With apologies to regular readers for the lack of posts in recent weeks. Cneifiwr has his nose to the grindstone at the moment, but here is a brief selection of news and updates.
Trisha Breckman
The campaign of intimidation and bullying which got underway earlier this year when the county council finally managed to bury a highly critical report from the Public Services Ombudsman has stepped up. Last week Mrs Breckman's neighbour resumed quarrying on his land.
He can do this legally provided the rock is for use on his own land, but Public Protection has become involved and appears to agree that the noise levels are unacceptable for people living in the surrounding area. The likely outcome is that a stopper notice will be applied, obliging Mr Thomas to cease work after an initial notice period.
The Noise Abatement Notice would prevent Mr Thomas from carrying out further quarrying activity for a couple of months, and then the whole process would have to begin again.
The quarrying has been accompanied by repeated "escapes" of horses onto Mrs Breckman's land and a further very sinister incident which is now in the hands of the police.
Filming Council Meetings
The archive of the first council meeting to be filmed can be found here. If you can understand Welsh, it is well worth clicking on Cymraeg (top right hand corner of the screen) because the translator, although good, sounds like a robot.
The technical quality of the filming is excellent, and for anyone who has not sat through a session in County Hall before, this may well change your voting habits.
A separate post on Peter Hughes Griffiths' speech is in the offing, but he refers at one point to the waste of talent which the current political arrangements involve. Whatever your political leanings, there is no doubt that the current Plaid group contains a lot of experience and talent. Labour has some strong councillors as well, although some of their more able members languish on the backbenches while the pygmies rule the roost. As for Pam Palmer and her collection of Elmer Fudds and museum pieces, the least said the better.
While rummaging around on Youtube for something else, I came across this lecture (in Welsh) given by Cllr Alun Lenny as a part of the Tir Sir Gâr production about politics in Carmarthenshire and the county's long and honourable tradition of agitation and riotous assembly. Aruthrol.
Freedom of Information
Caebrwyn's attempt to get the county council to release some of the background documents relating to its deal with Towy Community Church has, as expected, been rejected on appeal by the council, which is now trying to argue that the request is "vexatious". Following a recent tribunal ruling, the Information Commissioner now defines a vexatious request as one which "is likely to cause a disproportionate or unjustified level of disruption, irritation or distress".
Why a request for correspondence between the council and the recipient of so much public money should be disproportionately disruptive or cause distress is something to set the imagination racing. You would think if the two organisations had nothing to hide, then they would be glad to show the world.
Jacqui will now have to take her request to the Information Commissioner who has already ruled in her favour once on this request.
Value for Money
The Taxpayers' Alliance has published new figures showing that Carmarthenshire leads the pack when it comes to rewarding its senior council officers. Not only do we have the highest earning chief executive in Wales, but we also have a clutch of other officers who knock spots of the earnings of most of their peers in Wales.
In today's Wales on Sunday Mr James can be seen sporting a broad grin (as well he might) and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bryn Parry-Jones from neighbouring Pembrokeshire. To see why Mr Parry-Jones is worth so much, try googling the words Pembrokeshire scandal.
Needless to say, the WLGA's own chief executive, Steve Thomas, was quick to come out with a statement explaining why in his view high salaries are essential, somehow overlooking the fact that Wrexham manages to get by with no officers earning more than £100,000, while Ceredigion has just one.
"Barnau sy'n drewi fatha trons cneifiwr ar ôl diwrnod caled o gneifio".....(ffrind)
Sunday, 19 May 2013
Thursday, 16 May 2013
Council Censors at Work
Hold The Front Page, an online site carrying news about the UK regional press, reports that 27% of local newspaper editors have been threatened with advertising blockades by councils and other public bodies because of editorial coverage they did not like, and that 40% of the editors surveyed who had been threatened said that the threats had been carried out.
This is nothing new in Carmarthenshire, where meddling by the county council with the editorial independence of our local newspapers has been going on for years. The most recent known example was the blacklisting by County Hall of the South Wales Guardian (see previous posts such as this) late last year.
The survey conducted by Hold The Front Page was anonymous, something which is if anything more disturbing than the fact that there are a lot of town hall bullies at work, because such is the climate of fear that very few of the victims are willing to speak out.
Just as with playground bullies, the only way the cycle can be broken is if the offending local authorities are named and held to account. Hoping that over-mighty council leaders and chief executives and their PR departments will eventually go away is as naive as it is forlorn.
The peculiar half-secret announcement by Carmarthenshire County Council earlier this week that it wants to set up focus groups next week to consider how the council should "further ensure people in Carmarthenshire have access to high quality, accurate information", tells us how the council's press and PR departments like to see themselves.
The view from County Hall is that it churns out top quality, accurate and reliable information which then gets distorted and misreported by irresponsible elements within the press. That was the original justification for launching the council's newspaper.
Examples of very poor quality council press releases are legion in Carmarthenshire. Sometimes they are just gibberish; sometimes they recycle quotes multiple times as they cobble together "new" stories; and sometimes the claims don't stand up to even cursory examination. Sometimes the "information" being conveyed is simply spin, political propaganda or plain untrue (e.g. the Sainsbury's press release).
A prime example of how little importance is attached to accurate and truthful reporting came shortly after news broke that the South Wales Guardian was being blacklisted.
The council's press office went to work to tell us, with a completely straight face, that the withdrawal of advertising had nothing to do with criticism by the paper of the council. It was purely a commercial decision based on the newspaper's circulation, suggesting for good measure that the paper should stop whining and try to sell more copies.
A couple of months later, advertising with the Guardian quietly resumed, giving the lie to the council's earlier statement. So much for truth, reliability and accuracy.
As the president of the Newspaper Society, Adrian Jeakings told Hold The Front Page:
Local newspapers’ ability to hold authority and the powerful to account on behalf of their readers underpins local democracy in Britain and we are in serious danger of seeing this become irreparably damaged.
Let's hope that someone sticks that quote up on the walls of the offices of the Carmarthen Journal and Llanelli Star.
This is nothing new in Carmarthenshire, where meddling by the county council with the editorial independence of our local newspapers has been going on for years. The most recent known example was the blacklisting by County Hall of the South Wales Guardian (see previous posts such as this) late last year.
The survey conducted by Hold The Front Page was anonymous, something which is if anything more disturbing than the fact that there are a lot of town hall bullies at work, because such is the climate of fear that very few of the victims are willing to speak out.
Just as with playground bullies, the only way the cycle can be broken is if the offending local authorities are named and held to account. Hoping that over-mighty council leaders and chief executives and their PR departments will eventually go away is as naive as it is forlorn.
The peculiar half-secret announcement by Carmarthenshire County Council earlier this week that it wants to set up focus groups next week to consider how the council should "further ensure people in Carmarthenshire have access to high quality, accurate information", tells us how the council's press and PR departments like to see themselves.
The view from County Hall is that it churns out top quality, accurate and reliable information which then gets distorted and misreported by irresponsible elements within the press. That was the original justification for launching the council's newspaper.
Examples of very poor quality council press releases are legion in Carmarthenshire. Sometimes they are just gibberish; sometimes they recycle quotes multiple times as they cobble together "new" stories; and sometimes the claims don't stand up to even cursory examination. Sometimes the "information" being conveyed is simply spin, political propaganda or plain untrue (e.g. the Sainsbury's press release).
A prime example of how little importance is attached to accurate and truthful reporting came shortly after news broke that the South Wales Guardian was being blacklisted.
The council's press office went to work to tell us, with a completely straight face, that the withdrawal of advertising had nothing to do with criticism by the paper of the council. It was purely a commercial decision based on the newspaper's circulation, suggesting for good measure that the paper should stop whining and try to sell more copies.
A couple of months later, advertising with the Guardian quietly resumed, giving the lie to the council's earlier statement. So much for truth, reliability and accuracy.
As the president of the Newspaper Society, Adrian Jeakings told Hold The Front Page:
Local newspapers’ ability to hold authority and the powerful to account on behalf of their readers underpins local democracy in Britain and we are in serious danger of seeing this become irreparably damaged.
Let's hope that someone sticks that quote up on the walls of the offices of the Carmarthen Journal and Llanelli Star.
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Watching Paint Dry
Update
After the utter tedium of the morning session, Cneifiwr resolved to go and get a life, but was dragged back by urgent messages suggesting he tune into yet another car crash speech by the Council Leader, Kevin Madge. On logging back in to the live broadcast, Peter Hughes Griffiths was ripping into the leader's report and its spin.
Pam Palmer, the leader of the Independents, was then invited to speak as deputy leader. She clearly had not anticipated that the job might involve having to say anything, and looked distinctly miffed to be asked to respond. So she fumbled and growled away for a couple of minutes, looking very cross.
This was followed by a serious of unanimous votes approving various reports, and the show came shuddering to an end. With the prospect of many more dire repeat performances from Kev and Pam, we can only hope that the final curtain comes down on their long political careers just as abruptly.
For all who missed today's broadcast, you should at some point be able to watch it at your leisure here. The first half will certainly be an aid to anyone suffering from insomnia.
******************************************************
Carmarthenshire County Council sputtered into the twentieth century today with its first ever webcast. The technical quality of the first broadcast was good, with clear sound and good camera work.
As expected, the content left a lot to be desired. The fancy dress uniforms were straight out of the nineteenth century, as were a good many of the speakers. After two hours of polite speeches, congratulations and expressions of thanks, the meeting was adjourned for a two-hour slap-up lunch off camera, leaving first time viewers with the not wholly inaccurate impression that they had intruded upon a rather chummy private club.
Cllr Sian Thomas gave a good speech as outgoing chair of the council, and was the only speaker to introduce any realism into the proceedings. She noted with some disappointment that the council had not always taken advantage of her hidden talents, and she hoped that it made full use of the talents of her successor, Labour's Terry Davies. She also felt sure that the new vice chair, Cllr Daff Davies (Independent) probably had some hidden talents somewhere.
And that was about it, although viewers may have spotted that, as usual, the Independent benches looked rather empty, and the meeting began with a roll-call of apologies for absence. Absentee Independents included Cllrs Meryl Gravell, Giles Morgan and Theressa Bowen, while Labour's Keri Thomas also stayed away. Frankly, who can blame them, although some of the absentees often have more pressing business elsewhere (such as Mediterranean and other cruises in some cases) when there is real business to be transacted.
After the utter tedium of the morning session, Cneifiwr resolved to go and get a life, but was dragged back by urgent messages suggesting he tune into yet another car crash speech by the Council Leader, Kevin Madge. On logging back in to the live broadcast, Peter Hughes Griffiths was ripping into the leader's report and its spin.
Pam Palmer, the leader of the Independents, was then invited to speak as deputy leader. She clearly had not anticipated that the job might involve having to say anything, and looked distinctly miffed to be asked to respond. So she fumbled and growled away for a couple of minutes, looking very cross.
This was followed by a serious of unanimous votes approving various reports, and the show came shuddering to an end. With the prospect of many more dire repeat performances from Kev and Pam, we can only hope that the final curtain comes down on their long political careers just as abruptly.
For all who missed today's broadcast, you should at some point be able to watch it at your leisure here. The first half will certainly be an aid to anyone suffering from insomnia.
******************************************************
Carmarthenshire County Council sputtered into the twentieth century today with its first ever webcast. The technical quality of the first broadcast was good, with clear sound and good camera work.
As expected, the content left a lot to be desired. The fancy dress uniforms were straight out of the nineteenth century, as were a good many of the speakers. After two hours of polite speeches, congratulations and expressions of thanks, the meeting was adjourned for a two-hour slap-up lunch off camera, leaving first time viewers with the not wholly inaccurate impression that they had intruded upon a rather chummy private club.
Cllr Sian Thomas gave a good speech as outgoing chair of the council, and was the only speaker to introduce any realism into the proceedings. She noted with some disappointment that the council had not always taken advantage of her hidden talents, and she hoped that it made full use of the talents of her successor, Labour's Terry Davies. She also felt sure that the new vice chair, Cllr Daff Davies (Independent) probably had some hidden talents somewhere.
And that was about it, although viewers may have spotted that, as usual, the Independent benches looked rather empty, and the meeting began with a roll-call of apologies for absence. Absentee Independents included Cllrs Meryl Gravell, Giles Morgan and Theressa Bowen, while Labour's Keri Thomas also stayed away. Frankly, who can blame them, although some of the absentees often have more pressing business elsewhere (such as Mediterranean and other cruises in some cases) when there is real business to be transacted.
Focussing on Hamster Bedding
Carmarthenshire County Council has announced that it intends to hold a "consultation" on its bi-monthly propaganda sheet, Carmarthenshire News, and is inviting anyone interested to register to join one of two focus groups which will be held next week, for some strange reason at the headquarters of Dyfed Powys Police near Carmarthen and at the new "shoppertainment" complex in Llanelli known to the council as Y Ffwrnes and to Llanelli residents as the Stepney Centre.
The invitation appeared briefly on the home page of the council's website before being consigned to a dark corner where nobody apart from bloggers and other obsessives are likely to venture.
This is bad news for Parc y Scarlets, which has until now been the council's venue of choice for events of this kind.
It is unlikely that many people in Carmarthenshire will be familiar with the contents of the council's newspaper, with instant recycling being the most common option, but for those who have read it, pictures of grinning senior council officers and a handful of senior councillors, usually wearing hard hats and fluorescent jackets, are probably the most abiding images. If you are looking for details of more hum-drum stuff such as refuse collections, consultation timetables, useful telephone numbers and contact details, Carmarthenshire News is not for you.
So if you are retired, unemployed or otherwise at a loose end next Monday or Tuesday, what can you expect?
A couple of years ago Cneifiwr attended a council "consultation" involving focus groups in a community hall. Running the show was a team of very smartly dressed external consultants, accompanied by a few council staff. The chief consultant buttered up his audience. He had never been to these parts before, he announced, but what a charming place it was. He could well imagine returning with his family for a holiday.
The senior consultant began by setting the scene in broad terms before inviting the public to form groups to brainstorm ideas for improving our surroundings. The result was a few score of ideas listed on flipcharts. Within less than 10 minutes this list was whittled down to nothing, while a couple of new ideas appeared as if from nowhere.
As if by magic, the senior consultant and his team then whipped out a lot of beautifully produced artists' impressions and slides explaining the projects in more detail, with the stunned public being given the impression that this is what they had come up with.
And so a scheme was "chosen" to go forward for an application for European funding, and that was the end of the matter. The consultants no doubt got a fat cheque, but the schemes never saw the light of day.
Cynical it may be, but if the consultation on Carmarthenshire News does go ahead, don't expect the outcome to be a popular vote to have the propaganda rag scrapped. Suggestions from the floor that the bloated carcass of the council's press and PR department should be humanely disposed of are also unlikely to get beyond the flipcharts.
The invitation appeared briefly on the home page of the council's website before being consigned to a dark corner where nobody apart from bloggers and other obsessives are likely to venture.
This is bad news for Parc y Scarlets, which has until now been the council's venue of choice for events of this kind.
It is unlikely that many people in Carmarthenshire will be familiar with the contents of the council's newspaper, with instant recycling being the most common option, but for those who have read it, pictures of grinning senior council officers and a handful of senior councillors, usually wearing hard hats and fluorescent jackets, are probably the most abiding images. If you are looking for details of more hum-drum stuff such as refuse collections, consultation timetables, useful telephone numbers and contact details, Carmarthenshire News is not for you.
So if you are retired, unemployed or otherwise at a loose end next Monday or Tuesday, what can you expect?
A couple of years ago Cneifiwr attended a council "consultation" involving focus groups in a community hall. Running the show was a team of very smartly dressed external consultants, accompanied by a few council staff. The chief consultant buttered up his audience. He had never been to these parts before, he announced, but what a charming place it was. He could well imagine returning with his family for a holiday.
The senior consultant began by setting the scene in broad terms before inviting the public to form groups to brainstorm ideas for improving our surroundings. The result was a few score of ideas listed on flipcharts. Within less than 10 minutes this list was whittled down to nothing, while a couple of new ideas appeared as if from nowhere.
As if by magic, the senior consultant and his team then whipped out a lot of beautifully produced artists' impressions and slides explaining the projects in more detail, with the stunned public being given the impression that this is what they had come up with.
And so a scheme was "chosen" to go forward for an application for European funding, and that was the end of the matter. The consultants no doubt got a fat cheque, but the schemes never saw the light of day.
Cynical it may be, but if the consultation on Carmarthenshire News does go ahead, don't expect the outcome to be a popular vote to have the propaganda rag scrapped. Suggestions from the floor that the bloated carcass of the council's press and PR department should be humanely disposed of are also unlikely to get beyond the flipcharts.
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Lights, Camera and ....Action!
Next week will mark the start of a pilot to film meetings of the full council in Carmarthenshire as the pageant of the Annual General Meeting gets underway. Prepare for a display of posh frocks and lots of glinting municipal bling.
Democracy is not one of the first words to spring to mind when we think of Carmarthenshire County Council, and in a neat piece of symbolism we can expect the abused and half-starved spirit of Welsh democracy to be temporarily kicked out of the chamber to make way for a sword carrying representative of the Queen of England and a couple of other Establishment worthies dolled up in lace and fancy dress. We may even be treated to glimpses of various absurd "British Empire" insignia that have been heaped on some of the senior officers and a few councillors for their services in keeping democracy at bay in our county.
Once that is over, the second act of the annual pantomime will get underway as various committee chairs and other recipients of generous special responsibility allowances are elected. There will be no surprises as favours are repaid for toeing the line, the only unknown being whether Cllr John Jenkins will repeat his performance from last year when he shouted out "A Curse on All Your Houses".
There is some logic in having the arrival of the cameras coincide with the beginning of the new term, although it is sadly likely to be the case that many curious viewers getting their first glimpse of local government Carmarthenshire-style will be put off for ever by this empty and predictable charade.
If you are tempted to tune in, much better to wait until normal business resumes, which with any luck will be before the long summer break. If last year is anything to go by, we will have several opportunities to marvel at the inventiveness and sheer energy which goes in to preventing open debate and awkward questions.
But let's end on a positive note.
If it had not been for the tireless campaigning at enormous personal cost of Jacqui Thompson to try to bring a little more transparency into council proceedings, there would be no cameras in the chamber. No amount of press office spin can disguise that fact.
The pilot is due to run for 12 meetings of the full council only. Committee meetings, including those of the planning committee, will continue to take place free from the glare of the lights.
It is nevertheless a small victory for all those who want to see better and more transparent local government.
Well done Jacqui.
Democracy is not one of the first words to spring to mind when we think of Carmarthenshire County Council, and in a neat piece of symbolism we can expect the abused and half-starved spirit of Welsh democracy to be temporarily kicked out of the chamber to make way for a sword carrying representative of the Queen of England and a couple of other Establishment worthies dolled up in lace and fancy dress. We may even be treated to glimpses of various absurd "British Empire" insignia that have been heaped on some of the senior officers and a few councillors for their services in keeping democracy at bay in our county.
Once that is over, the second act of the annual pantomime will get underway as various committee chairs and other recipients of generous special responsibility allowances are elected. There will be no surprises as favours are repaid for toeing the line, the only unknown being whether Cllr John Jenkins will repeat his performance from last year when he shouted out "A Curse on All Your Houses".
There is some logic in having the arrival of the cameras coincide with the beginning of the new term, although it is sadly likely to be the case that many curious viewers getting their first glimpse of local government Carmarthenshire-style will be put off for ever by this empty and predictable charade.
If you are tempted to tune in, much better to wait until normal business resumes, which with any luck will be before the long summer break. If last year is anything to go by, we will have several opportunities to marvel at the inventiveness and sheer energy which goes in to preventing open debate and awkward questions.
But let's end on a positive note.
If it had not been for the tireless campaigning at enormous personal cost of Jacqui Thompson to try to bring a little more transparency into council proceedings, there would be no cameras in the chamber. No amount of press office spin can disguise that fact.
The pilot is due to run for 12 meetings of the full council only. Committee meetings, including those of the planning committee, will continue to take place free from the glare of the lights.
It is nevertheless a small victory for all those who want to see better and more transparent local government.
Well done Jacqui.
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Different hymn sheets
"New alley opening will bowl you over" screams the headline in the Carmarthen Journal, announcing the forthcoming much delayed opening of the new evangelical bowling alley in Johnstown, financed in large part by the long-suffering council tax payers of Carmarthenshire.
The Journal reckons that the venture has cost £1.3 million, although it does not say how that figure was arrived at. Presumably that's what it said in the press release.
As previously noted on this blog, the county council's contribution alone is more than £1.4 million (the price paid for the site, the grants and loans), while the Big Lottery Fund chipped in with £800,000, and there are bank loans in the region of £750,000. Towy Community Church's contribution to the project was originally stated to be £17,000, and mystery continues to surround how much actual money the church has put into the kitty.
As we know (see previous post), the council is very keen not to allow any daylight to shine on its dealings with Towy Community Church. Although the council is by far the largest financial backer and the church's bankers and the Lottery Fund have secured priority over the tax payer in the event that the venture goes belly up, requests for detailed information about the project are considered to be not just impudent, but vexatious.
Ever since the project first saw the light of day, the council and the church have been consistent in one thing only: they have sung from different hymn sheets. The numbers quoted have been all over the place. The church claimed at one point that the council had purchased the site in Johnstown for the church. The council said it had always wanted a bowling alley and had bought the site while it was in negotiations with someone else (identity still unknown). The Wales Audit Office said that it was the church which first approached the council with the idea of turning the former creamery into a bowling alley. Take your pick.
Here is an entirely imaginary conversation from 2009:
Mark: "Hallo Mark, it's Mark! I've had a wonderful vision. We could turn that crumbling old dump down in Johnstown into a ten-pin bowling alley. I wonder who owns it?"
Mark: "Well Mark, what an extraordinary coincidence! It just so happens that we own it, and Meryl and I have always wanted Carmarthen to have a bowling alley. So much more in keeping with our exciting corporate image than those mouldy old museums and all that Welsh language and culture stuff standing in the way of progress. Let's start a project together!"
Things moved very rapidly. Incredibly rapidly, in fact. In July 2010 the Big Lottery Fund announced that it was awarding £798,000 to the project.
And so it came to pass in the days of Meryl Augusta that the former creamery was leased to Towy Community Church at a peppercorn rent for 99 years. Interestingly, the Journal quotes the pastor as saying that the bowling alley will be leased to the church for 20 years.
This is the first time that a shorter lease has been mentioned, and if correct it would suggest that someone has got cold feet about the wisdom of committing to a century of evangelical bowling. Although that's still a much shorter stretch than the eternity of conscious punishment which, the church says, faces people like Carmarthenshire's bloggers.
The Journal notes that the bowling alley is just the first phase of a bigger project. Phase II will involve the development of a 612 seater auditorium (to be run by the church and used for its church services, but emphatically not to be regarded as a church). Both phases were passed by the council's planners at the same time, and a condition of the deal is that Phase II has to be completed within 5 years, or "a few years away", as Mr Bennett put it rather vaguely.
But let's give the last word to Meryl and the Journal:
"It is the way forward. It's working in partnership. They don't have to come back to us for more grants in future. It's self financing."
The project team hopes to start tendering for contractors to build phase one of the scheme by the end of the year. (Carmarthen Journal September 2010)
Sadly, Meryl's crystal ball must have been malfunctioning that day, because in 2011 the church was back asking for more money (lots of it), and the opening is two and a half years late.
The Journal reckons that the venture has cost £1.3 million, although it does not say how that figure was arrived at. Presumably that's what it said in the press release.
As previously noted on this blog, the county council's contribution alone is more than £1.4 million (the price paid for the site, the grants and loans), while the Big Lottery Fund chipped in with £800,000, and there are bank loans in the region of £750,000. Towy Community Church's contribution to the project was originally stated to be £17,000, and mystery continues to surround how much actual money the church has put into the kitty.
As we know (see previous post), the council is very keen not to allow any daylight to shine on its dealings with Towy Community Church. Although the council is by far the largest financial backer and the church's bankers and the Lottery Fund have secured priority over the tax payer in the event that the venture goes belly up, requests for detailed information about the project are considered to be not just impudent, but vexatious.
Ever since the project first saw the light of day, the council and the church have been consistent in one thing only: they have sung from different hymn sheets. The numbers quoted have been all over the place. The church claimed at one point that the council had purchased the site in Johnstown for the church. The council said it had always wanted a bowling alley and had bought the site while it was in negotiations with someone else (identity still unknown). The Wales Audit Office said that it was the church which first approached the council with the idea of turning the former creamery into a bowling alley. Take your pick.
Here is an entirely imaginary conversation from 2009:
Mark: "Hallo Mark, it's Mark! I've had a wonderful vision. We could turn that crumbling old dump down in Johnstown into a ten-pin bowling alley. I wonder who owns it?"
Mark: "Well Mark, what an extraordinary coincidence! It just so happens that we own it, and Meryl and I have always wanted Carmarthen to have a bowling alley. So much more in keeping with our exciting corporate image than those mouldy old museums and all that Welsh language and culture stuff standing in the way of progress. Let's start a project together!"
Things moved very rapidly. Incredibly rapidly, in fact. In July 2010 the Big Lottery Fund announced that it was awarding £798,000 to the project.
And so it came to pass in the days of Meryl Augusta that the former creamery was leased to Towy Community Church at a peppercorn rent for 99 years. Interestingly, the Journal quotes the pastor as saying that the bowling alley will be leased to the church for 20 years.
This is the first time that a shorter lease has been mentioned, and if correct it would suggest that someone has got cold feet about the wisdom of committing to a century of evangelical bowling. Although that's still a much shorter stretch than the eternity of conscious punishment which, the church says, faces people like Carmarthenshire's bloggers.
The Journal notes that the bowling alley is just the first phase of a bigger project. Phase II will involve the development of a 612 seater auditorium (to be run by the church and used for its church services, but emphatically not to be regarded as a church). Both phases were passed by the council's planners at the same time, and a condition of the deal is that Phase II has to be completed within 5 years, or "a few years away", as Mr Bennett put it rather vaguely.
But let's give the last word to Meryl and the Journal:
"It is the way forward. It's working in partnership. They don't have to come back to us for more grants in future. It's self financing."
The project team hopes to start tendering for contractors to build phase one of the scheme by the end of the year. (Carmarthen Journal September 2010)
Sadly, Meryl's crystal ball must have been malfunctioning that day, because in 2011 the church was back asking for more money (lots of it), and the opening is two and a half years late.
Monday, 6 May 2013
An arbitrary exercise of power
It is no secret that there is no love lost between fellow blogger Jacqui Thompson and a handful of people at the top of Carmarthenshire County Council, and the council has fired the latest shot in its battle to silence her and her blog by branding a Freedom of Information request as "vexatious" as a justification for refusing it.
You can read the background to the request and its already lengthy history on Jacqui's blog here, but in summary the request for information on the council's dealings with Towy Community Church was first rejected by the council, then rejected again on appeal, before the Information Commissioner ruled that the council had been wrong to reject it on the grounds stated, and the process began again.
Ever resourceful, the council has combed through the Act and now hit upon Section 14 (1) which says simply that a request may be rejected if it is considered to be vexatious. The Information Commissioner has provided a handy set of guidelines as to what constitutes a vexatious request for those dealing with FOI requests here.
The first key point is that the council may not dismiss a request because it considers the person making the request to be vexatious. The council has to show that the request itself is vexatious.
Reading through the guidelines, it is hard to see how the council will be able to make its decision stand as it fails just about all of the Commissioner's tests, but the one straw it is likely to cling to is that "it may be reasonable for the authority to conclude that a particular request represents a continuation of behaviour which it has judged to be vexatious in another context and therefore to refuse the request as being vexatious".
In other words, we can expect County Hall to argue that the request for information about the council and the church is linked to the dispute which boiled over in the recent libel trial.
The problem with that is that the Commissioner says an authority should not declare a request to be vexatious if it would supply the information to someone else who was not known to it.
This raises the interesting question of whether the rejection is just part of the ongoing war between Jacqui Thompson and the Chief Executive, or whether the council is using that dispute as a pretext for refusing to disclose information it simply does not want the public to see because it may contain embarrassing revelations about how the church came to benefit from so much council money.
Freedom of Information requests to Carmarthenshire County Council are handled by Mr John Tillman, an officer in the Chief Executive's department who is unfailingly polite and, the evidence suggests, inclined to favour openness and transparency. The problem he has is not so much unreasonable, frivolous or vexatious requests from the press and public, but interference from within County Hall to prevent the release of information. In one case, for example, a senior officer put pressure on a newspaper editor to get a request for information about senior officer pay withdrawn.
My initial reaction when I read about the rejection of Jacqui Thompson's request was to hope that the press and other investigative journalists would take up the baton and submit requests for this information. After all, there has been a lot of interest in this story in the media, and there are many people in Carmarthenshire who feel very strongly about the generosity showered by the council on this particular evangelical group.
For the time being, however, a wiser course may be to let this dispute play out in the wider interests of transparency and public accountability, because what we have here appears to be an arbitrary decision which goes against the letter and spirit of the Freedom of Information Act and the way it has been implemented. This must be challenged.
Jacqui will now need to request an internal appeal, which if past performance is anything to go by will almost certainly result in yet another rejection, before taking the matter back to the Information Commissioner who may begin to wonder what on earth is going on in Carmarthen.
You can read the background to the request and its already lengthy history on Jacqui's blog here, but in summary the request for information on the council's dealings with Towy Community Church was first rejected by the council, then rejected again on appeal, before the Information Commissioner ruled that the council had been wrong to reject it on the grounds stated, and the process began again.
Ever resourceful, the council has combed through the Act and now hit upon Section 14 (1) which says simply that a request may be rejected if it is considered to be vexatious. The Information Commissioner has provided a handy set of guidelines as to what constitutes a vexatious request for those dealing with FOI requests here.
The first key point is that the council may not dismiss a request because it considers the person making the request to be vexatious. The council has to show that the request itself is vexatious.
Reading through the guidelines, it is hard to see how the council will be able to make its decision stand as it fails just about all of the Commissioner's tests, but the one straw it is likely to cling to is that "it may be reasonable for the authority to conclude that a particular request represents a continuation of behaviour which it has judged to be vexatious in another context and therefore to refuse the request as being vexatious".
In other words, we can expect County Hall to argue that the request for information about the council and the church is linked to the dispute which boiled over in the recent libel trial.
The problem with that is that the Commissioner says an authority should not declare a request to be vexatious if it would supply the information to someone else who was not known to it.
This raises the interesting question of whether the rejection is just part of the ongoing war between Jacqui Thompson and the Chief Executive, or whether the council is using that dispute as a pretext for refusing to disclose information it simply does not want the public to see because it may contain embarrassing revelations about how the church came to benefit from so much council money.
Freedom of Information requests to Carmarthenshire County Council are handled by Mr John Tillman, an officer in the Chief Executive's department who is unfailingly polite and, the evidence suggests, inclined to favour openness and transparency. The problem he has is not so much unreasonable, frivolous or vexatious requests from the press and public, but interference from within County Hall to prevent the release of information. In one case, for example, a senior officer put pressure on a newspaper editor to get a request for information about senior officer pay withdrawn.
My initial reaction when I read about the rejection of Jacqui Thompson's request was to hope that the press and other investigative journalists would take up the baton and submit requests for this information. After all, there has been a lot of interest in this story in the media, and there are many people in Carmarthenshire who feel very strongly about the generosity showered by the council on this particular evangelical group.
For the time being, however, a wiser course may be to let this dispute play out in the wider interests of transparency and public accountability, because what we have here appears to be an arbitrary decision which goes against the letter and spirit of the Freedom of Information Act and the way it has been implemented. This must be challenged.
Jacqui will now need to request an internal appeal, which if past performance is anything to go by will almost certainly result in yet another rejection, before taking the matter back to the Information Commissioner who may begin to wonder what on earth is going on in Carmarthen.
Saturday, 4 May 2013
A bleak outlook
As businesses go in this part of the world, Scarlets Regional Limited is quite a big one, and so the very late publication of its results for the year to 30 June 2012 is striking. The report should have been published by the end of March 2013 at the latest, but the auditors and the board did not finally sign off until 13 April, and the results were not submitted to Companies House until last week.
Delays like this are normally an indication that all is not well, and that a lot of arm twisting and convincing needed to take place before people were prepared to put pen to paper.
The first thing to emerge from the report is that the company is insolvent, with liabilities exceeding assets by £3.24 million. That would be bad enough, but the auditors remind us that a very large question mark hangs over the valuation of the company's assets, of which by far the largest is the stadium itself. The value put on the stadium at the year end was £10.3 million.
Bearing in mind that the company does not actually own the stadium, that figure represents the hypothetical value of the lease, a sum which the directors would like the world to believe is the sort of money which could be raised if the club ever decided (or was forced) to sell the lease to someone else. The problem with that is that it is hard to think of anyone who might want to buy it.
As an old boss of Cneifiwr's used to remark, the value of something you cannot sell is nothing.
Nevertheless the chief executive of Carmarthenshire County Council told listeners to his recent radio broadcast that the council's investment in the venture was "very safe".
For the third year running, the auditors say that the losses and the excess of liabilities over assets "indicate material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern", as well as "significant doubt about the carrying value of the stadium".
The directors see things rather differently, and the report contains a lot of what can only be called spin. One of the few positives highlighted in the report was a reference to a very spurious consultants report commissioned by the club and Carmarthenshire County Council claiming that the Scarlets contribute £16 million to the local economy.
Match day attendance reached the third highest in the league, they point out. The turnover figures showed an increase of 5%, and by no means all of that can be attributed to higher ticket sales. In the absence of any figures, the truth is that ticket sales were probably flat, and that the match attendance figures were purely relative, and it would seem that season ticket holders are counted as attending regardless of whether they actually turn up.
"Administrative expenses" on the other hand rose by 11% to £3.82 million, and the bottom line was helped out by an unexplained entry for £175,000 in "other operating income" (previous year £nil). The notes unhelpfully explain that this was "sundry" income, and we have no way of knowing whether it will reappear next year.
What helped reduce overall operating losses was the unexplained "sundry items" and a reduction of roughly £360,000 in costs of sale, also unexplained.
A rather bleaker picture is presented by the balance sheet, where current liabilities (debts payable within one year) have risen sharply from £3.38 million to £4.6 million. Cash at hand shrank from £268,000 to £164,000.
In short, the club's indebtedness is rising rapidly, and any improvement in the performance of the underlying business has been slight. Meanwhile, despite the dire state of the club's finances, the directors paid themselves emoluments totalling £125,000 (up from £113,000).
Two things will come to the club's rescue in the current year. First, the report mentions (for the third year running) an anticipated sale of an asset. No information is provided as to what this might be, but the likelihood is that this is the sale of part of an area designated as a car park to Marston's, the pub group.
Like the rest of the site, this was leased to the club by the County Council. When the idea of flogging off the lease to Marston's leaked out, the council responded by saying that "there would normally be a division of any uplift from the sale".
It now seems that at some point in the last six months the freehold was actually sold to the club. What the sale price was is a very interesting question, and council taxpayers have a legitimate interest in knowing what profit the club has made from this transaction.
The other factor which will have helped the club was the loss of George North to Northampton. The storyline has enough skulduggery, crocodile tears and bluffs to fill the pages of a trashy airport novel. The WRU accused the Scarlets of touting the player for sale without his knowledge, while Scarlets claimed that they did everything to try to keep him before "reluctantly" allowing him to go a year before his contract ended.
Perhaps this will appear as a sundry item in next year's report, but the loss of George North is a serious loss to Welsh rugby, and the way in which the deal was handled further exacerbated the already strained relationship between the WRU and the regions at a time when both sides were trying to set aside their differences and work together more closely for the good of the game.
These rare rays of sunshine are balanced by more looming dark clouds. A debt of £2.5 million is owed to Carmarthenshire County Council, and payments of interest on the loan are due to resume this year.
The generosity of the club's other wealthy backers dropped sharply in 2011-12, with only two of the directors pumping in loans of £100,000 each.
On top of all that, the club needs to renegotiate its banking facilities by the end of May 2013. The bankers will hardly be jumping for joy at the prospect.
The likelihood is that Scarlets Regional Limited will limp on for another year or two. Unless there is a sudden and unexpected improvement in the company's fortunes, the county's taxpayers should brace themselves for more demands for help, including another moratorium on debt and interest payments.
The warning signs were always there, and the council, under the guidance of its chief executive, chose to ignore the advice they had commissioned which pointed out the high risks involved in the venture.
You would think that lessons would have been learned from this, but as austerity bites and more cuts are made to council jobs and services, the visionaries in County Hall are pressing on with their latest scheme in the shape of the Towy Community Church bowling alley (over £1.4 million in council funds committed so far).
That is loose change in comparison to the Scarlets venture, perhaps, but loose change we no longer have.
Delays like this are normally an indication that all is not well, and that a lot of arm twisting and convincing needed to take place before people were prepared to put pen to paper.
The first thing to emerge from the report is that the company is insolvent, with liabilities exceeding assets by £3.24 million. That would be bad enough, but the auditors remind us that a very large question mark hangs over the valuation of the company's assets, of which by far the largest is the stadium itself. The value put on the stadium at the year end was £10.3 million.
Bearing in mind that the company does not actually own the stadium, that figure represents the hypothetical value of the lease, a sum which the directors would like the world to believe is the sort of money which could be raised if the club ever decided (or was forced) to sell the lease to someone else. The problem with that is that it is hard to think of anyone who might want to buy it.
As an old boss of Cneifiwr's used to remark, the value of something you cannot sell is nothing.
Nevertheless the chief executive of Carmarthenshire County Council told listeners to his recent radio broadcast that the council's investment in the venture was "very safe".
For the third year running, the auditors say that the losses and the excess of liabilities over assets "indicate material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern", as well as "significant doubt about the carrying value of the stadium".
The directors see things rather differently, and the report contains a lot of what can only be called spin. One of the few positives highlighted in the report was a reference to a very spurious consultants report commissioned by the club and Carmarthenshire County Council claiming that the Scarlets contribute £16 million to the local economy.
Match day attendance reached the third highest in the league, they point out. The turnover figures showed an increase of 5%, and by no means all of that can be attributed to higher ticket sales. In the absence of any figures, the truth is that ticket sales were probably flat, and that the match attendance figures were purely relative, and it would seem that season ticket holders are counted as attending regardless of whether they actually turn up.
"Administrative expenses" on the other hand rose by 11% to £3.82 million, and the bottom line was helped out by an unexplained entry for £175,000 in "other operating income" (previous year £nil). The notes unhelpfully explain that this was "sundry" income, and we have no way of knowing whether it will reappear next year.
What helped reduce overall operating losses was the unexplained "sundry items" and a reduction of roughly £360,000 in costs of sale, also unexplained.
A rather bleaker picture is presented by the balance sheet, where current liabilities (debts payable within one year) have risen sharply from £3.38 million to £4.6 million. Cash at hand shrank from £268,000 to £164,000.
In short, the club's indebtedness is rising rapidly, and any improvement in the performance of the underlying business has been slight. Meanwhile, despite the dire state of the club's finances, the directors paid themselves emoluments totalling £125,000 (up from £113,000).
Two things will come to the club's rescue in the current year. First, the report mentions (for the third year running) an anticipated sale of an asset. No information is provided as to what this might be, but the likelihood is that this is the sale of part of an area designated as a car park to Marston's, the pub group.
Like the rest of the site, this was leased to the club by the County Council. When the idea of flogging off the lease to Marston's leaked out, the council responded by saying that "there would normally be a division of any uplift from the sale".
It now seems that at some point in the last six months the freehold was actually sold to the club. What the sale price was is a very interesting question, and council taxpayers have a legitimate interest in knowing what profit the club has made from this transaction.
The other factor which will have helped the club was the loss of George North to Northampton. The storyline has enough skulduggery, crocodile tears and bluffs to fill the pages of a trashy airport novel. The WRU accused the Scarlets of touting the player for sale without his knowledge, while Scarlets claimed that they did everything to try to keep him before "reluctantly" allowing him to go a year before his contract ended.
Perhaps this will appear as a sundry item in next year's report, but the loss of George North is a serious loss to Welsh rugby, and the way in which the deal was handled further exacerbated the already strained relationship between the WRU and the regions at a time when both sides were trying to set aside their differences and work together more closely for the good of the game.
These rare rays of sunshine are balanced by more looming dark clouds. A debt of £2.5 million is owed to Carmarthenshire County Council, and payments of interest on the loan are due to resume this year.
The generosity of the club's other wealthy backers dropped sharply in 2011-12, with only two of the directors pumping in loans of £100,000 each.
On top of all that, the club needs to renegotiate its banking facilities by the end of May 2013. The bankers will hardly be jumping for joy at the prospect.
The likelihood is that Scarlets Regional Limited will limp on for another year or two. Unless there is a sudden and unexpected improvement in the company's fortunes, the county's taxpayers should brace themselves for more demands for help, including another moratorium on debt and interest payments.
The warning signs were always there, and the council, under the guidance of its chief executive, chose to ignore the advice they had commissioned which pointed out the high risks involved in the venture.
You would think that lessons would have been learned from this, but as austerity bites and more cuts are made to council jobs and services, the visionaries in County Hall are pressing on with their latest scheme in the shape of the Towy Community Church bowling alley (over £1.4 million in council funds committed so far).
That is loose change in comparison to the Scarlets venture, perhaps, but loose change we no longer have.
Sunday, 28 April 2013
Because he's worth it
Cneifiwr's lawn needed urgent attention on Friday, but thanks to feedback from several loyal readers (Sid and Eirlys Bonkers of Llanelli), this blog is pleased to provide a summary of the interview with the Chief Executive of Carmarthenshire County Council which went out on Radio Carmarthenshire on 26 April.
Six questions were fielded by the awestruck presenter during the course of the hour long, pre-recorded programme which was interspersed with endless ads and dire music. Alan Partridge is alive and well and broadcasting in Carmarthenshire, it seems.
We began with a recital of the immensity of the chief executive's role. The 9,500 staff, the 4,000 elderly people looked after by the council, and so on, before being given a brief glimpse of his private life, which features walking and swimming.
Up first was a question about the council's decision to introduce car parking charges on Sundays. The question went unanswered, and what we got instead was a song of praise to the St Catherine's Walk shopping precinct and its wonderful multi-story parking facilities. Carmarthen had ample parking (if you can pay for it), and the rates were competitive when compared with other, lesser councils.
The background to this is that the mainstream Christian denominations in Carmarthen and traders outside the council's favoured St Catherine's Walk development were upset by the introduction of Sunday parking charges. The council has argued that it is important to create a level playing field for St Catherine's Walk which has always charged for parking on Sundays.
The fringe evangelical churches so beloved by the council's top brass continue to benefit from free parking at venues such as Trinity College and Queen Elizabeth High School, and so they have remained strangely quiet about the council's support for Mammon.
Someone in Llanelli wondered about the boundless generosity of the county council to the Scarlets in a week when Llanelli AFC was wound up in the High Court. This gave Mr James a chance to wax lyrical about Parc y Scarlets.
The council's investment in Parc y Scarlets was fairly safe, Mr James began, before quickly correcting himself to say that it was very safe. The council had given the Reds £40,000 some years back for a new stand, but it was important to remember that it was Llanelli Town Council which owned the ground, not the county council.
The county council had not been approached about the team's problems, Mr James said, claiming that the first they had heard of it was news reports of the court hearing. Nevertheless, the doors at County Hall remained open.
Listeners were left to ponder how little the council appears to know about what is going on in its own back yard during a rendition of Money's Too Tight To Mention by Simply Red.
The subject of filthy lucre came up again with the next question from someone who wanted to know if it is true that Mr James earns more than the Prime Minister.
It is, but Mr James was not about to admit it. Out came the violin as he told listeners how his pay had been frozen for four years. He claimed that the Prime Minister gets a lot more but chooses to take home only £140,000 or so. Unlike the Prime Minister, the chief executive doesn't get all the perks, we were told (first class rail travel and use of limos etc. are presumably not perks). And anyway, he could be earning four times as much in the private sector (merchant banking, perhaps).
So there we are. We are extremely lucky to have him. Whether his pay is justified was not for him to say, Mr James purred, having done his level best to justify it. It was all a matter for councillors.
As it happens, the BBC published a rich list of Welsh council chief executives last week showing that, just like Manchester United, Carmarthenshire can celebrate being top of the league. Third world councils such as Ceredigion have been left in the dust.
A question about filming came up next. The chief executive was pleased to confirm that webcasting would begin soon. As for filming by the public, there had been only one case of this by someone (not named) who had been doing it as part of a campaign because she could not get planning permission. Oh really?
Business rate relief was nothing to do with the council, but it did everything it could to help small businesses, we were told. Including, presumably, ramping up car parking charges and introducing parking charges on Sundays.
Finally we got round to the libel case. The interviewer, who appears to live on a different planet, claimed he knew nothing about it and wondered what it was all about. Paxman can sleep easy.
This enabled Mr James to give listeners a synopsis of the case and the judgement. It was a lesson to all, he opined (all being anyone in Carmarthenshire foolish enough to criticise the council). Jacqui Thompson was not referred to by name, but simply as "an individual" in what can only be described as snarled tones.
The kindly old judge, Mr Tugendhat, had ruled that Mr James was perfectly entitled to dip into council coffers to pay for his court action, and anyway, he was waiting for an Order for Costs and would get it all back. It wouldn't cost taxpayers a penny, he assured the people of Carmarthenshire.
"It won't cost us a penny" is one of Mr James's favourite phrases, and it has been used to describe all sorts of visionary schemes down the years. The first recorded instance was in Boston where, more than ten years on, the Princess Royal Arena is still a drain on council finances.
And on that ticking time bombshell, the programme had to make way for more urgent messages from B&Q and other sponsors.
Six questions were fielded by the awestruck presenter during the course of the hour long, pre-recorded programme which was interspersed with endless ads and dire music. Alan Partridge is alive and well and broadcasting in Carmarthenshire, it seems.
We began with a recital of the immensity of the chief executive's role. The 9,500 staff, the 4,000 elderly people looked after by the council, and so on, before being given a brief glimpse of his private life, which features walking and swimming.
Up first was a question about the council's decision to introduce car parking charges on Sundays. The question went unanswered, and what we got instead was a song of praise to the St Catherine's Walk shopping precinct and its wonderful multi-story parking facilities. Carmarthen had ample parking (if you can pay for it), and the rates were competitive when compared with other, lesser councils.
The background to this is that the mainstream Christian denominations in Carmarthen and traders outside the council's favoured St Catherine's Walk development were upset by the introduction of Sunday parking charges. The council has argued that it is important to create a level playing field for St Catherine's Walk which has always charged for parking on Sundays.
The fringe evangelical churches so beloved by the council's top brass continue to benefit from free parking at venues such as Trinity College and Queen Elizabeth High School, and so they have remained strangely quiet about the council's support for Mammon.
Someone in Llanelli wondered about the boundless generosity of the county council to the Scarlets in a week when Llanelli AFC was wound up in the High Court. This gave Mr James a chance to wax lyrical about Parc y Scarlets.
The council's investment in Parc y Scarlets was fairly safe, Mr James began, before quickly correcting himself to say that it was very safe. The council had given the Reds £40,000 some years back for a new stand, but it was important to remember that it was Llanelli Town Council which owned the ground, not the county council.
The county council had not been approached about the team's problems, Mr James said, claiming that the first they had heard of it was news reports of the court hearing. Nevertheless, the doors at County Hall remained open.
Listeners were left to ponder how little the council appears to know about what is going on in its own back yard during a rendition of Money's Too Tight To Mention by Simply Red.
The subject of filthy lucre came up again with the next question from someone who wanted to know if it is true that Mr James earns more than the Prime Minister.
It is, but Mr James was not about to admit it. Out came the violin as he told listeners how his pay had been frozen for four years. He claimed that the Prime Minister gets a lot more but chooses to take home only £140,000 or so. Unlike the Prime Minister, the chief executive doesn't get all the perks, we were told (first class rail travel and use of limos etc. are presumably not perks). And anyway, he could be earning four times as much in the private sector (merchant banking, perhaps).
So there we are. We are extremely lucky to have him. Whether his pay is justified was not for him to say, Mr James purred, having done his level best to justify it. It was all a matter for councillors.
As it happens, the BBC published a rich list of Welsh council chief executives last week showing that, just like Manchester United, Carmarthenshire can celebrate being top of the league. Third world councils such as Ceredigion have been left in the dust.
A question about filming came up next. The chief executive was pleased to confirm that webcasting would begin soon. As for filming by the public, there had been only one case of this by someone (not named) who had been doing it as part of a campaign because she could not get planning permission. Oh really?
Business rate relief was nothing to do with the council, but it did everything it could to help small businesses, we were told. Including, presumably, ramping up car parking charges and introducing parking charges on Sundays.
Finally we got round to the libel case. The interviewer, who appears to live on a different planet, claimed he knew nothing about it and wondered what it was all about. Paxman can sleep easy.
This enabled Mr James to give listeners a synopsis of the case and the judgement. It was a lesson to all, he opined (all being anyone in Carmarthenshire foolish enough to criticise the council). Jacqui Thompson was not referred to by name, but simply as "an individual" in what can only be described as snarled tones.
The kindly old judge, Mr Tugendhat, had ruled that Mr James was perfectly entitled to dip into council coffers to pay for his court action, and anyway, he was waiting for an Order for Costs and would get it all back. It wouldn't cost taxpayers a penny, he assured the people of Carmarthenshire.
"It won't cost us a penny" is one of Mr James's favourite phrases, and it has been used to describe all sorts of visionary schemes down the years. The first recorded instance was in Boston where, more than ten years on, the Princess Royal Arena is still a drain on council finances.
And on that ticking time bombshell, the programme had to make way for more urgent messages from B&Q and other sponsors.
Friday, 26 April 2013
A Selfless Act
The recent libel case between Jacqui Thompson and the Chief Executive of Carmarthenshire County Council is continuing to make news as people digest the implications of Mr Justice Tugendhat's verdict.
MP Jonathan Edwards (Plaid) put down an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons (here) to draw attention to the use by Carmarthenshire County Council of public funds to help Mr James bring an action for defamation against Jacqui Thompson, as well as defending an action being brought against him.
The motion also refers to the public interest in knowing how much the case cost the council. Needless to say, the council has no intention whatsoever of disclosing this information, and at least two requests under the Freedom of Information Act have so far been refused. One went to appeal within the council, and naturally the appeal was dismissed as well. Whether the request will now be referred to the Information Commissioner remains to be seen, but that is always a slow process.
In a separate move, Jonathan Edwards wrote what has to be one of the best comment pieces so far on the implications of this case (here), and this and the EDM were picked up by the Western Mail which ran a story here. You will see from that article that there is a clear divergence of opinion between the Welsh Government and the County Council on the use of public money to bring actions for defamation.
The spokesperson for the Government said, "An order was made in 2006 which prohibited local authorities from granting indemnities to members or officers who want to initiate defamation cases".
For its part, the council's view is that it has a "common law power to bring defamation proceedings". A two finger salute to the Government, in other words.
Meanwhile, back in Carmarthen the chief executive has set out his view of the matter in his latest triumphant missive to council staff in Y Gair, the monthly staff newsletter.
"This was a significant case, not only for the Council, but for local authorities generally. The result has been welcomed by Councils across the UK", he boasts, thereby demonstrating why Jonathan Edwards and so many other people are right to be worried.
The verbal victory parade continues, "The High Court dismissed Mrs Thompson's claims that she had been defamed by the Council, in their entirety".
The spin put by the chief executive on the case is that his counter-claim and defence were selfless acts taken to protect all 9,000 of the council's staff from an unprecedented assault by a middle-aged woman armed with a blog. This assault had been maintained against "numerous officers", he thunders.
Numerous? The court case featured three officers, one of whom had only a brief walk-on part. The other was the head of planning who was the subject of a handful of blogposts out of hundreds, while the third was the chief executive himself, the star of the show (and of Jacqui's blog).
The piece continues for several more paragraphs, outlining the bare bones of the case as it was heard in court along with a summary of the juicier parts of the judge's findings.
Mr James mentions that Jacqui Thompson was ordered to pay damages of £25,000, but does not say that the damages were awarded to him personally. Neither does he hint at what he intends to do with the money. A few weeks ago he told the Carmarthen Journal that any money raised would go to good causes, without specifying what those might be. Now there is just silence.
Somehow, then, the case was not anything to do with him; he was merely defending the council when he counter-sued Jacqui Thompson..
If we accept that, the counter-claim was in essence the council suing a private citizen. Mr James just happened to be the proxy.
That would perhaps explain why Mr James made such liberal use of council resources as he fought the case (the funds, the cars, the first class rail travel and the presence in court of the council's Head of Law, the head of the press office and other council staff).
It is also consistent with attacks Mr James and the press office have made on council critics over the years, who are described variously as "small, unrepresentative groups" with an agenda and people who "have a problem with local government".
Thus, criticism of the chief executive becomes an attack on local government.
At the very end of the piece Mr James pops up in first person for the first time, only to say once again (with an obvious dislike of commas) that it was all for the sake of others:
This is one of the worst cases I have ever come across in my career and I am very pleased for all of the staff who have been falsely accused by Mrs Thompson as they have been completely vindicated by this judgement.
A reform of the law of defamation is currently wending its way through Parliament, and there are growing calls for changes in the law to prevent local authorities from following in Carmarthenshire's footsteps. But there are plenty more legal ways of silencing critics open to councils and other government bodies.
One noticeable feature of the article is the importance Mr James attaches to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.
This was a piece of legislation passed in the dying days of John Major's dire administration and was intended to deal with stalking. A victim of stalking, Mrs Evonne von Heussen, played a prominent part in getting the bill onto the statute books.
In the years since the introduction of the Act, however, it has morphed into something rather less admirable. If ordinary people can be stalked and harassed, so too can companies or even councils, the legal fraternity has decided, helped along by more illiberal amendments in the Blair years.
In the most infamous attempted use of the Act so far, the British Airports Authority applied in 1997 for an injunction under the Act to ban groups including members of the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Woodland Trust from Heathrow, the surrounding area and even routes to the airport such as the Piccadilly Line. Unsurprisingly, the injunction was not granted as it would have criminalised an estimated 5 million people.
The Act has been used more successfully on other occasions to deal with people protesting against militarism and climate change.
Companies and other bodies which claim that someone may feel "alarmed or distressed" by the actions of protesters or others (Mr James appears to think that bloggers may fit the bill as well), can apply for an injunction. If the injunction is then breached, a criminal act has been committed which can mean imprisonment for up to five years.
Harassment is defined merely as something which causes alarm or distress, and harassment may take the form of words only. Harassment is deemed to have taken place if something is done or said twice. Two blogposts mentioning the chief executive could be enough, in other words.
No wonder Mr James was so pleased with Mr Tugendhat's verdict and the potential it provides to protect councils from the alarm and distress they may feel whenever they are criticised.
More background on the Protection from Harassment Act is available from The Guardian here and Liberty here.
MP Jonathan Edwards (Plaid) put down an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons (here) to draw attention to the use by Carmarthenshire County Council of public funds to help Mr James bring an action for defamation against Jacqui Thompson, as well as defending an action being brought against him.
The motion also refers to the public interest in knowing how much the case cost the council. Needless to say, the council has no intention whatsoever of disclosing this information, and at least two requests under the Freedom of Information Act have so far been refused. One went to appeal within the council, and naturally the appeal was dismissed as well. Whether the request will now be referred to the Information Commissioner remains to be seen, but that is always a slow process.
In a separate move, Jonathan Edwards wrote what has to be one of the best comment pieces so far on the implications of this case (here), and this and the EDM were picked up by the Western Mail which ran a story here. You will see from that article that there is a clear divergence of opinion between the Welsh Government and the County Council on the use of public money to bring actions for defamation.
The spokesperson for the Government said, "An order was made in 2006 which prohibited local authorities from granting indemnities to members or officers who want to initiate defamation cases".
For its part, the council's view is that it has a "common law power to bring defamation proceedings". A two finger salute to the Government, in other words.
Meanwhile, back in Carmarthen the chief executive has set out his view of the matter in his latest triumphant missive to council staff in Y Gair, the monthly staff newsletter.
"This was a significant case, not only for the Council, but for local authorities generally. The result has been welcomed by Councils across the UK", he boasts, thereby demonstrating why Jonathan Edwards and so many other people are right to be worried.
The verbal victory parade continues, "The High Court dismissed Mrs Thompson's claims that she had been defamed by the Council, in their entirety".
The spin put by the chief executive on the case is that his counter-claim and defence were selfless acts taken to protect all 9,000 of the council's staff from an unprecedented assault by a middle-aged woman armed with a blog. This assault had been maintained against "numerous officers", he thunders.
Numerous? The court case featured three officers, one of whom had only a brief walk-on part. The other was the head of planning who was the subject of a handful of blogposts out of hundreds, while the third was the chief executive himself, the star of the show (and of Jacqui's blog).
The piece continues for several more paragraphs, outlining the bare bones of the case as it was heard in court along with a summary of the juicier parts of the judge's findings.
Mr James mentions that Jacqui Thompson was ordered to pay damages of £25,000, but does not say that the damages were awarded to him personally. Neither does he hint at what he intends to do with the money. A few weeks ago he told the Carmarthen Journal that any money raised would go to good causes, without specifying what those might be. Now there is just silence.
Somehow, then, the case was not anything to do with him; he was merely defending the council when he counter-sued Jacqui Thompson..
If we accept that, the counter-claim was in essence the council suing a private citizen. Mr James just happened to be the proxy.
That would perhaps explain why Mr James made such liberal use of council resources as he fought the case (the funds, the cars, the first class rail travel and the presence in court of the council's Head of Law, the head of the press office and other council staff).
It is also consistent with attacks Mr James and the press office have made on council critics over the years, who are described variously as "small, unrepresentative groups" with an agenda and people who "have a problem with local government".
Thus, criticism of the chief executive becomes an attack on local government.
At the very end of the piece Mr James pops up in first person for the first time, only to say once again (with an obvious dislike of commas) that it was all for the sake of others:
This is one of the worst cases I have ever come across in my career and I am very pleased for all of the staff who have been falsely accused by Mrs Thompson as they have been completely vindicated by this judgement.
A reform of the law of defamation is currently wending its way through Parliament, and there are growing calls for changes in the law to prevent local authorities from following in Carmarthenshire's footsteps. But there are plenty more legal ways of silencing critics open to councils and other government bodies.
One noticeable feature of the article is the importance Mr James attaches to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.
This was a piece of legislation passed in the dying days of John Major's dire administration and was intended to deal with stalking. A victim of stalking, Mrs Evonne von Heussen, played a prominent part in getting the bill onto the statute books.
In the years since the introduction of the Act, however, it has morphed into something rather less admirable. If ordinary people can be stalked and harassed, so too can companies or even councils, the legal fraternity has decided, helped along by more illiberal amendments in the Blair years.
In the most infamous attempted use of the Act so far, the British Airports Authority applied in 1997 for an injunction under the Act to ban groups including members of the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Woodland Trust from Heathrow, the surrounding area and even routes to the airport such as the Piccadilly Line. Unsurprisingly, the injunction was not granted as it would have criminalised an estimated 5 million people.
The Act has been used more successfully on other occasions to deal with people protesting against militarism and climate change.
Companies and other bodies which claim that someone may feel "alarmed or distressed" by the actions of protesters or others (Mr James appears to think that bloggers may fit the bill as well), can apply for an injunction. If the injunction is then breached, a criminal act has been committed which can mean imprisonment for up to five years.
Harassment is defined merely as something which causes alarm or distress, and harassment may take the form of words only. Harassment is deemed to have taken place if something is done or said twice. Two blogposts mentioning the chief executive could be enough, in other words.
No wonder Mr James was so pleased with Mr Tugendhat's verdict and the potential it provides to protect councils from the alarm and distress they may feel whenever they are criticised.
More background on the Protection from Harassment Act is available from The Guardian here and Liberty here.
Thursday, 25 April 2013
The Chief Executive speaks to the Nation
Update 26 April
Thanks to Anon again (see comments below). It turns out that the programme was pre-recorded. Anyone who tuned in to listen to what was no doubt a carefully edited programme can get in touch in the usual way. Mowing the lawn seemed more important.
Update 25 April
Thanks to Anon below. It seems that the programme will go out at between 6pm amd 7pm on Friday, 26 April. It also appears that Mr James will not be taking questions directly from the great unwashed after all.
**********************************************
Radio signals in this part of the world can be quite fickle, and Radio Cymru seems to come and go every couple of miles, necessitating frequent re-tuning of the car radio to retrieve the dusky tones of Iola Wyn or the excellent Garry Owen, the world's greatest living broadcaster. So many readers will have found themselves accidentally listening to Radio Carmarthenshire for a few minutes.
Today the station will join the Carmarthen Journal in spreading Mr James's vision of the future that faces our county as he takes to the airwaves, and apparently Radio Carmarthenshire's listener will be given an opportunity to phone in with questions.
Cneifiwr can think of quite a few questions that could be asked, although it is unlikely that many answers would be forthcoming.
But if you can find Radio Carmarthenshire on your wireless, you may catch Mr James at some point today.
Unfortunately the station's website has no details, presumably for security reasons, but it is likely that invitations to phone in will have gone out to a small number of reliable callers, such as "Debbie" from Carmarthen who will probably ask:
"Would the Chief Executive like to share with listeners his thoughts on why Carmarthenshire is the best run county council in all Wales?"
Or possibly "Kev" from Ammanford:
"I would like to congratulate the officers of the council...blah blah [confused waffle continues until the end of the programme].
Thanks to Anon again (see comments below). It turns out that the programme was pre-recorded. Anyone who tuned in to listen to what was no doubt a carefully edited programme can get in touch in the usual way. Mowing the lawn seemed more important.
Update 25 April
Thanks to Anon below. It seems that the programme will go out at between 6pm amd 7pm on Friday, 26 April. It also appears that Mr James will not be taking questions directly from the great unwashed after all.
**********************************************
Radio signals in this part of the world can be quite fickle, and Radio Cymru seems to come and go every couple of miles, necessitating frequent re-tuning of the car radio to retrieve the dusky tones of Iola Wyn or the excellent Garry Owen, the world's greatest living broadcaster. So many readers will have found themselves accidentally listening to Radio Carmarthenshire for a few minutes.
Today the station will join the Carmarthen Journal in spreading Mr James's vision of the future that faces our county as he takes to the airwaves, and apparently Radio Carmarthenshire's listener will be given an opportunity to phone in with questions.
Cneifiwr can think of quite a few questions that could be asked, although it is unlikely that many answers would be forthcoming.
But if you can find Radio Carmarthenshire on your wireless, you may catch Mr James at some point today.
Unfortunately the station's website has no details, presumably for security reasons, but it is likely that invitations to phone in will have gone out to a small number of reliable callers, such as "Debbie" from Carmarthen who will probably ask:
"Would the Chief Executive like to share with listeners his thoughts on why Carmarthenshire is the best run county council in all Wales?"
Or possibly "Kev" from Ammanford:
"I would like to congratulate the officers of the council...blah blah [confused waffle continues until the end of the programme].
Monday, 22 April 2013
A Development Opportunity in Newcastle Emlyn
According to reports coming in from local sources, Carmarthenshire County Council is hoping to sell a couple of small fields located on a bend in the river in Newcastle Emlyn behind the Maes Llywelyn residential care home and the Day Centre.
At a rough guess, the site extends to about 5 acres and is currently a favourite haunt for walkers and other fauna and fauna, such as otters and recently a naked young man who jogged through the fields, past Maes Llywelyn and on to the playing fields of Ysgol y Ddwylan.
The identity of the naturist remains unknown, and since it was such a cold day, the police don't have much to go on.
A couple of years ago part of the fields was offered up for use as allotments, but the scheme fell through because of council red tape.
The site is not earmarked for housing development under the Local Development Plan, and it forms part of the Teifi Valley Special Site of Scientific Interest and a European Special Area of Conservation. Being right next to the river, it is also on a flood plain.
The fields therefore tick all the boxes required for housing development in Carmarthenshire, and it is to be hoped that the council can find the right kind of investor. Perhaps Meryl will let Robbie Savage know.
At a rough guess, the site extends to about 5 acres and is currently a favourite haunt for walkers and other fauna and fauna, such as otters and recently a naked young man who jogged through the fields, past Maes Llywelyn and on to the playing fields of Ysgol y Ddwylan.
The identity of the naturist remains unknown, and since it was such a cold day, the police don't have much to go on.
A couple of years ago part of the fields was offered up for use as allotments, but the scheme fell through because of council red tape.
The site is not earmarked for housing development under the Local Development Plan, and it forms part of the Teifi Valley Special Site of Scientific Interest and a European Special Area of Conservation. Being right next to the river, it is also on a flood plain.
The fields therefore tick all the boxes required for housing development in Carmarthenshire, and it is to be hoped that the council can find the right kind of investor. Perhaps Meryl will let Robbie Savage know.
Sunday, 21 April 2013
Penybanc and Carmarthenshire's house of planning horrors
A protest was held yesterday in the village of Penybanc to highlight concerns of local residents and Cymdeithas yr Iaith about the planned housing development at Tirychen Farm which would double the population of the village.
The event was well attended, and members of the local action group spoke in detail about the plans and the effect that they would have on this community.
A request has gone to the Welsh Government to have the application called in, and it will be interesting to see how the minister responsible, Carl Sargeant, responds to a plan which borrows a proposed housing allocation from the unadopted Local Development Plan plus a whole chunk more and tries to shoe horn that into the council's existing Unitary Development Plan.
The speakers made it clear that they were not opposed to the development of 141 houses on the site, as envisaged by the UDP, just the additional 148 which the developers and the council's planners want to cram in.
It was also striking that a lot of other development is taking place in the village. A stone's throw from the village hall where the protest took place was another new housing development. All of that would certainly cater for any local need for new housing with quite a lot to spare for incomers.
Joy Davies, one of the members of the Penybanc action group, pointed out that the Local Development Plan proposes 1,200 new houses in the village and surrounding area, with no evidence of local need. The schools in the area are full, and the effect would be to create the basis for a massive inflow of people from outside the area, undermining the Welsh language and the existing communities.
The Penybanc development joins Carmarthenshire County Council's extensive gallery of rogue planning deals, and it is interesting to note that people outside the county are beginning to sit up and take note. Last week the Commissioner for the Welsh Language, Meri Huws, complained bitterly about foot dragging by the Welsh Government in coming up with new guidelines for the consideration to be given to the language in planning.
Last week also the council's head of planning, Eifion Bowen, joined the debate and called for an independent body to be set up along the lines of the Environment Agency to assess the impact of developments in Welsh-speaking areas.
As reported in an earlier post, the chair of the planning committee, Cllr Anthony Jones (Lab), is the subject of a formal complaint to the Ombudsman for Public Services. Apparently Cllr Jones saw nothing wrong with insisting on chairing the meeting and voting despite, it is claimed, having spoken in favour of the development previously.
Bearing in mind the sanctions imposed on councillors in neighbouring Ceredigion for breaching the code of conduct in planning matters in recent years, this will be an interesting case to follow.
The return trip from Penybanc along the A483 northwards provides some graphic reminders of why Carmarthenshire County Council is so frequently in the news for the wrong reasons. First, you pass close to the now mothballed police station in Ammanford. This state of the art facility is costing Dyfed Powys Police, and therefore us, £700,000 a year in PFI payments.
As Caebrwyn reported last week, the council leader Kevin Madge (Lab) has been caught out yet again. Fourteen months ago he called for a public inquiry into the scandal, but forgot to put pen to paper to make a formal request for an inquiry to the Government or the Home Office.
Heading north you pass the site of the proposed new school in Ffairfach. Plans for the new school were approved at the same meeting as the Penybanc development. Unlike the rest of Wales where building on flood plains has become something of a no-no, Carmarthenshire sees nothing wrong with the practice.
A couple of miles further on, and you pass the site of the proposed Sainsbury's store just outside Llandeilo. That application was also enthusiastically recommended by the planning officers and rubber-stamped by the planning committee before Sainsbury's realised that operating two gigantic stores in Llandeilo and nearby Cross Hands wasn't perhaps such a good idea after all.
Meanwhile the Welsh Government is looking at ways to improve what it calls "delivery" of the planning system. As Plaid Wrexham reported, attention has been drawn to the size of the planning committee in Denbighshire where 30 of the council's 47 councillors decide planning applications. In Carmarthenshire just 19 of the 74 councillors are selected for membership of this committee, and in the case of the Labour and "Independent" contingent, the principal selection criteria would appear to boil down to two things:
(i) Do you have a pulse?
(ii) Can you raise your hand at the right time?
Ability to understand the complexities of the planning system and determination to make up your own mind on the basis of the merits of any planning application do not appear to be requirements. Indeed, they are probably handicaps. After all, why would you need to make up your own mind when the planning officers and the party whips are there to do it for you?
The event was well attended, and members of the local action group spoke in detail about the plans and the effect that they would have on this community.
A request has gone to the Welsh Government to have the application called in, and it will be interesting to see how the minister responsible, Carl Sargeant, responds to a plan which borrows a proposed housing allocation from the unadopted Local Development Plan plus a whole chunk more and tries to shoe horn that into the council's existing Unitary Development Plan.
The speakers made it clear that they were not opposed to the development of 141 houses on the site, as envisaged by the UDP, just the additional 148 which the developers and the council's planners want to cram in.
It was also striking that a lot of other development is taking place in the village. A stone's throw from the village hall where the protest took place was another new housing development. All of that would certainly cater for any local need for new housing with quite a lot to spare for incomers.
Joy Davies, one of the members of the Penybanc action group, pointed out that the Local Development Plan proposes 1,200 new houses in the village and surrounding area, with no evidence of local need. The schools in the area are full, and the effect would be to create the basis for a massive inflow of people from outside the area, undermining the Welsh language and the existing communities.
The Penybanc development joins Carmarthenshire County Council's extensive gallery of rogue planning deals, and it is interesting to note that people outside the county are beginning to sit up and take note. Last week the Commissioner for the Welsh Language, Meri Huws, complained bitterly about foot dragging by the Welsh Government in coming up with new guidelines for the consideration to be given to the language in planning.
Last week also the council's head of planning, Eifion Bowen, joined the debate and called for an independent body to be set up along the lines of the Environment Agency to assess the impact of developments in Welsh-speaking areas.
As reported in an earlier post, the chair of the planning committee, Cllr Anthony Jones (Lab), is the subject of a formal complaint to the Ombudsman for Public Services. Apparently Cllr Jones saw nothing wrong with insisting on chairing the meeting and voting despite, it is claimed, having spoken in favour of the development previously.
Bearing in mind the sanctions imposed on councillors in neighbouring Ceredigion for breaching the code of conduct in planning matters in recent years, this will be an interesting case to follow.
The return trip from Penybanc along the A483 northwards provides some graphic reminders of why Carmarthenshire County Council is so frequently in the news for the wrong reasons. First, you pass close to the now mothballed police station in Ammanford. This state of the art facility is costing Dyfed Powys Police, and therefore us, £700,000 a year in PFI payments.
As Caebrwyn reported last week, the council leader Kevin Madge (Lab) has been caught out yet again. Fourteen months ago he called for a public inquiry into the scandal, but forgot to put pen to paper to make a formal request for an inquiry to the Government or the Home Office.
Heading north you pass the site of the proposed new school in Ffairfach. Plans for the new school were approved at the same meeting as the Penybanc development. Unlike the rest of Wales where building on flood plains has become something of a no-no, Carmarthenshire sees nothing wrong with the practice.
A couple of miles further on, and you pass the site of the proposed Sainsbury's store just outside Llandeilo. That application was also enthusiastically recommended by the planning officers and rubber-stamped by the planning committee before Sainsbury's realised that operating two gigantic stores in Llandeilo and nearby Cross Hands wasn't perhaps such a good idea after all.
Meanwhile the Welsh Government is looking at ways to improve what it calls "delivery" of the planning system. As Plaid Wrexham reported, attention has been drawn to the size of the planning committee in Denbighshire where 30 of the council's 47 councillors decide planning applications. In Carmarthenshire just 19 of the 74 councillors are selected for membership of this committee, and in the case of the Labour and "Independent" contingent, the principal selection criteria would appear to boil down to two things:
(i) Do you have a pulse?
(ii) Can you raise your hand at the right time?
Ability to understand the complexities of the planning system and determination to make up your own mind on the basis of the merits of any planning application do not appear to be requirements. Indeed, they are probably handicaps. After all, why would you need to make up your own mind when the planning officers and the party whips are there to do it for you?
Monday, 15 April 2013
Maggie and Me
Everybody else is at it, and that's my excuse for sharing memories of how Margaret Thatcher briefly intruded on my life on a couple of odd occasions.
Cneifiwr's family was a pretty unremarkable mix of farmers, miners, bakers and engineers, with a teetotal Baptist minister thrown in for good measure. The bakery hit the buffers in the 1950s, partly because Uncle Will drank himself to an early grave, and partly because factory produced steamed bread became immensely popular and people no longer wanted the old-fashioned stuff.
The teetotal Baptist minister and his wife ended up in a small village in Herefordshire, and I am lucky to have a copy of "Granny's Memories", a short book of about 30 pages which tells her life story, including an account of a battle with the local Anglican vicar. The vicar scandalised the Baptists with his heavy drinking, and he would fight dogs in the public house for money, with his fists wrapped in old towels. Eventually he was removed from his parish. Cue Baptist schadenfreude.
On my mother's side, the family was for the most part employed in the pits, and my great grandfather died in 1916 in a mining accident at the age of 30. He left four young children and a widow. Anne, my great grandmother, was by all accounts a very sweet old lady who spent her last few years in what was effectively a workhouse where the old, confused and mentally infirm were dumped. She died in one of the last smallpox outbreaks in South Wales not long before I was born because the local authorities dumped smallpox cases on the "hospital", and the disease spread to the other inmates.
As far as I know, I was the first in my family to go to university. When the time came, my UCCA form was a bizarre selection of different degree courses, and the final incongruous choice was either London or Lampeter. I chose London because it seemed more exciting.
A year after Thatcher came to power I graduated. It was not a good time to graduate because she had engineered a recession; the civil service had a freeze on recruitment, and jobs were like gold dust. After a couple of precarious years scraping a living as a part-time research assistant, I got my first job with a small news and information company which initially received a lot of funding from the EU.
The Chairman was an old-fashioned queen who liked young men and seemed to have an allergy to women. Every couple of months a small job ad would be placed in the Daily Telegraph, and we would receive sackfuls of mail in response. Several of the boys would be seconded for a day or two opening up all of the application letters and binning anything which appeared to come from a woman. Occasionally there were mishaps and someone called Lesley would turn up for an interview wearing a frock.
The Chairman would have a fit of the vapours.
It was about this time that I found digs in Finchley, which happened to be Maggie's constituency. Finchley, which for those of you not familiar with it is in the north of London, was a strange mix of leafy suburbs and tough working class areas. My two local pubs would not have been out of place in the tougher parts of Glasgow, but the Old King of Prussia was generally reckoned to be a safe place to drink because it was the favourite haunt of some old lags, including Big Tony, who didn't want any trouble on their patch.
One day during the miners strike I must have had a half day, because I got back to Finchley Central tube station in the early afternoon to find a small group of miners outside waving placards.
We didn't see many miners in Finchley, and I was observing the scene when suddenly the doors of a nearby van burst open and about a dozen police emerged. They knocked the miners to the ground and beat the living daylights out of them.
This being London, most people walked on as though nothing was happening. It was all over in a couple of minutes, and the miners were carted off. As far as I could see, they had not been doing anything wrong, and had just been hoping to bring their cause to the attention of Thatcher's constituents.
The incident was not reported anywhere as far as I can remember, and this was in the days before mobile phone cameras. It was as though nothing had happened.
I moved from my first digs to a house in a road close by which happened to be where Maggie's constituency agent also lived.
We never saw anything of the Iron Lady, as she had become, but she would visit her agent after every election to thank him, and our road was sealed off by police and security heavies.
Time went by, and I moved away from Finchley and Maggie left Downing Street. Some years later, I went for a drink with my Dad in a village pub.
Dad would talk to anyone, and when I returned from the bar with a couple of pints, he was deep in conversation with an old boy who was down visiting his son. It turned out that he came from Grantham and could remember the young Margaret Roberts. They were not fond memories.
The Roberts apparently thought they were a cut above everybody else, and he recalled how the young Margaret would sit at the window above the family grocery shop spitting on people down below.
And that was the last time that Margaret Hilda intruded on my life, until her death reminded us all how she had polarised the society she claimed never existed.
Cneifiwr's family was a pretty unremarkable mix of farmers, miners, bakers and engineers, with a teetotal Baptist minister thrown in for good measure. The bakery hit the buffers in the 1950s, partly because Uncle Will drank himself to an early grave, and partly because factory produced steamed bread became immensely popular and people no longer wanted the old-fashioned stuff.
The teetotal Baptist minister and his wife ended up in a small village in Herefordshire, and I am lucky to have a copy of "Granny's Memories", a short book of about 30 pages which tells her life story, including an account of a battle with the local Anglican vicar. The vicar scandalised the Baptists with his heavy drinking, and he would fight dogs in the public house for money, with his fists wrapped in old towels. Eventually he was removed from his parish. Cue Baptist schadenfreude.
On my mother's side, the family was for the most part employed in the pits, and my great grandfather died in 1916 in a mining accident at the age of 30. He left four young children and a widow. Anne, my great grandmother, was by all accounts a very sweet old lady who spent her last few years in what was effectively a workhouse where the old, confused and mentally infirm were dumped. She died in one of the last smallpox outbreaks in South Wales not long before I was born because the local authorities dumped smallpox cases on the "hospital", and the disease spread to the other inmates.
As far as I know, I was the first in my family to go to university. When the time came, my UCCA form was a bizarre selection of different degree courses, and the final incongruous choice was either London or Lampeter. I chose London because it seemed more exciting.
A year after Thatcher came to power I graduated. It was not a good time to graduate because she had engineered a recession; the civil service had a freeze on recruitment, and jobs were like gold dust. After a couple of precarious years scraping a living as a part-time research assistant, I got my first job with a small news and information company which initially received a lot of funding from the EU.
The Chairman was an old-fashioned queen who liked young men and seemed to have an allergy to women. Every couple of months a small job ad would be placed in the Daily Telegraph, and we would receive sackfuls of mail in response. Several of the boys would be seconded for a day or two opening up all of the application letters and binning anything which appeared to come from a woman. Occasionally there were mishaps and someone called Lesley would turn up for an interview wearing a frock.
The Chairman would have a fit of the vapours.
It was about this time that I found digs in Finchley, which happened to be Maggie's constituency. Finchley, which for those of you not familiar with it is in the north of London, was a strange mix of leafy suburbs and tough working class areas. My two local pubs would not have been out of place in the tougher parts of Glasgow, but the Old King of Prussia was generally reckoned to be a safe place to drink because it was the favourite haunt of some old lags, including Big Tony, who didn't want any trouble on their patch.
One day during the miners strike I must have had a half day, because I got back to Finchley Central tube station in the early afternoon to find a small group of miners outside waving placards.
We didn't see many miners in Finchley, and I was observing the scene when suddenly the doors of a nearby van burst open and about a dozen police emerged. They knocked the miners to the ground and beat the living daylights out of them.
This being London, most people walked on as though nothing was happening. It was all over in a couple of minutes, and the miners were carted off. As far as I could see, they had not been doing anything wrong, and had just been hoping to bring their cause to the attention of Thatcher's constituents.
The incident was not reported anywhere as far as I can remember, and this was in the days before mobile phone cameras. It was as though nothing had happened.
I moved from my first digs to a house in a road close by which happened to be where Maggie's constituency agent also lived.
We never saw anything of the Iron Lady, as she had become, but she would visit her agent after every election to thank him, and our road was sealed off by police and security heavies.
Time went by, and I moved away from Finchley and Maggie left Downing Street. Some years later, I went for a drink with my Dad in a village pub.
Dad would talk to anyone, and when I returned from the bar with a couple of pints, he was deep in conversation with an old boy who was down visiting his son. It turned out that he came from Grantham and could remember the young Margaret Roberts. They were not fond memories.
The Roberts apparently thought they were a cut above everybody else, and he recalled how the young Margaret would sit at the window above the family grocery shop spitting on people down below.
And that was the last time that Margaret Hilda intruded on my life, until her death reminded us all how she had polarised the society she claimed never existed.
Saturday, 13 April 2013
Penybanc row set to continue
The decision by the planning committee of Carmarthenshire County Council to give the go-ahead to a Guernsey-based developer to build 289 houses at Penybanc near Ammanford is controversial even by Carmarthenshire's standards.
A rally is being organised in Penybanc by local residents and Cymdeithas yr Iaith for Saturday, 20 April at 11.30 a.m.
The organisers point out that Penybanc is just one of a number of proposed massive housing developments in the county, and that this is something which should be of concern to people from across Carmarthenshire.
A request to have the plans called in has now gone to Carl Sargeant. The main issue is that the site had an allocation of just 150 houses under the current Unitary Development Plan, whereas the council's planning officers were happy to use an allocation of 250 houses from the as yet unadopted Local Development Plan, plus 39 more for good measure.
It wasn't just the officers who performed somersaults to get this plan pushed through, but also some of the local Labour councillors who switched sides after initially rejecting the plan in December.
To be fair, some of the local Labour members were in favour of the development from the word go, including it seems Cllr Anthony Jones, who also happens to be the chair of the planning committee. Questions are now being asked as to whether Cllr Jones was in breach of the code of conduct because he allegedly spoke in favour of the plan previously.
The South Wales Guardian reported during the week that the approval on 28 March took local residents and objectors completely by surprise because they had been assured by planning officers that no decision would be taken at the planning meeting.
If you can, please come along next Saturday to send a message back to County Hall that the people of Carmarthenshire have had enough of greedy developers and cynical manipulation of the planning system.
Dyw Penybanc ddim ar werth!
Bydd Cymdeithas
yr Iaith yn ymuno â thrigolion Penybanc ddydd Sadwrn, 20 Ebrill am 11.30 i
wrthwynebu datblygiad o 289 o dai yn y pentref.
Dewch yn llu i
anfon neges gref i'r Cyngor Sir bod pobl Sir Gaerfyrddin wedi cael llond bol ar
ddatblygiadau sy'n chwalu ein cymunedau.
Bydd cyfle i
glywed y Banditos, band ifanc lleol, a chael manylion pellach am yr ymgyrch
leol i rwystro datblygiad a sut bydd yn effeithio'r gymuned a'r Gymraeg ar
draws y Sir.
Meddai Alun Davies, y cynghorydd lleol:
Mae llawer o wrthwynebiad yn lleol ond mae'n rhywbeth
sy'n berthnasol i bawb yn y Sir. Rydyn ni'n trafod yn lleol beth gallwn ni
wneud i roi stop ar y datblygiad ac yn falch o allu cydweithio gyda Chymdeithas
yr Iaith ar hynny. Gobeithio y bydd y brotest rydyn ni yn lleol yn ei
chyd-drefnu gyda Chymdeithas yr Iaith ar gyfer dydd Sadwrn nesaf (20fed o
Ebrill) yn ddechreuad ar ymgyrch gref i ddangos i'r Cyngor Sir fod angen iddyn
nhw wrando ar lais y bobl.
Ychwanegodd Sioned Elin, Cadeirydd Cymdeithas yr Iaith yn
yr ardal:
Mae'r datblygiad tai yma yn pwysleisio'r negeseuon cymysg
sydd yn dod gan y Cyngor Sir - ar y naill law mae sefydlu grŵp fel ymateb i'r
ganlyniadau'r Cyfrifiad ond eto yn caniatáu datblygiad mor fawr, datblygiad a
fydd yn cael effaith ar gymunedau a'r Gymraeg ar draws Sir Gaerfyrddin - a
hynny er gwaethaf gwrthwynebiad lleol. Rydyn ni'n pryderu mai dim ond un o
nifer o ddatblygiadau fydd hwn, felly nid protest ar gyfer pobl Penybanc yn
unig yw hon ond, protest ar gyfer Sir Gaerfyrddin gyfan i bwysleisio nad yw Sir
Gar ar werth i ddatblygwyr tai.
Wednesday, 10 April 2013
Beans on Toast - Or Just Toast?
Viewers of the main BBC Wales news programme last night will have seen a man with heavily gelled and cropped hair staring fiercely at a computer screen. This was Jonathan Roberts, the new editor of the South Wales Evening Post, the paper affectionately known locally in Swansea as The Beans on Toast.
Jonno sat in a large leather swivel chair from where, according to the BBC, he had been interacting with locals about the newspaper's role in the measles epidemic which is now sweeping the city.
It would be unfair to blame the measles outbreak on Mr Roberts, although Cneifiwr notes that it seemed to begin at about the time he left his previous post in Carmarthen to begin his new job running the Toast.
Viewers in Swansea who were expecting a grovelling apology from the editor of the paper which ran a campaign against the MMR vaccine in the late 1990s would have been disappointed. Mr Roberts began by saying that he had been contacted by people who supported the paper's original campaign and went on to waffle something about the role of the local press in keeping people informed.
Prior to taking possession of the big swivel chair at the Toast, Jonathan Roberts was editor for a very brief but dramatic six months at the sister Carmarthen Journal. The Journal had been through a pretty torrid time when Mr Roberts arrived on the scene. Circulation had been plummeting, there had been redundancies and cutbacks, and as readers of this blog will know, the paper's woes had been compounded by bullying from Carmarthenshire County Council, which continues to protest that it values a free local press and freedom of expression as it tries to root out dissent and criticism.
The newspaper's troubles with the council go back several years, and a pattern emerged of periods of conformity with the line dictated by County Hall interspersed by brief flickers of editorial independence.
Jonno swept in to King Street and broke the pattern with a self-imposed ban on anything which the council might consider to be criticism. No letters from dissatisfied residents were allowed, and stories on council matters often appeared to have been written in County Hall. A two page "interview" with the the council's chief executive which took the form of a monologue without questions was just one of the delights served up to long-suffering readers.
The Journal reaped the benefits with a generous crop of council ads, while the independent-minded South Wales Guardian was put in the sin bin and punished with an advertising ban for daring to speak out of turn. A senior journalist from another paper contacted County Hall to investigate. A stormy conversation ensued, with the Press Office telling him to stay away from the story before slamming down the phone.
The love-in culminated in a re-launch of the Journal, with the council distributing a glossy brochure describing the new-look paper along with copies of the council propaganda sheet, the Carmarthenshire News.
How much the Journal paid for this privilege, we shall probably never know, but the distribution deal neatly demonstrated the dramatic reversal of fortunes of our local press. Only a few years ago the Journal had helped the fledgling Pyongyang News by distributing copies free inside the newspaper.
The Journal was re-launched at the end of January this year, bigger and fatter than ever before. The publicity featured lots of management jargon, including promises of much more "user generated content". The "user" appeared to be the Press Office in County Hall.
Readers struggled to find their way through the new-look Journal, which had dispensed with old-fashioned practices such as sequential numbering of pages, and the Teifi Valley was treated to a weekly opinion column written by probably the only person in Cardigan who thinks that a large new Sainsbury's is just what the town needs.
No sooner had the Journal completed its re-launch than Jonno was off with a big promotion at The Beans on Toast.
Whether it is coincidence or not, the departure of Jonathan Roberts saw the sudden appearance of some green shoots of editorial independence. People outside County Hall who had not been contacted for months suddenly found themselves being asked for a quote, and articles even appeared which, ever so subtly, hinted that not everyone agrees with the council's press office on everything.
Sales of the Journal continued to slide during the last 6 months of 2012, and it will be interesting to see what effect if any the re-launch will have.
In the meantime the management merry-go-round at Local World, the corporate entity which now brings together Northcliffe Media and Iliffe News and Media, appears to be gathering pace. After the quickfire changes at the Journal and the Beans on Toast, it is now the turn of the Llanelli Star.
All of this brings back uncomfortable memories for Cneifiwr who remembers working for a once proud and mighty institution which struck the corporate equivalent of an iceberg. Like all sensible rats, Cneifiwr didn't hang about, but from the safety of his new home it was noticeable how the deckchairs were rearranged with an increasingly manic desperation as the icy waters of oblivion beckoned.
But all is not gloom and doom. It is worth shelling out 65p for this week's Carmarthen Journal just to read the completely bonkers letter sent in by that stalwart of the letters page, Sir Eric Howells CBE. Alternatively you can get it for free here.
Jonno sat in a large leather swivel chair from where, according to the BBC, he had been interacting with locals about the newspaper's role in the measles epidemic which is now sweeping the city.
It would be unfair to blame the measles outbreak on Mr Roberts, although Cneifiwr notes that it seemed to begin at about the time he left his previous post in Carmarthen to begin his new job running the Toast.
Viewers in Swansea who were expecting a grovelling apology from the editor of the paper which ran a campaign against the MMR vaccine in the late 1990s would have been disappointed. Mr Roberts began by saying that he had been contacted by people who supported the paper's original campaign and went on to waffle something about the role of the local press in keeping people informed.
Prior to taking possession of the big swivel chair at the Toast, Jonathan Roberts was editor for a very brief but dramatic six months at the sister Carmarthen Journal. The Journal had been through a pretty torrid time when Mr Roberts arrived on the scene. Circulation had been plummeting, there had been redundancies and cutbacks, and as readers of this blog will know, the paper's woes had been compounded by bullying from Carmarthenshire County Council, which continues to protest that it values a free local press and freedom of expression as it tries to root out dissent and criticism.
The newspaper's troubles with the council go back several years, and a pattern emerged of periods of conformity with the line dictated by County Hall interspersed by brief flickers of editorial independence.
Jonno swept in to King Street and broke the pattern with a self-imposed ban on anything which the council might consider to be criticism. No letters from dissatisfied residents were allowed, and stories on council matters often appeared to have been written in County Hall. A two page "interview" with the the council's chief executive which took the form of a monologue without questions was just one of the delights served up to long-suffering readers.
The Journal reaped the benefits with a generous crop of council ads, while the independent-minded South Wales Guardian was put in the sin bin and punished with an advertising ban for daring to speak out of turn. A senior journalist from another paper contacted County Hall to investigate. A stormy conversation ensued, with the Press Office telling him to stay away from the story before slamming down the phone.
The love-in culminated in a re-launch of the Journal, with the council distributing a glossy brochure describing the new-look paper along with copies of the council propaganda sheet, the Carmarthenshire News.
How much the Journal paid for this privilege, we shall probably never know, but the distribution deal neatly demonstrated the dramatic reversal of fortunes of our local press. Only a few years ago the Journal had helped the fledgling Pyongyang News by distributing copies free inside the newspaper.
The Journal was re-launched at the end of January this year, bigger and fatter than ever before. The publicity featured lots of management jargon, including promises of much more "user generated content". The "user" appeared to be the Press Office in County Hall.
Readers struggled to find their way through the new-look Journal, which had dispensed with old-fashioned practices such as sequential numbering of pages, and the Teifi Valley was treated to a weekly opinion column written by probably the only person in Cardigan who thinks that a large new Sainsbury's is just what the town needs.
No sooner had the Journal completed its re-launch than Jonno was off with a big promotion at The Beans on Toast.
Whether it is coincidence or not, the departure of Jonathan Roberts saw the sudden appearance of some green shoots of editorial independence. People outside County Hall who had not been contacted for months suddenly found themselves being asked for a quote, and articles even appeared which, ever so subtly, hinted that not everyone agrees with the council's press office on everything.
Sales of the Journal continued to slide during the last 6 months of 2012, and it will be interesting to see what effect if any the re-launch will have.
In the meantime the management merry-go-round at Local World, the corporate entity which now brings together Northcliffe Media and Iliffe News and Media, appears to be gathering pace. After the quickfire changes at the Journal and the Beans on Toast, it is now the turn of the Llanelli Star.
All of this brings back uncomfortable memories for Cneifiwr who remembers working for a once proud and mighty institution which struck the corporate equivalent of an iceberg. Like all sensible rats, Cneifiwr didn't hang about, but from the safety of his new home it was noticeable how the deckchairs were rearranged with an increasingly manic desperation as the icy waters of oblivion beckoned.
But all is not gloom and doom. It is worth shelling out 65p for this week's Carmarthen Journal just to read the completely bonkers letter sent in by that stalwart of the letters page, Sir Eric Howells CBE. Alternatively you can get it for free here.
Monday, 8 April 2013
Delyth Jenkins joins Compassion in Care
After all of the bad news recently it is really good to be able to report that Delyth Jenkins has been appointed whistle blowing coordinator for Wales by Compassion in Care.
Delyth has had a difficult time since she blew the whistle on abuse in a day centre run by Carmarthenshire County Council, and it is really good to see that good will now come of her experiences. She will bring passion, integrity and courage to her new role.
Da iawn chi, Delyth, a llongyfarchiadau mawr ar eich penodiad. Dych chi'n haeddu pob llwyddiant.
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