Monthly Archives: September 2013

FRESH HORSE FLESH SCANDAL AT ‘POST’ AWARDS!

For TROUBLED CHARITY HorseWorld (see The BRISTOLIAN #4.3) the race to the bottom is not yet over if whispers emanating from within the equine charity’s Whitchurch Führerbunker are anything to go by…

Shortlisted for an almost-coveted Bristol Post Business Award, the Horseworld management team forgot about their financial troubles and cut loose at the Awards dinner earlier this Summer. Hey, who wouldn’t jump at the CHANCE TO HOBNOB with red-blooded red trouser fetishist Mayor Fergo and other high-falutin’, self-regarding members of the Bristol business community?

"I heard an envelope was being opened..." Mayor Fergo pops up at the Post Business Awards

“I heard an envelope was being opened…” Mayor Fergo pops up at the Post Business Awards

So off trotted HorseWorld managing director Mark ‘Not That One’ Owen – plus the whole senior management team and even the chair of trustees – to bask in the recognition of their particular brand of business genius.

Like others attending they made copious use of the microblogging service Twitter to report on events – and as the vino flowed, the messages got raunchier. At a SURPRISINGLY EARLY 9:45pm came a particularly eye-catching tweet from the official HorseWorld Trust account: “Nikki has promised to streak if we get 10 RTs [retweets] or a donation on table 18”…

The ‘Nikki’ in question is none other than Nikki Bridges, the charity’s high-earning Finance Director – the woman in charge of accounts in an organisation HAEMORRHAGING MONEY ever since Owen took up the reins. Possibly not the most becoming behaviour for a charity bean-counter.

Her boss Owen didn’t even have the common sense to delete the OFFENDING TWEET afterwards. Much, it appears, to the annoyance of several trustees and donors who now suspect their money is being used less to support needy steeds and all too often in funding boozy gala dinner nosh-ups for HorseWorld’s MD and his underperforming pals.

It is also notable that while the Finance Director seems WILLING TO STRIP for cash, the day job has been suffering. The Charity Commission reveals that three-quarters of the way through 2013, HorseWorld has yet to submit its annual accounts for the previous year. In 2012 they filed by May – and reported a staggering £647,000 loss. Could the current reporting delay be in any way connected to an even deeper FINANCIAL BLACK HOLE?

Oh, and by the way, HorseWorld won in its award category – for (yes, you’ve guessed it) ‘Communicator of the Year’.

Booze-fuelled HorseWorld management team - including MD Mark Owen (centre) & FD Nikki Bridges (back right) celebrate with jobbing ex-Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton (right) at Post Business Awards 2013

Booze-fuelled HorseWorld management team – including MD Mark Owen (centre) & FD Nikki Bridges (back right) – celebrate with jobbing ex-Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton (right) at Post Business Awards 2013

LADY GAGA PORTRAIT JOY

lady Gaga portrait

The BRISTOLIAN can EXCLUSIVELY unveil Bristol City Council’s new official portrait of City Director Nicola “Lady Gaga” Yates, created by local artist and Twitter enthusiast @guriben.

The portrait of the city’s wealthy first lady of local government will accompany all official Bristol City Council announcements and publications by Lady Gaga from Monday and it will also appear on a range of Conservative general election material from next year.

MAYOR FERGO told The BRISTOLIAN, “The portrait is magnificent. It perfectly encapsulates Nicola, her character, intellect and not insubstantial beauty. Well done to Guriben and I look forward to an interpretation of me.”

“Nicola Yates will be responsible for the delivery of the Mayor and council's vision”

“Nicola Yates will be responsible for the delivery of the Mayor and council’s vision,” says £160k Nicola Yates with tongue firmly in cheek

Lady Gaga has been described as “satisfied” with her official portrait and is said to be keen to see the painting displayed in the City Museum and Art Gallery where she may fit in nicely alongside some of  Bristol’s  other famous Conservative political figures like the slave trader EDWARD COLSTON and that old reactionary EDMUND BURKE.

The BRISTOLIAN will be commissioning further portraits from Guriben soon for some of our favourite local government officers such as country boy solicitor LIAM ‘MALFOY’ NEVIN, the less than magical new chief legal officer; ANGIE ‘PAIDWELL’ RIDGWELL, the generously remunerated chief bean counter and a farewell portrait of PR man for himself, PETER ‘CLAUDIA-JEAN’ HOLT.

Have you painted a portrait of your favourite local government officer or councillor? Why not send it in?

The best artistic rendering of GARY HOPKINS will win a prize…

HOLT BOLTS! NO-BALLS GOEBBELS JOINS SHITTY HALL RATS-FROM-SINKING SHIP EXODUS

Outgoing Communication Director Peter Holt and ‘friend’ (identity obscured)

Outgoing Communication Director Peter Holt and ‘friend’ (identity obscured)

And so The BRISTOLIAN, with a tear in its eye, draws your attention to the impending departure of Bristol City Council’s Communication & Marketing Director PETER ‘CLAUDIA JEAN’ HOLT – as EXCLUSIVELY revealed in The BRISTOLIAN!

Yes, the SELF-PROCLAIMED PR GURU – who showed off his muscular messaging abilities by cringing in the corner at an Easton Community Centre neighbourhood meeting back in April as his boss Mayor George Ferguson announced that rioting was okay as long as you did it “in the right way” – is off to “a new and exciting role in London”.

Notorious ALLEGED DOLPHIN-FUCKER Holt – snapped up as a hip-sounding young gun by Bristol City Council back in 2009 – will be trading in his BS8 Clifton Hill pad (average price: £350,000) for an NW8 Clifton Hill mansion (currently averaging £1m for flats up to £4m for houses). It’s almost enough to make you wonder how he could have managed to save up so much whilst working for BCC – has he been rifling around in the back of millionaire Mayor Fergo’s sofa for loose fifties?

Holt: Thinks he's sophisticated spin doctor CJ...

Thinks he’s sophisticated like spin doctor CJ…

Anyway, who could begrudge Claudia Jean – who saw himself as the firm-but-fair White House press secretary CJ from The West Wing, when he was more PJ, the Byker Grove kid blinded in a freak paintball accident – the odd ‘PERK OF THE JOB’? Toiling away on thankless tasks like dealing with constant grunty pocket calls from Gary Hopkins every time he sits on his council-issue smartphone whilst settling down on the office chaise longue to enjoy his ‘special interest’ DVDs; or having to explain to a sobbing Sir Hoyty-Toyty that no, the reason your email doesn’t work isn’t because “the pixies who carry the messages through the internet tubes have died” but because you haven’t turned your PC monitor on.

...But is actually more like squeaky blind Geordie PJ

…But is actually more like squeaky blind Geordie PJ

But don’t panic! You fine people of Bristol have not been forgotten! His Royal Holtness is having a taxpayer-funded leaving do at Council House, and you’re all invited!

He’s asked for RSVPs, but he surely won’t mind those who paid his NOT-INCONSIDERABLE WAGES turning up at Committee Room 15 of the Council House on College Green, from 4:30-6pm. Be sure not to be late – there will be a grand “ambient multi-media presentation” at four five o’ clock, “showing you…unexpected sides of Peter you will never have seen before.” If you can’t make it down to Shitty Hall, you can join the fun on Twitter. He even has his own hashtag: #byebyebristol.

Who could resist?

BLACKLIST BAN!

Council finally calls time on sickening anti-safety bosses – but will Mayor Fergo take notice?

Bristol Hazards Group - fighting the blacklisting bastardsAfter a long fight led by determined construction workers, Bristol City Council in early September voted to END THE GRAVY TRAIN of juicy local authority contracts for firms that profit out of ‘blacklists’.

With blacklisting, construction giants like McAlpine secretly trade ILLEGAL FILES on ‘troublesome workers’ – the ones that kick up a fuss over inadequate safety – and keep them out of a job.

Whilst the new council policy won’t affect private sector projects – such as the building of Cabot Circus, where building boss CULLUM MCALPINE admits his company blacklisted brickies and sparks from the site due to whistleblowing on safety issues – it could help workers running council services.

As we revealed in The BRISTOLIAN #4.4 back in June, KIER GROUP – now responsible for Bristol’s household waste collections after it bought up May Gurney – has a proven record as a key contributor to the blacklisting database.

Thanks to the LONG-RUNNING PICKET of May Gurney’s depots by blacklisted workers, union activists and local campaign Bristol Hazards Group that put the blacklist issue onto the table, Kier may yet lose that lucrative council rubbish collection contract…

Focus now shifts to McAlpine’s fellow Merchant Venturer, millionaire mayor George Ferguson and his own CAVALIER APPROACH TO HEALTH AND SAFETY.

It was Mayor Fergo’s outspoken disregard for safety that helped cost cyclist Sean Phillips his life in March (see The BRISTOLIAN #4.3), and in 2009 his deathtrap ‘Millennium Mast’ in the Centre had to be dismantled over fears pieces could fall off and cause fatalities.

And did we mention his fast-becoming-legendary CONTEMPT for ordinary bar workers at his image-over-substance hipster venues like The Tobacco Factory, #1 Harbourside and Canteen?

So whether Gorgeous George actually honours the blacklist ban, or throws his weight behind his corner-cutting rich building boss pals, is still not entirely clear…

Stop Press: TREBLES ALL ROUND AS RUNAWAY COUNCIL MANAGERS TROUSER A WEDGE!

Rumours of a Shitty Hall meltdown emerge as news reaches your caring, sharing BRISTOLIAN that no less than THREE senior Bristol City Council senior managers sensationally QUIT last week.

All – apparently – are unable to work any longer in Mayor Fergo’s shambolic ‘rule-by-Twitter’ and ‘manage-by-foolish-announcement-on-BBC-Radio-Bristol’ regime. Sources in the council have also revealed to us that these exits are being accompanied by UNUSUALLY LARGE CASH PAYMENTS from our cash-strapped council to some of the quitters.

The quitters so far identified to The BRISTOLIAN include senior finance boss, Peter ‘Robbin-us’ Robinson; communications boss, Peter ‘Claudia-Jean’ Holt and belly-flopping major projects manager Alun ‘It’s a Fuck Up’ Owen, the man in charge of the rubbish BRT project and who tried, a few years ago, to swap – with the city’s wealthiest man – a piece of our land at Ashton Gate worth millions for a few hundred cut-price health club memberships. A deal he laughably described as “good value”.

In a further extraordinary twist, a source has confirmed to The BRISTOLIAN that Peter Robbin-us, who fled for the shires on Friday, was handed £50,0000 of our money as he went out of the door. This is unusual as Robbin-us, who voluntarily resigned to take up a post in Hereford – deep in the Tory shires where, traditionally, bent accountants have oiled the wheels of commerce and power – would not usually be entitled to a redundancy payment. How many times have you voluntarily put in notice to take up another job and then been rewarded with a massive redundancy payment?

And even if this was a redundancy payment, the amount involved has raised eyebrows. Just three years ago, the council’s former Chief Exec, the BRADFORD SUN QUEEN, Jan Ormondroyd introduced strict limits on redundancy payments to senior managers ensuring all payments were capped to reflect a pay maximum of £35,0000 a year, less than half Robbin-us’s generous wage. So even in the unlikely event Robbin-us was entitled to the maximum amount of redundancy over the maximum time period, he’s still received an amount of our money some 50% over his entitlement!

Our source confirms that this is because Robbin-us did not receive redundancy at all. Instead he was paid handsomely for signing a COMPROMISE AGREEMENT with a convenient GAGGING CLAUSE agreed by Mayor Fergo’s new City Director Nicola ‘LADY GAGA’ Yates, who has a bit of form for shutting her staff up. Such agreements should be used to settle genuine legal disputes not cover-up dodgy public money payments to senior bosses. However, any details of this agreement are conveniently now secret thanks to this little clause in the deal:

Secrecy

What a joke! Bristol City Council has effectively GAGGED ITSELF from discussing with the public, its councillors or journalists its own dodgy pay outs to its former managers. Where’s the accountability? This news comes just a few months after a national scandal over the city’s excessive use of compromise deals to gag staff, which had senior managers assuring councillors that these deals  “are only ever used in exceptional circumstances”.

Yeah. An exceptional circumstance like when they want to give one of their mates a generous, top secret pay-off.

Staff at the council, meanwhile, are said to be livid at the deal. Robin-us’s reputation at Shitty Hall is appalling. In the last year he’s purchased a new finance system from Agilisys, “one of the UK’s most innovative IT and business services providers”, as part of a £40m outsourcing deal, which has been described to the BRISTOLIAN reliably as, “a load of shit that doesn’t work … that must have been bought by a cretin who’s never operated a computer before”.

He’s also DELIBERATELY DRAGGED HIS FEET over locating £165k missing from the council’s Markets Service (BRISTOLIAN passim). Insiders tell us, “he’s more interested in COVERING HIS MIDDLE MANAGEMENT CRONIES’ ARSES than the sound management of public money.”

While so degraded was Robin-us’s financial management culture that his own internal auditors, responsible for investigating irregularity, fraud and corruption, are now openly admitting that they can no longer protect whistleblowers from what’s been described to us as A SLEAZY CULTURE OF MANAGEMENT BULLYING AND COVER-UP”.

So, while kids go hungry, families queue at food banks and our streets remain uncleaned you can rest assured that our local authority’s former senior managers are all doing just fine, thanks.

SEE The BRISTOLIAN #4.7 (out in October) FOR EVEN MORE:

  • Robin-us’s parting shot the finance boss’s exit plan to slash our services and create a Barnet-style ‘easyCouncil’
  • The Sun Queen’s pay-offhow Jan Ormondroyd avoided her own redundancy rules to trouser her own secret wedge

BRISTOLIAN 6 HITS THE STREETS!

Front page
Featured in this edition:

» BLACKLIST BAN!
Council finally calls time on sickening anti-safety bosses

» HORSEWORLD – ROUND 2!
Horse flesh scandal!

» BEDROOM TAX BALL-UP!
Hoyty-Toyty and Co. in brewery/piss-up non-shocker

» COMMUNITY CENTRE COUP!
Plans are afoot in Easton …

» COUNCIL BOSSES SECRETLY PLOT TO BACK TORIES!
Sicko Shitty Hall Tory election plot

» ZERO CLUE ON ZERO HOURS!
May Gurney taking the piss out of Shitty Hall bosses (again)

» THE BIG B.I.D. CON!
Tory rat’s personal fiefdom paid for by you!

See the Distribution page for your local stockist – and if there isn’t one near you, let us know!

UPDATE: Digital PDF of The BRISTOLIAN #4.6 now available to download!

RED AND BLACK SCARE!

Avon and Somerset Police force have been FAILING SPECTACULARLY to catch a group or groups of anarchists responsible for a string of arson attacks in and around Bristol for the last few years.

In the latest twist they’ve decided because they can’t catch the people responsible they’re going to pick on people not responsible and threaten anyone associated with anarchism, protest or recent riots. This RED-AND-BLACK SCARE has begun before police have even finished their investigation!

Well, our very own beloved riot-supporting Mayor Fergo was at the Bristol Anarchist Book Fair in April getting in to trouble. Will he be raided any night soon? Arrested for being posh in possession of red trousers?

The Post is of course backing the MAD WITCH HUNT. The ‘Tesco riot’, if you believe the police/Post line, is that the whole thing was organised by anarchists with a one-in one-out door policy. So the riot wasn’t anything to do with the cops invading a busy area full of drunken punters on a bank holiday during a heatwave? Why not evict the squat at 6 on Monday morning? Then you wouldn’t have needed the small army they had there that night either.

http://www.bristolanarchistbookfair.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Tesco-closed.jpg

The Post is now jumping at the chance to see some KIDS CHUCKED IN PRISON for 5 years in the wake of the scare as that’s all that what will happen. They wont get the arsonists. They’ll get any ‘anarchists’ to make us all feel safe.

The whole scare sounds like desperation. They’ve not had any evidence to nick the small arsonist cell so they’re opening up their investigation to anyone they can pin anything on in the last few years who may have stood near the word ANARCHIST.

‘Mad’ Mike Norton, editor of the Post, says we should support the police in their crackdown on ‘domestic extremists’. The BRISTOLIAN says support your local anarchists and troublemakers…

Otherwise it could be you next!