ELECTION VIDEO HISTORY - 29 July 2021

GLYNNEATH CENTRAL WARD BY-ELECTION

20210729A-WBVI-election

DAI RICHARDS POLITICIAN  -  ELECTION HISTORY  -  ELECTION VIDEOS

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This is what i look like, today I'm clean shaven for effect, and this is what I look like normally with two to ten days stubble.

This is what i love, I love the mountains, swimming in the lakes at sunrise and walking the waterfalls in flood, I love to be part of nature to be at one with this amazing planet, and i want to enjoy my remaining days left on this earth. 

I'm 61 years old and apart from living five years in Swansea, I've lived all my life in Neath-Port Talbot, and the last 14 years in Brynhyfryd, Glynneath. My family hail from Neath and in 1891 all four sets of my great-grandparents lived near the Neath town centre.  These are my my great-great-grandparents, Thomas and Elizabeth Snow. Thomas Snow is credited with building Victoria Gardens
in the Neath Town centre.  

I'm best known for my prowess as a sportsman, I've represented Wales at cyclo cross, triathlon, mountain running, marathon kayaking, duathlon which is combined running and cycling, and mountain biking. This is me in the red top and pink shorts riding for wales in the 1996 mountain bike tour of Britain where i finished the leading rider in the Welsh team. I rode six years as a sponsored rider for the Schmoo's mountain bike team travelling the length and breadth of Britain to race against professional teams such as Raleigh Marin and Peugeot, with the occasional magazine photo shoot included. 

During this period of my life I also worked as a physical training instructor with the territorial army winning the major British military mountain running competition the welsh 1 000 meter peaks race twice in succession running from the sea near Bangor to the top of snowden via the four highest peaks in Wales and I won the territorial army triathlon championships for the first four years of of its existence. I also spent time perfecting other military skills.

In 2000 near Prague in the Czech Republic, I won the veteran over 40 title in the world quadrathlon championships combining kayaking with the three triathlon sports and in 2009 inside sport magazine named me Wales fitness man. I was 16 years past my best by that time and i had retired to focus on developing sport locally so that my children could enjoy a healthy lifestyle.

I live with my wife Hayley and we have four children, three of whom have represented Wales and
or Great Britain, Simon and Dale at orienteering, Dale at cyclo cross, Victoria represented wales and Great
Britain at slalom Kayak and in 2017 Victoria was a member of the Great Britain women's team that won a gold medal in
the slalom discipline at the world white water rafting championships in Japan, so we have another world champion in the family she's pictured in the front left of the raft. Two of my children are respected scientists, they both have a PhD in chemistry, Dr Simon contributed a chapter to the Royal Society of Chemistry periodical, Organometallic chemistry in 2020 and Dr Victoria is the chief editor of the chemistry journal, Nature Chemistry Communications. I worked at Neath-Port-Talbot College managing the first college Triathlon Academy in Britain and to support the academy, I built a feeder system for junior triathletes. In 2005, 75 percent of wales age group champions were from the academy feeder system. At the same time i was chairman of Wales's largest and most successful club of that period based in Neath, Multi-sport Racing Club. 

I work occasionally as a sports coach and my day job is running the world's leading leading supplier of rugby memorabilia Rugby Relics. This is a company I started from a shoebox of spare rugby programmes 48 years ago back in 1978. 
We sell all kinds of rugby memorabilia and have an online museum of memorabilia we exhibited our collection of artefacts
in 125th and 130th welsh rugby union anniversary exhibitions. I've also written a book on the origin of sport which explains the birth of Rugby Union, 

For fun i work as an extra in television and movie productions including Casualty, Sherlock and the locally filmed Pride where i was featured in the first scene filmed. If you have the DVD, I'm the first person you see when you put it on i appear to the right of Bill Nye in this promo photo.

This is my family, my wife Hayley and I and our direct direct descendants together with their partners we are 13 in total. We moved to Glynneath 2007 and up until 2016 with the occasional hiccup i kept myself to myself and i enjoyed living in Glynneath until the Cuddy Group started building a mountain of Aberfan proportions behind our homes.

In 2020 my research into the planning process relating to the Heol-y-Glyn development has identified malpractice in the Neath-Port Talbot Council planning department that has led to contamination being ignored on the site as opposed to being treated and cleaned up or removed in line with the council's contaminated land strategy and UK Government law. The council have in effect failed to safeguard the health of the residents surrounding the site, early on in the planning process residents from 20 properties asked me to represent them in objecting against the format of the Heol y Glyn development. 

I've supported these residents since then, Richards,  firstly thank you for allowing me to speak, I've spent the last three days trying to get my representation down to under five minutes and found it impossible my document is four pages long and represents the combined knowledge of around thirty council tax paying residents of Glynneath most of whom have lived next to the tip for the majority of their lives. I call it the tip because that's what it is and that's what it has always been a landfill site a rubbish tip the planning department have 52 pages to support a developer was history of breaking the law and here I refer to the 70 protected trees that
Enzo Homes cut down in Penllegaer, the judge who imposed the fine on Enzo Homes stated that this was a deliberate
and defiant act. Most of you will have received our report on how the planning department broke the 1990 environmental protection act, in 2010 the planning committee rubber stamped planning department malpractice that has placed placed the lives of Glynneath residents at risk and this includes my children 

The council does not like plain speaking and the truth so they've blocked me from asking more questions relating to the development, this is why i need to become a councillor so that i can ask these questions officially and not as a member of the public
Recently, I have discovered that twenty percent of properties in Brynhyfryd that have long term occupancy and a physical border with the site have had a family member die of a rare neural degenerative disorder in the last five years. 
This is 112 times above the national average and some of these deaths can be linked to a similar example of industrial contamination in a northern French town. In a nutshell what I'm saying here is that Neath-Port Talbot council are potentially killing Glynneath residents to support their own historical corruption. I'll give you a second or two to digest this information.

I would consider myself to have been reasonably successful in achieving my life's goals this is not through being lucky or having the boxes ticked for me by someone else. It's through sheer hard work attention to detail and an aptitude for understanding the steps required to achieve those goals. If you've watched this video to this point please understand the video is not an advertisement for my arrogance, the video is a demonstration of a series of successful processes that i and my family have completed in a world that celebrates winners not losers. Achieving success is a process and the skills involved within that process are transferable and can be applied to solve community problems as well as to kind of enhance community projects. The residents of central ward of Glynneath
have the opportunity to have me working for you by voting for me this Thursday. Please vote for me this
Thursday so i can help this community achieve success. Please vote for me this Thursday to support the families of the Glynneath Residents Against Contamination whose lives are being threatened by a corrupt council thank you.