An open letter to the owner of Nat Watch

Nat Watch :: Will the real Nic Dafis please stand up?.

A few weeks ago, we asked our readers to help us identify Nic Dafis. We wondered which branch of the Nats he was a member of, and we also wanted to know if he was one of their spokespersons on energy, these questions remain unanswered.

Let’s see if we can make it a bit easier for you. This might take a while.

I don’t know how many people read Nat Watch, but I do know how many read Morfablog, so I’m breaking my usual habit of posting only in Welsh, in the hope that someone out there will be interested enough to ask a few questions of their friends in the Labour Party and find out who is behind the site. Shouldn’t be too difficult.

First of all, to answer price4president’s questions, since s/he obviously hasn’t come across Google: Nic Dafis is a 38 year old, part-time Welsh tutor. He works for the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and lives at Maes y Morfa, Llangrannog, Ceredigion, with his long term partner, Philippa. He is divorced, and has no children. He has a third class (I know) degree in humanities from the Polytechnic of Wales. He learnt Welsh as an adult. Before becoming a Welsh tutor, he worked on a farm, and before that in a bookshop in Cardiff. He is not a member of any political party, although he has been a member of Plaid Cymru, briefly. He is a member of Cymdeithas yr Iaith and Cymuned, and doesn’t do as much as he thinks he should for either movement. He has maintained this blog (the first one in Welsh, fact fans!) since April 2001, and since August 2003 has also run maes-e.com, a popular Welsh language bulletin board. He also runs an MP3 blog and uses and endorses Flickr, a popular photo sharing site. The only time he uses a pseudonym online is when he posts to Metafilter, because he thought having a pseudonym was pretty cool, back in 1999.

Can I drop the third person stuff now?

Since becoming aware of Nat Watch, I have twice tried to open a discussion with price4president. Since there is no facility to leave comments on the blog, this has been through email. In fact, this was the subject of my first email, sent to natwatch@gmail.com on July 17th::

Hello,

I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you opening comments on your blog, to let people respond to your interpretation of current affairs and political history?

Can’t imagine you’d be scared of a bunch of clueless nashis.

Hei ho,

Nic

I haven’t received a response to this.

When Nat Watch became a subject of discussion on maes-e, several people suggested sending hundreds of emails to p4p, and using other, out-dated and ineffective ways of irritating them, like signing them up for porn spam and so on. On the 18th July I pointed out that this would be a waste of time at best and counter-productive at best:

Welith e mohono fe, mae hidlau sbam Gmail yn gadarn iawn (dw i’n cael rhyw 1000 o sbams bob dydd, a phrin iawn mae un yn cyrraedd y mewn flwch). Byddai wneud rhywbeth fel hyn jyst yn rhoi stori arall i’w flog: “Welsh Nats try to spam me into submission” – a byddai pwynt ’da fe, am unwaith.

He’ll never see them, the spam filters on Gmail are very solid (I get some 1,000 spams a day, and very rarely does one reach my in-box). Doing this would just give him another story for his: “Welsh Nats try to spam me into submission” – and he’d have a point for once.

[My translation, and my sexism - at the time I assumed that "p4p" was a man.]

Unfortunately, some over-enthusiastic (oh, all right, drunk) member of maes-e, found himself on the cover of the Daily Post and facing disciplinary action at work, for having sent am intemperate email, in his cups. But since, at the time, Nat Watch’s front page contained the following invitation:

I thought it a little unfair, not to say hypocritical, that far from respecting Aled Cottle’s anonymity, price4president would show a copy of this email to a Welsh Labour AM, Carl Sargeant, who passed it on to the Daily Post (I may be wrong about the chain of events: p4p may have gone straight to the Daily Post, who may have contacted Sargeant as a reliably bulldogish rent-a-quote. I am in no position to state what the connection is between price4president and Carl Sargeant, or any other Labour AM for that matter, if indeed there is a connection.) Struck by this blatent abuse of confidentiality, I once again wrote to price4president, this time on 26th July:

Would your definition of “mendacity” include an invitation to readers of a website to “contact us in confidence”, with the most juicy (i.e.
drunken) responses then being passed on to a newspaper? It certainly fits mine, but I’m probably missing something.

Hey ho,

Nic

No response to this email, but fair play, the text of the invite was changed within a couple of days, so there must be a glimmer of conscience in there somewhere (or a lawyer nearby):

On the 29th July, p4p posted this:

But for every Dafydd Wigley there appears to be one of the brutalists. The sort of people who threaten violence towards the producers of this weblog.

And that is why we now say to people like Dafydd Wigley that they have a duty to confront this sort of politics. They might not like Natwatch, but we have every right to speak out – just as they have every right to criticise us. But nobody – and we mean nobody – has the right to threaten violence against us just because they don’t like our politics.

Something I agree with. Given the (unspoken) suggestion that the “brutalists” are members of maes-e, I again contacted price4president, on the 30th July:

Hi,

I’m the owner of maes-e.com, and would be only too happy to investigate your claim that members of my site have threatened you. I take accusations of this kind very seriously, given that they take us into the field of legally actionable conduct. I certainly hope that legal action can be avoided, although it would be interesting to see who is behind these anonymous accusations of racism and brutality. I’ll be away for the next few days (Eisteddfod), but can be contacted on [phone number]

Rather than responding to this email (anyone else see a pattern emerging here?), and on the very same day, p4p posted the “story” Who is Nic Dafis? Apparently, my emails had been read, but instead of replying to them like a grown-up, p4p had been busy burrowing away at my messages on maes-e, until s/he found something that could be taken out of context and hopefully, you know, stir some shit for me.

(Sorry Mum.)

As regular readers will know by now, every so often we are forced to reconsider our belief that, deep down, most Nats are really nice people.

After exposing the hypocrisy of Nat MP Adam Price’s views on wind-farms, Nat Watch asked how Plaid Cymru planned on supplying us with energy.

A certain Mr Nic Dafis took it upon himself to respond on behalf of the Nats:

“Digon o dai haf i’w llosgi, ond oes?”

This translates to:

“There’s enough holiday homes to burn down, isn’t there?”

Does anyone out there know Mr Dafis? What branch of the Nats is he a member of? Is he a Nat spokesperson on energy we wonder?

(Sorry for the long quotes by the way, but people like p4p have an unfortunate Stalinist bent with the “Edit post” button. I want to make sure this is all on the record in a form that can’t be changed by p4p.)

What I actually said, here, was:
Digon o dai haf i’w llosgi, ond oes?

(Nodyn i stringer maes-e y Daily Post: mae hynny yn jôc. Wele: )

Plenty of holiday homes to burn down aren’t there?

(Note to the Daily Post’s maes-e stringer: that is a joke. See: )

Since I was at the Eisteddfod (as p4p knew, since I had told him/her so), I was not in a position to reply to this, expect for on maes-e, where I again urged people not to over-react, and certainly not on my behalf. When I got back home, since I had to be on-line anyway as I was doing a 24 hour sponsored blogathon, evil nationalist bastard that I am, I posted a response to p4p’s “who is he?” question, pointing out that I had already tried to start a conversation with him/her, but s/he was ignoring me. I also mentioned that thanks to his/her hounding of me, and the suspicions I have regarding the identity of price4president (nothing can be proved, but “someone within the Labour Party” seems to be the emerging favourite), I am considering rejoining Plaid Cymru, after a period when I’d become so sick of party political infighting that I’ve closed some of the most popular sections of maes-e just so I don’t have to moderate the crap that justs posted there, from all sides.

Result, p4p! You’ve made me more likely to campaign for Plaid than I was before reading your blog.

So, we’re up to date, until today, when p4p came across my comment on this blog where I mention Meibion Glyndŵr (in the context of how the English language media gives a less than complete picture of the reality of Welsh nationalism, ironically enough), and so decided to drag out the thing about how urged members of maes-e to burn down holiday homes to solve the fuel crisis, because I am an evil bastard nationalist. It’s not even that misrepresentation that has sparked this screed (again, apologies for the verbosity – using Welsh forces me to be succinct, I’d need an editor in English) but the accusion that in between my guest appearances on Nat Watch, I was somehow “in hiding”. So far this month, I have posted 81 posts to this blog and over 100 messages on maes-e, all in my own name. Far from avoiding p4p, I have not only written to him/her 3 times, but have given him/her my mobile number, in case s/he wanted to get in touch to try and sort out the threats which have been (allegedly) made by people who may (or may not) be members of maes-e. In other words – the words I should have used instead of the massive tome you’ve just ploughed through – I have done everything I can to open a conversation with price4president, but because s/he is paranoid about losing his/her anonymity, s/he has refused to reciprocate. I have also tried to stop people sending pointless abuse to the site. In return, s/he has used his/her blog, which being in a majority language has a much greater potential reach than a blog in my language of choice, to paint a picture of me as a medacious, xenophobic nationalist.

I utterly reject these accusations, which are based on blatent misrepresentations of things I have posted online (which are still online), and challenge price4president to answer my question.

I know who I am, who the fuck are you?

(Sorry Mum.)

(This blog post contains a trackback ping. Trackbacks, I notice, are open on Nat Watch, even if comments aren’t. So a link to this rebuttal should appear on Nat Watch itself, unless p4p choose to delete it. I bet trackbacks get disabled by tomorrow.)