In June, Green Councillor David “The Builder” Wilcox, from the Transport and Connectivity Policy Committee, trumpeted that the M32 Junction 3 pedestrian underpass had been “unblocked” and would no longer flood. It’s the end of “breeze [sic] blocks or pallets to cross the ponds,” he boasted.
Emma “Air” Edwards, Leader of the Green Party Group and another member of the Transport and Connectivity Policy Committee, waded in. “No more Krypton Factor challenged [sic] to get through the underpass when it floods,” she gushed on Twitter. While fresh new Green Councillor for St George, Cara “La Caravan” Lavan predicted that flooding would “be no more”.
Wilcox went on to explain that “after some investigation” it was unnecessary to fix an underground pipe and suggested people contact other politicians to find out why they had not got the problem fixed sooner.
Alas, by September, the underpass was flooded again. On Fix My Street, the council says, “this issue is currently under investigation. We’ll provide updates on the outcome as soon as we can.”
Bristol City Council’s Children’s Services has a deficit of £23m this year, excluding the car crash SEND deficit. Efforts at ‘transformation’ of the service have predictably failed to make the savings touted by bosses and consultants.
According to a recent report to councillors about Home to School Travel, “The Children’s Transformation programme is currently forecasting a delivery of £4m of the £6.2m [savings] target in 24/25.”
Undershooting target by 35 per cent, thanks, are due to corporate consultants PwC who, in 2022, council bosses paid £444k for a secret unpublished report into, er, savings in Home to School Travel.
Bristol 24/7’s new deputy editor from London is shaping up to be quite the entertainer. Seun “Scoop” Matiluko kicked off her career in Bristol with an exciting three hour book promo interview with the Reverend Rees.
Much of Matiluko’s scribblings were a lengthy repetition of the Reverend’s neo-Dickensian back story, which we’ve all heard before. However, she also briefly unexplains the Reverend’s eight-year run-in with “Twitter trolls” and local reporters. “This is what we end up going back-and-forth about for the majority of our chat,” she says.
Neutrally calling local Twitter users “keyboard warriors”, Seun says, “some describe [Rees] as a career politician or self-promoter,” without bothering with any of the detail unearthed on Twitter about Rees’s administration over the last eight years.
On local reporters, Seun helpfully explains, “some of the local reporting on Marvin’s tenure could very much be described as racist.”
Unfortunately she doesn’t bother to very much identify what reporting and we are very much left with an impression that any journalist in the city, including Seun’s subordinates at 24/7, could very much be racist.
Freshly minted Green MP Carla “Head Girl” Denyer has had to publish her financial interests for the House of Commons without any of the unlawful fucking about allowed at Bristol City Council.
One £15k donation to her came from ‘We Deserve Better’. A shadowy Tankie organisation whose best known supporter is the Guardian’s “Oxbridge” Owen Jones.
We Deserve Better is currently run by a “committee” of three: Hilary Schan, former Co-Chair of Momentum and independent councillor in Worthing; Dr Carl Walker who left the Labour in May to serve as an independent councillor in Worthing and former Manchester Labour councillor Amna Abdullatif, who resigned from Labour in October 2023.
Until recently, the committee also included Hamza Ali Shah, “British Palestinian journalist, writer and political researcher”. A few years back, Hamza agreed with George Galloway that “abortion is murder” and posted a number of racist comments, including “Sikhs? Clean hearted?” along with laughing emojis.
More problematic for openly gay Oxbridge Owen and bi-sexual Denyer is that he also posted messages like “Looool, imagine getting banged by a fag.”
Cherry-picked prisoners (checked for ‘good behaviour’ and most already with the skills) will be ‘employed’ to build pre-fab ‘eco’ homes ‘for the vulnerable’, built from… erm, recycled milk cartons!
This public/private project, promoted by an ad-hoc mishmash of council, probation/reoffending bodies, eco-charities, churches and quangos, is an ‘experiment’ to employ prisoners in ‘useful activities’ to ‘learn skills’ for employment after release.
Nauseating middle class PR guff about an amazing ‘win win’ for prisoners, ‘the community’, social housing, churches, building companies and landowners accompanies the plan. Bristol’s ‘Green’ council is among the talking heads. Taking over where the Reverend left off.
A ‘minimum wage’ for prisoners is mentioned but not whether it’s the statutory minimum wage. Theoretically it might be a ‘minimum wage’ of £5 an hour!
A dystopian vision of this public/private partnership ‘win/win future’ would see prisons becoming 21st Century workhouses. An aristocracy of labour drawn from compliant prisoners with skills would be conditioned to accept a ‘minimum wage’ as the norm. The rest of the undeserving poor could be employed to do shit for free.
Free labour for the ticky tacky milk carton houses of the future
“Day after day council staff witness the blatant disregard, lawbreaking and contempt with which citizens like myself are treated. It’s hardly surprising that less than half of staff trust senior leaders to act with integrity, and that just over half feel confident using whistleblowing policies without fear of retaliation.”
A parent of a disabled child spied on by council bosses has published, on Twitter/X, a public statement that council Monitoring Officer, ‘L’il’ Tim O’Gara, banned from the council’s last Human Resources Committee meeting.
The statement reveals that the parent has started legal action against the council for their weird and unlawful surveillance of her and her family.
This legal action was the final resort after the council, under the Reverend Rees and, now, the Greens reneged on a promise to set up an independent investigation into their surveillance of residents.
The statement also explains that the council has failed to provide a response to this parent’s formal legal letter in seven months.
The officer accountable for that response is Monitoring Officer ‘L’il’ Tim O’Gara. Never one to let a blatant conflict of interest get in the way, he has enthusiastically banned a statement, highlighting his self-serving negligence, from being heard by a committee of councillors responsible for employing him.
To add insult to injury, the parent further reveals that the Reverend’s appalling cabinet sidekick, Asher “The Slasher” Craig, told a meeting of local community groups that the parent was “hysterical”.
How long before the council denounces her for witchcraft and sets up witch trials with O’Gara as judge?
As a statement bannned by the council’s chief legal officer to cover his own bent arse is unlikely to appear in any other local press, here’s the full statement:
With the vote by councillors to trash Bristol’s only remaining working farm and a Site of Nature Conservation Interest, Yew Tree Farm, due on Friday, Green Party councillors are gearing up to break one of the few manifesto commitments they managed to make.
The manifesto the Greens ran on in May promised they would, “Protect Sites of Nature Conservation Interest (SNCI) that Bristol City Council controls by preventing development on them.”
The policy seemed to be confirmed as recently as August 22. Green council leader, “Tory” Tony Dyer, huffed and puffed at Bristol 24/7 that he had been ‘misrepresented’ in an interview with BBC Points West the day before when he had appeared to support plans to expand the South Bristol Crematorium onto Yew Tree Farm SNCI.
Dyer whined at 24/7, “Yesterday in an interview with BBC Points West, I reaffirmed the Green Party’s opposition to development on SNCIs in response to a question on Yew Tree Farm. This was edited out of the broadcast interview.”
Now in October, developing the farm seems to have been edited back in. Four Greens on the Public Health and Communities Policy Committee are being asked to consider a council officer report proposing to expand South Bristol Crematorium on to Yew Tree Farm, a site ‘Bristol City Council controls’.
And these councillors – Abdul “Dull” Malik and Fi “Fie Foe” Hance, a couple of dodgy old Lib Dems mainly loyal to their own ambition, and rookie councillors Cara “Caravan” Lavan and Ed “Fuk” Fraser – appear to be getting cold feet about saving this council controlled SNCI.
All four councillors have point blank refused to visit the farm to meet the farmer Catherine Withers and learn about the importance of the site and three of them – Abd-dull, Fi and Ed – have refused to meet with independent ecology experts. Labour, Lib Dem and Tory councillors have all visited the farm to learn more before voting on this crude act of environmental destruction.
Ab-Dull has even gone one step further, ignoring both his boss, Tory Tony and the manifesto he ran on just a few months ago, publishing a rambling piece in Bristol 24/7 about Muslim burials and claiming that ‘we must balance the need for burial space with protecting the environment’.
The article was accompanied by one of the weirdest publicity shots ever (see above). An uneasy pastoral like something out of the 17th Century, the gloomy folk horror tableau features Ab-Dull stood solemnly in front of a coffin flanked by male counterparts. Any women present are stood ten metres back and off to the side of Ab-Dull and the boys.
Is this weird shit the progressive new look for Tory Tony’s not very greens?
“Where funding is granted and where it is not, is not directly comparable”?
Please find attached statement from Youth Moves regarding the Youth Zone: All The Wrong Moves Article which I have been asked to forward to you. [signed by the admin manager]
