When the Ministry of Defence announced they were coming to town in the form of meetings in Solva and St Davids, it was pretty obvious to many Dewisland residents: the petition of thousands of signatures, the BBC Wales TV coverage, and the widespread positive local press for PARC Against DARC had got them majorly spooked.
This, however, was where the unmitigated carnival of MOD’s incompetence, evasiveness and—eventually—local and national media nosediving only began!
First there was the absolute shower of the MOD’s public engagement announcement flyers, sent to homes in Dewisland. The flyers, thin on information and heavy on vague, flawed and long-discredited claims, couldn’t even get right half the place names of the communities their catastrophic radar proposal was proposing to ruin:
Then came the ‘engagement’ events themselves. This was the MOD’s big moment, their plan to ride into the countryside, loud hailer its people with as many lies and evidence-free denials as they could squeeze into a couple of sessions, and do something—anything—to get the massively hostile media reception and huge petition of voices under control.
What followed was a response by the community majority which comprised, in a fashion completely unprecedented in any public engagement ever hosted in Pembrokeshire’s history, nothing less than a sweeping takeover of the whole event weekend.
PARC and local residents turned up in St Davids over several hours with a twelve roller-banner People’s Exhibition so comprehensive that passers-by, stopping to read it and speak to the campaign, at first believed that the consultation was itself simply PARC Against DARC’s event!
When the MOD had arrived in St Davids in the morning before a single protestor was to be seen, the first sight meeting them would have been PARC’s NO RADAR (DIM RADAR) banner, with the official permission of St Davids City Council, standing as a clear local community statement at the entrance to the very building of St Davids City Hall where their event was taking place:
The wave of resistance was just getting started. Dozens of residents headed in armed with pressing and pertinent questions, and received, as aptly reported by local paper The Pembrokeshire Herald, nothing but ‘dismissive or uncertain answers.’
Car horns could be heard blasting from inside the events, with chants, and hundreds of PARC’s counter-disinformational leaflets being distributed to the public to debunk one absurd, ridiculous and inconsistent claim by the MOD after another!
Exhausted by a particularly unforgiving afternoon of local resistance to the monumentally unpopular DARC proposal on the Saturday in St Davids and over seven hours of long-haul resistance by the locals, the MOD awkwardly packed up their displays alongside the gleeful campaigners, and cowered away into the twilight.
But the MOD's nightmare was only just beginning.
That evening, the 6:30 BBC Wales News broadcast a sum-up of the day’s events. It was a bruising indictment of the MOD, with the three-minute report giving excellent coverage to PARC, mentioning its 15,000 signature petition at the top of the story, and speaking directly to residents who had started a whole two-day tent encampment on the land directly outside the Cawdor Barracks military base!
The MOD’s media performance began to worsen even more quickly though. Withering coverage of the emerging story of just how shambolic the MOD’s consultation itself truly was in the Pembrokeshire Herald, Western Telegraph, Tenby Observer and The Canary began to create the sense that the MOD might not just have achieved nothing—but the total opposite of what their catastrophic attempt at a PR charm offensive had intended!
News outlets reported one top military official who had been quoted by a resident saying, ‘No, I wouldn’t stand next to one of these radars myself; it’d be like putting my head in a microwave.’ He had obviously been doing his due diligence and reading PARC Against DARC’s health argument!
Papers presented the story as the MOD having presided over an ‘utter shambles’ of a public consultation, accused of failing to adhere to National Principles of Public Engagement in Wales, with ‘a large number of anti-DARC locals attending the PR meetings.’
Publications were even printing the most critical possible campaign quotes, uncritically and in full:
If the temperature of public opposition was already high though, it was about to get a whole lot hotter.
Days after the events, PARC took the MOD at its word and invited its large email supporters’ list to provide feedback on its shambolic consultation. Residents began sending their inevitable condemnations in via the MOD’s online form…
And suddenly, apparently rattled even further by a deluge of complaints about both DARC and the non-statutory consultation itself, the MOD’s PR firm Cascade Communications, in what can only be presumed to be a state of utter panic, took down the entire consultation off the internet without explanation over the weekend!
Springing into immediate action, PARC mobilised its ground team to hand- and postal-deliver an incredible 50+ paper consultation forms with freepost envelopes to local residents its email had offered them to.
Faced with the mounting pressure of local news media outlets literally taking it upon themselves to threaten to publish in their papers a photocopied version of the MOD’s paper consultation form with a Cascade Communications address for members of the public to send it to, the MOD finally caved, and re-uploaded the form…
… Which almost certainly only significantly increased the volume of complaints and negative feedback for DARC radar that they had been getting!
News of the scandal has now intensified the pressure against the MOD’s sham consultation—fast becoming legend—in the form of somehow even more catastrophic articles in Nation.cymru and The Tenby Observer!
While the overpaid London PR firm and the broadcast-only MOD might have come to Dewisland with what they believed was a plan that could save DARC, the DARC agitators have been finding the hard way in the last few weeks that they have picked the wrong local community to mess with—and may just have a battle on their hands that is far beyond all they could have bargained for.
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