Tag: Association of County Councils

A Major Coup – Or A Complete Disaster?

The Welsh Gov’ts most senior civil servant Dame Shan Morgan, the Permanent Secretary, was in the news yesterday. I had a look at her CV and also at the CV of Sir Derek Jones, the Permanent Secretary who preceded her. I didn’t see anything earth shatteringly incriminating on their CVs, it was all fairly standard Whitehall mandarin stuff. However I certainly had a shock when I took a look at the previous of the Permanent Secretary before Sir Derek – Dame Gillian Morgan, Permanent Secretary 2008-12.

So had Gillian done the rounds in Whitehall, in the European Commission or in the Diplomatic Service as is the norm for a mandarin? Not at all. Gillian Morgan was a Top Doctor! Neither was Morgan a medical graduate who early in her career decided to join the civil service – Morgan was a Top Doctor until the day before she was appointed the most senior civil servant in Wales.

The Welsh civil servants have no loyalty to Wales, they are appointed by Whitehall which is why it has always been said that the civil service serving Wales is actually doing the work of the Westminster Gov’ts, who are usually very hostile to Wales. It might also explain why so many senior civil servants who have ‘served’ Wales concealed the paedophile gang which decimated the nation. But Whitehall was certainly  aiming for the bulls-eye in terms of screwing Wales when it appointed Dr Gillian.

Gillian was appointed under Gordon Brown’s Gov’t in May 2008. That was during the dying days of the North West Wales NHS Trust. I was being harassed, threatened and arrested by Martin Jones, the CEO of the Trust and Elfed Roberts, the Chairman, like there was no tomorrow. Members of the public witnessing what was going on wrote to Elfed and Martin and made statements to my lawyer. There was never an investigation into Martin and Elfed’s conduct. Staff were walking away from the North West Wales NHS Trust in droves and Martin was relying on agency staff to run Ysbyty Gwynedd – who were not being subjected to CRB checks. Patients were dying, complaints were not being investigated and litigation costs were going through the roof.

Edwina Hart, the Welsh Gov’ts Health Minister, was doing her best to confront Martin, Elfed and the Top Doctors but they virtually spat in her face. In 2011 Edwina was removed from the post and paedophiles’ friend Lesley Griffiths, a member of the Mafia of Drips, replaced her (see post ‘History Repeats Itself, First As Tragedy, Second As Farce’).

I was told at the time that Edwina was being undermined by the Welsh civil service – could it possibly have been dear old Dame Top Doctor Gillian that this person was thinking of? Dame Gillian was sent to Wales to rescue someone the year after Edwina became Health Minister.

Immediately before Morgan was appointed to the most senior job in the Welsh civil service despite having no experience at all in the civil service, she was the Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation and had been since 2002. The NHS Confederation is the body which represents Health Trusts and Boards!

So somebody in Westminster saw fit to appoint someone who actually represented the North West Wales NHS Trust and it’s criminally negligent senior managers to run the Welsh civil service at a time when patients were being threatened, unlawfully refused treatment and were dying – and when the senior managers of that Trust were conducting a co-ordinated campaign to undermine and indeed remove the Health Minister.

Somebody needs to explain this.

Martin Jones will have known Gillian Morgan before she was given the job of Permanent Secretary. Not only will they have known each other from their mutual troughing at public expense at the NHS Confederation but they were both members of the Institute of Health Service Management -indeed old Gillian was President, 1997-98.

At the time that Morgan was Chief Exec of the NHS Confederation, their website also featured a Sue Slipman as Director of the Foundation Trust Network Service. I remember dear old Sue from her appearances on Question Time in the 1980s. Sue was one of Dr Death’s acolytes in the SDP and was the source of much entertainment because when she had been a leading light in the NUS she had been a Communist. Sue is a rather vacuous Lampeter graduate who had held a senior role in the National Council for One Parent Families and before that the NCCL, when the NCCL was busy advising paedophiles on their rights. Sue later found herself Chairing an NHS Trust but all references to which one exactly disappeared from the internet after those embarrassing revelations about the NCCL cosying up to PIE hit the media a few years ago.

Gillian’s biography mentions that she has worked as a doctor in ‘hospitals, GP practices and public health medicine’, has ‘served on a large number of national committees and working groups’ and is a member of the NHS Stakeholders Forum. She is a past President of the International Hospital Federation. Dame Abuse and Corruption is also a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners. So she’ll know Dr D.G.E. Wood, the corrupt GP who concealed the paedophile gang in north Wales and assisted the mental health services in their criminal activities, who has held high office in the Royal College for many years.

It is noticeable that where information about the work of Dame Abuse and Corruption is concerned, there is an absence of a timeline – we are told that she was a Consultant and then Director of Public Health in Leicestershire, but we are not told when. However, it is admitted that at the turn of the millennium the Dame was Chief Exec of the North and East Devon Health Authority, based in Exeter. That has been a very troubled region with regard to the NHS for a very long time and one Chief Executive narrowly avoided being imprisoned (see post ‘NHS Chief Executive Collapses In Court After Being Spared Jail’). There have been problems in the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, including the hounding and eventual exclusion of Professor Edzard Ernst, because he had the temerity to produce research which demonstrated that some of the alternative therapies that the Medical School wished to promote were clinically ineffective. One of the people demanding Edzard’s head on a plate was a close friend of Prince Charles. Exeter Medical School is also fully on board with the research fraud that is MBCT (mindfulness based cognitive therapy), perpetrated by Professor Mark Williams (see post ‘The Biggest Expert Of The Lot’).

It can therefore be assumed that Gillian was Director of Public Health for Leicestershire sometime before 2000 and presumably a Consultant in public health for Leicestershire before she was Director.

That places Gillian in Leicestershire in the 1980s/90s – when there was a massive cover-up on the part of the NHS, social services and local authority of the paedophile ring that operated in the region, two members of which were Frank Beck and Greville Janner. In 1987 Dr James Earp, the leading forensic psychiatrist in Leicester, concealed the wrongdoing of the mental health services in north Wales (see post ‘An Expert From England’).

I cannot imagine that your average Top Doctor would decide to apply for the post of the head of the Welsh civil service if they saw the advert in the Job Centre. So who told this toxic cow that the post of Permanent Secretary in Wales was about to become vacant and suggested that she apply for it? This was a highly irregular appointment and I imagine that a few eyebrows were raised when it was made.

One person who was delighted with Dame Abuse and Corruption’s appointment was Rhodri Morgan, Wales’s First Minister who was hated by Martin Jones and no doubt hated him in return – but Rhodri had a massive problem in the NHS in north Wales, was as thick as pig shit himself and desperately needed to conceal the criminality and the deaths. Furthermore Rhodri’s wife Julie Morgan is a former social worker who had been Deputy Director of Barnardo’s, which was one of the organisations to which some of the paedophiles of north Wales had links.

Rhodri stated that Dame Abuse and Corruption’s appointment was ‘a major coup for Wales’ – and then no doubt went off to sink a few pints and stick his head in the sand, thus exposing his thinking parts as George Carman would say.

We were told that Dame Abuse and Corruption would use one of Wales’s most powerful jobs to ‘deliver better public services’. So that’s why the Health Board in north Wales is now in special measures after a huge mental health patient abuse scandal and is effectively bankrupt – the old Dame certainly delivered on that one. The rest of the NHS in Wales and the social services are pretty crap as well…

Entertainingly I have found a copy of a letter that the Dame wrote to Sir Michael Scholar – someone else who knew much about the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal but kept it under his hat (see post ‘So Who Was It Exactly Who Appointed The Corrupt Old Bastard?’) – in 2009 regarding the Welsh Assembly Gov’ts Strategic Plan to address violence to women and domestic abuse. Two days ago the leading story on BBC News Wales online was the serious problem of domestic violence in Wales. A few days before that it was reported that the lawyer who prosecuted the trafficking gang in Rotherham had been retained by the Welsh Gov’t to make Wales the safest country in Europe for women. Somebody obviously thinks that Wales needs him after one particular woman going under the name of Gillian Morgan was imported into Wales to assist a bunch of paedophiles’ friends.

So who could possibly have thought that it would be a good idea to send Gillian of the Leicestershire Paedophiles to help out the Welsh civil service when the wrongdoing of Martin and the paedophiles’ friends in north Wales had become so high profile that it was being openly discussed by the general public?

Someone whispered the word ‘Cherie’ in my ear earlier. It was Cherie’s mate Michael Beloff QC who advised Clwyd County Council’s insurers to redact, withhold and then pulp the Jillings Report into child abuse in north Wales because what had happened was completely indefensible (see post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake’). Cherie was of course mates with many of the Councillors in the London authorities who sent children in their care into the arms of a vicious paedophile gang in north Wales – she was also mates with the ‘radical’ lawyers who ignored what was going on. Cherie and Tony were both colleagues of George Carman who was one of the most corrupt barristers in the UK and who certainly knew about organised child abuse (see posts ‘No Ordinary Methods’ and ‘No Ordinary Methods -Supplementary Post’).

Cherie – when you became a QC you were smug enough to tell a journo that being a QC was ‘pretty smart’. Witnesses to the North Wales paedophile gang were murdered Cherie – they were poisoned, they were strung up, they were killed when cars drove into them at high speed and five of them were killed by a petrol bomb. You are not pretty smart, you are a weak pathetic woman who needed a friend like Carol Caplin, who believed in silly New Age therapies and who threw hissy fits because you felt threatened by Anji Hunter. You are also a greedy bitch who is married to a war criminal. I’ll look out for you both in the media coverage of Tessa’s funeral – who will die because the whole bloody lot of you failed to stop the rampant corruption and research fraud in the UK medical establishment, substantially because the Top Doctors were concealing the organised paedophile rings which infiltrated the whole of the UK child care system in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I hope that those free holidays at Berlusconi’s place were worth it you fucking idiots. That’s the Berlusconi who is alleged to have Mafia connections. Serious organised crime is a running theme with the Blairs and their friends isn’t it.

Hey there Smart One how does it feel to be outed on the internet by a Service User when I’m supposed to have green teeth, weigh twenty stone and be sitting in a group run by a paedophile’s friend telling me that I’m now empowered?

Cherie and Tony’s mate Alastair Campbell was the man who constructed the cock and bull story about Ron Davies’s moment of madness on Clapham Common when he’d been caught with a male prostitute called Boogie – days after Blair had told old Ron that he would be the next First Minister of Wales.

What does Blair think that Wales has done to him??? Is all this his revenge because Prestatyn produced John Prescott or something?

 

If the Dame’s arrival in Wales was mystifying, so was her departure. She retired in Aug 2013 on ‘voluntary exit terms’ with a pay off of approx 190k. In retirement Dame Serious Organised Crime gave a media interview in which she explained that throughout her life she had suffered from anasphasia,  an inability to picture in her mind people’s faces. Presumably she also had an inability to picture kids being battered, raped, kept in a cellar at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh and then burnt to a crisp in arson attacks when they were young adults.

At the same time as questions were asked about Dame Serious Organised Crime’s gratuitous pay off, there were also questions asked of another Welsh Gov’t civil servant, Bernard Galton. Galton had been the DG for People, Places and Corporate Services and was still receiving his generous salary, despite having stepped down from that role and was due to receive an exit package. Galton explained that he was now doing the job of DG, Workforce and Organisational Development for NHS Wales. This was in 2014 – when there was a massive problem with recruitment to the Wales NHS.

Galton had a sideline as well – in June 2014 he was appointed as a non-executive director for the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases NHS Foundation Trust in Bath. Galton lives in Bath. Well he wasn’t going to slum it in Wales was he. The Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases described itself as having an ‘excellent reputation for research both nationally and internationally’ and offers ‘musculo-skeletal conditions chronic pain management’ and also ‘chronic fatigue syndrome/ME fatigue management’.

For the 35 years that Iived in north Wales I found it impossible to get treatment for a musculo-skeletal problem which frequently left me in agony. I knew other people refused treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome/ME.

This is presumably why Galton lived in Bath.

After Galton retired from the civil service which blocked all attempts to improve the public services in Wale, he became a non-executive director of the Oxford Health Foundation NHS Trust. Professors Mark Williams and Tom Burns work in the mental health services in Oxford – both of them concealed the criminal activity in the north Wales NHS which was associated with the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal.

In Feb 2016 the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments – the organisation which waves through lucrative directorship for politicians and civil servants who have recently left office – gave their approval for Galton to take on a part time role as a non-executive director in a company to pursue ‘a joint venture between three Welsh local authorities and Capita Property and Infrastructure. Galton had already accepted the post when he condescended to request the permission of the Advisory Committee – this was of course in breach of the rules but the Advisory Committee let him off this time.

The Advisory Committee also approved a role for Galton as a Strategic Consultant at Green Park Ltd. The Advisory Committee noted that Galton had dealings with Green Park Ltd whilst he had worked in the Welsh Gov’t – Green Park Ltd had landed a 1.25 million contract from the Welsh Gov’t. Furthermore Galton had sat on the decision making panel throughout the tendering exercise. The HR Senior Civil Service team had awarded the contract to Green Park Ltd – Bernard Galton was their line manager. The Advisory Committee let him off again. Bernard is also a Strategic Advisor at Sapienti Consulting – that was OK with the Advisory Committee too.

 

The Chairman of the NHS Confederation for the last year in which Dame Serious Organised Crime was Chief Exec of that organisation was Professor Bryan Stoten. Stoten was Chair of UKPHR (UK Public Health Regulation), the body which regulates the ‘specialist public health workforce’ who are not regulated by the GMC ie. who are not medically qualified. Which might include Dame Gangster – I had assumed that she was medically qualified but I note that is not actually clarified.

Stoten is a big name in the NHS in the Midlands. In 2001 he was appointed Chair of University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust and in 2006 he became Chair of Warwickshire PCT. Stoten has also been Chair of Birmingham Health Authority and Coventry Health Authority. So he knows Professor Robert Bluglass (from Birmingham) and Dr Colin Berry (from Coventry) who concealed the criminal activities of Dafydd and the paedophiles (see post ‘Enter Professor Robert Bluglass CBE’).

Stoten lectured at Birmingham University’s Health Services Management Centre, 1972-77. He was featured on their website reminiscing over his happy days there, but observed that it was ‘a pity after 40 years to see the management of the NHS in such disarray’. Well Bryan it was you who trained the collection of mindless greedy crooks and spivs who very obviously did not know how to manage anything, although they were taught how to intimidate patients who had been harmed, how to deflect complaint, how to cook the books and fiddle the stats and how to get rid of whistleblowers.

Bryan’s colleague Elisabeth Buggins was Chair of the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority whilst it was responsible for supervising Mid Staffs NHS Foundation Trust when an estimated 1000 people died unnecessarily there (more sober voices have suggested that many more died, although because the NHS lies about everything only the deaths of 1000 were estimated). At least 1000 deaths and patients drinking water out of vases and told to crap in their beds by Angels because they couldn’t be bothered to walk across a ward with a bedpan? No problem. Buggins was awarded a CBE in the 2008 New Years honours and in 2011 was appointed Chair of Birmingham Women’s Hospital. In 2016 Buggins resigned after it was revealed that Birmingham Women’s Hospital had a 3.4 million deficit.

Buggins Chaired the UK Organ Donation Taskforce, 2006-09. She is or was Chair of the Eastern Academic Health Sciences Network as well as of the Walsall Refugee and Asylum Seekers Support Association. She is or was Deputy Chair of Accord Housing Group and team leader of the Big Feed, as well as an Independent Reviewer for DeepMind Health. Buggins has also taught on the Patient Public Involvement module at Warwick University. She maintains that she has worked with the voluntary sector on local, national and European projects.

Buggins is or was Deputy Lieutenant for the West Midlands.

The Chief Exec of the neighbouring Birmingham Children’s Hospital whilst the Birmingham Women’s Hospital ran up gambling debts under Buggins’s Chairmanship was Sarah-Jane Marsh. Sarah-Jane appeared in the press looking very pleased with herself and explained that discussions were underway regarding the merger of Birmingham Women’s Hospital with Birmingham Children’s Hospital and regarding the appointment of Dame Christine Braddock, the Chair of the latter, to Chair the new merged organisation.

Braddock had not long before resigned as Principal and Chief Exec of Birmingham Metropolitan College after she was rash enough to ban the wearing of Muslim veils at the College and was faced with  9000 signature petition, the threat of a mass demo and a very big political row. In the same year Braddock was made a Dame for her services to FE. In the wake of the row over the veils Braddock stated that she was approaching 60 and had always planned to retire.

So it was good to know that Braddock suddenly found enough life left in her to become the Chairman of a major hospital as well as High Sheriff of the West Midlands and then Deputy Lieutenant.

Braddock had previous – she had been a past President of Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and also ran the prison education service in the Midlands for the Home Office.

For many years there has been a major problem with corruption in many areas of civic life in Birmingham.

To return to Sarah-Jane Marsh. In Feb 2014 it was reported that Sarah-Jane, in her capacity as Chief Exec of the Birmingham Children’s Hospital, had overpaid staff by more than one million – and that most of the overpayments had not been recovered.

Sarah-Jane was appointed as Chief Exec in 2009 at the age of 32. She was one of the youngest NHS Chief Execs in the UK and concerns were expressed by some that she did not have the experience for the position. In 2007 before Marsh became Chief Exec but was Chief Operating Officer at Birmingham Children’s Hospital – responsible for the day to day management of the hospital – the hospital was criticised by the Healthcare Commission for a lack of beds resulting from bad planning.

Marsh began her NHS career as an NHS graduate trainee. One of her first jobs was as an assistant to Sir David Nicholson for six months, in 2002. David Nicholson – later the Chief Exec of NHS England – was named by the Daily Mail as the most hated man in Britain a few years ago, in the furore when the nation finally woke up to what had happened at Mid Staffs and how whistleblowers had been intimidated and hounded out, how there was a culture of dreadful misconduct and bullying within the NHS and how everyone responsible for the disaster at Mid Staffs had been promoted to even more senior roles often after having ‘retired’ with huge golden good-byes. Many of those involved were occupying the most senior roles in the UK NHS and Nicholson epitomised all that was wrong.

At the time that Marsh worked for Nicholson, he was Director of Health and Social Care for the Midlands and the East of England. He gave Marsh a reference in 2003 when she landed the job as Director of Planning and Development for Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust. Nicholson also gave Marsh a reference when she bagged the job as Chief Operating Officer at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

In 2009 Marsh announced that she and Nicholson were getting married! Nicholson hastily reassured everyone that of course they had not been having any sort of affair when he wrote Marsh those references, but as Nicholson had lied for years about hundreds of people dying at the hands of the NHS, no-one was very convinced.

Sarah-Jane was recently appointed to lead NHS England’s maternity services transformation plan, after the revelations that women and babies have been suffering serious harm and have sometimes died in the hospitals in which TV companies film sentimental documentaries about our wonderful NHS. I’ll await the next maternity scandal – now the NHS has implemented a transformation plan it can only be just around the corner and will no doubt be even bigger and better than the one in Cumbria.

When I read the gory details of the everyday story of Mid Staffs folk when the world was after the blood of David Nicholson, I was struck by how very similar the practices of Nicholson et al were to those of Martin Jones and his mates in the North West Wales NHS Trust. I discussed with my friend Brown the possibility that Martin might have personally worked with Nicholson and learnt at his knee. Brown was sceptical and observed that from what he had seen Nicholson was the model of NHS practice anyway.

However, when we had that discussion, I didn’t realise that Nicholson and co had grown their power base from their earlier careers in the West Midlands. Martin Jones began his career as a twat in an office in Ysbyty Gwynedd and then disappeared for a short while – as  an NHS manager in Birmingham and Coventry. Martin also passed through the hands of Aston  University Business School at some point. Martin then returned to north Wales, terrorised everyone and presided over a lethal NHS Trust which exterminated vulnerable people.

When Gillian Morgan was appointed Permanent Secretary, Martin and his friends started telling people that he was going to be the next Chief Exec of NHS Wales.

Readers who follow the comments on this blog will know that Martin’s mug has disappeared from the Betsi website and that he is now Director of NHS Wales External Investigations. The Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board of which Martin has been a senior executive since its formation nearly 10 years ago is currently in special measures and under investigation after a huge scandal involving the abuse of mental health patients. The problem was substantially caused by Martin Jones.

Martin will now be charged with investigating the Betsi. I urge readers not to presume that Martin will do the decent thing, declare a conflict of interest and step aside. He won’t. Furthermore, Martin’s appointment as Director of External Investigations NHS Wales will not be a coincidence. This is how the NHS works – for decades it has operated on the principle of promoting the people who have caused the problems on the basis that they will then be highly motivated and most effective at concealing the root of the problem and will either remain in denial or find a scapegoat.

Martin had already been appointed as one of the investigators into the Tawel Fan Scandal last year. Tawel Fan arose as a result of callous, untrained staff who should never have been employed routinely abusing patients (see post ‘The Tawel Fan Scandal’). The nurse who blew the whistle was suspended, arrested and received death threats. She now works elsewhere. The staff who abused the patients in Tawel Fan were not disciplined and were transferred to another mental health unit – where some months later some of them were caught abusing patients all over again (see post ‘Update On Bryn Hesketh Investigation’). They also refused to take part in a real external investigation into their conduct.

Martin Jones was Director of the Workforce for the Betsi throughout all of this.

Martin tried to punch me on one occasion. He had by then harassed me, threatened me and had me repeatedly arrested as the wider NHS looked on and did nothing. One day I was walking down a deserted corridor in the old main building of Bangor University when Martin saw me and steamed towards me at a high speed with his fist raised, but just before he belted me my friend jumped out from behind a pillar – because we knew that Martin was visiting the University that day I’d asked my friends to ensure that they didn’t lose sight of me at any point – and greeted Martin. He swerved and veered off in the opposite direction.

Thank goodness that some junior academics are braver than virtually all NHS staff and Gov’t Ministers.

 

Somebody had such confidence in the abilities of Dame Organised Crime to destroy Wales that she was also appointed as one of the three members of the Review set up by Jeremy Beecham in 2006 to advise the Welsh Assembly Gov’t on the reform of public services in Wales.

Jeremy Beecham was the Labour leader of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne City Council, 1977-94. He had been a Councillor in Newcastle since 1967. So Beecham was a Councillor in Newcastle throughout the years of serious corruption in the north east which was cultivated by and blossomed under T. Dan Smith, who was the Labour leader of Newcastle City Council, 1960-65 (see post ‘Another Episode Of Friends’).

Beecham went to the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and then to University College Oxford. After graduation he worked as a solicitor. He joined the Labour Party in 1959 and Chaired the Social Services Committee, 1973-77. So Beecham Chaired that Committee whilst Brian Roycroft the Director of Social Services for Newcastle sent kids in care on placements to the Bryn Alyn Community in north Wales – which was owned and managed by paedophile John Allen who was not only abusing and trafficking the kids but who also ran a child porn and drugs business (see post ‘Another Episode Of Friends’). Newcastle Social Services continued to send children to Bryn Alyn after complaints of abuse had been made and Roycroft also recommended Bryn Alyn to other Directors of Social Services in the north east.

Beecham has been a Council member of Common Purpose since 1989, a weird network that is well represented among people abusing their positions which is reputed to be connected to New Labour.

Beecham was a member of the Labour Party NEC from 1998 and Chaired the NEC, 2005-06.

In 1991 Beecham was appointed Chairman of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (AMA). Many of those from the London boroughs who later became Blair’s acolytes when he was PM held office in the AMA.

In 1997 the AMA merged with the Association of District Councils and the Association of County Councils to form the LGA (Local Gov’t Authority). Who was the first Chair of the LGA, 1997-04? Jeremy Beecham of course.

In 2006 Jeremy doubled up as the LGA Vice-Chair and Chair of the LGA Labour Group. Jeremy is described as having been a member of many Boards and Committees in Newcastle and the north east. So Beecham will know the network of those who worked in the mental health services in Newcastle and who then joined Dafydd and the paedophiles in north Wales (see post ‘The Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Connection’), he will also have known the dreadful Top Doctor Lord John Walton who provided a substantial umbrella for the criminals of north Wales (see post ‘Little Things Hitting Each Other’) and he will have known those involved in the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal who provided a most useful distraction  away from Dafydd and the paedophiles of north Wales whilst Alison Taylor, Mary Wynch and I were raising the alarm (see post ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas And The Culprits Were Named’). Beecham will have known about the serious abuse of children in care in Sunderland (see post ‘Another Episode Of Friends’) and he will have known about Matt Arnold and Peter Howarth abusing kids at Axwell Park Approved School until 1973, when they both relocated to Bryn Esytn and joined – and then greatly expanded – the paedophile gang that was operating there.

Beecham enjoyed a number of Gov’t advisory roles and in 2010 was given a peerage.

I have long been aware of the AMA and the LGA but knew very little about them, having spent most of my adult life in Wales. I was however very au fait with the WLGA – the Welsh Local Government Association. The signature of one of their senior representatives appears on every report and review which tells us how the NHS or social services in Wales is now the envy of the UK, or will be now that this Report/Review has been published or will be after the New Strategy has been implemented – the New Strategy which has been written by the bozos who wrote the last Strategy which didn’t work and resulted in scandal (see post ‘The Reality Is, There Is No Problem’). The other function of the WLGA is to explain that the Gov’t hasn’t given them enough money and that’s why the public services are still shite. This statement appears on a regular basis in the Welsh media and punctuates the news reports re Councillors and Council officers stealing the funds or fiddling their expenses.

As with senior positions in the public services, life in the WLGA is one big round of pass the parcel. Or indeed pass the Local Gov’t crook.

The Principal Leader of the WLGA, 2008-12 was John Davies, who was leader of Pembrokeshire County Council, 2004-12.

I have seen references to a John Davies from Carmarthenshire County Council, but I’m not sure if it is the same John Davies. Carmarthenshire is another Welsh Council riding high in the public dissatisfaction stakes. Meryl Gravell, a leading light in the Council  frequently stars on the Welsh political blog Jac O The North and has a track record of insulting both her own staff and the people of Carmarthenshire. There seems to be a lot of citizen blogging in Carmarthenshire  – one blogger was taken to the High Court in an attempt to silence her. Another blog is written by Sian Caiach, a surgeon who some years ago found herself dismissed and struck off by the GMC after she reported two fellow Top Doctors for defrauding the NHS – her allegations were substantiated but one of the guilty Top Doctors was promoted nonetheless. Sian was the only person who lost her job.

John Davies was an S4C presenter in the early years of the channel and was or is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society. He spent nine years sitting on the Electricity Consumer Council and subsequently was a member of Energywatch Wales. Davies is or was a member of the Dyfed-Powys Police Authority and Chaired their Finance Committee for nine years. Davies picked up the award for the ITV Wales local politician of the year in Dec 2008.

In April 2014 John Davies was reappointed to the Board of S4C for another four year term. The appointment was made by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport under the Coalition Con Dems Gov’t, Maria Miller.

In Feb 2014 the Western Telegraph revealed that John Davies had been Council leader when unlawful payments had been made to senior Council officers – Bryn Parry-Jones the Chief Exec and another senior officer received over 50k in unlawful payments.

The Wales Audit Office – the head of which is Huw Vaughan Thomas who was the Chief Exec of Gwynedd County Council whilst the paedophile gang made merry in the Council’s children’s homes (see post ‘I Know Nuzzing…’) – said that the payments were contrary to the law and Dyfed-Powys Police were investigating.

Bryn certainly did well whilst he served the citizens of Pembrokeshire. Not only was he the highest paid Council executive in Wales for 18 years from 1996 onwards – reigning over the agricultural land and scenic coast of Pembrokeshire which includes the throbbing metropolis of St Davids with its Cathedral, Abbey and little art galleries and bijou shops is a dangerous and stressful job after all – but Bryn was also given a Council funded Porsche, which other members of his family had the use of as well as him. Bryn left his job in 2014 – and received a severance deal of 330k.

A paedophile gang operated in Pembrokeshire and there was an unrelated scandal related to the ill treatment of children in the care of the Council as well (see post ‘The Reality Is, There Is No Problem’).

Very expensive cars driven by Council leaders or senior Council officers were not unknown in north Wales either. There was a north Walesesque spat some years ago when someone with a sense of humour photographed Dafydd Iwan’s car parked in a disabled bay. The said car was no Reliant Robin. Not long after this, I became friendly with someone who although on a limited income drove quite a swish car – an Audi – and for some reason wouldn’t flog it to raise money. They eventually fessed up that the car belonged to Gwynedd County Council and that when they had worked for Gwynedd they had leased the car for the grand sum of one pound per week and had been allowed to continue this arrangement even after they left the Council’s employment. They didn’t have a senior job with Gwynedd either, they were a minion.

On another occasion someone pointed out a top of the range Mercedes Sports car in the car park of Bangor University and told me that it belonged to the man responsible for running Anglesey Social Services and commented that considering the state of the social services on Anglesey it was outrageous that the person running that dysfunctional shoddy outfit was driving something like that. The driver of the said car had actually turned up to the University to try to intimidate the long suffering Professor of Sociology who had been defending the social work students after they had complained of being viciously bullied whilst on placement with Anglesey Social Services. Two days later a friend rang who was rolling around laughing as they explained that the owner of the Mercedes Sports had been caught by the police having sex with someone other than his wife in the car whilst parked in a public place. The officer concerned knew immediately who he was dealing with because it was about the only such car in Llangefni. Everybody waited with baited breath for the prosecution and coverage in the Daily Post – but no, it never happened.

Dyfed-Powys Police also eventually decided not to prosecute in the case of Pembrokeshire County Council and Bryn Parry-Jones.

I read a news report this morning about a severely disabled man in Wales who is concerned that he will lose his independence because of a change in the way that his care is funded. His care is currently funded by the Independent Living Fund but soon the funds will be given to local Councils for them to purchase packages of care for clients. I am sure that the disabled man has good grounds to worry, priority will be given to a Porsche for the Chief Executive to go dogging in every time.

The present leader of the WLGA is Debbie Wilcox, the leader of Newport City Council. Debbie was appointed leader of the WLGA in June 2017 and Mark Drakeford, the Local Gov’t Secretary, was delighted to congratulate her on her appointment. That’s the Drakeford who worked as a social worker for Dyfed when the kids in care in Dyfed were being abused, the Drakeford who was a social worker and Councillor in south Wales when kids in care in south Wales were being abused, the Drakeford who was special advisor to Rhodri Morgan when the oaf Rhodri ignored complaints about serious criminality in the NHS and social services in north Wales and appointed paedophiles’ friends to senior positions. Then Drakeford the paedophiles’ friend became Health Minister himself and ignored warnings about criminality and research fraud in the NHS in north Wales. And then Tawel Fan exploded in the face of the big jelly.

Drakeford stated that he was looking forward to fresh ideas from the wimmin who are now leading some of Wales’s councils. I don’t know Debbie Wilcox but if she or indeed any other wimmin show any signs at all of having any fresh ideas, Drakeford and the paedophiles’ friends will soon manouvre them out.

BBC News Wales recently carried a report explaining that the Welsh Labour Party will soon be selecting their Deputy Leader and because Carwyn is in posession of testicles, a female Deputy has to be appointed. (When is someone going to speak up for intersex people or hermaphrodites? Feminism is tearing itself apart over the issue of transgender people, but intersex people have been with us since mankind first evolved and have endured great injustices and even harm from the good old Top Doctors, who until recently frequently sliced their genitalia off at birth and ordered their parents never to tell anyone that their baby was Not As Others.) The three shortlisted candidates are Julie Morgan, Debbie Wilcox and Carolyn Harris.

Julie Morgan was married to the pillock Rhodri and like Rhodri has spent a lifetime ignoring serious wrongdoing. Remember – Julie was a social worker in Barry and Deputy Director of Barnardo’s, which hosted paedophiles and then remained silent about it. All I know about Carolyn Harris is that she provides a source of entertainment for the writer and readers of the blog Jac O The North.

One of Welsh Labour’s wimmin in the Senedd, Julie James, is today featured on BBC News Wales giving her backing to a campaign launched by the Welsh Gov’t to break gender stereotypes. I’m not too keen on gender stereotyping myself but Julie James is quoted as saying that gender stereotyping is a result of and leads to domestic abuse and violence against women. Actually Julie it isn’t and it doesn’t. Throughout my life I have known men who have held very traditional attitudes to gender roles and they would never have used violence towards anyone yet alone a woman. I have known other men with impeccably liberal credentials who have actually been highly abusive towards women.

Julie – I know one man who flaunts his feminist and socialist credentials but who has spent decades ignoring the abuse of women and children, some of it very serious abuse. He’s called Mark Drakeford and I think that you know him well. Another such man was Rhodri Morgan, who is no longer with us but his wife with feminist principles who takes a firm line on domestic violence and child abuse still is.

As part of the campaign the Welsh Gov’t are planning adverts featuring people in gender non-traditional roles, including a male midwife.

There was a male midwife who used to work at Ysbyty Gwynedd – he lived in the same village as me, Waunfawr. He had graduated with a First from Bangor University and the patients loved him. He killed himself, leaving a note behind saying that he could longer cope with what was happening at Ysbyty Gwynedd and things were going on there which were so bad that no-one would ever believe it. His last wish was that no-one from the hospital should attend his funeral. Martin Jones was Chief Exec at the time. The Daily Post did not print a word about this young man’s death.

A number of other staff at Ysbyty Gwynedd killed themselves whilst Martin was running the hospital, including a nurse who left behind a suicide note naming the Director of HR as someone who had been bullying her and a psychiatrist who stabbed himself to death through the heart upstairs at home whilst his young family had breakfast downstairs. The psychiatrist who killed himself had believed that he had cancer and had been going to Europe for medical advice. So he didn’t feel comfortable consulting his colleagues or anyone who knew them then.

After this psychiatrist’s suicide, Kenny Midence, a clinical psychologist with the north Wales mental health services, told a concerned third party that the doctor in question was neurotic and that it wasn’t a real suicide. What was it then Midence, a murder?

Suicidal people are referred to Kenny Midence by the Betsi.

Perhaps NHS Wales External Investigations should carry out an inquiry into these staff suicides at Ysbyty Gwynedd.

 

Back to Debbie Wilcox. As the leader of the WLGA perhaps she could tell everybody exactly what has been going on in Caerphilly Council – there has been a long running dispute concerning allegations of serious misconduct on the part of a small number of people but involving large sums of money which seems to be unresolvable and which has consumed millions of pounds of public money.

Ron Davies – who would have become Wales’s First Minister had he not had a moment of madness on Clapham Common with a male prostitute called Boogie and who was then photographed looking for badgers in a well known gay cruising spot – is a Councillor in Caerphilly. So why has such wrongdoing been tolerated in a Council which boasts Ron Davies as a member?

 

I and correspondents to this blog have been entertained by the co-ordinated campaign being run by the Top Doctors recently. We were subjected to #NHSLove and now we have #PublicDuty. Anyone reading this blog will have gained an idea of just how much duty the Top Docs feel that they have towards the public. It seems that the Daily Mail recently published an article about a group of Top Docs from St George’s Hospital Medical School going on a jolly to France and there has been a Twitter storm of fuming Top Docs berating the Daily Mail. Many tweets begin with the words ‘as a consultant with 20 yrs experience’ – consultants with 20 yrs experience were working in the NHS when Top Doctors at St George’s facilitated a paedophile ring and people trafficking, also had a line in drug dealing and distribution and perpetrated a major research fraud. I witnessed it all Top Docs!

The Top Docs are being very rude about Daily Mail readers. Be warned Top Docs – Daily Mail readers vote and the Mail has more readers than your self indulgent tweets. The Top Docs need to remember what happened to the NUT in the mid 80s when they went on strike. They placed big adverts in all the newspapers featuring a fictional geography teacher called Jim who was going on strike because although he was ‘an honours graduate’ with years of teaching experience he ‘only’ earned 40k pa. Half the nation was on the dole, Wales had been decimated and there was a furious backlash against the NUT – an angry Mail reader wrote to the NUT and told them that Jim should consider himself lucky that he had a job. The Guardian published comments about the ‘wallies’ who read the Mail. Even more people became angry, the NUT lost the argument and unfortunately Thatcher won the next election. Like Jim, at the time I too was an honours graduate – I was on the dole being threatened and harassed by Top Doctors! And now I’m in hiding with 10,000 documents.

 

Lastly, the leading story on BBC New Wales online is a report about the extraordinarily high death rate among patients admitted to A&E at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd. They’re certainly dropping like flies there – the death rate is 30.4 per 10,000 (for the year to Oct 2017) as opposed to the Welsh average of 19.4 per 10,000. Could this because of years of corruption and mismanagement and negligent callous senior staff? Not at all. According to the Betsi, it is a consequence of the high number of elderly people living in the area. Which was as I remember the reason that Harold Shipman gave for all those old dears pegging out in his surgery.

The only politician to speak out about these terrifying figures so far has been the Tory AM Darren Millar. I await the twitter mob to demand the lynching of Darren.

Surely another case for the Director of NHS Wales External Investigations – who until two months ago ran Ysbyty Glan Clwyd.

#PublicDuty!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Know Nuzzing…

My post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake’ described how the Jillings Report was commissioned in 1994 to investigate the extent of child abuse in children’s homes managed by Clwyd County Council. Jillings uncovered such horrors that Municipal Mutual, the Council’s insurers, refused to allow the Report to be made public. It was only in 2013 that the Jillings Report was released after constant allegations that the subsequent Waterhouse Inquiry had been a cover up – although even then the Jillings Report was heavily redacted. Following Jillings, there was huge pressure for a public enquiry into events in children’s homes in north Wales as allegations of a paedophile ring involving senior public figures and police officers swirled. A number of people employed in children’s homes in north Wales had been imprisoned for offences against children and many former residents of children’s homes in north Wales had been found dead. By this time the Secretary of State for Wales was William Hague. Hague initially held out against holding a public inquiry but then buckled. In 1996 he announced that Sir Ronald Waterhouse, a judge who had just retired, would be Chairing a public inquiry into the abuse of children in the care of Clwyd and Gwynedd County Councils between 1974 and 1996. The Waterhouse Report, ‘Lost In Care’, written as a result of this Inquiry, was published in February 2000. Like Jillings, it’s findings were damning, revealing widespread abuse of children in care in north Wales. However, as soon as the Waterhouse Report was published, there were angry allegations that there had been a substantial cover-up at a very high level. Waterhouse concluded that a paedophile ring had been in operation in north Wales, but he was perceived to have ‘blamed’ everything on a few bottom feeding social care workers, rather than investigate the possibility that a number of much grander people might have been fully involved. (When one examines the background of Sir Ronald Waterhouse, it is easy to see why he would be in an excellent position and indeed be motivated to lead such a cover-up. A future blog post will be exploring the backgrounds and networks of some of the lawyers and judges named on this blog, including Ronald Waterhouse.) The Waterhouse Report is enormous and I’ve never read it from cover to cover, but I have read big chunks of it and I have been refreshing my memory over the past few days. What strikes me upon reading it is that Waterhouse managed to frequently avoid blaming the bottom feeders as well -the abuse of children was undoubtedly far worse and far more extensive than Waterhouse admitted. He seems to have disregarded huge amounts of evidence of extensive brutality and wrongdoing – this man was a JUDGE, some of what he brushed to one side or chose not to comment on was extraordinary. I will give examples later on in this post.

Waterhouse supplied details of the management structures and the backgrounds of the senior managers and managers of Gwynedd and Clwyd Councils after taking evidence from numerous witnesses. Everybody involved claimed to have no knowledge of the extensive abuse of children. It is always said of north Wales that everybody knows everybody else’s business and to a large extent that’s a fairly accurate caricature. This seems to be one reason why the idea that the arson campaign against second homes in the 70s and 80s was the work of the security services acting as agent provocateurs caught on – I was told by a number of people rooted locally that ‘no-one can do anything in north Wales without everyone knowing, but no-one knows anyone who knows anything about the fires, it is definitely not one of us doing it’. Regarding the abuse of children though, people most certainly did know that it was happening – they just weren’t openly admitting it. It was a classic case of the social anthropologist Isabel Emmett’s notion of ‘not knowing’ (please see post ‘How No-One Knew About Dr Dafydd Alun Jones’). In the same way that everybody knew that Dr Dafydd Alun Jones was sexually exploiting patients, people knew that those kids were being abused. I got wind of it as a first year undergrad at Bangor University – I had no family from the region, I knew nothing about north Wales until I went to university there, but I soon found out that all was not well with the disadvantaged kids. I didn’t hear about a paedophile ring, but then laypeople didn’t tend to be obsessed with paedophiles in the early 1980s – but I did hear about ‘cruelty’. I heard more and more about it as time went by – at one point I lodged with a man who had grown up in care and I heard it from him and his girlfriend. Then I shared a house with some other young people, one of whom was a young man who’d grown up on a farm on the Llyn Peninsula. His mum had been a foster parent and the whole extended family were appalled at the lack of care and the degree of callousness shown by social workers towards the children in their care. This particular family were vey keen to care for their foster children well, but they observed that there was no help or interest from social workers at all and that they could have done pretty much anything to those kids and no-one would have asked any questions. They also told me that on the 16th birthday of the children the social workers would announce that the kids were no longer their responsibility and that was that, they wanted to hear no more about them. This particular family continued to support their foster children without the ‘input’ of the social services after they were 16. (Interestingly enough one thing that was admitted in both the Jillings and Waterhouse Reports was that ‘aftercare’ for children in care was appalling.) When I entered the mental health system I encountered many people who had grown up in ‘care’ and it was very clear that something was terribly wrong – of course the mental health services were key figures in concealing the paedophile ring, as detailed in previous posts. So if an 18 year old undergrad newly arrived in north Wales heard a few worrying things I think it highly unlikely that the managers of those ‘services’ did not know what was going on. To illustrate this further and explore how so many people were able to maintain that they ‘didn’t know’, let’s take a look at the management of Gwynedd Social Services and what they said, based on the information supplied in the Waterhouse Report – as well what I saw and heard when I lived in Gwynedd. (I’ll explore the situation in Clwyd in another post.)

Waterhouse looked at the scene from 1974 onwards, although the Jillings Report noted that they suspected that the serious abuse of children had been going on in north Wales for decades. My own knowledge of those involved with the children’s and mental health services and conversations with numerous people suggest that is indeed likely.

Let’s look at Gwynedd Social Services. Between April 1974 and September 1982, the Director of Gwynedd Social Services was T.E. Jones. He had previously held the same post in the old Local Authority area of Caernarvonshire, before the formation of Gwynedd County Council. T.E. Jones had grown up in Montgomeryshire, had no professional qualifications and no experience of child care work. He had been the County Welfare Officer in Merionethshire from 1952 to 1964 and the County Welfare Officer in Caernarvonshire for seven years after that. The Deputy Director until 1983 was David Alun Parry – he was then Assistant Director (Special Duties) until March 31 1987, when he took voluntary redundancy. Before Parry was Deputy Director of Gwynedd, he had spent three years as Director of Social Services for Anglesey. Between 1964 and 1971 he was Deputy Children’s Officer, then Children’s Officer, for Anglesey. Parry was an Aberystwyth graduate who had also undertaken Diplomas in Social Science and Applied Social Studies at the Universities of Swansea and Liverpool. He also held the Home Office Letter of Recognition in Child Care and had attended several management courses for senior officers at Liverpool University and in 1972, attended two short courses for Directors of Social Services at the Institute for Local Government Studies at Birmingham University. Below Jones and Parry, there were three Assistant Directors. The responsibilities for children were divided between Emyr Davies and G.H. Egerton. Elizabeth Hughes was the Homes Officer reporting to Emyr Davies. Egerton was responsible for five Area Officers under an Area Controller – the Senior Officer (Children) accountable to him from 1975 was Larry King. T.E. Jones maintained that Parry was incapable of carrying out his duties as his Deputy – Parry was therefore relieved of these duties, but kept his rank and was put in charge of the children’s section. T.E. Jones also maintained that Emyr Davies and Egerton were seriously ill, absent for a long time and had to retire. From February 1976 a new structure was imposed. A Principal Assistant Director of similar status to the Deputy Director was appointed – one Lucille Hughes, who had previously been an Assistant Director. For the benefit of new readers – Lucille was named in the Waterhouse Report as knowing that a paedophile ring was in operation in the social services but failed to act. She was also the mistress of the dreadful Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, who was illegally banging up people n the North Wales Hospital Denbigh who had complained about the mental health services or who had been molested ‘in care’. Lucille now had Emyr Davies (Elderly) and Egerton (Mental Health) under her and Parry had Larry King as Senior (later Principal) Officer (Children) under him. King retired in 1988. He had been in the Army, then in the police in England, transferring to the Colonial Police in Rhodesia. He had been a Housemaster at Bryn Estyn – the home in Clwyd which was one of the centres of the most serious abuse, where a number of staff were imprisoned for serious sexual offences. In 1969 King began work for Denbighshire County Council after qualifying for the Home Office Letter of Recognition in Child Care at Liverpool University. He was later a Senior Social Worker for Flintshire County Council and then moved to the Llandudno Area Office managed by Gwynedd County Council in 1974. From 1975 King was a Senior Officer in Gwynedd  – he was redesignated as Principal Officer (Children) from 1979.

Parry’s story was that the previous incorporation of Anglesey Social Services into Gwynedd was not a happy one. He maintained that working relationships were seriously impaired and claimed that the children’s section lacked resources. From July 1981, the responsibility for the children’s section was transferred to Lucille Hughes. This transfer occurred at the same time that Gwynedd County Council’s Chief Executive Ioan Bowen Rees commissioned officials from Dyfed County Council to investigate complaints made by current and former staff regarding Y Gwyngyll community home. Furthermore in 1981, Nefyn Dodd was made responsible for all the community homes in Gwynedd. Nefyn Dodd and his wife June were accused by scores of people of the most ferocious abuse and brutality towards children. Parry was an uncritical admirer of Nefyn Dodd. Elizabeth Hughes the Homes Officer was for a long while on long term sick leave, then left and was not replaced. In the face of this chaos and mismanagement, Waterhouse commented that it was ‘commendable’ that Gwynedd provided such a level of service with ‘comparatively few’ complaints of abuse. (Waterhouse doesn’t seem to have questioned the degree of fuckwittery present and there were actually numerous complaints of abuse, many ignored by Gwynedd and others brushed aside by Waterhouse himself.)

Then in 1982, Parry had a car crash and was off for a long time. When T.E. Jones retired in 1982, Lynn Ebsworth, who had been Chief Personnel Officer, became Acting Director. Parry returned as Assistant Director (Special Duties) after May 1983. In March 1987, after ‘negotiations with his professional organisation’ Parry took voluntary redundancy and received an enhanced pension. To return to Lucille who had been responsible for children since July 1981. Lucille was an English graduate from UCNW (which later became Bangor University) and also had a Certificate in Social Sciences from Liverpool University and the Home Office Letter of Recognition in Child Care. For 13 years she had worked in the children’s departments of Cheshire and Anglesey County Councils, as a Children’s Officer in both counties and then as Deputy Director in Cheshire in 1971. She was Principal Assistant Director in Gwynedd from Feb 1976 and until July 1981 her responsibilities were principally the elderly and mental health. Assisting Lucille was Owain Gethin Evans. Gethin Evans had graduated in Social Administration from Manchester University in 1968 and obtained Diplomas in Education (1970) from Cardiff University and Social Work Studies (1974) from the LSE. He had worked as a social worker in Cheshire between 1971 and 1973. After his stint at the LSE he returned to Gwynedd as a social worker and from 1975 spent three years as a community organiser. In 1978 Gethin Evans was appointed Senior Officer (General) to assist Lucille. He was then appointed Principal Officer (Children) and was Head of the Children’s Services in 1982. In 1995 he was appointed Director of Social Services for Ceredigion County Council. Evans was the de facto Head of Children’s Services in Gwynedd, except for between 1987-1992 when he was Assistant Director (Resources and Support). Evans was also a member of Dwyfor District Council between 1976-1986 and was it’s Chairman in 1983/84.

Lynn Ebsworth was Acting Director of Social Services from May 1982-Sept 1983. Lucille Hughes was appointed Director with effect from 1 Oct 1983. Ebsworth had previously been Management Services Officer to Ioan Bowen Rees the County Secretary, and Chief Personnel Officer to the newly formed Gwynedd County Council’s first Chief Executive, D. Alun Jones. Bowen Rees succeeded D. Alun Jones as Chief Exec in 1980. Ebsworth then became accountable to Bowen Rees. Ebsworth had no previous training or experience in Social Services. Under Ebsworth was Gethin Evans, responsible for the Children’s Section but with virtually no experience of children in care. Responsible to him were Nefyn Dodd and Larry King. It was Gethin Evans who oversaw Dodd being given responsibility for all of the community homes. Extraordinarily, amidst this mess, the County Council’s Chief Exec, Ioan Bowen Rees, thought that Lucille ‘performed admirably’ as Director of Social Services. That was while she knew that a paedophile ring was in operation but failed to act. I will return to Bowen Rees later.

On 2 April 1984 a new Deputy Director of Social Services was appointed, David Glanville Owen – Gethin Evans was also short-listed for the post. Glanville was from Pwhelli and had been a trainee in the Children’s Dept in the Liverpool Corporation in 1965 after graduating in economics from Liverpool University. He then acquired a Diploma in Applied Social Studies and the Home Office Letter of Recognition in Child Care from Nottingham University by 1967. He had also worked in four English Local Authorities and for the National Children Home (NCH). He had been a senior social worker to the Assistant Director at Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council.

When Glanville was applying for the Gwynedd position, he was undertaking a course in Advanced Management for Local Government at Birmingham University. He was Deputy Director of Gwynedd Social Services until the local government reorganisation, then spent 18 months as Head of Policy Unit of the new Gwynedd County Council until Sept 1997, when he was made redundant.

Being made redundant didn’t end Glanville’s substantial toxic influence in Gwynedd. By 2003 Glanville was Chief Exec of Gwynedd Community Health Council – the patients watchdog! That’s how I came across him. I approached him with my very serious complaint about the Hergest Unit – this was at a time when the madness was evident with patients dying and being hauled off to prison and people writing to politicians about the brutality and the chaos – and Glanville refused to receive me, telling me that the CHC wasn’t responsible for hospitals. I found out that this was a lie, so I returned to Glanville who then lied about telling the first lie. I submitted my complaint and for many, many months Glanville and one of his ‘officers’, a lady called Hilary, went around and around in circles. My complaint was neither investigated properly or resolved and Glanville and Hilary never managed to explain why. The last time that I saw the disgusting Glanville he was attending a meeting in his capacity as a member of the North Wales CHC. So Gwynedd is not rid of him yet.

Glanville sounds as though he was his usual slippery negligent self in his evidence to Waterhouse.  He emphasised that he had never managed a community home for children or worked in one, even when he was with the NCH. As Deputy Director, he was ‘remote’ from the residential section and had not much contact with it – that was Lucille’s domain. However although Glanville claimed to know nuzzing, Waterhouse noted that almost as soon as he arrived in Gwynedd, he took up 12 points regarding the community homes in Gwynedd, including some serious allegations of staff misconduct, with Gethin Evans. Evans responded to Glanville with a memo that Waterhouse described as ‘inappropriate, complacent and discourteous’ which onbiously was ‘intended to discourage intrusion’. Glanville reorganised the Social Services Dept soon after his arrival and the responsibility for the development of Children’s Services was given to the Assistant Director, one Gethin Evans.

From 1987, the Assistant Director responsible for the Children’s Section was Rob Evans, who had been the Area Officer for Aberconwy since November 1984. Rob Evans had graduated in Social Sciences from Leicester University and obtained his CQSW in 1976. By 1984 he had acquired 10 years of management experience of social work in Northampton and Dorset and had served as a Team Manager in Dorset. In 1992, restructuring resulted in Rob Evans being appointed Assistant Director (Mental Health) – Waterhouse notes that Evans ‘left local government’ in March 1996. It was in his capacity as Assistant Director that I encountered Rob in the mid 90s. As a result of the constant aggro that I was receiving from the delightful Arfon Community Mental Health Team (please see previous posts), Rob was called in to sort it out. I had a truly bizarre meeting with him in which he made no comments about the law-breaking and perjury and constant aggression of the Arfon Team, but instead offered a discourse on ‘changing practice’ in social work. As an example he explained that when he used to take children to children’s homes he used to take their shoes away to stop them running away. He said that the children hated him for taking them to the homes but he knew that he was doing the right thing. A couple of years ago, some of the interviews that some of the former residents of north Wales children’s homes gave to the police in the criminal trials were made public. Some of the witnesses explained that they ran away after they were molested by members of the paedophile ring but someone took their shoes away after that to prevent them escaping. Many years after my own encounter with Rob, my lawyers obtained the documents that he had compiled after he had met me to discuss the Arfon Team and their activities. Rob had noted that he had met Keith Fearns, the psychopath who was the ‘leader’ of the Arfon Team and asked him what he wanted done with me. Fearns had replied ‘lock her up’. Rob had told him that wasn’t possible. Fearns had replied once more ‘lock her up’. Rob had noted that the situation was unresolvable and that he was leaving his post tomorrow anyway. Waterhouse was wrong about Rob – he didn’t leave local government in 1996. After no-one had been held to account for the rape and battery of hundreds of children over many years, Rob resurfaced again – as Head of Community Services on Anglesey! Waterhouse noted that in his evidence, Rob had told him that he wasn’t a fluent Welsh speaker and he considered that his chances of an appropriate ‘senior’ position were virtually zero. So it’s good to know that Anglesey found a home for him. The last time that I saw Rob I tried to ask him about his activities regarding Fearns many years ago. Rob told me that I was ‘arrassin’ him and if I didn’t stop he’d call the police. Rob often seemed to find himself the line manager of thugs – he was responsible for Larry King and Nefyn Dodd until his job changed and he was then overseeing dear old Fearns.

Rob had an interesting interpretation of Fearns and co’s threats, harassment and aggression though. In his evidence to Waterhouse, Rob maintained that because a Health Advisory Service Inspection in 1986 had been ‘very critical’ of mental health services in Gwynedd, Rob had made mental health a priority and the community mental health services had now been recognised as among the best in Europe! I’d love to know who ‘recognised’ them as such. The only people with knowledge of social work and mental health services in other parts of Europe that I knew who had contact with the thugs and liars that were employed by Lucille et al were a team of German social scientists who had a link with Bangor University. I worked with them myself and they were a nice lot – but they had no idea at all how patients were being treated because their contact was with the thugs and liars themselves who never fessed up that they were facilitating a paedophile ring. They just met up with the Germans for nibbles and drinks and no doubt told them that the services had been recognised as the best in Europe. But then idiots in north Wales were a bit obsessed with Europe in those days. Dr Dafydd Alun Jones kept appearing in the local press described as ‘Europe’s leading forensic psychiatrist’. He wasn’t even a forensic psychiatrist.

Larry King retired in 1988 and was replaced by Peter James Hibbs. Hibbs had grown up in Colwyn Bay and graduated in sociology from the South Bank Poly in 1973. He had been an Education Welfare Officer in ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) for four years, then completed his CQSW at UCNW (Bangor University) and also gained a Diploma in Social Studies. In Dec 1979 Hibbs joined Gwynedd as a member of the Child Care Team at the Anglesey Area Office and was promoted to senior social worker in Nov 1985. When Nefyn Dodd retired from the post of Principal Officer (Residential Services) in May 1990, Hibbs took over. Hibbs himself encountered serious personal difficulties and became ill with severe depression –  he was deemed by a Medical Officer to be unable continue working after December 1990 and formally retired in Jan 1993. However, at the time of giving evidence to Waterhouse, he had been working since November 1995 as a Senior Practitioner at the Family Centre, Rhyl, run by NCH. Hibbs stated that he used to see Rob Evans about once a week, but was ‘uncertain’ whether Rob grasped ‘child protection issues’, he was more of a ‘mental health specialist’ no less.

Hibbs had been responsible to Gethin Evans and when Hibbs retired he was replaced by Dafydd Ifans. Ifans had worked in the North Wales Probation Services for the last ten years after obtaining his CQSW at Cartrefle College as well as an OU degree. Prior to that he’d been in the Army for fifteen years after leaving school at fifteen to join as an Army apprentice. He then worked as a manager for ASDA for two years. Ifans worked in Gwynedd until 31 December 1995, when he was then appointed as Service Manager for the Children and Families Services for Conwy County Borough Council. During his nearly three years as a Principal Officer, Ifans was responsible for line managing three community homes in Gwynedd.

I have deliberately given a lot of details regarding the managers of Gwynedd Social Services to demonstrate a number of points. Firstly, the degree of conflict that obviously existed between some of them. Secondly, the number of people that were falling apart at the seams themselves – a lot of people were on long-term sick leave or being deemed incapable of fulfilling their duties. This is a key sign of an organisation in trouble but judging from the chunks of the Waterhouse Report that I’ve read so far, Waterhouse doesn’t seem to have taken on board the significance of this. One inescapable theme is how many of these people had connections with each other, or had been circulating around the system for some time. During the 80s and 90s, if one was English and living in Gwynedd, one heard constant allegations that Gwynedd County Council was a ‘closed shop’ and that ‘they only employ their friends and their relatives’. There does seem to have been an awful lot of that going on – but another allegation that English people frequently made was ‘none of them have ever been out of Gwynedd’. Judging from the previous account that is very obviously not true. They had all had stints of studying or working elsewhere – or moving on elsewhere after presiding over the horror that was Gwynedd children’s services. But as far as I can see that is simply more terrifying. That lot had a well-established network that will have been affording them protection and as I have previously argued it stretched far and wide, into England as well. A number of them had also worked in places where it is now known that there was a problem with the organised abuse of children eg. Cheshire, Leicester and inner London. Again and again I was told that the problems in north Wales re the children’s services and mental health services was ‘just north Wales’. It was not. It surfaced in north Wales and ‘outsiders’ were always suspicious and curious because they were very obviously excluded on the grounds of language and it was easy for them to conjure up spectres of cave-dwelling sheep shaggers who molest the kids and burn English peoples houses down. But the vile ones had mates next door in England and had an established network to assist them. Some of them also had connections to the police and the Army…

Among all the detail supplied in the Waterhouse Report regarding Gwynedd Social Services, there is a glaring omission. Waterhouse mentions in passing a ‘child protection officer’ who was working under Gethin Evans. In a region where children were being abused by a paedophile ring and having the living daylights battered out of them by the likes of Nefyn Dodd and were being half-starved and used as free labour by ‘foster parents’, the child protection officer would be a fairly crucial member of the team. Yet they are not named and there is no reference to their evidence in the Waterhouse Report. Were they fast asleep on the job or simply terrified? Or had someone decided that they didn’t want to hear evidence from them? Or had Waterhouse heard their evidence and decided not to mention it? There was something else that he passed by with barely a comment. When he ‘reviewed’ the evidence against Nefyn and June Dodd, as well as ignoring scores of complaints of brutality – and a few of sexual abuse – against the Dodds and the people whom they employed in the community home that they ran in Bangor, Waterhouse mentions a complaint from someone referred to as X, against the Dodds. Waterhouse acknowledges that a letter of ‘dubious authenticity’ allegedly signed by X was sent from Risley Remand Centre to Lucille Hughes expressing support for the Dodds. But Waterhouse accepted that X didn’t write this and so he disregarded it! So someone in Risley Remand Centre forged a letter from X and sent it to Lucille Hughes, supporting the Dodds, when the Dodds were under investigation for abusing children. And Waterhouse barely bats an eyelid. But then someone forged a letter from me and sent it to the GMC after I complained about Dr Tony Roberts (please see post ‘The General Medical Council And Yet Another Forged Document’). Someone forged a certificate of indictment saying that I’d been found guilty of ‘violent disorder’ at Caernarfon Crown Court when I hadn’t (please see post ‘An Update On Those Legal Conundrums’). It’s good to know that I wasn’t being singled out – forging documents is obviously an everyday pastime of health and welfare folk in the face of complaints about the health and social care services. How many more forged documents are there sitting in files in the wake of caring staff having been cleared of serious wrongdoing after the plebs of this parish dared complain about them?

And therein lies the key. For the most part, the people on the receiving end of this bunch of scumbags were indeed the plebs. They were people with long-term mental health problems, drug/alcohol problems, kids in care, various dispossessed or disadvantaged people. They also often had criminal records, because as I have detailed previously on this blog, if you complained about that bunch of bastards they stitched you up for crimes that everyone knew that you hadn’t done so they could then dismiss your complaints as coming from a ‘criminal’ and therefore not to be believed. Because I constantly had the most dreadful encounters with the ‘services’ and then more dreadful encounters with officious lying shits like Glanville Owen when I tried to raise concerns about them, for many years I gained the impression that Gwynedd and Clwyd Councils must be run by daft old buggers who had worked their way up from jobs as admin assistants when they were 16 and who did not know their arses from their elbows. Some people did equate to this stereotype – namely Alun Davies, the manager of the Hergest Unit, who could hardly string a coherent sentence together – but let’s have a look at those at the very top of the tree in Gwynedd County Council, the successive Chief Executives who oversaw this horror. So how dim and uninformed were they?

The Chief Execs of Gwynedd County Council for the period of time reviewed by Waterhouse were: David Alun Jones, 1974-1980; Ioan Bowen Rees, 1980-1991; Huw Vaughan Thomas, 1991-1996.

David Alun Jones was a solicitor, the Deputy Clerk (1952-1961), then Clerk of Denbighshire County Council for 13 years. He read law at Aberystwyth University, then held posts as a solicitor in Ilford, Southampton, Berkshire and Surrey before Denbighshire. After his stint as Chief Exec at Gwynedd, he was the Commissioner for Local Administration in Wales for the next five years until his retirement in 1985. His evidence to the Waterhouse Tribunal revolved around the theme of how financially poor the area of Gwynedd was. It was stated that T.E. Jones, the Director of Social Services, didn’t discuss problems regarding children or the community homes with Alun Jones and Waterhouse stated that he had no reason to think that Alun Jones was aware of the complaints. Alun Jones was consulted by the Director of Social Services regarding the alleged failings of Parry, the Deputy Director of Social Services, in approx. 1974. Alun Jones thought that Parry’s services should be dispensed with, but the Chairman of the Social Services Committee, formerly of Anglesey County Council (I presume this will have been Councillor Eric Davies) thought that Parry should be given responsibility for children’s services and this was the view that prevailed. So they handed children’s services over to a man whom they seemed to be in dispute with and whom they maintained could not do his job. Did Alun Jones not think this was a little high risk? Alun Jones was a lawyer – presumably not completely stupid. But look at his background – all those years as a legal advisor to Denbighshire County Council. The North Wales Hospital was on his patch – he was there whilst Gwynne the lobotomist and Dafydd were in action. He will have known about the problems out there and what was alleged to have been happening. I note that Alun Jones read law at Aber – it has always been maintained that one factor preventing the true extent of the child abuse in north Wales becoming public was rampant corruption among lawyers in the region. A previous post of mine looking at corruption in the region noted how many people who had been implicated were law graduates from Aber (see post ‘Updates, Common Themes And News, May 5 2017’).

Ioan Bowen Rees was Chief Exec for much of the time under review by Waterhouse, ie. 1980-1991. It was during this time that the complaints and allegations of child abuse came thick and fast, when Alison Taylor the social worker who blew the whistle on it all first raised concerns within the social services and, when she was dismissed in the wake of doing so, went very public indeed, contacting the media as well as Ministers, including Margaret Thatcher. So one would have that Ioan might have noticed that something was amiss. Ioan was a from a local family and had grown up in Dolgellau. His father was a teacher there and his mother had been one of the first women graduates from UCNW (Bangor University). Ioan went to school in Dolgellau and won a scholarship to Oxford to read modern history. So not only did he know the area but he was no fool. He decided to become a solicitor and did his articles with – the Clerk of Denbighshire County Council! Well where else? Waterhouse states that Ioan Bowen Rees was admitted as a solicitor in 1956 – so one presumes that he was doing his articles when his predecessor as Chief Exec Alun Jones worked as the Deputy Clerk of Denbighshire County Council. Bowen Rees then served in local government in Lancashire, Cardiff and Pembrokeshire, as Deputy Clerk to the County Council. Waterhouse mentions that Bowen Rees was ‘well-known’ outside Gwynedd. He certainly was. Bowen Rees died some years ago and his obituaries tell us a lot about him. He stood for election as a Plaid candidate in Conway in 1955 and 1959 and in Methyr Tydfil in 1964. Dr Dafydd Alun Jones was involved in Plaid during those years and stood for election for Denbigh in 1959 and 1964. Another reason why Bowen Rees will have known Dafydd then. That’s the Dafydd whose mistress was Lucille Hughes. The Dafydd who illegally banged people up in the North Wales Hospital Denbigh if they complained about the childrens services or the mental health services. In 1973, Bowen Rees became the County Secretary of the newly formed Dyfed County Council. Bowen Rees was considered something of an authority on local government and won the Haldane Medal from the Royal Institution for Public Administration for his 1971 publication ‘Government By Community’, which was described by Max Beloff as ‘essential reading’. This is the Conservative peer Max Beloff, the father of Michael Beloff QC. Michael Beloff was the lawyer who advised Municipal Mutual, Clwyd County Council’s insurers, to suppress the Jillings Report! Bowen Rees was awarded an honorary LLD by the University of Wales in 1997. He was a member of the Gorsedd of the Bards – as was Dafydd and so many others mentioned in previous blog posts. He advised the Association of County Councils and was Chair of the Society of Local Chief Executives. He was described by the TLS as ‘one of the old breed of highly educated, civilised public servants’. My co-researcher made the following observation of Bowen Rees – ‘Oxford, Plaid, Gorsedd, Gwynedd County Council – he’s got a full house’. Bingo indeed.

In his evidence to Waterhouse, Bowen Rees stated that there was a ‘difficulty’ because Gwynedd Council had no overall leader and that the financial situation through the 1980s left one with a feeling of ‘helplessness’. It was stated that Bowen Rees was more ‘interventionist’ in the Social Services than his predecessor. He was told of complaints and he therefore ordered an enquiry and a report to be conducted by officers of Dyfed County Council – whom he will have known well because he had previously been County Secretary of Dyfed. It was during Bowen Rees’s time as Chief Exec that Gwynedd saw many children in their care ‘boarded out’ (often, it was alleged, to the care of very unsuitable people). Gwynedd had the highest proportion of children boarded out in Wales and the second highest proportion in Great Britain. But Bowen Rees explained to Waterhouse that it saved the Council a great deal of money. Bowen Rees had taken a particular interest in the complaints of Alison Taylor. He told Waterhouse that he had ‘very little recollection of events surrounding the police investigation’ (thank goodness his memory didn’t let him down like that at Oxford or when he was winning medals, it just went a bit flaky when his Council was investigated by the police in the wake of allegations of a paedophile ring), but he knew that he’d asked Lucille to get in touch with him when investigation was over.(Nuffin’ to do with me Guv, I’m only the Chief Exec.) Luciile was described as being ‘over the moon’ when she told him that the police would not be taking proceedings against anyone and that there was ‘no substance’ to the allegations of abuse. Bowen Rees was satisfied that no disciplinary proceedings would have to be taken against any Council officers without talking to Lucille, because he’d talked to senior police officers. (Regular readers will remember that among the allegations of child abuse in north Wales were those that police were involved. A former senior police officer from the North Wales Police, Gordon Anglesea, was last year imprisoned for molesting children in care in north Wales.) Bowen Rees told Waterhouse that he had not been aware of Nefyn Dodd’s dual role in the management of children’s services and had been told that Alison Taylor was ‘worse than a troublemaker’. He thought that poor old Lucille had been ‘unfortunate’ in her Chairman of the Social Services Committee in the 1980s, as he was ‘wilful’ and tolerated only because of his war record. Which is quite a surprising thing for Bowen Rees to have said really, because the rest of us are of the opinion that Eric Davies did Lucille some pretty big favours – he spat poison in the direction of Alison Taylor, carried out a character assassination of her and ensured that she was sacked after she blew the whistle on child abuse in Gwynedd.

Even just the information supplied above suggests that Bowen Rees knew that there was cause for concern in the children’s services which he was paid to run. But there’s another reason why Bowen Rees would have known about the misery and suffering that his children’s services inflicted upon local people as those services worked hand in hand with his mental health services. Because he lived in a hill village near Bethesda where an awful lot of the casualties of Lucille and Dafydd resided. I know because I too lived there for years. At the same time as Bowen Rees. I and the others who had been shafted by Bowen Rees’s ‘services’ mostly lived in the main part of the village, comprised of 19th century quarrymans cottages. Bowen Rees lived near us – but not in our terraces. No, Bowen Rees resided in splendour in an enormous house shielded from our view by beech trees, down a long lane. (However, his widow does now live in the village square, but in one of the most desirable houses there.) Bowen Rees was described by his mates Jim Perrin and Meic Stephens in their obituaries of him as a ‘leftwing nationalist’, an ‘internationalist’, ‘with a philosophy of localism’, who believed in ‘the centrality of [the citizens] voice in determining policies’ and whose observations on mountaineering – which Bowen Rees enjoyed – included that ‘the early mountaineers didn’t concern themselves with the activity of a lower class’. Jim Perrin stated that Bowen Rees ‘firmy identified with that lower class’. That’s funny Jim, because I got the distinct impression that he didn’t give a fuck about them. Except perhaps at election time. I was amused to see in one of Ioan’s obituaries the comment that he ‘enjoyed the close community spirit’ of the village where we all lived. Wondering if I’d somehow missed all the occasions on which Ioan hung out in the village pub or in the canolfan or purchased his stamps from the Post Office, yesterday I rang one of my former neighbours to ask her if she ever remembered socialising with Ioan. Now this was not a neighbour who was one of the dispossessed being screwed over by Ioan and his staff. This is someone who is a retired teacher, whose husband is a retired teacher (and he graduated with a First as well), who have lived in that village for decades, who both learnt Welsh to a very high standard, who do know quite a few public figures and who are acquainted with pretty much everyone around. She replied that she knew OF the Bowen Rees’s and his wife ‘is very pleasant but they are a bit above and beyond the reach of the rest of us’. The man of the common people! Bowen Rees’s obituaries also stated that when he was young, he was regularly consulted by Gwynfor Evans, the President of Plaid (I think that he also co-authored with Gwynfor Evans) and was subsequently consulted by Dafydd Wigley, the MP for Caernarfon. Who definitely knew about the havoc in the mental health services because I wrote to him about it – and I can’t really believe that he didn’t ever hear about what Lucille and co were up to either.

I’ll outline a few things that were going on in the village where Bowen Rees actually lived. There was a severely mentally ill homeless man who for some months literally lived on the playing field, completely psychotic, whilst his neighbours begged for help from the mental health services to no avail. There was another severely mentally ill man who was living in a derelict schoolhouse with an open fire inside and about nine dogs – both the police and his neigbours begged the Arfon Mental Health Team to assist him. They didn’t. This went on for many months until a relative of his was traced and she arranged for a religious order to look after him in another region. One of my neighbours up there was a young man who whose mother had killed herself when he was a child – he used to scavenge in bins for food and by the time that he was a teenager he had developed a drink problem and mental health problems. He was violent and a nuisance when he was pissed but to be fair to him, he went down to the GPs surgery in Bethesda for help with his ‘nerves’. No help was forthcoming from the GPs let alone the mental health team. There was a whole family of adults who had been on the receiving end of such serious sexual and physical abuse whilst they were children that one of them was an elective mute and another one was in the ‘care’ of the mental health services – he became destitute when the day centre at the Hergest Unit was shut down, on the orders of the Arfon Team. There was a single parent who was such a hopeless drunk that her 10 year old daughter was looking after her, the house and her younger brother – who was displaying sexually abusive behaviour himself after being exposed to sexual activity from his father. There were also the people whom I discussed in my post ‘It’s All About Protecting Children’ – in which two fathers were denied access to their own children by Gwynedd Social Services and one of those children was instead handed over to people with a known record of abusing children themselves. There was the family who had been swindled out of their inheritance and left to rot by a number of crooked lawyers and doctors, who were also refused help from the Arfon Team (please see post ‘A Trade In People – Between London and North Wales’). There were two other men displaying what a social worker (well one who knew what they were doing) would describe as sexually inappropriate behaviour who had been in the ‘care’ of Gwynedd Social Services as children. There was another family whose daughter had been removed from them and had been handed over to Gwynedd Social Services for her ‘protection’ who was wrecked after her encounters with the children’s and mental health services. There was also a little girl being fostered at weekends to give her mother who lived in the neighbouring village ‘respite’. That little girl’s mother had held Alun Davies the manager of the Hergest Unit hostage at knife point in her house and he had to be freed in a police operation. No charges were ever brought against her because Davies had unlawfully accessed her medical records, removed them from the hospital and gone out to see her without anyone’s permission or indeed even telling anyone. He would have been in much trouble himself if anyone had discovered what he had done, therefore his ordeal as a hostage was ignored.

What a record of achievement! Give that man another medal. Bowen Rees drove past these people on his way to work every day – whilst they waited for the bus. Lest any readers think that poor old Bowen Rees just wasn’t mixing in the right circles to hear the accounts of the ‘service users’, there were some people in that village who had worked in his children’s homes and left, appalled at the abuse that they witnessed. I knew three of these people – they all told me that they had witnessed young people being abused. They didn’t witness sexual abuse but they witnessed physical abuse and one of them described Nefyn Dodd to me as a ‘total fascist’. The other two people had worked in the home where Alison Taylor had initially reported abuse and told me that as well as being on the receiving end of ‘cruelty’, the teenaged boys in the home were being forced to work for no pay in the black economy. They boys expressed fear of physical violence from social workers if they refused this work.

But something else was happenining in that village as Ioan Bowen Rees managed to not see what was happening on his doorstep. Something that he most certainly knew about. Lucille Hughes’s henchmen from the Arfon Team were perjuring themselves in Chester Crown Court in an attempt to have me imprisoned. They were being coached and advised in this by Lucille, Hywel Ellis Hughes the County Secretary and Solicitor, and Ron Evans, his sidekick. I have the documents to prove it and described it in detail in my post ‘Some Big Legal Names Enter The Arena’. Ioan will have known about all that because Gwynedd County Council were spending a fortune trying to have me (and a few other patients) imprisoned and he will have had to sign something off. I bet he knew my address as well, because I was being served with Court documents at home. So Ioan knew that I was a neighbour! Where was his much boasted about community spirit? Oh – the other thing that happened whilst I lived in the same village as Ioan was that someone tried to set fire to my house. Twice. Another memorable feature of the village was the phone box. Ioan won’t have used it because he’ll have had a landline and a mobile as well, but a lot of people in that village didn’t have a phone so there was often a queue at that phone box. That phone box lives on in my memory for one reason – it was the phone box that was used by a mental health patient who lived in that village who repeatedly rang Crimestoppers and reported the law-breaking and abuse of named staff of the mental health services and the thugs that they were using to distribute drugs and intimidate patients who complained. There wasn’t an investigation. Ioan probably had a few words with his friends in the police again like he did after Alison Taylor blew the whistle.

Ioan will not have been able to have missed the reality of the lives of the people in that village no matter how fast he drove past them. Because his own son went to school with some of those kids who had been so badly neglected and abused. Ioan’s son went to Ysgol Dyffryn Ogwen and is now famous – he is Gruff Rhys from the rock band the Superfurry Animals. He and his mates used to practice their music in the hall at the end of the terrace where I used to live. Ioan was known to be passionate about the Welsh language and is on record as saying that we speak Welsh ‘for the sake of our children’. I’m all for bilingual children as well, but whilst Ioan’s son was learning Welsh and becoming a rock star there were a number of other children who were being beaten, buggered and raped in the ‘service’ for which Ioan was paid handsomely to provide.

Ioan’s glorious career didn’t stop after he stood down from the Chief Exec’s role after the police investigation which exonerated the whole bloody lot of them. No, Ioan was a passionate believer in devolution and was a member of the working party that advised Ron Davies the Secretary of State for Wales regarding the creation of the National Assembly of Wales. Who knows, Ioan would probably have gone on to become President of the World, but he died (Waterhouse observed that he was very sad about this) in 1999. Months before the publication of the Waterhouse Report. So if any lesser gifted and less well-connected creatures than Ioan feared that Waterhouse was actually going to admit the enormity of what had gone on and that Ioan would get himself out of the ordure by landing them right in it, they need not have worried. Ioans’s memories have been taken to the grave with him.

The Story of Ioan reminds me very much of the work of the Welsh Labour historians who were busy in the 1970s and 80s. They pissed a lot of people off because they maintained that the exploitation of the Welsh labourers in the quarries and other industries involved an enormous degree of collusion from the Welsh middle classes who also exploited the labourers and did very well for themselves out of this, but who had successfully rewritten their part in history and framed themselves as defenders of language and nation. I think it was in Jim Perrin’s obituary of Ioan Bowen Rees that there was a reference to the refreshing Ioan in contrast to the English bourgeoisie who colonised the land conservation societies… the noble Ioan who lived in his Plas shielded by beech trees so as to avoid the prying eyes of the people whom he was shafting whilst they lived in poverty…

After the People’s Champ and Defender of the Nation left his post as Chief Exec of Gwynedd County Council, Huw Vaughan Thomas took over. Huw was originally from mid-Glamorgan, read modern history at Durham University, acquired a Masters in Administrative Sciences from City University and entered the civil service. He worked in the Department of Employment and bodies associated with it and was the Private Secretary to two Ministers of Employment. He then lead the Manpower Services Commission’s employment rehabilitation programme for disabled people. In May 1988 he moved to Wales as Director of Training Agency, Wales. He was Chief Executive of Denbighshire County Council for six years – of course he was, it seems obligatory to do a stint with them if you’re going to preside over a major child abuse scandal. Huw told Waterhouse that the allocation of resources in Gwynedd County Council  owed much to history and political considerations rather than assessment of need and the Council’s image was one of ‘fortress Gwynedd’ with a single issue of the language agenda. (I rather suspect that might have been the smokescreen that Ioan created to detract from rather more serious problems.) For most of the first three years of Huw’s tenure, there was a police investigation of Gwynedd’s children’s homes. Alison Taylor wrote to Huw shortly before an HTV programme about the abuse in north Wales in Sept 1991, requesting a meeting to discuss the ill-treatment of children. He ‘took advice’ – we are not told from whom – and he said that she should get in touch with him if she had any new matters not already investigated to report. Alison wrote again asking for a meeting regarding the extensive dossier that he had prepared relating to the abuse of children. Huw declined to meet her on the advice of the Council’s legal officers and the Chief Constable. That will have been at about the same time that those legal officers were pursuing me through the Courts for ludicrous offences such as ‘staring at a social worker in Safeways’ or more serious offences that I had not committed.

So how did Huw fare once he stopped being the Chief Exec of Gwynedd in 1996? Well he was the  Assistant National Secretary of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and he has also been on exchanges with Chief Execs in Tasmania and New Zealand (Christ he’s gone global.) In 2001 he was appointed the Director and Principal Consultant for Taro Consulting Ltd. He was a member of the Richards Commission into the powers and electoral arrangements of the National Assembly of Wales 2002-2004, he’s Chaired the Big Lottery Fund and served on the Parole Board for England and Wales (it really is unbelievable isn’t it). He’s a Board member for the Institute of Welsh Affairs, for the North Wales Training and Enterprise Council, a member of HEFCW, of the Law Society Council, of the Hearing Aid Council and the Olympic Lottery Distributer. His voluntary activities include involvement in two charities for deaf people, a member of the National Trust Committee for Wales, of the Princes Trust and the Chair of Plas Glyn Y Weddw Arts Centre.

Concealed a paedophile gang? Come this way Sir, we’d just love to have you on our Board.

The jewel in the crown was that on July 2010 Huw was recommended for the post of Auditor General of Wales by the National Assembly of Wales. HM the Queen herself appointed him from October 2010. He now oversees 20 billion quid of taxpayers money. His wife Enid is the Chair of the Solicitors Regulation Authority and a member of the BUPA council. His son Owain is a trainee – at the Wales Audit Office.

Once more, I can only repeat what the residents of Ioan Bowen Rees’s village used to say when they were screwed over once more by Gwynedd County Council in some way – Jesus Christ.

There is an ancient Bela Lugosi film that used to cause merriment among film and media students because it was thought to be so ridiculous. I was told that it contained a scene where Bela looms up out of a churchyard and says ‘It’s murder – and somebody’s responsible’. Well for years children in the care of Gwynedd County Council were beaten, kicked, forced to lick Nefyn Dodd’s shoes, used as slave labour, sexually molested, kept short of food and/or abandoned. And nobody was responsible at all. The only person who lost their job was Alison Taylor.