Goose stepping to victory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through a glass darkly - the local press and Cantref

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Letter from Port Talbot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help yourselves to another cappuccino.