As regular readers will know, I have been having problems from the Wales Eye blog and the Western Mail / Wales Online, they’ve been misrepresenting what they find in my blog and, when that isn’t enough, they’ve just told blatant lies. The story of my relationship with Wales Eye unfolds, chronologically, in the following posts: Cymrophobia and the Many Identities of Jacques Protic (14.08.2013); Wales Eye & Jacques Protic – a Marriage Made in Hell (11.09.2014); Wales Eye, Jacques Protic and North Wales Police (21.10.2014); Seeking a Latter-day Waldorf T. Flywheel (19.01.2015); I Must Be Doing Something Right! (28.01.2015); Now I KNOW I’m Doing Something Right! (03.02.2015); Helping A Man In A Hole (05.02.2015).
Things came to a head recently with Plaid Glyndŵr’s petition on social housing, for which I provide a link in my sidebar. The assault started with a strange tweet from Martin Shipton, chief reporter at Llais y Sais, on the afternoon of January 26th, asking for my phone number in order to discuss “your housing petition”. When I received the Shipton tweet I was unaware of the Wales Eye piece, because of course it hadn’t yet appeared, so I innocently and helpfully tweeted Shipton back, explaining my relationship with the petition.
Overnight the Wales Eye article by Phil Parry was published saying, “A website which urges a policy of Welsh homes only for Welsh people has been reported to the police for inciting racial hatred, Wales Eye can reveal”. Martin Shipton said the same thing in the Western Mail / WalesOnline, and despite what I’d told him, he began his piece with, “The Wales Eye news website discloses that the Jac O’the North blog has been reported to South Wales Police after launching a petition” Significantly, perhaps, the WalesOnline article soon became (and remains) unavailable.
In the hope of getting redress I contacted the legal department of Trinity Mirror, the company that owns Llais y Sais, on Februay 2nd. On the 25th I received an e-mail from a Paul Mottram, which said:
“I refer to your 
complaint dated 2nd February and apologise for the late reply.
The Western Mail has obtained a statement from the police saying the following: ‘South Wales Police was contacted by a member of the public who was concerned at the language used in a blog posted under the name of ‘jacothenorth’.
The content of the blog was scrutinised and no offence was committed.
The reporting person has been spoken to and given assurances that no criminality has taken place’.
Media Wales would be happy to publish the fact that no offence was committed on the walesonline website to resolve this issue.
If that is satisfactory, I will arrange for it to be published.”
Eventually Mottram an
d I agreed on the wording that appeared on the WalesOnline website on Friday the 27th of February and on page 2 of the following day’s edition of the Wasting Mule. You can read both on the left (click to enlarge).
You may find the synchronicity in this episode noteworthy, for the Wales Eye piece by Parry was posted on Tuesday, January 27, and the WalesOnline version was timed at 06:30 on the same day. I should imagine that the Wales Eye piece appeared in the early hours, otherwise Shipton would have been quoting from a blog post that hadn’t yet appeared! There was obviously collusion, the proof being the tweet from Shipton asking about the petition. In fact, Shipton is almost acting as Parry’s researcher!
Yet the two accounts differ significantly in their conclusions. The Wales Eye piece, after relating – yet again! – the horrors endured by ultra bigot Jacques Protic, and how he was failed by GogPlod, ends thus:
“Now, it appears, the target of the Jac O’ the North website is incomers (presumably a reference to the Plaid Glyndŵr petition) and this has led to another police inquiry.
Perhaps this one will be the last.”
Whereas the WalesOnline article by Tub O’Lard ends like this:
“It is understood that South Wales Police will not forward the complaint about Mr Jones to the Crown Prosecution Service.”
So Shipton already knew that the police were not taking the complaint seriously when he wrote his piece, and seeing as he and Parry were collaborating so closely, Parry must also have known, but he chose not to say because to have done so would have undermined his attack on me. Worse, he pretends to believe that the complaint will lead to action resulting in the closing down of my blog, and yet . . .
Parry gives the game away that he knows the police have thrown out the complaint with the caption he attaches to the petition link he lifted from my blog. (My intellectual property.) For in it he says: “Petition calling for social housing for Welsh 
people which was investigated by the police”. Not is being investigated by the police but ‘was’. Clearly Parry knew when he wrote his nonsense that the police had thrown out the complaint. But maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe all that mattered was that a complaint had been made, which allowed Parry and Llais y Sais to write their libellous bollocks.
The lies written by Parry and Shipton referred specifically to the Plaid Glyndŵr petition, but if you look at the reply I got from Trinity Mirror, it reads: “The content of the blog was scrutinised (by police) and no offence was committed”. So if this really does mean the blog, rather than the petition, are we now talking of two complaints, or more than two? Worth asking because Parry also got his knickers in a twist over the old FWA photographs on my blog, with Shipton again acting as his ‘researcher’.
Yet despite him knowing, and finally admitting, that the police were not taking the original complaint against me seriously, Parry can’t resist upping the ante in his February 4th posting, Arms Race, with:
“An earlier probe by a Police Constable and Inspector of South Wales Police into alleged racism on the blog was aborted for lack of evidence.
But now the police have received more information after several complaints about inflammatory comments and decided to take action.
A complainant was contacted by a senior officer who said several similar protests were made to the police following the revelations about the petition and a decision has been reached to pursue the inquiry.”
What ‘racism’? Does he mean the petition? But the only group mentioned in the petition are the Welsh! ‘Inflammatory comments’. Does he really mean comments, things said by visitors to my blog? What possible ‘revelations’ could there be about a simple, self-explanatory, 21-word petition in plain English?
So if Phil Parry is to be believed (yes, I know), people are queuing up to report me to Plod! Rubbish of course, but still, we must consider the various possibilities here, which appear to be: 1/ South Wales Police misled Trinity Mirror, which means that the clarification published on Friday is unreliable. 2/ Phil Parry is privy to everything the police are doing and is therefore the only one who really knows what’s going on. 3/ Phil Parry is an obsessive fantasist who’s taken an intense dislike to me. 4/ Somebody is pulling Parry (and possibly Shipton’s) strings, and perhaps protecting Trinity Mirror’s interests by getting Parry to write the bilge leaving Llais y Sais able to argue that it’s merely relaying what someone else has written. Make up your own minds. If it helps, no police officer, from any force, has ever been in contact with me.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to South Wales Police; it can be found here, together with the first page of the reply. Which says, in essence, ‘We can’t give you the informtion you request because that would breach your data protection rights’! There were a few other pages and a form for me to officially ask if they hold any information on me. But what’s the point, I’ve been through this rigmarole before with North Wales Police over the Protic allegations.
Looking at the four options I’ve posited above, I choose number four, because I can’t believe that Parry and Shipton believe what they’re writing. No rational and balanced individual could possibly think that a petition asking for social housing to be allocated (but not exclusively) to Welsh people ‘incites racial hatred’. And do they really believe that the authorities would be interested in photographs taken almost half a century ago of men who are now almost all dead! Or that those same authorities care that I knew these men? Or to put it another way, when it comes to my support for the FWA, or my respect for John Jenkins, do Parry and Shipton seriously believe that they’re telling the police, MI5, or anyone else, anything they haven’t known for decades? So why bother?
This is not journalists breaking stories, this is history lessons spiced up with lies, hyperbole and silly, time-wasting complaints to the police for a contemporary purpose. Another example of the desperation on display is Parry quoting my playful references to alcohol having been consumed in some of the scenes depicted in those 1960s photographs, as if this somehow damns me! Effectively saying, ‘Oh my God! look at this – a group of young men in the late ’60s, and they used to drink!’ What it really shows is that Phil Parry will use anything, however innocent or banal, in his pathetic and increasingly desperate attempts to blacken my name.
Consequently, the only conclusions I can draw are that either Parry and Shipton have lost all sense of proportion and the instinct for what makes a good story (in which case they shouldn’t be allowed near a keyboard), or that this is some kind of a silly game, in which they are no more than pawns.
Both Shipton and Parry are clearly two dummies talking on behalf anti Welsh interests, I confronted Shipton accusing him for being a bigot and discriminate Welsh language, he answer me “Welsh speakers are not “always” discriminated against…..” Subsonscious always surface.
Llais y Sais printed this one recently and it kind of chimes with what’s been said repeatedly on this site
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/meet-family-six-living-two-bed-8753064
Meet the family of six living in a two-bed council house who are on a 12 YEAR waiting list for a suitably-sized home – Wales Online
There’s the usual mix of hostility towards family with 4 kids, but some of the correspondents are aware of the circumstances and it seems the dad is a worker, grafting away to bring in a wage, but can’t get local housing authority to shift. All this happening less than 2 miles from the Luxury Home for Lazy Bastards down the Bay !.
On good authority I can tell you Phil Parry really does believe that what he is doing to you is right and he’s doing it in partial retaliation for what he sees as you attacking him and his family. He’s good friends with Martin Shipton but he’s not having his strings pulled which makes his tawdry attacks on you all the more bizarre and pathetic.
The welsh Trinity Mirror titles are a joke, but at least they had the decency to apologise to you for printing the absurd tripe about the petition, albeit after considerable prompting by you. Don’t expect anything from Phil Parry though he will go to his grave thinking he’s right and doing a good job protecting Wales from hardliner like you and makes him more delunded than Jacque Protic and more dangerous than Cayo Evans of the FWA ever were.
To my knowledge, I have never attacked his family. I don’t know his family. I only became aware of his family when his son and daughter started sending me tweets, as did some of their friends. I blocked them both and told them not to be so silly.
I understand what you’re saying about Parry being utterly convinced he’s right. Perhaps worse than the self-serving shysters ‘Welsh’ Labour has always attracted are the smug and superior idealists who believe they’re on a mission from (?) to save us Welsh from the mortal sin of standing up for ourselves.
Trinity Mirror in Wales had nothing to do with the apology / clarification. I complained to Trinity Mirror HQ, so the order came down from above, leaving Media Wales with no alternative but to comply.
Im not saying the family attack is right, just passing on what i’ve been told by someone on good authority that it’s part of Phil Parry’s justification for his ongoing crusade against you.
Parry’s always had a bee in his bonnet about welsh nationalism, he’s running a smear story tomorrow about a Plaid Cymru councillor being accused of sexual harassment and he cant leave the Rhyn ap Iorweth and Wylfa B story alone either.
Even better it wasn’t Media Wales who instigated it, I bet they were really pissed off at being told to apolgise/retract the statement after Martin Shipton’s latest cock up and smear attempt.
Dont let the bastards grind you down, your work is needed more than ever
If he’s using my non-existent attacks on his family to justify his vilifying me then he’s even more detached from reality than I had previously thought. Or a worse liar.
This is a bizarre state of affairs – if I was editor of the Wasting Mule I’d be asking questions of my chief reporter’s rather too cosy relationship with the rather obsessive Parry. Shipton hasn’t had a decent exclusive in years and the Mule continues to lose readership on a staggering level. In five years’ time, it’ll be gone and hopefully independent media will take its place.
If I had any authority in Trinity Mirror I’d consider ‘retiring’ Shipton now.
It’s all about a petition making the point that local people should be given priority in the allocation of social housing.
The petition is addressed to Carwyn Jones (our First Minister) and appears to be asking the Welsh Government to act with the Housing Associations which, in Wales, fall under their remit. (Admittedly the wording of the petition could have been better.)
Personally I thought that this priority was already covered by the Localism Act 2011, so I’ve no idea why someone should think it illegal to petition for it, or indeed report one of its supporters to the police; which seemed to be the main point of their article.
I can’t find an exact quote for the act but I believe it says something like :-
Allocation schemes are also allowed to determine priorities in relation to applicants who fall within the reasonable preference and additional preference categories. The criteria may include:……
*any local connection with the area such as residence in the area, family connection or any other special circumstances.’
(This from the Age UK website Factsheet 8 April 2014- Council and housing association housing)
Possibly it could have been more clearly worded, but the point is that it does not demand that ALL social housing be allocated ONLY to Welsh people, which is the lie that Parry and Shipton are peddling. And was the basis, presumably, for the complaint of stirring up racial hatred made to the police. But who made that complaint! Let’s think . . . .
I attended Cayo’s funeral, it is fair to say that I attended because I knew him through Welsh nationalist circles. I was one of the many hundreds who were unable to get into the church so I listened to the service relayed by loud speakers into the church yard. Amongst those who were outside with me were people like Glyn Rowlands from “the extreme nationalist fringes”, Plaid Cymru supporters and councillors, Labour, Liberal and Tory councillors (including one Tory who is a leading AM now) but the vast majority inside and outside the church were not “political” they were people who respected Cayo’s contribution to his community and his expertise in horse rearing; which proves the lie that Julian was regarded as a “fantasist” a “loner” with an “undeveloped personality” peddled by Wale Eye – he was clearly a man who was held in high regard by those of us who agreed with his political activism and by many, many more who disagreed with it.
Phil Parry displays the worst tendencies of ‘Welsh’ Labour, one of which is adopting an air of moral superiority – e.g. calling others ‘racists’ – to give the impressive of being open and tolerant, while being thoroughly vindictive towards political enemies, even those who are dead. And doing it with no concern for children and grandchildren.
Another ‘talent’ is the ability to tell bare-faced lies. Take the ongoing debate over further devolution. We all know that MPs are opposed to further devolution because they fear it will undermine their cosy and useless lives at Westminster. Another consideration is that it could weaken Labour in Westminster by hastening the introduction of EVEL. What’s best for Wales doesn’t come into it. But that doesn’t stop Owen Smith and others telling us that they are thinking only of us in opposing further devolution.