As regular readers will be aware, certain people have been saying all sorts of nasty things about me, even trying to get my collar felt. These attacks almost certainly result from my criticisms of the Labour Party, its scrounging cronies in the Third Sector, and the influence of London-loyal civil servants wielding far too much power in a country we are asked to believe is now running its own affairs in so many spheres.

Unintentionally perhaps, these attacks on me exposed the linkages between the Labour Party, the police, and certain elements of the Labour-supporting media, specifically, Martin Shipton at Media Wales and his venomous little sidekick, Phil Parry at the Wales Eye blog. I am not the only one who has found himself on the receiving end of such machinations. Indeed, the other victim, who has recently been in contact, has suffered more than me, and although now hors de combat still suffers petty harassment and vindictive behaviour, but to cut a long story short . . .

A name mentioned to me, that might suggest – until very recently, anyway – a link between the police and Media Wales, is James Pritchard, see his Linkedin profile here, or here in pdf. You will see that Pritchard, educated at Rydal School, Bae Colwyn, and Swansea University was, between 2001 and 2004, the London Editor of Media Wales, and from January 2013 to October 2014 Assistant Director, Corporate Communications at South Wales Police. After leaving Media Wales Pritchard worked for Westminster City Council for a couple of years, where he gained a brief notoriety for an incident reported here in the Daily Telegraph. And here’s a nice picture of Jimmy (fourth from left, front row), back in Swansea with his London cricket team; though why does his captain refer to him as the “Ageing lothario”!

When he’s not sating his overactive libido Pritchard likes to gamble, in fact, looking at his Twitter account I see that he follows dozens of bookies, tipsters and others associated with the Turf, with many following him! Clearly, Jimmy Boy loves the ladies and the gee-gees, and so can’t help coming across as a bit of a chancer, certainly a swordsman, talking of which, and staying with the police . . .

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The elections for Police and Crime Commissioners in November 2012 didn’t exactly have people fighting to get into the polling stations. In the South Wales Police area the turnout was a risible 14.7% and it saw Alun Michael, former Labour MP (and, very briefly, First Secretary), get 47% of the first round vote and 54.4% in the second round run-off against his Independent rival Michael Baker. So Alun Michael became the Labour PCC for South Wales with the votes of some 8% of the electorate. A ringing endorsement for him and the Labour Party to take control of the Police and Crime Commissioner office.

Control helped when, in February 2013, Sophie Howe, former Labour councillor and Special Adviser to both Rhodri Morgan and Carwyn Jones was – “after a public advert and open selection process” (i. e. ‘open’ to Labour Party members) – appointed Michael’s deputy. Her Linkedin profile (here in pdf) suggests that like so many others associated with ‘Welsh’ Labour she’s a) a lawyer, and b) has never had a ‘real’ job; by which I mean that all her positions have been gained through her membership of the Labour Party. Though it seems that despite having been close to so many top Labour men she is currently on the cardboard chicken circuit and dodging the gropers while seeking a seat. So with three young children to care for and her other work for the party, it’s reasonable to assume that Deputy PCC is just another political sinecure rather than her first real job.

Despite this being another dreary saga of Labour Party corruption and nepotism, with undesirable linkages and malicious leaking thrown in, this being Labour, the laughs are never far away. For example, Alun Michael appears to have two Twitter accounts, one as Alun Michael, the other as the PCC, which might seem reasonable enough. Though many PCC tweets go out on his ‘personal’ account! Curiously, he has more followers as himself than as PCC, so is he that interesting?

Naturally, Alun Michael follows Sophie Howe, and as a loyal underling desperately seeking a seat, she reciprocates. But Alun Michael also follows another Sophie Howe, many of whose own followers’ tweets are ‘secured’, suggesting . . . well, I’d rather not think about it. Is this Sophie Howe the deputy PCC’s alter ego or someone else entirely? And if she is a different young woman, why is Alun Michael, the Police and Crime Commission for the South Wales Police, following her?

This idea of the alter ego on Twitter amuses me. Take this from the ‘real’ Sophie Howe, retweeting a tweet of Leighton Andrews (the grotesque on the right in the picture above). The tweet attacks a Plaid Cymru AM who, along with others, had raised the issue of the unhealthy links between the Third Sector and the Labour Party, and how Labour’s private army, dependent on patronage, harasses AMs on behalf of the party. (Andrews chose to deliberately misinterpret this criticism of the Labour – Third Sector nexus as ‘sexism’!) Despite this tweet from Andrews being so obviously party political, it’s apparently OK for the ‘impartial’ Deputy PCC to join in because it’s done on her personal Twitter account!

But then, given the Labour-leaning media that Wales suffers, who’s going to make an issue of such hypocrisy and double standards when it comes from a woman who may officially be the Deputy PCC but, no matter what her title, is always working for the Labour Party, and can brazenly display that bias.

UPDATE 20.03.2015: I have now been informed that Sophie Howe is the daughter of another Labour apparatchik, Peter Howe. He was at one time the office manager for Julie Morgan and, allegedly, something of a bully. Julie Morgan was of course Labour MP for Cardiff North until 2010 and is the wife of Rhodri. Howe was an unsuccessful Labour candidate in 2008 for the Whitchurch and Tongwynlais ward, where electors found him considerably less attractive than his daughter, which might account for him subsequently being passed over by Labour selection panels, something that might have embittered him.

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The fellow-victim to whom I’ve referred has provided me with an insight from the other side, as it were, having had experience inside the Cardiff bubble. The story he tells substantiates much of what I knew, or had worked out, with other behaviour that I – having led a sheltered and blameless life – never suspected. More of which anon . . .

Let’s take Our Glorious Leader. I’ve always argued that he is a weak and vacillating individual who pipes up only when squeezed like some child’s toy, and then usually with something idiotic like his pre-referendum threat to veto any currency union between the FUK and an independent Scotland following a Yes vote in the independence referendum. As if he could! My contact confirms what I have long suspected, Carwyn Jones is a plaything of his special advisers and civil servants, pulled this way and that, but he always ends up serving the interests of London and the Labour Party.

This is allowed to happen – by the ultimate controllers up in London – because in Wales Labour is the ‘establishment’ party, and viewed as the bulwark against any Scottish-style ‘problems’ (not that Plaid Cymru poses much of a threat). It could be that someone up in London follows the old US State Department dictum and looks at ‘Welsh’ Labour thinking, ‘They may be sons of bitches, but they’re our sons of bitches!’. How else do we explain Labour being allowed to build up a vast network of cronies and hangers-on to support it and keep it in power, with virtually all those making up this network – even the media – dependent to a greater or lesser degree on the public purse? A network whose members contribute nothing to the wealth of Wales other than their spending power, which of course is derived from the public purse in the first place! And you still wonder why Wales is so poor!

This network guarantees Labour – and, consequently, Unionist – control over many aspects of Welsh life. If that makes no sense to you, or you think I’m exaggerating, then just remember that in Scotland at the moment, though obviously to a much lesser degree in Wales, ideological politics is dead, or at least in suspended animation, for what matters is the constitutional debate and holding the Union together. This is why we hear commentators speculate on a previously unthinkable Conservative – Labour coalition. And why people in MI5 and GCHQ who think Hitler was a dangerous liberal will be doing their best – with the help of their tame media – to make Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy look like a composite of William Wallace, Jimmy Reid and Superman as we near polling day on May 7.

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While much of what I have learnt lately accords with what I previously knew or suspected, my new source was able to tell me of behaviour of which I was previously unaware; which is hardly surprising, given its nature. I’m talking now about sex. More specifically, a very easy-going attitude that you wouldn’t need to be a maiden aunt to regard as rather shocking. For example, there’s the ex-minister universally known as ‘Shagger ______’. Then there’s the very senior civil servant who likes to film himself having sex, and uses his official credit card to pay for rooms in London where his epic performances can be saved for posterity on video and still footage. In addition, there’s wife-swapping and group sex available down the Bay with very little of this involving, ahem, professionals. For we are talking here of talented and enthusiastic amateurs.

Yet despite Cardiff being a relatively small city, and with the Bay bubble throbbing with scandal, little of this will be reported in the ‘Welsh’ media. The only cases to surface are instances of laddish drunkenness, and incidents where there are witnesses. One gem in this category was provided by the ever-thirsty Keith Davies, AM for Llanelli, when he took some slapper back to his five star hotel. (He has to stay in Cardiff because Llanelli is 700 miles away . . . and his wife lives there.) Here’s a photo of Keith Davies taken at last year’s National Eisteddfod in Llanelli. He’s the one on the floor suffering, according to Labour, from a virus. I know the feeling, I had a ‘virus’ of Argentine red Saturday night, and very nice it was too, Shiraz.

Then, a few weeks ago, while looking into something totally different, I ran across this example of hanky-panky among the comrades. It’s almost as if fidelity and sobriety are rejected as bourgeois values that should not apply to the right-on, morally superior, posture-adopting, self-congratulatory (but still angst-ridden), freedom-loving, eco-friendly paragons of ‘Welsh’ Labour.

And while writing this piece I learnt of this story of a Labour councillor from Cardiff who’s moved 100 miles to Pembrokeshire, but intends to stay on as a councillor and collect her Cardiff council allowances. Though I’m assured by another Cardiff councillor that she is hard-working and dedicated to serving her ward. It is further suggested that she is on the wrong side in the civil war currently raging inside the Cardiff Labour Party. (Who shouted, ‘Arm both sides!‘?) Giving us another example of how Labour operates – make waves, or challenge those in power, and you will, at the very least, be briefed against. But your problems could be even worse if you leave Labour and have the potential to seriously damage the party with your revelations.

Which is what has been happening recently to my fellow-victim, and why he describes the Labour Party in Wales as being like a cult. For just as with a cult, it was after he’d left the party, and his job in the Bay, that his problems really began. Police came to the house he shares with his teenage son over a minute book belonging to a charity he himself had founded and had handed over to someone else eight months previously. Now the thing to understand here is that there was no police investigation into the charity so the whereabouts of that minute book had nothing to do with the police. This heavy-handed visit is inexplicable . . . unless South Wales Police was harrasing him at the behest of ‘Welsh’ Labour. A worrying thought.

But a valid one, because it soon became clear to my contact that he was being watched, and that someone, somewhere, was carefully sifting through his every action and utterance, present and past, in a search for anything that could be used to discredit him. He has been further pursued by the police over trivial and domestic matters. He has suffered electronic and other sabotage, such as being unable to use his credit cards, having unsummoned taxis arrive, and being accused of insane things by persons who appear to be manipulated by Labour’s Third Sector cronies.

In my case, I have recently been called an ‘extremist’, attacked for being a member (forty-odd years ago) of the Free Wales Army, and accused of launching a ‘race hate’ social housing petition (see it in my sidebar) that a) was perfectly reasonable and b) had nothing to do with me. Yet neither Phil Parry nor Martin Shipton would have taken any interest in me, and would certainly not be trying to get me arrested, if I wasn’t a regular critic of their Labour Party and its empire of evil. The question I ask is, are they doing this off their own bat, or are they acting on instructions from within ‘Welsh’ Labour? Either way, I promise to keep them busy.

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The Labour Party in Wales is now comparable to the ruling party in a crumbling totalitarian state. Due to the absence of any real opposition it is out of control, a law unto itself. There is no independent media to hold it to account beyond a few websites and lone bloggers. Enough power has been devolved from the centre to allow this situation to develop, but we are consistently denied a judicial system that might hold it to account. (Is this coincidence?) And before our eyes we see this party that always places its own survival above the best interests of the people become ever more corrupt and desperate as its power ebbs. This party that once acted as a magnet for idealists now draws careerists, shysters, single-issue obsessives, and probably contains more spin doctors than socialists. Without its regular intake of activists – mainly English – from the universities, the Third Sector, the trade unions and elsewhere, the Labour Party in Wales would find it very difficult to continue functioning at grass roots and local authority level. (This is one reason Labour wants to reduce the number of councils.) But perhaps worst of all, Labour doesn’t seem to understand that it’s doing anything wrong. Or if Labour does understand, then maybe it thinks itself untouchable.

Labour is coming to the end of a long road, but unlike in Scotland there is no obvious successor, so we may be entering a period in Welsh Assembly politics that sees no party enjoy an overall majority. In which case, Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats should start thinking of persuasive excuses if they’re considering going into coalition in 2016 with this corrupt and decadent party that is, in all that really matters, no different to the Conservatives. The reputation of Wales, the prosperity of her people, the integrity of her public life, and the vitality of her democracy, all demand that the Labour Party be denied power, and then the evil empire Labour has created to keep it in power must be dismantled.