Northcliffe Media, the publishing group whose titles include the Carmarthen Journal, Llanelli Star, South Wales Evening Post and Swansea Herald of Wales, is rumoured to have been sold for £90 million. The identity of the buyer is not yet known, but is said not to be one of the "usual suspects".

The group is a division of the Daily Mail and General Trust, and is understood to have been looking for new owners for some time. Earlier this year, Northcliffe was said to be valued at £150 million, which was roughly a tenth of what it was estimated to have been worth five years ago (see article here).

The plummeting value of the group, which publishes more than 80 local papers, shows just how desperate times have become for the local press as titles haemorrhage readers and advertising revenue. That in turn has made them all the more vulnerable to town hall bullies, with Carmarthenshire County Council leading the field.

Watch this space. Who knows, perhaps we could soon be reading the Carmarthen Journal courtesy of the Xinhua News Agency? Now that really would be something for County Hall to celebrate.

Hat tip to Alex Smith for this.

The Chief Executive shall record the time and date at which every such notice is delivered to him. That record shall be open to the inspection of every member of the Council.

Councillors may propose motions without notice during a meeting, and the constitution gives a list of the types of motion which may be moved (e.g. suspending the meeting, appointing a chair, going for a wee [made that bit up] etc.), but Cllr Price's motion would not seem to fit any of them.

The Chair may decide to add an urgent item to the agenda, but the new item would only come up after all of the items on the published agenda have been dealt with. And, of course, it is the Chief Executive alone who determines the agenda. Whatever it is that is so urgent will have to wait until all of the rubber stamping is finished.

If the peculiar timestamp clause is not sufficient, then the motion may well have fallen foul of the following catch-all clause:

The Chief Executive shall not accept any notice of motion which, by reason of any enactment or any provision in these Procedure Rules other than paragraph (12.9) below could not be considered at the meeting for which is given.

Which in plain English means that it means whatever the Chief Executive decides it means. The Chief Executive gets to decide, and that's that, although just to make it all look a bit more convincing, a red herring in the form of (12.9) is chucked in - a paragraph dealing with motions that are not moved and therefore lapse.

The chances that next week's meeting will see any discussion on the subject of the Sainsbury's applications are therefore roughly those of a snowball in the Pit of Hell.

In the past, the Chief Executive has shown no hesitation in kicking out motions submitted by non-aligned councillors, often on completely incomprehensible grounds, but his decision to block a motion submitted by the official opposition and the largest party on the Council marks a new departure. 

It is nothing more than a two finger gesture to the 39% of voters in Carmarthenshire who put their cross against a Plaid candidate.

It seems that Plaid Cymru has now also fallen foul of Carmarthenshire's Putinesque constitution. A motion calling on council leader Kevin Madge to withdraw the claims he made about the Sainsbury's planning applications in Llandeilo and Cross Hands has been ruled inadmissible because it was not correctly dated.

Unless there is a last minute surprise, the council will not now get an opportunity to discuss the issue until November, assuming that nothing else can be found in the constitution to prevent it.