labour Party? Or about Carwyn Jones?
In a sense, this is a follow-up to a piece I put out in February called ‘Wildlife Trusts, Crazy Money, Hidden Agendas‘. Perhaps a variation on a theme.
