Zzzz Cars
Caebrwyn has followed up Gloucestershire Constabulary's investigation of the unlawful pension and libel indemnity payments to Carmarthenshire County Council's chief executive, Mark James, with a freedom of information request. We now know that the police took three months to complete their inquiries but did not interview anyone, and there was no correspondence between the council and the police. There was also no involvement from the Crown Prosecution Service.
The only remaining mysteries are what took them so long and what this rather underwhelming exercise cost.
Parc y Trap
It's been a while since this blog looked at the rumbling planning dispute at Parc y Trap in Adpar (in reality the bit of Newcastle Emlyn which comes under Ceredigion).
The application finally came up for a decision this week, with planning officers recommending refusal. After some to-ing and fro-ing and a complaint that the applicant's agent appeared to have taken to e-mailing councillors and ignoring the planning officers, the decision was deferred to another day.
Aldi
Also in Newcastle Emlyn, residents this week received a leaflet from Aldi explaining its plans for a new store on a development which will also include workshops/employment units on the Castle Motors site. The store group is asking locals to write in to the council to express their support.
This is the latest twist in a planning saga which has now been rumbling on for five years, with the council approving plans for two new supermarket developments, despite questions over whether this small market town (population roughly 1,500) actually needs three supermarkets, and fears about the impact this will have on locally owned businesses.
The Aldi/Castle Motors proposals are likely to receive broad support in the town, something which is definitely not the case with the second proposed development on a site occupied by Cawdor Cars. The Cawdor site was, however, the planning officers' preferred development, and the owner is currently trying to get the council to drop a requirement for a Section 106 agreement - with, it seems, the support of the planning officers.
The Cawdor plans were approved back in 2011 with the backing of Labour and Independent members, and shortly afterwards allegations were aired in the council chamber that Cllr Pam Palmer (Independent) had been seen urging her Independent troops to vote for the proposal, although she denied doing so.
Dylan Thomas and the turbine
The row over the siting of a wind turbine at a farm near Llansteffan also rumbled on, with allegations that Cllr Meryl Gravell had intervened in the planning process. Similar allegations against the veteran Independent councillor have been made in the past, also denied.
A strange and no doubt coincidental feature of both the controversial supermarket development in Newcastle Emlyn and the campaign against the wind turbine in Llansteffan is that there are links to business interests involved in the Scarlets.
Foodbanks
A report produced by the Trussell Trust shows that more people are using foodbanks in Wales than in Scotland despite the fact that Scotland has over 5 million people and Wales has 3 million. The report also shows that the gap between rich and poor is growing in Wales.
Kevin Madge, leader of Carmarthenshire County Council, told the South Wales Guardian that he was shocked. His recipe is for everyone to vote Labour at the next general election.
Perhaps the Guardian should have pointed out to Kev that Scotland is run by the SNP, while Wales is run by, um, Labour.
Friday, 13 June 2014
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
Nathan Gill breaks his silence - well nearly (Updated)
Golwg360 has succeeded in getting a response of sorts from Ukip to the recent revelations about Nathan Gill, the recently elected Ukip MEP for Wales. Or rather the news service managed to speak to a Ukip spokesperson who said that the press had been attacking Gill "for being kind to foreigners".
The spokesperson told Golwg360 that this was a new press tactic, adding that Nathan Gill had not done anything wrong, and that there was no case to answer.
A Hull Daily Mail article in which it was claimed that Gill had treated foreign workers better than locals was "very unfair" because those making the accusations had not given their names.
Ukip also refused to answer questions about Gill's religion, his claim that he was not a professional politician and the employment of Eastern Europeans in the family's care home business.
Update
Golwg360 said it had been trying unsuccessfully to contact the elusive MEP since revelations about his past emerged last week.
An observant reader spotted him in a family snapshot of Farage's new troops arriving in Brussels earlier this week (just to the right of Nigel Farage):
Meanwhile, Daily Wales reports that Gill's biography has mysteriously disappeared from the Ukip Wales website.
There is also a Facebook page dedicated to our man in Brussels which consists for the most part of messages and videos of people pledging their support. They include a rather stiff performance from Jana, Mr Gill's American wife, telling is why we should vote for her man, and another of a public meeting in Anglesey where two of Gill's young sons were pressed into service to read from a prepared script.
The family business is alive and well.
Correction
A previous version of this piece referred to a website being set up in the name of Nathan Gill. It is now clear that this website has nothing to do with the MEP of the same name.
The author of this blog would like to offer sincere apologies for this error.
The spokesperson told Golwg360 that this was a new press tactic, adding that Nathan Gill had not done anything wrong, and that there was no case to answer.
A Hull Daily Mail article in which it was claimed that Gill had treated foreign workers better than locals was "very unfair" because those making the accusations had not given their names.
Ukip also refused to answer questions about Gill's religion, his claim that he was not a professional politician and the employment of Eastern Europeans in the family's care home business.
Update
Golwg360 said it had been trying unsuccessfully to contact the elusive MEP since revelations about his past emerged last week.
An observant reader spotted him in a family snapshot of Farage's new troops arriving in Brussels earlier this week (just to the right of Nigel Farage):
 |
There is also a Facebook page dedicated to our man in Brussels which consists for the most part of messages and videos of people pledging their support. They include a rather stiff performance from Jana, Mr Gill's American wife, telling is why we should vote for her man, and another of a public meeting in Anglesey where two of Gill's young sons were pressed into service to read from a prepared script.
The family business is alive and well.
Correction
A previous version of this piece referred to a website being set up in the name of Nathan Gill. It is now clear that this website has nothing to do with the MEP of the same name.
The author of this blog would like to offer sincere apologies for this error.
Tuesday, 10 June 2014
It's war in Llaregyb!*
What better way to while away these long summer nights than by trawling through planning documents relating to the highly controversial wind turbine which is set to be erected at Llansteffan, within sight of Dylan Thomas's writing shed.
Mrs Ogmore Pritchard would not have been pleased, and it seems that Mrs O P's current manifestation in Carmarthenshire isn't either. All that rabble breathing on her furniture.
Ahead of the planning committee's decision there were reports of heavy artillery being drawn up on the eastern banks of the Tywi. The anti-renewable energy campaign includes some old friends from the Coed Bach biomass debacle, as can be seen from a perusal of the list of objectors.
Mrs O P was adamant that she would not have biomass anywhere her lovely new race course.
The Coed Bach row eventually resulted in a successful action for defamation brought by the leader of the Coedbach Action Group, Robin Cammish, against the developer, Mr Clive Hughes. Mr Cammish, originally from Scarborough, has since been appointed a director of Scarlets Regional Limited.
Despite the victory over on the Llansteffan side of the water, celebrations have been muted to say the least, with Independent councillor and current Council Chair, Daff Davies, coming under fire from irate citizens.
Harmony has now been replaced with acrimony tragically soon after Pam and Meryl attempted to rally their grizzled Independent troops with morale boosting pep talks and buttered scones on an away-day in Carway.
Cllr Davies is affectionately known as Elmer Fudd, whose catchphrase was, "Oh, you dubbuh cwossing wabbit". At the last county council elections locals noted the enthusiasm with which Daff's Polish farm workers participated in the democratic process, with about 20 of them turning up to cast their votes after what must have been long and passionate debates in the cowshed on the relative merits of the candidates.
Perhaps it was just as well that they did turn out to vote because their boss squeaked home by just five votes.
Since being returned to County Hall, where he sits with his Labour coalition partners, Daff has sold the farm for a price said to be around £1.5 million to Cwrt Malle, the gigantic industrial dairy farming business where recently more than 150 of the 1,800 strong herd died in an outbreak of botulism.
*Llaregyb in honour of Jim Parc Nest, a native of Newcastle Emlyn, whose brilliant adaptation of Under Milkwood is available in all good bookshops as Dan y Wenallt.
Mrs Ogmore Pritchard would not have been pleased, and it seems that Mrs O P's current manifestation in Carmarthenshire isn't either. All that rabble breathing on her furniture.
Ahead of the planning committee's decision there were reports of heavy artillery being drawn up on the eastern banks of the Tywi. The anti-renewable energy campaign includes some old friends from the Coed Bach biomass debacle, as can be seen from a perusal of the list of objectors.
Mrs O P was adamant that she would not have biomass anywhere her lovely new race course.
The Coed Bach row eventually resulted in a successful action for defamation brought by the leader of the Coedbach Action Group, Robin Cammish, against the developer, Mr Clive Hughes. Mr Cammish, originally from Scarborough, has since been appointed a director of Scarlets Regional Limited.
Despite the victory over on the Llansteffan side of the water, celebrations have been muted to say the least, with Independent councillor and current Council Chair, Daff Davies, coming under fire from irate citizens.
Harmony has now been replaced with acrimony tragically soon after Pam and Meryl attempted to rally their grizzled Independent troops with morale boosting pep talks and buttered scones on an away-day in Carway.
Cllr Davies is affectionately known as Elmer Fudd, whose catchphrase was, "Oh, you dubbuh cwossing wabbit". At the last county council elections locals noted the enthusiasm with which Daff's Polish farm workers participated in the democratic process, with about 20 of them turning up to cast their votes after what must have been long and passionate debates in the cowshed on the relative merits of the candidates.
Perhaps it was just as well that they did turn out to vote because their boss squeaked home by just five votes.
Since being returned to County Hall, where he sits with his Labour coalition partners, Daff has sold the farm for a price said to be around £1.5 million to Cwrt Malle, the gigantic industrial dairy farming business where recently more than 150 of the 1,800 strong herd died in an outbreak of botulism.
*Llaregyb in honour of Jim Parc Nest, a native of Newcastle Emlyn, whose brilliant adaptation of Under Milkwood is available in all good bookshops as Dan y Wenallt.
Monday, 9 June 2014
The view from the boathouse
Things continue to be very quiet at Carmarthenshire County Council, with only a slight flurry of media attention last week when the Planning Committee rejected the advice of planning officers and voted to approve an application for a wind turbine near Llansteffan within line of sight of Dylan Thomas's boathouse and writing shed.
The planning officer's report can be found here, and the recommendation was for refusal, largely on grounds that the turbine, which is of modest size, would have a detrimental impact on the landscape. Most of the agencies consulted had no objections to the proposal, but 422 letters were received from members of the public.
The matter will now go back before the planning committee to either confirm or reverse its decision, and no doubt there will be the usual arm twisting behind the scenes in the meantime. If the council runs true to form, the decision will be reversed.
Most of us can't remember the last time we opened the letters pages of a local newspaper and did not find at least one anti-wind turbine campaigner. Some are reasonable, but others are positively unhinged. A few years back someone thought they had found conclusive evidence that the Nazis were behind one operator from North Wales, and whenever an application is submitted, uproar nearly always ensues.
We all want and need electricity, but for many it's a case of not in my backyard, although it's OK if someone else has a nuclear power plant or a coal or gas power station in theirs.
To make matters worse, responsibility for large power generation installations has not been devolved, and so what we have is a piecemeal and largely undemocratic approach to harnessing the huge potential Wales has for developing and securing its future energy needs.
A couple of years ago this blog looked at the experience of Denmark (here). Back then 24% of the country's electricity was being generated by wind power, and today the share has risen to 28%. Unlike the UK, 80% of turbines in Denmark are owned by local communities as cooperatives.
The country has a long history of running successful cooperatives in all sorts of fields, Danish bacon and a thriving cooperative banking sector to name but two examples. By giving people a stake in wind power generation, the sort of bitter and destructive planning battles we have here are practically unknown.
It's not just about wind power and energy security where there are lessons to be learned from our neighbours in Europe, but also in tackling fuel poverty, another field in which the UK lags way behind.
A couple of years ago Leanne Wood and the Plaid group in the Senedd commissioned an interesting report on the subject, which you can find here.
The planning officer's report can be found here, and the recommendation was for refusal, largely on grounds that the turbine, which is of modest size, would have a detrimental impact on the landscape. Most of the agencies consulted had no objections to the proposal, but 422 letters were received from members of the public.
The matter will now go back before the planning committee to either confirm or reverse its decision, and no doubt there will be the usual arm twisting behind the scenes in the meantime. If the council runs true to form, the decision will be reversed.
Most of us can't remember the last time we opened the letters pages of a local newspaper and did not find at least one anti-wind turbine campaigner. Some are reasonable, but others are positively unhinged. A few years back someone thought they had found conclusive evidence that the Nazis were behind one operator from North Wales, and whenever an application is submitted, uproar nearly always ensues.
We all want and need electricity, but for many it's a case of not in my backyard, although it's OK if someone else has a nuclear power plant or a coal or gas power station in theirs.
To make matters worse, responsibility for large power generation installations has not been devolved, and so what we have is a piecemeal and largely undemocratic approach to harnessing the huge potential Wales has for developing and securing its future energy needs.
A couple of years ago this blog looked at the experience of Denmark (here). Back then 24% of the country's electricity was being generated by wind power, and today the share has risen to 28%. Unlike the UK, 80% of turbines in Denmark are owned by local communities as cooperatives.
The country has a long history of running successful cooperatives in all sorts of fields, Danish bacon and a thriving cooperative banking sector to name but two examples. By giving people a stake in wind power generation, the sort of bitter and destructive planning battles we have here are practically unknown.
It's not just about wind power and energy security where there are lessons to be learned from our neighbours in Europe, but also in tackling fuel poverty, another field in which the UK lags way behind.
A couple of years ago Leanne Wood and the Plaid group in the Senedd commissioned an interesting report on the subject, which you can find here.
Saturday, 7 June 2014
A bit of a lad
Update
For the latest turn in this saga, see Jac o' the North.
Under normal circumstances most of us would agree that sons and daughters should not be judged by the actions of their parents, but if someone is standing for election to public office and has some pretty major skeletons tucked away in the closet, just two courses of actions are open to them:
(1) Keep quiet and hope that nobody notices.
(2) Be honest and open from the start, and make sure that there is nothing nasty that can come out to embarrass either you or your party.
"This doesn't look very good"
Nathan Gill appears to have opted for the first course of action on a number of matters. Jac o' the North has already chronicled some of Gill's business dealings, including the bunkhouse for Filipino and other migrant labour; the fact that he claimed in his election literature not to be a career politician when his main job of work was as a paid adviser for a Ukip MEP; and the fact that he did not disclose his religious affiliations. As he admitted to the Western Mail, he realised that some of this did not look very good.
Now we know, thanks to a comment posted on this blog posted by Jac himself, that Gill's father spent time in jail for offences which Anonymous, commenting on the previous post, felt made him "a bit of a lad". Emlyn Hooson QC who defended Michael Gill at the trial described him as "a dirty old man".
Rather than leave the story hanging half-explained among the comments on a blogpost, here is a fuller account and some more on the tawdry world inhabited by Wales's newest MEP.
Michael Gill had been an active Mormon while the family still lived in Hull, but according to a former Mormon bishop interviewed at the time of the trial in Caernarfon in 1988, his membership ended some time after that because of "certain problems".
Having moved to Angelsey, Michael Gill set up shop as a homeopath, and part of the treatment he offered involved hypnosis using a strange black box with a flashing red light. Three women alleged that he took advantage of them while under hypnosis to perform sexual assaults. Gill pleaded guilty to two charges of sexual assault and third of persuading a woman to have sexual intercourse with him by telling her that it was a part of the treatment. Two further charges of rape and buggery were left on file, with prosecuting counsel telling the court that it would serve no useful purpose to try Gill for these other offences.
Gill was sentenced to two years in prison. The very lenient sentence caused surprise and anger at the time, and it would be unthinkable today. A couple of years ago, a charlatan living in the Carmarthenshire village of Cwmduad was jailed for seven years at the age of 77 for remarkably similar offences. In what seems to be a freak coincidence, the name of this sex pest and fraudster was Reginald Gill.
One of Michael Gill's "patients" told the press that she believed that there could be up to 15 victims, but that others had felt too afraid to come forward. Gill had boasted to one of the women that he had sex seven times a day.
All of this took place in the late 1980s when the son was in his teens.
Bunking up
Father and son subsequently went into business together in Burgill Ltd. Burgill described itself as a company involved in letting its own property. That turns out to have been a nice way of describing the bunkhouse for migrant care home workers.
Bearing in mind the nature of the father's earlier offences, it is disconcerting to see that he had no problem setting up and running a care home through a separate company called Pink Panther Resource Centre, subsequently renamed Gill Enterprises Yorkshire, which despite the name is registered to an address in Angelsey.
Rather oddly in view of the former Mormon bishop's claims that Michael Gill's membership of the church had ended in the 1980s, both the care home and the bunkhouse were located in the same road as the Mormon church in Hull.
Cutting red tape
Nathan Gill's parents gave an address in Menai Bridge on documents relating to Burgill Ltd, while Nathan Gill lives not far away in Llangefni. These two locations are important for the next chapter in the story which takes place in 2011 when Gill Senior would have been aged around 78.
On 22 October 2011 the Daily Post reported that North Wales Police and the Environment Agency Wales had raided two properties in Menai Bridge and Llangefni after an illegal stash of 5,000 tyres was discovered in the garden of a property in Pentraeth Road, Menai Bridge. The same address as on the Burgill documents, in fact.
It seems that the tyres were to be shipped to Ghana as part of a scam to avoid dumping charges, and the article tells us that an order was served to have the stash removed and disposed of legally.
Perhaps our MEP did not know what was happening in his parents' garden, although judging from the photograph accompanying the piece in the Daily Post anyone visiting the property would have wondered what the gigantic pile of tyres was doing there.
Parliamentary matters
In the news this morning is a complaint from Ukip that the party is being treated unfairly by the establishment and that it should have at least 23 more peers in the House of Lords.
Who knows, but perhaps we could yet see Lord Gill of Menai Bridge donning ermine robes and heading off for a new career in expense claiming.
Meanwhile Nathan Gill has been busy after his success in the European elections. No sooner had he been elected than he left Llangefni - not for Brussels or the European Parliament, where he does not intend to spend too much of his time anyway, but to campaign in the Newark by-election.
His Twitter account is strangely silent about the result in Newark and the recent press revelations about his background, but he did retweet this from BBC Wales:
MPs recall is expected to be part of today's Queen's Speech. Should you be allowed to sack your MP in between elections?
In the meantime, Jac is promising yet more insights into the House of Gill.
For the latest turn in this saga, see Jac o' the North.
____________________
Under normal circumstances most of us would agree that sons and daughters should not be judged by the actions of their parents, but if someone is standing for election to public office and has some pretty major skeletons tucked away in the closet, just two courses of actions are open to them:
(1) Keep quiet and hope that nobody notices.
(2) Be honest and open from the start, and make sure that there is nothing nasty that can come out to embarrass either you or your party.
"This doesn't look very good"
Nathan Gill appears to have opted for the first course of action on a number of matters. Jac o' the North has already chronicled some of Gill's business dealings, including the bunkhouse for Filipino and other migrant labour; the fact that he claimed in his election literature not to be a career politician when his main job of work was as a paid adviser for a Ukip MEP; and the fact that he did not disclose his religious affiliations. As he admitted to the Western Mail, he realised that some of this did not look very good.
Now we know, thanks to a comment posted on this blog posted by Jac himself, that Gill's father spent time in jail for offences which Anonymous, commenting on the previous post, felt made him "a bit of a lad". Emlyn Hooson QC who defended Michael Gill at the trial described him as "a dirty old man".
Rather than leave the story hanging half-explained among the comments on a blogpost, here is a fuller account and some more on the tawdry world inhabited by Wales's newest MEP.
Michael Gill had been an active Mormon while the family still lived in Hull, but according to a former Mormon bishop interviewed at the time of the trial in Caernarfon in 1988, his membership ended some time after that because of "certain problems".
Having moved to Angelsey, Michael Gill set up shop as a homeopath, and part of the treatment he offered involved hypnosis using a strange black box with a flashing red light. Three women alleged that he took advantage of them while under hypnosis to perform sexual assaults. Gill pleaded guilty to two charges of sexual assault and third of persuading a woman to have sexual intercourse with him by telling her that it was a part of the treatment. Two further charges of rape and buggery were left on file, with prosecuting counsel telling the court that it would serve no useful purpose to try Gill for these other offences.
Gill was sentenced to two years in prison. The very lenient sentence caused surprise and anger at the time, and it would be unthinkable today. A couple of years ago, a charlatan living in the Carmarthenshire village of Cwmduad was jailed for seven years at the age of 77 for remarkably similar offences. In what seems to be a freak coincidence, the name of this sex pest and fraudster was Reginald Gill.
One of Michael Gill's "patients" told the press that she believed that there could be up to 15 victims, but that others had felt too afraid to come forward. Gill had boasted to one of the women that he had sex seven times a day.
All of this took place in the late 1980s when the son was in his teens.
Bunking up
Father and son subsequently went into business together in Burgill Ltd. Burgill described itself as a company involved in letting its own property. That turns out to have been a nice way of describing the bunkhouse for migrant care home workers.
Bearing in mind the nature of the father's earlier offences, it is disconcerting to see that he had no problem setting up and running a care home through a separate company called Pink Panther Resource Centre, subsequently renamed Gill Enterprises Yorkshire, which despite the name is registered to an address in Angelsey.
Rather oddly in view of the former Mormon bishop's claims that Michael Gill's membership of the church had ended in the 1980s, both the care home and the bunkhouse were located in the same road as the Mormon church in Hull.
Cutting red tape
Nathan Gill's parents gave an address in Menai Bridge on documents relating to Burgill Ltd, while Nathan Gill lives not far away in Llangefni. These two locations are important for the next chapter in the story which takes place in 2011 when Gill Senior would have been aged around 78.
On 22 October 2011 the Daily Post reported that North Wales Police and the Environment Agency Wales had raided two properties in Menai Bridge and Llangefni after an illegal stash of 5,000 tyres was discovered in the garden of a property in Pentraeth Road, Menai Bridge. The same address as on the Burgill documents, in fact.
It seems that the tyres were to be shipped to Ghana as part of a scam to avoid dumping charges, and the article tells us that an order was served to have the stash removed and disposed of legally.
Perhaps our MEP did not know what was happening in his parents' garden, although judging from the photograph accompanying the piece in the Daily Post anyone visiting the property would have wondered what the gigantic pile of tyres was doing there.
Parliamentary matters
In the news this morning is a complaint from Ukip that the party is being treated unfairly by the establishment and that it should have at least 23 more peers in the House of Lords.
Who knows, but perhaps we could yet see Lord Gill of Menai Bridge donning ermine robes and heading off for a new career in expense claiming.
Meanwhile Nathan Gill has been busy after his success in the European elections. No sooner had he been elected than he left Llangefni - not for Brussels or the European Parliament, where he does not intend to spend too much of his time anyway, but to campaign in the Newark by-election.
His Twitter account is strangely silent about the result in Newark and the recent press revelations about his background, but he did retweet this from BBC Wales:
MPs recall is expected to be part of today's Queen's Speech. Should you be allowed to sack your MP in between elections?
In the meantime, Jac is promising yet more insights into the House of Gill.
Wednesday, 4 June 2014
Jac and Gill Round Two
The brown stuff certainly hit the fan today as a result of Jac o' the North's relentless quest to get to the truth about Nathan Gill, our newest MEP for Wales.
The story was picked up first by Martin Shipton at the Western Mail and has since gone viral, with reports very close the Western Mail's article appearing in the Independent and the BBC.
It may just be that the Western Mail came to the story completely independently of Jac's explosive revelations, but somehow that does not seem likely. The truth of the matter is that the big boy papers should have credited Jac, but didn't.
What we now know is that Gill:
For all those who voted for Ukip on 22 May, you cannot say you were not warned.
The story was picked up first by Martin Shipton at the Western Mail and has since gone viral, with reports very close the Western Mail's article appearing in the Independent and the BBC.
It may just be that the Western Mail came to the story completely independently of Jac's explosive revelations, but somehow that does not seem likely. The truth of the matter is that the big boy papers should have credited Jac, but didn't.
What we now know is that Gill:
- Ran a care home in Hull and also supplied contract staff to other care homes in Hull. A part of the Gill business was running a hostel to house workers from the Phillippines and various eastern European countries in what sound like very cramped conditions, with six or more adults to a room sleeping in bunkbeds.
- The business went bust, and according to Gill this happened because one of the banks pulled the plug on a loan.
- It turns out that after selling up in Hull, Gill went to work for a Ukip MEP. Despite that, he portrayed himself as a fresh-faced newcomer to politics and an antidote to professional politicians.
- He also failed to mention to his voters that he is a Mormon, a sect which has views which are very much at odds with modern Welsh society.
For all those who voted for Ukip on 22 May, you cannot say you were not warned.
Fever pitch
It has been a while since Carmarthenshire County Council's press office featured on this blog, largely because it has been unusually quiet since the meltdown in February when the Ministry of Spin issued a series of vitriolic statements at the height of the unlawful payments scandals.
In the weeks and months that followed, its output has consisted for the most part of the dull but worthy stuff you would expect of a council press department.
Not all Welsh councils see the need for a press office issuing a daily batch of press releases. Ceredigion, for example, manages somehow to survive without a daily news service, but in Carmarthenshire the council considers it necessary to maintain a press and PR operation which employs more staff than all of the local newspapers combined.
In return for this investment we are served up a rough average of half a dozen unique stories a day, five days a week (no news happens at weekends), and the output can be divided into three main categories:
BBC Wales did its best to whip us up into a frenzy, as you may have noticed from the news bulletins, but the results were decidedly mixed. In some places the media circus passed by with hardly anyone noticing. In others school children and flag wavers were bussed in to boost numbers. Unsurprisingly things looked a little better whenever the baton relay reached town centres and mingled with the shoppers.
So it was in Llanelli where, according to the council's press release, thousands turned out in the sweltering heat, and Asda dished out free plastic cups of squash for the brownies and scouts.
Perhaps Llanelli was hit by a heatwave on 27 May, but elsewhere in this part of Wales we were enjoying a pleasant day with temperatures in the high teens.
Kevin Madge also got caught up in the excitement, as belly dancers, stilt walkers and the athletic shape of Go Compare's Wynne Evans swept by. Things may have been very quiet in Cilycwm and Capel Iwan, but apparently people from Katmandu, Kuala Lumpur and Calgary were tuning in in their millions:
"Carmarthenshire put on a tremendous show showcasing the county to a global audience", said Kev.
Perhaps the most startling piece of news to emerge from the event, if the council's press release is to be believed, is that Sam Evans, the 20-something star of Deal or No Deal and Big Brother, has become "Town Mayor of Llanelli". Let's hope someone has told Cllr Michael Burns who seems to be labouring under the illusion that he holds that office.
Why we need a council press office to tell us this when we have local newspapers with their own reporters out on the streets is another matter.
If that excitement was not enough, we now face a month of the World Cup in Brazil, and Carmarthenshire County Council has announced through its press office that Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has decreed that pubs in Wales can opt to extend their opening hours so that we can all rush down to the Llwyndafydd Inn or John y Gwas to watch Ingerland play footie.
As Daily Wales points out, Mrs May was responding to the wishes of 19 people from Wales who took part in an official consultation in March. They would like to wave the Cross of Saint George and down more Stella than is good for them as "our boys" go down to another glorious defeat.
Inger-lund, Inger-lund!
In the weeks and months that followed, its output has consisted for the most part of the dull but worthy stuff you would expect of a council press department.
Not all Welsh councils see the need for a press office issuing a daily batch of press releases. Ceredigion, for example, manages somehow to survive without a daily news service, but in Carmarthenshire the council considers it necessary to maintain a press and PR operation which employs more staff than all of the local newspapers combined.
In return for this investment we are served up a rough average of half a dozen unique stories a day, five days a week (no news happens at weekends), and the output can be divided into three main categories:
- Political propaganda (currently suspended, with councillors reviewing this aspect of the press office's work)
- Dog muck, fag ends, recycling and service announcements
- A bizarre mix of stuff about deaf parrots, huskies, hurdlers and sporting heroes.
BBC Wales did its best to whip us up into a frenzy, as you may have noticed from the news bulletins, but the results were decidedly mixed. In some places the media circus passed by with hardly anyone noticing. In others school children and flag wavers were bussed in to boost numbers. Unsurprisingly things looked a little better whenever the baton relay reached town centres and mingled with the shoppers.
So it was in Llanelli where, according to the council's press release, thousands turned out in the sweltering heat, and Asda dished out free plastic cups of squash for the brownies and scouts.
Perhaps Llanelli was hit by a heatwave on 27 May, but elsewhere in this part of Wales we were enjoying a pleasant day with temperatures in the high teens.
Kevin Madge also got caught up in the excitement, as belly dancers, stilt walkers and the athletic shape of Go Compare's Wynne Evans swept by. Things may have been very quiet in Cilycwm and Capel Iwan, but apparently people from Katmandu, Kuala Lumpur and Calgary were tuning in in their millions:
"Carmarthenshire put on a tremendous show showcasing the county to a global audience", said Kev.
Perhaps the most startling piece of news to emerge from the event, if the council's press release is to be believed, is that Sam Evans, the 20-something star of Deal or No Deal and Big Brother, has become "Town Mayor of Llanelli". Let's hope someone has told Cllr Michael Burns who seems to be labouring under the illusion that he holds that office.
 | ||
| Sam Evans, 23, in the Big Brother Chair |
Why we need a council press office to tell us this when we have local newspapers with their own reporters out on the streets is another matter.
If that excitement was not enough, we now face a month of the World Cup in Brazil, and Carmarthenshire County Council has announced through its press office that Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has decreed that pubs in Wales can opt to extend their opening hours so that we can all rush down to the Llwyndafydd Inn or John y Gwas to watch Ingerland play footie.
As Daily Wales points out, Mrs May was responding to the wishes of 19 people from Wales who took part in an official consultation in March. They would like to wave the Cross of Saint George and down more Stella than is good for them as "our boys" go down to another glorious defeat.
Inger-lund, Inger-lund!
Monday, 2 June 2014
Jac and Gill
Update 3 June
It seems that further and very serious allegations about our new Ukip MEP have reached Jac. Watch this space.
Updated update
Barely had the ink dried on that before Jac posted some startling new claims involving a mysterious fire at a church, running a hostel for Polish migrant workers packed in like sardines and interesting financial dealings. If there are any readers in Hull who remember any of this, there are at least two Welsh bloggers who would like to hear from you.
As it happens, Gaerwen (near Llangefni) and Newcastle Emlyn have the unusual distinction of being far-flung Mormon outposts in Wales.
Cue X Files theme music.
If you have not seen it, take a look at Jac o' the North's latest piece about Nathan Gill, the newly elected Ukip MEP for Wales and, in the eyes of those who voted Ukip on 22 May, the antidote to all those lying professional politicians on the make.
If the information which Jac has turned up is true, Nathan Gill has some serious questions to answer and some at least of the 202,000 people who voted for him may want their votes back.
A couple of weeks before the election Cneifiwr did a little googling to try to find out more about the Ukip candidate, and within a couple of minutes it became evident that his business history deserved a closer look. The problem with that, as Jac points out, is that digging deeper means that as a hard-up blogger you will have to fork out to buy reports from Companies House.
The reason for saying this is not sour grapes at Jac's scoop, but to show how easy it is to do a little background checking on someone in the public eye. So why did none of our mainstream media organisations bother?
The local press lacks the resources, and the Western Mail and Daily Post are focused on their respective regions rather than on Wales as a whole. The London press is just not interested, and so that leaves the BBC, which when it comes to elections is the default for anybody remotely interested in finding out about the issues, the parties and the candidates.
The BBC has received a torrent of complaints from the public about its coverage of the European elections - a record for any election, it seems. 1,190 people felt that the BBC had been biased towards Ukip, 149 felt it had been biased against Ukip, and 73 thought it had been biased against Labour (a party which produced two election broadcasts that did not mention Europe once).
As usual the BBC has rejected the criticism, trotting out the old argument that if you are being criticised by all sides, you have probably got the balance about right.
Let's hope the Corporation is not let off the hook so easily. Nigel Farage received blanket coverage and clocked up far more appearances on programmes such as Question Time than any other party leader. Other Ukip candidates got barely a look-in, probably to the intense relief of Ukip itself, and Nathan Gill got just a few, deeply unimpressive minutes of air time on BBC Wales.
The BBC has the resources, and could have done its homework on Nathan Gill before the campaign started as part of its obligations to inform and educate as well as entertain.
It is not just Nathan Gill who has questions to answer.
It seems that further and very serious allegations about our new Ukip MEP have reached Jac. Watch this space.
Updated update
Barely had the ink dried on that before Jac posted some startling new claims involving a mysterious fire at a church, running a hostel for Polish migrant workers packed in like sardines and interesting financial dealings. If there are any readers in Hull who remember any of this, there are at least two Welsh bloggers who would like to hear from you.
As it happens, Gaerwen (near Llangefni) and Newcastle Emlyn have the unusual distinction of being far-flung Mormon outposts in Wales.
Cue X Files theme music.
______________
If you have not seen it, take a look at Jac o' the North's latest piece about Nathan Gill, the newly elected Ukip MEP for Wales and, in the eyes of those who voted Ukip on 22 May, the antidote to all those lying professional politicians on the make.
If the information which Jac has turned up is true, Nathan Gill has some serious questions to answer and some at least of the 202,000 people who voted for him may want their votes back.
A couple of weeks before the election Cneifiwr did a little googling to try to find out more about the Ukip candidate, and within a couple of minutes it became evident that his business history deserved a closer look. The problem with that, as Jac points out, is that digging deeper means that as a hard-up blogger you will have to fork out to buy reports from Companies House.
The reason for saying this is not sour grapes at Jac's scoop, but to show how easy it is to do a little background checking on someone in the public eye. So why did none of our mainstream media organisations bother?
The local press lacks the resources, and the Western Mail and Daily Post are focused on their respective regions rather than on Wales as a whole. The London press is just not interested, and so that leaves the BBC, which when it comes to elections is the default for anybody remotely interested in finding out about the issues, the parties and the candidates.
The BBC has received a torrent of complaints from the public about its coverage of the European elections - a record for any election, it seems. 1,190 people felt that the BBC had been biased towards Ukip, 149 felt it had been biased against Ukip, and 73 thought it had been biased against Labour (a party which produced two election broadcasts that did not mention Europe once).
As usual the BBC has rejected the criticism, trotting out the old argument that if you are being criticised by all sides, you have probably got the balance about right.
Let's hope the Corporation is not let off the hook so easily. Nigel Farage received blanket coverage and clocked up far more appearances on programmes such as Question Time than any other party leader. Other Ukip candidates got barely a look-in, probably to the intense relief of Ukip itself, and Nathan Gill got just a few, deeply unimpressive minutes of air time on BBC Wales.
The BBC has the resources, and could have done its homework on Nathan Gill before the campaign started as part of its obligations to inform and educate as well as entertain.
It is not just Nathan Gill who has questions to answer.
Sunday, 1 June 2014
Remembering
Writing in yesterday's Independent (article not yet available online), Andreas Whittam Smith chronicled the way in which the political establishment has tried to hobble and frustrate the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war right from the word go, with Gordon Brown announcing that its proceedings would be held in private until a storm of protest forced him to back down. And that was only the beginning of the foot dragging.
The latest compromise agreement means that in all likelihood four years will have passed since the inquiry held its last public session before we get a redacted final report, quoting "gists" and carefully selected extracts from Blair's correspondence with George W Bush.
Elfyn Llwyd MP and Leanne Wood have called for the "unvarnished truth" to be published, and for the senior politicians involved to be held to account.
Adam Price and Elfyn Llwyd together tried to impeach Tony Blair. Here, as a reminder, is an article which Adam wrote in the Guardian back in 2004. It reads as true today as it did 10 years ago.
There is a long and noble tradition in Wales of opposition to militarism which is not confined to Plaid Cymru. Paul Flynn, Labour MP for Newport West, has also taken a very strong and consistent stand against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is not afraid to dish it out to the bigwigs in his own party. Here he is on top form laying into Peter Jay.
By coincidence, this year is of course the centenary of the start of World War One, and thousands of events will be held to commemorate Britain's part in the slaughter. In Carmarthenshire the enterprising owner of Morfa Bay Adventure (stag and hen parties catered for, coasteering and a mud assault course) has opened a World War One Trench Experience, aided by a hefty grant from Carmarthenshire County Council.
The Trench Experience attracts lots of school parties, apparently, although anxious parents can rest assured that it is nothing like the real thing. If it were, the Health and Safety Executive would have shut it down.
Elsewhere barely a week passes these days it seems without some new war memorial, arboretum or heritage centre opening to recall the sacrifice of British troops, and if that was not enough, parades of troops returning from tours of duty have become a common occurrence in our towns - a practice which had all but died out.
In 2006 the then Labour Government introduced Veterans Day. Jim Devine, the Scottish Labour MP who was subsequently jailed for fraud, enthusiastically called for it to be made a public holiday, and Gordon Brown (yes, him again) upgraded the event to Armed Forces Day when he became Prime Minister in 2009.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, most people if asked would probably have predicted that remembrance days, veterans parades and the rituals involving royals, bemedalled bishops and assorted generals in full fancy dress would gradually fade away, but the opposite has happened.
Commemorations now turn up in the most unexpected places. Switch on the telly to watch the Antiques Roadshow, and there's Fiona Bruce standing in front of the Menin Gate. Tune into the BBC's coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, and there are lingering and mournful shots of the Help for Heroes show garden. It won't be long before we see the cast of Eastenders belting out "Pack up your troubles" down the Queen Vic.
There is no doubt that people who take part in these events do so with good intentions, whether it's a fund raising pub barbecue for Help for Heroes, another march-past, or getting young school children to witness the signing of the Armed Forces Covenant in Llanelli, but invariably these things are wrapped up in the Union Jack and turned into drum-beating jingoism.
How much of the money raised by the scores of military charities goes to help the people on the receiving end of British "liberal interventionism", such as the family of Baha Mousa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist murdered by a "large number" of Britishheroes soldiers? War is never black and white.
With all the commemoration, tin rattling and flag waving going on, it's little wonder that we forget to remember the most important lessons.
In Alan Bennett's The History Boys a young teacher, Irwin, sums it up as he stands in front of a war memorial:
"The truth was, in 1914, Germany doesn't want war. Yeah, there's an arms race, but it's Britain who's leading it. So, why does no one admit this?
[Points to the names on the memorial]
"That's why. The dead. The body count. We don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault 'cause so many of our people died. And all the mourning's veiled the truth. It's not "lest we forget," it's "lest we remember." That's what all this is about — the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes' silence. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it."
The latest compromise agreement means that in all likelihood four years will have passed since the inquiry held its last public session before we get a redacted final report, quoting "gists" and carefully selected extracts from Blair's correspondence with George W Bush.
Elfyn Llwyd MP and Leanne Wood have called for the "unvarnished truth" to be published, and for the senior politicians involved to be held to account.
Adam Price and Elfyn Llwyd together tried to impeach Tony Blair. Here, as a reminder, is an article which Adam wrote in the Guardian back in 2004. It reads as true today as it did 10 years ago.
There is a long and noble tradition in Wales of opposition to militarism which is not confined to Plaid Cymru. Paul Flynn, Labour MP for Newport West, has also taken a very strong and consistent stand against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is not afraid to dish it out to the bigwigs in his own party. Here he is on top form laying into Peter Jay.
By coincidence, this year is of course the centenary of the start of World War One, and thousands of events will be held to commemorate Britain's part in the slaughter. In Carmarthenshire the enterprising owner of Morfa Bay Adventure (stag and hen parties catered for, coasteering and a mud assault course) has opened a World War One Trench Experience, aided by a hefty grant from Carmarthenshire County Council.
The Trench Experience attracts lots of school parties, apparently, although anxious parents can rest assured that it is nothing like the real thing. If it were, the Health and Safety Executive would have shut it down.
Elsewhere barely a week passes these days it seems without some new war memorial, arboretum or heritage centre opening to recall the sacrifice of British troops, and if that was not enough, parades of troops returning from tours of duty have become a common occurrence in our towns - a practice which had all but died out.
In 2006 the then Labour Government introduced Veterans Day. Jim Devine, the Scottish Labour MP who was subsequently jailed for fraud, enthusiastically called for it to be made a public holiday, and Gordon Brown (yes, him again) upgraded the event to Armed Forces Day when he became Prime Minister in 2009.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, most people if asked would probably have predicted that remembrance days, veterans parades and the rituals involving royals, bemedalled bishops and assorted generals in full fancy dress would gradually fade away, but the opposite has happened.
Commemorations now turn up in the most unexpected places. Switch on the telly to watch the Antiques Roadshow, and there's Fiona Bruce standing in front of the Menin Gate. Tune into the BBC's coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, and there are lingering and mournful shots of the Help for Heroes show garden. It won't be long before we see the cast of Eastenders belting out "Pack up your troubles" down the Queen Vic.
There is no doubt that people who take part in these events do so with good intentions, whether it's a fund raising pub barbecue for Help for Heroes, another march-past, or getting young school children to witness the signing of the Armed Forces Covenant in Llanelli, but invariably these things are wrapped up in the Union Jack and turned into drum-beating jingoism.
How much of the money raised by the scores of military charities goes to help the people on the receiving end of British "liberal interventionism", such as the family of Baha Mousa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist murdered by a "large number" of British
With all the commemoration, tin rattling and flag waving going on, it's little wonder that we forget to remember the most important lessons.
In Alan Bennett's The History Boys a young teacher, Irwin, sums it up as he stands in front of a war memorial:
"The truth was, in 1914, Germany doesn't want war. Yeah, there's an arms race, but it's Britain who's leading it. So, why does no one admit this?
[Points to the names on the memorial]
"That's why. The dead. The body count. We don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault 'cause so many of our people died. And all the mourning's veiled the truth. It's not "lest we forget," it's "lest we remember." That's what all this is about — the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes' silence. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it."
Thursday, 29 May 2014
Rubbish news
Anyone who drives along the A48 between Carmarthen and Cross Hands will be aware of a certain fragrance in the air as you pass Nantycaws. As locals know, it isn't cheese but the pong coming from the landfill and waste management site operated by CWM Environmental, a wholly owned subsidiary of Carmarthenshire County Council.
The waste produced by households, businesses, hospitals and other public bodies has to go somewhere, and in Carmarthenshire most of it ends up at Nantycaws.
Don't tell Ukip, but the drive to recycle more and send less to landfill is a direct consequence of EU policy, with those meddling Brussels bureaucrats forcing member states to tackle the problem by setting binding targets under a directive.
The Landfill Directive set targets to reduce biodegradable waste going to landfill to 50% of 1995 levels by 2009 and 35% by 2016.
The UK was a relative late developer when it came to recycling, and some readers may remember jokes about Germans washing their yoghurt pots. At any rate, the UK negotiated softer targets, reducing landfill to 50% of 1995 levels by 2013 and 35% by 2020.
Devolution has also had an impact, with the Welsh Government setting rather more ambitious targets for Wales than England. The target Welsh councils are now working towards is to hit 70% in the next couple of years.
The main weapon in the armoury is landfill tax, a levy on every tonne of waste going to landfill, with the money going to national treasuries rather than Brussels. To encourage more recycling, landfill tax rates have been rising steadily year on year. In 1996 the standard rate was £7 per tonne; today it is £80. Moreover, councils which fail to meet their targets for landfill face fines of £200 per tonne of waste dumped to landfill in excess of their allocation.
So far, it seems, Welsh councils have managed to come in below their allocations, with Carmarthenshire among those which have used only around 70% of their allowance. Wrexham and Pembrokeshire are among those which have been hovering perilously close to the limit.
In a recent post (Rubbish Statistics), this blog looked at a report in Resource magazine dealing with recycling rates. Carmarthenshire was one of the best performers in the UK, although statistics being statistics, other Welsh local authorities could reasonably have made the same claim.
Carmarthenshire nevertheless performed very well for the period 2012/13, and the survey also showed that while recycling rates have been improving in Wales, many English authorities have been going backwards.
As it happens, the Welsh Local Government Association produces very detailed reports looking at waste management in Wales, with a particular emphasis on cost and efficiency. The most recent one available on the WLGA's website (here) covers the period 2011/12 and runs to 55 pages. It uses many different measures to compare performance, and so inevitably there is something there which would enable just about any of the 22 Welsh local authorities to claim that they are best in one category or another, unless you are Wrexham Borough Council.
Carmarthenshire performs well on most of the measures, and very well on some, but perhaps the most interesting thing to emerge from the report is the huge variance in cost and performance across Wales. For example, the cost of recycling a tonne of dry materials was eight times higher in rural Powys than it was in the cheapest authority, and Denbighshire (a mix of rural and urban areas) showed a very impressive performance in terms of cost versus volumes and percentage of dry materials recycled.
If the tax has been the stick driving landfill down, the carrot has been an arrangement which enables landfill operators to use up to 6% of the tax to award grants to community projects.
Under the scheme grants can be awarded to a wide range of different activities, including renovating churches and other places of worship, projects aimed at restoring and reclaiming land, conservation schemes and "the provision, maintenance and improvement of a public park or other public amenity".
In recent years grants administered under the Landfill Communities scheme by CWM in Carmarthenshire have been running at around £250,000 per year. Grants range from a few thousand pounds (e.g. £3,500 for improvements to Llanddarog Village Hall) to £150,000 (the National Botanic Gardens at Llanarthne). Perhaps the most controversial grant (£50,000) went to Towy Community Church's bowling alley in Johnstown just outside Carmarthen.
CWM is adamant that there is no political interference in its grant awards.
£1.8 million has been paid out since 2006, and during that time recycling rates have improved year on year, more than doubling over the period. Conversely, volumes going to landfill have declined by more than 50%.
From next month CWM will begin processing residual waste and sending the remainder for treatment and conversion into fuel. One consequence of this will be the demise of the community landfill scheme in Carmarthenshire and an end to the grants. If little or nothing is going to landfill, there will be no landfill tax to fund the grants.
From around the middle of June, then, CWM will start deploying new plant to separate organic waste (mainly food residues) from plastic, metal, card and uncontaminated paper. What is left will be baled, wrapped and sent on as waste derived fuel, commonly known in the industry as WRF.
The market for this material is mainland Europe where it is used for heat and power systems. The UK market is still in its infancy, but capacity is rising. The Viridor plant in Cardiff will be operational by late summer, although it is subject to planning conditions which look unreasonable if you live outside south-east Wales. Input material is restricted to the ‘Prosiect Gwyrdd’ local authorities in the Cardiff area, but capacity is more than the combined amount of waste in the region.
The upshot of this is that waste in the form of WRF from the rest of south and south west Wales will be sent hundreds of miles east, bypassing Cardiff, adding to our carbon footprint and with local council taxpayers paying to get rid of what is basically a resource.
Controversially there are plans for a new privately operated (energy from waste) EFW plant at the New Lodge Farm landfill site in Cwmgwili.
The plant is the brainchild of a company called Clean Power Properties, would separate organic waste from recyclable plastics, metals etc., and treat it using anaerobic digestion and pyrolysis to create gases which would be combusted to produce heat and power. There would also be a solar farm on the site to feed into the National Grid.
The company has embarked on a major PR drive, and has set up a website specifically to sell the virtues of the project. Hooking up a plant of this size to the National Grid would not come cheap, but perhaps the biggest question hanging over the project is what would happen to the heat, not least because the site is miles from the nearest centres of population, Ammanford being the nearest.
Whatever happens, it seems that the pong at Nantycaws will soon be a thing of the past.
Or as the young poet Eurig Salisbury had it:
A dyna pam ei bod hi'n haws
i fi ddod o hyd i Nant y Caws.
The waste produced by households, businesses, hospitals and other public bodies has to go somewhere, and in Carmarthenshire most of it ends up at Nantycaws.
Don't tell Ukip, but the drive to recycle more and send less to landfill is a direct consequence of EU policy, with those meddling Brussels bureaucrats forcing member states to tackle the problem by setting binding targets under a directive.
The Landfill Directive set targets to reduce biodegradable waste going to landfill to 50% of 1995 levels by 2009 and 35% by 2016.
The UK was a relative late developer when it came to recycling, and some readers may remember jokes about Germans washing their yoghurt pots. At any rate, the UK negotiated softer targets, reducing landfill to 50% of 1995 levels by 2013 and 35% by 2020.
Devolution has also had an impact, with the Welsh Government setting rather more ambitious targets for Wales than England. The target Welsh councils are now working towards is to hit 70% in the next couple of years.
The main weapon in the armoury is landfill tax, a levy on every tonne of waste going to landfill, with the money going to national treasuries rather than Brussels. To encourage more recycling, landfill tax rates have been rising steadily year on year. In 1996 the standard rate was £7 per tonne; today it is £80. Moreover, councils which fail to meet their targets for landfill face fines of £200 per tonne of waste dumped to landfill in excess of their allocation.
So far, it seems, Welsh councils have managed to come in below their allocations, with Carmarthenshire among those which have used only around 70% of their allowance. Wrexham and Pembrokeshire are among those which have been hovering perilously close to the limit.
In a recent post (Rubbish Statistics), this blog looked at a report in Resource magazine dealing with recycling rates. Carmarthenshire was one of the best performers in the UK, although statistics being statistics, other Welsh local authorities could reasonably have made the same claim.
Carmarthenshire nevertheless performed very well for the period 2012/13, and the survey also showed that while recycling rates have been improving in Wales, many English authorities have been going backwards.
As it happens, the Welsh Local Government Association produces very detailed reports looking at waste management in Wales, with a particular emphasis on cost and efficiency. The most recent one available on the WLGA's website (here) covers the period 2011/12 and runs to 55 pages. It uses many different measures to compare performance, and so inevitably there is something there which would enable just about any of the 22 Welsh local authorities to claim that they are best in one category or another, unless you are Wrexham Borough Council.
Carmarthenshire performs well on most of the measures, and very well on some, but perhaps the most interesting thing to emerge from the report is the huge variance in cost and performance across Wales. For example, the cost of recycling a tonne of dry materials was eight times higher in rural Powys than it was in the cheapest authority, and Denbighshire (a mix of rural and urban areas) showed a very impressive performance in terms of cost versus volumes and percentage of dry materials recycled.
If the tax has been the stick driving landfill down, the carrot has been an arrangement which enables landfill operators to use up to 6% of the tax to award grants to community projects.
Under the scheme grants can be awarded to a wide range of different activities, including renovating churches and other places of worship, projects aimed at restoring and reclaiming land, conservation schemes and "the provision, maintenance and improvement of a public park or other public amenity".
In recent years grants administered under the Landfill Communities scheme by CWM in Carmarthenshire have been running at around £250,000 per year. Grants range from a few thousand pounds (e.g. £3,500 for improvements to Llanddarog Village Hall) to £150,000 (the National Botanic Gardens at Llanarthne). Perhaps the most controversial grant (£50,000) went to Towy Community Church's bowling alley in Johnstown just outside Carmarthen.
CWM is adamant that there is no political interference in its grant awards.
£1.8 million has been paid out since 2006, and during that time recycling rates have improved year on year, more than doubling over the period. Conversely, volumes going to landfill have declined by more than 50%.
From next month CWM will begin processing residual waste and sending the remainder for treatment and conversion into fuel. One consequence of this will be the demise of the community landfill scheme in Carmarthenshire and an end to the grants. If little or nothing is going to landfill, there will be no landfill tax to fund the grants.
From around the middle of June, then, CWM will start deploying new plant to separate organic waste (mainly food residues) from plastic, metal, card and uncontaminated paper. What is left will be baled, wrapped and sent on as waste derived fuel, commonly known in the industry as WRF.
The market for this material is mainland Europe where it is used for heat and power systems. The UK market is still in its infancy, but capacity is rising. The Viridor plant in Cardiff will be operational by late summer, although it is subject to planning conditions which look unreasonable if you live outside south-east Wales. Input material is restricted to the ‘Prosiect Gwyrdd’ local authorities in the Cardiff area, but capacity is more than the combined amount of waste in the region.
The upshot of this is that waste in the form of WRF from the rest of south and south west Wales will be sent hundreds of miles east, bypassing Cardiff, adding to our carbon footprint and with local council taxpayers paying to get rid of what is basically a resource.
Controversially there are plans for a new privately operated (energy from waste) EFW plant at the New Lodge Farm landfill site in Cwmgwili.
The plant is the brainchild of a company called Clean Power Properties, would separate organic waste from recyclable plastics, metals etc., and treat it using anaerobic digestion and pyrolysis to create gases which would be combusted to produce heat and power. There would also be a solar farm on the site to feed into the National Grid.
The company has embarked on a major PR drive, and has set up a website specifically to sell the virtues of the project. Hooking up a plant of this size to the National Grid would not come cheap, but perhaps the biggest question hanging over the project is what would happen to the heat, not least because the site is miles from the nearest centres of population, Ammanford being the nearest.
Whatever happens, it seems that the pong at Nantycaws will soon be a thing of the past.
Or as the young poet Eurig Salisbury had it:
A dyna pam ei bod hi'n haws
i fi ddod o hyd i Nant y Caws.
Wednesday, 28 May 2014
Ukip - a lesson from history
In retrospect the European elections in 2014 were a turning point. Voters in the UK, as it was still known, had taken them no more seriously than the Eurovision Song Contest, and Ukip under its populist leader Nigel Farage performed rather better than expected. Nevertheless the most popular daily newspaper of the time, Rupert Murdoch's Sun, ran with a story about a celebrity love triangle on its front page the day after the results were declared.
The more serious newspapers reacted with alarm. The Guardian reported that Farage's agent had previously been an organiser for the now defunct fascist National Front, and that Alan Sked, the founder of Ukip, was adamant that Farage had told him he was not worried about the n-word vote because "the nig-nogs will never vote for us".
Despite this nobody paid much attention, and the Labour Party continued to ignore Ukip and concentrate its fire on what was left of the Liberal Democrats.
The next shock came in September 2014 when Scotland voted to become independent, with fears about what was happening south of the border fuelling a much stronger Yes vote than expected.
The Labour Party under its leader Ed Milliband had been struggling to make headway even before the Scottish vote, but it now faced climbing an electoral mountain.
Two elections
The May 2015 general election was much closer than many had expected. The Liberal Democrats were reduced to a rump of just 6 seats and were now back to where they had been in the 1950s, but by splitting the Conservative vote, Ukip emerged holding the balance of power with a contingent of 38 MPs.
The Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, was forced to resign after a revolt by hardline Eurosceptic MPs. Nigel Farage refused to go into coalition with the new minority Conservative administration headed by Douglas Carswell.
Ed Milliband resigned the party leadership immediately after the election and was succeeded by Ed Balls, who set out to win back working class Labour votes by taking a much tougher line on immigration and siding with the anti-European lobby.
Prime Minister Carswell promised an in-out referendum for May 2016, but before the campaign could get underway, Farage and his Ukip MPs joined Labour in a vote of no confidence, and a general election was called for March 2016.
Leading Tory Eurosceptics successfully negotiated a coupon arrangement with Ukip, and the result was a landslide for the right. Ukip emerged with 20 seats more than the Tories, and Labour was reduced to just 126.
Nigel Farage entered 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister on 18 March 2016, officially at the head of a coalition with the Conservatives, and announced that the new government was immediately suspending membership of the EU, pending a snap referendum to be held a month later.
In a televised address as Prime Minister a week later, Farage announced that the country would be charting an exciting new course. Unity and a common sense of purpose would be vital, and for that reason he would be seeking approval of a new Defence of the Realm and Emergency Powers Act (DOREPA) as part of the referendum on the EU.
He was also delighted to announce the formation of a new government of national unity. Ed Balls took the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer, while the new Tory leader, Boris Johnson, became Foreign Secretary. In a popular move Jeremy Clarkson became Minister for the Environment. The Sun was ecstatic.
Ed Balls crossed the floor with 30 MPs, leaving the opposition benches populated by rump Labour, a handful of Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru.
DOREPA and the Referendum
Parliament set about an ambitious legislative programme even before the referendum. The Human Rights Act was repealed; the Welsh Assembly was abolished and Health and Safety legislation was scrapped. A new 34% flat rate of income tax and national insurance was introduced. This was highly popular with higher rate tax payers, but meant that several million low-paid workers and pensioners found themselves paying tax on very low incomes.
The financial markets had been watching nervously, and the decision by voters to back immediate withdrawal from the EU caused a serious run on the pound and very heavy falls on the stock market.
The Bank of England was put under the control of Chancellor Balls who introduced exchange controls and a base rate of 7%. Inflation began to creep up.
As 2016 wore on the pound continued to drop, and Balls responded by raising interest rates until base rate reached 15%.
There was a sharp rise in mortgage repossessions, and in a popular move Farage invoked DOREPA for the first time to order the banks to convert mortgages into equity instead of repossession, with home owners paying rent instead of their mortgages.
This had unexpected consequences: the government was now finding it very hard to borrow on the international capital markets, and the credit ratings of the banks were revised sharply down to junk status.
Chancellor Balls responded by announcing that government spending would be slashed. Benefit payments were cut by 50% and plans for health insurance schemes were announced to replace the NHS. Crapita and other private sector service providers were awarded franchises to run hospitals and GP surgeries.
A long, hot summer
Investment by overseas companies dried up, and some major players announced that market conditions in rump UK and the imposition of tariffs by the EU were forcing them to relocate to mainland Europe, Ireland and Scotland.
Unemployment rose sharply, and by the end of 2016 it was nearly 3 million. Large numbers of British expats began to return from Europe because they could no longer get work or residence permits. Fortunately this influx was matched by an exodus of EU citizens, including many Scottish and Irish families.
Inflation was reported to be running at 30%, and nobody paid attention to Bank of England base rates any more. Foreign holidays were out of reach for most people, and even the well-off were finding it difficult thanks to exchange controls and a worthless pound.
Riots broke out in many English cities, and there was widespread looting and scores of deaths.
The Prime Minister invoked DOREPA again to impose drastic restrictions on news reporting in an attempt to prevent "copy cat" riots, or so the government said.
The board of the BBC was dismissed, and government commissioners sent in to ensure "balanced coverage" of news and current affairs. Newspapers were subjected to similar controls.
Vigilante groups appeared on the streets, armed and equipped with what appeared to be police and army-issue weapons and equipment. Pitched battles took place, and eye witnesses said they had seen many bodies.
Terrorism
The Prime Minister went on television to announce that terrorist elements were at work, and he blamed foreign extremists for the unrest. With immediate effect the government would use powers conferred by DOREPA to intern those responsible, partly for their own protection, prior to deporting them "back to where they came from".
Thousands of people were rounded up, and snatch squads began operating across the country to remove "terrorist and foreign elements" and hold them in camps run by Krapita, G-four-S and other private sector companies. When foreign journalists claimed that conditions in the camps were terrible, the Prime Minister commented that these were not holidays camps.
Capital punishment was reintroduced.
The collapse of the pound, soaring inflation and a desperate shortage of foreign exchange meant that shops ran out of many basic foodstuffs and commodities. If you wanted coffee or bananas the only way to get them was on the now thriving black market, where dealers would accept only Euros.
In fact, the Euro had become the de facto currency of rump UK, and if you wanted a plumber or electrician, you could expect to have to pay in cash, in Euros.
There were severe fuel shortages, and hundreds of thousands of public sector workers were laid off because of the desperate state of public finances. The government's attempts to pay the bills by printing money had only served to boost inflation further.
Exodus
By 2018 Britain had been expelled from the Commonwealth and had its membership of a host of other international organisations suspended. The Commonwealth's decision was mocked in a memorable party political broadcast by the Rt Hon Jeremy Clarkson.
On a begging trip to the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, stunned the media when he announced that he would be seeking asylum.
Despite the government's best efforts to control the media, including bans on Facebook and Twitter, satellite TV and the internet meant that uncensored news was freely circulating.
Those suspected of spreading "false and malicious" rumours were likely to be picked up by the paramilitary League of St George and interned "for their own safety".
A combination of the government's new Repatriation Grant Scheme, open attacks on foreign-looking or sounding people in the streets (including a Welsh family from Caernarfon on a day trip to Birmingham), and the threat of internment resulted in a dramatic exodus from the country.
Nigel Farage went on television to announce that his government had solved the housing crisis, and that henceforth Parliament would meet on just one day a year to approve decrees issued under DOREPA. This would stop any further abuse of MPs' expenses, Farage declared.
On 30 January 2019 officially backed unionist paramilitaries mowed down hundreds of people in Belfast calling for reunification with the Republic.
The Sun, Daily Mail and Times marked the occasion with special souvenir editions to celebrate the birth of a second son to Wills and Kate.
The general election scheduled for March 2021 was cancelled on security grounds.
Footnote
This post has attracted several responses from people who claim that Plaid Cymru is xenophobic - some of them most likely from Labour's black propaganda department. So here for the record is what Leanne Wood has said about the party's principles:
The more serious newspapers reacted with alarm. The Guardian reported that Farage's agent had previously been an organiser for the now defunct fascist National Front, and that Alan Sked, the founder of Ukip, was adamant that Farage had told him he was not worried about the n-word vote because "the nig-nogs will never vote for us".
Despite this nobody paid much attention, and the Labour Party continued to ignore Ukip and concentrate its fire on what was left of the Liberal Democrats.
The next shock came in September 2014 when Scotland voted to become independent, with fears about what was happening south of the border fuelling a much stronger Yes vote than expected.
The Labour Party under its leader Ed Milliband had been struggling to make headway even before the Scottish vote, but it now faced climbing an electoral mountain.
Two elections
The May 2015 general election was much closer than many had expected. The Liberal Democrats were reduced to a rump of just 6 seats and were now back to where they had been in the 1950s, but by splitting the Conservative vote, Ukip emerged holding the balance of power with a contingent of 38 MPs.
The Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, was forced to resign after a revolt by hardline Eurosceptic MPs. Nigel Farage refused to go into coalition with the new minority Conservative administration headed by Douglas Carswell.
Ed Milliband resigned the party leadership immediately after the election and was succeeded by Ed Balls, who set out to win back working class Labour votes by taking a much tougher line on immigration and siding with the anti-European lobby.
Prime Minister Carswell promised an in-out referendum for May 2016, but before the campaign could get underway, Farage and his Ukip MPs joined Labour in a vote of no confidence, and a general election was called for March 2016.
Leading Tory Eurosceptics successfully negotiated a coupon arrangement with Ukip, and the result was a landslide for the right. Ukip emerged with 20 seats more than the Tories, and Labour was reduced to just 126.
Nigel Farage entered 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister on 18 March 2016, officially at the head of a coalition with the Conservatives, and announced that the new government was immediately suspending membership of the EU, pending a snap referendum to be held a month later.
In a televised address as Prime Minister a week later, Farage announced that the country would be charting an exciting new course. Unity and a common sense of purpose would be vital, and for that reason he would be seeking approval of a new Defence of the Realm and Emergency Powers Act (DOREPA) as part of the referendum on the EU.
He was also delighted to announce the formation of a new government of national unity. Ed Balls took the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer, while the new Tory leader, Boris Johnson, became Foreign Secretary. In a popular move Jeremy Clarkson became Minister for the Environment. The Sun was ecstatic.
Ed Balls crossed the floor with 30 MPs, leaving the opposition benches populated by rump Labour, a handful of Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru.
DOREPA and the Referendum
Parliament set about an ambitious legislative programme even before the referendum. The Human Rights Act was repealed; the Welsh Assembly was abolished and Health and Safety legislation was scrapped. A new 34% flat rate of income tax and national insurance was introduced. This was highly popular with higher rate tax payers, but meant that several million low-paid workers and pensioners found themselves paying tax on very low incomes.
The financial markets had been watching nervously, and the decision by voters to back immediate withdrawal from the EU caused a serious run on the pound and very heavy falls on the stock market.
The Bank of England was put under the control of Chancellor Balls who introduced exchange controls and a base rate of 7%. Inflation began to creep up.
As 2016 wore on the pound continued to drop, and Balls responded by raising interest rates until base rate reached 15%.
There was a sharp rise in mortgage repossessions, and in a popular move Farage invoked DOREPA for the first time to order the banks to convert mortgages into equity instead of repossession, with home owners paying rent instead of their mortgages.
This had unexpected consequences: the government was now finding it very hard to borrow on the international capital markets, and the credit ratings of the banks were revised sharply down to junk status.
Chancellor Balls responded by announcing that government spending would be slashed. Benefit payments were cut by 50% and plans for health insurance schemes were announced to replace the NHS. Crapita and other private sector service providers were awarded franchises to run hospitals and GP surgeries.
A long, hot summer
Investment by overseas companies dried up, and some major players announced that market conditions in rump UK and the imposition of tariffs by the EU were forcing them to relocate to mainland Europe, Ireland and Scotland.
Unemployment rose sharply, and by the end of 2016 it was nearly 3 million. Large numbers of British expats began to return from Europe because they could no longer get work or residence permits. Fortunately this influx was matched by an exodus of EU citizens, including many Scottish and Irish families.
Inflation was reported to be running at 30%, and nobody paid attention to Bank of England base rates any more. Foreign holidays were out of reach for most people, and even the well-off were finding it difficult thanks to exchange controls and a worthless pound.
Riots broke out in many English cities, and there was widespread looting and scores of deaths.
The Prime Minister invoked DOREPA again to impose drastic restrictions on news reporting in an attempt to prevent "copy cat" riots, or so the government said.
The board of the BBC was dismissed, and government commissioners sent in to ensure "balanced coverage" of news and current affairs. Newspapers were subjected to similar controls.
Vigilante groups appeared on the streets, armed and equipped with what appeared to be police and army-issue weapons and equipment. Pitched battles took place, and eye witnesses said they had seen many bodies.
Terrorism
The Prime Minister went on television to announce that terrorist elements were at work, and he blamed foreign extremists for the unrest. With immediate effect the government would use powers conferred by DOREPA to intern those responsible, partly for their own protection, prior to deporting them "back to where they came from".
Thousands of people were rounded up, and snatch squads began operating across the country to remove "terrorist and foreign elements" and hold them in camps run by Krapita, G-four-S and other private sector companies. When foreign journalists claimed that conditions in the camps were terrible, the Prime Minister commented that these were not holidays camps.
Capital punishment was reintroduced.
The collapse of the pound, soaring inflation and a desperate shortage of foreign exchange meant that shops ran out of many basic foodstuffs and commodities. If you wanted coffee or bananas the only way to get them was on the now thriving black market, where dealers would accept only Euros.
In fact, the Euro had become the de facto currency of rump UK, and if you wanted a plumber or electrician, you could expect to have to pay in cash, in Euros.
There were severe fuel shortages, and hundreds of thousands of public sector workers were laid off because of the desperate state of public finances. The government's attempts to pay the bills by printing money had only served to boost inflation further.
Exodus
By 2018 Britain had been expelled from the Commonwealth and had its membership of a host of other international organisations suspended. The Commonwealth's decision was mocked in a memorable party political broadcast by the Rt Hon Jeremy Clarkson.
On a begging trip to the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, stunned the media when he announced that he would be seeking asylum.
Despite the government's best efforts to control the media, including bans on Facebook and Twitter, satellite TV and the internet meant that uncensored news was freely circulating.
Those suspected of spreading "false and malicious" rumours were likely to be picked up by the paramilitary League of St George and interned "for their own safety".
A combination of the government's new Repatriation Grant Scheme, open attacks on foreign-looking or sounding people in the streets (including a Welsh family from Caernarfon on a day trip to Birmingham), and the threat of internment resulted in a dramatic exodus from the country.
Nigel Farage went on television to announce that his government had solved the housing crisis, and that henceforth Parliament would meet on just one day a year to approve decrees issued under DOREPA. This would stop any further abuse of MPs' expenses, Farage declared.
On 30 January 2019 officially backed unionist paramilitaries mowed down hundreds of people in Belfast calling for reunification with the Republic.
The Sun, Daily Mail and Times marked the occasion with special souvenir editions to celebrate the birth of a second son to Wills and Kate.
The general election scheduled for March 2021 was cancelled on security grounds.
Footnote
This post has attracted several responses from people who claim that Plaid Cymru is xenophobic - some of them most likely from Labour's black propaganda department. So here for the record is what Leanne Wood has said about the party's principles:
Tuesday, 27 May 2014
More number crunching
As mentioned last week, representatives of the political parties get to scrutinise the process of verifying votes ahead of the official count, and in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr Plaid sampled 924 ballots from boxes in 13 wards from across the constituency. On that sample, Plaid won every box, and some very comfortably indeed.
One of the exceptions in the constituency was Llandovery where Ukip is believed to have topped the poll, with Plaid second and Labour third (this is a correction to the previous post which had Plaid winning in every ward).
Based on this sampling, the returns for the constituency come out at:
Plaid: 42.6%
UKIP: 28.4%
Labour: 13.2%
Tory: 8%
The official results are for the county as a whole, and figures are not published for the constituencies contained within them, but compared with the European election in 2009 the sample shows that Plaid Cymru was up 4%, Labour down 2% and the Tories saw their vote halved to 8%. Ukip put on 10%.
Unconfirmed as yet are the turnout figures for the individual wards, but overall it is believed that turnout in Llanelli was significantly lower than in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr.
Monday, 26 May 2014
The morning after
The results are in, and it was a pretty disastrous night for everyone in Wales except Ukip. What good news there was is that Plaid held onto its seat in the European Parliament. That was no mean achievement considering that Labour was always going to bounce back from its disastrous performance in 2009 when Gordon Brown was still entrenched in No. 10 and that Ukip had the wind in its sails.
As things turned out, Labour's bounce was more of the dead cat variety, and in Wales the party failed to pick up the second seat it had been very confident of taking.
In Carmarthenshire Plaid Cymru topped the poll, with Labour falling back into third place:
Plaid 15,281
UKIP 12,495
Lab 11,793
Tories 6,686
It is worth remembering that these votes were for Carmarthenshire as a whole, which includes the whole of the constituency of Carmarthen East and Dinefwr and part of Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire.
In Carmarthen East and Dinefwr Plaid won in every single ward.
How the parties react as they lick their wounds over the next few days and weeks remains to be seen, but Owen Smith MP, Labour's shadow Secretary of State for Wales in Westminster, was happily tweeting last night, oblivious of the large elephant standing next to him in the room and tapping him on the shoulder:
As things turned out, Labour's bounce was more of the dead cat variety, and in Wales the party failed to pick up the second seat it had been very confident of taking.
In Carmarthenshire Plaid Cymru topped the poll, with Labour falling back into third place:
Plaid 15,281
UKIP 12,495
Lab 11,793
Tories 6,686
It is worth remembering that these votes were for Carmarthenshire as a whole, which includes the whole of the constituency of Carmarthen East and Dinefwr and part of Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire.
In Carmarthen East and Dinefwr Plaid won in every single ward.
How the parties react as they lick their wounds over the next few days and weeks remains to be seen, but Owen Smith MP, Labour's shadow Secretary of State for Wales in Westminster, was happily tweeting last night, oblivious of the large elephant standing next to him in the room and tapping him on the shoulder:
Saturday, 24 May 2014
Cariad at Iaith a'r siaradwyr colledig
Byddai'n hawdd gwneud hwyl ar ben y 'selebs' fydd yn dysgu Cymraeg dros wythnos o Cariad at Iaith yn Nant Gwrtheyrn eleni: dyn canol oed oedd yn canu mewn grŵp anghofiedig yn y 90au, actores sy'n byw yn Llundain, cyn-chwaraewr pêl-droed, seren cyfres realiti ar Channel 5, tri arall a Jenna pwy?
Cafodd pob un ohonyn nhw eu haddysgu yng Nghymru, a'r rhan fwyaf yn weddol ddiweddar. Mae'r ffaith eu bod nhw'n cael eu trin fel dechreuwyr pur yn tystio i fethiant llwyr Cymraeg ail iaith fel pwnc yn ein system addysg, on'd yw hi?
Ond peidiwch â fy nghamddeall - mae gan y rhaglen y bwriadau gorau. Dim ond gofyn ydw i pa mor effeithiol yw hi.
Nod y rhaglen yw ysbrydoli eraill i ddysgu'r iaith, mae'n debyg. Dyna'r meddylfryd y tu ôl i ddewis carfan sy'n cynnwys pobl (weddol) enwog ac ifanc o ardaloedd trefol de Cymru. Y ddemograffeg sy'n bwysig, ond gan fod y rhaglen yn cael ei darlledu ar S4C, mae yna le i ofyn faint o bobl ddi-Gymraeg yn eu 20au/30au sy'n debyg o wylio.
Mae Cariad at Iaith yn pregethu i'r cadwedig, ac o farnu yn ôl esiampl y blynyddoedd blaenorol, isel iawn yw'r tebygolrwydd y bydd mwy nag un aelod o garfan 2014 yn croesi'r bont, os hynny.
Mewn gwirionedd, mae yna hen ddigon o gyrsiau a chyfleodd i ddechreuwyr pur ymhobman, ond os ydyn ni am adfer yr iaith yn ei chadarnleoedd a chreu Cymru wir ddwyieithog, mae grŵp mawr o bobl yn ein plith sydd yn cael eu hesgeuluso. Yn ôl y cyfrifiad, 5.3% (dros 150,000 o bobl) yw'r canran sy'n deall Cymraeg lafar yn unig. Dydyn nhw byth yn siarad Cymraeg, felly, ac roedd 20,000 ohonyn nhw yn Sir Gaerfyrddin.
Dychmygwch - mi fyddai Ioan Talfryn a Nia Parry'n creu 8 o siaradwyr newydd o fewn wythnos.
Cafodd pob un ohonyn nhw eu haddysgu yng Nghymru, a'r rhan fwyaf yn weddol ddiweddar. Mae'r ffaith eu bod nhw'n cael eu trin fel dechreuwyr pur yn tystio i fethiant llwyr Cymraeg ail iaith fel pwnc yn ein system addysg, on'd yw hi?
Ond peidiwch â fy nghamddeall - mae gan y rhaglen y bwriadau gorau. Dim ond gofyn ydw i pa mor effeithiol yw hi.
Nod y rhaglen yw ysbrydoli eraill i ddysgu'r iaith, mae'n debyg. Dyna'r meddylfryd y tu ôl i ddewis carfan sy'n cynnwys pobl (weddol) enwog ac ifanc o ardaloedd trefol de Cymru. Y ddemograffeg sy'n bwysig, ond gan fod y rhaglen yn cael ei darlledu ar S4C, mae yna le i ofyn faint o bobl ddi-Gymraeg yn eu 20au/30au sy'n debyg o wylio.
Mae Cariad at Iaith yn pregethu i'r cadwedig, ac o farnu yn ôl esiampl y blynyddoedd blaenorol, isel iawn yw'r tebygolrwydd y bydd mwy nag un aelod o garfan 2014 yn croesi'r bont, os hynny.
Mewn gwirionedd, mae yna hen ddigon o gyrsiau a chyfleodd i ddechreuwyr pur ymhobman, ond os ydyn ni am adfer yr iaith yn ei chadarnleoedd a chreu Cymru wir ddwyieithog, mae grŵp mawr o bobl yn ein plith sydd yn cael eu hesgeuluso. Yn ôl y cyfrifiad, 5.3% (dros 150,000 o bobl) yw'r canran sy'n deall Cymraeg lafar yn unig. Dydyn nhw byth yn siarad Cymraeg, felly, ac roedd 20,000 ohonyn nhw yn Sir Gaerfyrddin.
Dychmygwch - mi fyddai Ioan Talfryn a Nia Parry'n creu 8 o siaradwyr newydd o fewn wythnos.
Friday, 23 May 2014
Votes and rumours
Votes from yesterday's European elections in Wales won't be counted until Sunday, and it is unlikely that we will get the results until Monday, but the Carmarthen Journal is reporting that turnout for Carmarthenshire was slightly down at between 36 and 37 per cent, compared with 38% in 2009.
That still compares fairly well with the overall turnout for Wales, which is provisionally put at 32% (ITV), up from 30% in 2009.
As Roger Scully from the Wales Governance Centre points out, Labour's best results in elections to the Assembly were achieved when turnout was lowest. We'll see, but ahead of the count comes the job of verifying the votes, with party representatives in attendance to scrutinise the process.
Early glimpses and samples suggest that the Plaid vote in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr was very strong, with both Labour and the Tories taking a hammering. Plaid sources say that the party was ahead in every single ward.
In Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire the rumour is that the Tory vote has collapsed and that Ukip has polled more than expected. Tory Simon Hart took the seat from Labour in 2009.
No-show
Back in Carmarthen, the County Council held its Annual General Meeting this week. Judging from the empty seats, quite a few councillors understandably came to the conclusion that it was a waste of time showing up.
The only surprise was the no-show of chief executive Mark James who returned to work after almost three months of self-imposed exile a fortnight before. In the meeting the previous week Mr James spoke only once when he read out the list of apologies.
Labour's Cllr Keri Thomas (Tyisha) meanwhile clocked up his eleventh successive apology for absence, and he was last seen at a meeting of the full council in September.
That still compares fairly well with the overall turnout for Wales, which is provisionally put at 32% (ITV), up from 30% in 2009.
As Roger Scully from the Wales Governance Centre points out, Labour's best results in elections to the Assembly were achieved when turnout was lowest. We'll see, but ahead of the count comes the job of verifying the votes, with party representatives in attendance to scrutinise the process.
Early glimpses and samples suggest that the Plaid vote in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr was very strong, with both Labour and the Tories taking a hammering. Plaid sources say that the party was ahead in every single ward.
In Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire the rumour is that the Tory vote has collapsed and that Ukip has polled more than expected. Tory Simon Hart took the seat from Labour in 2009.
No-show
Back in Carmarthen, the County Council held its Annual General Meeting this week. Judging from the empty seats, quite a few councillors understandably came to the conclusion that it was a waste of time showing up.
The only surprise was the no-show of chief executive Mark James who returned to work after almost three months of self-imposed exile a fortnight before. In the meeting the previous week Mr James spoke only once when he read out the list of apologies.
Labour's Cllr Keri Thomas (Tyisha) meanwhile clocked up his eleventh successive apology for absence, and he was last seen at a meeting of the full council in September.
Wednesday, 21 May 2014
Prize giving day and an end of term report
Carmarthenshire County Council's annual parade of posh frocks, bouquets and silly uniforms, otherwise known as the Annual General Meeting, will be held today. Unless you are interested in seeing what Meryl will be wearing this year (think Cruella Deville meets the Queen Mother with a side-helping of Edna Everidge), you may have better things to do.
If that hasn't put off any potential viewers, Kev will be presenting his very long annual report, of which advance copies have already gone out.
This is of course Kev's side of the story. If he has any regrets, they are too few to mention. True enough, there have been some challenges, mainly of the budgetary kind, he says, but otherwise this is a tale of progress on all fronts.
The year Kevin Madge sees in his rear view mirror is very different to the one most people in Carmarthenshire will remember.
There are some worthwhile regeneration projects, although some of those pre-date Kevin Madge's role as leader by quite a long way. As usual a great deal of emphasis is placed on the council's Modernising Education Programme which is about closing down small schools and building large new ones, but apart from bricks and mortar the report has nothing much to say about what goes on inside them.
Spending tens of millions on a beautiful new campus does not guarantee a good education, and whether it's the Welsh Government's rankings, Estyn inspections or GCSE results, the evidence is that Carmarthenshire is lagging behind quite a few other Welsh local authorities. Ceredigion, Neath Port Talbot and Swansea are performing better on all sorts of measures, and yet Carmarthenshire has joined forces with Pembrokeshire and formalised "a new sub-regional collaborative hub for school improvement". Pembrokeshire's record in education is the envy of no-one.
The scandals and chaos which dominated the news for much of last year are referred to only indirectly. The Wales Audit Office highlighted some "procedural issues" which Kev feels need to be addressed. To that end he has asked the Welsh Local Government Association to conduct a "completely independent review" of the council's democratic structures and procedures.
If you watched the Extraordinary Meeting which discussed the WAO reports, you may remember that Meryl Gravell described the barrister representing Mark James as a "completely independent" source of legal advice. Words have a different meaning inside County Hall.
The problem is that nobody else sees the WLGA as completely independent. Its political arm is dominated by Labour, and its unelected apparatchiks have a long track record of defending the power and privileges of council chief executives and highly paid senior officers. The WLGA opposed moves to curb senior council officer pay, and it is opposed to Carwyn Jones's plans to try to reduce the number of Welsh councils.
There is a very strong hint in Kevin Madge's report that the solution to the problems which have beset the council is a brand new constitution to replace the current set of rules which govern how the council conducts its business.
The existing constitution has been repeatedly amended and patched up over the years, eroding the rights of ordinary elected councillors and handing power to the Executive Board and through them to the Chief Executive who now pretty much controls everything.
Tearing up the existing constitution and starting again sounds attractive, but the document the WLGA is certain to recommend is what is known as the New Model Constitution for local government in Wales. It was drawn up by a gaggle of local government lawyers, and for anyone who has seen some of them in action in council meetings, it will come as no surprise to learn that the results are anything but designed to strengthen democracy, transparency and accountability.
Old Grumpy, otherwise known as Mike Stoddart, the Pembrokeshire County Councillor who has been such a thorn in the side of the ruling Independent mafia on the Western Cleddau, concluded after reading the document that it was so illiberal, it might as well have been drafted by Vladimir Putin.
Carmarthenshire councillors who ask awkward questions have repeatedly been thwarted by a ruling that questions must relate to what is on the published agenda (drawn up and controlled by the chief executive). If the issue is not on the agenda, you may not ask the question, unless it is of the "Would Cllr Madge care to explain why the county has blossomed under his wonderful leadership/" kind.
Even if the subject you are asking about is on the agenda (e.g. the environment), you may find as Cllr Siân Caiach did last year that a question on pollution in the Burry Inlet is ruled inadmissible because it is, er, not on the agenda.
As Old Grumpy points out, under articles 4.19.2 and 4.19.3 of the model constitution
"Questions must, in the opinion of the chair:
(a) contain no expressions of opinion;
(b) relate to matters on which the council has or may determine a policy;
(c) not relate to questions of fact."
Once facts and opinions have been ruled out, there is not much left, and councillors might as well stay at home.
But it does not just stop at questions. Here's Old Grumpy again:
"There are several options in the NMC mainly concerning the issue of whether the councils adopt the strong or weak Leader model.
The present constitution is based on the strong Leader model which gives the leader almost identical powers to an elected mayor - without having to go to the trouble of seeking a county-wide mandate.
One option under the new arrangements is to have an even stronger leader who will be appointed after each election for the full term of the council.
To unseat the Leader will require a two thirds majority on a written Notice of Motion and only one such NoM will be allowed in any rolling twelve-month period.
If I read that correctly, once installed, the Leader could cling on to power even if he only had the support of 21 of the sixty members.
And as the Leader has the power to hire and fire Cabinet members at will, and as the cabinet has almost absolute powers, it is difficult to see how this bears any resemblance to what is traditionally regarded as democracy."
Putin would be proud.
Turning to the Welsh language, Kev welcomes the recent report by the Census Working Group which made over 70 recommendations for change. It would be unrealistic to expect him to list them, but from the 70 he has picked out increasing the provision of Welsh medium education as the most important. Whoever it was that wrote the report (we can be sure it was not Kev) makes no mention whatever of the report's proposals to make Welsh the working language of parts of the council administration, even though that stands out alongside the plans for schools as the most significant change which the council appeared to accept when it adopted the report.
What the report shows is not so much a strong leader, but a leader on a tightrope trying to balance the competing and conflicting demands of those who keep him in power. On the one hand there are the senior officers and "Independents" led in reality by Meryl Gravell, and on the other is the Labour group on the council which is divided between the Llanelli and Ammanford factions and those who cynically favour a strategy of sitting the recent scandals out in the belief that, come election time, people will have forgotten all about them, versus those who want change. If that was not bad enough, Kev also has to contend with the constituency parties and the wider Labour hierarchy which knows from canvassing that what has happened in Carmarthenshire is pure electoral poison.
If that hasn't put off any potential viewers, Kev will be presenting his very long annual report, of which advance copies have already gone out.
This is of course Kev's side of the story. If he has any regrets, they are too few to mention. True enough, there have been some challenges, mainly of the budgetary kind, he says, but otherwise this is a tale of progress on all fronts.
The year Kevin Madge sees in his rear view mirror is very different to the one most people in Carmarthenshire will remember.
There are some worthwhile regeneration projects, although some of those pre-date Kevin Madge's role as leader by quite a long way. As usual a great deal of emphasis is placed on the council's Modernising Education Programme which is about closing down small schools and building large new ones, but apart from bricks and mortar the report has nothing much to say about what goes on inside them.
Spending tens of millions on a beautiful new campus does not guarantee a good education, and whether it's the Welsh Government's rankings, Estyn inspections or GCSE results, the evidence is that Carmarthenshire is lagging behind quite a few other Welsh local authorities. Ceredigion, Neath Port Talbot and Swansea are performing better on all sorts of measures, and yet Carmarthenshire has joined forces with Pembrokeshire and formalised "a new sub-regional collaborative hub for school improvement". Pembrokeshire's record in education is the envy of no-one.
The scandals and chaos which dominated the news for much of last year are referred to only indirectly. The Wales Audit Office highlighted some "procedural issues" which Kev feels need to be addressed. To that end he has asked the Welsh Local Government Association to conduct a "completely independent review" of the council's democratic structures and procedures.
If you watched the Extraordinary Meeting which discussed the WAO reports, you may remember that Meryl Gravell described the barrister representing Mark James as a "completely independent" source of legal advice. Words have a different meaning inside County Hall.
The problem is that nobody else sees the WLGA as completely independent. Its political arm is dominated by Labour, and its unelected apparatchiks have a long track record of defending the power and privileges of council chief executives and highly paid senior officers. The WLGA opposed moves to curb senior council officer pay, and it is opposed to Carwyn Jones's plans to try to reduce the number of Welsh councils.
There is a very strong hint in Kevin Madge's report that the solution to the problems which have beset the council is a brand new constitution to replace the current set of rules which govern how the council conducts its business.
The existing constitution has been repeatedly amended and patched up over the years, eroding the rights of ordinary elected councillors and handing power to the Executive Board and through them to the Chief Executive who now pretty much controls everything.
Tearing up the existing constitution and starting again sounds attractive, but the document the WLGA is certain to recommend is what is known as the New Model Constitution for local government in Wales. It was drawn up by a gaggle of local government lawyers, and for anyone who has seen some of them in action in council meetings, it will come as no surprise to learn that the results are anything but designed to strengthen democracy, transparency and accountability.
Old Grumpy, otherwise known as Mike Stoddart, the Pembrokeshire County Councillor who has been such a thorn in the side of the ruling Independent mafia on the Western Cleddau, concluded after reading the document that it was so illiberal, it might as well have been drafted by Vladimir Putin.
Carmarthenshire councillors who ask awkward questions have repeatedly been thwarted by a ruling that questions must relate to what is on the published agenda (drawn up and controlled by the chief executive). If the issue is not on the agenda, you may not ask the question, unless it is of the "Would Cllr Madge care to explain why the county has blossomed under his wonderful leadership/" kind.
Even if the subject you are asking about is on the agenda (e.g. the environment), you may find as Cllr Siân Caiach did last year that a question on pollution in the Burry Inlet is ruled inadmissible because it is, er, not on the agenda.
As Old Grumpy points out, under articles 4.19.2 and 4.19.3 of the model constitution
"Questions must, in the opinion of the chair:
(a) contain no expressions of opinion;
(b) relate to matters on which the council has or may determine a policy;
(c) not relate to questions of fact."
Once facts and opinions have been ruled out, there is not much left, and councillors might as well stay at home.
But it does not just stop at questions. Here's Old Grumpy again:
"There are several options in the NMC mainly concerning the issue of whether the councils adopt the strong or weak Leader model.
The present constitution is based on the strong Leader model which gives the leader almost identical powers to an elected mayor - without having to go to the trouble of seeking a county-wide mandate.
One option under the new arrangements is to have an even stronger leader who will be appointed after each election for the full term of the council.
To unseat the Leader will require a two thirds majority on a written Notice of Motion and only one such NoM will be allowed in any rolling twelve-month period.
If I read that correctly, once installed, the Leader could cling on to power even if he only had the support of 21 of the sixty members.
And as the Leader has the power to hire and fire Cabinet members at will, and as the cabinet has almost absolute powers, it is difficult to see how this bears any resemblance to what is traditionally regarded as democracy."
Putin would be proud.
Turning to the Welsh language, Kev welcomes the recent report by the Census Working Group which made over 70 recommendations for change. It would be unrealistic to expect him to list them, but from the 70 he has picked out increasing the provision of Welsh medium education as the most important. Whoever it was that wrote the report (we can be sure it was not Kev) makes no mention whatever of the report's proposals to make Welsh the working language of parts of the council administration, even though that stands out alongside the plans for schools as the most significant change which the council appeared to accept when it adopted the report.
What the report shows is not so much a strong leader, but a leader on a tightrope trying to balance the competing and conflicting demands of those who keep him in power. On the one hand there are the senior officers and "Independents" led in reality by Meryl Gravell, and on the other is the Labour group on the council which is divided between the Llanelli and Ammanford factions and those who cynically favour a strategy of sitting the recent scandals out in the belief that, come election time, people will have forgotten all about them, versus those who want change. If that was not bad enough, Kev also has to contend with the constituency parties and the wider Labour hierarchy which knows from canvassing that what has happened in Carmarthenshire is pure electoral poison.
Tuesday, 20 May 2014
Vote for Jill Evans
The opinion polls have been very volatile during the last few weeks, and this Thursday we will finally get to decide who will represent Wales in the European Parliament.Much of the British press, Tory right wingers and Ukip like to treat the European Parliament as a joke, but it isn't and we need a strong Welsh voice there. The only candidate with a realistic chance of winning who does not take her orders from Westminster is Jill Evans.
150,000 Welsh jobs depend directly on trade with the EU, and the EU underpins the economic well being of Welsh agriculture. Trade with Europe is worth £5 billion to our economy every year. We receive structural funds to improve our infrastructure and invest in community and regeneration projects, and Jill Evans was the only Welsh MEP who voted to protect EU funding for Wales and against budget cuts. She is also a well-known campaigner on issues such as clamping down on tax avoidance, voting to cap bankers' bonuses and speaking up on the need to protect our environment.
| Jill Evans |
It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that Jill will be getting my vote, but whatever your views please use yours and ensure that fear, stupidity and hatred do not triumph.
Monday, 19 May 2014
Emlyn Dole takes over as Plaid group leader in Carmarthenshire
As this blog reported a couple of weeks ago, Emlyn Dole has been elected to take over from Peter Hughes Griffiths as leader of the Plaid Cymru group on Carmarthenshire County Council, and his deputy will be Cllr David Jenkins.
Peter Hughes Griffiths will become deputy chair of the council at the AGM this month, and he made his final contributions as leader at last week's meeting of the full council. Whether you agree with him or not, Peter is a man of integrity who never minces his words, and he has a long and distinguished record of public service.
Emlyn Dole is from a different generation, and will bring his own style to the job. Those who have seen him in action know that he has a powerful intellect and is tenacious in standing up for ordinary people. He also has a great sense of humour.
Below is the text of the official announcement with Emlyn's biographical details:
Peter Hughes Griffiths will become deputy chair of the council at the AGM this month, and he made his final contributions as leader at last week's meeting of the full council. Whether you agree with him or not, Peter is a man of integrity who never minces his words, and he has a long and distinguished record of public service.
Emlyn Dole is from a different generation, and will bring his own style to the job. Those who have seen him in action know that he has a powerful intellect and is tenacious in standing up for ordinary people. He also has a great sense of humour.
 |
Cllr.
Emlyn Dole, 57, has represented the Llannon area on the council since
2008. He is married to popular singer Gwenda Owen and is part-time
minister of three Independent churches in the Gwendraeth Valley. He
lived in many parts of the world in his youth, before returning to Wales
as a student at University College Bangor. During his career, he has been
a BBC producer and director and has worked in the fields of translation
and public relations. Emlyn Dole is a member of the Planning Committee
and has chaired the Social Care and Health Scrutiny Committee for the
past two years.
He takes over from Cllr. Peter Hughes Griffiths, who led the Plaid group on the council for eight years. During
that period, the number of Plaid councillors rose from 16 to 28. Upon
retiring as group leader, Peter is taking on a new role as vice-chairman
of the County Council. Cllr. David Jenkins, Glanaman, has been elected
as deputy leader of the Plaid group, as Cllr. Tyssul Evans retires from
the post.
“It
is with a sense of great pride that I take over the duties and
responsibilities as Leader of the Plaid Cymru group on Carmarthenshire
County Council,” said Cllr Emlyn Dole. “Although we are the largest
political group on the Council, it is controlled by a Labour/Independent
coalition which means that I take over from Cllr Peter Hughes Griffiths
as Leader of the Opposition. As I assume this responsibility, I would
like to pay tribute to Peter’s leadership over the past eight years.
During his tenure, the number of Plaid members has almost doubled,
thanks in no small part to his strong leadership and total commitment. I
intend to maintain that momentum and build on that foundation, by
representing the views of the people of Carmarthenshire and their wish
to hold the present council administration to account. It is a delight
to lead such a talented team with its wealth of experience, all of which
will be brought to to bear as we look towards a challenging future in
local government.”
"It
has been a privilege and a pleasure to lead the Plaid Cymru group
through a period of growth on Carmarthenshire County Council,” said Cllr
Peter Hughes Griffiths. “We have developed to be a very effective
Opposition, which gives voice to public concerns about the attitudes and
controversial decisions made by the coalition Labour/Independent regime
in County Hall.
"I extend by best wishes to Cllr Emlyn Dole and the energetic, experienced and capable team which Plaid has on the Council. The future is in safe hands."
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