County Council endorses Towy Community Church - again!

I'm not making this up - honest. Stories about the county council and the American-style evangelical church are like London buses at the moment.

For those old miseries who complain about the council's propaganda sheet, Carmarthenshire News, the latest edition is the stuff of our worst nightmares, with a colour picture of Cllr Pam Palmer grinning out at us and announcing that the county council is now working with Towy Community Church, the Elim Pentecostal Church in Llanelli, the Ammanford Evangelical Church and Communities First Pantyffynnon to distribute Christmas presents to children across the county.

It seems that, unlike Tony Blair when he was in Downing Street, Carmarthenshire County Council has decided that it does God, and not the wishy-washy kind favoured by mainstream religious groups, but the fire and brimstone, anti-gay, anti-abortion, gun-toting, rootin-tootin right-wing kind of God imported direct from the American Bible Belt. Halleluiah!

Towy Community Church's website devotes a lot of space to its sponsors' logos, with the county council plastered all over parts of it.

So I suppose it's only right that the two "brands" should also come together in the council's official "newspaper".

Will Pam fit down your chimney?

Towy Community Church accounts

A quick glance at the Charity Commission's website shows that Towy Community Church, which has received so much public money, has so far not been able to file its accounts for 2010.

True, the deadline has so far only been missed by 10 days, but you would expect to be able to inspect accounts for previous years given that the church has been in existence for some while. However, it turns out that the church was registered under the name of "Towy Community Church Trust" until June 2010, and that charity has been wound up.

The result is that no accounts of any kind are available for inspection by the public which has become such a generous benefactor.

Of course, there is bound to be an entirely reasonable explanation for this, and we can be sure that our county council will be asking the church to explain.

As mentioned before, the breakdown of the finances underpinning Project Xcel (the name for the bowling alley, etc.) is also more than a little confusing, with some odd discrepancies between what the church tells us on its website, and what councillors were told by the Executive Board in May of this year. Whereas the church says it received just under £800,000 from the Big Lottery Fund and Welsh Government, councillors were told that this figure was just £500,000.

Meryl and the Mercy Ministries

On Friday we learned that Carmarthenshire County Council has spent £100,000 on private detectives, and we know also that the council spends quite a lot of time checking up on bloggers who criticise it. So you would think that they would also check out some of the organisations they are throwing money at. It would seem not.

Council leader Meryl Gravell and chief executive Mark James are very enthusiastic backers of Towy Community Church and its Project Xcel, so much so that they have taken to showering this evengelical group with public money to build a bowling alley, etc. Meryl told us only this week that the work the church is doing will help reduce the burden on the council's social services budget. It sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Almost too good to be true.

Buried deep on the church's website is a piece about Mercy Ministries, and it plans to open a Mercy Ministries house right here in Carmarthen. The website is fairly terse about this project, but just in case anyone decides to edit the church's website, here is what it currently says in full:

Mercy Ministries residential home for women with life controlling issues Towy Community Church is a partner church with Mercy Ministries UK. Mercy Ministries operates unique residential homes around the world for young women dealing with issues such as eating disorders, self-harming, abuse, depression, unplanned pregnancies and other life controlling issues. It provides a 6 month structured residential based programme free of charge that includes life-skills training and professional counselling based on Christian principles. Established over 20 years ago Mercy Ministries has seen thousands of lives transformed from hopeless despair and brokenness to lives full of hope, dignity and future. It is the vision of Towy Community Church to set up a Mercy Ministries house in Carmarthen to meet the needs of the community. The need for Mercy Ministries in Carmarthen and Wales The Uk has the highest rate of self harm in Europe. Suicide and depression are on the increase, there is a need for support for young women to help them tackle the root causes of their issues. Mercy Ministries UK helps young women between the ages of 16-28, who display a sincere desire to change. Young women come to Mercy Ministries suffering the effects of eating disorders, self harm, abuse, depression, unplanned pregnancies and other life controlling issues. Mercy ministries provides a holistic programme that addresses all aspects of a young woman’s well being; physical, spiritual and emotional. The goal is to have each young woman not only complete the programme but also discover the purpose for her life and bring value to her community as a productive citizen. Free service 6 month structured residential based programme professional counselling based on Christian principles Why not visit Mercy Ministries online to find out more  Why not, indeed? Or why not widen our search, and put Mercy Ministries into a search engine. Perhaps Mr James's office was too busy to do this, but if they had typed "Mercy Ministries Scandal" into Google, they would have been in for a shock. Mercy Ministries was founded by an American fundamentalist Christian called Nancy Alcorn, and it now has affiliates in several countries, including the UK. Mrs Alcorn even has her own Youtube channel, where you can listen to her preaching about demonic possession and the need to cast out demons. As with so many other organisations of its kind, Mercy Ministries also teaches that homosexuality is inherently sinful, and it is virulently opposed to abortion. You will find plenty of accusations on the Internet about the methods used by Mercy Ministries, including repeated allegations of exorcisms to cast out demons in cases such as eating disorders, and Mrs Alcorn is very critical of modern psychiatric practice. In 2008 the respected Sydney Morning Herald investigated the Australian affiliate and uncovered practices which eventually led to the closure of two homes there. It is worth a read. Towy Community Church does not yet operate a Mercy Ministries house, but it is a partner church of Mercy Ministries UK and intends to open a residential centre. Carmarthenshire County Council needs to open its eyes and ask itself some searching questions. Towy Community Church is not the only evangelical grouping to have sprung up in Carmarthen in recent years. Another is Living Word, a group understood to have some very influential adherents. Here is an extract from its Statement of Faith: 'That those who believe in him look forward to the sure and certain hope of eternal life whereas those who do not will spend eternity separated from Christ, in hell'  Of course, the more traditional Welsh chapels continue to minister to their flocks alongside these newer organisations. The Bethel Evangelical Church has applied for planning permission to change the old MFI building in Carmarthen into a community centre, and there's another one in Ammanford doing the same, without massive financial support from the county council. A final thought. It would seem that the decision last week to loan Towy Community Church £275,000 on top of the huge sums already received in grants will not need to be ratified by our democratically elected councillors in full council because the Executive Board gave itself powers to complete the deal back in May.

Towy Church gets another £275,000 from Carmarthenshire

No doubt prayers of thanks were offered up at Towy Community Church last Sunday that the Lord has yet again provided, and once again in the unlikely forms of Meryl Gravell and Mark James. This week's collection included a bumper £275,000 from the hapless taxpayers of Carmarthenshire, who are lending this sum on top of all the other contributions we have made to Project Xcel.

The deal was reported in this week's Carmarthen Journal and was agreed at the recent meeting of the council's Executive Board. Readers may remember that Cneifiwr had a funny feeling that the church had come back to ask for more.

The article raises many more questions than it answers in terms of the finances of the project, ethical considerations and PR.

Spin
Let's start with public relations. The proposals put before the Executive Board on 31 October were, as is so often the case in Carmarthenshire, secret. And a pattern is now beginning to emerge. A few days after decisions are made in closed sessions, a call goes through to a local journalist who is invited along for a chat with chief executive Mr Mark James. Mr James gives the hack a few crumbs of information and the line to follow.

A report will then appear in the local paper with a few snippets of information and a rather longer rationale for the decision as seen from Mr James's perspective. The result is that the chief executive has control of the story, and the news flow is nicely managed. If the journalist wants privileged access and more exclusives, he'd better avoid difficult questions or negative reporting.

Numbers
The financial aspects of this project also raise questions. The first phase of the project involves the building of a 10 pin bowling alley, at a projected cost of £2.25 million. When the full council was asked to look at this back in May, councillors were told that the church had been asked to identify savings of £250,000 to bring the capital cost down to £2 million.

Councillors were told at the same time that just over £1.7m of funding had been agreed, including a bank loan of £730,000. This left a funding gap of £280,000, which the council filled in the form of a capital grant.

Now we are told that church members have carried out work on the council-owned property which someone (the church?) values at £200,000. We are also told that the total value of grants, including those from the Lottery, amounts to £1.2m.

Mr James told the Journal, "If we didn't approve this [the new loan of £275,000, ed.] we could lose the £1.2 million that they have already accessed in funds from elsewhere."

Mr James seems to be suffering from a bit of an identity crisis here. When he says "we", is he now speaking as the church? And when he says "elsewhere", you might be forgiven for thinking that the number did not include money already given by the council. But it almost certainly does.

In the same story we are told that the new loan of £275,000 was needed because banks were unwilling to lend the full sum originally agreed (presumably £730,000?). A few short breaths later, and we are told, "They are still borrowing far less than intended because of the extra work they have done for themselves."

Somehow these two statements don't match up, do they?

The simple truth would seem to be that the bank did its sums again and realised that the risk was too great to loan £730,000, with the result that the taxpayer has had to jump in and stump up another £275,000.

So far, it seems, nobody has thought to question Mr James about the wisdom of the original decision to purchase the St Ivel creamery site, now valued at £750,000. The valuation is likely to be somewhat lower than the price the council originally paid for the site, given what has happened to commercial property values, and on top of that the council has been paying around £55,000 a year in business rates for the privilege of owning an empty creamery. The cost to council taxpayers so far is probably not far off £1.5m, before we take into consideration the various grants and loans the council is making, plus a probably vast opportunity cost as the church has been given a 99-year lease on very generous terms (i.e. next-to-nothing).

Of course, the problem that we the public have is that it is impossible to make sense of this jumble of conflicting numbers and statements, and Mr James is not about to let us see the real numbers.

Given that all the numbers discussed so far relate to just Phase 1 of the project, and that Phase 2 is likely to cost another £3 million, it is more than likely that we will be asked for further contributions.

Outsourcing
The other worrying aspect of this project is the way in which the council apparently sees it as a way of reducing its social services bill. Here is Meryl Gravell:

"If it wasn't for people like that, our social services bill would be even more. It's the biggest social enterprise in Carmarthenshire. That's what we need more of in the future."

We can probably safely assume that the council does not regard providing 10 pin bowling alleys as part of its social services remit. The same presumably applies to cafes, conference centres and performing arts centres. Those make up the vast bulk of the overall estimated £5 million project cost.

Of the activities listed, that leaves just a food bank, debt counselling service and a furniture recycling centre. Not mentioned by Mrs Gravell or Mr James, but on the church's website there is a brief outline of something called "Mercy Ministries".

The county council provides a range of benefits, but its obligations do not include providing food and furniture for the vast majority of social security claimants. That leaves the "Mercy Ministries". Here's what the church says:

Mercy Ministries operates unique residential homes around the world for young women dealing with issues such as eating disorders, self-harming, abuse, depression, unplanned pregnancies and other life controlling issues. It provides a 6 month structured residential based programme free of charge that includes life-skills training and professional counselling based on Christian principles...... It is the vision of Towy Community Church to set up a Mercy Ministries house in Carmarthen to meet the needs of the community.

It is true that in some of these cases the council would sometimes intervene and pick up part of the cost, but these represent only a very small part of the cost of the council's social care bill. Moreover, it is by no means clear whether the proposed Mercy Ministries house is a part of the project which kicks off with the bowling alley.

Is Mrs Gravell saying that the council is happy to hand a part of its statutory responsibilities to an evangelical grouping run by a husband and wife team who are not part of a mainstream religious organisation? Is it "intensely relaxed" at the prospect of young vulnerable people being taken in for a spot of religious indoctrination in return for help?

The council appears to be sleep-walking into a commitment which carries significant risks that are not just measured in pounds and pence.

The vultures circle over County Hall

Another month has gone by, so time for another meeting of the full council in Carmarthen's Black Lubianka, otherwise known as County Hall. This one was strangely different from recent sessions, and there was a distinct feeling of tension, raw nerves and paranoia about the whole thing. Perhaps it's the thought of next year's looming elections which, with any luck, will see a good many of the old dinosaurs and monsters consigned to the dustbin of history. As we shall see, the vultures are already eyeing up some of the Independent councillors.

I arrived to find a small throng clustered around the Reception desk. Lost souls from some Kafka novel trying to negotiate their way in to see local democracy in action. This time they included a minor celebrity in the shape of Chris Segar, the presenter of ITV Wales' consumer affairs programme, The Ferret. 

The poor woman behind the desk has the unenviable job of applying the dictats of chief executive Mark James to a less than grateful public; in a just world, she would be paid twice as much as Mr James. One fellow blogger was refused entry for declining to sign the statement on recording and filming, even though he had been given a visitor's badge. Mr Segar was patiently trying to explain to some official that he wanted to do a bit of filming (shock horror), and he was led away, presumably to a padded cell.

Caebrwyn and I mortgaged our souls yet again, and were escorted by two wardens who had been briefed to explain that the doors would open automatically in case of fire. "What about the fire exit nearest the gallery?" asked Caebrwyn. They had not been briefed on how digital technology would somehow turn the key and slide back the bolts.

"All be upstanding for the Chair, Deputy Chair and Chief Executive", we were ordered. A few of us in the public gallery remained seated, desperately clinging to our last vestiges of self-respect, before we were launched into this month's round of congratulatory announcements.

A round of applause greeted the announcement that Carmarthenshire had won a prize for "best in-house team" by the Welsh Chartered Institute of Public Relations in its awfully named "PRide Awards", and the bi-monthly Carmarthenshire News had been short-listed for another award. Now, Wales is a small place, and it is fair to say that anyone who is involved in PR here is likely to find themselves both on the nominations list and in receipt of an award. This institute is full of wannabe Malcolm Tuckers, hoping that their abilities will one day be recognised on a larger stage.

Carmarthenshire's in-house PR team is, it is true, adept at the black arts of spin. On instructions from the executive suite they churn out a relentless flood of "news" of targets being met, outstanding achievements and bountiful harvests. Sometimes, critics of the regime are the subject of smears and insinuations. Occasionally there are patently daft exercises such as the Pam Palmer Twittergate affair, when Democracy Week was celebrated with a short burst of tweets allegedly written by one of the senior councillors in English and flawless, if very stilted Welsh. Cllr Palmer never speaks Welsh in the chamber and has to use headphones when other councillors use the language, and not one of the tweets from members of the public asking her questions was answered.


The Carmarthenshire News is one of those glossy local authority propaganda sheets we have all had to recycle, arriving as it does unloved and unwanted and full of pictures of grinning councillors and senior officers cutting ribbons and celebratory cakes.


Another winner at the awards was Dyfed Powys Police whose dire PR department fell foul of New Statesman magazine for its truly dreadful handling of the #daftarrest affair.


So much for the awards, then. But Cllr Siân Caiaich stood to announce that blogger Jacqui Thompson had won this year's award for best political blog in Wales. Mrs Thompson is a perpetual thorn in the side of the chief executive and ruling clique, and the announcement that a local woman had received recognition for her brave battle against County Hall was met with deafening silence.

Next Cllr Caiach rose to make a formal complaint to the Chair about the blocking of a motion of no confidence in the Leader. She asked the Chair for a response. The Chair, Cllr Ivor Jackson, would be out of his depth in a paddling pool, and here was Cllr Caiach chucking him into a shark-infested ocean. Fortunately, the chief executive leaned over and whispered something.


"Ah, um, give me that in writing, and I will deal with it", said Cllr Jackson. Nobody was under any illusion that Cllr Jackson would deal with anything; he would get the chief executive to pen a suitably paralegal reply.

The first major piece of business was the presentation of the Standards Committee's annual report by its outgoing chair, an independent (i.e. not capital I) member of the committee. The presentation was competent, and there was frankly not much of interest, although he noted that the number of applications from councillors asking for dispensations to speak or vote when there was a possible conflict of interest had declined dramatically since 2007, when the rules were changed so that councillors did not need to notify the committee in cases where their interest was less than £500.


Conflict of interest was a subject which came up several times during the rest of the meeting, and it is clearly a very touchy subject for Carmarthenshire's councillors. Many councils now publish their registers of interests on-line; but not in award-winning Carmarthenshire. Recently there have been two separate Freedom of Information requests for information from the Register, and both have been refused. Members of the public wanting to see it have to make a request and an appointment, at the council's convenience of course. For many residents, this will mean taking a half-day to trek to County Hall, with attendant petrol and parking costs, to inspect documents which could so easily be published for all to see. But then that would be making things a little too transparent, wouldn't it?


Next came one of the major set piece debates on a proposal to delegate powers to the Director of Regeneration, Dave Gilbert, to give small and medium sized businesses grants of up to £35,000 without consulting councillors. A number of opposition councillors expressed disquiet about the delegation of yet more powers and the removal of another shred of democratic accountability.


For once we had a real debate, with searching questions and good speeches. There were safeguards in the form of the scrutiny committee, it was said, although a couple of councillors pointed out that the scrutiny committees don't always live up to their name. Someone asked about possible conflicts of interest for the Director of Regeneration as he doled out wodges of money to local companies.


The feathers flew. Mr Gilbert was emphatic that he had no conflicts of interest, and a Labour councillor, Anthony Jones, gave a good speech saying that the aim of the change was to cut bureaucracy and speed up help for small companies. But he was furious that Mr Gilbert's integrity should be impugned. Mr Gilbert was one of the best local authority officers in Wales! (As we all know by now, no matter who or what, the official line is always that Carmarthenshire has the best officers/toilets/schools/care homes/refuse collection in Wales, if not the world).


And so it continued, with another good speech from Peter Hughes Griffiths, leader of the Plaid Group and leader of the opposition. PHG was also very cross; the role of councillors was to question and hold to account, and it was deplorable that every time anyone questioned anything, it was regarded as an attack on the council's officers.

Cllr Pam Palmer, an ironically mellifluous name for someone who otherwise has the same effect on people as finger nails being slowly dragged down a blackboard, said she had personally helped lots of local companies to get grants, and she wanted it noted that she had never received anything from them in return. The public will be able to see that for themselves when the register of interests is opened up.


Chief Executive Mark James intervened to give us the benefit of his opinion. He felt that some of the questions had been worded in such a way as to question the integrity of the officers, and that was unacceptable. Councillors should remember, he added with a glance up at the public gallery, that there were members of the public watching this political ding-dong.


Mr James does not like debate or questions, and neither does Cllr Pam Palmer who attempted four times to curtail discussion by trying to call for a vote, but the public can feel relieved that there are some councillors who do their best to hold him and his administration to account.


In the end, the proposal was voted through, and the explanations eventually given by Dave Gilbert were reasonable. Without the questioning and debate we would not have known why the change was a reasonable one.


Next was a discussion on biodiversity. Everyone agreed it was a good thing, and the officer who had written the report before councillors was thanked effusively by all and sundry for her work, just as Dave Gilbert had been praised repeatedly in the session before. In fact a feature of these council meetings is that a significant amount of the time spent is devoted to councillors praising officers.


At the risk of sounding sour, how many other highly paid jobs can you think of where you would be heaped with praise every month, many times over? The culture developed by Mark James is such that anyone who does not offer up their praise and thanks to officers for doing their jobs is (a) a troublemaker, and (b) attacking him and his officers. Got that, Cllrs Caiach and Davies? Dechrau canu, dechrau canmol.*


There were several good speeches at the meeting, and of course the Labour leader Cllr Kevin Madge had to go and spoil all that. Yes, we did get a refrain from his usual "things are getting better" speech, this time when he noted that in the bad old days there had been newts in a pond near his home. Now a whacking great housing estate has been built, and the newts have gone. Things are improving. Why does Kev have such an intense and burning hatred of newts? Is it something to do with Ken Livingstone?


Anyway, good news for newt haters has arrived from North Wales. See this. Incidentally, a couple of cynical councillors pointed out that new rules on biodiversity would almost certainly mean that owners of properties seeking planning permission would in future take care to spray, poison, burn and hack away any wildlife before submitting a planning application.


Just before Cneifiwr left, councillors turned their attention to the euphemistically named "Modernising Education Programme". Step forward Mr Robert Sully, Carmarthenshire's answer to Whackford Squeers and a deadringer for Dr Evil from the film The Spy Who Shagged Me". Caebrwyn has given a good account of the row over Furnace School in Llanelli, but of interest was the contribution of a couple of Independent councillors from the Llandovery/Llandeilo area to Mr Sully's plans to forge ahead with the closure of Ysgol Pantycelyn in Llandovery despite massive local opposition.


Cllr Tom Theophilus said that he had been the victim of malicious rumours and attacks from local people who had accused him of staying silent as opposition to the plan had been steamrollered. He acknowledged that he had been silent, and he blamed that on the code of conduct. He wanted it to be known that he opposed the closure of Pantycelyn. The chair, Cllr Ivor Jackson, perked up. The same had happened to him, he said. He too was opposed to the plan.


All very odd. The reference to the code of conduct is apparently because councillors who speak out against a planning application are effectively frozen out of the discussions on a planning application. Now, there will be a planning application for the new school, probably sometime next year, but that should not have prevented them from talking about the changes to the education system in their part of the county. But by saying that they were opposed to the plan yesterday, they have probably now also ruled themselves out of participation in the planning discussions. 


Stranger still, both Mr Sully and Mr James are on record as having praised Cllrs Jackson and Theophilus for their support for the school plan.


Cllr Theophilus will apparently be stepping down at the next election, but the four other councillors from the area were clearly unsettled yesterday as the vultures perched on the edge of the public gallery and peered down on what may soon be electoral dead meat.

* Mrs Angry, Dechrau canu, dechrau canmol is the Welsh equivalent of your favourite Sunday teatime show Songs of Praise. It means "Start singing, start praising". Funnily enough, Songs of Praise is presented by a Welshman!

Ruffled blue feathers

News reaches me of a bad tempered spat on Facebook between a local man and Ms Henrietta Hensher, who has stood as Conservative and Unionist candidate (or as a supporter of "David Cameron's Conservatives" as they appeared on one ballot) in various elections, including a county council by-election, the UK general election and the elections to the Welsh Assembly. Fortunately for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, she was wildly unsuccessful on each occasion.

The latest ding-dong was caused when this member of the public dared to suggest that the Independents on Carmarthenshire County Council were closet Tories, and he backed up his claim by pointing out the bleedin' obvious fact that, unlike all the other mainstream parties, the Conservatives do not contest county council elections here. The sole exception was when Ms Hensher stood as Conservative candidate in Cenarth ward (better known as Newcastle Emlyn) after nobody could be found to stand as an Independent.

He did so in response to a homily posted by Ms Hensher in which she waxed lyrical about the need for political choice, and argued that we here in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr live in a one-party state (Plaid Cymru being the voters' party of choice).

Ms Hensher was outraged. She demanded a retraction of this "disgusting" slur, which she went on to claim was libellous. The poster was a liar, she hyperventilated.

Before anyone could join in the debate, Ms Hensher's comment was removed, and silence descended.

Unfortunately for Ms Hensher, copies of correspondence still exist from the by-election she contested last year.

In an attempt to spark off a genuine debate and encourage more people to take an interest in local politics, two local men challenged the two candidates (Ms Hensher and Mrs Hazel Evans for Plaid Cymru) to hold public meetings so that they could set out their platforms and help voters to make an informed choice. They also pointed out that both candidates had issued bland and meaningless election material which contained little more than vague claims that they would "stand up for the area", along with statements of the bleedin' obvious, such as "agriculture is important to this area".

It seems that both were advised by their respective party machines not to get involved, and so there were no meetings and no debate. So when politicians bemoan the lack of interest in local politics, they really only have themselves to blame, don't they? And calling members of the public who disagree with you a liar, and describing their criticisms as libellous is not exactly encouraging free speech and participation in politics, is it?

In order to give the two ladies a heads up on the sort of issues local people were worried about, the two troublemakers sent them a long list of questions, covering everything from car parking and road safety to their stance on the Welsh language and plans for another supermarket in town.

As it happens, of all the issues exercising local people at the time, the most controversial was the supermarket planning application. Cllr Evans knew all about it and opposed the plan at the recent planning meeting. The Tories, on the other hand, were completely unaware of the supermarket issue, despite the fact that it had received extensive coverage over a period of more than 2 years in the local press, local shop windows were plastered with posters, and there had been several public meetings and action days in town to gather petitions on signatures.

Ms Hensher's agent responded to the invitation with one of the most intemperate outbursts since Gordon Brown called Mrs Gillian Duffy a bigot. Sounding like a bonkers colonel, he attacked the authors of the questions and revealed that neither he nor his candidate were aware of any supermarket planning application. Here I should remind readers that this is a very small community where just about everybody knows everybody else and their business.

Even after he had been politely referred to the council's website and shown the application itself, he still managed to get things wrong, arguing that the application was not for a supermarket but a convenience store (in planning law anything up to a mammoth superstore can be described as a convenience store).

So here are some tips for Ms Hensher and any other budding politician hoping to win elections around here.

• Get to know the area you want to represent. Familiarise yourself with local issues.
• Read the local press and talk to local people.
• Join, or even initiate some local campaigns.
• In this area you should also take the trouble to learn Welsh to a standard where you can speak to voters in it.
• Grow a thicker skin and listen to what people have to say.
• Don't call your voters liars and dismiss any criticism as libellous.

Not much to ask, is it? But, as we have seen from previous posts on the two Tory MPs from neighbouring constituencies, the Conservative Party in Wales attracts some pretty odd people these days. Even David Cameron knows that, which is why he chose an MP representing a constituency in the Home Counties to act as Secretary of State for Wales.

Endangered Species: Pembrokeshire's Tory MPs - 2. Stephen Crabb

On the face of it, you would think that the two sitting Pembrokeshire MPs could not be more different. Simon Hart is the archetypal English squire: hunting, shooting, fishing, likes dressing up in military uniforms, minor public school, Cirencester and links to the murky world of arms dealers, lobbyists, South African mercenaries and Arab businessmen.

Stephen Crabb, on the other hand, is a working class lad who was born in Scotland but grew up on a council estate in Pembrokeshire and went to a state school in Haverfordwest. But as we shall see, there is more than just membership of the Conservative Party that brings them together.

Mr Crabb was elected to parliament in 2005 and so has a head start on new boy, Simon Hart. Hart is quite active in debates and asking questions, even though he has a bit of a fixation with squirrels. Crabb, on the other hand, has become a shrinking violet, having asked no written questions in the last year and taken part in just one debate.

This was not the case before the last general election, however, when Mr Crabb was very busy asking questions of the last Labour government. The questions take us on an exotic journey around what were for the most part forlorn backwaters of the British Empire of old: Burma, Palestine, Orissa state in India, Kenya, Aden. A strong theme is human rights, particularly in respect of religious freedom and the persecution of Christian minorities. He is frequently worried about Israeli security, and clearly does not like Hamas in the Gaza Strip or Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon.

To be fair, there are also questions of more direct relevance to his constituents, including questions on Trust Ports, Liquefied Natural Gas and Defence Rescue Services. In 2008 he was on a mission to question the provision of Welsh language services by every government department you can think of, including the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The sub-text was that, in his view, money was being wasted when there was no evidence of demand.

Strangely, this activity comes to almost a complete halt after the election which resulted in David Cameron becoming Prime Minister. In fact it appears that he has spoken just twice in 2011, uttering a staggering 24 words; once to ask for more time to allow members to arrive at a committee meeting, and the other to comment that someone or other "knows his stuff".

The interest in the fate of Christians in far-flung places, and Mr Crabb's unswerving support for Israel may well be explained by his membership of CARE (Christian Action Research and Education) described by the pinko-lefty Daily Telegraph as having "borrowed the tactics of America's religious Right in its attempts to affect policy. Care describes itself as a 'mainstream Christian charity bringing Christian insight and experience to matters of public policy'. A closer look at its website appears to contradict the claim to be 'mainstream'. The organisation's published doctrinal basis is distinctly fundamentalist and among other things talks of 'the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture and its consequent entire trustworthiness and supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct'. In other words, the Bible is the literal truth."

Before becoming an MP, Mr Crabb was a CARE intern working for another Tory MP in parliament. CARE is keen to extend its influence in parliament and hopes to create a generation of fundamentalist Christian politicians. To do this, it sponsors interns in the hope that they will become MPs, who then take on CARE interns.... Which is just what Mr Crabb has done.

As you might expect, Mr Crabb has strong views on issues such as gay rights and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Unsurprisingly, Mr Crabb's website is silent on his links with CARE, but it does tell us that he is leader of "Project Umubano, the Conservative Party’s social action project in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Each July he leads large teams of Conservative volunteers to work in the fields of Education, Business, Health, Justice and Community alongside local partners in these two countries."

Project Umubano has received a good press and the support of David Cameron as one of the strands in his "Big Society". Both Sierra Leone and Rwanda have of course been through appalling suffering, and as a result Rwanda is turning away from its francophone and Catholic heritage. The country has become a member of the Commonwealth, and is proving to be fertile ground for fundamentalist evangelicals.

All of this charitable work and prayer did not prevent Mr Crabb from becoming mired in the MPs' expenses scandal, when it emerged that he had indulged in a spot of "flipping" which eventually led to a bedroom in a shared flat being designated as his main home.

A glance at the Register of Interests shows trips to various exotic destinations being paid for by a whole host of organisations, including Christian Aid, Oxfam Novib, International Alert, ActionAid and Christian Solidarity Worldwide (president Jonathan Aitken, former jailbird and disgraced ex-Tory minister) . In 2005 on another visit to India, we read that flights were paid for by Dr Liam Fox's office with a donation from a man described as a Middlesex businessman called Stanley Fink*. Dr Fox's office operated like a right-wing travel agency, it would seem.

In common with his neighbour, Simon Hart, Stephen Crabb does not have a lot of time for the Welsh language. His website makes no reference to it, and he supported the government's plans to undermine S4C. Nevertheless, the constituency includes one of the cradles of Welsh culture in the northern part of the county, with its distinctive dialect, its role in the Mabinogion and its association with Waldo Williams, possibly the most popular of all Welsh poets, and a pacifist who went to jail for his beliefs. The Preselau were also the scene of a famous battle between chapel ministers and their congregations on the one side, and the Ministry of Defence on the other which wanted to turn the mountains into a giant military playground after the Second World War.

At a meeting of Cymdeithas yr Iaith (the Welsh Language Society) in Mr Crabb's constituency at Crymych last year, residents were less than admiring of the county's two Tory MPs, who it seems are known affectionately as "Crap and Fart".

Mr Crabb comes across like some latterday Mrs Jellyby, fretting about the far-flung Christians of Orissa and Burma, and championing Israeli security. In the recent scandal involving Dr Liam Fox, we learned of an agenda to strengthen ties with the American Right and Israel, with a motley mix of arms dealers, Tea Party lunatics and Christian fundamentalists trying to shape government policy here. And it is in part this mix of friends and associates that links our Mrs Jellyby with the neighbouring fox hunting squire in Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, another character straight out of the pages of Victorian literature.

* Stanley Fink would appear to be the same Stanley Fink who is co-treasurer of the Conservative Party, a hedge fund manager and pal of Lord Levy. Lord Levy, it will be remembered, is Tony Blair's friend who was interviewed by the police as part of the Cash for Honours scandal. What a small world.

Endangered species: Pembrokeshire's Tory MPs - 1. Simon Hart

A couple of reports in this week's Carmarthen Journal and a couple of hours of unexpected spare time have prompted Y Cneifiwr to lift a stone or two and take a closer look at local Tory boy Simon Hart, MP for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire.

Simon Hart made it into the local press this week following the unfortunate discovery that his (apparently now former) party chairman, Stephen Crouch, was "granted a meeting with the arms sales minister Gerald Howarth, at the request of Mr Fox [Dr Liam Fox, disgraced former Defence Secretary, ed.], after secretly donating a reported £20,000 to fund the expenses of Mr Werritty [Dr Fox's lobbyist friend, ed.]."

Stephen Crouch was still named as constituency chairman on Mr Hart's website when the story broke, although it now seems that he has moved on to unknown new pastures, and was "not available for comment".

Although Mr Hart attempted to distance himself from Crouch, claiming that they had not been in touch for a "couple of years" and that it was not practical to ask volunteers to fill out "life history forms", we are informed,  "Last year Mr Hart told the Evening Post a £5,000 donation to the association from Tony Buckingham, who was a partner of former South African mercenary army, Executive Outcomes, had come through Mr Crouch."

A bit odd that a Conservative MP who was elected as recently as May 2010 should not have spoken to his constituency chairman for a couple of years.


Strange also, given that there has been so little contact and that Mr Hart knew so little about his associate's background, that Mr Hart's website nevertheless informed us (until a few days ago) that, "A veteran of a number of Conservative Westminster campaigns around the UK, Stephen is currently working in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq as an advisor to governmental, non-governmental, and economic institutions."

Is it me, or is there a rather unpleasant smell? There's plenty more unsavoury stuff on Crouch and friends (see the Guardian and an interesting profile from Powerbase).

But Mr Hart has other interesting friends, as we can see from the House of Commons Register of Members' Interests. These include Mr M A R Galadari, who comes from one of the most influential families in Dubai and runs the emirate's English language newspaper the Khaleej Times. Mr Galadari generously gave Mr Hart tickets and hospitality to the value of £1,190 (+VAT) to watch a cricket match. Other generous benefactors include Lord Daresbury, a fox hunting lord and businessman, and a Mr Johan Christoffersen, who runs a New York-based hedge fund as well as the Isle of Wight Hunt.

Prior to becoming an MP, Mr Hart was chief executive of the Countryside Alliance in its militant huntin', shootin' and fishin' phase. He grew up in the Cotswolds, now the stomping ground of his boss and the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, before going on to public school at Radley, followed by the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. It will come as no surprise to know that he was also a very enthusiastic member of the Territorial Army.

His voting record is what you would expect: in favour of raising university tuition fees, free schools, a Trident replacement and raising VAT. He is against proportional representation. He is quite active in parliament, and has asked quite a number of written questions, including several on squirrels.

The CV reads like a standard roll call from the pages of County Life (for which Mr Hart has been a contributor): Cotswolds, hunting and shooting, minor public school, Cirencester, Territorial Army. His friends appears to be rather more exotic, with their Middle Eastern, South African mercenary and arms dealership connections.

None of this screams Welsh, does it? Mr Hart's pronouncements on the future of S4C and his website's complete lack of any reference to the Welsh language show that the language spoken by many of his constituents is nowhere on his priority list.

The constituency of Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire is in fact a very odd creature indeed, taking in as it does anglophone seaside resorts such as Tenby and Saundersfoot and the rural west of Carmarthenshire, which in parts has a very strong Welsh identity.

Let's hope that the forthcoming boundary changes will persuade Mr Hart to take look for a seat in the shires of England, which is where he belongs.

Town Planning - pulling in opposite directions

Golwg 360 has carried two interesting reports - one on plans for a huge new Sainsbury's store in Haverfordwest, and the second on a speech given by Huw Lewis, Minister for Housing, Regeneration and Heritage in which he promises to restore town centres and seaside towns.

The Haverfordwest story is sadly typical of what has been happening elsewhere in South West Wales, with a large supermarket chain announcing plans to build a huge new store on the outskirts of a market town and promises to create lots of new jobs (500 in the case of Haverfordwest). Typical also is the reaction of the county council, in this case Pembrokeshire, with the council leader almost beside himself with joy ("very exciting proposal for the county and the town.....most encouraging that a leading supermarket group should have the confidence to commit to what could be a huge investment...."). All of that before so much as a planning application has been submitted (members of the planning committee take note - he's giving you a hint).

The site itself is owned by a property development company called Conygar, which is also planning to build 900 houses adjacent to the supermarket. Conygar appears to be particularly active in Wales, with other major developments in Fishguard and Holyhead.

A spokesperson for the council added that the council was not aware of any opposition to the development, although as BBC reporter Aled Scourfield quickly established the next day, the news has received a very mixed reception among local people. Perhaps the council should get out more, although with Conygar planning three major developments in the county, it is unlikely that the council will be in listening mode to any objectors.

For anyone who has not been to Haverfordwest for a while, you will be in for a surprise. A large new retail park has opened outside the town next to Withybush Hospital, with a Marks & Spencer, Boot's, Next and other big name stores. The effect on the town centre itself can easily be imagined. It might as well have been fire bombed.

So while local authority planning officers bang on and on about the sanctity of sequential development and their preference for retail development in town centres, you might wonder why they are so supportive of developments out of town everywhere you look.

Huw Lewis deserves praise for his plans, but he would be well advised to get his message across to the county councils first.

More Junk Mail - Carmarthenshire's view of public opinion

Carmarthenshire County Council has a lot of experience in misrepresenting the level of public opposition to its plans. If you think as a concerned member of the public that your signature on a petition, or that letter you wrote will register as an objection, think again.

The latest example of this concerns the extremely controversial proposal to close Pantycelyn School in Llandovery and merge it with Ysgol Tregib in Llandeilo. The proposal will leave this proud and ancient market town without a state secondary school, one of the most vital ingredients in creating a strong and sustainable local economy.

The county council has decided to plough ahead with its plans despite massive local opposition, with the Director of Education, Robert Sully, once again taking a swipe in the press against objectors. Previously he railed against what he felt was misrepresentation of his plans by local people and criticised the board of governors, parents and others for campaigning against them. Now he says there were just 36 objections, and as none of them had anything new to say, he feels justified in pressing on.

The consultation process is immensely complex, as Mr Sully knows from personal experience. He has tripped himself up on at least two occasions, resulting in the scandal of the school with no pupils in Capel Iwan and a cock-up over the Dinefwr consultation timetable.

The statutory consultation process was preceded by an earlier, informal, consultation in which thousands of people objected. A petition with 3,000 names fell foul of the council's rules and was initially rejected because it had not been handed in on time. Eventually the council relented.

But what many objectors failed to understand was that they were expected to write in twice to register their objection: once in the informal consultation, and again in the formal consultation. The result was that objections from organisations such as the Ysgol Pantycelyn Action Group, the board of governors and others bodies representing large numbers of parents, residents and students counted only once, and somehow, the 150-odd letters received were subsequently sifted down by the council's officers to just 36.

A couple of months ago the people of Newcastle Emlyn experienced something similar when the council decided a controversial planning application for a supermarket. When the first planning application was submitted in 2009, around 900 objections were received by the council. That application was rejected, and a new and almost identical application was re-submitted by the same developer a couple of months later. We asked if the objections from the first application could be taken into account in the second application, since apart from moving the building by a few feet, the application was in every respect the same.

No, came the answer. So objectors scrambled and collected around 700 letters of objection to the "new" application. In addition, about 130 others wrote in independently.

When the planning officer's report was finally published, the council stated that only 130-odd objections had been received. The 700 others had not been counted. The result was, of course, that the strength of public opposition to the scheme was dramatically understated.

The Action Group spearheading the campaign wrote to the Head of Planning before the planning meeting pointing out that it had signed receipts from his department for 700 letters and asked for an explanation. Silence. Minutes before the planning meeting itself, one of the spokesmen for the group asked the Head of Planning whether the committee would be told about the missing letters.

Finally, the councillors were told that another batch of 700 letters had been received, but because they were identical, they had not been counted.

So there you are, your concerns are nothing more than junk mail in the eyes of the council.

Alarm Bells - Little Richard versus Cliff Richard

More on this week's meeting of Carmarthenshire's Executive Board meeting.

As Caebrwyn has pointed out, the board considered two "exempt" reports at the end of the meeting, meaning that the public (all one of them) were asked to leave so that two reports on the Towy Community Church bowling alley project and the former Technium site at Dafen in Llanelli could be approved in secret.

The Towy Community Church project is worth looking at in some detail, because alarm bells should be ringing in County Hall about something which could swallow up huge amounts of taxpayers' money.

The church itself is an evangelical grouping run by a married couple, Mark and Nicola Bennett, and it has hugely ambitious plans for not just a 10 pin bowling alley, but also a conference centre, a cafe, a furniture recycling centre, a food bank, a debt counselling service, a performing arts venue for teenagers and a service aimed at helping what evangelicals might describe as "fallen women" (see the link here).

There is no reason to question the group's sincerity, and depending on your point of view, at least some of these activities could be of benefit to local people. Of course, we already have a national network called Citizen's Advice run by volunteers to help with things like debt counselling, and there are many charities involved in helping women who are the victims of violence and abuse, or struggling to escape from prostitution and drug and alcohol dependency. Why does Carmarthen need more of these? Why don't church members simply go and join existing charities and contribute that way? After all, pooling resources is usually much more effective than creating more splinter groups.

The answer would presumably be that they want their services to reflect their own particular ethos, and being evangelicals, they almost certainly also see this as a way of getting new recruits.

Which brings us to the bowling alley. When you think about bowling alleys, the image conjured up is usually 1950s America, with lots of chrome, burgers, popcorn, bottles of Budweiser and rock 'n' roll. Somehow, it's hard to see the church approving the sale of alcohol or playing Little Richard's hits. Cliff Richard, perhaps.

So how does a bowling alley fit in with the church's "vision"? Who are the potential customers? Given that the site in Johnstown is quite a long way out of the town centre, and that bowling alleys are not cheap, it is unlikely to become a mecca for teenagers negotiating the dual carriageways and roundabouts on foot. And would they really want to spend a wholesome evening sipping fruit juices, listening to gospel rock and reading evangelical pamphlets? Much the same probably applies to the bulk of the rest of the town's sinful citizens.

Apart from its two full-time directors, Mr and Mrs Bennett, does the church have any experience or expertise in running a huge, multi-million pound project? Is it going to employ someone who does? Questions, questions, and very few answers.

Let's look at some of the numbers.

The bowling alley is just one phase of this ambitious project, and is budgeted to come in at £2.25 million. Where is this money coming from given that the church itself had managed, according to the county council's report earlier this year, to raise just £17,000 towards the cost?

The Lottery has weighed in with a grant of just under £800,000 (£798,202 to be precise). Now here's a funny thing. When councillors were given sight of the numbers earlier this year, they were told by the Chief Executive that the Lottery grant was £500,000. Somehow, £300,000 appear to have gone astray somewhere.

In addition to the Lottery, the council had also approved grants totalling £104,000, with a further £300,000 from the Wales Community Facilities and Activities Fund, plus £68,000 pending from the Wales Rural Development Plan.

One of the commercial banks bailed out a couple of years back with taxpayers' money had advanced loans to the church approaching £750,000, leaving a shortfall of £280,000 which Carmarthenshire agreed to fill. Strangely, the shortfall was almost equal to the missing £300,000 from the Lottery grant.

In addition to the grants and other council funding, the county council also agreed to lease the former St Ivel creamery to the church on a peppercorn lease for 99 years. The value of the site, purchased just a couple of years previously by the council as a "strategic investment", was put at £750,000.

As things stood in May, therefore, the council's contribution to the project was well in excess of £1 million.

All of this information was declared exempt on the grounds that disclosure might damage the council's own financial interests. Let's test that claim.

There are five main parties to this agreement: the church itself with an equity stake of just £17,000 (rather less than 1% of the project cost); the county council; the Welsh Government through its grants; the Lottery and the bank, with the bank being the sole truly commercial operation involved.

As anyone who has tried to borrow money from a bank will know, a loan of £750,000 will come with a lot of strings attached. It will have to be secured on assets, and given that the church appears to have no significant assets (it does not even own a church building), an important question has to be: what is the security for these loans? Surely not the council-owned building? Or is the council acting as guarantor? If the project goes belly up after all the cash has been spent, who will pick up the pieces?

Also, as anyone will know, no bank will advance sums of this kind without conducting exhaustive enquiries into every aspect of the project and its funding. No stone will have been left unturned, and every last dot and comma of the council's commitment will have been disclosed to the bank.

In other words, we can take it as read that all of the parties to the agreement will have had full sight of all of the numbers. The only one which hasn't is the sixth party, which is you, me and the rest of the taxpaying public.

Against that background, it is hard to see how the public interest test could have been applied to exempt this information from publication.

Almost certainly the same applies to the Technium site in Llanelli, which the council is proposing to lease or purchase from the Welsh Government. Unless there is some hitherto undisclosed private sector operator involved, this transaction would appear to be taking place between two arms of government with public money. Again, the public interest test does not appear to have been applied correctly.

The fact that both of these projects (the bowling alley and Technium) have come back to the Executive Board suggests that there have been significant new developments which require decisions taken at the most senior level. It is a fair bet that in the case of the bowling alley, the reason could well be that the council is being asked to deepen its commitment.