The Wardman Wire

Dave Walker Cartoons and Reporting

These are musings, so contributions and shootings-down-in-flames are more than welcome.

The Campaign to scrutinise the mismanagement of the former-SPCK-bookshops campaign I am involved in over here has two Facebook Groups attached:

1. A group for all those people who mourn the tragic demise of SPCK Bookshops (250+ members)
2. We Support Dave Walker (500 members)

The total membership is probably around 600-700, accounting for overlaps. These musings about the use of Facebook in campaigning online were prompted when I sent out this message to the relevant facebook groups the clickthrough rate was high - somewhere between 10% and 15%.

This is an advert for Third Space Books scanned in from the Directory of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Middlesborough.

Call me St Cuthbert and set me spinning in my grave, but I’d have thought that any adverts bigging up Durham Cathedral Great Kitchen as the base for the Brewer run bookshop should actually say “Durham Cathedral Shop“. Certainly when I phoned up 0191 386 2972 this morning, that is how the phone was answered by a friendly-sounding shop assistant.

Further, the terms of the Lease on the shop commit the lessee to “diligently publicise” the shop. Using a different name in adverts to that used to answer the phone does not seem to me to fit that bill.

And surely the real advantage of the name “Durham Cathedral Shop” is that is that it stays the same for a reasonable length of time. You almost have to put a display screen in where the lease used to say “SPCK” these days, because responsibility for the lease has gone through a series of business entities like a game of pinball as the Brewers’ try to dodge paying for the at least $1.5m worth of goods, services and employees money they have retained in violation of all their promises and legal responsibilities.

I crashed into the former SPCK Bookshop story when it became a Free Expression issue back in July, and since then I am simply horrified at what has gone on and how staff, suppliers, the authorities and everyone have been treated with contempt by this pair of Shysters J Mark Brewer and Philip Brewer.

Below is an article from me attempting to help current and ex-staff members get in touch to give the Pensions’ Board the information needed. I am posting it here because the Wardman Wire has a prominence in search engines which is currently greater than the SPCK/SSG News and Information blog. It will be reproduced on the News blog on Monday.

The Brewers’ various corporate vehicles - of which the key one is the Society of St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust - have simply not been responding to requests to supply information about the status of staff pensions, which is itself an entire contempible and despicable course of actions. Further, there are very real questions about whether the monies that were deducted from staff salaries as “pension contributions” were ever in fact even passed on to the Pension’s Bodies.

Click on the title for the full article.

It just keeps on growing:

1. Storm rages over cathedral shop: Northern Echo, 28/11/2008
2. Row breaks out over ownership of cathedral bookshop: Durham Times, 28/11/2008
3. Critics want cathedral bookshop ‘saved’: Durham Advertiser, 05/12/2008

Where next? Watch this space…

If you haven’t signed the petition, please do read it and, if you share the concerns raised, please sign it.

If you have signed it, please spread the word: a good place to start would be to share this page on facebook.

For more background on this story, please see our dedicated Durham petition page.

Thank you.

We have been looking for information to throw light on the history of the underlying changes going on in the Society of Saint Stephen the Great, and the cluster of charities and companies that J Mark and Phil Brewer have set up around it.

One of the things we are audit trailing as closely as we can are the VAT numbers in use in different places at different times as recorded on the public record - which in this case consists of till receipts. Till receipts with VAT numbers are legal documents of record within the UK Tax and Accounting systems (which is why you can use them to prove expenses claims of course).

(Click through on the title for the full article.)

I have covered the rundown of the bookshop chain that used to be known as SPCK over several months.

The SSG News Blog is carrying a story of some leaked correspondence from the time when the management of the bookshop at Durham Cathedral was transferred from the Society of Saint Stephen the Great to the newly created company “Durham Cathedral Shop Management Limited”. I reproduce the relevant part of the article.