REES BOARDS THE COLSTON BANDWAGON …

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… After years of kicking the can down the road

Colston docks

Since Colston came off his pedestal and went for a swim on June 7th social media, TV and the press have been dominated by politicians, journalists and so-called ‘community spokespeople’ gushing with praise for the statue coming down.

The Mayor’s Office even banged on in a press statement that the Reverend Rees had an audience of 10 million around the world, from Bangladesh to Tokyo after Colston’s ‘burial at sea’. However, while seizing this new opportunity for pontificating, Rees conveniently failed to give a toss about the people who had put him on the world stage. That was the 17 or so demonstrators who had been identified under Home Secretary, Priti Patel’s orders to “get these people” – the statue topplers.

So as Rees was boring the masses in Bangladesh, Avon & Somerset Police were being forced to line up charges of criminal damage that could put the protestors away for up to 10 years. And what did Rees do? Intervene at the Council for the good of the city and agree not to press charges, allowing the cops to give two fingers to Patel?  Like fuck he did … Far better to bathe in the glare of global publicity and forget about those who put him there.

Campaigners who have fought for many years for the Colston statue to be removed and to get a permanent memorial to the victims of slavery in the City have been astounded by the two-faced hypocrisy of these turncoats. Rees told Points West:

“When I first came in, myself and a number of black people in the creative sector said that the best thing to do is to keep that [Colston] debate away from me.”

So Mr Civil Rights’s major contribution to the struggle to get the Merchant Venturers pet slave trader off our streets and schools was not just to do nothing but to actively discourage others from getting involved.

When calls came to change the name of the Colston Hall in 2017 Rees was silent, refusing to make his position clear until he was caught like a rabbit in the headlights at the end of a TV programme. Martin Luther King, who Rees idolises, must be turning in his grave.

In 2019 after the Merchant Venturers had spent months sanitising the wording on a plaque for the statue that was meant to correct the history of Colston, Rees only intervened to avoid becoming a laughing stock. Finally using some of his executive power to block the Venturer’s sanitised plaque before heading to the hills faster than Dominic Cummings in a top of the range Land Rover, leaving the project in limbo for over a year.

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Bullies? Abolition Shed campaigners

Meanwhile Rees’s second in command Asher Craig’s hardly covered herself in glory in dealing with persistent calls by campaigners for a permanent memorial to remember the victims of the trans-atlantic slave trade. Bristol lags far behind other ports like Liverpool and Nantes in France that were involved in the ‘vile trade’ and have made major efforts to both memorialise the victims and tell the history – warts and all.

One historian from Bristol University stated in a meeting with Asher Craig in March 2019 “that Bristol’s reputation abroad, when referring to the city’s response to its slaving past, was very bad”. He also said that Bristol shouldn’t limit its ambitions regarding a slavery museum, “the city should think big and be better than Liverpool”.  

Bristol City Council have missed opportunities to right this embarrassing wrong many times. In 1996 around the Festival of the Sea, in 1999 when the Respectable Trade exhibition was launched,  in 2007 with the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade and again in 2015 when the Colston protests began.

In 2017 campaigners from three groups and local residents proposed the Abolition Shed project, which wanted to convert two council-owned warehouses on Welsh Back into a memorial for the victims of the African slave-trade with a visitor centre to tell the history. When they approached Asher Craig to get support from Bristol City Council she basically told them to clear off and get some private funding.

Despite this slap in the face campaigners continued the fight to halt the council’s proposed development of the warehouses into more restaurants and bars and to finally do something. This persistence and enthusiasm by unpaid Bristolians who gave a fuck about the memorial, the history and the city’s reputation was clearly starting to annoy Rees and Craig.

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That Rees/Craig proposed slave trade memorial

In August 2019 Marvin angrily demanded to know “who the campaigners were” and in response to their proposals cited a record in office of being amazing, without, of course, any concrete commitment to a memorial and museum. Asher was even more furious claiming“the City was now taking this seriously” and accusing the campaigners of being “bullies”. One local historian from the Counter-Colston group commented:

“Despite the fact that it is just not true, for Asher to characterise people as ‘bullies’ who have, without ‘funding’ and political power given lots of time and energy over several years to try to get something done after decades of failure, is disgraceful.”

Needless to say the Abolition Shed project was strangled at birth by Rees, Craig and the Council as they voted to turn the warehouses into pizza restaurants whilst wasting a million quid on moving a barge to appease the developers. Another missed opportunity in Bristol’s tradition of failure.

Asher’s only response to persistent demands for a memorial was to set up a ‘roundtable’, which descended into the usual talking shop while those who wanted to get a concrete commitment from the Council were seen as ‘troublemakers’.

It is also no surprise that Marvin’s response to Colston’s statue coming down was to propose a ‘history commission’. Looking into the “true history of the city”, which sounds like another opportunity for free-loading academics to fail to do anything.

So here we are, kicking the can down the road again….

ROTTEN COMRADES: Manoeuvring People Out of Their Jobs and Then Buying Their Silence

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By The Dwarf

I’ve been watching for some time Bristol City Council’s war against its own staff, but it becomes particularly vicious in light of the coronavirus situation. The suppression of our black whistle-blowers continues apace and the dismissal and downgrading of our disabled staff has been made worse by the pandemic because there aren’t any safe roles to be redeployed into. But nonetheless, BCC won’t let an impossible job market get in the way of following an unethical and discriminatory policy to the bitter end, no matter how illegal it is.

I’ve written at length about this (see Smiter passim). The message, I think, has got through but they sadly have no shame and continue down the same road anyway. There is one member of the cabinet who is genuinely interested in these affairs and has tried to rectify these problems but the chain of command is so long it becomes like a game of Chinese whispers. Instructions and queries are garbled on the way down and replies obfuscated on the way up. When reports are written (for example, the workforce survey which jumped across the management chain and informed leaders directly) the facts are obfuscated by legal agreements that prevent disclosure and therefore the reasons for staff unhappiness aren’t shown.

And here we come to the nub of it. Bitter disputes between management and staff (grievances, disciplinaries and capability hearings) are being hidden by settlement agreements that have non-disclosure clauses. This means that if BCC discriminates against a member of staff and gets its chequebook out so no one can talk about it. This situation often happens when staff reach the point where appeals have failed and they are left with the option of either taking a settlement or going to court. You can’t blame them for settling when the council starts writing a cheque that equals what they would expect in court but without all the stress, but the process prevents the leadership of the organisation from seeing staff being manoeuvred into their predicament and then being bought off. The council is buying the silence of people it victimises.

So, even if a discriminatory event takes place that has been identified (like manoeuvring out most of the black staff from a department during a restructure and then making it impossible to stay at your own grade if you manage to hang on in there) any subsequent agreement not to go to court about it can’t be talked about. So we can’t learn from it. So the narrative that there was no discrimination at all is maintained and black staff, apparently, weren’t “a cabal” as reported. (You know who you are.)

Of course our black staff aren’t the only ones who are frightened, because our disabled, sick and older staff are too. It’s quite clear that quite a few of our staff are clinically vulnerable to the coronavirus (BCC used to be disability-friendly) and have shielded. Except a lot of these instructions to shield were rescinded. Some have cancer, some have heart conditions or hypertension and others have diabetes. Others have family members with the same sort of impairments and need to shield for their sake. When the instruction not to shield (unless you matched very strict criteria) came in, the staff phoned in sick and got a doctor’s note because they were in danger. BCC is now having sickness absence hearings for these people (some of which are the last stage, stage three). They promised not to penalise people who were sick because of coronavirus and they have gone back on this promise. How I really feel about this behaviour is just not reportable.

All of this is led by a well-motivated, well-organised human resources team. They enable the worst excesses of managers and provide custom-crafted tool-kits for those managers to demote, redeploy, harass and dismiss staff who do little more than stand up for statutory rights such as whistle-blowing and protecting themselves from danger.

It’s about time HR was reorganised. Hopefully they can then get a taste of their own medicine.

CITY’S SLAVE CULT SETTLED LIBEL ACTION AFTER SMEARING ANTI RACISTS

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Brown: RESIGNED

Press releases tumbling out of the Society of Merchant Venturers since the fall of Colston on Sunday 7 June 2020 have left campaigners against the cult and their slave trade icon gobsmacked.

“The statue of Edward Colston was removed from Bristol’s city centre last weekend and the fact that it has gone is right for Bristol,” the Venturers innocently chirped to the press late on a Friday evening about a statue they fought a bitter and underhand battle for years to maintain at the heart of city.

Public warm words and contrition now are in stark contrast to the cult’s attitude as recently as 2018. Then the Merchant’s misfiring education wing, the Venturers Trust, which runs Colston Girls School and  Withywood’s Merchants Academy as well as string of primary schools across the city, accused Colston campaigners and anti-racists of terror offences.

The damaging smear, a deliberate attempt to destroy the careers and reputations of campaigners prepared to directly challenge our city’s wealthy and influential Colston cult, came after Countering Colston’s Christine Townsend submitted a formal objection to the Office of the  School Adjudicator in April 2018 about admission arrangements at Colston’s Girls School.

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Smallwood: RESIGNED

During this adjudication process, in letters to the Adjudicator and to Bristol’s Local Education Authority, signed by senior Merchant Venturer Anthony Brown of the Venturers Trust, they claimed that Christine had harassed children and associated her with a bomb threat to Colston Girls School. They even demanded that the Home Office’s PREVENT Programme to tackle homegrown terrorism investigate Christine and other members of Countering Colston.

The Adjudicator ignored Brown’s absurd fabrications as the Adjudication process deals exclusively with school admissions and a ruling on this appeared in August 2018. The local authority told the Merchants they needed to speak with the police, not a local council, in line with long established children’s safeguarding processes an academy chain should be familiar with.

Throughout the summer of 2018 the Venturers Trust ignored all correspondence and refused to retract and apologise for the kind of damaging smears that can cost people hard-earned careers. Eventually, in August 2018, a Civil Procedure Rules Pre-Action Protocol was served on Anthony Brown as Chair of Colston Girls Schools and trustee of the Venturers Trust. Christine was suing for libel.

By February 2019, with neither Brown, Colston Girls School or the Venturers Trust able to produce a shred of evidence for their claims, a written apology and a full and detailed retraction of their allegations was received by Christine from Anthony Brown. The proven liar also quietly resigned as Chair of Colston Girls School and a Trustee of the Venturers Trust. Oddly, Trevor Smallwood, a former Master of the Merchant Venturers, followed Brown out of the door as Chair of the Venturers Trust. The typical fanfare the local press reserves for vain old Venturers for their much-vaunted charitable and voluntary work was noticeably absent.

No explanation for Brown and Smallwood’s sudden departure from running one of the city’s leading academy chains has ever been publicly provided by The Venturers Trust or the Merchant Venturers. While the editor of the Bristol Post, Mike Norton, has declined to publish this news, almost certainly in the public interest, that his newspaper has held for over a year.

Are we to believe it is so entirely unremarkable for senior Merchant Venturers running academy chains to be proven liars that it is not worthy of news or comment? Or is the city’s wealthy slave trade cult so malignly powerful and influential it can easily silence our city’s senior media figures in order to maintain their false reputation?

Why are these wealthy men allowed to continue getting away with it and what else haven’t you heard about the Colston cultists dominating our city?

HOW BRISTOL WORKS

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smallwood

Meet Merchant Venturer Trevor Smallwood, a very wealthy man indeed. Like a number of Venturers, Smallwood obtained the majority of his wealth courtesy of Thatcherite privatisation policies and ended his career as chairman of First Group, who count Bristol’s buses among a portfolio of public transport service mediocrities run for shareholder benefit. Smallwood, from a fairly ordinary background, has used his wealth to climb the social ladder and has been the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Somerset and the Master of the Society of Merchant Venturers, the top job at the racist cult.

2009: Smallwood finally loses in the Court of Appeal and is forced to pay £2.7m in Corporation Tax to the Inland Revenue after attempting to dodge the tax via a Trust Fund – of which he was a beneficiary – that had been temporarily based in Mauritius. The tax was due on a £6m sale of shares in First Group held by the trust that were sold in 2001. His tax advisors at the Bristol office of big four accountants Price Waterhouse Cooper had encouraged Smallwood’s trust to sell these shares only after its governance had been transferred to Mauritius in a transparent attempt for the share sale to come under the jurisdiction of Mauritian tax law rather than British. A tax dodge that publicly and spectacularly failed.

2014: UWE Bristol awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Business Administration to Trevor Smallwood OBE DL in recognition of his, er, “entrepreneurial and charity work”. Tax dodging, apparently, being no bar to gaining the highest honour from one of our city’s universities.

steve-west

So does it come as any surprise that, also, in 2014 UWE Bristol’s Vice Chancellor, over-promoted podiatrist Prof Steve West, became a member of the Society of Merchant Venturers? But what on earth for? Why would a leader of an allegedly progressive institution wish to join a racist organisation best known among the majority of progressives in the city for openly lying to generations of children for sanctifying and sanitising their hero, the slave trader Edward Colston?

What’s in this bizarre arrangement for West exactly? What’s in it for the public he’s supposed to serve? And how much longer are UWE staff and students going to tolerate their boss hanging out with racists and tax dodgers? His position as both a Venturer and head of a higher education institution that aspires to be anti-racist is surely untenable? Or, like tax dodging, is being a member of a racist cult a cause for public celebration and honours when you’re part of Bristol’s self-styled elite?

“Do as we say. Not as we do.”

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM ON POLITICAL SHOW TRIAL

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assangebox

Prisoner of the British state Julian Assange is being kept inside a Hannibal Lecter style see-through armoured box throughout the hearings in a Belmarsh Prison ‘special court’ over his extradition warrant from the USA.

Assange, investigative journalist and WikiLeaks founder with many international journalism awards to his credit, and whose only ‘crime’ was releasing footage of a 2007 US massacre/atrocity in Iraq, is being escorted every day by Serco private security guards to and from his courtroom box/cage (built by G4) through a special underground tunnel from his cell, all shelled out for at untold cost to the taxpayer.

In scenes reminiscent of the Nazi State’s ‘Trial’ of Sophie Schöll, or the infamous and internationally condemned Diplock Courts from Northern Ireland’s darkest days of injustice, Assange is not allowed to even see his defence team, let alone confer with them in private as British law allows. Instead, he has to shout across the court chamber to them through a slit in the box and in full exposure to the entire court. And considering even the US authorities have no objection to Assange getting a proper legal defence, why are the Brits so craven and desperate to exceed their master’s call?

The UN special rapporteur on torture has already stated that Julian Assange was undergoing extreme psychological torture even before he was unceremoniously bundled out of his diplomatic sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy, and that his subsequent treatment by the British state has only served to amplify that. Amazingly, amid the deafening silence of UK and world ‘liberal’ media over his plight, the only effective action implemented to reduce his suffering was that made by his fellow prisoners in Belmarsh high security prison, who formed a successful campaign to get him removed from the 24 hour solitary confinement dungeon he was being kept in and be transferred to the normal part of the jail.

Yes, it was these people, all incarcerated violent criminals to a man, who are the only ones who took concrete sympathy with his plight and told the prison authorities, ‘He is not one of us, and the way you are treating him is wrong. Take him out of here.’

BRISTOL LABOUR: PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS

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Sack Marvin

Victory for Labour in all four Bristol wards at the general election – alongside bad defeats in South Gloucester target wards Filton and Bradley Stoke and Kingswood – just about managed to PAPER OVER THE CRACKS emerging along CLASS LINES in Bristol. A closer look at Labour’s victorious results reveals A DIVIDE emerging between WEALTHY INNER CITY WARDS now occupied and gentrified by the middle classes and the city’s neglected WORKING CLASS SUBURBS.

Could Labour’s historic coalition between organised labour and the progressive middle classes be falling apart in Bristol? For example, in South Bristol, Labour romped home in Southville, Windmill Hill and Bedminster grabbing TWO THIRDS OF THE VOTE. However, in the working class wards of Filwood, Hartcliffe and Withywood and Hengrove and Whitchurch Park Labour reputedly TRAILED IN BEHIND THE TORIES.

This pattern was somewhat repeated in Bristol North West where Darren “Dipshit” Jones LOST BADLY in working class Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston while he RACKED UP VOTES in middle class Westbury-on-Trym, Stoke Bishop and Henleaze. However Dipshit can point to some glimmers of light in that ultra-Corbynite stronghold Lockleaze remained unfaithful to him as did key working class estate Southmead.

Another story altogether unfolded in Bristol West, however, where working class communities with a larger mix of immigrant and black voters in wards such as Easton, Eastville, Hilllfields and Lawrence Hill, stayed with Labour to deliver Thangam Debbonaire a THUMPING MAJORITY – the largest of any Bristol MP – to continue her  vendetta against the left wing of her party.

What all this means for the future and for Bristol is open to interpretation. Especially as many people who voted Labour at the general election are telling us that they only LENT THEM A VOTE to keep the Tories out and they’ll VOTE DIFFERENTLY at next year’s local elections.

All to play for in the mayoral elections in 2020, then. (306)

THE HISTORY PERSON

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stars

It looks like “Little Read” Olivette Otele, Bristol University’s new high-profile woke diversity hire brought in to foghorn A HARMLESS LIBERAL VERSION OF THE HISTORY OF SLAVERY at us, is going to be very good value indeed. One of Little Read Olivette’s first moves was to announce on Twitter that she wanted “to put together a list of UK based black scholars 1/ historians with a PhD in History or PhD students. 2/ working on the history of slavery, memory, memorialisation and legacies of the past (Atlantic, Transaharian, Indian Ocean).”

Unfortunately her request didn’t go down too well with some chippy WHITE ACADEMICS who felt left out of the ELITIST WOKE HISTORY PARTY. But they had no reason to worry because Little Read soon returned to Twitter to explain, “I’m told that as identity is fluid, ONE CAN CHOOSE TO BE BLACK. So white born can choose to be black and non white born can choose to identify as black as in political blackness.”

So that’s all right then. Anybody white can just pop on a black identity like A PAIR OF UNDERPANTS every morning when they get dressed and become a black scholar. Who knew being a black scholar was so accessible these days? Indeed WHAT THE FUCK IS BEING BLACK ANYWAY if we follow Little Read’s advice to its logical conclusion?

And yes, before you ask, we are paying Little Read handsomely to educate our young people in this deranged drivel. Happy days.

AGILE STILL FRAGILE?

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agile
An exciting Counts Louse agile workspace. Admire the colour scheme;
ignore the cost?

An expensive SEVEN YEAR FIASCO of ‘agile working’ continues unchallenged at Bristol City Council. There’s still NO EVIDENCE that the council’s plan to buy the Temple Street Lubianka for £18m and expensively refurbish the Counts Louse at a further cost of £16m while selling off council offices across the city has delivered any savings.

Alongside the pricey property arrangements came a ‘Workplace Programme’ promoting HALF-BAKED TECH SOLUTIONS and fashionable MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCY NONSENSE. This claimed the council could create money-saving “new agile working environments” for their workforce by issuing staff with laptops, smart phones and tablets and promoting home-working and mobile working to save money.

The expensive plans, put together by UNACCOUNTABLE MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS, originally came with promises of £60m of savings by Max Wide “Boy”, one of the many execs who have rolled in through THE COUNCIL’S REVOLVING DOOR over the last few years to scrounge a six-figure salary.  Wide Boy arrived in 2013 and departed out again in 2016 leaving a £30 million agile working-shaped DEBT in his wake.

Fast foward three years and the ‘Agile Working’ fiasco continues. A recent report to councillors on the latest AGILE WORKING FAILURE in adult care – where the implementation of tablets and tech on the advice of consultants has belly-flopped – explains, “there still isn’t a clearly defined and available benefits document for the Agile Working Project”.

In other words after seven years of forking out HUGE SUMS OF MONEY on the advice of management consultants procured by high-earning council directors, no one HAS MEASURED THE COST EFFECTIVENESS of their ‘agile working’ strategy. Consequently the obvious conclusion that cutting back staff and giving those that remain a tablet will NOT SAVE ANY MONEY is still yet to be reached.

Although any targets for rewarding failure among council execs and their management consultants continue to be exceeded.

WALSH’S WHISTLEBLOW JOB FLOP

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MAYOR GETTING RACY

More problems for Bedwetter Walsh emerge as his useless HR department is UNCEREMONIOUSLY DUMPED from managing whistleblowing matters at the council. Responsibility for whistleblowers now sits with the Chief Internal Auditor as bosses’ and councillors’ trust in their OVERPAID HR MANAGEMENT CLOWN and his MALFUNCTIONING DEPARTMENT evaporates after a series of highly avoidable mishaps.

The new arrangements arrive after staff REPEATEDLY told council bosses and councillors that they had NO TRUST in the whistleblowing process under the bizarre management of Bedwetter who’s hobbies appear to include targeting whisleblowers for the sack.

It’s now general knowledge around the Counts Louse that this useless lying fruitbat was working at Wakefield Council in a senior HR role when six whistleblowers were PAID £1MILLION IN COMPENSATION after being FIRED and placed on a register of POTENTIAL SEX OFFENDERS for trying to expose CHILD ABUSE in Wakefield children’s homes.

How much longer can this dangerous fool survive in Bristol?