Just before Christmas all members of the council received a lengthy email from Cllr Rob Summons setting out his thoughts on the council’s pre-Christmas meeting, which, as I reported earlier, descended into a tangle of amendments and amendments to amendments to the point where nobody seemed to have the first idea of what was going on.
Unfortunately, it was some days before I became aware of Cllr Summons’ lengthy missive because my PC had dumped it in the spam folder.
Whoever said computers aren’t capable of making rational decisions?
Robocop, as he’s affectionately known, signed off his email:
” Negativity abounds in certain quarters and we never ever hear or see all the good things being reported. That might just be on purpose though!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone. Is there more to life than thinking you are right all the time I wonder?
© Rob Summons 2016″
Old Grumpy’s eye alighted on the “© Rob Summons 2016” which as most people will know is the standard form for indicating a claim to copyright.
Naturally, I wondered if this was a warning that anyone who reproduced this document might find themselves sued for infringing Cllr Rob’s intellectual property rights.
The alternative is that it was a bit of self-mockery following on from his performance at the full council meeting on 13 December 2013 when he reproached me for reproducing architect’s drawings on my website as part of my allegations of irregularities in Commercial Property Grant Scheme (CPGS) in Pembroke Dock.
Cllr Summons was keen to know: “Did you have permission to to reproduce those [architect’s drawings] on your website?”
Although he is a former traffic cop, it occurred to me that deep knowledge of copyright law was unlikely to be an essential qualification for catching speeding motorists.
Earlier in that famous meeting Cllr Summons had displayed an unsuspected expertise in the Freedom of Information legislation and I had already formed the suspicion that he was acting as stooge for someone in authority.
His masters seem to have been impressed with this shameless piece of toadying because before too long he found himself in the Cabinet (SRA £15,000).
The meeting ended just after half-past one and, having tucked into the traditional Christmas dinner and a few glasses of Merlot from the chairman’s wine cellar, I made my way home to find a message timed at 5.02 pm from the Monitoring Officer.
This comprised an essay-length dissertation on copyright law and concluded:
I would therefore suggest that you remove the copyright plans from your website so as to minimise the possibility that you may incur any liability for copyright infringement
Laurence J. Harding
Monitoring Officer,
Pembrokeshire County Council
It was very thoughtful of him to be concerned that I might be sued, but as these plans were freely available to the whole world on the council’s planning department website, I declined his advice.
And, as the copyright was the property of the architects, Kinver Kreations, it is not easy to see why the council was getting excited about its infringement.
In any case, it would seem that S 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, exempts works of “criticism, review and news reporting” from the rules against infringement.
Of course, conspiracy theorists will conclude that all this stuff about breaches of copyright was designed to throw me off balance, but that would be to fall into the “negativity” trap referred to by Rob Summons in his email.
The council meeting of 13 December 2013 – the first ever to be webcast – is the gift that keeps on giving.
Here is Brian Hall pontificating on the Townscape Heritage Initiative of which he was chairman:
“It had regular monthly meetings which consisted of people from the Port Authority, PCC, CADW, a consultant appoint by the National Lottery who were funding the scheme, Quality Pembrokeshire, Principal Development Officer, Directors, THI officer, Project manager, WDA, Civic Society and Town Council.”
He then recited a long list of successfully completed projects and waved a collection of certificates he, as chairman, had received for good performance.
These projects were: “Not only audited internally they were audited by external auditors and several other organisations.”
And, if my allegations of chicanery had any substance: “There is no way that we in Pembroke Dock would have won national awards for the best THI in the country”.
Not wishing to pee on Cllr Hall’s bonfire, or give Rob Summons the opportunity to accuse me of “negativity”, I would point out that Oxford Brookes University did an evaluation of the THI scheme in Pembroke Dock and came to the conclusion that it had missed almost all of its targets and in some cases had made things worse.
As for Cllr Hall’s army of auditors crawling over the project they can’t have been up to much because, as was recently reported, PCC had to pay back some £180,000 after an audit by an independent firm of surveyors identified payments for work that wasn’t eligible for grant aid.
And that doesn’t include Mr McCosker’s dodgy dealings in respect of Coronation School and 16-19 Commercial Row.
Another who was keen to stress how closely these grant schemes had been monitored was Johnny Allen-Mirehouse.
He referred members to the officer’s report where it says: “There have been four different audits – four different auditors have been through this.
“That is WEFO, The Wales Audit Office, Welsh Government European Funding Audit Team and The Directorate of the Regional and Urban Policy Unit of the EEC. None of these have found the slightest thing wrong.”
Squirehouse concluded: “But I do say he [Old Grumpy] should not continue with his policy of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.”
Of course, all this needs to be looked at in the light of subsequent events.
In April 2014, just four months after this fateful meeting, where I was accused of not having the truth on my agenda, the council handed a thick dossier to Dyfed-Powys police detailing irregularities in grant claims amounting to some £80,000.
Also in April, Mr McCosker wrote to the council offering to pay back all the £180,000 he had received in grants provided that would be the end of the matter.
And in July 2014, because of flaws in its administration of these grants, the council was forced to pay back £309,000 to WEFO.
It is difficult to reach any other conclusion than that all these fancy titled auditors are not providing the value for money that is their raison d’etre.
Both Hall and Johnny made the fundamental error known as appeal to authority which is so well known that, in books on logic, it has its own Latin tag: argumentum ad verecundiam.
It is a trap often fallen into by those with closed minds who find parroting what someone else has told them is easier than thinking for themselves.
Anyone who is in any doubt about the unpleasant, corrupt nature of the regime that holds power in the aptly named Kremlin on Cleddau could profitably spend an hour watching the webcast of this meeting (agenda items 9 and 10).