Monthly Archives: February 2018

CITY OF SUFFERING 2018?

In a bizarre religious outburst at New Year, the Reverend Rees – who refuses to challenge Tory austerity and continues to cut essential public services at every opportunity – has told the city it should “GLORY IN SUFFERING”.

The Reverend’s New Year message, sent to Bristol City Council staff on 3 January, found him rambling on about “Bristol as a City of Hope”. “An aspiration I find compelling,” he told bemused staff before quoting something “I came across as a young man” from the BIBLE at them.

“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope,” he explained. So that’s all right then. The Reverend Rees, with the assistance of his bible, has decided suffering is GOOD for us plebs.

So do be sure to CELEBRATE alongside the Reverend when his crappy austerity policies create further suffering this year won’t you? Although please be aware that the Reverend – with his two homes, a £65k salary and lots of foreign trips funded by us to look forward to – will NOT personally experience much of this suffering he’s so keen on.

Isn’t it time the local Labour Party stepped in and sorted this reactionary religious maniac out once and for all? It’s a basic Labour value that we COLLECTIVELY challenge and relieve suffering, not celebrate it for its supposed character building benefits to the INDIVIDUAL?

Come on Labour, deselect the deranged Thatcherite twat and give us a proper Labour mayor.

MEET THE UNION TRYING TO CON ITS MEMBERS

With all the class and integrity of a sleazy payday loan company, the Bristol Branch of Unison, which represents council workers, is BALLOTING its members.

They’re asking their members whether they want to accept the Reverend’s MEAN-SPIRITED changes to their terms and conditions. According to the council, the key changes the Reverend wants are to:

“Update the Council’s Managing Change Policy to strengthen the provisions in relation to redeployment and re-training and so reduce the need for staff to leave the Council on voluntary or compulsory redundancy. As part of these reforms, the maximum period of pay protection will be REDUCED from TWO YEARS to 12 MONTHS and the redundancy scheme will be REDUCED from TWICE to 1.5 TIMES the statutory minimum.”

However, on Unison’s website, where they’re supposed to communicate these proposals to their members and ask them to vote on them, the text has been SEVERELY CUT to say:

“Update the Council’s Managing Change Policy to strengthen the provisions in relation to redeployment and re-training and so reduce the need for staff to leave the Council on voluntary or compulsory redundancy.”

How convenient for the Reverend. The union best known for being a permanent fixture up his rectum has REMOVED the most controversial features of his proposals – and information that could cost their members a lot of money – and asked them to vote on a bland and vague proposal instead.

Unison members, don’t fall for this sleazy trade union/Labour Party STITCH-UP! Vote NO to the changes. All it will do is COST YOU MONEY – for NOTHING in return – if you get made redundant, which is increasingly likely as the Reverend  continues to deliver even more Tory cuts over the next year.

Unison members can vote here (while anyone else can view the union’s disgraceful sharp practice for themselves): http://www.unisonbristol.org.uk/bcc-consultation-proposed-changes-to-redundancy-and-pay-protection/

ROTTEN COMRADES: Redundancy pay and, now, pay protection too

by Our Industrial Correspondent  -The Dwarf

I was going to talk about a multitude of issues (including management calling in the enforcement officers on their own smokers and timing staff on the bog) but today there is only really one thing on the agenda: the slashing of redundancy pay and pay protection and the unions’ inability to show any backbone whatsoever. Vote this out now!

The latest spin being applied to the redundancy pay reduction plan is that the money saved from redundancy payments could be used to give those remaining in work a pay rise. One of the union reps who told us that looked surprised when he was told that that would mean they could make even more people redundant. He had the grace to look embarrassed. Then, needing a distraction to make his getaway, he set his bow tie spinning before jumping into his tiny car, which collapsed.

But now, finally, after plenty of rumours and leaks, having consulted absolutely nobody, having absolutely no debate whatsoever, the unions are putting it to the vote. The last time we balloted over a change to terms and conditions about 45 people took part (out of thousands) and the unions used that “mandate” to agree to slash our evening and weekend pay. And lo and behold, restructures took place forcing more of our workers to work more unsociable hours. These terms and conditions protect workers and compensate them if things go wrong. Of course, none of our union reps work evenings and weekends, heaven forfend, and are confident they shall be the last people to be laid off, being so useful to the business.

My fear is that a handful of politically motivated idiots, feeling only pity for their work mates and only admiration for their betters, will fall for this, dragging us all down with them.

The details can be found on the council’s intranet – The Source – though at the time of writing it was hidden away somewhere in a dusty corner. Unison have some details here. Why not print off a hundred or so copies, roll them up and use the resulting tube in a way that would make it difficult for some of our comrades to sit down?

But remember, don’t have a go at your local shop steward. The unions are using them to take the flak. He or she is as surprised as you are by this turn of events. Give your branches and regions a call and ask them what the hell they are playing at.

Unison’s Bristol office number is 0117 353 3956.

Unite’s Bristol office number is 0117 923 0555.

Say no to this awful example of incompetent negotiation, for heaven’s sake!

The unions’ have been hopeless, is there no organisation that can come to our aid? We’ve had the Bristolian Party, is it not now time for ‘Bristolian the Union’? Now there’s a thought. Can you imagine us at the Council’s top table?

HARTCLIFFE’S HOT AIR CENTRE

Anyone got any idea what’s happened to the HARTCLIFFE RECYCLING CENTRE, the state-of-the-art recycling facility for south Bristol that could be located on a 5-acre site on Hartcliffe Way?

Politicians of every shade of useless have PROMISED the facility for years now. While the hot air expended on this non-existent facility, if captured, could generate imaginary plans for the city for the next hundred years.

This recycling centre was originally touted by the Lib Dems’ Gary “Fuckbucket” Hopkins in 2010 when he was the cabinet member responsible for waste. However, the centre has subsequently been promoted by Labour, Tories and Greens, including the Reverend Rees who PROMISED to build the place by 2018 in his first speech to Bristol City Council in May 2016.

The Lib Dems even got as far as agreeing, at cabinet meeting on 4 July 2012, to build the centre and allocated £2million for the task. Alas, Mayor No-more Ferguson arrived in autumn 2012 and put the project “ON HOLD” citing government cuts. Although Ferguson subsequently found MILLIONS to splurge on European Green Capital eco-tainment for the wealthy, such as dumping a load of festering tugboats in Leigh Woods to “challenge us to think about issues surrounding climate change”.

The Reverend, having personally put the recycling centre back on the agenda in 2016, appears to have done NOTHING about it since and he’s now set to miss his own 2018 deadline for the opening of the centre. Will it ever happen?

Perhaps Bristol Waste Managing Director, Tracey Morgan, who seems to take all the decisions in Bristol these days, has decided she doesn’t want a recycling centre in Hartcliffe?

THE BRISTOLIAN SAYS … HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT RUBBISH

As the amount of homeless people on our streets grows due to government austerity measures, the Reverend and his mates have a plan.

So, who’s in charge? Social Care? No. Health? No. Er, Bristol Waste are carrying out the new procedure. They’re now threatening to steal what little property rough sleepers have in an attempt to clear the streets of homeless people so that shoppers can consume without having to trip over them.

People don’t choose to become homeless. This is a direct effect of austerity that has cut funds to services.  The Nazi Post did a study of rough sleepers and discovered people who had lost their business, broken their back and couldn’t work or got kicked out of a flat when their dad died of cancer.

Most of these human beings are at their wits end. They have tried to get help but to no avail. So they’re sleeping on the streets with their worldly possessions. Many have been beaten up. One comrade was dragged from his tent, beaten with a golf club and told to “fuck off back to his own country”. Do they mean Somerset, which is where he came from? Others have had their possessions burned.

Now the Council are joining in. One young woman told a reporter that she was scared to go to the toilet in case council bullies stole her stuff. This is theft. She was even trying to sell a few trinkets, so that she would not be forced into prostitution and the Council stopped her doing that. This is just bullying people who lack the resources to fight back. Why is Bristol Waste even handling this? Human beings are not garbage. The remaining stuff they have is theirs, just like ours in our homes.

Maybe, the next time our Mayor leads the “masses” on another march against his austerity measures, he doesn’t want to trip over the casualties of his own endeavours? Spend some of your reserves you cunt! We also understand that when he has his jolly for fellow global mayors later this year, they do not want to see people lying in the streets. It might put them off the canapes and champagne as they discuss what a terribly difficult job they do.

Stealing people’s stuff will not make them go away. Until the authorities in this city stand up to central government, it will get worse. Bullying is not the answer. They teach you that at school Marvin. Also, remember, many working class people are one paycheck away from becoming homeless themselves. It can happen to anyone in Tory Britain, which is a sobering thought.

Please try to give some cash to the homeless. They do not choose to sleep out in a damp sleeping bag during winter. And if you see the council bullies stealing property from the homeless, stop them. Talk to them. See where they are taking the stolen property and try to help the human being who is being attacked.

They are not a problem, the inequalities of wealth are. The Mayor is a fucking hypocrite.

MEET THE TORY WASTE BOSS RUNNING BRISTOL

What the fuck is going on at BRISTOL WASTE, run by, officially, the thickest bureaucrat in Britain, Bristol City Council’s Tracey “Beaker” Morgan, appointed Managing Director of this shitty little council  firm in 2016 by half-witted councillors?

In November, Beaker, a dim Tory from Portishead, instructed her staff to REMOVE from the Bear Pit an artwork celebrating Labour pacifist MP Walter Ayles, which formed part of the nationally acclaimed Journeys to Justice exhibition hosted by the city in the autumn.

It appears that Beaker PERSONALLY decided that this artwork, produced by the Creative Youth Network, had no value and should be binned after she received a request to remove it in the lead up to Remembrance Day from her FAT TORY TURD mate, Henbury Councillor, Mark “Lard Arse” Weston.

Following UPROAR on social media and the personal intervention of the mayor, Beaker was forced to quickly restore the work to the Bear Pit and the mayor issued an apology explaining that Beaker and Bristol Waste had removed this private property without his or anyone else’s authority. Surely a disciplinary matter?

Fast forward two months and guess what? Just one day after UPROAR in the newspapers after Bath City Council issued their homeless with threats to REMOVE their belongings from the city centre, reactionary thicko Beaker issued notices of dubious legality to homeless people in Broadmead, er, threatening to REMOVE their belongings from the city centre.

Yet again, the mayor had to personally intervene and make an apology explaining that Beaker and Bristol Waste had acted without his or anyone else’s authority! What the fuck is wrong with this North Somerset piece of TORY SHIT, Beaker? What makes her think she can do what she likes in our city, such as judging our children’s artwork as rubbish to be dumped or treating our homeless as SUBHUMAN WASTE?

This latest piece of blatant right wing fuckwittery from Beaker, targeting vulnerable people in the city while totally misreading the mood of Bristolians regarding homelessness, came just weeks after she personally FUCKED UP the city’s rubbish collections over Christmas.

Having decided NOT to print and deliver leaflets listing altered household rubbish collection times over Christmas, Beaker then published a load of INACCURATE information about these collections on the internet. This resulted in rubbish being left out on our streets for days on end in the new year and made the city – she conveniently doesn’t live in – look like shit.

Isn’t it about time that the Reverend fired this incompetent right wing twat who thinks she can do what she pleases in our city? Let’s send her packing back to Portishead to die the long, slow, painful death all Tories deserve.

HENGROVE PARK LATEST

Labour housing czar, Paul “Wolfie” Smith’s efforts to “build communities not just houses” on Hengrove Park continue to go badly awry as his planning team persist in their attempt to dump 1,400 homes in a field in south Bristol and call it “planning”.

Some progress was made when Wolfie’s planners caught up with the rest of the sentient universe and agreed that a public road access to their development was REQUIRED from Hengrove Way, the only major arterial route to the site.

However, planners then decided that this route must STOP one third of the way into the development to prevent “rat-running” between Hengrove Way and Whitchurch Lane. However, this will also PREVENT vehicle access to two thirds of the proposed homes from the road with the best capacity to handle the traffic. Planners, when asked where they think they are preventing rat-runners going, deliver the BLANK LOOK of someone who’s spent about as much time in south Bristol as the average Japanese Puffer Fish.

Concern for rat running then DISPELS less than a mile away where an existing residential road and ‘rat-run’, Bamfield, will provide vehicle access for two thirds of the development. Is the plan to prioritise the quality of life in the NEW DEVELOPMENT by reducing traffic there at the expense of an EXISTING residential area already handling supermarket traffic for Asda, school run traffic for Perry Court Primary School and existing “rat-runners” going home to Hengrove and Whitchurch?

How Bamfield, a residential road, is supposed to cope with even more traffic is NOT EXPLAINED. While enquiries regarding how many vehicle movements the new development might generate go UNANSWERED by planners who are, apparently, near the end of their “masterplanning” with NO CLUE how much traffic their development might generate.

Throughout this process, planners have remained DEAF to concerns regarding traffic issues in the area. Instead, the council’s mantra is that the new housing is a major benefit that residents have been calling for. A view CONTRADICTED by the council’s own Quality of Life Survey, where concern over traffic and transport dwarfs housing issues by about four to one.

So far, planners’ only real response to impending TRAFFIC HELL, reduced air quality and increased pollution is to enthusiastically draw little blue lines all over their plans indicating where their cycle lanes will go. This is for an area where their own data shows ZERO PER CENT of people cycle to work and any new roads will be cycle-friendly 20mph anyway.

Another “benefit” planners are keen to highlight is the £10MILLION proposed spend on park facilities and landscaping for the open space they haven’t concreted over. Although the reality is that residents are losing huge amounts of open space to housing and roads while any benefit from more park facilities is QUESTIONABLE while the council is proposing to close the existing Hengrove Play Park on Mondays and Tuesdays.

It also appears that there will actually be £10million worth of landscaped PSEUDO PUBLIC SPACE as the land will be turned over to a dodgy Carillion-style private management firm, procured by a skint council, to run. The level of maintenance and upkeep of this space is therefore likely to be LOW with ZERO community or democratic oversight once the council signs our land away to the private sector to manage.

The latest highlight of this public-private pseudo public space LANDSCAPING BONANZA is an optimistically named “village green”, planned to be built over the popular Family Cycling Centre. However, any traditional sound of leather on willow may be a little subdued by the main road into the development running DIRECTLY THROUGH this village green.

It’s obvious that this development is being pursued at a RAMPANT PACE by Wolfie in order to chase numbers for a manifesto pledge on housing numbers. While it might – if we’re lucky – support the housing needs of the rest of the city, it provides little that’s much use to locals who’ll have to live with the predictably DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES of it all.

Wolfie needs to get back to the drawing board or accept responsibility as the architect of a new Hartcliffe (another public housing development full of bold promises where there was never any money for the services and facilities to fulfil them).

CANTONESE KOWTOW WITH FRIED REES

The Reverend’s latest international junket in December to the Fortune 500 Global Forum in our human rights abusing twin city of Guangzhou in southern China raised a few eyebrows when the Reverend went armed with a top secret SALES BROCHURE.

Among the dazzling “opportunities” being offered to the high priests of global capital was a £2.5 BILLION chance to build the Rev an underground rail system (since recosted a month later for no apparent reason at £4.5 BILLION) and another MULTI-BILLION opportunity to create a corporate glass, steel and concrete tower block hell all over the Cumberland Basin.

The Rev’s brochure also offered some CHEAPER and more appetising deals such as building PROFITABLE homes for 5,000 economically negligible students and promoted the city’s high cost private rental sector as an excellent INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY for any circling vultures of global capital.

Just to be clear, the Fortune 500 Global Forum was a meeting of international corporate business leaders seeking Chinese investment into their unreconstructed corporate globalisation project on the model that spectacularly FAILED in 2007, crashed the banks and created austerity.

Some characteristics of this project include use of CHEAP flexible labour; SYSTEMATIC tax avoidance; ‘light touch’ and/or self-regulation; RIGGED ‘free’ markets, asset stripping, privatisation, rent seeking, environmental destruction, MASS TRANSFER of labour and capital across international borders and financial and economic DOMINANCE by hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds. All overseen by transnational and democratically unaccountable bodies.

Surely Labour should be protecting Bristol from the threats of international high finance not inviting them to set up shop here?

BOSSES’ DATA FLOP

The Reverend Rees continues to a run a Rolls Royce bureaucracy. If the Rolls Royce in question is a BURNED OUT WRECK on the hard shoulder of the M32 currently acting as the temporary home for a family of small rodents.

On the 25 May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will replace the Data Protection Act, supposedly to better protect our PRIVACY and PERSONAL INFORMATION from rampant corporate crooks and mendacious public sector bureaucrats. The changes have been in the pipeline for years and organisations across the country have been working flat out to make sure they comply with the new regulations and protect OUR RIGHTS.

Not, however, at Bristol City Council. Despite an endless procession of expert managers on six figure salaries coming through the revolving door over last few years, none of them has BOTHERED to prepare for the launch of the GDPR in May. Although the council openly admits, “GDPR will have a fundamental effect on all Bristol City Council processes and systems that hold personal data and will require significant change to working practices across all Directorates.”

Instead, the council – with four months to go – ADMITS that there’s NO formal project plan in place to implement GDPR across the Council; that NO governance arrangements for GDPR exist; that NO resources have been allocated to deliver GDPR and NO statutory Data Protection Officer, as required by the legislation, has been appointed. Nor does anyone seem to know where this new post might fit in the staff structure.

Council bosses promised councillors that they would URGENTLY report back to them about the GDPR through the Audit Committee at the end of January. But, alas, that particular item fell off the meeting agenda with NO explanation. Wonder why?

Good to see our privacy, personal data and rights are being so well looked after by the Reverend Rees and his expensive bosses isn’t it?

A HARPY NEW YEAR FROM CONNOLLY & CALLAGHAN!

Word reaches The BRISTOLIAN that Bristol City Council’s Housing Department are issuing EVICTION NOTICES TO HOMELESS FAMILIES that they have emergency-housed in rented flats owned by private property vultures Connolly & Callaghan. This is in order to try and recoup some of the enormous payouts that ROBBER BARONS Connolly & Callaghan are demanding from BCC as ransom.

BCC Housing Department are currently sending out THREATENING LETTERS to homeless families in Connolly & Callaghan properties who have fallen behind on what’s euphemistically termed a ‘service charge’. But there’s no precedent for people on BCC’s homeless list being compelled to pay charges for electricity, gas etc – and by rights, if the council insists on using the C&C shark pool as its ‘emergency accommodation’, THEN THEY SHOULD COVER THIS COST THEMSELVES.

C&C are already raking in £545 PER WEEK, PER FAMILY in their COUNTS LOUSE HOLD UP, and instead of BCC telling these GANGSTER SWINE where to get off, management came up with this sneaky ruse to swindle it out of the daily survival benefits and minimum wages of the TRAUMATISED RESIDENTS that they put in there!

The BRISTOLIAN has obtained a copy of the draft letter BCC are sending out:

What next? Is interim BCC housing manager Dorian ‘Grey’ Leatham going to carry through on these questionable legal threats and EVICT FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN just so they can be MADE HOMELESS ALL OVER AGAIN? All while C&C waltz off with their ILL-GOTTEN GAINS to the Cayman Islands and then come back greedy for more?

And what do Paul ‘Wolfie’ Smith and The Reverend have to say about this FUCKING OUTRAGE going on right under their noses and on their watch?

STAY TUNED: this story is only going to get bigger…