Monthly Archives: November 2024

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Matiluko

Bristol 24/7’s new deputy editor from London is shaping up to be quite the entertainer. Seun “Scoop” Matiluko kicked off her career in Bristol with an exciting three hour book promo interview with the Reverend Rees.

Much of Matiluko’s scribblings were a lengthy repetition of the Reverend’s neo-Dickensian back story, which we’ve all heard before. However, she also briefly unexplains the Reverend’s eight-year run-in with “Twitter trolls” and local reporters. “This is what we end up going back-and-forth about for the majority of our chat,” she says.

Neutrally calling local Twitter users “keyboard warriors”, Seun says, “some describe [Rees] as a career politician or self-promoter,” without bothering with any of the detail unearthed on Twitter about Rees’s administration over the last eight years.

On local reporters, Seun helpfully explains, “some of the local reporting on Marvin’s tenure could very much be described as racist.”

Unfortunately she doesn’t bother to very much identify what reporting and we are very much left with an impression that any journalist in the city, including Seun’s subordinates at 24/7, could very much be racist.

That’s cleared that up then.

DO WE DESERVE BETTER THAN ‘WE DESERVE BETTER’? 

We deserve better

Freshly minted Green MP Carla “Head Girl” Denyer has had to publish her financial interests for the House of Commons without any of the unlawful fucking about allowed at Bristol City Council.

One £15k donation to her came from ‘We Deserve Better’. A shadowy Tankie organisation whose best known supporter is the Guardian’s “Oxbridge” Owen Jones. 

We Deserve Better is currently run by a “committee” of three: Hilary Schan, former Co-Chair of Momentum and independent councillor in Worthing; Dr Carl Walker who left the Labour in May to serve as an independent councillor in Worthing and former Manchester Labour councillor Amna Abdullatif, who resigned from Labour in October 2023. 

Until recently, the committee also included Hamza Ali Shah, “British Palestinian journalist, writer and political researcher”. A few years back, Hamza agreed with George Galloway that “abortion is murder” and posted a number of racist comments, including “Sikhs? Clean hearted?” along with laughing emojis. 

More problematic for openly gay Oxbridge Owen and bi-sexual Denyer is that he also posted messages like “Looool, imagine getting banged by a fag.”

Classy stuff!

LITTLE BOXES

Little boxes

Cherry-picked prisoners (checked for ‘good behaviour’ and most already with the skills) will be ‘employed’ to build pre-fab ‘eco’ homes ‘for the vulnerable’, built from… erm, recycled milk cartons!

This public/private project, promoted by an ad-hoc mishmash of council, probation/reoffending bodies, eco-charities, churches and quangos, is an ‘experiment’ to employ prisoners in ‘useful activities’ to ‘learn skills’ for employment after release.

Nauseating middle class PR guff about an amazing ‘win win’ for prisoners, ‘the community’, social housing, churches, building companies and landowners accompanies the plan. Bristol’s ‘Green’ council is among the talking heads. Taking over where the Reverend left off. 

A ‘minimum wage’ for prisoners is mentioned but not whether it’s the statutory minimum wage. Theoretically it might be a ‘minimum wage’ of £5 an hour!

A dystopian vision of this public/private partnership ‘win/win future’ would see prisons becoming 21st Century workhouses. An aristocracy of labour drawn from compliant prisoners with skills would be conditioned to accept a ‘minimum wage’ as the norm. The rest of the undeserving poor could be employed to do shit for free. 

Free labour for the ticky tacky milk carton houses of the future