“Education, education, education”

On 22/03/202127/03/2021 By JacIn Labour Party, Public Funding, Welsh Government31 Comments

I’M IN SEMI-RETIREMENT AND THIS BLOG IS WINDING DOWN. I INTEND CALLING IT A DAY SOON AFTER THIS YEAR’S SENEDD ELECTIONS. POSTINGS WILL NOW BE LESS FREQUENT AND I WILL NOT UNDERTAKE ANY MAJOR NEW INVESTIGATIONS. DIOLCH YN FAWR.

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The title is of course taken from Tony Blair’s famous speech of May 2001. It seems apposite because this offering is also about the UK Labour Party (Welsh branch) and education.

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Last Friday, the BBC Wales website ran a story headlined ‘Black history lessons to be made mandatory in Welsh schools’. (If the link is broken, then the article is available here in pdf format.)

On the same day, Llais y Sais ran a full-page piece (below) by Jane Hutt MS, speaking on behalf of the ‘Welsh Government’, setting out her gang’s plan for an “anti-racist Wales”. (It too is available in pdf format.)

The two pieces are obviously linked. And both connect with a petition from last year demanding that the ‘Welsh Government’, ‘Make it compulsory for Black and POC UK histories to be taught in the Welsh education curriculum’.

It’s clearly orchestrated. And it needs to be answered because this campaign is misinterpreting statistics, telling outright lies, and marginalising the history of the people to whom this country belongs.

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Let’s start with the BBC piece.

It focuses on Professor Charlotte Williams, “who led a working group set up by the Welsh government to look at how BAME contributions through history was taught in schools”.

To the surprise of absolutely no one Prof Williams discovered that the current education system could have been designed by the Ku Klux Klan. Her working group made 51 recommendations – all of which have been accepted by the ‘Welsh Government’. Which has also shelled out £500,000 to help implement those recommendations. (With more to follow, I’m sure.)

I can’t tell you much about Professor Williams. She’s probably a Labour Party loyalist, and that explains how she got the gig. That’s how things work in Wales.

Though I’m not clear about her field of expertise and her titles seem to be honorary. Certainly, that’s what’s suggested by this piece on the Bangor University website. (Available here in pdf format.) She’s an honorary professor at Bangor and an honorary fellow at Glyndŵr and South Wales.

In the Bangor University article I’ve linked to Williams says: “We have a rich history in Wales, built on difference and diversity”. Er, no.

For the greater part of our history we have been one people, speaking one language, divided only by geography and dialect. This is what held us together, this is what gave us our sense of ourselves as a people during centuries of conquest and subjugation.

As late as the 19th century that unity was reinforced by the Industrial Revolution and our adherence to the nonconformist denominations. Making me wonder how much Prof Williams really knows about Wales.

The ‘diversity’ to which she refers is very recent. And while its proselytisers preach unity, in practice they label and divide.

While Welsh children are to be taught BAME history the ‘Welsh Government’ has decided they will not be taught their own history, or the history of their country unless this is done through the prism of a ‘diversity’ that is absent from the history of Wales until comparatively recent times.

Something very strange is happening. The desire to tell the story of ‘colonialism, discrimination and exploitation’ is being used to ignore or marginalise the history of an indigenous population with first-hand knowledge of colonialism, discrimination and exploitation.

And this has all been prompted by the death of a man last year in a US city most of you can’t even remember the name of.

Another untruth in the BBC article can be found with, “In 2019, 12% of all pupils aged five and over came from minority ethnic backgrounds . . . according to Pupil Level Annual School Census data.”

We are encouraged to interpret that as meaning 12% of pupils in Welsh schools come from non-white backgrounds. But the source used, StatsWales, makes it clear that’s not the case. What it tells us is that 12% did not identify as ‘White British’.

This 12% is made up of Irish children, Italian children, and Polish children, maybe even white Welsh kids who didn’t want to identify as British.

But if we are to have an à la carte education system then I suggest our pedagogues get their answers ready for when Mrs McGillicuddy rocks up demanding to know why Seamus and Siobhan are not being taught the history of Gaelic Ireland.

Polish history is very interesting as well. And what about the Risorgimento!

It may sound like a good idea, but once history is tailored to group or individual backgrounds then it can become as irrelevant to others as one’s family history.

That’s why sensible countries take the ‘broad sweep’ approach to the history of their country and then fit that national past into the wider, global picture.

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Now a quick shufty at the petition.

A hybrid beast, this. It is addressed to the Welsh Parliament, yet it keeps referring to the UK and Britain.

To take the petition wording at face value it seems to be asking that Welsh children be taught about the experiences of immigrant groups in England. But why?

It also wants our children to learn that Wales, “benefited from colonialism and slavery for centuries”. Did we really! These ‘benefits’ must have passed my family by.

But what is Black and POC history? Is it the history of African people(s)? The spread of Islam? Moghul India? Asia? China? Pre-Columbian America? With nothing to connect these disparate stories other than their contacts with Europeans, at what point will BAME history degenerate into, ‘White bastards . . . ‘.

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Finally, let’s look at the Llais y Sais article. There are so many distortions that it’s difficult to know where to start.

The article is written by Jane Hutt of Surbiton, who spent much of her childhood in colonial Africa. Her career in Wales began in the third sector, which helped her become a Labour councillor. She was then an unsuccessful Westminster candidate before securing the consolation prize of a seat in the new Welsh Assembly in 1999.

So, yet another Labour politician who’s never done a real job.

In the second paragraph Hutt says, “. . . our partners have shared more shocking stories of racism and hate crime endured in Wales”. Who might these ‘partners’ be, I wonder?

I would hazard a guess that these are Labour’s cronies in the third sector and elsewhere. People and groups reliant on public funding that can be best secured by exaggerating a problem and / or telling the ‘Welsh Government’ what it wants to hear.

What’s in it for the Labour Party? Well, the sub-text has always been – from the days of Naz Malik and his Swansea Bay Race Equality Council – ‘Welsh nationalism is by definition racist’. (Remember Naz?)

In discussing the impact of Covid, Hutt suggests that people from ethnic minority backgrounds have suffered worse than white people. This is more bollocks. The critical factor has been deprivation. The kind of deprivation experienced in the post-industrial communities that the ‘Welsh’ Labour Government has condemned to managed decline. Communities where the population is almost exclusively white, and Welsh.

Towards the end Hutt writes: “We want to make sure that Wales becomes not just non-racist, but anti-racist, by the year 2030”.

‘Non-racist’ means the absence of racism. To go further is to pander to extremists who argue that all white people carry the guilt for slavery and imperialist exploitation. A sentiment we saw articulated in the petition.

We are now in the territory of Critical Race Theory, reporting neighbours for watching Gone With The Wind, and shopping Nain for her Robertson’s golliwog badge. Maybe even self-flagellation.

Wales does not want to go there. Labour should not be taking us towards this fresh kind of intolerance.

And yet Hutt’s overlong homily is not without its unintended humour.

The idea of Travellers complaining about ‘racism and hate crime’ is laughable. What they’re far more likely to be moaning about is being collared for their criminal behaviour. (Here’s a very recent example.)

‘Colourism’ may be a term many of you are unfamiliar with, but it’s rife in India, where it seems people of darker skin tone tend to be looked down on. All tied up with history, caste, religion, etc. It also seems to operate in the USA. Where, again, it is something found within communities, in this case, African-Americans.

Either way, ‘colourism’ or ‘shadism’ is a complex subject internal to certain countries and groups. It should never be a concern of the ‘Welsh Government’.

Hutt concludes with, “We must stand proud with open hearts and minds, and take positive action to banish racism, discrimination and inequality from Wales”. All very noble, and guaranteed a round of applause at the next Labour Party bunfight.

But this commitment to combating discrimination and inequality would carry more weight if, instead of playing to certain galleries, Labour politicians took action to stop Welsh people being ethnically cleansed from their own communities.

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BAME education is so typically ‘Welsh’ Labour – about Wales, but not the Welsh. Twenty-two years of devolution has been all about gestures and virtue signalling for external audiences and tiny groups of activists.

While the essential Welshness of Wales, that sense of identity that brought devolution into being, has been undermined and the threats against it ignored.

Twenty-two years of anti-Welsh devolution.

This is why the Labour Party is opposed to both Welsh language education and the teaching of Welsh history in our schools. They fear it might make our young people more patriotic, and therefore, less likely to vote Labour.

Which is why, the more I think about BAME education, the more I suspect Labour may not have thought this through.

As I’ve just said, Labour does not want to enthuse Welsh children with a sense of patriotism, or worse, grievance. Nor does it wish to encourage anti-British or anti-English sentiment.

But if history is to be taught from a BAME and leftist perspective then how are children to be told about the slave trade, the Amritsar Massacre, An Gorta Mór, the Bengal famine, the coup against Mosaddeq, and so many other episodes of Britain’s past without encouraging a “Bastards!” reaction?

What you’ve read here is my interpretation of the Labour Party pandering to yet another vocal and unrepresentative minority. And while we should all strive to marginalise racism – for it will never be entirely eradicated – I believe that what is being suggested risks damaging the Welsh education system and doing more harm than good for communal relations.

I say that because I can think of few things more insulting than middle class left liberals designing a curriculum that tells kids relying on food banks in post-industrial shitholes that they should feel guilty for being the beneficiaries of slavery and ‘white privilege’.

It really is time to get rid off these dangerous and insulting clowns in the Labour Party, and the same goes for any other leftist party that might keep Labour in power.

♦ end ♦

Third Sector Nightmare

On 08/03/201816/03/2018 By JacIn Colonisation of Wales, Common Purpose, Higher Education, Local Government, Public Funding, Swansea, Third Sector, Welsh Assembly, Welsh Government, Welsh Labour, Welsh Media44 Comments

OLIVE AND POPEYE

Regular readers will know that before this incarnation of my blog – hosted by the estimable Gwilym ab Ioan – I had a blog with Google that ran for a few years until December 2012. Then it was pulled for no obvious reason, though Google suggested that I was a spammer, which was palpable nonsense.

I always suspected that someone made a complaint. (However difficult that might be to believe!)

Perhaps because, in that last month, I had a quite bitter exchange with a rather odd woman based in Swansea; her name was Denise Acton Kingsley and her hope for riches was called the Olive Trust, a weird outfit dealing in alternative therapies and treatments. Joss sticks and incantations as far as I could make out.

If you really want to, you can get something of the flavour of the exchange from reading I Will Have My Say.

Acton Kingsley was yet another of those oddball, middle class Englishwomen who have flooded into Wales since devolution was introduced. True to form she cwtched up to the Labour Party – in the form of long-serving Swansea councillor Alan Lloyd OBE, Lord Mayor 2009-10, and now Alderman – before whacking in her application for funding.

Again, sticking to the template we see across Wales, she found herself – or hoped to find – an old building and asked the Wales European Funding Office (WEFO) for a cool one million pounds to turn it into a ‘community building’. (Well, it’s a nice round figure.)

As someone pointed out, ‘community’ and ‘communities’ appears 14 times in the screen grab you see above, and that’s no accident, for these are magic words which initiates know as the keys to untold wealth. Throw in ‘minority’ or ‘minorities’ and you can hit the jackpot.

I’m not sure if this application was successful. I’d like to think it was laughed off, as it should have been, but the WEFO Online site is currently offline, so I can’t check.

Anyway, after I started the new blog I forgot about Denise Acton Kingsley and her Olive Trust until someone referred me to a piece in Llanelli Online telling us she has resurfaced, across the mighty Llwchwr, in Cydweli, but with the ageing Alderman still in tow to open doors for her.

Now, it appears, she is an expert in ‘equality training’, obviously cashing in on the Equality Act 2010.

According to the Llanelli Online article by Alan Evans the “Olive Trust was set up in 2011”. But we know different, don’t we, boys and girls, because the WEFO application was submitted in July 2010.

What’s more, the Olive Trust may go back even further. Checking the Charity Commission website turned up this reference to an Olive Trust based in Gloucestershire until 2005, when it was “Removed – REGISTERED IN ERROR”.

Given that this outfit was involved with “natural therapies” it’s reasonable to assume that it’s the same Olive Trust that washed up in Swansea and is now plying its dubious trade out of Kidwelly.

The new ~~scam~~ venture is Olive Training 180 (though the name seems to change from page to page on the website). And reading it causes me to worry for the good people of Carmarthenshire. Turning to the ‘About the CEO’ page (which doesn’t give the CEO’s name!) brings up the panel below. How can anyone claiming to be so well educated have written that first line?

She also writes of “our team” . . . which is presumably her and Alan Lloyd, the latter described in the Llanelli Online piece as the Chair. The gem above says that Olive Training is the “business arm” . . . of the Olive Trust? I ask because the Olive Trust is nowhere mentioned on the website, but is the only entity mentioned in the Llanelli Online report.

But on the plus side, if you go to the ‘Store’ page you can “Ask an equality question” – for £3! Bloody hell! this is money for old rope – I can offer a service like that. I can see the questions now: ‘Dear Jac, Do you think Labour is doing a good job running Wales?’, or, ‘Dear Jac, Do you have views on the third sector in Wales?’.

I have searched and searched, but have been unable to find anything on the Charity Commission website or the Companies House website for the Olive Trust, Olive Training, Olive Training 180, etc., etc. Which suggests to me that this outfit, whatever it might be called, has no official existence.

That being so, and given that Denise Acton Kingsley is clearly lacking in the small, brightly-coloured round things we boys flicked with our thumbs along the gutters of Brynhyfryd and Manselton, I shall certainly revisit the Olive Trust if I hear that any public money has reached the unlikely pairing of Denise and Al.

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STAYING IN CARMARTHENSHIRE . . .

As if the Odd Couple weren’t bounty enough for Sir Gâr I hear of more ~~charlatans~~ third sector mentors putting in an appearance, this time we are being saved from the darker angels of our nature by Gerli Orumaa and Rosie Leach.

Now you’re looking blankly at the screen and wondering, ‘Who the f . . . . . ?’ So let me tell you.

Gerli is an Estonian, living in Swansea, and she’s the Regional Coordinator in Central South Wales for the Ethnic Minorities & Youth Support Team Wales (EYST); while Englishwoman Rosie is based in Cardiff and works for the Welsh Refugee Council (which, despite the name, is not a body helping Welsh refugees).

Unusually, perhaps, for a woman in this area of activity, Gerli has three children.

Gerli Orumaa and Rosie Leach are organising a focus group in The Hub, Llanelli on Monday the 12th. I don’t know much about Orumaa beyond the fact that she’s involved in the ‘diversity’ industry and has some connection with Swansea University.

Rosie Leach on the other hand provides plenty of information in her Linkedin profile and it’s a fascinating read. She was educated at private schools in Somerset before going up to Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, getting a 2:1 in the Oxford degree that runs Britain.

Her first job in Wales seems to have been as an Oral History Researcher at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Corris from December 2012 to March 2014. (Though of course that would not have been local oral history.)

She went back to England before returning to do 4 months as a research assistant at Cardiff University in the early part of 2015, then back to England before flitting in again to do 4 months in 2016 as a researcher at Bangor. This was somehow fitted around a two-year stint as a Money Advice Caseworker with Advice Mid Wales. Since June 2017 she has been Refugee Week Wales Coordinator for the Welsh Refugee Council.

Theatre is obviously Rosie Leach’s ‘thing’, but her background tells us so much about modern Wales.

Here we have yet another highly-educated middle class Englishwoman involving herself with the Labour-controlled third sector (often with a university connection thrown in), which then results in her and others like her touring our land educating us in how to behave towards fellow human beings – as if we Welsh are in dire need of such lecturing! What is the real message here?

And who are the minorities?

In the case of Naz Malik of Awema fame, Rose Mutale Nyoni Merrill of Bawso, and the Board of Community Health Councils, plus various others, the minority benefitting often extends little further than their family and cronies, most of whom seem to be recent arrivals. So they tend to be self-perpetuating and very self-serving minorities.

By comparison, what of the Chinese, who work hard, keep to the law, and rarely if ever trouble the public purse? The same perhaps could be said of Jews, Sikhs, and to some extent Hindus. Which means that the minorities dominating the third sector in Wales are of African and / or Muslim background.

And why, apart from Gerli Orumaa do we see so few European minorities represented in the third sector when we have so many of them in Wales now, especially the Poles? And what of the long-established Italian community of the south – did they ever demand a constant drip-feed of public funding?

And if we’re talking of minorities, what about those areas of Wales where we Welsh are in a minority, such as the coastal strip between Mawddach and Dyfi? I belong to this minority, so can I demand my wodge? Of course not.

Because it’s not really about minorities, or about respect, or dignity; it’s all about serving ‘Welsh’ Labour’s agenda in suggesting that racism is rampant in Wales due – nudge, nudge – to ‘nationalism’.

It a publicly-funded propaganda exercise.

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MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE MIGHTY LLWCHWR . . .

News has also reached me concerning Beverly Garside, of whom I wrote last month in ‘Move to Wales – Plenty of funding, no questions asked’. Garside is a former animal rights activist who mixed with some pretty hairy characters before removing herself to Wales and starting a new life . . . in the sector between second and fourth.

My source, reliable thus far, now tells me that it’s all falling apart, writing, “Occupation of The Feelgood Factory, Bryncynon, by the Empower SVS/Garside empire has been terminated as of this coming weekend. Desertion by Staff or the recent exposé(s) may be the reason.”

But it’s what my source says next that really concerns me.

“Empower/Garside however may be seeking forgiveness for Sins past and present – rumour is that it/she has been engaged to overcome the legal problems faced by https://morristontabernacl.org/ following a period of failure to pay minimum wage.

£60,000 underpayed (sic) is rumoured to be the claim.

Those responsible for management of The Tabernacle are also Trustees of other Charities that receive Council and Government support and funding. The Morriston Tabernacle building itself is Grade 1 listed and has been beautifully (and expensively) restored……with funding from where?

It takes dedication in all weathers to hand out Pink flip flops in Wine Street, Swansea on a Saturday night (grant funded?) It takes competence to act as a Manager and/or Trustee and to properly administer public and charity funds.”

Not only does it concern me, it also confuses me.

Let’s start with Morriston Tabernacle / Tabernacl Treforys “The largest, grandest and most expensive chapel built in Wales”. My source talks of legal problems due to underpaying, presumably of staff, but Morriston Tabernacle is an unlikely rogue employer. Come to that, how many employees would it have?

The source then says that those responsible are also “Trustees of other charities”. But looking at the three charities connected with the chapel – 1116477, 1164521 and 1152614 – I can only find one trustee who is also a trustee of another charity, and that one is very small.

Then there’s the reference to “Wine Street, Swansea”. While some may be pronounce it like that, it’s in fact spelled Wind (and probably derived from wynd). Though where the hell the pink flip-flops fit I have no idea.

If there is a link between Garside and Morriston Tabernacle, then the question has to be, Who recommended this woman to Tabernacle, and why?

So, Source, please get back with clarification.

♦ end ♦

UPDATE 10.03.2018: Thanks to a phone call out of the blue I may now have made the hitherto unfathomable connection between Garside and Morriston Tabernacle.

The minister at Tabernacle is Reverend Jill Hailey Skeel Harries and she also serves as a trustee on the board of the Union of Welsh Independents, Charity number 248076. More importantly for our purposes, Reverend Harries is also involved with Carmarthenshire Domestic Abuse Services Ltd (previously Carmarthen Women’s Aid) which, as my source suggested, receives “public and charity funding”.

Given that Garside is also involved with domestic abuse, having been a director of Cyfannol Women’s Aid Ltd, of Pontypool, it’s entirely reasonable to assume that if they didn’t already know each other then contact was made through a mutual acquaintance, unless of course Garside has been recruited by the Union of Welsh Independents.

‘Welsh’ Labour – The True ‘Nasty Party’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carwyn vote — Photo courtesy of BBC Wales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE TO UPDATE

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

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

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

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

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

~ ~ ~ ~ END ~ ~ ~ ~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

White Water Up Shit Creek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/ How are you funded?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naz Malik and Awema: The Real Charges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YMCA ‘Wales’, Another Trojan Horse At The Trough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AWEMA Reborn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naz Malik, AWEMA: Not Over Yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jac o' the North

Tag: Naz Malik