Llanelli Ice Cream Wars

At last, a blogpost about something other than Llangennech Labour.

When historians sit down to analyse the turbulent times we live in at some point in the future, one phenomenon which will probably puzzle them as much as it does us is why the explosive growth in Labour Party membership numbers has been accompanied by a massive slump in the party's electoral fortunes.

Unlike us, historians will know whether or not the decline we are now witnessing really was terminal.

If you are reading this, future historians of Wales, you may also want to examine why in some places the influx of new members with all their hopes for change actually achieved the reverse, with the gnarled and rotten old guard strengthening its grip on the party.

Llanelli is a case in point. The same old faces are increasing their grip on the party, intimidation and bullying are rife, and just two families and their friends dominate the show in a town with a population of around 50,000.

Power grab

This week saw a small coup d'etat on Llanelli Rural Council. No dead and not many injured, but the Labour Party's reputation was shot to pieces as 75 year-old Tegwen Devichand seized control.

By all accounts, the meeting was extremely heated, with Cllr Sharen Davies, Devichand's daughter, once again in the thick of it, heckling and shouting down her opponents. Several councillors left early, citing intimidation and personal abuse, with Sharen Davies accusing one councillor of corruption.

Cneifiwr understands that formal complaints have been made about the conduct of some of the Labour councillors, and that the legality of the motion which triggered the change of control is being challenged.

In a separate move, Cneifiwr understands that Labour Party HQ is conducting an investigation into other allegations made against Cllrs Devichand and Davies in particular.

The following account is based on a summary provided by Cllr Martin Davies, the Plaid leader on Llanelli Rural Council, and a similar explanation appears in this week's Herald.

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To explain what has happened, we need to go back to December 2012 when two defections from Labour to Independent (Cllrs. Akhtar and Bowen) meant that the Plaid/Independent coalition had the numbers to take  control of the council. Plaid and the Independents could have done this in January 2013, but to save on costs, disruption and extra work for staff, and after a request from Councillor Bill Thomas (Labour), the then leader of council, to 'leave things as they were', the opposition parties waited until the new council year in May 2013.

[Cllr Thomas is no longer a member of the council. Correction: He is. Ed]

Committees are established at the AGM in May, and since 2008, save for two exceptions (the death of Cllr Edwards, and a clash of interests by Cllr Cundy) they stay and have stayed unchanged throughout the council year. If the leader changes, it has repercussions for the entire membership of all committees. A number of changes will now be required and this of course will lead to more administrative work. 

From the council's point of view this week's power grab by Cllr Devichand is entirely pointless; it will have to be ratified at the next monthly meeting in March, and then changes will have to be made to the committees. Such changes will have to be put on the agenda of (presumably) the March meeting. Of course, election purdah kicks in on March 28, therefore being leader of council is of no benefit except as a political weapon, in time for this year's elections.

A former Plaid councillor, Cllr Stephen Donoghue, 'crossed the floor' to Labour in November, giving Labour the numbers it needed, and it could have tabled this motion some time ago. Just recently Cllr Devichand was very critical of a WAG bid to change the council's name, citing it to be a waste of money. But it appears that wasting scarce Rural Council money on unnecessary changes is OK.

The effect of Cllr Devichand's manoeuvre, therefore, is to put her in charge of the council with just six weeks to go before its goes into election mode, with a lot of time and resources now having to be spent on changing the council's administration.

In something of an understatement, Cllr Martin Davies added, "It concerns me that events like those witnessed this evening risk bringing the Rural Council into disrepute."

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Explaining her actions to the Herald, Cllr Devichand justifies this abrupt change of control so close to an election by arguing at some length that she and her Labour colleagues felt obliged to move because attendance at council meetings had been so low.* Stretching credibility to snapping point, she also claims that she had no wish to become leader, but did so at the urging of her fanbase.

[*Although she did not say so, she was referring to the Independents. Ed]

If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

Countering that argument, Cllr Giles Morgan (Independent) told the newspaper that the main reason why the Independents' attendance figures were poor was because of intimidation and bullying, principally by Cllrs Devichand and Davies.

As readers of this blog will recall, one particular incident involving Cllrs Devichand and Bowen ended up with the Public Services Ombudsman, with allegations of pushing, shoving, foul language, punches and slaps being traded.
 

Fozia and Shahana

Readers may also recall that Fozia Akhtar dramatically resigned from the Labour Party in 2013, accusing Tegwen Devichand and her daughter Sharen Davies of bullying.

It is now clear that there has been an equally dramatic reconciliation between these formerly warring parties.

According to local sources, Fozia's large extended family signed up en masse to Labour, and ward party politics being what they are, that gave them sufficient clout to call the shots in Llwynhendy where Sharen Davies is a county councillor.

The Gucci handbags and knuckle dusters were put aside and a deal struck. The Devichand clan and friends would support Fozia's candidacy in Llwynhendy, in return for Fozia's clan's support for Sharen.

In addition, it was agreed that both clans would support installing Fozia's sister, Shahana Najmi, as candidate for the county council in Lliedi alongside young Rob James who has moved down from Neath and is very keen to reboot his so far unsuccessful political career.

Rob's arrival in Lliedi and the parachuting in of Shahana meant that "sadly", the two incumbent councillors, Bill Thomas and Jan Williams had to be put out to grass. 

According to recent reports, Bill Thomas may yet throw his hat into the ring in the May elections as an unaffiliated independent.

Prunes

Shahana Najmi is a serving councillor on Llanelli Town Council and a former mayor.


One of her claims to fame was that she ran the John Street Post Office in Llanelli, a business venture which came to an abrupt end amid a swirl of rumours, with Shahana herself being locked out of the building minus her very smart handbag and mobile phone.

The post office was run by a company called Starnine Ltd, with Shahana Najmi being the sole remaining director when the company went bust and the receivers were brought in at the end of 2013.

Her time as mayor of Llanelli was also not without controversy, and she came in for considerable criticism when she headed a Labour delegation, including herself and the deputy mayor, to Agen in France for that town's annual Prune Festival at considerable expense to Llanelli's taxpayers on, cough, vital council business.

One remarkable aspect of this trip was not just that it was a Labour-only affair, but also that a series of past Llanelli mayors, including Bill Thomas (Lab), had passed up the opportunity to sample the delights of the prune. Bill Thomas told councillors that he had been invited twice before, but had not gone. 

Times may be hard, but Shahana clearly knows a trough when she sees one.

Statistics

Rob James was said to be "tamping" when he discovered that Tegwen Devichand had further extended her powerbase onto his newly adopted patch, but last week he brushed himself down and gave an extended interview with all the usual guff about standing up for his new community to the Herald.

The Herald interviewer pointed out rather unkindly that his attendance record as a councillor in Neath Port Talbot over the last five years had been the subject of some criticism. Or to put it another way, once he had bagged his seat, his enthusiasm for standing up for his voters had waned rather dramatically. For much of 2016 he clocked up a record which is almost as bad as Keri Thomas's (Labour, Tyisha), with 0% attendances on the four committees he was nominally a member of.

Ah well, he replied, being a councillor was not all about showing up to meetings. True enough, but if other councillors followed his example, local government would grind to a halt.

And anyway, he continued, he had a day job, and that had made attending to council business difficult. 

It would have been rude to ask why he had decided to stand for election in the first place.

Rob continued to brazen things out by telling the newspaper that his attendance record in Neath Port Talbot  had improved dramatically over the last six months (i.e. since bloggers pointed out just how bad his stats were), and were now running at 90%!

This spectacular improvement can be put down to two things: a very poor grasp of basic maths and Rob's resignation from all committee posts.

According to local sources, he was also disqualified or politely asked to resign from two school governorships in Neath after failing to turn up to any meetings at all.

The Herald interview was by and large a pretty unremarkable mix of self-justification and platitudes, but Rob James went off piste spectacularly at one point to call for a vote of no confidence in the chief executive of Carmarthenshire County Council.

Remarkably, this earned him a very sharp rebuke from Paul Harries, another Labour candidate who is standing in Swiss Valley.

In a letter to the Herald, Harries pointed out that reckless statements like this could end up costing the taxpayer huge amounts of money because if it ever comes to the point where the council attempts to free itself of its Head of Paid Service, the highly litigious Mr James would be able to point to Rob James's interview and claim unfair dismissal.

With three months to go, Labour's election campaign is already proving to be comedy gold.

  

Llangennech - A Suspension and Tegwen's Reaction

Events have moved so fast over the last week, and so much information has come in that this blog will post two separate pieces today.

Early yesterday evening reports came in that one or more Labour Party members had been suspended in the Llanelli area. The best information available is that, so far at least, just one person is involved, and that the decision was made not in Cardiff, but in London after Jeremy Corbyn intervened.

If that is correct, it speaks volumes about the 'Welsh' Labour Party. Despite having clear and unequivocal evidence of collusion between Labour Party members and UKIP, despite clear evidence that some members have been flirting with the extreme right, and despite the open contempt shown by a raft of Labour figures, including Llanelli's AM, Lee Waters, councillors and candidates for official party policy, the best Carwyn Jones could come up with was to try to shift responsibility for sorting out the mess onto Carmarthenshire County Council.

Earlier in the day Jonathan Edwards MP wrote to Corbyn, and it would seem that it was Jonathan's letter that finally produced action.


The letter is worth producing in full:

"Annwyl Jeremy,

Labour party members campaigning with UKIP in Carmarthenshire

I write an open letter to bring to your attention the activities of Labour activists in Carmarthenshire which I know, having worked with you over a number of years, will cause you considerable concern.

Since I was elected to the House of Commons, you and I have both campaigned on fundamental issues such as human rights; protection of minorities; religious and cultural diversity; solidarity with working people; an ethical foreign policy; peace and global disarmament.  I know these are values which are fundamentally important to you as a progressive politician.  Above all, we stand on a common platform against the politics of the far right which bases its politics on sowing division and hatred and, in particular, the targeting of minorities.

I regret to inform you of the activities of Labour party members and activists in the Llanelli constituency in relation to Welsh medium education in the village of Llangennech. 

I am sure you will be familiar with the Labour Welsh Government's education strategy of promoting and increasing bilingual education provision as part of its strategy to achieve one million Welsh speakers.  Welsh as a language faces significant pressures in its traditional heartlands, a social symptom of economic decline as our young people have to move to find meaningful work.  Increasing bilingual education provision is a key part of the strategy supported by both Labour and Plaid Cymru at a national level.

Regrettably, the Labour party in Llanelli has run a nasty, divisive campaign against the plans of the local Plaid Cymru-led Council to implement a policy initiated by the then Labour-run Council administration and approved by the Labour Welsh Government.  I am informed by local residents that parents who support the plans have been intimidated by local activists.

Most surprising to you might be the fact that one Labour County Councillor referred to bilingual education as "apartheid" during a debate in the local Council.   These actions are undoubtedly influenced by political considerations as we approach this year's local authority elections.  Both County Council seats in Llangennech are held by Plaid Cymru. 

I know it will be an issue of grave concern to you that the Labour party in Llanelli is actively coordinating efforts with UKIP in Llangennech community.  UKIP Assembly Member Neil Hamilton recently campaigned with Labour in Llangennech – a visit we now know was coordinated in liaison with the official Labour party candidate for Llangennech ward.  Labour party members pictured on social media wearing Labour party rosettes are too seen in the picture with UKIP's Neil Hamilton. Furthermore, recent comments to local media from a Labour supporter in Llangennech suggest your party will contest the Llangennech Community Council elections in a joint campaign with UKIP.

Finally, and perhaps most shocking, I have seen that the Labour supporter who is orchestrating this joint campaign with UKIP has shared deplorable images from the Tea Party and English Defence League on social media.

Sadly, none of the issues I raise are a surprise to me.  The institutional anti-Welsh prejudice of Labour locally is why working class politicians like myself find their natural home in Plaid Cymru.  However, I am sure considering your principled position on these issues you would be horrified by the activities of these representatives of your party.  Furthermore, with these activities taking place within the constituency of your Shadow Defence Secretary, I am sure you will want to ensure your Shadow Cabinet is not brought into disrepute by these worryingly close links with UKIP.

I would hope that you, like me, would consider the fight against intolerance, prejudice and the far right as the struggle of our times.  If we are to succeed there must be no compromise in our rejection of the politics of hate and division.      

I ask that you, as the Leader of the Labour Party, investigate the activities of Labour members in the Llanelli constituency to ensure the voice and opinions of the far right are not given a platform in your party membership or those who seek public office in your party's name.

Yn gywir iawn,

Jonathan Edwards AS/MP

Dwyrain Caerfyrdin a Dinefwr / Carmarthen East and Dinefwr"

_______________________

Following news that there had been a suspension, Jonathan was asked by the press for his response:

"It seems that Jeremy Corbyn has responded to the worrying collusion between his party and UKIP within a matter of hours, whilst the First Minister, Labour officials in Wales and elected members in Llanelli have done nothing for weeks.

"A suspension and investigation is a welcome course of action but the scope of it must be expanded to suspend all members and candidates that we have shown to be involved in actively campaigning with UKIP or have permitted such cooperation.  The toxic actions of the Labour party in Llangennech are not the result of just one individual.

"As this investigation gets underway, I would expect all those who have perpetuated the divisive rhetoric of the far right, including those who brand this Welsh Government policy as 'apartheid' to be barred from standing for public office in the name of the Labour Party.

"Furthermore, with only three Labour councillors voting to support its own policy on Welsh medium education, Labour head office should ask itself whether those who disregard party policy should be allowed to represent the party at all."

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A defining characteristic of the Labour Party in Llanelli (and the Amman Valley for that matter) is the intensely tribal nature of their politics, and it will be anathema to many that it was Jonathan's intervention which triggered the suspension.

If dissenting voices have proof that the suspension had nothing to do with Jonathan Edwards, this blog will be pleased to publish it.

When it comes to tribalism, no Labour Party figure could be more tribal than the grande dame of Llanelli Labour, Tegwen Devichand, about whom much more in the second piece which will follow later today.

As we have seen, Tegwen Devichand was one of the first to ship up outside the school in Llangennech last year to fan the flames of bigotry and division. 

The following screenshot was taken at 7pm last night and shows that, with breathtaking chutzpah, she responded to the news of the suspension by "liking" Jonathan's letter three quarters of an hour earlier.

 

Having finally sensed which way the wind was blowing, it seems that self-preservation kicked in at the very last minute.

Llangennech: Lee's Leadership

A week has now gone by since the Hamiltons' outing to Llangennech, and if anything the fallout is intensifying.

Attention has now turned to Lee Waters AM who is facing scrutiny for his role in the whole Llangennech saga. What did he know? What has been his relationship with the group running the school campaign, and what has he said and done?

Fortunately, thanks to public pronouncements and social media, we know quite a lot about Lee Waters' role in all of this, and we can say for certainty that his involvement goes back a long way.

Back in August 2016, this blog wrote an open letter to Lee Waters asking him to show real, decisive leadership. Needless to say, the letter did not receive a reply.

Two things were happening at the time. First, the Labour leadership contest between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith was in full swing. Waters backed Smith, as did Nia Griffith, which can't have gone down well with many of the movers and shakers in the Llanelli Labour Party, not to mention people like Michaela Beddows who had joined to support Corbyn, despite holding views which he would find completely repugnant.

Whenever there is a row in Llanelli, you can be sure that Tegwen Devichand will be close by, and Cneifiwr noted her less than whole-hearted support for her MP:

Taking up her knitting and her seat in the viewing area at the foot of the guillotine, Tegwen Devichand told the Carmarthenshire Herald this week that, "Nia is entitled to her opinion. When it comes to re-election, if people want to re-elect her, only time will tell".

Meanwhile, Lee Waters was writing about the virtues of what he called "Leadership".

At the same time as war was raging in the Labour Party, the Llangennech school campaign was in full swing, and it was already clear that the campaigners had developed close bonds with some very extreme elements. As this blog noted earlier this week, Tegwen Devichand shipped up outside the school in Llangennech at a very early stage, even though Llangennech is not on her patch.

Demonstrating what he meant by "Leadership", Lee Waters' response to the school campaign was first to keep a very, very low profile. But then, at the end of July 2016, he came out with what he said was his first public pronouncement on the issue. That suggests that behind the scenes discussions had been going on for some time.

Showing yet more "Leadership", Waters sided with the campaigners while claiming that he supported his government's policy on extending Welsh medium education, a stance which would leave the policies being pursued by Alun Davies and Carwyn Jones dead in the water.

Lee Waters had decided that the best approach would be to ride the tiger of intolerance and ignorance in the hope of picking up a few more votes, while keeping his fingers crossed that the tiger would not turn on him.

It is clear that Lee Waters has maintained close links to the Llangennech campaigners. Nobody would accuse Waters of being lacking in grey matter. Was he really unaware, with his background, that they held views and were consorting with extremists diametrically opposed to the values the Labour Party is supposed to stand for?

The ties between Waters and the campaign group have continued right up to the present, as this leaked very recent exchange from a closed Facebook group shows:

Waters was aware that the Hamiltons were being invited to Llangennech, and he knew that Beddows and Jacqueline Seward, both Labour Party members, had taken the lead in arranging the visit and the PR.

The visit involved other Labour members and activists as well, as we know from a wealth of photographic evidence.

Once again, Waters showed what he means by "Leadership".

Instead of saying, "this visit must be cancelled, and under no circumstances must any member of the Labour Party associate themselves with it. In fact, by liaising with UKIP, you have broken party rules and must now face disciplinary proceedings", Lee's response was "be careful".

Neil Hamilton must be chuckling away to himself as he tucks into his full English in Wiltshire.

Llangennech - More News from the Vipers Nest

Update 16 February

Operation Smoke and Mirrors has clearly begun in Llangennech, with one anonymous source having sent several convoluted comments to this blog with the aim of trying to prove that Labour was not really involved in arranging and stage managing Neil Hamilton's visit to the village.

He (and Anon is almost certainly one of those pictured below) focusses on one woman in particular, claiming that she is not a Labour Party member or activist.

Rather odd, then, that this individual should have been pictured out canvassing with Jacqueline Seward while appearing in the main profile picture of Llangennech Labour's Twitter account, wearing a red rosette.

Anon also overlooks Jacqueline Seward's role in setting up the Hamilton visit.

As noted below, this unfortunate picture has now been removed from the account in an attempt to rewrite history.

 

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It was one of those rare occasions when Kevin Madge, former Labour leader of Carmarthenshire County Council, got something right.

"Carwyn won't forget Carmarthenshire", he told councillors a few years back.

And how right he was. There is probably not much that disturbs the slumbers of our First Minister, but the thought of the Labour Party in Carmarthenshire must have him waking up in a cold sweat.

Fallout from the row in Llangennech reached the Senedd yesterday, with Leanne Wood taking Carwyn to task for the conduct of Labour councillors, candidates and members in Carmarthenshire and the collaboration between Labour and UKIP in Llangennech. They were trashing Carwyn's policies. What was he going to do about it?

Carwyn responded with his Uncle Jim Callaghan routine. Everyone needed to calm down and pipe down. He was aware that comments had been made that he did not agree with, but if anyone thought he was about to take responsibility and read the Riot Act, they shouldn't be allowed out on their own.

Nothing to do with me, Sunny Jim, was his message. It was for Carmarthenshire County Council to explain their decisions and sort this out, although quite how the county council is expected to sort out the sewer that is Labour in Llanelli, he did not say.

Meanwhile, Nia Griffith and Lee Waters have been keeping their heads down as the lid has been lifted on the dysfunctional and toxic nature of their constituency party, and with good reason.

First, both of them have been helping to fan the flames of intolerance and prejudice. Recently Nia Griffith appeared on the panel of Radio Four's Any Questions in Tywyn. A member of the audience who turned out to be a Conservative Party activist and former election agent, asked which should be prioritised: spending on the Welsh language or spending on social care.

Instead of explaining that spending on the language is an infinitesimally small part of government spending (a fraction of 1%), she played to the gallery.

Waters has gone rather further in recent months, siding with the group which arranged the Hamiltons' visit to Llangennech, some of whose members have been cosying up to neo-Nazis and others on the extreme right.

Second, as we shall see, their constituency party has spiralled way out of control, and they can only look impotently on.

Behind the scenes, however, there are signs that alarm bells have finally started to ring at Labour HQ. An anonymous source from Far Right Watch announced on Twitter that the "local party" was aware of the situation and intended to deal with it.

It is not clear what this source, almost certainly watching aghast from somewhere in England, meant by "local party". Was it "Welsh" Labour or the local constituency party? If the latter, there is zero likelihood that anything will be done to tackle the real causes of the party's problems in Llanelli and the surrounding area.

It is a mark of how messed up things are that this information had to be gleaned from a Labour source based far away from Llanelli rather than the MP or AM.

Ferrets in a Sack

That there are those who despair about what is happening to Labour in Llanelli is clear from a leaked e-mail  from a Labour activist to the party's county councillors. Referring to this blog and likening the situation to ferrets in a sack, "Mr T" asks,

Have you seen this? Honestly, you couldn't make it up - what a bunch of idiots we are!!

It's no wonder we could be wiped out after May's elections!

Putting aside the vile slur on the good character of ferrets who are really much nicer than the key players in this soap opera, Mr T was clearly very naive if he thought his fears were going to be taken seriously.

First to reply was Cllr Louvain Roberts who assured him that not all of Cneifiwr's facts were correct.

No doubt Mr T is an intelligent soul, and so he would have inferred from that answer that Cllr Roberts acknowledges that some at least of the myriad accusations are indeed correct.

Needless to say, Tegwen Devichand was having none of it.

If you believe half the rubbish that comes out of this blogger mouth. He has lost his vocation in life.
He'd be better off writing fairy stories.*

*Punctuation courtesy of Y Cneifiwr.


As Kevin Madge might say using one of his favourite cliches, the ostriches replied to Mr T's concerns by running around with their heads in the sand.

Airbrushed and secret

One of the first signs that something may be going on was a sudden change in the profile of the Twitter account of Llangennech Labour. Until now it had a large picture of various members and activists, several of whom were involved in arranging the Hamiltons' visit to the village last week. One or two of them have also been flirting with fascist agitators and neo-Nazi groups.

Suddenly yesterday, the picture was gone, replaced with photos showing only the two Labour candidates for Carmarthenshire County Council, Gary 'Poumista' Jones, who hails from somewhere near Aberdare, and Jacqueline Seward, who was closely involved in arranging the Hamiltons' outing to Llangennech and managing the PR side of the trip.

As readers of this blog have seen, her friends include the sinister Jacques Protic, author of the Glasnost hate site.

One of the pictures on the account shows Jones and Seward rushing away from a battered old campervan, possibly after an encounter with a voter.

Hours later, and the account went 'protected', meaning that its tweets can now only be viewed by permission of the account holder. That is a truly remarkable state of affairs for what is presumably an official account belonging to a mainstream political party.

What are they hiding? Is a gigantic spring-clean now in progress?

Sacrificial lamb

Members and would-be members of the Labour Party have been expelled or barred for the most trivial of offences. You can be barred, for example, for retweeting anything produced by the Green Party.

On the other hand, Jacqueline Seward is still the official Labour Party candidate despite cwtshing up to UKIP, and Michaela Beddows appears still to be a member despite retweeting material from the neo-Nazi EDL and her open flirtation with UKIP.

Beddows, whose Twitter account is now also protected, told the world last year that she had joined Labour to support Jeremy Corbyn, and also that she was planning to stand for election as a community councillor in May.

It remains to be seen what, if anything, will happen to the pair, but it is now unlikely that Beddows will end up sitting on Llangennech community council wearing a Labour rosette. Perhaps she will offer her services to UKIP or the EDL.

Jacqueline Seward's case is more interesting, but if she remains as the official candidate, Labour will be writing off their chances in Llangennech.

Gary Jones' role in the UKIP scandal should also be looked at closely if the Inquisition is brought in. Jones has been a key player in the toxic anti-Welsh medium campaign from the start, coaching Beddows and others.

What is much more unlikely is that the Labour Party will take action to get to the heart of its problems in the Llanelli area by tackling the bigger fish.

Tegwen and Co.

One conspicuous figure who turned up to one of the first demonstrations outside Ysgol Llangennech was none other than our old friend Tegwen Devichand:

With exquisite timing, and despite being reprimanded by the Ombudsman for Public Services for her conduct at a council meeting, Cllr Devichand has just become leader of Llanelli Rural Council.

Carwyn Jones will be pleased.

Stay tuned for the next installment, in which we will be exploring goings-on in Lliedi and Llwynhendy that make the Cosa Nostra look like a bunch of amateurs.

Llangennech: Michaela and the EDL

Readers of this blog will have seen how Michaela Beddows, one of the more prominent anti-Welsh medium campaigners in Llangennech posted a comment on this blog yesterday.

"Bless you", the campaign group was not anti-Welsh, she protested, and Cneifiwr had totally misunderstood the whole situation. "You would not take one bullet into a battle you would take all the ammunition you could take and that is exactly what I am doing. I am fighting a battle of common sense and fairness", she went on, defending the group's decision to cosy up to UKIP.

Beddows was silent on the group's links with Glasnost.org, run by right-wing extremist Jacques Protic, and she also forgot to tell us about her friends in the English Defence League, those bastions of fairness and common sense.

Thanks to sharp-eyed observers for picking up on the following "misunderstandings":

And here she is passing on the views of her friend Protic whose latest rants mix fake news about Islamic rapist rampages in Germany, pro-Putin black propaganda and statements such as "Welsh is a tribal language":

Needless to say, the Hamiltons' meeting in the village last week with assorted Labour activists, candidates and Beddows is now propaganda gold for UKIP:

Mainstream media sources, such as the South Wales Evening Post and the Llanelli Star, which have been happily providing a platform for Michaela, the Sewards and others, need to consider carefully what they are helping to foment in Llangennech.

Jacques, Jacqueline and Neil - Updated

Update 13 February 

More disturbing information about the activities of the Labour Party in Llangennech emerged yesterday.

It is now clear that Neil Hamilton's visit to the village was organised and staged in close collaboration with Labour Party supporters, with one of the main players standing as a Labour candidate in May's council elections.

Here is Michaela Beddows explaining how she and Jacqueline (that would be Jacqueline Seward, Labour's candidate for the county council ward) had been liaising with Hamilton and managing the PR.

This is surely a flagrant breach of Labour Party rules, and it will be interesting to see if Party HQ now intervenes to tackle the stench issuing from the Llanelli Labour Party.

One of Jacqueline Seward's other friends, Jacques Protic, was busy as usual on social media over the weekend, sending some frankly creepy messages to broadcaster Lucy Owen and Rydal Penrhos School.

Lucy Owen had posted a picture of her daughter predicting the score in the Wales v England game, with Protic telling her that Wales was a proper rugby team, not for girls. The Rydal Penrhos tweet showed five young boys on a scuba diving course, with Protic asking the school if the girls had chickened out.

The images will not be reproduced here, but have been saved by Protic watchers.

As a reminder, the Labour supporting right-wing extremist (yes, it is possible to be both these days) Protic worked closely with the group campaigning against the proposal to phase out the English medium stream in Llangennech.

________________

Twitter was briefly ablaze yesterday with news from Llangennech which received a visit from Neil Hamilton and Christine, down for the day from Wiltshire to stir things up in the village.

Here are the happy families who claim to speak for 95% of the village saying cheese for the camera:

Sandwiched between Mr and Mrs H is Labour supporting Michaela Beddows, who readers will recall popped up on Question Time to declare that she had never had a problem with UKIP.

Absent from the picture is Labour's Cllr Kim Thomas who last month described plans to turn Llangennech into a Welsh medium school as apartheid - rather an odd thing to say for someone who is governor of a Welsh medium school, you might think.

Perhaps they found time to meet up for a chat later on to compare notes on South African politics because Neil Hamilton could have told her about the time he addressed the pro-Apartheid Springbok Club which wants to restore "civilised rule" to that country.

Drawn into the row on Twitter was Lee Waters, Labour's Assembly Member for Llanelli who is also not averse to dogwhistle politics.

One of the many questions he ignored on Twitter yesterday was whether Labour and UKIP were planning to field joint candidates in Llangennech.

That question was not as tongue in cheek as many might think, as readers can see for themselves if they compare the snapshot of the campaigners smiling happily with the Hamiltons above with this picture of Jacqueline Seward and friends out on the campaign trail last week.

Mrs Seward is standing for Labour in Llangennech and is a core member of the Beddows anti-Welsh medium group.

Seward's tweet was greeted enthusiastically by Jacques Protic, a virulently anti-Welsh nutcase of Serbian origins who runs the notorious hate-filled Glasnost website from his cave up in the north. Protic has previously described himself as a member of the Labour Party, although he believes that Carwyn Jones is a closet Welsh Nationalist.

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, Seward responded to the kisses with a "like".

Protic's interests include support for Donald Trump and right wing extremist groups, including Geert Wilders' PVV party in the Netherlands. He seems to be a fan of the Katie Hopkins, the Daily Mail's Voice of Reason, and quotes her rants with approval. One of his favourite words, as readers of the "Keep Llangennech Primary Dual Stream" website will recognise, is "currently", and currently Protic is fretting about the threats posed by refugees, gangs of Islamic rapists, schools indoctrinating children with anti-Brexit and anti-racist propaganda, as well as the evils of the Welsh language.

Readers of this blog were recently treated to a report of another Labour councillor in Llanelli disseminating leaflets produced by Britain First, a neo-Nazi group which describes itself as patriotic street fighters.

If it is true, as Kevin Madge maintains, that Labour in Llanelli is being infiltrated by "vicious" Corbinystas, the party seems to be just as comfortable cwtshing up to the extreme right.

When Labour's old guard used proudly to describe the party as a broad church, it is safe to say that never in their worst nightmares did they realise quite how broad Labour would become in Llanelli.

Llanelli Labour: More Tales from the Psychopaths' Kindergarten (Updated)

You don't need old Cneifiwr to tell you that Labour is in a mess as the clock ticks down on May's council elections. In Westminster we have the least effective and most chaotic official opposition in living memory, and never has a strong, resourceful and united opposition been more sorely needed. Heading west, the Labour-led Cardiff City Council has put on a long-running farce of backroom turf wars and a whole string of resignations amid claims of misogyny, bullying and worse. In Bridgend, 2016 ended in a night of the long knives with a wave of deselections and resignations.

In Swansea, Labour's antics have kept Jac o' the North's readers entertained with tales of absentee councillors, deselections, financial malarkey, intimidation and alleged assaults (including this one).

Next door in Neath Port Talbot there are reports of a wholesale purge, with as many as 25 Labour councillors being told their services are no longer required. That's half of the entire Labour contingent on the council, and it is believed that the cull has been particularly ruthless in and around Port Talbot. Stan of the Neath Ferret has more on this saga here.

Not that you can expect to read anything about the mayhem in the local press in the Neath Port Talbot area, with the editor of the South Wales Evening Post being rather keener to tell readers about an exciting new promotion by TGI Fridays which is offering customers a menu of ENDLESS jumbo starters.

"Vicious"

Keen not to be outdone by its neighbours, Labour in Llanelli has been indulging in its own displays of internecine warfare and skulduggery.

Getting to the truth of what is happening in the local Labour Party is probably as difficult for most ordinary  members as it is for outsiders. If Kevin Madge is to be believed, the Carmarthenshire Labour Party is now prey to what he terms "vicious" infiltrators from Momentum.

This is the same Kevin Madge who was ousted from leading Carmarthenshire County Council in a bloody coup back in 2015, and who has been proudly proclaiming from his new perch on the back row of the chamber in County Hall that he is busy sharpening his knives, as he peers down at his old place in the front row.

Cneifiwr could not help noticing when he watched the December council meeting that poor old Kev was squashed up against his nemesis, Tegwen Devichand, the grande dame of Llanelli Labour politics, who for some reason had deserted her normal seat next to current leader Jeff Edmunds to plonk herself on the back row.

The word on the street is that Dafen Dolly had fallen out with Jeff Is-There-Anybody-There? Edmunds. Jeff  ought to whip out his crystal ball because it may well warn him to beware of a aged, bee-hived assassin creeping up behind him, stiletto in hand.

Tea and Tantrums


An old acquaintance of Cneifiwr's who is connected to Labour royalty once said that going around stabbing people in the back was one thing, but to be caught doing it was unforgivable.

It is perhaps in that light that we should view another report that Tegwen Towers last year received a visit from Carwyn Jones himself who had come all the way down from Cardiff to discuss certain complaints with her.

Far from being a cosy chat over the PG Tips and custard creams, it is said that customers at the nearby garage could hear the shouting.

Back in November, this blog chronicled some of the goings-on in the Llanelli Labour Party, and the post attracted some interesting comments from, cough, distressed Labour insiders who fought to hold back the tears as they explained how Cllr Bill Thomas had been deselected by ordinary ward members and that he would be most welcome to put his name forward somewhere else, knowing full well that (a) he wouldn't, and (b) it was too late anyway.

Cllr Thomas's defenestration had three possible explanations:

1. Rank and file members really had turned against a long-standing and hard-working councillor who had fought many David versus Goliath battles on their behalf.
2. The ward had been infiltrated by "vicious" Momentum fanatics who for reasons best known to themselves decided to ditch Bill Thomas in favour of Rob James, a careerist young interloper from Neath who is proudly on the right, or as he would have it, centre of the party. Shome mishtake shurely?
3. The usual forces were at work, with strings being pulled from Dafen to pull the plug on a councillor who has long been a thorn in the side of the party's top brass.

Readers will have to decide for themselves which of those explanations is more likely.

The Mystery of the Rings


This blog has on several occasions alluded to the strange case of Cllr Theressa Bowen who was elected as a Labour councillor for Llwynhendy ward in May 2012.  Previously, Cllr Bowen and Cllr Devichand had been close, but cracks began to appear in the relationship sometime before the council elections.

The feud between Cllrs Bowen and Devichand and Cllr Devichand's daughter, Cllr Sharen Davies, has continued ever since. What follows is an account of events which have been corroborated by independent witnesses and parties. There are other serious allegations and claims for which cannot yet be verified.

Cllr Bowen alleges that the final breach came when Cllr Devichand asked her to file a complaint about a senior council officer. She refused, and a row ensued. Shortly after Cllr Bowen arrived home from visiting Cllr Devichand, Tegwen phoned Theressa Bowen in an agitated state to say that valuable jewellery (understood to be some Indian rings) worth thousands of pounds had gone missing from Tegwen Towers.

The next day, just as Cllr Bowen was about to leave for a  meeting in County Hall, the police turned up at her house, and both she and her son were arrested and taken off to the cells, something which left her deeply traumatised.


No jewellery was found, and no charges were brought.

Cllr Bowen made a formal complaint to the then leader, Kevin Madge, who replied on 7 December 2012 that he understood that Jeff Edmunds had been to see her "at this stressful time". Group officers would be meeting that day to discuss what action to take.

Whatever they decided, they failed to restore harmony to the Labour group.

The fireworks between Cllrs Devichand and Bowen did not escape the attention of other councillors outside the Labour fold, and it is understood that the council chief executive, Mark James, was drawn in to the dispute as a most unlikely agony aunt.

Labour's long-term coalition partners, the Independents, saw an opportunity to get one over on their political allies, and approaches were made to Cllr Theressa Bowen who as a result left the Labour group and crossed the floor to sit with their, ahem, friends six short months after being elected as a Labour councillor.

Needless to say, this did not go down well with Cllr Devichand and her associates, and a campaign began to discredit Cllr Bowen.

At a meeting in Llanelli Town Hall, stunned councillors from other political groups and a reporter from the Llanelli Star witnessed an attack on Cllr Bowen in her absence by her former friends whose aim was to force her to resign as a school governor.

Cllr Keri Thomas (Lab, Tyisha), who has what must qualify as the worst record for any councillor in Wales having been incapacitated for much of the last 10 years while drawing a councillor's salary, began by shouting "She's a nutter!" when someone mentioned Cllr Bowen's name.

For her part, Cllr Bowen readily acknowledges that she has suffered from severe depression in the past, and that her life has been far from easy.

Another Labour councillor who worked for the NHS and had somehow (illegally) accessed Cllr Bowen's medical records, joined in saying that she could confirm that Cllr Bowen had suffered from mental illness. Other colleagues weighed in, suggesting that this would not look good if it came out in the press.

For reasons best known to the newspaper, the Llanelli Star decided not to report on an incident which most journalists would have seized on.

Cllr Bowen resigned her posts, saying that she did not want the row to damage the schools where she was a governor. Her place was naturally taken by Labour councillors.

In the years that followed, there have been more incidents and name calling. One one occasion, a member of the public reported Cllr Sharen Davies (Devichand's daughter) to the chief executive for flicking V signs as she drove past her and Cllr Bowen.

Then a couple of years ago a fracas took place after a meeting of Llanelli Rural Council, with Cllrs Devichand, Davies and Bowen making conflicting allegations about an incident in a doorway. The matter was referred to the Ombudsman for Public Services who eventually warned both Cllr Devichand and Cllr Bowen of the need to observe the code of conduct.

In what may be a completely unconnected move, Cllr Sharen Davies tabled a motion to council a couple of years back calling for councillors to go through DBS checks. The motion was later withdrawn without explanation.

______________

Update

Information has been received that the proposal to implement DBS checks had nothing to do with the ongoing dispute between Clls Bowen, Devichand and Davies, but was instead an attempt to out a male councillor who is alleged to have sexually assaulted an underage boy.

______________

Now aged 75, Cllr Tegwen Devichand was selected to stand again in May's elections. Unsurprisingly, given the culture which exists in the Labour Party in Llanelli, nobody else was unwise enough to stand against her. Cllr Devichand will be 80 by the time we get to the next council elections in 2022.

The Battle for Llwynhendy

While Bill Thomas has been purged from Lliedi in true Stalinist tradition, other former Enemies of the People have been rehabilitated. 

Step forward Ms Fozia Aktar and her large family which now wields a block vote that is reminiscent of the good old days at Labour Party conferences when grim-faced trade union leaders would trump any vote by rank and file members with the wave of a card purporting to be the voice of countless millions of boiler plate operatives.

Fozia, who describes herself as a business woman, stood unsuccessfully for election in Llangennech in 2012 while she was still running the main post office in Llanelli, a business venture which appears to have come to an abrupt end shortly afterwards. This year, she will be standing in Llwynhendy against her former friend Theressa Bowen.


To put it mildly, this is a remarkable turnaround for someone who resigned from the Labour Party citing bullying, as readers can see for themselves in the e-mail below:

Click to enlarge

It is sometimes said that we get the politicians we deserve, but surely poor old Llanelli deserves a break from this lot.

Momentum may or may not be active elsewhere, but in Llanelli the turmoil inside the Labour Party seems to have precious little to do with policy differences or the finer points of socialist theory, and rather more to do with old-fashioned turf wars.

Fed on a Diet of Porky Pies

News being what it is, this blog normally finds itself raking over past events, but a potentially explosive Employment Tribunal hearing is set to begin in Cardiff tomorrow which threatens to lift the lid on the sordid saga of Carmarthenshire County Council's management of Pembrey Country Park.

The case concerns a claim for unfair dismissal being brought by a whistleblower, Mr Eirian Morris, and it is likely to attract considerable media attention because the allegations of cover-ups of corruption and other criminality involve some of the council's most senior serving and former officers.

We will have to wait for more details to come out, but what is already abundantly clear is that councillors, and especially those on the council's Audit Committee, have been misled and even lied to in a way which can only be described as systematic.

When the Audit Committee was first alerted that all may not have been as it should in the park in a brief report on 22 May 2016, members were told that there had been an investigation into "historic issues", and that work was now underway to tighten up procedures. Not that any criminal behaviour or anything like fraud had taken place. Oh no.

The investigation into those "historic issues" took the form of an internal audit review of allegations made by the whistleblower. The report, which was not made available to members of the Audit Committee, effectively applied a thick coating of whitewash to the allegations and concluded that there was no evidence of fraud, and no basis for any action to be taken against the staff at the centre of the allegations.

The day after the committee met, the manager of the park assaulted Mrs Stephanie Thomas who was running the park cafe and shop, and the case eventually reached court in October of last year, with the manager, Rory Dickinson, admitting the charge. He had been allowed to resign from his post just four days earlier.

The assault arose because Mrs Thomas and her husband had initially decided not to tender for a contract to continue running the shop and cafe because they felt that they had no hope of winning, given what they knew had been going on at the park, and on 23 May 2016, with just one hour and forty minutes to go before the deadline for tenders, Mr Dickinson paid his fateful visit to Mrs Thomas to persuade her to change her mind because the Council was desperate to be able to claim that this had been a competitive tender with more than one bidder.

The result of the behind the scenes moves was to compromise the bid process, although the Council continued to maintain in the face of mounting evidence that it had been "a rigorous application process designed to get the best value and service for the County Council and users of Pembrey Country Park" (Ian Jones, Head of Leisure).

Come July, the Council was forced to change its tune, noting in a statement that, "it is possible that a member of staff involved in the process may have had a personal interest which might be perceived to compromise the impartiality and independence of the process".


Far from being "historic", as members of the Audit Committee were told, things were actually going from bad to worse at the park.

Cneifiwr also understands that the police are intensifying their investigations of the allegations, and that a senior officer has been put onto the case.

This is strangely at odds with categoric assurances given by the council's Director of Resources, Mr Chris Moore, last month that the police had popped in for a "dailogue" and that no further action was being taken.

West Wales News Review

Update

WordPress has now 'unlocked' West Wales News Review, and the latest article can be found here. Why the blog was suddenly taken down is not clear, but this scare goes to show at a time when more and more people are turning to social media to get their news, much of it rubbish or downright lies, how vulnerable serious investigative sources are to forces which would like to see them silenced.

The Curran Resort story is an important one by any standards, with £16.7 million having disappeared in a scam which has robbed hundreds of private investors of their savings and hit local businesses, including a family butcher in St Clears.

Needless to say, the resort had lots of ambitious plans. Back in December 2015, less than a year before the administrators were called in, Carmarthenshire County Council's planning committee wisely rejected one of the proposed schemes by a majority of 12 to 2.

The two who wanted the council to give the scheme its blessing were Labour's Kevin Midas Madge, whose back catalogue includes Garnant Golf Club and the Scarlets Red Room, and Anthony Jones (Llandybie), former chair of the planning committee. Both will shortly be back on the stump asking unsuspecting punters for their votes.

______________

Free speech and a free media are precious and increasingly under threat, as many readers in Carmarthenshire can testify.

Call someone Pinocchio, and you can be sued and lose everything. Refer to lumpy carpets, and the Chief Executive of Carmarthenshire County Council will go to the police asking for a criminal prosecution.

Now West Wales News Review has suddenly had the plugs pulled for allegedly violating WordPress's terms of service.

For those unfamiliar with this extremely well-written and researched blog, West Wales News Review looks at local issues from a moderate left of centre, greenish point of view. The most recent story to appear on the blog dealt with the need for speed limits along the rural lanes of Porthyrhyd near Llandovery.

Earlier today, the author had just pressed "publish" on a new story dealing with the rather more delicate subject of the investors who have lost millions of pounds in the Corran Resort and Spa development at Laugharne after the sudden collapse late last year of the company running it. Seconds later, a message appeared saying that the blog had been removed, and has disappeared with all of its valuable archive.

West Wales News Review, Yr Hogyn o Rachub and Jac o' the North are three very different beasts, but all three have had the plugs pulled on them in recent years. The list of suspects behind the sudden demise of Jac o' the North in its old Blogspot incarnation would fill Parc y Scarlets (now there's an idea for their marketing manager...), while Yr Hogyn offended a particularly pompous and thin-skinned literary figure with a humorous piece on his blog.

Patricia Dodd Racher, the author of West Wales News Review is a very experienced journalist who takes great care to check her facts, and is scrupulously fair to her subjects. Who persuaded WordPress to take down her blog and why is therefore a mystery. If it was something to do with the Corran Resort, the disappearance of the blog is very strange indeed because the story was only up for a matter of seconds. So who else could it have been?

County Hall in Carmarthen would have to be high up on the list of suspects.

Apartheid?

Update 25 January

Most county councillors are also school governors almost by default. If a school is fortunate, it will land a hard-working, conscientious and knowledgeable councillor who will work with parents and staff to ensure that the school is a success. Others will find that they have a dud foisted on them.

It turns out that Labour's Kim Thomas, who last week made highly inflammatory remarks about Welsh medium education and showed an almost total lack of understanding of how schools work and children learn, is in fact - wait for it - a governor of the Welsh medium Ysgol Cross Hands.

As she was catapulted in as an LEA appointment, there is very little that parents or staff can do to get shot of a governor whose inability to grasp how primary schools work and whose views run completely against the school's ethos, although they may want to lodge a formal complaint with the council for starters.

For the school's sake, we can only hope that Cllr Thomas is as active as a governor as she is as a county councillor.


Update 23 January

Interesting to note that Labour's two youngest councillors, Calum Higgins and Ryan Thomas, broke ranks with Kevin Madge, Tegwen Devichand and the rest of the dinosaurs and dunces to vote in favour of the Llangennech proposal.

_______________

Mrs Helena Jones of Brecon was 99 years old when she took to the stage of the National Eisteddfod for the last time in 2016. Although her father spoke Welsh, her mother did not, and Helena grew up in an English speaking home.

When she was 90, her doctor advised her to learn a new language and a musical instrument. So she bought a harp and started going to Welsh classes. As you can see from this interview, recorded when she was just 97, her enthusiasm is infectious.

"Two windows on the world are better than one", she says.

After the best part of two years of rows, consultations and miles of red tape, Carmarthenshire County Council has finally approved plans to create a single Welsh-medium primary school in Llangennech, which means that all the children in the village will in future have two windows on the world if their parents don't yank them out of the school.

There were very strong feelings on both sides of the argument, and it is important to emphasise that there were indeed supporters and opponents of the proposal.

Llangennech is not the first community to go through this process, and it will not be the last. A pattern seems to be emerging whenever there are proposals to change the language category of a school, with very vocal groups of objectors grabbing the headlines, aided and egged on by some very extreme political elements and claiming to speak for everyone, while supporters keep a much quieter and less confrontational profile.


Some pretty stupid things were said during the campaign as it dragged on and on, but we had to wait until the dying moments, just minutes before the final vote, to hear the dummest contribution of all.

Step forward Cllr Kim Thomas (Lab., Llannon). Cllr Thomas has hardly left a mark in her years as county councillor and rarely takes an active part in council meetings. On the basis of her remarks on Wednesday, we can be grateful for that at least.

What about children starting school in Llangennech who have no Welsh, she asked. How are they going to be able to participate in the lessons when they don't understand the language?

She might just as well have asked how young children could be expected to read, write or do mathematics in school when they have not learned those skills at home before starting school.

The answer to that is that just like thousands of other children from non-Welsh speaking homes who go to Welsh medium schools, they learn, and they learn incredibly quickly.

But Cllr Thomas was only just getting into her stride. "This is segregation, and at its worst we are looking at apartheid". And she was not going to apologise for saying that.

Perhaps some of the older Labour councillors should try to explain to Kim Thomas what apartheid was.

At present, children in Llangennech are divided into streams. Most readers will know what that means, but for Kim Thomas's benefit, it means that children are separated within the same school and go to different classes with different teachers. That is divisive in itself and tends to create a "them and us" culture within schools. The proposal before her was to eliminate the division and create a school in which all children sit and learn together.

"This is my opinion, and I have the right to say it", she added, proudly wrapping herself in the flag of her own Ukip-lite ignorance and basking in the glow of a ripple of applause from the objectors seated behind her.

"I went to a Welsh school", she continued, explaining that she had the right to take some (most by the sound of it) subjects in English.

Clearly, it was not a Welsh medium school, and the irony that she delivered her entire rant in English was lost on her. As some readers may by now have realised, Kim Thomas was talking about her experiences at secondary school and superimposing them on a debate about a primary school. She appeared not to know the difference.


Let's hope for the sake of parents and children in Llannon that Kim Thomas is not a school governor. In the case of most councillors, it would be easy to find out because the information is recorded in their annual reports. Kim Thomas has never got around to writing hers.

At length, the matter was put to the vote. 38 councillors voted in favour of the change, including to his credit Calum Higgins (Lab). 20 voted against, although all of them voted a couple of years ago in favour of the policy now being pursued by the council. That includes Kevin Madge, who also voted against the policy of his own government in Cardiff. There was one abstention.

That means that 15 councillors did not vote. Some, like Meryl Gravell were absent (yet again); others seem to have been struck dumb. From the Labour benches the temptation to play politics with the language was obviously too strong for most to resist; where there should have been leadership and influence to ensure a calm and well-informed debate, we saw dog-whistle politics.

The vote was recorded, so the minutes should show exactly how everybody voted. It is not possible to tell from the webcast.




One thing which both sides could probably agree on is the need to reform the truly awful statutory process which has to be followed each and every time a change is proposed. The effect of the process is to draw out and delay change for years, delays which serve only to deepen divisions in places such as Llangennech and create lingering uncertainty for children, staff and parents alike.

There is no doubt that parents who opposed the plans were sincere, even if some of them lost the plot during the course of their protests. Part of the problem is that past fudges and policy errors mean that words such as "bilingual" can mean very different things to different people.


Just as as happened elsewhere, it is a fair bet that in a couple of years from now everyone will wonder what the fuss was all about. For the sake of the school and the children, it is important that everyone puts the dispute behind them.

One of Llangennech's former residents, the indefatigable and courageous Eileen Beasley, a pioneer for women's rights and the Welsh language, would be proud of the decision her old council took last Wednesday.

The Sicilian Cartel and the Tip of the Iceberg

Many years ago Cneifiwr was working for a large, prestigious and now sadly defunct company in the Big City. The upper echelons were like an old boys' club, and they enjoyed a jet set lifestyle with a cellar full of very expensive vintage wines and ports, "business" trips on Concorde, the best hotels and pretty much unlimited expenses.

Shortly after Cneifiwr joined, shockwaves went through middle management when the first of a series of belt tightening measures was announced for the lower ranks. Henceforth, horrified staff were told, they would no longer be allowed to order a different wine with every course at lunch or dinner.

Slowly but surely the good old days were coming to an end.

Some years later news of a scandal involving the Head of Internal Audit percolated down to one of Cneifiwr's drinking holes.

The Head of Internal Audit was feared and god-like. It was drummed into us that he was the moral guardian of the company; the eyes and ears that were supposed to keep everybody on the straight and narrow. As it happened, Cneifiwr was on nodding terms with God's deputy, a fierce and expensively dressed old bat who would occasionally join Cneifiwr and his cronies for a glass or three of something and a little light flirting.

It turned out that he had died in rather compromising circumstances after a wild party at his very expensive address in Manhattan, a party which had involved lots of drugs and some very expensive ladies. Worse, it seemed that the Old Bat, our occasional drinking buddy, had been conducting a clandestine affair with her boss for years, and that a great deal of company money had been privately invested in some very swish real estate.

The second in command of the company, a large and pompous man who had the strange habit of thrusting both hands down his trousers and fiddling with himself while talking down to his inferiors, was instantly dispatched to New York to tidy things up, a job which involved rather more than just running round with a duster and Hoover. The Old Bat disappeared, probably into early retirement with a himbo in tow, and the whole affair was consigned to the icy depths of the Hudson River, never to be spoken about again.

There were no prosecutions, the police never seem to have been troubled with the affair on either side of the Atlantic, and nothing leaked out to the press; or if it did they kept shtum.

Carmarthenshire County Council will count itself very lucky indeed if it manages to pull off a similarly successful cover-up of the scandals emerging from Pembrey and the Millennium Coastal Park.

For a start, some of the allegations and rumours are circulating well beyond County Hall, and second, Cllr Bill Thomas is on the case.

As far as Cllr Thomas is concerned, one or two senior officers will be praying for all they are worth that the veteran councillor will decide not to stand for re-election as an unaffiliated member in May. Incredibly, the mad house which is the Labour Party in Carmarthenshire has deselected him.

This week's Carmarthenshire Herald and its Llanelli sister (both worth at least 70p) carry an interview with Cllr Thomas and a report of the Audit Committee meeting on 6 January.

Looking back on the meeting, Cllr Thomas told the newspaper that he thought members of the Audit Committee were being duped, and he is calling for a full "forensic" audit of Pembrey Country Park.

Responding to Cllr Thomas's concerns, the council wheeled out its chief financial officer, Chris Moore, to pirouette and spin across some very thin ice as he spoke to the Herald. The paper was given the standard County Hall line. Progress was being made, processes improved, members had been 'reassured', etc.

During the meeting Cllr Thomas had asked if the committee was aware of any imminent court cases. Apparently not, it would seem, which is very odd given that a hearing has been scheduled for 6 February in Cardiff. Even odder when you consider that the council is a party to the case and that one or two of those present at the meeting are likely to play a prominent role in the proceedings.

The solution to this mystery probably boils down to semantics. The 6 February hearing is an employment tribunal, a judicial body stuffed full of lawyers which will at some point deliver a verdict. But it is not, as Mr Moore helpfully pointed out, a criminal court.

The line which council officers are grimly sticking to is that there is no evidence of criminality at Pembrey. It's just that they can't give assurances that all assets can be accounted for, and they cannot guarantee that all revenues from gate receipts and other activities were correctly booked.

The council had engaged in a "dialogue" with the police, he said, and Dyfed Powys had now confirmed that they would be taking no further action.

Note the very careful wording. Did the council go to the police with evidence of fraud and corrupt practices which had been presented to it (remember that there is a recording in which a senior officer yelps "For Christ's sake, don't go to the police)?

It would seem not, even though the accusations are of an extremely serious nature. Whereas the chief executive had no qualms about wasting police time with complaints about Jacqui Thompson's use of the phrase "lumpy carpets", the council seems to have decided not to worry the boys in blue with trivial worries about fraud, theft, blackmail and corruption.

What we can surmise from this is that the police approached the council with some questions (or a "dialogue") based on material which had been forwarded to them by third parties, including Nia Griffiths MP.

Cneifiwr understands that the MP has been given a contradictory assurance by the police that their investigations are continuing.

Performing a final pirouette, Mr Moore told the Herald that members of the Audit Committee had been reassured by officers that action had been taken, including seconding a new team to run the park. If they were reassured by that, they probably also believe that the moon is made of cheese.

Back on 22 March 2016, members of the Audit Committee were told for the first time that various "historical" issues had been identified at the park. The very next day the then manager of the park, Rory Dickinson, assaulted the manager of the catering facilities in a row about what in all likelihood was a severely compromised tender process.

Mr Dickinson remained in post, despite facing a welter of allegations about his conduct, until he resigned from the council a week before his trial seven months later. Was the new team seconded to run the park before or after Mr Dickinson's abrupt departure, which meant that the council had to find someone to replace him in any event? Was the council really as proactive as Mr Moore would like us to believe?

The very anodyne version of what has happened at Pembrey spoon fed to members of the Audit Committee is, as many of them will be aware, a very pale reflection of accusations which extend very much further than the gates of the country park.

The claims include fraud on an industrial scale, thuggery, secret attempts to hive off public assets, nepotism and cover-ups of utterly bizarre conduct by certain officers. One alleged cover-up relates to an incident in which a naturally aggrieved husband caught a senior manager in bed with his wife.The angry husband is said to have thrown the officer out of a first floor bedroom window, breaking his arm. He was then carted off to A&E with the irate husband in pursuit, with another fracas ensuing at the hospital.

After a high level intervention from Jail Hill, the incident was quietly smoothed over. Meryl ("we always defend our officers") was apparently not amused.

Readers with long memories will recall that the latest developments are not the first time that Pembrey has been the subject of controversy.

Back in July 2013 an almighty row broke out when Unison alleged that the council was preparing to privatise the park. Council leader at the time was Kevin Madge (Lab), with Meryl Gravell then, as now, responsible for Regeneration and Leisure.

The allegations met with a furious response from County Hall which released a statement couched in language which sounds more like a hybrid dowager duchess/stroppy teenager on Facebook than a public body:

 Unison's claims are complete and utter tosh and scaremongering. This is same old same old rumour and fabricated diatribe that is resurrected every few years that has absolutely no foundation at all. It is a downright and cheap-shot lie that the park is for sale, designed to provoke anxiety.

Contrary to that outburst, Cneifiwr understands that very real discussions with external investors took place, and that expressions of interest came from far and wide, including from someone in Australia who wanted £22,500 to be paid in expenses to enable him to travel to Pembrey. It was later established that he was a bit strapped for cash at the time after his rose farm went bust.

Proposals included building a theme park on part of the park, extending out on to land owned by Pembrey Airport. Readers may recall that at one time Pembrey Airport had this interesting message to would-be investors on its website:

One of the few Airports in the United Kingdom that has 5000 acres of adjoining land available for joint venture with very little planning and environmental constraints. We are within Convergence funding Area (qualifies for European funding). Pembrey Airport is exempt planning and large tracts of freehold development land are immediately available from the Local Authority.

Sadly, these exciting plans came to nothing, probably because would-be investors discovered that the council had inconveniently leased off some of the biggest cash generators in the park, and some of the allegations now swirling around suggest that attempts to get rid of those inconvenient leaseholders may have something to do with the turbulence which the park has seen in recent years.

Where is Anthony Barrett when you need him?

New Year Honours

After the usual nauseating lists of gongs for Tory party donors, shifty businessmen, hangers-on and assorted brown nosers, here's a richly deserved municipal award from Private Eye which is unlikely to make it into the glass cabinets in the lobby of County Hall.

Undulating Axminster

In the smoke and mirrors world of spin and public relations management, the defective moral compasses used by some authorities can lead them into believing that anything goes when they set about the business of shoring up their reputations.

As this blog has pointed out ad nauseam, the joke on these public institutions, and Carmarthenshire County Council is by no means alone in this, is that while they move heaven and earth to protect what they fondly believe are unassailable reputations for excellence in every way, an increasingly cynical public has long since concluded, often unfairly, that the same institutions are rotten to the core.

Let's call it the public relations paradox.

Simpler souls might think that a wiser option and one which might help restore tarnished images would be to fess up, acknowledge that we all live in the real world where not everyone, not even public servants, is an angel, and root out the bad apples. But that is not how things work.

It is this paradox which explains why whistleblowers so often find themselves treated as the real villains. It helps explain why, for example, Cllr Jacob Williams in Pembrokeshire found himself caught up in a Kafka-esque procedure designed to silence and discredit him for daring to post a link to a Western Telegraph article about that council's ongoing grants scandal.

Neither the article nor the comments beneath it submitted by members of the public named the council officer at the centre of the row, but he nevertheless felt, or quite possibly was persuaded to feel, that his reputation had been besmirched and his human rights infringed. Why, one or two commentators had even called for the Fraud Squad to be sent in. What an outrageous suggestion to make.

The slight problem with using these comments as a stick with which to beat Cllr Williams was that after a great deal of prodding, the council itself called in the cops.

For much, much more (a long Sunday afternoon read, perhaps), turn to the councillor's blog and embark on Trumped Up Charges. Parts 1 and 2 out now, with a promise that Bryn Parry Jones will enter the scene in Part 3.

In the same vein, when Cllr Siân Caiach inadvertently discovered a few years back that her official e-mail account was being "monitored" by council officers, the chief executive claimed the complaint was an attack on the integrity of the hapless council employee tasked with accessing her e-mails.

Further afield, readers of the Christmas issue of Private Eye were treated to a brief report on the activities of Cleveland Police in the north of England. A whistleblower had tipped off a local newspaper that all was not well in the force, and that among other things an internal review had found evidence of widespread racism.

The force then invoked powers to tap the landlines, mobile phones and home phones of two journalists on a local paper in an attempt to discover the identity of the whistleblower, arguing before an Investigatory Powers Tribunal that the racism report was damaging the force's reputation, and was therefore "not in the public interest".

A verdict is due this month, but the judge, Mr Justice Edis, commented in the final hearing that, "Isn't it in the public interest that the police force should have a reputation it deserves, rather than an artificially good reputation that it gets from brushing things under the carpet?"

Luckily Mr Justice Edis is a judge and does not live in Carmarthenshire because his reference to uneven floor coverings may well have prompted the council chief executive, Mark James CBE, to make a complaint to the police of criminal harassment.

That is what happened last year to blogger Jacqui Thompson who used the phrase "lumpy carpets" in a piece about the ongoing Pembrey Country Park scandal.

One of the odder aspects of this complaint is that Jacqui Thompson was simply quoting an opinion piece by Cadno in the Carmarthenshire Herald, as the council's press office which monitors the press, blogs and social media for criticism of Jail Hill would have been well aware.

As far as we know, Cadno has not had his brush felt by Dyfed Powys Police for this defamatory reference to whoever was responsible for the carpets in County Hall, but the cases of Jacob Williams and Jacqui Thompson show that even quoting or linking to mildly critical comments on local newspapers articles can land you in serious trouble with your council in what some people still like to call "a free country".

As for snooping on whistleblowers, the press, councillors and bloggers, we can all sleep easily in the knowledge that responsibility for supervising the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act lies in the capable hands of Cllr Pam Palmer who would no doubt firmly resist any attempts to put anyone under covert surveillance to protect the county council's immaculate reputation.

__________________

That was a long preamble to what will, for various reasons, have to be a fairly short update on the scandals emanating from Pembrey County Park, or as the council would prefer to have it, the progress it is making in tightening up various procedures.

Although there had been rumours and whispers that all was not well at Pembrey for some time, the first councillors got to hear about it officially was when a very brief report on Pembrey Country Park and the Millennium Coastal Park appeared on the agenda of a meeting of the Audit Committee on 22 March 2016.

The report said that a number of weaknesses had been identified after the robustness of various procedures had been tested. Various things needed to be tightened up to ensure that policies were correctly adhered to, and that the review had come about at the request of the new Director, Jake Morgan (who rejoined Carmarthenshire after a spell at the Kremlin on the Cleddau in Haverfordwest under Bryn Parry Jones). Any issues identified were "historical".

Several councillors smelled a rat. What they had been given was not a report detailing allegations or the results of any investigations into them, but a very bland summary saying that new measures needed to be put in place to account for revenue, assets and health and safety, etc.

The even blander minutes recorded:

 In terms of the review of the leisure facilities at Pembrey Country Park and the Millennium Coastal Park which had been undertaken at the request of the Director of Communities the Committee was assured by the Head of Leisure that the weaknesses identified were being addressed and officers would be working closely with the Audit Section. This included ensuring that Corporate Financial Procedure Rules were adhered to at all times and that health and safety issues were addressed. Members were advised that an Action Plan was being prepared in respect of the issues in question and it was suggested that this could be brought to the Committee at its next meeting.


Much as the senior officers may have worried about the health and safety of park users, it is fair to say that they were probably even more concerned about the risk to their own health and safety should anyone peek under those allegedly lumpy carpets.

Councillors were assured that there was no evidence of any fraud.

The following month, the full council met and a couple of councillors wondered whether findings from investigations into the "historical" issues should be handed for checking to the police, or even worse, the Wales Audit Office.

Certainly not, they were told, the clear implication being that this was all about procedural fine tuning with no hint of any criminality.

The Audit Committee next met on 16 May, but would have been disappointed if they were looking forward to the update promised back in March. Instead they appointed a successor to Sir David Lewis whose retirement at this tricky juncture must have lightened the mood on Jail Hill somewhat.

Roll forward to the next Audit Committee on 8 July 2016 where the minutes record in full technicolor magnolia that:


Reference was made to the serious failings which had come to light at Pembrey Country Park and an assurance was sought that lessons have been learned and taken on board.  The Head of Leisure pointed out that the rate of change in the service over the past 4/5 years had been substantial.  He added that the challenge was to deliver services whilst deriving income at the same time.  The lesson they had learned was the importance of having the correct structure in place.  He assured the Committee that processes and procedures are being put in place and progress was being made.

Lessons had been learned, progress was being made, and the challenge was really not about unfortunate "historical" issues but delivering services and improving income.

Nothing to worry about there then. 

The committee was back at work on 30 September where it considered another brief summary. There had been yet more progress and improvement, and "the Head of Leisure outlined the measures being taken to resolve the catering issues at the Park which included an extended café at the ski shop for an interim period whilst refurbishment work was being undertaken."

According to the minutes, "the Committee was reassured that appropriate measures and procedures were being put in place to address the increased cash flow at the park since the establishment of the caravan site".

Far from this being a scandal, it was actually all about maximising cash flow.

In view of what had been going on behind the scenes and was about to happen a few weeks later, members of the committee should have been left feeling rather less than reassured by what they heard

A big part of the "catering issues" involved allegations that the tender process for a contract to run the park cafe and kiosks had been rigged.

The local company which had run the catering facilities for a number of years was SFS Events, run by Ms Stephanie Thomas. SFS lost the contract to a Yorkshire-based company after what the Head of Leisure, Ian Jones, described as "a rigorous application process designed to get the best value and service for the County Council and users of Pembrey Country Park"

Unfortunately, this turned out to be a little wide of the mark. The outcome of the tender process was challenged, and the whole process was scrapped in July, with the council saying,"it is possible that a member of staff involved in the process may have had a personal interest which might be perceived to compromise the impartiality and independence of the process".

Note the equivocations with all of those 'possibles', 'mays' and 'perceiveds'. The tender process had been gravely compromised, and in most people's book, this bland statement would have been reworded to read "suspected corruption".

Having been reassured, members of the Audit Committee may have spluttered on their cornflakes when they opened the Llanelli Herald or the Llanelli Star in the last week of October to read that Rory Dickinson, the council's 'Countryside and Coast' manager, had pleaded guilty to assault against Mrs Stephanie Thomas of SFS Events.

Observant members of the committee will also have noted the date of the assault with some discomfort because it took place on 23 March 2016, the day after they had been presented with a report which spoke of progress in dealing with "historic" issues:

A former Carmarthenshire Council manager has been fined nearly £1,000 after he admitted assaulting a catering manager in a row over the tendering process at Pembrey Country Park.

While appearing at Llanelli Magistrates' Court this afternoon, Rory Dickinson pleaded guilty to assaulting Stephanie Jayne Thomas on March 23 earlier this year.

(Llanelli Star)

It is now clear that the vague issues referred to in the March 2016 report to the Audit Committee were anything but historic. Like proverbial mushrooms, members of the Audit Committee were being kept in the dark and fed horse poo.

In view of the seriousness of the allegations, councillors may also wonder why the council did not refer Mr Dickinson's activities to the police, and why he was allowed to resign from the council a week before the trial in October.

As a senior manager put it when confronted by a whistleblower recording their conversation, "FFS don't call the police!"
·     
The Dickinson case is by no means the end of matters. Back in October, Ms Thomas told the Llanelli Herald that she was still involved in a legal dispute with the council, and a further court hearing in a different case also relating to Pembrey Country Park is scheduled for 6 February in Cardiff.

In the meantime, the Audit Committee plods on. The most recent meeting took place on 6 January, with members being told of yet more 'progress'.

Unfortunately, meetings of this key committee are not broadcast or filmed, and unless you go along in person, you will have to reply on press reports or those heavily disinfected minutes. What we do know is that Cllr Bill Thomas (Lab., Lliedi, deselected) took up the cudgels once more and questioned the council's Head of Leisure, Ian Jones, and that the questions focussed on the fate of machinery and other assets belonging to the park.

The minutes will not be available for another couple of weeks at least, but no doubt we will read once more that members were reassured to hear that there was no evidence of any theft or fraud, which is what they were told.

The catering contract, the assault on Ms Thomas and the fate of those assets are just some of the ingredients  swirling around in this toxic soup. Others include claims that one employee was taking £10,000 a week out of the park; extortion; illegal, unlicensed commercial fishing; a sexual assault, blackmail and industrial scale cover-ups.

Of course, there is no hint of anything remotely worth telling the police about in any of those trivial allegations. References to lumpy carpets by a blogger, on the other hand, are a much more serious matter.


A key question is who knew what and when. Jake Morgan's March 2016 report was into "historical" issues which would have taken place during the tenure of his predecessor, Dave Gilbert OBE (now advising the Swansea Bay City Region). How much did Gilbert know about what was happening in his department? By the same token, was Cllr Meryl Gravell as former council leader and current portfolio holder ("we always defend our officers") in the loop?

And given the extraordinarily sensitive nature of what has happened, what part was played by the chief executive, and has there been a concerted cover-up and attempt to mislead councillors by some officers?

OBEs and CBEs all round!