Council plans to close Park Street are backed by a private sector report by the council’s ‘private sector capital partner’, Arcadis – Queens Road, Triangle and Park Street – Economic Benefits Review.
The report claims that the proposal will generate a large 28.5 per cent increase in economic activity for the retail and food sector and a 19.64 per cent increase for the office sector.
Fantastic news until you learn from campaigners that the research Arcadis used to ‘prove’ these economic benefits is derived from US research from the 1960s about pedestrianising shopping malls.
The data is therefore 60 years old and, in three cases, malls were reopened to traffic to stop the economic decline caused by, er, pedestrianisation!
Units at Stafford Yard on Malago Road (part of Bemmy Green development) are going for £1,450 – £1,600/month for 1 – 2 bedroom apartments.
That’s 3 – 4 rooms respectively with a balcony barely large enough to squeeze in a deck chair. Council flats in Withywood and Hartcliffe are better appointed.
Maybe it’ll be worth it when the shopping mall goes up next door with biometric screening and armed security to exclude the riff-raff?
Maybe the unaffordable rents reflect the panoramic views across the city complete with violet sunsets stolen from the locals living in the long shadow of the steel framed fake brick clad block of flats?
One construction worker told The BRISTOLIAN that he can’t afford to live there.
Is that the landlord we can hear laughing all the way to Dubai to sup cocktails with petro chemical giants posing as climate saviours?
Confused councillors have pointlessly delayed the Turbo Island Town Green application for three months on the advice of their clueless legal team.
At a Public Rights of Way and Greens (PROWG) meeting in April the applicants and objectors presented their evidence to the committee and a council lawyer admitted he had no idea how to decide the issue.
Normally, an expert inspector would be appointed by the council to look at the evidence and provide the way forward. Instead the council have decided to take three months out to figure out what the hell to do.
However, it seems unlikely the council’s legal team can produce a recommendation without landing themselves in the hot water of an expensive judicial review. That means they will need to appoint an inspector.
Why didn’t they just do this in April?
SECRET OWNER SHOCKER
The Nazi Post and Bristol 24/7 breathlessly assured us in October that Turbo Island had been sold by owners Wildstone Investments to ‘a mystery buyer’.
This ‘mystery buyer’ was reputed to be Bedminster printing company Out of Hand, a claim vigorously denied by the Nazi Post who won’t identify the actual ‘mystery buyer’ of the land.
This ‘mystery buyer’ mystery becomes more tangled in the bundle of documents for the Turbo Island item at the PROWG in April.
It includes a letter from Merret & Co solicitors who say “we act on behalf of the local freehold owner of the Property” and the council lists Out of Hand as the firm represented by Merret & Co.
Who actually owns the land and why’s it being disguised by local press?
**UPDATE: papers released this week by the council for a PROWG meeting next week have confirmed Out of Hand as the owners of the land.
DEAL OR NO DEAL?
Campaigners for the Town Green, led by the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, are pushing for a deal where the landowner – whoever they are – voluntarily registers the land as a Town Green in exchange for concessions on public access to the site.
Councillors on the PROWG, allegedly concerned about costs being run up, appeared blissfully unaware that a deal could be on the table.
Instead, they opted for the expensive option of funding their own legal team to look at an issue they know nothing about for three months before appointing a barrister as an inspector to decide the issue.
Bizarrely, the council’s PROWG lawyer quoted a cost of at least £1,000 for an inspector.
Hapless local party blows WECA election after member goes rogue
Quite contrary …
Why was the Green Party WECA mayoral campaign underpowered? Their candidate Mary “Contrary” Page told The Times days before the election that she had no campaign manager and was paying for leaflets from her pension for an election they could win.
The party’s presence on the ground was non-existent. Nothing like the numbers for last year’s horrific ‘Team Carla’ experience in Bristol Central. Their social media campaign was pathetic too.
A few random local party branded Tweets drifted out sporadically while councillors and activists hid away in splendid isolation on the empty Bluesky app for nonces and snowflakes.
According to an insider, the campaign was a car crash because Mary only got the nomination after lodging a formal complaint with the Green Party when original candidate Heather “Hack” Mack put her nomination papers in late. Heather was then disqualified on the technicality by the Greens.
In response, the majority of Bristol Green Party didn’t bother campaigning for Page.
With former Mayor Dan “The WECA Man” Norris arrested before the recent election, questions are being asked about who supported the mayor’s shenanigans at WECA and why?
Local journalist Andrew Lynch, asked questions before Norris’s arrest at a January scrutiny meeting. He queried why an item on an independent report into Norris’s unlawful efforts to get his image plastered over the region’s buses had disappeared from the agenda?
The question was intercepted by WECA CEO Stephen “Preening” Peacock. Feigning confusion, he bizarrely claimed not to recall which report Lynch could be referring to and would need to go away and think about it.
That was the last the public heard of the report with Lynch’s further questions to WECA knocked back by Monitoring Officer Bob Brown “Nose” as, er, ‘defamatory’. Lynch chased up with scrutiny committee chair Jerome “Unhinged” Thomas, Green councillor for Clifton. Back came the ludicrous claim that Peacock “legitimately needed to refresh his memory on the matter”.
A matter that should stand out like a sore thumb. It’s not everyday an independent report states your mayor has acted unlawfully.
Suspicions of a Peacock cover-up for Norris are strong.
HOW MUCH DID THE WECA MAN SPEND ON HIMSELF? A July 2024 FoI request to WECA asked for, “full copies of all expenses claims by Mayor Dan Norris for each year he has been in office”.
The response from WECA was,“no expenses were claimed by the Mayor for that period.”
However, in January Norris explained, “I have not claimed any expenses since being elected in 2021. The authority organises train tickets etc.”
So he received expenses but he and WECA bosses unlawfully failed to publish them.
Another FoI on the matter in March remains outstanding
Kevin Guy: will he give a shit if your daughter gets gang raped?
Bath Lib Dem leader Kevin “Weird” Guy has been appointed by new WECA woman, Helen “Oh My” Godwin, as her deputy mayor.
Before pitching up in Bath, Guy was a Labour Councillor and chair of Children and Young People Scrutiny in Telford.
Here, the Crowther Report of 2022 agreed in a ‘measured, reasonable and non sensational assessment’ that more than 1,000 children in Telford were sexually exploited over decades while the failure by authorities to investigate ‘emboldened offenders’.
This report was no thanks to Weird Guy, who, along with nine other men at Telford council, wrote to the, then, Tory Home Secre tary, Amber Rudd, in 2018 telling her there was no need for a child rape inquiry in Telford.
The Greens have now decided to close Park Street to through traffic for reasons that nobody understands.
It’s such a crap idea that even the Greens’ WECA mayoral candidate Mary “Contrary” Page said she opposed the plan. Along with just about everyone else in Bristol.
Works will commence at the same time a liveable neighbourhood will be installed in south Bristol and something expensive and unnecessary is done to Bedminster Bridge.
The Society of Merchant Venturers (SMV) have been running (or at least trying) to run Bristol since their ‘royal charter’ of 1551. Nearly 500 years of feathering their own fat nests.
This unelected, undemocratic ‘union’ of rich merchants and businessmen, landowners, property speculators and their ilk concentrated on controlling the port, overseas trade, the corporation (now the City Council) and of course they made a fortune out of slavery.
In the 20th and 21st century they are renowned for masquerading as a ‘charity’, whilst their members have their ‘fingers in the pies’ of the Port of Bristol, public utilities like Wessex Water, huge business deals such as the ‘Arena’, the Church of England, both Universities, healthcare, the arts, schools and institutions such as the Beacon (ex-Colston Hall) that have swallowed up hundreds of millions of public funds. The power of the SMVs purse dominates these areas.
As a manager at the Old Vic theatre explained to us a few years ago “you musn’t have a go at the Merchant Ventuers, nothing happens unless they say so”.
An important part of this historic control has been manipulating the local media and politicians for their own interests. For example, in the 2000s the journalists at the Bristol Post knew they could not write pieces which were critical of SMV projects, from academy schools, funding the ‘Colston Hall’ to buying the Port of Bristol for a £1.
This was because Post editors like Mike Norton were well-known for being up the arse of the Venturers. It was common knowledge amongst Post journalists that Norton desperately wanted to be invited to be a member of the SMVs and he suppressed any stories that might piss them off as a result.
In one case he even threatened to sack a journalist for exposing members of the Venturers trust (the educational arm of the SMVs) for defamation. Despite his sychophantic loyalty to the SMVs, Norton never made it to be a member and retired a few years ago.
Five years ago, under huge pressure after the city rejected the SMVs slave-trading idol Edward Colston, the Venturers realised they had to modernise in order to survive. In their minds this meant allowing a few women and ‘ethnic monorities’ to join… shocker!
Of course, these people weren’t normal Bristolians but had to be millionaire business owners with good political ties, seeking status amongst the big business people in the city. One of their targets was corporate lawyer, Marti Burgess of the Burgess family empire, inner city ‘entertainment’ property owners who made millions running clubs like Lakota in Stokes Croft.
Burgess, a close aide of Marvin Rees during his Mayoral electoral campaign in 2016, realised how powerful the SMVs were when she was asked by Rees to map out the power structures in the city. She recalled “I did not know who the Merchant Venturers were until I surveyed the city. The SMVs had interests in so many sectors I told Rees that, after the Council, they were the most powerful organisation in Bristol”.
The unelected, undemocratic and exclusive SMVs appealed to Burgess and Rees, as a powerful body to join and collaborate with.
As elected Mayor, Rees went along with most of the SMV members’ needs, continuing to pour money into their iconic baby ‘the ex-Colston Beacon’, handing the arena site at Temple Meads to Bristol University and the airfield at Filton to Malaysian corporation YTL.
Rees seemed to think that if powerful businessmen from the SMVs were nice to him, then that meant they liked him. Worried close associates in the Labour Party pointed out they were only being nice because he was the elected Mayor and they were after contracts, not because they actually liked him!
Rees even refused to engage with the campaign to remove the slave-trader Colston from representing the city, sending the cops after the Colston 4 statue topplers and claiming that the protesters were “privileged” and the SMVs were the “genuine anti-racists in the city”.
Meanwhile, despite the anti-racist rhetoric of Marti Burgess, she joined the SMVs in 2020, claiming she was going to ‘change’ the organisation from within. Fuck all has happened of course and far from leaving the SMVs Burgess has stayed in there.
In 2024, with the blessing of the “anti-racist” SMV Rees was paid off with an honorary degree from their (Bristol) university, given a ‘job’ travelling round the world to climate conferences. Earlier this year made it into the House of Lords, as Lord Rees of Easton. Not bad for a failed Mayor who managed to get the post of elected-Mayor voted out of the city.
However, there was a spanner in the works when Rees was asked to declare his business interests as a Lord. As Private Eyepointed out, Rees’ own ‘personal services’ company was being paid by Ameresco Inc, the US multinational that signed a billion pound contract (yes! £1,000,000,000) with Bristol City Council under Rees’ watch in 2021. Smoking gun or what? At the Bristolian press centre we waited weeks for a news organisation in Bristol to follow up the Eye article.
The only place it appeared was on a local blogger’s website and the blogger’s husband happened to be a leading reporter in the Bristol media organisation Bristol 24/7, but still there was silence.
Who is on the board of 24/7? Yes, you guessed it SMV member and close associate of Rees, Marti Burgess. It would be no surprise to us that Burgess suppressed this massive story.
As a result of the yawning silence over this smoking gun, The Bristolian broke the story on the streets of Bristol by publishing the ‘Robber Baron’ issue . 48 hours later the cat was out of the bag when the Bristol Post ran the story, and then surprise, surprise even the fawning Rees propaganda arm the Bristol Cable were forced to say something. This is nothing new to us at The Bristolian as we often have to lead the way with ‘difficult’ stories like this. To this day 24/7 have left it unreported.
They say nothing changes, everything stays the same…..in the newly ‘diverse’, ‘modern’ Bristol we have the same old power structures, political corruption, businesses leeching off public money and of course members of the SMVs like Burgess controlling our access to news to protect their business interests and their dodgy ‘high and mighty’ mates.
