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The leader of Neath Port Talbot Council, Cllr. Rob Jones, has been suspended by the Labour party and has stepped aside from his position after being secretly recorded calling Bethan Sayed MS (Plaid, South Wales West) a “cow”.
The comments were made during an internal Labour party meeting in 2019 and referred to the MS’s campaign against local school reorganisation.
Equally as damaging were comments made which suggested that Neath Port Talbot Council has made spending decisions to Labour’s political advantage, instead of on merit or necessity.
“I wouldn’t do it overtly, but clandestinely – if two Plaid councillors came to me and said ‘we want to find money for this, we want to find money for that’ and there was a contradictory project that potential Labour councillors wanted: which one am I going to [plough] money into?
“I did it up in Ystalyfera….I don’t know if you’ve heard this story….the cemetery was owned by the local church and the local vicar…he refused, he didn’t want anything to do with this project. We just did it anyway. What I said to the officers was ‘go and search down behind the backs of the sofa and cost out how much you could do for the whole road’. He came back and they said it was something like twenty thousand, twenty-five thousand. So the long and the short – we put the road in. It took three days to put it in. They have now turned to Labour.”
– Leader of Neath Port Talbot Council, Cllr. Rob Jones.
Cllr. James said the recordings were made without his permission and has issued a written apology to Bethan Sayed. He has also referred himself to the Public Services Ombudsman for an investigation.
