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.