New-York-Daily-News-cneifiwr-emlyn

Alun Lenny, one of Plaid's county councillors in Carmarthen, recently gave a superb lecture on Carmarthenshire's history of rioting and civil disobedience. Our forbears were certainly a more lively lot, and if they were around today it is likely that the glaziers would be kept very busy repairing the windows at County Hall.

Perhaps the unruly days of the past may yet make a return. The other day council leader Kevin Madge was predicting cuts of "biblical proportions". Perhaps he is more prescient than most of us thought because a couple of days later Ed Milliband and Ed Balls promised to deliver just that if they get back into power in Westminster.

What has not changed is the volatile nature of politics in the county. The old Carmarthen constituency had a continuous history from 1542 until it was abolished in 1997. In the nineteenth century it returned Tories on only two occasions for very brief periods, and in the twentieth century it accidentally acquired a Tory on only one occasion for a couple of years when a Liberal switched sides.

For most of the last 200 years then, Carmarthen has consistently backed the forces of progress and radicalism.

The constituency has twice made history since the Second World War: firstly with the election of Gwynfor Evans as the first Plaid Cymru MP in 1966, and secondly for its pivotal role in the 1997 Referendum. It has also punched beyond its weight with some of the politicians it has returned to Westminster since 1945, including Megan Lloyd George, Gwynfor Evans and Adam Price (the latter representing Carmarthen East and Dinefwr which was carved out of the old constituency).

With Jonathan Edwards and Rhodri Glyn Thomas the constituency also stands out from the pack.

Adam Price announced yesterday that he would be putting his name forward as a candidate to represent Carmarthen East and Dinefwr for Plaid in the Senedd following the retirement of Rhodri Glyn Thomas.

Adam is one of the most exciting and interesting politicians around, and not just in Wales. He has a clear vision and a natural ability to communicate his ideas. Above all, he conveys a sense of optimism and hope.

Croeso 'nol Adam. Gall Cymru.

Rhodri Glyn Thomas may be standing down at the next Assembly elections, but he is not going quietly. A year ago he launched a campaign to get the Welsh Government to rethink its plans to pass on Westminster cuts to council tax benefit, and he eventually succeeded in getting the government to bring forward a measure this year which will help 300,000 people. Even Kevin Madge, the leader of Carmarthenshire County Council, praised his efforts.

This week came the news that Rhodri Glyn Thomas has been instrumental in forcing the Welsh Government into another U-turn over senior council officer pay. The Welsh Government will now table proposals to set up an independent panel to control the pay of council fat cats.

There have been predictable howls of outrage from the Welsh Local Government Association and threats that in between trips to Buckingham Palace to collect their CBEs, MBEs and other gongs for loyal service, etc., etc., the deserving rich from Welsh county halls may find time to sue the rest of us for compensation.


It has also been argued that the existence of all these generous pay deals could be a major stumbling block to the overdue and much-needed reform of local government in Wales. Fewer councils would mean fewer officers, and that could mean lots of very expensive golden parachutes and redundancy packages.

Others have argued that having centralised control of senior officer pay is an attack on local democracy and the right of local councillors to reward their officers as they see fit, even though senior officer pay is already subject to national terms and conditions. Try telling that to the long suffering people of Carmarthenshire and see if you live to tell the tale.

If it is a competitive market, it's a very strange one with enormous disparities. In Wrexham only one officer earns more than £100,000 (£105,000 according to the BBC), and the roof has not fallen in yet. Carmarthenshire, by contrast, has enough big earners to fill a small bus (not that they would be seen dead on one, of course). In fact, Carmarthenshire's chief executive is either the highest earning chief executive in Wales or the second highest, depending on who's counting. The departure of Cardiff's chief executive is likely to remove any niggling doubts and ensure that Mark James finally gets the top spot.


Something the WLGA would probably also rather keep quiet about is the peculiar correlation between top earning council officers and council scandals. Carmarthenshire County Council regularly makes the news headlines despite the best efforts of its bloated PR machine, and over in Pembrokeshire the council has had a very torrid time with the press and interfering government ministers.

Rhodri Glyn Thomas has also called on Welsh local government to begin developing talent of its own rather than buying in expensive imports from England. Perhaps that might mean that counties like Carmarthenshire could in future even get chief executives who can speak Welsh, as well as costing a fraction of what we pay now.

Carmarthenshire County Council finally got round to issuing a statement yesterday admitting that it had accessed the e-mail account of Cllr Sian Caiach (see Western Mail report here).

Given the existence of an internal form reporting details of an e-mail sent by the councillor, the council could hardly deny that snooping had taken place. Equally unsurprising, the council sees no need to apologise for what it did, and most of the statement is taken up with a reminder that it has the power to monitor the e-mail accounts of both staff and councillors without their knowledge or permission.

There are a couple of problems with the statement.

Firstly the authors talk about the council as though it was a person capable of doing all the things which real people can do, albeit a lofty and strictly impartial person. The reality is that it was real people in the shape of senior council officers who decided to target Cllr Caiach's e-mail account.

A sinister aspect of this is that the identity of the officer or officers requesting the information from IT remains unknown because they did not put their names on the form (the first part of the form is headed "Name of Client").

The second problem with the council's response is that it is misleading in one key respect. The reason for the snooping, the council says, was that:

In this case, the council had become the subject of legal action and needed to identify potential evidence in an impending court case and the email came to light as a result.

Cllr Caiach's e-mail account was accessed on 2 September 2011, and the council was at that stage not actually the subject of legal action. What had happened just a couple of days previously was that Jacqui Thompson's solicitors had written what is called a letter before action to the council.

The purpose of a letter before action is to advise that legal action may be taken, and the reason for sending such a letter is to initiate discussion in the hope that court action can be avoided.

So there was no legal action at that stage, and certainly no "impending court case". The relevant papers initiating legal proceedings were not served on the council until three months after the snooping took place. Moreover, the e-mail did not somehow accidentally come to light while council officers were looking for something else, but the action was targeted.

Cllr Caiach's stance in favour of allowing the public to film council meetings was not a secret. She had made her position very clear in public, and council officers can have been in no doubt that in the event of a legal action, there was a very strong possibility that Cllr Caiach would be a witness for Jacqui Thompson.

So why were senior council officers so interested in Cllr Caiach's e-mails? There appears to be no suggestion that she was suspected of any criminal wrong-doing, and the contents of the e-mail revealed nothing which was not already in the public domain. The suspicion has to be that someone was hoping to catch her out, and that does not justify snooping.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that covert monitoring of a potential witness should constitute contempt of court.

Ruck Off

A few days ago this blog questioned why the Llanelli Star was employing the services of Julian Ruck as a weekly columnist, and it turns out that the paper has received strong complaints from regular readers about his bigoted and vitriolic attacks on a range of subjects including the Welsh language and Welsh culture.

The newspaper says that it has had numerous conversations with Julian Ruck to voice its concerns about his column and that it has been unable to reach agreement with him on "objectives for the column moving forward". As a result, the newspaper "is currently not accepting nor receiving further columns from Mr Ruck".

The good news for anyone suffering from withdrawal symptoms is that you can continue to read his rantings on the Labour Party's Labour Uncut website.

Bias

The Llanelli Star has also come under fire for its increasingly blatant bias towards the Labour Party under its acting editor, Alana Lewis. In addition to Julian Ruck, the newspaper plays host to regular columns written by Nia Griffith MP (Lab) and Keith Davies AM (Lab). Nothing unusual about that, but three times during May Ms Lewis popped up at the end of the politicans' columns to ask readers to contact her if they had any questions for Nia and Keith, giving readers the impression that she was acting as their agent.

Of course, the Llanelli Star has every right to support any political party it chooses, or none, but if a local paper starts to act as a mouthpiece for a particular political party, it should nail its colours to the mast and make its political leanings clear to readers.

As a marginal constituency in which Labour squeaked in with a majority of just 80 in the last Assembly elections, the Star probably can't afford to alienate a large section of its readership, and it has given assurances that it will remain politically unbiased.

Time will tell.

 Bonkers Burry Port

And finally in what has to be one of this week's most bizarre stories, Burry Port Town Council has passed a motion banning any of its councillors who write columns for the Llanelli Star from being a member of its various committees.

The reason for the move was not the sudden discovery by council members of any love for Welsh culture; neither was it triggered by objections to the paper's political bias, but by the activities of Cllr Graham Davies who has begun writing a column for the paper covering dangerous topics such as gardening, holidays and folk music.

The motion was brought by Cllr Steve James, until he was booted out by voters last year one of the leading lights of Pam Palmer's Independent group in County Hall. Cllr James, a practising Tory, explained that councillors were concerned that by writing the column, Cllr Davies might "be in touch with the process of the press", and that by writing a column, it was somehow elevating one particular councillor above the rest, who presumably are barely literate and therefore disqualified from such elitist activities.

With all these columns, it's a wonder that there is any space for news in the Llanelli Star.

It's taken a while, but the legal system has finally presented the bill for the libel case involving blogger Jacqui Thompson and Mark James, chief executive of Carmarthenshire Council. You can read Jacqui's statement about it here.

There were two parts to the case: the action brought by Jacqui against the chief executive over comments he made in a letter he wrote to the Madaxeman blog, and a counterclaim brought by Mr James against Jacqui. The costs were £190,000 and £41,000 for these two actions respectively. In addition, Jacqui has been ordered to pay £25,000 in damages to Mr James personally.

All told, that's just over £250,000, an amount which exceeds the value of the smallholding where Jacqui and her family live.

It took more than a year for the case to come to court, and as Jacqui says, in the first few months the hope and expectation was that the two parties would reach a settlement. That opportunity was lost.

The bombshell comes at the end of Jacqui's statement where she reveals that her insurers used the wording of the judgement to withdraw their cover. The entire £250,000 therefore falls on Jacqui and her family, who the judge noted were of very modest means.

Where this leaves the council is not clear. What is known is that the council's own insurance was invoked to meet the cost of the defence, while the council funded the counterclaim action directly. Whatever happens, the result will be a black hole for the council's tax payers, while Jacqui and her family face the prospect of being made homeless by the council, which would then have to rehouse them.

In his many interviews and articles since the judgment was handed down, Mr James has described this as an important victory for local government. Pyrrhic would be more apt. Wiser councils, particularly councils which are run by elected councillors rather than unelected officials, will certainly think twice before following the route Mr James took Carmarthenshire down.

The legal construct which the county council used to bring its counterclaim could and should have been challenged by the Welsh Government, which chose to sit on the sidelines wringing its hands.

The manner in which the council funded the counterclaim was, bizarrely, one of the key features of Mr James's case against Jacqui. The judge found Jacqui's description of the arrangement whereby Carmarthenshire County Council changed its constitution to enable council officers and members to dip into taxpayers funds to bring libel actions to be libellous.

Jacqui's lawyers are now seeking leave to appeal the judgement, and we wish her every success.

Labour Uncut is a website set up by Labour Party activists in the wake of the 2010 general election defeat to act as a platform for party members to let off steam, indulge in a bit of navel gazing and pontificate. Debate is often quite lively, and judging from some recent articles, the party rank and file are not a happy bunch.

Tucked away among articles urging Ed Milliband to get his act together is a "Letter from Wales" from Julian Ruck, who is presumably a member of the zoo that is the Labour Party in Carmarthenshire, since this is where he has made his home.

If Labour's county councillors are representative of the party in Carmarthenshire, a few of the zoo's exhibits are cute and cuddly. Some of the inmates have seen better days, and cling grimly to their perches in what is left of their plumage. A very strong smell comes from some of the cages, and the Llanelli enclosure in particular contains some pretty nasty specimens.

Julian Ruck is not a member of the Labour county council zoo, but if he were, he would be in the reptile house (see previous post here). His letter begins with a moan about the Welsh Labour Party before launching into a vitriolic and poisonous attack on the Welsh language, Welsh culture and senior BBC journalists such as Vaughan Roderick and Betsan Powys. You can read it for yourselves here.

Julian Ruck is Julian Ruck, and there is no likelihood that this pompous self-publicist will ever allow facts to disrupt his bigoted and bitter outpourings. His "Letter from Wales" could just as well have appeared on a website dedicated to the English Defence League or the BNP, and that is what quite a few of the responses from Labour activists on the Uncut site argue.

To be fair then, Labour Uncut is what it says on the can: the Labour Party warts and all, the real thing.

What is rather more shameful is that Julian Ruck is a columnist for the Llanelli Star.

In 2014 Llanelli will play host to the National Eisteddfod, an event which showcases Wales and Welsh culture at its best, most creative and most talented. It will also give the local economy a big boost as tens of thousands of people descend on the area and spend money with local businesses.

No doubt the Llanelli Star will have its own stand, and the paper will feature excited coverage of the Eisteddfod.

Remembering that the paper regularly gives space to the rantings of someone who hates the Welsh language and culture so much, Eisteddfod-goers should reply to offers to buy a copy with a firm Dim diolch. That's language which even the Llanelli Star would understand.

Imagine that you want to send your county councillor some highly confidential and sensitive information. You  trust your councillor and believe that they will act in your best interests. It may well be that the problem you are highlighting involves the actions of the authority itself as a provider of adult care, education or children's services; perhaps it may have something to do with planning or regeneration schemes. Perhaps you have reason to believe that council staff or officers are guilty of abuse or corruption. Perhaps you are employed by the council and are acting as a whistleblower.

What you, and very likely your councillor, do not know is that the council can monitor your correspondence, without your knowledge or permission.

That is what happened to Cllr Sian Caiach, a Carmarthenshire councillor, who has written about it on her website here. Coincidentally some other councillors are known to have expressed concerns recently that their e-mails have also been accessed by "the authority".

Cllr Caiach discovered that her e-mails were being read by people other than those for whom they were intended when a scrap of paper headed "Attendance Form" came into her possession. The form was filled out by the council's head of IT and noted the recipients of an e-mail sent by the councillor. The identity of the person requesting the information was left blank, although it is likely to be one of only a couple of senior officers.

Whether monitoring was a routine event is not yet clear, but Cllr Caiach is now attempting to find out.

It may be helpful to provide a brief timeline of what happened in this case.

In the aftermath of her arrest for filming part of a council meeting, Jacqui Thompson wrote a letter to all councillors calling on them to support the filming of council meetings. Some councillors asked the chief executive to respond to Jacqui Thompson.

Instead, the council's chief executive, Mark James, sent a letter to the Madaxeman blog which subsequently became the subject of a libel action. Having sent the letter to the Madaxeman, Mr James then decided to tell his employers, namely the elected councillors, what he had done.

Cllr Caiach responded to the chief executive's e-mail as follows:


That is the full text of her reply, and its content can hardly be described as seditious.

For reasons which remain unclear, someone in the council felt sufficiently nervous to instruct the head of IT to investigate.

The council's policy on e-mail monitoring is confused and open to interpretation, and since it is senior council officers who do the interpreting, you can safely assume that the interpretation will be whatever is in their interests rather than yours.

This is how the council's own Standards Committee summarized the e-mail policy:

The authority’s email usage policy makes it clear that emails generated by, or accessed via, council owned equipment will not be considered as the private property of their creator/recipient, and that the authority may access those emails at any time without an individual’s consent or knowledge. 

Individual senior officers cannot directly access the emails of others in the authority, unless they have been given permission to do so by that person.

A senior officer can request that an individual email account be examined by the IT department, but will be expected to give good reasons why this should take place.



There will be legitimate reasons why one person should access the e-mails of someone else in a workplace, but this case is surely not one of them. Given what happened subsequently, there is a very strong likelihood that one party in a trial effectively accessed the e-mail account of an elected representative who was also a witness for the other party in the trial.

Old fashioned snail mail or a private e-mail address may be safer options if you have something confidential to tell your councillor in future.