Council being urged to sign up for more meaningless green bollocks:
We’ve had a meaningless Climate Emergency Declaration. We’ve had a meaningless Ecological Emergency declaration. Now stand by for …
Shadowy international organisation, the Fossil Fuel Treaty, are targeting Bristol City Council, demanding they sign up to the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty, which they call “an initiative of the Global South that we hope Bristol City Council will endorse.”
They also explain it involves “no financial outlay, but offers an important signal to the international community”. Virtue signalling in other words.
The Fossil Fuel Treaty are funded by such ‘global south’ interests as Cayman Islands-based hedge fund Quadrature – who invest in F35 bombers for Israel and gave the Labour Party £4m last July – and, er, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund who made their fortune from Standard Oil in the US.
No doubt our local councillor idiots – gearing up to support this ridiculous PR bollocks – in the next breath, will be cheerleading increased western arms production for more mechanised slaughter in Ukraine.
The Greens have published a long and boring 10 year economic plan for the city, ‘Fair, Green and Thriving: Bristol’s Economic Strategy 2025 – 2035’.
The council officer produced report mentions ‘business’ 178 times while lowly ‘public services’ are mentioned twice. If that doesn’t convince you this is a business charter from the Greens, then how about the 100 mentions of ‘growth’; the 32 mentions of corporate-coffer filling ‘net zero’ and 8 mentions for an unexplained ‘just transition’?
Looks like another right of centre coalition aligned to local business grifters has set up at the Council House to shovel public money to the private sector.
MORE BLOODY ‘GROWTH’ The Reverend’s meaningless buzzwords ‘inclusive growth’ are revived by the Greens in their economic plan. “We will grow our global reputation for innovation, creativity and sustainability [yawwwwn, Ed.] and attract investment aligned to our inclusive growth principles” they gush.
This ‘inclusive growth’ nonsense term appears a further eight times in their strategy. Nowhere do they explain what it is or how it differs from old-fashioned growth and its reliance on “trickle down theory”. The ridiculous belief that if the rich get richer the poor benefit by magic too. They don’t tell us what these ‘inclusive growth principles’ are, either.
The report rambles on, “[We will] use our role in the Bristol Temple Quarter LLP to support the implementation of the Bristol Temple Quarter Inclusive Growth Strategy.”
Naturally, there’s no such thing at present as the Bristol Temple Quarter Inclusive Growth Strategy. Although we’re promised, “[it] will be published in early 2025,” a date that has now passed.
It’s all a load of bollocks isn’t it?
FILM FLAM “The health and social work sector is [Bristol’s] largest employer, providing 16% of local jobs in 2022,” say the Greens. Almost one in six workers in Bristol. This huge employment sector gets just seven mentions in their economic strategy.
Meanwhile, an obsession with the film industry continues. ‘Film’ gets 17 mentions, although the Greens forget to say what percentage of local jobs their Hollywood dream actually delivers. Instead we get a tired old stat: “the Bottle Yard Studios contributed almost £21 million to the city’s economy”. £21m is a little over a tenth of one per cent of Bristol’s £15bn annual turnover.
Why the exposure and subsidies for a marginal industry while the sectors people actually work in get downplayed and underfunded?
DOWN SOUTH: After a few crocodile tears about inequality in south Bristol, the Green economic plan announces nine ‘designated areas of growth’ for the city for the next ten years.
Seven of these are north of the river. Two – Bedminster and Brislington – are in the south. Bedminster is gentrifying fast while the selection of Brislington along the Bath Road looks like a sweetener to help get the greenbelt built on at Hicks Gate.
Little support from the Greens for South Bristol, then.
Council bosses’ Safety Valve SEND bailout from the Department of Education has gone tits-up in less than a year.
The story was that it would eliminate the SEND budget deficit by 2029/30 in exchange for cuts to services. Recent news to the council’s education committee is that the deficit is expected to reach £41.5m by 2030!
Meaning the city ends up with brutal cuts to SEND services and a huge deficit.
Low information officer morons surrounding ‘Tory’ Tony Dyer refused to publish his diary under FoI claiming the minimal effort involved would, er, “affect the efficient conduct of public affairs”!
Who makes this shit up? According to the Information Commissioner (ICO), it’s Bristol City Council Monitoring Officer, “Dumpty” Tim O’Gara. He declared himself a ‘reasonable person’ and signed off this lazy-arsed refusal as a ‘reasonable opinion’.
Alas, the ICO begs to differ and has instructed the council to publish Tory Tony’s diary within 30 working days.
The hapless Green clownshow of pointless secrecy takes another hit.
‘Bedminster Green-Wash’ development? What a palaver.
Bedminster hell site
A mortgage lender to the Bemmy student hell site project, Shawbrook, has been ordered by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) to repay £100 million fiddled from vulnerable pensioners who unsuspectingly invested in non-existent time-share properties. That figure could exponentially multiply next year following the conclusion of the FCA investigation.
Described as ‘local’ by the Bristol Post, Shawbrook’s HQ is in London and their parent company’s HQs are in New York and Berlin. Luxury holiday resorts in the Canaries, unfamiliar to the majority of Bedminster dwellers, were used to lure elderly investors and steal their money after a life-time of labour.
Not content with the constant pounding of pneumatic jackhammers and drills from dawn ‘til dusk, the chopping down of our trees and the persistent ‘beep-beep’ of vehicles reversing all day. These fuckers robbed our Nans and Granfers to prop up Bristol University.
Wealthy environmentalists have an opportunity to save the planet while, er, getting a return on investment!
Bristol City Council, in partnership with Abundance Investment, is launching the “first Bristol Climate Action Investment, offering locals a chance to directly support green initiatives while earning a financial return.”
The first effort “aims to raise up to £1 million [..] to install a range of energy efficiency and renewable technologies at locations such as a children’s respite care home in Lawrence Weston.”
You read that correctly. The wealthy have the opportunity to make cash from disabled children’s respite care.
Where’s the billion quid from the private sector through City Leap to sort this shit out?
In March 2024, Ameresco’s heat network partner for City Leap, Vattenfall, announced they “expect to invest £475 million to grow the Bristol Heat Network, enabling it to provide heat to supply the equivalent of 12,000 homes.”
Now fast forward to this March and, with no sign of much invested, Vattenfall announce, “After the recent sale of Heat Berlin, Vattenfall is now looking into the remainder of its district heating portfolio.”
This includes Bristol’s heat network, sold to Vattenfall by the council at a knockdown “at cost” price in 2023 by the Reverend Rees.
We’re reliably informed private equity interests are now making enquiries about this opportunity to make a fast buck as monopoly providers of heat to customers in Bristol.
Rumours suggest Vattenfall got cold feet when plans for the government to regulate the wild west heat network sector to protect consumers started to emerge. This could result in making a tidy return on any investment tricky.
The ascension of the Reverend Rees to the House of Lords will not leave him short of cash and having to rely on just the £361 per day in attendance allowance with travel expenses and subsidised restaurant facilities.
His recently published register of interests to Parliament reveals he also has some other income streams. Including US multinational Ameresco, Inc, who have paid fees to the Reverend’s ‘personal services company’, Three and Two Ltd.
Ameresco was awarded a £1bn contract by Bristol City Council in 2021 on the Reverend’s watch after winning the tender to run his ‘Billion pound City Leap’ net zero nonsense.
Ongoing efforts by Bristol City Council to avoid answering the phone to the public who pay them take a new turn.
The Bristolian hears that later this year the council will launch ‘a major generative AI-enhanced service’, ‘the digital assistant Briz’, in their contact centre.
It says here, “Briz will be taking calls and dealing with lots of customer requests, freeing up advisors to work from home and engage with the public as little as is humanly possible.”[we might have made some of that up, Ed].
Best of luck trying to contact the council in the future.
