New-York-Daily-News-cneifiwr-emlyn

The Wales Blog Awards are back after a year off, and you can nominate your favourite blog or blogs in different categories from now until 28 February.

Jacqui Thompson had a truly terrible year for a variety of reasons in 2013, and the outcome of the libel case was devastating for her and has worrying implications for free speech and press freedom in this country, as Kevin Madge reminded us recently when he said, "Nobody has the right to say what they like about this council, its officers and members". Welcoming the verdict last year, the council's chief executive said this was an important victory for councils everywhere.

The nightmare is not over by a long way, and she and her family face a very uncertain future regardless of the outcome of her appeal.

But it is not out of sympathy that I am asking readers to nominate her blog, but because she has refused to be silenced and bullied into quiet submission. The odds have always been stacked against her, but throughout she has remained quietly dignified and determined, and her blog remains a superbly well researched and knowledgeable read for anyone who is interested in our county council.

I sincerely hope that Jacqui wins the award for best political blog partly as a gesture of solidarity, but also because a win for Jacqui will be a two finger salute to the bully boys.

The nomination form can be found here.

Please take a few moments to enter carmarthenplanning.blogspot.co.uk

The event which triggered the creation of this blog was the arrest of Jacqui Thompson for filming a council meeting.

The arrest was shocking, unjust and completely out of proportion. At the time the author of this blog still felt that somehow common sense would prevail and could have prevailed. That all looks very naive now.

Even more shocking were the cat-calls and jeers which rose up from the council chamber as Jacqui was led away in handcuffs. And now it emerges that even the police were disgusted by the behaviour of the baying pack.

Jacqui has now blogged about correspondence which came to light in the aftermath of the arrest, and you can read it here.

Council officers, it is now clear, told the police at the time that Jacqui Thompson had a history of being abusive to members. The only thing that could possibly refer to was the planning dispute which ended in 2007 in a libel case over the wording of a letter which had been circulated but not published in the media. It named one council officer. By the time of the arrest the case had long since been settled, and a formal apology made.

Does that constitute a history of abusive behaviour to members?

Unfortunately this is not the end of the matter. In what looks increasingly like a vindictive campaign by the authority, the council recently published a report giving the impression that it had tried hard to settle the libel action involving the chief executive before that reached court, and Kevin Madge announced that he would shortly reveal the truth behind Cllr Siân Caiach's decision to stand as a witness in the trial.


Readers may recall that the council snooped on Cllr Caiach's e-mails and falsely claimed that this was part of the disclosure process required by the court (the disclosure process did not begin until over a year after the e-mail monitoring episode).

Councillors became aware of the snooping in June last year, and have been waiting for a report from officers ever since. In November they were told that the matter would first have to go to the Executive Board. Four meetings of the board have taken place since then with no sign of the report. If and when it does finally see the light of day, councillors will probably have been left waiting for a year.

What still has not dawned on the council officers involved, and now apparently also Kevin Madge, is that the longer this carries on, the more the sordid truth will come out and the worse they look, as we can see from the Dyfed Powys Police letter.

Update 10.31 a.m.

Commission member Nick Bennett says that the Commission identified 935 public bodies in Wales - twice the number of supermarkets in the country.

A further recommendation is the merger of many town and community councils.

The Commission would like to see the Welsh Government act quickly and implement the changes over a period of 3 to 5 years.

People in Carmarthenshire wait for a declaration from County Hall proclaiming that the Commission's recommendation to leave Carmarthenshire alone (sort of, perhaps, possibly) is a total vindication of the authority's track record.

Update 9.52a.m.

And he's off! Paul Williams is introducing his report now, and the full report plus a summary (a mere 105 pages!) have been published here. As a minimum he recommends a reduction from 22 to 12 authorities, leaving Carmarthenshire, Swansea and Powys unchanged. Ceredigion would merge with Pembrokeshire.

Here is the list of proposed mergers:

Isle of Anglesey and Gwynedd;
Conwy and Denbighshire;
Flintshire and Wrexham;
Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire;
Neath Port Talbot and Bridgend;
Rhondda Cynon Taf and Merthyr Tydfil;
Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan;
Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly and Torfaen; and
Monmouthshire and Newport

Going beyond the minimum, the report says, would mean merging Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire (= Dyfed), but it recognises that service delivery would be challenging.


There is growing speculation in the media about what the Williams Commission on the reorganisation of Welsh local government will say when it is published later today.

The BBC reckons that the report will recommend merging existing councils, rather than redrawing boundaries. It also believes that any mergers will take place within the boundaries of existing health authorities and police forces. Mergers should also not cross the borders of areas which qualify for EU aid, such as Blaenau Gwent, and those which don't, such as Monmouthshire.

Over on the IWA's website Jon Winterson Richards (a former Tory leader in Cardiff) argues that what we need is leadership, not reorganisation. He makes an interesting distinction between local government and what he believes we have now, which is local administration.

Widely expected is a recommendation that Carmarthenshire should merge with Pembrokeshire, taking two rotten councils into one new super rotten council.

The two neighbouring counties could hardly be more different, and stand by for howls of protest from our friends in the west who would really rather have nothing to do with Carmarthenshire. The feeling is mutual.

One horrible consequence of a new Sir Bengar or Carmbrokeshire would probably be a shot in the arm for the "Independents" on both sides of the county boundary. Left to their own devices, the Carmarthenshire Independents would probably be extinct within a decade.

Waiting for the Williams Commission is a bit like watching one of those films where someone has just stumbled into a dusty tomb and is about to open a box. The audience screams helplessly. "Don't open it, don't do it!"

Needless to say, the box is opened, sparking a new reign of terror by some mouldering old mummies.

The latest edition of Carmarthenshire News is now dropping onto doormats across the county. Most will probably go unopened into our blue recycling sacks, while others shred them for use as free hamster bedding.

The subject of what this unloved propaganda sheet actually costs cropped up in this week's Carmarthen Journal as part of a lengthy article supplied courtesy of County Hall, and reprinted word for word by our local paper. The article is "the Council's" response to Plaid Cymru's alternative budget proposals for the county council.

"Council" in inverted commas because, of course, councils cannot actually write articles for newspapers; only people can. And when it comes to people, there are only two varieties in councils: elected political representatives and unelected and supposedly politically neutral officers. 

The Journal does not tell us who wrote this piece, which takes up almost an entire page, but we can take it for granted that it was written by council officers rather than Kevin Madge or any of his fellow Executive Board members.

The phrasing of the article and some of the arguments deployed will be familiar to anyone who has
studied council press releases and statements made by the chief executive who also, as it happens, takes a very close interest in the content of Carmarthenshire News.

When the Plaid group published its proposals it noted that it was very difficult for anyone outside the inner sanctum to get a grip on the details of the council's finances. They also requested a peer group meeting with senior Labour and Independent councillors to discuss the upcoming budget as elected representatives, rather than with the council's officers who had already published their own proposals. As we know, that meeting was refused.

To illustrate just how hard it is to get to the truth of the council's finances, it is worth recalling a visit by a group of armchair auditors to County Hall a couple of years back. They were exercising the right which all citizens have to inspect the council's annual accounts, and they included in their number a real life auditor.

What they were presented with was a collection of files containing codes and numbers with very little in the way of wording to explain what the numbers actually related to. The group was particularly interested in the council's spending on its newspaper and the press and PR departments, and they got nowhere.

Items of expenditure would appear in the files, only to be zeroed out in a huge thicket of cross charges. An item which appeared frequently turned out to be the time spent by officers on particular projects, and that was invariably zeroed out and cross charged to something else.

When the group asked to see the documents which these numbers and codes referred to, the request was instantly refused. The public may have a right to inspect the accounts, but only the bits which they can make no sense of.

The sudden closure of Garnant Golf Club, and the failure of the County Council's bid to secure funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to save Parc Howard in Llanelli are a reminder in their different ways of how badly served many people in Carmarthenshire are when it comes to reporting of local news by the two largest local newspapers and the council itself, which maintains a large and very costly press and PR operation to ensure, it says, that there is fair and balanced reporting of council news.

The two failures also throw the council's decision making processes into the spotlight once again.

Garnant Golf Club went into receivership two days ago and closed its doors. So far there has not been a word about it on the council's website, although the collapse has been reported by the South Wales Guardian and the BBC, and there have been calls from opposition councillors for an investigation into the deal the council did with the operators in 2011.

Yesterday Rhodri Glyn Thomas AM was interviewed on both Post Cyntaf (Radio Cymru) and Good Morning Wales. He made the point that significant amounts of public money had been sunk into the venture, and that Plaid Cymru had expressed concerns when the deal was struck back in 2011. Why had the council not been aware of the company's financial difficulties?

The council was as usual unable to put up a spokesperson, but sent instead a brief statement saying that it was too soon to say what had gone wrong, and it was trying to contact the company. It went on to blame the general economic climate.

The Carmarthen Journal, whose patch includes Garnant, has also been silent on the debacle, presumably as it waits for guidance from County Hall about what to say. The only news you will find about Garnant there is that council leader Kevin Madge held a surgery in Garnant Club last week.

Update

The Journal finally got round to reporting on the closure of the golf club on 18 January, presumably having had to wait for guidance from County Hall on what to say. The South Wales Guardian broke the news on 14 January. The Guardian today carries an interview with Kevin Madge who defends the decision to lease the club out to Clay's Golf and promises that he will do everything in his power to keep the club going.

It looks like curtains for Garnant Golf Club, then.


In the case of Parc Howard in Llanelli, the council has issued a press release on the rejection by the Heritage Lottery Fund of the funding bid. The council pins the blame for this on what it terms a "small group of opponents" to the scheme who apparently objected to proposed car parking arrangements, and the Llanelli Star has reprinted the council's statement.

There is a story here, however. If the council's statement is true, opponents of the council's proposals turn out to have played a very important part in what has happened, but nowhere in the archives will you find any explanation of who the objectors were or what they did not like about the council's bid. The closest we get to a hint that everything was not well is in a Llanelli Star article from June 2013 (here).

What emerges from that report was that members of Llanelli Town Council felt the county council had not consulted widely enough with the public on the future of the park and its house, only to have their concerns dismissed by Meryl Gravell.

The truth appears to be that Carmarthenshire County Council tried to bulldoze through its vision for the park and failed to take on board the views of local people, with the result that the rescue plan came unstuck when it reached the Heritage Lottery Fund.

When Plaid councillors criticised the Garnant deal in 2011, Kevin Madge dismissed their concerns as "clueless electioneering".

In the light of the closure of the golf club and the very uncertain future which awaits Parc Howard, who looks clueless now?

If you watched the excellent series Tair Chwaer a few years back, you may recall a conversation about the dangers of GM food. "Just look at what's happened to people in Ammanford!", one of the sisters said to clinch her argument.

Whether it's the effects of GM food or not, Ammanford Town Hall has been the scene of some extraordinary shenanigans, as chronicled by the South Wales Guardian here and here. The row is about proposals to  raise the town council's precept to cover the cost of employing a technical officer to manage the parks and recreational areas which the town council is having to take on because of cutbacks by the county council.

The Labour mayor stormed out of the first meeting in a huff, with accusations and insults flying. Another petition appeared (remember the recent row over the cricket nets and a dodgy petition?) at the following meeting calling on councillors to reject proposals to raise the precept.

According to the clerk, a member of the public had telephoned before the meeting to threaten that if councillors ignored the petition, they would have no choice but to seek the dissolution of the council. Cllr Colin Evans, who is of course also a member of the county council's Executive Board, said this was blackmail.

If councils could be sent packing because they ignore voters, Kevin Madge wouldn't have lasted five minutes.

Meanwhile over in Llanelli, a group including some Plaid Cymru councillors had called a public meeting to raise awareness of the county council's plans to implement dramatic increases in charges for sports facilities.

A member of the public turned up saying that he had contacted two Labour county councillors to check the time of the meeting only to be told that it had been cancelled.

The meeting went ahead, with no Labour or "Independent" councillors showing up, presumably because they were hoping that it had been cancelled.