Great news just in. Our four-jobs mayor, the Reverend Rees, has now declared his fifth job!
He’s now picking up an honorarium from 17 Rooms, part of Centre for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC and the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. An honorarium is payment for services rendered and Rees has registered it as a pecuniary interest under ’employment’ .
This latest little income uplift fits alongside being chair of the Local Government Association’s (LGA) City Regions Board (1.5 to 2 days a week), chair of Core Cities and a non-executive director at TV company Plimsoll Productions.
We know he gets £83k as mayor (plus a councillor allowance of £14k) and that his LGA allowance is £17.5k. However, the rest of his pay is undisclosed.
This new Brookings Institute/Rockefeller gig seems to involve the Reverend pursuing his Atlanticist interests and promoting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. A self-interested US-led global free market template for the ‘free world’. A long way from Bristol.
You have to wonder when the Reverend finds any time to be the executive mayor of Bristol?
The revolving door at WECA, our regional government basketcase, must be about to come off its hinges.
Head of Infrastructure, David Carter; Section 151 Officer Malcolm Coe; dodgy Monitoring Officer Shahzia “Dim” Daya; Head of Transport Jason Humm and Democratic Services boss, Ian Hird all cleared off over last autumn and winter.
Since then another whole new bunch have headed for the door.
Among them are Mina Davies, Head of Comms; Katherine Vowles who was brought in as an interim Head of Infrastructure; Jack Catkoviv: he scarpered before the end of his probation period as the new Head of Democratic Services; Laura Ambler Head of Planning and Housing and, now, new Interim Comms boss Ruth Wilmshurst has decided WECA ain’t really for her.
This news arrives as WECA’s auditors slam the management and governance of the authority after an investigation that found five “significant weaknesses” at the authority. They were especially displeased that the Head of Infrastructure, David Carter’s £59k handout for quitting had put the organisation “at the potential risk of committing to an unlawful payment”.
Auditors say the person responsible for the generous gift, notorious Chief Exec Patricia Greer “was acting in good faith” while potentially breaking the law.
The council’s new racist Kulture Kommandant Genevieve “Klu Klux” Adkins has wasted no time foisting her white supremacist vision on the city.
You may recall our fragrant new council Head of Culture and Creative Industries told bemused staff back in August, “Black people don’t make or spend money. Why don’t you programme things for white people?”
So no surprises at the recent announcement that the Georgian House Museum on Great George Street is to close until next April. Many doubt, given the scale of cuts Adkins wants to make, that the museum will ever open again. A significant blow to the city.
The Georgian House, a reproduction of sugar plantation and slave owner’s home from around 1790, is the nearest thing we currently have in Bristol to a museum marking the city’s role in the slave trade.
What next from Adkins? Hopefully not much as she has been on leave for “personal reasons” since the Bristolian publicised her public racist outbursts.
“Ground control to Major Tom. I’ve fucked it all right up”
We learn that the appalling Saskia “Hindley” Koynenburg, Bristol City Council’s Head of External Comms and one of the Reverend’s main council flunkeys has quit the council. Her last day was September 30. Was that a small cheer we heard from her long-suffering staff as she left the building?
Hindley’s days always seem numbered at the council after she shot to national notoriety on Youtube this summer for trying to stop the Nazi Post’s LDR journalist, Alex Seabrook, asking the Reverend a question at a press conference because that “wasn’t part of his job description” or some such nonsense.
Matters then got worse for the embittered failed journalist when she was discovered at the centre of the SEND spy scandal. It was Hindley’s sicko team trawling parents’ social media accounts and supplying juicy nuggets of personal information and photos of parents of vulnerable children to Bristol’s SEND managers.
It rather looks like Hindley is fleeing the scene of a crime doesn’t it?
Plans to turn the ‘tramway’ – a section of the old North Somerset Railway Line in Brislington – into a PR-friendly hipster heaven Greenway for cyclists and snooty businesses running out of shipping containers have gone off the, er, rails.
Trendy property-less firm, Meanwhile Creative, got planning permission back in March from the council for the temporary greenway on land long earmarked for the Callington Link, on the route of the proposed A4 Bath Road relief road, by promising their greenway was “ready-to-go”.
Or perhaps not. Over six months down the line and Meanwhile Creative are now wheeling out that all-purpose excuse “the cost of living crisis” and claiming it’s unlikely to go ahead. Informed opinion, however, says this is because neither the applicants nor the council owned the land and the people who did wanted £250k for it.
None of this is surprising to some Brislington locals who have dubbed the efforts of Lib Dem Councillors Andrew “Reg” Varney and Jos “Peculiar” Clarke and Labour councillor Tim “The Ripper” Rippington along with Bike Bristol and the Meanwhiles as “an embarrassing failure”.
Lookout for that lovely link road coming to quiet green space in Brislington soon!
More bad news for the council’s City Leap energy project. Accounts lodged at Companies House for 2021-22 show that Bristol Heat Networks Ltd registered a loss of £937,471. A loss that will have to be paid by council tax payers.
The council wanted to sell the business to Swedish state energy company, Vattenfall, by December 2022 as part of City Leap. A deadline that’s been missed. So who pays the losses since March? Will the sale price even cover these losses?
Meanwhile, Goram Homes,the council’s housebuilding firm reported a loss of £850,730. Creating aloss of £2.4m since the council started the company
Another petulant outburst from our man-child Reverend mayor in the papers. He’s now got his knickers in a twist because opposition councillors aren’t attending his cabinet to watch him rubberstamp decisions he made earlier behind closed doors.
Seems councillors aren’t much interested in asking him questions at these meetings so that Rees can direct one of his bitchy little monologues at them that they’re not allowed to respond to.
It’s a shame the Reverend doesn’t take such a keen interest in Labour attendance at meetings. In three weeks in late September/early October there were four scrutiny meetings and one audit meeting and 18 places available to Labour.
They only filled five of them and, of those five, only two of them participated and spoke!
GOGG(NOT)IN
The current Labour record holder for not bothering to show up is the lazy bastards’ lazy bastard, Hartcliffe councillor Paul Goggin. He’s attended 33% of the meetings he’s been expected at. These are meetings like planning and licensing where he might have some input rather than a cabinet meeting where there’s no role for ordinary councillors.
But it’s not all bad news for Goggin. As it seems that this lucky council tenant has been gifted a brand new fence. Although no one quite knows how that works as it’s not council policy to provide tenants with new fencing.
Is it some sort of special award for being fucking lazy?
ANYONE FOUND A LOST LIB DEM
Has anyone seen the Lib Dem councillor for Hotwells and Harbourside, Alex “The Disappeared” Hartley? Residents say he doesn’t bother responding to emails and he hasn’t been near a council meeting for months? Has he died?
The councillor has quite an inbox too as the Reverend’s proposed plan to turn Cumberland Basin into a corporate high-rise hell is high on the agenda as are various other smaller developments that may involve height.
If anyone finds him, please return him to Hotwells and Harbourside pronto.
LABOUR LAWRENCE HELL
Plasticine Man: career building in Liverpool
No article on councillor attendance would be complete without a mention of that legendary serial absentee, Labour’s Lawrence Hill councillor Hibaq “To Basics” Jama. Hardly ever at the Counts Louse, she’s reputed to spend a lot of time out of the country.
Ms Jama managed an attendance at council meetings of just 30 per cent for the first six months of this year and was nowhere to be seen afer the recent fire in her ward at council owned Twinnell House.
A fire that left one dead and eight hospitalised. Instead of visiting, Jama announced to residents that they could contact her by email if they needed to.
Was Jama out of the country? The Reverend definitely was. Hanging around at various obscure Bloomberg and Rockefeller meetings in the Big Apple, he finally managed to fit in a difficult visit to Twinnell residents five days after the fire.
Labour Cabinet housing boss, Tom “Plasticine Man” Renhard, meanwhile, was at the Labour conference on the morning after the fire from where he did manage to tweet his sympathies to the victims. He then happily spent the rest of the day tweeting and retweeting about various dull career-building conference events he attended.
Who’s this “rude old git” getting thrown off the Cross Harbour Ferry? Step forward Mayor No More George Ferguson! It seems the daft sod in the stupid trousers recently shouted at the driver of the ferry, “get on the boat, you’re holding people up” as the driver waited a while for some more passengers.
“I’m not holding anyone up,” came the retort from the worker for the Harbour’s well-run ferry company, “you’re holding everyone up now because I’m not driving this boat ’til you get off it.”
Cue foot-stamping and “do-you-know-who-I-amming” from the red-trousered nobody before the other five people on the boat finally told George he was ‘a rude old git’ and could he get off the boat! The failed mayor (and ferry boat operator) finally did get off, muttering darkly that he would get the Harbour Master to shut them down.
Unlikely, as the Harbour Master is a thick lazy cunt and shutting a ferry down would involve some brains and effort.
‘Enough is Enough’, the left wing campaign trying to get gullible socialists, tankies and bitter Corbynites to vote for Starmer’s right wing authoritarian Labour Party next year, brought their bandwagon to Bristol on October 1.
Inexplicably, this self-styled ‘working class campaign’ held their rally at the overtly middle class St George Hall in leafiest west Bristol. “A venue,” we’re told, “a lot of the audience didn’t seem unfamiliar with.”
Local speakers included Acorn Union Ltd boss Nick Ballard and posho Green Party UK leader Carla Denyer. (Because it’s not a proper socialist meeting without a posh twit on the platform talking bollocks is it?) Both speakers talked a lot about “action and not just words” as the working classes face household economic meltdown this winter.
But the only action on offer seemed to be an opportunity to join the speakers’ respective organisations and listen to more “action and not just words” speeches on repeat from self-selected working class leaders with little idea what to do.
Our man on the spot says there were no concrete proposals from this meeting and “no rank and file worker spoke and no discussion was allowed. It felt very top down.”
About as effective as a Brahms recital then. The normal offering at St Georges.
