This morning protestors from Avonmouth fronted out George Ferguson as he attended the opening of four new wind turbines in the area.
George’s ‘eco car’ was stopped at the gates to the site by pickets demanding action by the so-called ‘green’ Mayor over continuing pollution and fly infestations from companies operating in the Port area. As one resident stated on this site:
Our little village is inundated with the stench that emanates from the sewage works. We have more ‘Waste Recycling Plants’ dotted around Avonmouth than is healthy. We have food waste composting plants, where the contents of all of Bristol’s little brown bins end up (together with all the fly larvae), and rubbish compacting plants that serve most if not all of Bristol. And now we have to suffer ‘biomass’ that is going to make the fly invasion even worse.
I blame Mr Ferguson and the whole of the Bristol Council. It is they that give planning permission to allow companies to operate and pollute people who live in the locality. Over the years they have tried to kill the area with chemical waste. Now we have to live like people in third world countries, with the stench of raw sewage. Blankets of dust covering the area. Explosions rattling the windows and then inundated with plagues of flies. We all pay Council Tax in and around Avonmouth, the same as the rest of the Bristol Area. WHAT DO WE GET BACK for that money?
Ferguson’s response today was to offer nothing new, defend his clueless ‘green assistant’ Gus Hoyt and to state to the protestors, “You being on the streets will not affect me, you can stay on the streets.”
The Avonmouth residents gratefully accepted his invitation and were then told by the Mayor that they “had a political agenda'”
“If protecting your health and that of your children is having a political agenda,” said one, “then we are political and bring it on.”
Ferguson then left in his ‘eco-mobile’ to return to the safer and less-polluted streets of gentrified Southville. How ironic for Ferguson and the middle-class ‘greens’ who attended the TRIODOS funded ‘Wind Turbine Open Day’ to be faced by protestors who are fighting for real green issues, that is their immediate health and well-being, which is being damaged by the expanding ‘green capitalism’ of mass recycling and bio-mass plants in Avonmouth, the dumping ground of Bristol.
As for the ‘green’ Mayor…my arse.