YMCA Flint – Jac o' the North

WHEN WAS YMCA WALES?

The answer to that question is, from the mid-1980s until some time in August or September of 2014, when YMCA Wales went into administration. In the report I’ve linked to you’ll read, “While the head office for YMCA Wales is in the Llansamlet area of Swansea, the majority of the staff are based in West Wales where the charity ran an outdoor education centre at Newgale.”

The “outdoor education centre at Newgale” in Pembrokeshire was YMCA Wales’ prize asset, worth some half a million pounds. Like a restless spirit that refuses to pass over the Newgale website is still available, though of course it hasn’t been updated since 2014.

From the information I’ve been able to gather it would appear that the Centre was bought in June 2015 for £507,000 by Captiva Holdings of Haverfordwest, and is run by another company at the same address known as The Development Company.

While I’m glad to see that this property (made up of three bunkhouses) was bought by a local company (Land Registry document), I was disappointed when told that all the money raised went to pay off creditors, with the administrators of course taking their cut, rather than it being distributed among the surviving YMCAs scattered about the land.

With the parent body demised, the jewel in the crown flogged off, and the coffers empty, it seems that the various YMCAs left standing affiliated themselves to YMCA England. The clip below is taken from page 3 of YMCA England’s Annual Report 2015/6.

I put this clip out on Twitter a few days ago, one response likened it to an acclamation of Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria in 1938. For there is something chilling and totalitarian about making the “federation stronger” and adopting “the national brand”, which of course can only mean the English national brand.

YMCA Wales was put into administration at the start of September 2014. Its CEO until July had been Mo Sykes, though she had not been at work for a few months, it’s possible she had been suspended. She certainly left under something of a cloud, to the extent that the ‘Welsh’ Government called Plod in to sniff around.

The feedback I was getting in 2014 and earlier argued that the real problem lay in affiliated YMCA groups being taken over and asset-stripped in order to a) fund the parent body run by Mo Sykes, b) pay off its debts, c) benefit projects favoured by Ms Sykes or d) any combination of those three.

One of the more bizarre of those projects was YMCA Wales wanting to build housing on land it claimed to own in Penrhyndeudraeth, just south of Porthmadog in Gwynedd. I wrote about this in July 2013 with YMCA ‘Wales’, Another Trojan Horse At The Trough. It soon became clear that YMCA Wales was in fact fronting for an evangelical church, Green Pastures, which has, quite unashamedly, commercialised homelessness, to the extent of seeking investors and partners. I explained this linkage in YMCA ‘Wales’ And The Green, Green Pastures.

A curious feature of this arrangement was the link between Green Pastures and YMCA Flint. To begin with, it appeared that YMCA Flint was not affiliated to YMCA Wales yet YMCA Wales seemed to be paying its salaries; also, there was funding coming from Flintshire County Council.

It only made sense when I realised that Green Pastures, an outfit with a presence all across Lancashire and Yorkshire, was invisible on Merseyside, instead it seemed to be dealing with the homeless of that conurbation through a group of evangelical churches in Flintshire, assisted by the local YMCA.

Another disturbing tale concerned Bargoed YMCA, where Mo Sykes and YMCA Wales displaced the locals who had been running this local outpost. A dispute arose, which went legal, and with perfect Christian timing those who dared challenge Mo Sykes and YMCA Wales were served with a notice to pay £9,800 – on Christmas Eve!

Though perhaps the major casualty was the YMCA Wales Community College, a multi-million pound adult education business that had been going well, expanding year on year. There seem to have been issues in certain quarters over ‘duplication’ and the Community College has since merged with the Workers’ Educational Association Cymru to form Addysg Oedolion Cymru / Adult Learning Wales.

Even though YMCAs in Wales have affiliated to YMCA England that body still brought out a Welsh Manifesto . . . or, rather, a YMCAs in Wales Manifesto 2016, ahead of last year’s Assembly elections. Why? Because the YMCA is a social landlord and a Third Sector body, so it wants to continue screwing money out of the ‘Welsh’ Government.

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LLANDOVERY YMCA

Having dealt with the more general picture, I’m now going to focus on a specific example of how a YMCA operates. I’ve written a few times about this subject, trying to explain what a racket it is. Unfortunately, it’s a familiar story and not confined to Llandovery.

It goes something like this: a bunch of incomers/good-lifers get together and wonder how the area – Wales, even – managed without them. This acceptance of their missionary duty is coupled with the realisation that there’s a lot of easy moolah sloshing around. Next step is to get some semi-numerate ‘adviser’ to concoct a business plan, spew forth bollocks about ‘community space’, providing ‘facilities’, blah, blah, blah, then whack in grant applications to all and sundry.

The real purpose of these schemes is of course to further boost the egos of those involved while also providing salaries and pension pots.

You can find these schemes all over the country but certain areas are affected worse than others because a number of factors come into play. One being whether an area receives EU structural funding (pissed away by the Labour Party at a rate which makes the half-time deluge at rugby internationals look like a trickle). Another consideration is how attractive an area is to good-lifers, white flighters, hippies, enviro-shysters and others. Finally, there’s the local council’s attitude towards such parasites.

By way of example, the Heads of the Valleys may qualify for Objective One funding, but Ebbw Vale, Merthyr and other towns won’t attract many belonging to the groups I’ve listed; furthermore, the local Labour hetmen have always been reluctant to see money over which they have any control pass out of the ‘family’.

On the other hand, the more scenically attractive and rural areas suffer greatly from this influx. One such area is the Tywi valley, and one such town is Llanymddyfri. Which is where we encounter Jill Tatman and her friends.

One source of funding made available to Tatman and her gang was Carmarthenshire County Council’s Rural Development Plan: Supporting Rural Carmarthenshire. Here’s a RDP video put out in September 2013, you don’t need to be a nationalist to be struck by the fact that the only Welsh voice we hear is in the introduction.

What we see here explains why the funding allocated to Wales has achieved so little. In the world of funding, dishing out the money so as not to jeopardise next year’s dollop is all that really matters. When the system is run on such lines then funding becomes nothing more than a box-ticking exercise, and money is inevitably wasted.

Thankfully, the Llandovery racket seems to be coming to an end. For I hear that the gang is no longer allowed to use the YMCA name, the Lottery funding may have stopped, and now they hope to keep afloat solely on what they make from room hire. Which means that it might all come tumbling down fairly soon.

It should not surprise anyone to learn that Jill Tatman, educated at a privately run evangelical college in Derbyshire, was for a time a trustee of YMCA Wales; in fact she was personal assistant to the CEO, which probably explains why Mo Sykes became a trustee of Llandovery YMCA, and was almost certainly instrumental in securing the grants and other benefits for ~~her friend Tatman~~ Llandovery YMCA.

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WHO’S WHO IN LLANDOVERY YMCA

Those still involved are an interesting crew, and serve to remind us yet again that our rural areas are being ripped apart by a combination of neglect, tourism and colonisation.

First of course we have Jill Tatman herself. I hear that the CPS will not be pressing charges against her husband but it’s suggested there are questions about the wisdom of allowing children near the (former) YMCA building in future.

Next up is Andrew Barker, owner of the Tŷ Gwyn tea rooms in Llanwrda. He tweets as Pastor Emeritus @barkerswoof. Barker was a teacher in Essex who married one of his pupils, moved to Wales, and now has eight children. A religious cove, our Andrew, who obviously went forth and multiplied.

Julie Richards is another ex-teacher, this time from northern England. She taught for a while at Ysgol Pantycelyn, but had to give up teaching due to bipolar disorder. She now helps run the Gwynfe Cat Welfare in Llandovery, which rescues cats . . . from whom or from what I know not.

Then there’s the man described to me as “a self-ordained and self-appointed ‘rural pastor'”, Simon Bowkett who runs a charity called Y Grwp or, to give it its full name, Grace Rural Wales Partnership. To judge by the photograph he wears the Horse and Hound clothing no authentic Welsh countryman would ever wear.

Another member of this circus may be encountered at the Cibola emporium in Llandovery. Owner Diane Fontenoy supplements her income by fostering children on her farm near Llandovery. I have it from more than one source that fostering is regarded as a nice little earner among the colon population.

Moving on . . . Anna Battek-Kosiorowska is – as the name might suggest – Polish, a vet and a friend of Julie Richards.

Let’s not forget one of the current trustees, Anne Swift, an elderly spinster, retired barrister and High Tory. Said to be from Gower, but might respond with the Duke of Wellington’s horse and stable analogy if accused of being Welsh. To judge by her Twitter account she has little time for people, being one of those elderly women who is obsessed with cats and dogs.

Finally, let’s remember two more seen in the video (at 1:47), Gill Wright and Jane Ryall. They took over the old North Western pub and had it converted into a bunkhouse called the Level Crossing. I don’t know how much public money went into this venture, but however much it was it was wasted. The venture collapsed last year after less than three years in ‘business’.

You will have noticed that a number of those involved are of a religious bent but do not belong to anything most of us would regard as mainstream religion, more the ‘happy clappy’ element, Evangelicals of the kind we met earlier in Penrhyndeudraeth. Nothing wrong with this, or course, but the Land Registry title document for the building makes interesting reading in this context.

You’ll see that the property was transferred to YMCA Wales by the Church in Wales, with certain covenants. I have no reason to suspect that Tatman and her clique hold Bacchanalian orgies in the building so it’s reasonable to assume that the conditions outlined in 2.1 have been adhered to, but what of 2.2?

Clearly the building has been used “other than for residential purposes”, indeed, except for Lee Mattocks – who can be found on the video at 2:53 – living there rent free for two years, I’m not sure the building has ever been used for residential purposes.

Perhaps of more worry should be that the building is said to be regularly used for happy clappy gatherings, which clearly contravenes 2.2 in that these belong to a “religious denomination or sect” other than Anglican.

The latest news is that the remaining Welsh trustees are being elbowed out and Tatman and her gang are seeking new sources of funding.

Though anyone minded to fund these people should insist on a rather more transparent accounting system than the one I’m told is currently in use. For La Tatman is said to pay for things with her personal debit card and then reimburse herself from YMCA funds!

And although there is only one known YMCA bank account some wonder where the £18,000 magically appeared from when that account was running low. Suspicions persist that there may be accounts existing that are unknown to those outside a gilded circle. Perhaps YMCA money is ‘resting’ in personal accounts, away from prying eyes.

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RETURN TO LLANSAMLET

Mo Sykes walked away from the wreckage of YMCA Wales and set herself up as a consultant before landing the post of New Beginnings Manager with the Swansea Young Single Homeless Project in November 2016, yet another ride on the Third Sector merry-go-round. SYSHP income for y/e 31.03.2017 was £1,190,550 (down from £1,349,594 y/e 31.03.2012) and salaries took a very hefty £860,031 of that (£994,721 y/e 31.03.2012).

Under her full name of Maureen Patricia Sykes she also started, in December 2015, a company called Clydach Craft House Ltd which appears to be dormant. Her next planned career move is to become a Labour councillor for the Llansamlet ward in Swansea next month, though the website I’ve linked to suggests she’s already a councillor – that’s confidence for you!

(I bet you’re surprised to learn that Mo Sykes is a member of the Labour Party! And this being Swansea, it should go without saying that she’s not Welsh. Sykes is from the Six Counties.)

Llansamlet is a ward I know quite well. I recall my old mate John Ball becoming the first Plaid Cymru councillor in Swansea when he won Llansamlet back in the early ’70s. I sank many a pint with Phil Henri in the Smiths and the Star. And I think the last time I ever spoke with Viv Davies the FWA veteran was in the Smiths. It all seems a lifetime ago now.

The vacancies in Llansamlet were caused by the departure of Bob and Uta Clay, the Anglo-Austrian Trotskyist duo, of whom I have writ more than once. I shall miss them. But I’m sure Mo Sykes will provide me with inspiration. I can say that because Labour never fails to give me something to write about. Add the Third Sector and it often becomes an embarrassment of riches.

And so we’ve come full circle to Llansamlet. I wonder if, when she’s out canvassing, any local will ask Mo Sykes, ‘What happened to YMCA Wales?’. I’d certainly like to know. Anyone out there with answers is more than welcome to get in touch.

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EPILOGUE

When it comes to grant-grabbers I take the view that they’ll always be with us, as will those, with their Labour Party connections, who think that a ‘career’ in the Third Sector puts them on a par with people who contribute to the economy by creating wealth and jobs. But they should be slapped down not encouraged and patronised.

What really concerns me in the case of YMCA Wales is that a body serving our country was wrecked, almost certainly by people with Labour Party connections, and the debris was then hoovered up by YMCA England without anyone raising a murmur. And this was happening 16 years into devolution. Unfortunately YMCA Wales is no isolated example.

It’s a pattern that sees Wales being integrated with England at a faster rate than we’ve known since the Tudors. It shows itself in countless ways, from the England (andwales) Cricket Board to Dee Valley Water being taken over by Severn Trent. Yet the politicians in our Assembly, which is supposed to be serving Welsh interests, say little and do nothing.

When they do put on a show of ‘doing something’, it often turns out to be the kind of thing I wrote about in the previous post – handing Wales over to the likes of Bear Grylls and Gavin Lee Woodhouse.

HOW BUSINESS IS CONDUCTED BETWEEN WALES AND ENGLAND English businessman to Ken Skates, Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure: ‘We’re prepared to take this valuable asset off your hands, but you’ll have to give us a lot of money’. Ken thinks, ‘Yes, sir, anything you want, and we’ll throw in some women too’.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, devolution is a chimera; the civil servants who run Wales change a few words in laws that have already been passed in England, add (Wales), and then get the BBC or Trinity Mirror to pretend it’s all the work of a real government. And while we’re being lied to in this way Wales is either being killed off or sold off all around us.

From now on Wales needs people who will not get bogged down debating whether registration of denture makers should be devolved; now that we can see devolution has failed we must reject it, and push for independence. There is no acceptable alternative.

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Anyone who hasn’t read the previous post should do so before reading this. Pay particular attention to the comments, for therein lies great wisdom.

In that previous post on the planning application from YMCA Wales for new housing in Penrhyndeudraeth, I asked, “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?” I asked these questions because, even at first glance, the YMCA seemed an unlikely property developer.

Subsequent enquiries, and information received in the form of comments, now persuade me that my initial surprise at the YMCA going into competition with Wimpey and Redrow was justified. For it now looks as if the YMCA is acting as a cat’s-paw for another organisation that, for reasons I hope to explain, would prefer not to show its hand. So how best to draw the threads together, for this is pretty complicated?

In my previous post I noted that even though the organisation is called ‘YMCA Wales’ the only YMCA association or branch affiliated in the north is a tin shack in Trawsfynydd; otherwise there’s nothing further north than Rhayader. Though out of a total of nine full-time YMCA Wales employees mentioned in the 2011/12 Report two are based in “Flintshire”. Which I suppose raises the question, why is YMCA Wales paying for staff at unaffiliated associations? When I Googled ‘Flint YMCA’ this is what came up. Which now raises the obvious question, what is Green Pastures?

The answer can be found at the Green Pastures website. Green Pastures describes itself as a “Christian Social Enterprise” providing accommodation for the homeless. For the purposes of what might be afoot in Penrhyndeudraeth, perhaps the important thing to know about Green Pastures is that it operates through franchisees, or ‘partners’. This panel from the website (click to enlarge) might give an idea of how this franchise system operates. The full page, and the video, can be found here.

Before leaving the Green Pastures website, I was struck by the distribution of the ‘partners’. Looking at the map (click to enlarge) we can see that GP is a largely northern English organisation, but with only one ‘partner’ further north than Harrogate. Then there is a cluster around London, plus a few outposts, one in Bridgend, the Well Christian Centre, another “Elim Pentecostal Church”. Surprisingly, there are four more ‘partners’ in the north east: the New Life Church in Holywell (which describes itself as “a church and a charity); EBVenture in Mold (no website); the Riverdee (sic) Church in Holywell; and the YMCA in Flint (again, no website). This cluster on the border explains why Green Pastures, despite being a very northern English outfit, and catering for the homeless, can manage without a presence on Merseyside other than Southport, nearer to Blackpool Tower than Liverpool Pierhead.

Some of you may now be thinking, ‘This is all very interesting, Jac, but pray tell – what has it to do with Penrhyndeudraeth!’ I’m coming to that, but first, let’s recap. There is a clear link, via Flint, between YMCA Wales and Green Pastures, yet another group in the homelessness racket. I say ‘racket’ because you mustn’t run away with the idea that the members of these sects are giving the homeless the clothes off their backs, or taking them in under their own roofs. No, it’s a business; a very lucrative business and someone else invariably picks up the tab. In Wales, the Welsh Government, your local authority, various other agencies. So let’s return to Penrhyndeudraeth. (I remember, vaguely, spending a wonderful and very drunken night there with the late, great Barrie Edwards of Harlech, complete with harp and penny whistle.)

Well, thing is, there just happens to be a church in Penrhyndeudraeth called Capel Fron. Once a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist chapel, now commandeered by happy clappies. In fact, Capel Fron is very typical of the kind of church that becomes a ‘partner’ to Green Pastures. Last November a new Pastor took over, by the name of Pete Campbell. He was ordained by Pastor Pete Day of Southport, which by an amazing coincidence is also home to Pastor Pete Cunningham, “co-founder of Green Pastures”, mentioned in this recent Southport Visiter report. Though the path has not always been smooth, as the same organ reports here.

What, I suppose, completed the circle, was learning that Pete Campbell, the new pastor in Penrhyn’, has Swansea connections. ” . . . Pete Campbell . . . was a worker at Townhill Baptist Church, Swansea. Both he and his wife Rachel have been ‘Relay’ workers with UCCF in the Swansea area.” (UCCF is the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship.) So we can assume that young Pete went to university in Swansea then, like too many others, stayed on for a while, making a nuisance of himself. (On the plus side, he didn’t become a Labour councillor.) I would wager my collection of Buddy Holly records that during his time in Swansea Predikant Piet had dealings with YMCA Wales.

So this is how I think it stacks up. YMCA Wales has applied to erect housing in Penrhyndeudraeth. (But remember, you don’t need to own the land in question to put in a planning application.) It may be being done this way so as not to draw attention to Capel Fron and Green Pastures. For given the link of Pastor Pete of Capel Fron with Swansea (and, almost certainly, YMCA Wales), and then the link between YMCA Wales and Green Pastures, a hardened old cynic like me is bound to assume that Green Pastures is the driving force with YMCA Wales merely fronting the project. If so, then these properties for which planning permission has been applied, and / or others planned for the same site, might be catering for the local homeless. And if there’s a shortage of local homeless, then prayers will be answered and homeless people will turn up from foreign lands, speaking in strange tongues.

I may be wrong on some details. And it could be just an incredible series of coincidences. But I think the time has come for some honesty from YMCA Wales, Capel Fron, and Green Pastures. It is also time for local politicians and media to start asking what exactly is going on. One thing I’m sure of: it is not a straightforward case of YMCA Wales applying to build private housing on land it owns in Penrhyndeudraeth.

CONCLUSION: As I’ve been saying for years . . . Wales has a Third Sector completely out of control and excessively large because the funding available has attracted grant-grabbers and shysters from over the border, who have often had to import the problems to justify the grants! An insane system only possible because of the weakness and connivance of successive ‘Welsh’ Governments.

There are rural areas of Wales – even urban areas such as Carmarthen – now experiencing an invasion of unwelcome Christian sects. In some cases congregations are moving en masse. These sects have primitive and reactionary attitudes to many issues, from evolution to homosexuality. They believe in the ‘laying on of hands’, the ‘casting out of demons’, and similar practices the rest of us believed were left behind in medieval times.

They often to try to hide their true nature by doing ‘good works’ which, when examined more closely, are invariably paid for out of public funds, and always serve as a front for proselytising. For the ‘good works’ they specialise in serve up a regular supply of weak and vulnerable people, desperate for support and open to suggestion. We should not be welcoming these sects into Wales. No local authority, and certainly not the ‘Welsh Government, should be funding or in any other way helping these groups. Nor should our elected bodies have anything to do with organisations, such as YMCA Wales, that work with these sects.

Jac o' the North

Tag: YMCA Flint

YMCA England(andwales)

YMCA ‘Wales’ And The Green, Green Pastures