Legal lows

Update 10 June

Anyone expecting to see a return to the good old days of campaigning, investigative journalism at the Carmarthen Journal or its sister, the Llanelli Star, is likely to be in for a very long wait indeed:


(Clipping from Private Eye, with thanks to Robert Lloyd)

Update 8 June

Jac o' the North has come out, all guns blazing, in his response to the threats of legal action by Pembrokeshire Housing Association and Mill Bay Homes. What is now clear is that their legal representatives sought at the same time to muzzle the owners of a property adjacent to Mill Bay Homes' development in Pentlepoir who have made some very serious complaints about the conduct of the company.

In other news, Dyfed Powys Police is facing questions over its decision to accept a claim of harassment made by Mark James against Jacqui Thompson for investigation. In previous investigations into Mr James's conduct in public office, Dyfed Powys handed responsibility to another force because it acknowledged that close relationships existed between it and the council. Why do earlier concerns about the force's independence and integrity in matters relating to the council chief executive appear no longer to apply, especially in view of comments made by the former Police and Crime Commissioner about a "Sicilian Cartel"?

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Free and independent media are an essential precondition of a healthy civic society in a democracy, and among those who subscribe to those values, you will not find anyone in Wales who believes that our media are in a state of rude, good health.

We have no daily national newspaper, our local press is a shadow of what it once was, and the BBC's English output has feet which are all too often made of clay. This week, for example, the BBC found itself having to apologise for the second time about an edition of Week In Week Out entitled "The Cost of Saving the Welsh Language". The programme was unbalanced, and some of its claims were patently false.

Week In Week Out is the flagship of the BBC's investment in investigative journalism in Wales. In fact, it is the only ship in the fleet, and its reputation has been left badly damaged by the programme.

If our media in general are in poor health, investigative journalism, the coal pit canary of media freedom, is gasping for breath. It is all but extinct in what is left of our local newspapers, the exception in this part of the world being the Herald's stable of titles. In English, we have just WIWO, Martin Shipton at the Western Mail, occasional forays by the Daily Post and a handful of blogs. The Daily Post's commitment to our fledgling Welsh democracy can be judged by its decision no longer to employ a reporter in the Senedd.

When it comes to blogging, the investigative end of the spectrum is now limited to Jacqui Thompson's Carmarthenshire Planning Problems, Jac o' the North and the Pembrokeshire pairing of Old Grumpy and Jacob Williams, with occasional efforts from this blog, Oggy Bloggy Ogwr and West Wales News Review.

Old Grumpy has had his troubles in the past, and went off air for a long period. Jacqui Thompson's blog is still under very heavy fire, and now Jac o' the North is being bombarded by the lawyers.

Just as you will never find a politician who does not claim to be in favour of motherhood, apple pie, openness and transparency, those who release the legal rottweilers in libel cases always protest that they are in favour of free speech, while trying to throttle it.

Jacqui Thompson and Royston Jones are poles apart politically, but what they both have in common is that attempts to silence them are being funded from the public purse.

Eight weeks after the Chief Executive of Carmarthenshire County Council went to the police to allege harassment, Jacqui Thompson is still waiting to hear whether the boys and girls in blue intend to finger her collar again - the first time being the notorious #daftarrest incident.

Having checked with the police to find out what was happening, she has been told that the police are waiting for documents "from the council", and it is clear that the council is still expending considerable resources on what is supposed to be an action brought by Mr James as an individual.

She is also still waiting to hear what steps both Mark James and the county council intend to take to try to enforce Mr James's damages award and the recovery of costs.

Neither Mr James nor the council will admit that they were wrong to pursue the line they took against Jacqui Thompson, but in a wider sense the outcome is not in doubt. The Thompson case will hang around Mr James's neck, giving off a pungent stench like the Ancient Mariner's albatross, for as long as he remains in office. The council, in heeding his advice, has been made to look like a foolish bunch of bully boys, and the taxpayer will end up footing the bill.

As this is public money, costs were never a cause of sleepless nights for Mr James or the councillors who supported him in his folly.

An interesting speculation is whether the outcome of the case would have been any different if it had been fought under the 2013 Defamation Act, which was supposed to reform the law on libel and reduce the number of cases going to court.

Nobody knows is the answer to that one, but the early indications are that those who can fall back on public money to pursue their critics through the courts have not been deterred from trying their luck.

Jac o' the North has taken a great deal of interest in the affairs of housing associations in the last couple of years. These are bodies which receive huge amounts of public funding, and yet they are far from being transparent or accountable. A number of them are or have clearly been very badly run. Some of their top brass make a very lucrative living out of running what are supposed to be not-for-profit organisations designed to help those priced out of the property market. And not least, political nepotism and patronage are rife.

A couple of years back, this blog took a brief look at Hafan Cymru, based in Carmarthen, which was set up to help the homeless, victims of domestic abuse and other vulnerable groups with housing. The charity was in the news in 2013 amid a welter of claims of bullying of staff, secret pay deals, massive pay rises for a few top managers and a £15,000 "essential" MBA course for the now former chief executive, paid for out of charity (i.e. public) funds.

The lawyers did very nicely out of that spat.

Much more recently Cantref, the housing association based in Newcastle Emlyn, has to all intents and purposes gone bust. Once again there were accusations of poor staff relations, large amounts of money wasted on consultants and bad governance.

Something must have gone very wrong at Cantref because the association was subject of a rare statutory investigation instigated by the government. The report which came out of that has remained firmly under lock and key, and almost no details about what went on there have been made public.

Cantref is now in the throes of being taken over by Wales and West, a Cardiff housing association with, it is rumoured, an unusually close relationship with the Labour Party. Some Wales and West staff, no doubt acting in a personal capacity, are said to have boasted that they helped remove posters and placards put up in Cardiff by opposition parties during the recent election campaign.

In the last few weeks, Jac o' the North has paid particular attention to Pembrokeshire Housing Association (PHA) and its property development subsidiary Mill Bay Homes Ltd (MBH).

It is now clear that there were some errors of fact in these pieces, and they have provoked a furious and extremely aggressive response from solicitors representing the two companies, with threats of action for defamation and an injunction. As a result, the offending articles have been removed from the blog.

One of the things which got the lawyers particularly worked up were questions about the extent to which PHA and MBH had met regulatory reporting requirements. Both come under the Financial Conduct Authority which presents its information to the world in a peculiarly confusing way. It also charges extortionate rates for anyone wanting to view basic information.

Click to enlarge

The FCA was set up by parliament to regulate a wide range of companies, societies and other bodies, and its aims include protecting consumers and informing the public. A search for the  accounts of PHA and MBH returns nothing after 2013, whereas the solicitor acting for these two clients has now produced e-mails showing that more recent reports have been submitted.

Click to enlarge
(Search conducted on 5 June 2016)

It is easy enough to contact Jac o' the North, and the simplest and most cost effective thing for PHA and MBH to have done would have been to get in touch and set the record straight. Instead, they phoned their legal rottweilers.


Now it has emerged that PHA and MBH have not only targeted Royston Jones, but have set the lawyers on a family who were unwise enough to complain about one of MBH's developments.

If the 2013 Act was meant to curb the litigious inclinations of those who think the world has a right only to glossy PR extolling their virtues, nobody seems to have told Pembrokeshire Housing Association or Mill Bay Homes.

The Act makes it clear that those seeking remedy must show that they have suffered 'serious harm'. In the case of corporate entities such as PHA and MBH, serious harm means that they have suffered or are likely to suffer significant financial loss as a result of a libel.

Because the 2013 Act is still in its infancy, a challenge for the courts is to establish what is meant by serious harm, and in particular what counts as a significant financial loss.

As a not for profit organisation, proving significant financial loss could be tricky for PHA, but in the case of MBH it might boil down to something like prospective house buyers telling the company that they had pulled out after reading Jac o' the North. Unlikely, but we are dealing with the Alice in Wonderland world of the legal profession here.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of yet another housing association which decided to try its luck with the 2013 Defamation Act after it read a piece in the Sunday Mirror. 

Midland Heart Housing Association clearly thought litigation in defence of its chief executive was money well spent, and it came a cropper. You can read more about this case here and here.

Solicitors acting for PHA and MBH contend that MBH is not a publicly funded company, which is true in the sense that it does not receive public funds to pursue its speculative property development business. But this is a chicken and egg argument because the company was set up by its parent which ultimately exists only because of public funding.

The moral of this complicated little tale is twofold.

If you are a blogger or a newspaper, tread carefully when criticising those with access to taxpayers' money.

If you are a chief executive of an organisation which depends on public cash, remember that litigation to protect your reputation may well end up doing really serious harm to your cherished public relations image, even if you win.

Under new management - business as usual

The other day Cneifiwr was talking to a retired county archaeologist from England who had a lot of tales to tell about the vandalism and wanton destruction of scheduled ancient monuments. One such incident involved the remains of a Roman temple which had stood on a bluff overlooking a valley. The archaeologists knew about the temple, but had reason to believe that there was more waiting to be discovered.

The landowner owned both the land at the top of the cliff and a site beneath it where he ran a caravan sales business. Taking matters into his own hands, he used a JCB to re-profile the top of the cliff, removing a large chunk of the archaeological site.

A planning officer and the horrified archaeologist were dispatched to find out what had happened, reminding the landowner that this was a site protected by law.

Producing his trump card, the landowner said that his planning consultant and solicitor had been having sleepless nights because of the health and safety risk to customers of the caravan business who could be struck by falling stone from the cliff face.

The council's solicitors concluded that a prosecution was likely to be both costly and unsuccessful. What was left of the temple and any other remains had gone after 2,000 years, carted off by lorries.

In some cases, my friend said, damage to protected sites was so severe that they had lost their protected status, and where culprits had been taken to court, fines were often modest. Sometimes hard nuts would refuse to pay the fines and would spend a couple of months in prison, after which the courts usually deemed that they had paid their debt to society.

Planning authorities and agencies such as Natural Resources Wales often feel similarly impotent in the face of actions by landowners who know how to play the system, but in Carmarthenshire the county council appears to have hit on a novel approach to such problems.

Rather than create difficulties by trying to enforce planning regulations, why not weave a narrative arguing that the applicant is doing a wonderful job of restoring their property and creating a successful business? If the landowner has already carried out the work without bothering to put in a planning application first, you can simply suggest that they might like to apply retrospectively, and everything will be all right.

This is what has happened at a modest smallholding called Ffynnon Luan near Maesybont. Here is the planning officer's report.

Ffynnon Luan appeared on this blog before after a spectacular fire in a large pile of tyres and timber on the night of 5th November 2015 left the taxpayer with a bill of nearly £30,000, no questions asked.

The owner of Ffynnon Luan, Mr Andrew Thomas, has also featured numerous times on this blog as the owner of nearby Blaenpant Farm where his activities since acquiring the property in 2001 have created a lot of work for the council's planning department, Natural Resources Wales, the police, the Ombudsman for Public Services, VOSA, various other agencies, the courts and members of the legal profession.

The key to Mr Thomas's successful transformation of Blaenpant from a quiet rural backwater enjoying protected status as a SSSI and European Special Area of Conservation into an industrial wasteland has been his exploitation of the planning status of Blaenpant as an agricultural holding, even though nothing resembling agriculture goes on there, apart from breeding horses and dogs.

Mr Thomas's main business interests are road haulage and quarrying, with occasional forays into scrap metal.

The latest row at Blaenpant has been rumbling on for a couple of years now after Mr Thomas started quarrying and building a network of roads on the protected site, and a planning application (retrospective, of course) for the "agricultural track" has been held up while the council and Natural Resources Wales wring their hands and work out a way forward.

Despite Mr Thomas's wrecking of a part of the SSSI/SAC at Cernydd Carmel, the authorities have ruled out a prosecution and concluded that restoration of the site is not feasible. Instead, they have been negotiating a management plan to protect what is left, with rules governing the numbers of horses kept on the land, the times of year they may graze, etc.

Nobody familiar with the turbulent history of Blaenpant believes that the management plan will be honoured, apart from the council and NRW, of course, but in return for a signature Mr Thomas will get retrospective planning for his roads which are, of course, purely for agricultural use.
 
Unlike Blaenpant, Ffynnon Luan is not a protected site, but like Blaenpant it lies on commercially valuable limestone, and like Blaenpant the planning department is proceeding on the basis that it is an agricultural holding.

When Mr Thomas acquired it in 2014, Ffynnon Luan was in a sorry state. The house was dilapidated, and the fields neglected. Renovation and extension of the house have been proceeding, and Mr Thomas has constructed a 550 metre stretch of tarmac road across the fields.

Planning applications have to be considered on their individual merit, meaning that Mr Thomas's history down the road at Blaenpant would not be regarded as relevant to his new venture. Fair enough, but the planning officer's report paints a glowing picture of Mr Thomas's heroic endeavours to breathe life back into Ffynnon Luan.

It is unfortunately true, the officer notes, that the application is retrospective, and there are some minor quibbles about the removal of "significant lengths of hedgerow" contrary to the Hedgerow Regulations 1997, and the importation of "unauthorised materials" onto the site, but these are subject to separate investigations, and clearly not something which should stand in the way of a ringing endorsement.

Mr Thomas is, we are told, pursuing a "genuine attempt" to restore Ffynnon Luan as a working farm. All 35 acres of it. The 550 metres of road are "field access" to be used only by HGVs delivering feedstuffs, agricultural implements and transporting livestock.

The council's Head of Transport agreed, arguing that "the proposed access is better than using the existing access which would lead to HGV lorries and agricultural vehicles travelling through a narrow back lane". How all these HGVs and agricultural vehicles would get to Ffynnon Luan avoiding public roads is a mystery, as is why such a small holding would generate so much traffic.

Members of the planning committee were told that it was Mr Thomas's intention to keep sheep and beef cattle at Ffynnon Luan. 35 acres of rough grazing would support a small flock of sheep and a few cattle, and according to the planning officer's report, the land is already being grazed.

Another eye popping feature of the planning officer's report is the revelation that the applicant has been in discussion with the council over plans to build sheds and a "slurry lagoon" at Ffynnon Luan.

Mr Thomas managed to build two enormous sheds down the road at Blaenpant using agriculture as the justification despite lack of evidence then or now of any genuine agricultural operations at the site, and it emerged at an inquiry in 2009 that the farm had in fact been used as a depot for his HGV business.

As for a slurry lagoon, how many 35 acre smallholdings with a few sheep and, possibly at some future date, a handful of cattle, warrant one of those? Unless Mr Thomas is planning to buck industry trends and go into dairy farming on a surprisingly large scale for a smallholding, it is hard to imagine what use the lagoon will see, unless it is for storing something else, such as scrap or stone.

Presented with this some councillors clearly had their suspicions and called for a site visit. They lost by a single vote, and the application was then duly passed, with the support of the local member, veteran Independent Wyn Evans.

As pointed out ad nauseam on this blog previously, genuine farmers who try to abide by the law and play by the rules must be left wondering why they bother. Equally gobsmacked will be the likes of Mr Andrew Redman whose mobile horse shelter in a field near Broad Oak incurred the full wrath of the council's planning officers. Mr Redman was taken to court by the council on three separate occasions for this outrage, and is still trying to extricate himself from the nightmare.

A highly illegal shed

A perfectly legal road with some unfortunate hedge destruction and importation of unauthorised materials
to be used for agriculture, and definitely not for commercial quarrying

The council's former head of planning, Eifion Bowen, author of countless controversial planning decisions, is now enjoying an early retirement, but the early indications are that nothing much has changed under his successor.

Pictures courtesy of West Wales News Review.

Small earthquake

Well, that's it. After weeks of campaigning, some lively debate, a marginally better voter turnout and what would anywhere else be significant shifts in the popular vote, the hybrid first-past-the-post, semi-proportional electoral system decreed for Wales has left things pretty much as they were. It's five more years of Labour, minus the over-inflated ego of Leighton Andrews.

Sticky

Writing in this morning's Guardian Professor Richard Wyn Jones notes, "the operation of this system meant that a drop in Labour’s constituency level support from 42% in 2011 to 35% in 2016, and in regional list support from 36.9% to 29%, resulted in the loss of only a single seat".

In another piece written ahead of the election, he described the voting system as "sticky" and perverse, giving Labour a big in-built advantage. "Huge shifts in the patterns of party support at the ballot box have very little impact in terms of the make-up of the Senedd in Cardiff Bay", and yet the operation of the regional list system also manages to be unfair to Labour voters, and this time round, for example, those who put a cross in the Labour box on the regional list in the North unwittingly secured the election of the appalling Nathan Gill and a non-entity called Michelle Brown for Ukip.

Rotten apples

Ironically, and more by accident than design, the system delivered seven regional seats for Ukip, reflecting the 13% of the popular vote they achieved across Wales. The winners include Gareth Bennett who thinks that migrants are "unhygienic", Neil Cash-for Questions Hamilton and this idiotic woman reading very badly from a script who thinks that the EU is preventing the police from getting out on the beat, and that her job as an AM is to secure more powers for Westminster.

Two of the Ukip crop do not even live in Wales. If you want to be a community councillor, effectively an unpaid volunteer prepared to mow grass, pick up litter and deal with dog mess, you must by law live in or within a few miles of the small town or village you represent. The Senedd must be one of the few legislatures in the world where you can become a member without bothering to live in the country whose laws you help shape. If you bother turning up, of course.

Neil Hamilton's response to questions about his home address was to say that he lives "near the M4".

If that was not perverse enough, we have lost the services of two of the most able and widely respected former AMs in the shape of William Powell and Aled Roberts (both LibDem).

It was a disastrous night for the LibDems, deservedly so in Ceredigion where their candidate Elizabeth Evans ran one of the most dishonest and negative campaigns anywhere in the country.

Room 101

The Tories also had a pretty dire time of it, and have thankfully been relegated to third place. In Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Matthew Paul saw his party's share of the vote drop from 20% to 15%. Writing in this week's Carmarthenshire Herald he spends a lot of time talking about Hitler's astrologer before going on to compare Adam Price to the bonkers David Icke. Er, no.

Matthew notes that his own Daily Mail horoscope predicted that "doors that have been firmly shut will spring open this week".

The only thing that opened for Matthew was a trap door.

Plaid had a mixed night. The fantastic outcome in the Rhondda and stonking victories in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr and Ceredigion were balanced by disappointing results in Aberwconwy (close), Llanelli (even closer) and Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (a poor third).

Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire must surely qualify as one of the most unnatural constituencies in Wales, bringing together places as diverse as Tenby and Carmarthen, Saundersfoot and Llanboidy, and the result is that most of its voters are effectively disenfranchised, no matter which party wins.

The C Factor

Llanelli is a special case all on its own. Helen Mary Jones and her team worked incredibly hard and nearly pulled it off. Her quiet dignity and good humour were characteristic after what must have been for her a bitterly disappointing defeat.

There were a number of factors at play here. First, Helen Mary was unlucky to be up against a strong Labour opponent. Lee Waters is young, bright and has strong local roots. In a party dominated by the likes of Kevin Madge, Tegwen Devichand and Kerry Thomas, Lee cuts a lonely figure.

On his blog he tells us that he has "an intolerance for mediocrity". If he is true to his word, he is likely to burst more than a few blood vessels as he settles down to life with Llanelli Labour.

A second factor which won't have helped Helen Mary is Carmarthenshire County Council, until recently led by Labour in coalition with the evergreen poison ivy Independents who have managed to maintain their stranglehold on the new Plaid-led administration.

It seems like only yesterday that Kevin Madge was robustly defending decisions on sports pitches and parks in the south of the county, only for Lee Waters to blame the mess on Plaid.

Last but not least, Plaid's prospects were probably sunk once again by the presence on the ballot paper of Siân Caiach.

Siân is a brave, principled and obstinate force of nature, and unlike any other county councillor in Carmarthenshire, she has a large personal following. The tragedy for her and for Plaid in Llanelli is that what began largely as a personality clash has been allowed to fester for so long and cause so much damage.

Almost for sure, that is not how Siân would see things, but she is one of those people it was always going to be better having in the tent. At which point the analogy breaks down for biological reasons and the law of gravity.

If a repeat is to be avoided next time round, personal animosities and resentment need to be set aside, and an olive branch offered from inside the tent.

Cockroaches

As far as the rest of us are concerned, a priority must now be to tackle the absurd voting system. Labour will for obvious reasons be uninclined to want change, but the looming reorganisation of Westminster constituencies which will see Wales reduced from 40 to 29 seats should be the catalyst. No political party in its right mind wants to end up fighting elections on constituency boundaries which differ wildly from year to year.

And looming over all of that is the NHS. After 17 years of Labour in control, the service is moving ever closer to meltdown.

It was obvious from the leaders' debates that health is by far the most important issue for most voters, and yet Labour is in denial. The NHS will be an even hotter topic at the next election, for sure.

The last word goes to Lyndon Rosser who had this to say on Twitter:

A Norwegian Blue writes

Only four more sleeps until we get the results of what has to be one of the most extraordinary election campaigns any of us can remember. It sputtered into life under the shadow of the EU referendum, and seemed destined to be a low-key affair with an even lower turnout - the warm-up act for the main event.


The Tories were busy tearing themselves to pieces in what still promises to be a revival of the old Carry On franchise.

Carry On down the Khazi, starring Michael Gove as Kenneth Williams, Boris Johnson as Terry Scott, Chris Grayling as Bernard Bresslaw, Theresa May as battle-axe Joan Sims and a special guest appearance by Nigel Farage as Sid James will be returning to a TV screen near you soon.

Labour was clearly nervous at the start of the campaign, concentrating its canvassing efforts on what should be rock-solid constituencies in Cardiff and the Valleys. Places like Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, once Labour strongholds, were abandoned and activists packed off to shore up the likes of Leighton Andrews, Jane Hutt and Jenny Rathbone, supplemented by a busload of students from Birmingham.

Then came the steel crisis, which was undoubtedly a welcome distraction for Labour because the issue that is exercising voters the length and breadth of Wales more than anything else is the NHS and social care, with education coming not far behind.

The Tories dithered, and Labour seized on this golden PR opportunity to make all the right noises without actually doing anything. A concerned Carwyn went down to Port Talbot, while Stephen Kinnock flew around the world, TV cameras in tow, and was probably jetting off somewhere else when he missed a crucial meeting to discuss the proposed management buyout.

One of Jeremy Corbyn's policy advisers was accused of bragging that the steel crisis had "played well for Labour". Ukip blamed it all on the EU, forgetting to mention that it had voted against proposals in the European Parliament which would have enabled the EU to impose higher tariffs on Chinese steel. Although the measure was passed, it was then blocked by the Tory-LibDem coalition in London and their allies.

The sigh of relief from Labour was audible from Penmaenmawr to Pontypool, but then came the row about anti-semitism, with Ken Livingstone enacting a re-run of this North Minehead by-election.

Meanwhile, over in Ceredigion, voters are quaking in their boots at the prospect of answering a knock on the door only to find the bonkers Tory Dr Felix Aubel glowering at them. Dr Aubel was recently memorably described as the Donald Trump of Trelech, and he is an ardent supporter of nuclear weapons, yelling "Peace through Strength" on Pawb a'i Farn a few weeks back. Dr A's Congregationalist flock can look forward to the traditional fires of hell being replaced by a thermo-nuclear holocaust if their minister has his way.

Yes, all human life is in this campaign, and anyone looking for a little light relief could do worse than turn to Matthew Paul's weekly column in the Carmarthenshire Herald.

As a fox-hunting Oxbridge barrister, Matthew clearly knows what is on the minds of the people of Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, where he is standing in the Boy's Own Conservative and Unionist interest.

This week he does a pretty good hatchet job on Labour's Ladybird Book manifesto, 24 pages of pretty pictures, few words and even fewer explanations about just how we will arrive in the Promised Land. He compares the party's optimistic 1999 vision with the drab 2016 reality before turning his blunderbuss on Adam Price for Plaid.

Matthew's main grouse with his rival is that Adam is not your average, run-of-the-mill non-entity, and has even been described as Y Mab Darogan, a man who wants to transform the fortunes of our nation. This all seems to have been started by the BBC's Vaughan Roderick who had this to say in a prophetic eponymous piece back in 2009:

Ychydig iawn o wleidyddion Cymru sy'n gallu denu newyddiadurwyr gwleidyddol i neuadd cynhadledd er mwyn gwrando ar araith.......Un o'r eithriadau prin yw Adam Price- un sy'n gwybod nid yn unig lle mae "g-spot" ei blaid ond un y wasg hefyd. Mae gan Adam y gallu i bleisio pob carfan o'i blaid gan gyfuno cyfeiraidau at Dryweryn, Streic y Glowyr, Merched Beca a Nye Bevan mewn ffordd sy'n swnio'n gwbwl naturiol.

(Very few Welsh politicians can attract political journalists [out of their hotel rooms, Ed.] to the conference hall to listen to a speech. One of the rare exceptions is Adam Price, someone who knows not only where to find his party's 'g-spot', but that of the press as well. Adam has the ability to please every section of his party by combining references to Tryweryn, the Miners' Strike, Beca's Daughters and Nye Bevan in a way which sounds completely natural.)


Matthew, who must be contemplating whether he will be pushed into fourth or fifth place on Thursday, has this to say.

Matthew weighs in

But while some of us worry about the NHS, schools, whether our children will be able to afford higher education and their future prospects, Matthew has his mind set on the issues which really matter to the people of Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, such as the fate of the bronze cock of Jesus College, Cambridge, a subject he covered at length in his column a few weeks back.

The cockerel was looted by the British along with thousands of other ceremonial pieces from what is now Nigeria just over a hundred years ago. 

The unfortunate independent kingdom of Benin had been unwise enough to resist attempts to subjugate it by the British. An armed force equipped with machine guns took on men armed with spears and bows and arrows. Palaces, temples and much of the rest of Benin City were torched, and uncontrolled looting by British troops ensued.

Or as Matthew Paul sees this most shameful episode, “a gunboat was sent to give the natives a bloody good hiding”.

The loot was shipped back to England, and a great deal of it was flogged off, much of it to the Kaiser in Germany, but the bronze cockerel ended up in Jesus College, Cambridge.  A large number of other items taken from Benin languish in storage in the British Museum.

To their credit, the students of Jesus College recently voted to return the cockerel to its rightful owners.

Matthew was outraged.

Perhaps Jesus College, Oxford might like to follow suit and return Llyfr Coch Hergest, one of the earliest and most important Welsh manuscripts, to the National Library of Wales. 

Toodle-pip and tally ho!

Mud slinging

A year ago the Cambrian News did a hatchet job on Mike Parker, Plaid's candidate in Ceredigion, with banner headlines which suggested that Mike, who spent his formative years in Kidderminster, was a swivel-eyed racist advocating the ethnic cleansing of the English from Wales.

In reality, someone had dug up a magazine article written years before in which he had described how members of extreme right-wing fringe groups were moving to parts of rural Wales and bringing their nasty ideas and friends with them.

Labour's candidate, Huw Thomas, certainly knew the truth behind the Cambrian's headlines, but chose to get on his rocking horse, feign shock and horror and call for Mike to step down.

It did not take long before someone else delved into Huw's more recent past to produce a whole series of unfortunate and infantile remarks he had made on an online forum, including advocating throwing Tippex on cars displaying the English flag.

This was gutter politics of the worst kind, and there is no doubt that some of the mud stuck. Who initiated this campaign of character assassination is not clear, but the Cambrian News bears most of the responsibility for its handling of the story.

Now there is more mud slinging in the election for North Wales Police Commissioner.

Someone has trawled through the Twitter account of the Plaid candidate, Arfon Jones, and come up with two tweets out of thousands to imply that Arfon is a friend of Jihadist extremists. You can read the BBC's account here.

Who initiated this latest round of smears is not clear, but one of the other candidates has a lot of form when it comes to cyber attacks and character assassination.

Making serious political points using humour on Twitter or any other forum can be dangerous because it is child's play to rip comments out of context. Twitter, with its 140 character limit, is also not an ideal place to engage in serious political debate on complex issues such as the Middle East.

The points Arfon Jones was making were firstly that the security forces in the UK already have a vast battery of sweeping powers at their disposal, and that proposals to extend the frontiers of the police and surveillance state even further by giving the authorities legal cover to store pretty much everything that anyone does online
are a serious threat to the liberties and civil rights which the Government and security services say they are protecting from terrorists and other extremists.

That is a legitimate point of view and one shared by lots of people across the political spectrum.

Arfon's second point was the the UK bears at least some of the responsibility for the existence of groups such as ISIS.

There are certainly a lot of people who think that if Tony Blair had not been so willing to throw in our lot with George W Bush and his 'War on Terror' that the Middle East might be a very different place to the what it is today.

Again, that is a perfectly legitimate view and one shared by people in all of the mainstream political parties, and it certainly does not make Arfon an extremist, as claimed by David Jones, Tory MP for Clwyd West.

Who has been muddying the waters here is not clear, but Labour's candidate for Police Commissioner in the north, David Taylor, has a lot of form.

Taylor made a name for himself a few years back by making some very tasteless remarks on Twitter about victims of the Hillsborough disaster while he was watching a game in a pub.

He was working as a researcher for Leighton Andrews at the time, and his activities included setting up an anonymous website to launch personal attacks on political opponents.

Unlike Arfon Jones, who was a police inspector and spent 30 years with the police, Taylor's career has largely been spent working as a backroom boy in Labour's spin machine.

So which of these two would make a better police commissioner? A man who cares about civil liberties and thinks about the consequences of UK foreign policy, or a political attack dog?

21,800 shades of grey

One of the juiciest perks enjoyed by council chief executives is the role of returning officer, and the untimely departure of Bryn Parry Jones in Pembrokeshire means that Mark James is now the doyen of the very exclusive club of local authority returning officers in the south-west.

Why extremely well-paid chief executives should be paid huge bonuses for overseeing elections is a mystery, and sadly Plaid Cymru's proposals to reform the system were stonewalled by Labour a couple of years ago.

The result is that 2016 will produce a bumper crop of fees for Mark James, what with the elections to the Assembly, the police commisisoner election and the upcoming EU referendum. We won't get much change out of £30,000, and if that was not generous enough, Mr James can also decide when it is most tax efficient to pay himself. How many council staff entitled to claim "expenses" can submit a claim and be paid in advance for the work to be carried out?

Mr James has had plenty of practice at organising elections over the years, so perhaps the bungling we have seen this year is down to the loss of Bryn Parry Jones's guiding hand.

First, Carmarthenshire County Council lost applications for postal votes. This was blamed on a technical issue at the printers.

If we are to believe that, a lot of personal information vanished into the ether, with the council not having kept any electronic files of the data. Perhaps it was inscribed on parchment with quill pens and posted to the printers who binned it as junk mail. But whatever happened, it was of course somebody else's fault.

Next, 28,000 postal ballots for the Welsh Assembly elections were sent out with a serious wording error, meaning that the council had to write to everyone and send out a new batch at almost the last minute.

Anyone who has used the incorrect papers to vote will find that their vote does not count. But don't panic. Here is the council's explanation.

Got that? Bin the grey version, and use the tan coloured papers. Here they are:

You may be forgiven for thinking that the new ballot papers look, um, grey.

A concerned old age pensioner contacted Y Cneifiwr to say, "the original mid and west Wales ballot paper was pale green, not grey. The new ballot paper is grey not tan . The instructions tell us to jettison the old "grey" ballot paper and replace it with the new "tan" ballot paper.  Presumably therefore if we send back the new ballot paper which is not tan, but grey, they will think it's the old grey, but actually green, ballot paper and it will be null and void."

And the bad news may not stop there. The regional voting system is complex and a very small number of votes could decide the fate of some candidates, opening up the possibility of legal challenge and, in the worst case scenario, a re-run of the election and yet more money for Mr James.