The Reverend rushed to the airwaves and into print within days of the Nazi Post revealing last month, with the help of four whistleblowers, that his council had miserably failed to take any action over 70 INSTANCES OF RACISM among their workforce over the last ten years.
The Reverend’s first port of call was a soft interview with Ellie “Copy Typist” Pipe, roving reporter for Venue-lite website and mag, Bristol 24/7. The Reverend’s crazed mission to EXPLAIN THE INEXPLICABLE appeared on the 24/7 website on Friday 22 February.
The first target from the failed journalist and failing mayor was successful journalism. “There is a massive challenge for the journalistic class in the city as well,” bleated the Reverend, taking aim at those who had recorded, for the public, his latest embarrassing ORGANISATIONAL FAILURE.
The Vicar went on to claim the press were “sensationalising” the issue as the four cases reported in the Post “were being addressed” by his senior bosses. Sidestepping the fact that the whistleblowers had gone to the Post because their cases remained UNADDRESSED while the perpetrators and the senior bosses protecting them remained UNCHALLENGED.
“We, as a leadership, have always taken race and racism very seriously,” Rees breezily assured 24/7 readers. “We have put in place a whole raft of measures to tackle it”. And what measures would they be? Er, we don’t know because the Reverend didn’t say and Copy Typist Pipe DIDN’T BOTHER TO ASK. So that’s all right, then.
The Reverend immediately followed this highly DEFENSIVE INTERVIEW with an appearance among friends at community radio station, Ujima where he was joined by a cheerleader from the local race relations industry, Sado Jirde of the Black South West Network.
Together, the pair spent an hour patronising listeners by batting about long-winded undergraduate seminar observations about race with little reference to the Reverend’s working class black staff experiencing THE SHARP END OF RACISM right here, right now in Bristol.
It’s all ever so “complex and systemic” listeners were assured as the pair ASSERTED that due to the way racism was “reproduced and remodelled in institutions” it had to be “contextualised”.
Was this because the context of black working class people having their experience of racism BELITTLED AND IGNORED by middle class public sector bosses with large mortgages to service and quiet lives to live was a little too raw and direct for them?
Further highlights at Ujima included Rees whining that he couldn’t be expected to resolve 400 years of racism. Or, it seems, even four straightforward issues of RACISM within his own organisation raised that week by WHISTLEBLOWERS in the press.
The Reverend also went right off the deep end at the Nazi Post. “We all knew about it anyway”; they were “behind the conversation” on race; they were “role playing at being investigative journalists”; they had a “shallow understanding”; they were using “shock terminology” based on “inaccuracies and embellishments” and the headlines “were a great splash but not true,” the Reverend variously BLUSTERED at listeners.
To polish off this hour of PARANOID WAFFLE and EMBITTERED DENIAL, the show’s presenter even chipped in telling listeners that “whistleblower” is the “wrong terminology”. So what is the correct terminology for what this little lot were up to then?
How about “another bloody hatchet job by council bosses and client media on working class whistleblowers”?