Goose stepping to victory

Twitter is like a city. There are pleasant leafy parks and gardens, interesting people and places. You may sometimes engage with people you disagree with, but because you disagree with them doesn't mean they don't sometimes have interesting things to say.

And then there are those parts of town which are best avoided, and on Twitter just as in real life, anyone with common sense knows the places not to go, and the sort of accounts it's best not to follow.

The account belonging to Nathan Gill, our Ukip MEP, is one of those places it is generally best not to go, but you can still take a peak at what he's broadcasting to the world without following him, and his timeline is full of stuff which tells you a lot about Gill's view of the world.

Last night his attention was caught by the presidential elections in Austria. The first round of voting was won by Norbert Hofer representing the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, and he now faces a run-off second ballot.

Hofer is, to put it mildly, a highly unsavoury character whose passions include weapons and a belief in pan-Germanic nationalism. At his behest, his party's official aims now include statements to the effect that Austria is a part of the "Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft", or German national community. This is a term with very strong Nazi overtones.

Hofer has also appeared in the Austrian parliament wearing a blue cornflower which was a symbol worn by Nazi sympathisers in Austria before Hitler's annexation of his former homeland. He has also complained bitterly that Austrian children are being "brain-washed" by the state when they are taught about the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes.

Over in the European Parliament, Ukip and the FPO sit in different groups, but they have a lot in common. Anti-EU, anti-immigration policies are just a start, and the national parties and some of their MEPs to and fro between different groups with bewildering regularity. Gill's former colleague,the very undelightful Janice Atkinson, now sits with Hofer's troops, for example.

So when Nathan Gill pressed the retweet button on this from someone called David Jones ("UK government have abandoned Brits. We need to exit EU, ECHR, stop all immigration + look after British people. Like UKIP. Southampton/Isle of Wight"), I can't help feeling that like Mr Jones, Gill was quite pleased to see Herr Hofer doing so well, don't you?

Through a glass darkly - the local press and Cantref

The Carmarthenshire Herald and its sister paper in Llanelli recently celebrated their first birthdays. It seems unlikely that Mark, Meryl and the denizens of County Hall's press office donned their party hats and popped champagne corks to celebrate this momentous anniversary, and the Wales Media Awards a few weeks back studiously ignored the existence of the Herald stable of titles, choosing instead to hand an award to the venerable Carmarthen Journal as Weekly Newspaper of the Year.

There were several deserving winners, including Iolo ap Dafydd, until recently BBC Wales' environment correspondent, although eyebrows will have been raised at the decision to crown Chris Betteley of the Cambrian News (Mike Parker ate my Nazi Hamster) as political journalist of the year.

Newspaper circulations are in free fall everywhere. At one end of the business the Independent and Independent on Sunday have now disappeared from the newsstands, and at the other the Tivyside Advertiser seems likely to draw its terminal breath any day now.


The Heralds are the only new local titles to have been launched in Wales in ages, and the Pembrokeshire Herald played an important part in bringing about the downfall of Bryn Parry Jones. In Carmarthenshire where established titles have been content for years to publish gushing press releases trumpeting Meryl Gravell's various "successes" without question, the Heralds have lifted a few stones and peered at some of the invertebrates that inhabit her schemes.

The Heralds' strength is their investigative journalism, although some of their full page exposés could do with a little ruthless sub editing. Lack of resources and fear of upsetting the powers-that-be with large advertising budgets have meant that serious journalism disappeared from our more established local titles a long time ago.

The Heralds' weakness is that they don't do the community news stuff which the ageing readership of local papers loves: grandchildren and great grandchildren dressed up for Dewi Sant, cats stuck up trees, old dears getting to grips with Facebook and the Cwmscwt Arms darts finals.

This week, a certain someone turned 90, and the Journal was naturally keen to celebrate this momentous anniversary. So it has rummaged through its archives to remind us how much Carmarthenshire means to Her Majesty, who pops back to see us about once every thirty years.

Look! There she was in 1947, and there she was again in 1977. She seems not to have made it back again until 2002 when she opened the Milennium Coastal Park and met some Very Important People:

The riff raff look on from behind a cordon as HM meets Mark and Meryl

With all that going on, no wonder there's no space for trivia such as the fate of a regional housing association.


A week ago Cneifiwr was talking to a friend who is now in her seventies. She is of the generation that still has a daily newspaper delivered and a brace of local weeklies. She is well connected, and generally has a pretty good idea of what is going on locally and further afield, and yet news that Cantref, the local housing association based just a short walk from her home, is in serious trouble was, well, news to her.

Rumours that something had gone wrong at Cantref have been circulating for almost a year, but unless you read the Carmarthenshire Herald or Jac o' the North's blog (here is a good place to start), you would not have known that anything was afoot.

Until a a couple of days ago, neither the Carmarthen Journal nor Cambrian News appear, at least on their websites, to have mentioned the association's troubles once, the only references of Cantref by the award winning Journal being recycled press releases about charity fun runs and an innovative new "lego" construction method. Tivyside readers have fared little better, and were probably startled to read a couple of weeks ago that the association was looking for a merger partner, and that Elin Jones AM was very worried about it.

This is a hugely important story to the areas served by the Journal and the others, and events are now moving rapidly.

Cantref owns 1,400 homes for a start, and in an area which has all too few decent employment opportunities, it offers relatively good pay and conditions and the prospect of long-term careers for local people. Or it did.

Let's leave the detail to Jac o' the North, but in a nutshell the government made the almost unheard of step of carrying out a statutory investigation into the association. Eventually a report was produced highlighting what were said to be various governance, leadership and personnel issues. The chief executive and chair resigned. The report is secret, and the government is being extremely tight-lipped about it all.


The only other thing we were told was that the report had not uncovered any financial irregularities, but the association's lenders reacted by demanding their money back pronto, presumably because they know rather more than the rest of us. Why would banks suddenly pull lines of credit to an organisation which was in robust financial health, you may wonder.

First off of the starting blocks was Carmarthenshire County Council. A vision of partnership and shared values was painted, with an anxious Welsh Government encouraging the happy couple to consummate their relationship. Other interested parties made approaches soon afterwards, but Cantref has now announced that its preferred partner is Wales and West Housing Association, based in Cardiff.


As a hard bitten New York banker once told Cneifiwr, there is no such thing as a merger, before explaining what he meant in biological terms which are not suitable for a blog which is read in many a manse and respectable household.

According to the Herald, which says it has seen some interesting documents, Carmarthenshire was not proposing a takeover or merger, but the acquisition of Cantref's housing stock, almost 90% of which is outside Carmarthenshire.

Ceredigion County Council was understandably less than keen about the prospect of a takeover of a large chunk of its social housing stock by another local authority, and it will certainly feel the same about the arrival of the cavalry from Cardiff.


The effect of all these sudden revelations on Cantref's tenants and staff can be imagined. In Newcastle Emlyn, where Cantref has its headquarters, Cantref is the largest and certainly best paying employer we have, and the fate of the association is hugely important to the local economy.

Who exactly is calling the shots at Cantref now is unclear. Is it the association's lenders, or is it Kevin Taylor, the interim chair, most of whose career appears to have been spent in the luxury hotel industry in sunny Bermuda?

Our award winning local newspaper of the year only seems to have noticed what was happening when a press release arrived from County Hall in Carmarthen last night announcing Carmarthenshire's disappointment at having been knocked out of the running.

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that the fate of Cantref is as important to this corner of Wales as the future of the steel industry is to Port Talbot, but it's not much of an exaggeration.

The Welsh Government should now intervene, press the pause button, underwrite Cantref's debt and ensure that the interests of the tenants, staff and the local economy are placed first.

Letter from Port Talbot

The incorrigible, muckraking Jac 'o the North has once again seen fit to serve up a lurid and sensationalist tale of sex, violence and byzantine, lowlife skulduggery in the Labour Party in Swansea, described by a Labour spokesperson as a nest of vipers in a little place in South Wales.

This presents a rather unfair and lopsided view of the party, as here in London SW1 Port Talbot we attract an altogether more refined and better class of person. So in the interests of balance, help yourselves to a macchiato and a buttered, warm spelt roll, and we will begin.

You will have seen quite a lot of our MP, Stephen Kinnock, on your TV screens recently as he jets around the world. A couple of weeks ago he was interviewed by the BBC in a particularly nicely tailored blue suit standing in the tasteful surroundings of a five star hotel in Mumbai, complete with birdsong and flute music in the background. How reminiscent of our own Premier Inn, conveniently located just off the M4.

Steve and Helle on a night out in the Port Talbot Working Men's Club

In last year's general election Stephen was triumphantly elected to Parliament, where Ma and Pa already have seats in the House of Lords, but his road to Westminster was not without its trials and tribulations, as this blog recorded back in March of 2014.

We've heard a lot in recent weeks about offshore accounts and the tax affairs of Tory ministers, but Stephen was for several years embroiled in an unseemly row about his tax status in Denmark, with guttersnipe journalists wondering why, if his wife and children and family home were in a swish part of Copenhagen, he had managed not to pay an øre in income tax in his adopted homeland, preferring to pay his dues in Switzerland instead.

In Switzerland Stephen worked for the World Economic Forum before becoming managing director of a consultancy working with various global corporate giants, including Tata Steel, advising them on "resource-efficient growth". So successful was Stephen's advice that Tata subsequently decided that its steel business in Port Talbot was not resource efficient, and that it would be better off pursuing growth opportunities elsewhere.

Investigations and inquiries in to his tax affairs rumbled on for several years. It emerged that at one point Kinnock's tax adviser had suggested to the Danish taxman that his client was either gay or bisexual by way of explanation as to why Stephen's family home was not really his home. At another point, Stephen told the Danish press that he would be prepared to start paying tax in Denmark, only to change his mind. His wife told the tax office that her husband lived at home from Friday to Monday every weekend, and claimed tax deductions in respect of her husband for nine years. When this was queried, she said she had made a mistake, and was obliged to repay three years of allowances, the other six years falling outside legal time limits, which she elected not to pay.

Eventually senior Danish tax officials concluded that Stephen did not qualify as a resident, and so was not liable to tax there after all. More rows and resignations followed amid claims that political rivals had tried to exploit the case, and that pressure had somehow been applied to secure a favourable verdict. Stephen's wife, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, just happened to be prime minister for much of the time while this was going on.

The recriminations and bickering would no doubt have continued, but this tedious saga fortunately came to an end when Stephen was elected to the House of Commons, rendering the disputeof purely historic interest.

Port Talbot, or at least a small select part of it, was awash with champagne as the results came in, and not long afterwards Stephen gave one of his first press interviews to a local newspaper the London Evening Standard.

The disastrous performance of Labour under Ed Milliband meant it was time for a rethink, Stephen said. We should reform inheritance tax and cut the top rate of tax to reduce the burden on the rich. Perhaps reflecting on his own unfortunate experiences, he wanted Labour to ban the phrase, “the people with the broadest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden”.

Back in Denmark, the leading quality daily Berlingske Tidende (article in Danish) noted that Stephen was hoping to move Labour to the right. Labour's rank and file responded by electing Jeremy Corbyn.

Fortunately for Stephen, David Cameron and George Osborne agreed with his ideas, and acted to reduce the burden on higher rate taxpayers, which was doubly fortunate for Mrs and Mrs Kinnock, as we shall see.


A month after the UK general election in May 2015, Denmark went to the polls and Helle Thorning-Schmidt found herself on the losing side and back on the opposition benches. She was not to hang around for long.

In September 2015 the new prime minister announced that he had put Helle's name down for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Sadly, she was passed over, and what sunk her chances was her record of introducing draconian new restrictions on refugees, including provisions which prevented refugee children from being reunited with their parents - policies which had been criticised in strong terms by the agency she was hoping to lead.

Helle took the snub in her stride and told the Danish press that she was happy to be able to continue her work in the Danish Parliament. So happy that, with the dust barely having settled on the UNHCR job, she struck gold at Save the Children International, where she became chief executive in January of this year.

Save the Children is no stranger to controversy, paying some of the highest salaries to its top managers of any UK charity. Defending its policies, the charity last year produced a break-down of its staff costs, showing that its wages bill had risen from just under £52 million in 2013 to £54.5 million in 2014, even though staff numbers had remained almost flat at just over 2,000.

There were 30 staff earning between £60,000 and £140,000, and a further 8 executive directors earning between £100,000 and £140,000.

But transparency went only so far because it seems that those figures included only staff working for Save the Children UK (headed up by one of Tony Blair's former advisers on £145,500), and not the top brass at Save the Children International where Helle's predecessor, Jasmine Whitbread, was reported to have been on a cool £234,000 a year. There is also a footnote suggesting that the figures might not include staff not liable to UK income tax.

Back in Denmark eyebrows were raised once again, with Ekstra-Bladet (article in Danish) questioning the great lady herself. Salaries had to be pitched at those levels to attract the right people, she said, pointing out that £234,000 was comparable with the sort of pay you could expect at the UN or the World Bank.

And although Helle Thorning-Schmidt had previously been criticised by Save the Children for her hard line on refugees, including keeping refugee children away from their parents, she got the job.

The Thorning-Schmidt-Kinnocks have finally been reunited as a family and settled into a new home in London, according to Helle, or Port Talbot if you ask Stephen. To add to their joy, this ordinary hard working family bringing more than £300,000 a year have had their tax bills cut by that nice Mr Osborne.

For once, dear readers, a happy ending. Unless you are a refugee or a steel worker.

Help yourselves to another cappuccino.

Time bombs

As predicted on this blog a couple of weeks ago, the recent flurry of activity by Mark James and Carmarthenshire County Council in their pursuit of fellow blogger Jacqui Thompson after a three year lull was part of a carefully constructed plan of action.

First the bailiffs turn up at Jacqui's home, then Mr James goes on a PR offensive, and next an item appears on the council's Executive Board agenda to be discussed in secret behind closed doors. The supposedly highly confidential report recommending action to try to recover £190,000 in costs (but not a further £40,000 in bills run up by Mr James in his unlawfully funded counterclaim) was then leaked to the Carmarthen Journal which, coincidentally, has served as his mouthpiece on countless occasions in recent years.

The dust had not settled on that before a new three-pronged attack was launched. The council has written to Jacqui asking for proposals in the next few days on how she intends to pay the £190,000 bill, knowing full well that she can't, and that the chief executive in any case has a charge on her property and a prior claim in respect of his libel damages.

The bailiffs having left empty-handed after a couple of fruitless visits, Mr James has gone to the police alleging criminal harassment, and he is threatening to take her back to the High Court, presumably at his own expense this time, alleging that she has breached undertakings given after the trial not to repeat statements made in her blog which the court found to be libellous.

"In defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity", runs one of Churchill's most quoted maxims. Magnanimity is clearly out of stock in County Hall and the James residence.

What happens next is anyone's guess. The council will have either to bite the bullet and write off the debt, or spend even more public money on further court action to have her declared bankrupt - before writing off the debt.

Dyfed Powys Police will have to spend a lot of time, effort and public money investigating Mr James's complaint of harassment.

Harassment can take different forms, but Jacqui has not taken to stalking Mr James with a sharpened axe. Rather, her supposedly vicious and relentless pursuit of Mr James consists of chronicling his 15-year rule in County Hall which has produced countless negative headlines in the press and on our TV screens.

Nearly four years ago Mr James launched an all-out assault on Cllr Sian Caiach with no fewer than five complaints of misconduct to the Ombudsman for Public Services because she had made a few prescient remarks critical of Mr James and Cllr Meryl Gravell. The Ombudsman dismissed every one of them, pointing out that freedom of expression was a feature of democracy, and suggesting that Mr James should grow a thicker skin.

Dyfed Powys has better things to do with its scant resources, and it would do well to take a leaf out of the Ombudsman's book.

That leaves the possibility of a return to the High Court, this time paid for by Mr James we would hope, to examine whether Jacqui is guilty of contempt for not having pots of money and not writing that Mr James is a beacon of virtue in Welsh local government.

While Dyfed Powys Police clearly have better things to do than protect Mr James's very tender ego, so too does the County Council, you would think. But countless hours and pounds continue to be poured into this bottomless pit, and what all of the latest initiatives against Jacqui Thomas have in common is that they will take a very long time, energy and pots of our money to pursue to the bitter end.

Any doomed attempt by the council to try to seize assets would take at least a year to pursue through the courts.

A thorough investigation by Dyfed Powys Police, involving trawling through hundreds of blogposts, will take months, and in the event that they conclude that there are grounds for prosecution, many more months would pass and tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money would have to be spent before the matter went to court, costing us all more money. And to what end? The holy grail of silencing a critical blog?

The same probably applies to the threat to pursue Jacqui for alleged contempt of court. It took 18 months from the publication of Mr James's fatwa on the Madaxeman blog for the judge and bewigged barristers to take their places in the Courts of Justice in London. Even if the legal system goes into overdrive, what could amount to a re-run of the libel trial is likely to take at least a year to bring about.

All of which means that a series of time bombs have been set ticking which could very likely begin exploding around the time of next year's council elections, generating a flood of unflattering PR for the council. There is a high risk that some or all of them could backfire, and even if Mr James succeeds in having the Thompsons made homeless, the blog silenced and Jacqui Thompson put behind bars for lèse majesté, it will all have been achieved at a massive cost.

If ever there was a case of "not in the public interest", this is it. 

Tory Boy

Most of us probably did things in our youth which we would rather not talk about now. Depending on our age perhaps we plastered our bedroom walls with pictures of Margaret Williams, Poly Styrene or Kylie, joined a train spotters' club, pretended to like prog rock or bought S Club 7 records. Cneifiwr owned a pair of bright yellow and extremely tight trousers which he wore proudly to a Young Farmers' welly disco where he contracted glandular fever after a cider-fuelled snog.

There was even a time when young people liked to join the Young Conservatives. Hard to believe it now, but the Young Conservatives were hip and cool in the fifties, a sort of tweed jacket and pearls equivalent of today's dating websites, their hormones driven to a frenzy as they listened to Harold Macmillan on the Home Service.

After that high point, the Young Conservatives embarked on a long and terminal decline. When Cneifiwr was a student in the late seventies they liked to submit motions in the student union calling for Nelson Mandela and/or members of the IRA to be hanged. On another occasion they wanted a portrait of Margaret Thatcher hung in the bar, and then they tried to spend union funds on a bouquet to be delivered to Mrs T on her birthday.


To their delight Maggie entered 10 Downing Street in 1979, and eventually faced down the "wets". The same battle took rather longer in the Young Conservatives, but the "dry" Thatcherite hawks finally succeeded in taking control of what was left of the organisation in 1989.

By then, joining the Young Conservatives had become just about the most uncool thing anyone under 25 could do, and Tory Boy, Alan B'stard and Young Tory of the Year cruelly mocked those who did.

In Wales, the decline of the Tories and their youth wing, with its strange hanging and Thatcher fetishes, was even more drastic. The 1984/85 miners' strike and its grim aftermath saw to that, and in the final years of Tory rule under John Major, it is hard to imagine that there were any Welsh teenagers plastering their bedroom walls with posters of Norman Lamont, Edwina Curry or John Redwood.

But hormones can do some very strange things to teenage boys.

In 1997 the Welsh Tories went down all hands on deck. William Hague, that prototypical Tory Boy, shut down the Young Conservatives.

But it is claimed that there was one small corner of Cymru fach where the blue flame flickered defiantly against the gathering gloom before finally being extinguished. And of all places, dear reader, that was in Ammanford where, according to former school friends, Lee Waters enthusiastically embraced the Conservative and Unionist cause in a town reeling from the effects of Thatcherism.

Cruelly those adolescent dreams of a blue future were dashed by the 1997 election. Lee completed his education, became a journalist and rose to become director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs, before setting his sights on a seat in the Senedd where he hopes to represent Labour for Llanelli.

Alan B'stard, it will be remembered, responded to the same events by joining the Blair revolution.

Brother Crabb and Brother Waters

The Doctrine of Officer Infallibility

After almost a year away from blogging it is depressing, if hardly surprising, how many of the long-running scandals chronicled by this blog continue to rumble on.

In a recent piece about the Pembroke and Pembroke Dock Commercial Property Grants Scheme fiasco, Old Grumpy referred to what he calls "the doctrine of (council) officer infallibility".

In practice, the doctrine involves a council adopting a stance on a particular issue, and then defending its position to the hilt in the face of mounting evidence that something is not right, while tying itself in increasingly absurd knots. Rule Number One is never, ever to admit that you have made a mistake or done anything wrong.

In the case of the Pembroke Dock scandal we are talking about grants (mis)managment, but in Carmarthenshire there are several long-running cases in which the lives of real, innocent people have been wrecked not by a single random act, but by years and years of denial, deceit and foot dragging as senior council officers shore up their increasingly absurd defensive positions.

As Old Grumpy and other Welsh bloggers have noted on numerous occasions (see the unlikely pairing of Oggy Bloggy Ogwr and Jac o' the North on the Regeneration Investment Fund for Wales land sales scandal, for example), there is a tendency for internal and external auditors, regulators and other bodies charged with protecting the public and upholding the law to draw up their wagons in defensive rings around beleaguered authorities. "Investigations" are carried out, reports are written, complaints are dismissed, whistleblowers and complainants are attacked or ignored, and buckets of whitewash are liberally applied absolving civil servants, council officers and the public bodies they work for of any blame or responsibility.


Sometimes, as Carmarthenshire's chief executive, Mark James CBE, discovered, it is possible to nip all this investigation nonsense in the bud, stamp your foot and tell bodies such as the Wales Audit Office to sling their hook:

Click to enlarge

An inquiry into the workings of the council's planning department, subject of countless complaints and scandals, was thus averted. Note the sneering tone used in the references to members of the public and their elected representatives, Adam Price (then MP) and Rhori (sic) Glyn Thomas (AM).

It is often only the sheer perseverance of a few bloody-minded individuals over years that finally shines a light through all the audit sign-offs and exculpatory reports to reveal the truth of what happened.

________________

One of the most frightening examples of the infallibility doctrine in action in Carmarthenshire is the case of Mrs Trisha Breckman, her partner Eddie, and other residents who live along the B4297 to the south of Maesybont.

The council's view, as articulated by the chief executive and the now retired head of planning, Eifion Bowen, is that the last fifteen years of complaints, court cases, investigations, a public inquiry, TV documentaries, arrests and a truckload of reports and correspondence are nothing more than a dispute between neighbours. Mr Andrew Thomas, the owner of the neighbouring Blaenpant Farm, is just a farmer going about his lawful business, and the real villains of the piece are the pensioner couple next door.

This argument was on shaky ground from the beginning because, as Mrs Breckman belatedly discovered, the council held a file of complaints from other local people against Mr Thomas dating back to his purchase of Blaenpant in 2001, two years before she and her partner moved in, and fifteen years later the complaints are still rolling in.

Just about everyone ever involved the events at Blaenpant, apart from council officers, has noted the lack of evidence of agriculture. Councillors on the planning committee also had their doubts about whether Blaenpant was really a farm when they were asked to approve two truly massive sheds on the site, but those reservations were swept aside, and the then head of planning used delegated powers to reverse a refusal of planning in the case of the second shed.

And despite a planning inquiry in 2010 which effectively demolished the council's position and a damning report from the Public Services Ombudsman, Carmarthenshire County Council has not budged an inch from the line it has pursued since 2001, which, coincidentally or not, was the year when Mark James blew in from Lincolnshire.

_______________

How to destroy an SSSI

Before going off air, this blog looked at Mr Thomas's activities on a large field which borders one side of Mrs Breckman's cottage.

Trees had been felled, vegetation stripped and topsoil removed before quarrying began on the site. There were two separate quarrying episodes, and in response to complaints, the head of planning eventually applied enforcement orders. The orders were about as effective as chocolate teapots because they allowed Mr Thomas to carry on quarrying for a month before levelling the ground, job done.

When asked why the quarrying was taking place, the council's head of planning showed remarkable foresight. Some of the rock was to be used for drainage, he declared, while more was to be used resurfacing a track. Was there planning permission for the track, he was asked. Um, no, but he was expecting a retrospective application. The Minerals Officer explained that the reason for levelling the land was that it would make it easier for horses to run across the field. 

A lot of the rock disappeared who knows where on the back of Mr Thomas's lorries, but some was used to create what would become a new private road network across his land capable of carrying HGVs.

The planning department took up its usual defensive stand. The tracks were for agricultural purposes, and a large section of the new road was simply the resurfacing of a track (footpath?) which last appeared on maps in the nineteenth century. It is doubtful whether that track/path had ever been surfaced, and it is unlikely that it had been used by HGVs in Queen Victoria's day.

Undeterred, Mrs Breckman took a look at the ancient map, and spotted that the supposed track ran at right angles to the new road.

The council performed the local authority equivalent of a polite cough, and suggested to Mr Thomas that he might like to submit a retrospective planning application for a small part of the new road, no permission being required for the section which supposedly followed the old path.

In due course, an application went in seeking retrospective approval for the work, and the application was accepted by the planning department as valid even though it contained a number of glaring "mistakes" and omissions. Did the track create any new exits onto the public road? "No", came the reply, although the accompanying map showed two new access points.

More seriously, the application forgot to mention that the new roads and all of the quarrying, tree felling, vegetation stripping and top soil removal which preceded their construction had been carried out on land which was a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and Special Area of Conservation (SAC).

The council was, surprise, surprise, initially defensive about the conservation status of the land. It may possibly fall within such a designated area, opined a planning officer, clearly reluctant to look at any more maps.

But a quick check on the boundaries of the Cernydd Carmel SAC showed that the field clearly was an SSSI and had been designated as an SAC in 2005. SACs have a higher level of legal protection than SSSIs and were set up to protect particularly valuable and rare habitats under UK legislation which flowed from the EU's Habitats Directive.

Damn those bloody Europeans coming over here and trying to protect special parts of our countryside from development as quarries and scrapyards.

In a letter to local residents, the minister responsible at the time, a certain Carwyn Jones, welcomed the decision and explained that SACs were very special places. Any plan or project that might damage a site - for example, a proposed development or an activity requiring a license - would first be assessed and could only go ahead if certain strict conditions were met. These rules also applied to projects or activities outside the the SAC boundaries which might impact on an SAC.

Statutory responsibility for assessing the impact of activities such as quarrying or building lies not with the county council, but Natural Resources Wales, and the council's planning department would have been well aware of that.

Massive redevelopment has taken place at Blaenpant during the last 15 years, and the entire character and  profile of the land around the farm has been changed. Surely the council would have told NRW about what had happened and that a chunk of an SAC had been utterly destroyed? Wouldn't it?

This is how the farm looked before Mr Thomas took over in 2001:

And this is how it looks now. You would scarcely believe it was the same place.

 

A freedom of information request asking to see correspondence between the council and NRW on the subject of Cernydd Carmel was sent to County Hall. The 22 day limit for a response came and went. A couple of polite reminders were sent. "We're working on it", came the reply. At length, three months after the request was made, the council refused to release the information.

So a second request went in asking a straight question. When had the local authority told NRW about Mr Thomas's activities?

Amazingly, a reply came back within the 22 day deadline - a very rare occurrence in Cneifiwr's experience of Carmarthenshire County Council - saying simply that it had not informed NRW which had found out thanks to a complaint from a member of the public. 

Cneifiwr suspects that that refreshingly honest reply somehow slipped through the usual screening processes. Perhaps Mr James was on holiday at the time.

In fact, it has since emerged that not once in the last 15 years has NRW or its predecessor been asked to give any consents for quarrying at Blaenpant, and it seems to have been kept in the dark about everything else.

Another FOI went into NRW asking to see correspondence with the council on Cernydd Carmel, and back came a large file with the names of Mr Thomas, his agent and the council's planning officers redacted. No need to call Sherlock Holmes to work out who the black blobs were.

That file showed that following the various complaints and reports, NRW and the council had started talking to each other, and there had been several meetings both on and off site, although no minutes or written records of those meetings appeared to have been kept. Evidence for what had been discussed was sparse, but two interesting facts emerged.

First, representatives of the county council and an officer for NRW had agreed among themselves that it was too late to save the site. Restoration was out of the question. And second, Mr Thomas, through his agent, was asked to submit what amounted to a plan to try to protect what was left. At no point does anyone seem to have considered taking Mr Thomas to court, even though destruction of habitats protected as an SSSI and SAC is a criminal offence.

A plan was duly submitted after further discussions, offering to restrict both the numbers of horses grazing, and the the times of year when they would graze.

That nearly brings us up to date. Months and months of discussions have taken place, but no land management or restoration plan has yet appeared among the planning documents, and given the history of what has happened at Blaenpant, you would have to be a wild optimist to believe that any carefully negotiated conditions would be adhered to. As for monitoring, past experience suggests that planning officers could go to Crufft's and fail to see any evidence of dogs.

What about those roads? All of the pointers were that the county council was hoping to be able to rubber stamp a retrospective application and move on, but thanks to the perseverance of Mrs Breckman and others, there are signs that things may not be going as smoothly as County Hall hoped. It now seems to be the case that the council is reluctantly shifting its position on the track/path last seen in the nineteenth century, and that the application may have to encompass the full extent of the network.

However, the council still seems wedded to the idea that there is an agricultural justification for the roads, although in the absence of any livestock apart from horses and no arable farming, it is hard to imagine what that justification might be. Perhaps they are there to keep the horses' hooves dry.

The suspicion has long been that Mr Thomas is planning a return of his road haulage business to Blaenpant, and the private roads would enable him to make short cuts, resume quarrying and, possibly, begin using the land to store scrap metal once again.

Busybodies

NRW had been kept in the dark by the county council about what was happening at Blaenpant, and it was the public which alerted the agency to the unfolding destruction. NRW's local officer was initially very hard to track down, and not obviously wildly enthusiastic about getting involved. Suspicions began to grow that he had been nobbled by the usual suspects.

But thanks once again to perseverance, alarm bells appear to have rung higher up the ladder at NRW. Stating what would seem to be the bleeding obvious NRW recently announced that a "Habitats Regulation Assessment" recently produced in response to the planning application for the road had concluded that the work "has had an adverse impact on the designated site".

As a result, and because the road has been built on an SSSI and SAC, it will now be down to the Welsh Government rather than the county council to endorse any planning decision.

Mr James will no doubt be delighted at the prospect of external bodies sticking their noses in.

A fire and yet more complaints

Having gone some way to transforming a quiet rural backwater designated as both an SSSI and SAC into what resembles a post apocalyptic industrial wasteland at Blaenpant, Mr Thomas has expanded his horizons further up the B4297 following the more recent acquisition of a smallholding called Ffynnon Luan.


Ffynnon Luan, probably for the first time in its history, was in the news last year when the Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Authority (MAWWFIRE) reported that it had attended a large blaze of tyres and timber at the site. The fire broke out on the night of 5th November (funny, that) and took 12 hours to put out, with a specialist environmental protection unit attending because of the tyres.

Cneifiwr wondered how much this had cost the public purse and whether there would be any repercussions.

MAWWFIRE was initially very reluctant to say, but eventually said it estimated the cost of tackling the fire at around £28,000. Although you would have thought that a large tyre blaze on 5th November might have aroused the curiosity of the fire brigade, NRW and the police, no investigation into the causes of the fire were carried out, and no questions were asked about what the tyres were doing on the property.

Perhaps they just spontaneously burst into flame on what Cneifiwr seems to remember was a pretty wet and miserable 5th November.

Mr Thomas's luck held once again.

By now it won't come as a surprise to readers to learn that new tracks/roads have gone in at Ffynnon Luan as well, and more recently thousands of tonnes of earth and rock have been removed from part of the site close to the farmhouse. The farmhouse itself is being renovated and extended, although that activity at least was subject to a planning application before work started.

Unsurprisingly, the council has received more complaints from local residents.

This is how Ffynnon Luan looked before Mr Thomas took over:

And here it is now:

We look forward to hearing the planning department's explanation for this new project.

An Apology

No, not from Carmarthenshire County Council, which still seems to be struggling to remember the helpful tips the Ombudsman gave it on how to say sorry, but this time from Dyfed Powys Police and the Police Commissioner for the appalling way the force had treated Mrs Breckman and her partner.

Mrs Breckman, now in her seventies, was arrested on six occasions and carted off from her home without once being charged. Nearly all of the arrests came about after phone calls from Mr Thomas's late wife alleging assault, and on one occasion Mrs Breckman was arrested for opening a gate the Thomases had erected blocking her right of way onto the public road.

Mrs Breckman's complaints were eventually investigated by the force itself, and after what sounded like a promising start with the investigating officer saying that he had uncovered evidence of unethical conduct, the final report effectively branded Mrs Breckman and her partner as liars, including a suggestion that they may have faked CCTV footage showing someone looking uncannily like their aggressive neighbour lurking outside their cottage in the middle of the night.

That report chimed conveniently with the line taken by the top brass in County Hall that Mrs Breckman and her partner were a couple of dishonest troublemakers, and there are strong suspicions that that was the message which was conveyed in a secret report handed to the Welsh Assembly's Petitions Committee when it met to consider a petition calling for a public inquiry into the Breckman case.

A second investigation into the conduct of Dyfed Powys police was much later carried out by West Mercia police. Their report was repeatedly delayed and eventually went back to the Chief Constable in Carmarthen for what could be called "Maxwellisation".

Some time later, Mrs Breckman was invited to meet the Cheif Constable who initially refused to let her have a copy of the report, and the stage seemed set for a repeat of the first investigation. More whitewash, in other words.

And then suddenly Mrs Breckman received a full and unreserved apology from both the Commissioner and the Chief Constable for what had happened to her, including the way in which her reputation had been smeared and her credibility undermined by the first investigation.

Sadly all this came too late to trigger any financial compensation for the couple.

Showing her usual perseverance, Mrs Breckman contacted Mr James to request a meeting to discuss the police apology. Mr James responded curtly that he could not see what there was to discuss. Mrs Breckman persisted, and eventually under pressure from Rhodri Glyn Thomas AM and others, he consented to grant an audience.

Unfortunately that meeting was cancelled at short notice, what with Mr James being such a busy man, although he always seems to have time to talk to the press when he feels the need to communicate with the masses.

So hectic was his schedule that he could not offer her another appointment for seven weeks. Barring any more last minute cancellations, a slot has been fixed for the end of April.

It is unlikely that humble pie or apologies will be on the menu along with the custard creams, especially not now that the Ombudsman for Public Services is showing renewed interest in the case.

A complaint by Mrs Breckman to the Ombudsman last year was dismissed, and unaccountably the investigating officer went off piste to tell Mrs Breckman that he could find nothing wrong with the council's handling of the Cernydd Carmel application, even though she had not complained about that particular matter.

Someone in County Hall seemed to have had words, and not only secured the dismissal of Mrs Breckman's original complaint, but struck gold by persuading the Ombudsman's officer to give the Cernydd Carmel (retrospective) planning application a clean bill of health.

Fortunately, perseverance may be about to pay off again, with the Ombudsman himself now taking a close interest and an even closer look at the what has happened at Cernydd Carmel.

Mr James will be pleased.

Meanwhile, if you are a landowner with a troublesome SSSI or SAC, or even just a large pile of unwanted used tyres, get out the bulldozer, a can of petrol and a box of matches. The council's planning department will help you explain it away should anyone complain.

A tangled web

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
(Marmion, Sir Walter Scott)

Another chapter has been written in the Jacqui Thompson case with the decision by Carmarthenshire County Council to pursue her for £190,000 in costs arising from the libel case involving her and the council's Chief Executive, Mark James.


This is a case of much more than purely local significance, as it raises questions which go to the heart of what it means to live in a democracy based on the rule of law, and the extent to which citizens are free to express opinions about government without fear of punishment and the arbitrary application of state power.

____________

Whatever happens in the weeks and months to come, it is certain that the council will find itself having to write off at least £190,000 at a time when it is cutting basic services and throwing teachers and other employees on the scrapheap.

Like so much else in this saga, the figures quoted by the council are a fiction.

The £190,000 relates to costs incurred in defending a claim Jacqui Thompson brought against Mr James after he attacked her and her family in a piece he sent to the Madaxeman blog in the wake of her arrest for filming a snatch of a council meeting in June 2011.

On top of that is a further £40,000 relating to Mr James's counterclaim, suing Mrs Thompson for libel for comments made on her blog. The Wales Audit Office later ruled that the council's decision to award Mr James an indemnity to fight this part of the case was unlawful.

How this split in costs came about is something of a mystery because those of us who attended the trial could not help but notice that a great deal of the court's time was devoted to developing a case against Jacqui. In normal circumstances the split would most likely have been challenged, but the decision by Jacqui's insurers suddenly to pull the plug meant that this did not happen.

And it does not end there. Not by a long chalk, because senior council staff, including Mr James himself, have spent countless hours preparing the case and defending the unlawful indemnity. And now even more midnight oil is being burned as the council tries to find a way out of a mess which was all of Mr James's own making. This doomed attempt to try to reclaim the costs will land us all with yet more legal bills.

The chief executive alone plotted the course the council has followed, confident that Meryl Gravell and Co would give him whatever he wanted.

The infamous libel indemnity clause, now currently languishing in suspended limbo, was Mr James's brainchild. It sought to bypass legal prohibitions against using public money to pursue libel cases and open up the way for any arm of government to pursue people who said things they didn't like through the courts, just as the likes of Robert Maxwell and Sir James Goldsmith used the courts to try to silence press criticism.

Carmarthenshire County Council hid this behind a fig leaf, saying that the power would only be used in vague and undefined "exceptional circumstances". In reality, Mr James was judge and jury when it came to deciding what was exceptional.

It was Mr James who lay behind Jacqui's arrest for holding up a smart phone to film a small snatch of a council meeting, as later became clear in correspondence which showed just how unhappy Dyfed Powys police were to have been dragged into what became a public relations disaster. Let's not forget that nowhere in the council's constitution nor anywhere else in County Hall was there anything to say that the public could not film or record public meetings.

Filming was illegal because Mr James said it was, although wisely neither the police nor the council was willing to press their luck by going to court to convince a judge and jury of the council's case.

Having seen the council's reputation trashed in the press, Mr James took the unique step for a Welsh council chief of submitting his thoughts to the Madaxeman blog in November 2011, even though he could have issued a statement through the council's press office or picked up the phone to the Carmarthen Journal or Llanelli Star, as is often his custom when he wants to communicate with the masses.

With the exception of Carmarthenshire, council chief executives are very shy and retiring flowers when it comes to the media. When did you last hear Bronwen Morgan in Ceredigion sounding off in the local press, let alone a blog? And the unlamented Bryn Parry Jones of Pembrokeshire was almost as reclusive as Howard Hughes, as witnessed by the fact that the media, the BBC included, only had one rather fuzzy stock photograph of his Bryn-ness to prove that he had indeed descended to live among us mere mortals.


Mr James's brief foray into the world of blogging threw petrol on a fire which had nearly run its course. By attacking not just Jacqui but her entire family, Mr James triggered a writ for libel. Only Mr James knows whether that was his intention.

The lawyers got to work, and as is usual in such cases attempts were made to avert a trial by negotiating a settlement. Jacqui's legal team were convinced that they had a deal a few weeks before the trial began, only to find that it was torpedoed by County Hall. Mr James, armed with a blank cheque, was clearly keen to have his day in court.

British justice is supposed to be blind, but the blank cheque ensured that Mr James had the best legal team money can buy, and the scales of justice responded accordingly.

Following the crushing verdict, the Chief Executive embarked on a prolonged victory parade with newspaper interviews, a radio appearance and a lengthy self-congratulatory piece in the council's staff magazine. He had done it all, he claimed, to protect the meek and mild, and his victory would pave the way for other public authorities to follow his example.


And he would have got away with it if it had not been for Mr Anthony Barrett from the Wales Audit Office, who ruled that the indemnity which allowed Mr James to counter-sue had been unlawful. A massive spanner had just been thrown into Mr James's works.

Rather than accept the ruling, the council attacked Mr Barrett and spent yet more money trying to shore up its position.

The simplest and wisest course of action at that point would have been to scrap the indemnity clause, admit defeat and ask the chief executive to cough up the costs of his counter-claim, but with Mr James running the show, supported to the hilt by the likes of Meryl Gravell, that was never going to happen.

So what we got, eventually, was a fudge. The council announced that it would "suspend" the libel clause, putting it out of action for the foreseeable future, without acknowledging that its use against Jacqui Thompson had been unlawful.

The Welsh Government was asked to give its opinion, and as usual it ducked by saying that this was a question which could only be decided by the courts. Reasoning, probably quite rightly, that nobody would now be daft enough to follow Mr James's example, the legality of the indemnity and the clause itself now reside in the land of the living dead.

Defending the council's actions at the time, the then council leader Kevin Madge expressed the hope that a line could be drawn and, in his usual platitudinous way, we could all move on. That ignored the fact that there was still the not-so-small matter of the costs to be resolved.

Three years went by with almost no movement, although there was a brief flurry of correspondence between Jacqui Thompson and Mr James's solicitors who were pressing for payment of Mr James's damages.

Her offer to pay the huge bill in modest installments was not accepted.

That brings us up to date and the start of what is obviously a carefully planned tactical campaign. First, bailiffs acting for Mr James turn up unannounced at Jacqui Thompson's home. They left empty-handed, finding nothing of value to seize. More calls followed, and with equally little success.

Something was clearly up.

Next Mr James launches the first part of his PR offensive, telling the press that he was being forced to take action because Jacqui Thompson had not responded to a request for proposals. Jacqui Thompson responded by showing documents to the press which, if we are to be charitable, showed that Mr James had, in Hilary Clinton's phrase, "mis-spoken".

Purely by coincidence no doubt, a mysterious item then appeared on the agenda for the council's Executive Board to discuss the recovery of unspecified legal costs. The item was marked exempt, meaning that the council would discuss the matter behind closed doors and the supporting documents would not be published. The justification for the exemption was that the report contained "information relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person (including the authority holding that information)".

A few days later Jacqui was contacted by a journalist working for the Carmarthen Journal who informed her of the Executive Board's decision, adding that he had been given sight of the supposedly secret report.

By whom it is not clear, but the fall-guy this time is council leader Emlyn Dole who gave the Journal a fairly anodyne statement saying that the council has a duty to protect public funds. That is true enough, but he was ill-advised to talk to the newspaper before publication of the meeting minutes.

What is certain is that the leak would have been made with the blessing of the council's press office and the chief executive himself who controls the press office.

Looked at in the cold light of day, we need to follow the money and ask who stands to benefit from the council's extraordinary contortions. Not Emlyn Dole for sure.

So where does this leave us?

The council has sat on the unresolved issue of costs for three years, and clearly at some point decisions would have to be made to clear up the mess to comply with auditing regulations. It is Emlyn Dole's misfortune that he inherited the problem and that it has to be resolved on his watch.

Although the attempt to recover the £190,000 will fail, it is also the case that the council cannot simply write it off without being seen to go through the motions of trying to get its hands on the loot, even though this farce will cost yet more money.

More interesting is the fate of the £40,000 run up by Mr James's counterclaim. That liability arose because of the unlawful indemnity which, if it was anything like a normal indemnity, would only have kicked in if Mr James had lost.

In a statement put out on 30 January 2014, the Council confirmed this when it said:

The indemnity was just that, an indemnity against costs should the Chief Executive not be successful in his counter claim. In the event of course, he was successful and the judge awarded costs and damages against the other party.

It is now clear that the council paid the costs of the counterclaim anyway, landing us all with an additional £40,000 bill for which we, as taxpayers, were not liable.

The supposedly secret meeting of the Executive Board performed yet another crab-like sideways shuffle when confronted with this problem, and decided to defer a decision, probably because it knew that spending yet more public money on trying to recover a debt which was incurred unlawfully would risk challenge and censure.

Cllr Dole is now keen to stress that the counterclaim, and the problems arising from it are a private matter between Mr James and Jacqui Thompson. That is certainly how it should have been from the beginning - if Mr James wanted to sue Jacqui, he should have done so at his own expense, but in reality this was the council suing a private individual by proxy, with Mr James calling all the shots and being the only person who stands to make money out of the affair.

Instead of deferring a decision, the Executive Board should have asked Mr James to pay up the £40,000 and try to recover the costs himself, but then Mr James and Meryl together have the power to veto anything they don't like.

The council will have to bite the bullet eventually, and Emlyn Dole needs to ensure that there is not a heavy political price to pay as well.