Monthly Archives: November 2017

RHAPSODY IN GREY: THE INCREDIBLE IMPLODING INQUIRY

Grey

An entirely predictable establishment carve up at Engineers’ House in Clifton yesterday as posh men in grey suits reached a DEAL on the first day of the public inquiry into Day Group’s efforts to get an environmental licence for their waste processing plant at Avonmouth. A plant that should never have been built.

The Environment Agency (EA) had been refusing the plant, which has NO planning permission and needs to be pulled down, a licence to operate citing concerns over dust pollution. However, when everyone sat down at 10.00am to start the inquiry, the EA announced they had agreed to grant a licence the previous evening following SECRET NEGOTIATIONS between Day Group and the EA. This effectively rendered the inquiry – into whether this licence should be granted – totally pointless.

The EA cave-in was wholly predictable to anyone who had had sight of Day Group’s defence presented by man in grey, David “Snooty” Elevin QC, the most obnoxious man in the room – or any room for that matter. This defence pointed out that the EA’s original REFUSAL to grant a licence was largely based on draft guidelines, yet to be agreed. While, according to any existing guidelines, it should have been granted. The EA has, again, FAILED Avonmouth residents after it had little choice but to concede in advance or be publicly humiliated for rank incompetence.

More grey

Planning Inspector, Nick “Grey” Palmer, decided to plough on regardless, however, and allow the two other respondents at the inquiry, Bristol City Council and Avonmouth residents, represented by local activist Ian “Fly” Robinson, to present their case as to why a licence should be REFUSED.

Bristol City Council’s grey men, also the Planning Authority who should be serving Day Group with a Planning Enforcement Notice to demolish the plant, claim to have concerns about potential noise pollution from the plant. While residents are generally BEMUSED by a licencing process that allows a polluting waste processing plant to operate from an enormous industrial plant that has no planning permission and would be unlikely to get it.

Planning Inspector, Palmer, however, has made it clear all along that he will NOT be looking at any planning aspects of the case on the basis he could only consider EA licencing matters. This approach clearly suits Bristol City Council too. The last thing they want is a FORENSIC public inquiry into how their planning officers and senior bosses allowed Day Group to build this plant in the first place.

Even more grey

Residents obviously do want a proper inquiry into the council’s planning SHAMBLES not least, as Robinson pointed out, because there’s no public confidence whatsoever in Bristol City Council, the Environment Agency or the Planning Inspectorate as they effectively dump another polluting waste processing plant on residents’ doorsteps. This one outside of the law.

Ian requested that Palmer DIRECTLY ADDRESS the issue of why he was refusing to look at the planning issue in his written conclusion to the inquiry. It remains to be seen whether Palmer will provide residents with this courtesy as lawyers for the residents begin to circle this crooked shambles with increasing interest.

Avonmouth residents will be giving statements and speaking truth to power at the inquiry on Thursday morning from 9.30am at Engineers House, Clifton BS8 3NB. Please attend and support – Ian will try and sort you out with tea and biscuits!

HENGROVE HOUSING HORROR

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Reverend Rees’s housing tsar, Paul “Wolfie” Smith’s promises to “build communities not just houses” on Hengrove Park have collapsed on first contact with the public.

The recent first round of public consultation in Hengrove found Wolfie’s Major Projects Team openly admit they will be providing NO FACILITIES as part of the development because “THEY ARE ALREADY HERE“. So don’t move there expecting anything other than McDonalds, KFC and Premier Inn to service your needs.

The only public investment planners are agreeing to will be a GP surgery – somewhere – which is already urgently required in the Whitchurch/Hengrove area due to CHRONIC over-subscription of the existing GP service – and more primary school places.

However, there will be NO NEW SCHOOLS. Instead, existing primary schools in the working class area – highly regarded for their leafy and spacious grounds – will be extended and expanded. Conveniently REMOVING playing fields and open space from the schools and leaving more prime development land for corporate developers to transform into high density rabbit hutches (surely exciting sustainable housing in the ‘Bristol Vernacular’ style? Ed.).

The highlight of this major development shambles, mainly designed to place large sums of cash into corporate developers coffers, however, is the plan to SHUT the recently opened Family Cycling Centre on the old Whitchurch Athletics Track and build a main access road over it!

Not only does this plan DEMOLISH one of the few public facilities still allowed in the area, it also demonstrates Bristol City Council’s real level of commitment to so-called “sustainable transport” and “active travel” once the hard cash for corporates is on the table.

The council’s current Quality of Life Survey lists the number of commuters cycling to work in the area as ZERO PER CENT while 60 per cent use their car. And car use will only increase once Wolfie throws up 2,000 extra homes with car parking spaces. Why would anyone want to promote cycling here?

Residents in and around Bamfield in Whitchurch are especially up in arms since their residential road is set to become the MAIN VEHICLE ACCESS to all this new housing. Thousands of vehicles will be encouraged to drive down Bamfield every day and then drive directly over the ex-running track to access Wolfie’s new “community”. Locals predict traffic chaos and say the level of congestion and pollution likely to be generated by this plan is “HUGE“.

Meanwhile, the obvious road access to the development, directly off Hengrove Way – a MAIN TRUNK ROAD specifically designed for heavy traffic – will be buses only and blocked to private cars!

Who thinks this shit up?

COUNCIL BASKETCASE BUSINESS NEWS

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Impressive news from Bristol Energy, Bristol City Council’s basketcase electricity reselling company that LOST £3.3million last year. Well, they’ve done whole lot better this year and will soon be posting A LOSS of £7.7million! Top work and trebles all round for the stupendously well-paid bureaucratic half-wits who thought this crap up.

There is room for optimism, however. Because Bristol Energy boss, Peter “High Pay” Haigh has taken to Twitter to assure concerned Bristolians that Bristol Energy MIGHT make a profit in about four years! Quite how much we’ll lose before High Pay manages to get a small profit dribbling in to his soppy business is anybody’s guess. Although judging by current trends, High Pay’s business is easily on course to lose us around £50million by 2021.

How the Reverend Rees is funding this loss-making nonsense is something of a mystery. Although if he’s borrowing the money to keep his MUNICIPAL VANITY PROJECT afloat, then recouping the investment and covering the losses he’s run up so far will cost us around £0.4million a year in debt finance and another £1million a year to pay off the capital over ten years. That’s lots of librarians, school crossing patrols or public toilets that the cash-strapped Reverend is closing to keep Bristol Energy’s solvent.

Should, as we predict, this debt rise to in excess of £50million then it will cost us over £4million a year to service the debt and pay off the capital over 25 years. The simple fact is that if the Reverend stopped DITHERING about like the wishy-washy voluntary sector plonker he is and took the decision to DITCH this business and also cancel the Arena that will never get built, he could cancel many cuts to our services.

For fucks sake Rees, grow some balls and start taking some decisions for the benefit of the people in this city you useless twat.

WOOLLEY WANKER AND THE FAKE NEWS FACTORY

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The Reverend meets Woolley Wanker earlier this year. But no one knows who leaked that private Facebook post to Wanker.

As the Reverend heads towards the end of the second year of his car crash term in office, he’s increasingly resorting to calling in favours from friends to silence the mounting number of his critics, not least within his own party, by making WILD ACCUSATIONS of racism.

On 17 November community radio station, BCFM’s Politics Show ran an embarrassing item regarding the Reverend’s father and his antics in St Paul’s in the 1980s. The Politics Show had originally attempted to run the item on 10 November but BCFM bosses PULLED it after the Reverend got wind of it and directly intervened with the station’s bosses.

When the item ran the following week, the calm and collected Reverend told the show the item was “RACIST MUDSLINGING from a racist mudslinging show”. Although there was no discernible racism in the item beyond the fact that the main protagonists were black.

In the same week, on the 13 November, on a PRIVATE local Labour Party Facebook group, Mal Sainsbury,a female Labour activist, to mark the anniversary, posted a historical account of suffagette Theresa Garnett assaulting Winston Churchill in 1909 with a HORSEWHIP at Temple Meads Station .

Mal then invited readers to join her on a demo OPPOSING CUTS at the Council House with the ill-advised rejoinder, “Please join us and bring your metaphorical horsewhip to lick our Mayor and Councillors into shape!”

The Reverend – not unreasonably considering he’s a black man and the role of the horsewhip in slavery – took OFFENCE at this remark and objected in the comments to the post. It was then agreed that the Reverend and the activist would resolve the issue, which had obvious hallmarks of a CLUMSY ERROR rather than RAMPANT HATE SPEECH, privately.

So far, so reasonable. However, fast forward a week and a FAKE NEWS article mysteriously appears on the national Operation Black Vote website under the byline of its boss, Simon Woolley “Wanker”, and headlined, “Labour party must expel Bristol’s racist members”. Coincidentally, Woolley Wanker was a MENTOR to the Reverend at the start of his political career and regularly writes puff pieces about the Reverend on his tedious Blairite website.

A cursory reading of Wanker’s article revealed that he’d been LEAKED some partial, selected and incomplete quotes from the Mal’s private Facebook post. Woolley therefore failed to mention the suffragette context in which her horsewhipping quote appeared.

However, despite only having been SPOONFED a couple of incomplete and conveniently incendiary lines from a private post devoid of all context, this didn’t stop batshit crazy Woolley Wanker calling on Labour Party bosses to “purge the party of its racists”, smearing an individual as well a section of Bristol’s Labour Party opposing Rees’s Tory cuts agenda in Bristol.

Woolley Wanker’s rant continued, “As a matter of urgency Labour party head office must SUSPEND its racist members in Bristol until a investigation is undertaken, and SANCTION those who have supported such appalling rhetoric.”

So not only should an activist who happens to vigorously oppose the Reverend’s shite politics be thrown out of the Labour Party over a poor choice of metaphor but any member who in any way defended her against OBV’s scurrilous FAKE NEWS accusations should also be thrown out as a racist too!

A social media storm naturally followed, stirred up by supporters of the Reverend and Woolley Wanker and with Mal at the centre being subjected to HARSH public accusations of being a racist on the basis of Wanker’s fake news. Mischievious Labour right-wingers piled in too, using the opportunity to attempt to smear Corbynites and anti-cuts activists in the local Labour Party with racism.

Even Alex “Half Baked” Raikes, queen of the local race relations scene and boss of publicly funded SARI, paid by us to deal with SERIOUS RACIST INCIDENTS, waded in to this overblown internal party row. Urging people to complain to the local Labour Party, “the more who write. The better. I’m planning some work with them due to this institutional racism and race hate speech. It’s so cancerous,” she thundered. Apparently perfectly happy to use public money and resources on any old fake news bullshit she discovers on Facebook to assist her friend, the Reverend.

We predict a lot more fake news bullshit as the 2020 mayoral election approaches. Be sure to keep an eye out for any RACIST WITCHHUNTS aimed at anti-cuts activists and Corbyn supporters in the local Labour Party as the Reverend attempts to get reselected in 2019 to run again for mayor in 2020 to deliver another four years of crappy Tory austerity.

Let us know if you spot any fake racism stories.

TAX EFFICIENT BOSSES JOY

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Mystery surrounds the latest corporate brownnoser to get the ear of the gullible Reverend Rees – Jackie “YOU’RE FIRED!” McGeachie. How exactly is she getting paid?

Ms McGeachie, urgently drafted in from her LUCRATIVE interim HR role at the council by the Reverend to knock together a new organisational structure after the disappearance of his former brownoser-in-chief Big Wedge Klonowski, usually SELLS her services through her own company.

The former Tesco UNION BUSTING HR boss turned jobbing local authority interim high-earner worked for Barnet and Haringay councils through her company Jacquie McGeachie HR Consulting Ltd. So has she taken this well-known TAX EFFICIENT route – avoiding the little people’s PAYE tax obligations – in Bristol?

According to the council’s Expenditure Over £500 accounts – that they must publish every month – no payments have been made to Jacquie McGeachie HR Consulting Ltd. However, since arriving in the summer MYSTERY PAYMENTS have started appearing in the accounts.

A payment for £14,058.66 in August and £21,087.99 in July for ONE HR member of staff do appear. Paid to Carlisle Staffing PLC, the council’s employment agency supplier. Who was this money for?

Coincidentally, when McGeachie worked in Barnet, they started routing her and other HIGH-EARNING interims’ payments through Barnet’s contracted agency staff supplier – Hays – to disguise who the money was going to. This was after nosey journalists and bloggers started to consult Barnet’s list of published payments over £500 to view the huge tax efficient sums corporate consultants were TROUSERING from council tax-payers.

Surely ‘onest Marv wouldn’t resort to such a dishonest practice?

COUNCIL CORRUPTION – OUT OF CONTROL?

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Paul Arrogant: “procurement rules are for the little people”

Big shout out to PERFORM GREEN LTD, the lucky recipient of a number of lucrative IT contracts with Bristol City Council. The main one being a contract with the council’s brand spanking new snooping operation (surely state-of-the-art CCTV Traffic Control Centre? Ed.).

This lucky company have scooped £248k so far this year for their selfless public service efforts. Big shout out too to PAUL ARRIGONI, appointed a director of Perform Green Ltd last November, just six months after starting work with the firm in May 2016.

And what remarkable progress this star employee’s made. Unbelievably, since he began employment with the firm, their earnings from the city council have LEAPED from around £5k a month to £28k a month!

But hang on, Paul “Arrogant” Arrigoni? Wasn’t he the Service Director, Business Change and ICT at Bristol City Council until April 2016 when he scarpered in DISGRACE? The man at the centre of the Bundred scandal after his useless Business Change department missed their savings target by a cool £30million and then created an UNLAWFUL BUDGET in 2016 to disguise the losses?

Indeed, so perspicacious was Arrogant in covering his tracks while at Bristol City Council, he even went to the effort of REWRITING an Internal Audit Report for councillors in autumn 2015 assuring them all was well with his savings efforts when it wasn’t.

Adding to this sense of OUTRIGHT CORRUPTION at the heart of Bristol City Council and its endless merry-go-round of bent bosses filling their boots, we’re reliably informed that NO procurement process was undertaken before Perform Green Ltd were awarded their six-figure sum control centre deal with the city council.

Shouldn’t someone be calling Inspector Knacker? (He may even be spending some time at Arrigoni’s control centre …)

IN THE COURT OF TSAR MARVIN

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Moseley: at a brewery. But could he organise the piss up?

A well-placed source tells The BRISTOLIAN that the Reverend Rees and his two posh boy advisors at the council KEVIN “Don’t Mention the Private Education” SLOCOMBE and BEN “Oswald” MOSELEY have “totally lost it” and are “selling Bristol off to corporates in exchange for crappy short term fixes that are doomed to fail the city”.

“It’s like the final days of the court of Tsar Nicholas II having a NEW LABOUR STRATEGY MEETING up there,” we’re told of Marvin and his court cronies upstairs in the Counts Louse.

“Despite all three having a history in the Labour movement, none of them has any interest in listening to anyone in the movement – especially their own STAFF, UNIONS or anyone in their local PARTY. Instead, a rolling roster of expensive corporate goons, proposing one daft “strategy” after another for a large fee get full house room and their arses thoroughly licked by the trio.”

The promotion of Oswald Moseley over the summer to run Marvin’s executive office has especially raised a few eyebrows at the Counts Louse and beyond. The post is supposed to be a NON-POLITICAL senior local government officer role. Although Oswald has a long history with the local LABOUR PARTY. Including a stint working for Bristol East MP, Kerry “And the Banshees” McCarthy, and, in 2012, running Marvin’s losing mayoral campaign – widely regarded as an abysmal shambles!

Oswald is hardly a shining beacon for objective, non-political senior council officers is he? And, questions are beginning to be asked about a recruitment process that identified the Rev Rees’s FRIEND and former CAMPAIGN MANAGER, Oswald, as the best person for the job. Is this another dubious public appointment made to appease a marginal mayor that will sell Bristol short?

Slocombe: “Don’t mention the private school education” or basic competence

Meanwhile Slocombe, supposedly a TRADE UNIONIST and the one political appointment the Reverend is allowed to make, seems to be attempting to square his new found love for ultra-New Labour anti-worker corporate solutions to any and every problem with his trade union contacts.

We’re informed that Slocombe has been SKULKING AROUND meeting various senior regional union bureaucrats from the council’s unions begging them to lay-off the Reverend and Bristol City Council generally. Something many rank and file members, especially from Unite, may not be happy about.

“Everything these three are promoting is a FUCKING STUPID corporate solution that takes the city backwards to Thatcher, punishes the workforce and strongly rewards a small group of managers and unaccountable corporate consultants” says our source.

“The City Office, the management restructure; the “One Bristol” plan to abandon the voluntary sector, the vicious cuts. All of them have been devised by temporary consultants and interims with an eye on a BIG PRIVATE SECTOR PAY DAY down the line.”

“This is a corporate takeover of Bristol City Council. Rees, his two advisors and their revolving door of corporate Rasputins must be stopped.”

ST MARVIN’S UP-THE-CREEK PARISH NEWSLETTER #10

PLANNING NEWS

FRIENDS, CRONIES, WEALTHY MEN …

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The state of the mayor is laughable. Another year, another self-aggrandising “State of the City” speech by a mayor from the city’s citadel of entrenched public school privilege, Bristol University’s Wills Hall.

Again, this year, the thick-as-a-brick Reverend attempted to bang on about his BACKGROUND and invite us to marvel at his achievement in getting to be mayor. Presumably this being a better bet than parading his record of HAPLESS non-achievement as mayor?

The overwhelming sense of second rate FAILURE was ignited early in the evening when the Reverend began his schtick by showing his audience a self-produced “comedy” video made with his mate. This was followed by another of his mates reading out an EMBARRASSING poem. The Reverend then thanked a roster of friends and cronies for their help and support in the ongoing decline and decay of our austerity hit city.

In terms of announcements in the speech, what went unsaid was – perhaps – most significant. The arena, promised by 2019 in his speech last year WASN’T MENTIONED. So it’s safe to say there’ll be no arena in 2019 or any other time soon since the Reverend called a halt to his current plans two weeks after his speech. Instead the Reverend’s dreamed up a couple of totally unfunded new major projects – or “AMBITION PLANS” as he called them – to distract us.

One “ambition plan” is an UNDERGROUND rail system he’s going “to speak to the government” about. The other proposal is to DIG UP the Cumberland Basin road and bridge system and build 1,000 houses there along with another bridge (and, maybe another road) for Christ knows what cost or purpose. The Reverend and his team of advisors have obviously worked extra hard on this imaginary plan as they even thought up a crap name for it – WESTERN HARBOUR.

Other than that, we got some WAFFLE from the Reverend about how well everything’s going for him and his mates and a cheery explanation that his Congestion Task Force – which he also announced last year – has had a couple of meetings and is thinking about things.

He also announced – mainly to save himself from being deselected for the next mayoral election by his own party – that he would NOT be implementing his gormless plan to cut Council Tax Relief to the city’s poorest. Our libraries, he’s threatened with closure, would also survive, he suggested, based on some UNEXPLAINED plan devised by his loopy privatiser cabinet friend, Asher “The Slasher” Craig.

And with that, the Reverend was gone. Hopefully to find the plot he mislaid some time last year?