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Category Archives: Bristol City Council
GREEN HORROR SHOW TO DESTROY SOUTH BRISTOL NATURE RESERVE
With the vote by councillors to trash Bristol’s only remaining working farm and a Site of Nature Conservation Interest, Yew Tree Farm, due on Friday, Green Party councillors are gearing up to break one of the few manifesto commitments they managed to make.
The manifesto the Greens ran on in May promised they would, “Protect Sites of Nature Conservation Interest (SNCI) that Bristol City Council controls by preventing development on them.”
The policy seemed to be confirmed as recently as August 22. Green council leader, “Tory” Tony Dyer, huffed and puffed at Bristol 24/7 that he had been ‘misrepresented’ in an interview with BBC Points West the day before when he had appeared to support plans to expand the South Bristol Crematorium onto Yew Tree Farm SNCI.
Dyer whined at 24/7, “Yesterday in an interview with BBC Points West, I reaffirmed the Green Party’s opposition to development on SNCIs in response to a question on Yew Tree Farm. This was edited out of the broadcast interview.”
Now in October, developing the farm seems to have been edited back in. Four Greens on the Public Health and Communities Policy Committee are being asked to consider a council officer report proposing to expand South Bristol Crematorium on to Yew Tree Farm, a site ‘Bristol City Council controls’.
And these councillors – Abdul “Dull” Malik and Fi “Fie Foe” Hance, a couple of dodgy old Lib Dems mainly loyal to their own ambition, and rookie councillors Cara “Caravan” Lavan and Ed “Fuk” Fraser – appear to be getting cold feet about saving this council controlled SNCI.
All four councillors have point blank refused to visit the farm to meet the farmer Catherine Withers and learn about the importance of the site and three of them – Abd-dull, Fi and Ed – have refused to meet with independent ecology experts. Labour, Lib Dem and Tory councillors have all visited the farm to learn more before voting on this crude act of environmental destruction.
Ab-Dull has even gone one step further, ignoring both his boss, Tory Tony and the manifesto he ran on just a few months ago, publishing a rambling piece in Bristol 24/7 about Muslim burials and claiming that ‘we must balance the need for burial space with protecting the environment’.
The article was accompanied by one of the weirdest publicity shots ever (see above). An uneasy pastoral like something out of the 17th Century, the gloomy folk horror tableau features Ab-Dull stood solemnly in front of a coffin flanked by male counterparts. Any women present are stood ten metres back and off to the side of Ab-Dull and the boys.
Is this weird shit the progressive new look for Tory Tony’s not very greens?
YOUTH ZONE: ALL THE WRONG MOVES
The horrifying reality, being built on open space at Inns Court, about Bristol’s Youth Zone, a giant shed for the youth of Bristol that no one in youth works wants, is emerging.
Now chairing Youth Moves, the charity managing this public-private partnership big project that’s swallowing Bristol City Council’s entire youth services budget whole, is Heather Frankham, a Merchant Venturer and, until July, a director of the miserably failing Venturers Trust. The local academy trust so useless it has had to disband and hand their work over to a competent body, the national E-ACT academy trust.
The Venturers Trust’s recent handiwork includes transforming the Merchants Academy in Hartcliffe into a OFSTED-rated ‘inadequate’ school and shutting the school’s sixth form at a week’s notice in September 2023 leaving sixth formers in Hartcliffe without a sixth form to attend. Just the track record required to be trusted with further large sums of public money for youth services in South Bristol then.
Frankham has wasted no time in appointing a snooty twit from Clifton to support her Youth Zone madness. Please step forward newly installed interim chief executive for Youth Moves, Guy Cowper. This former Operations Manager at posh and private Clifton High School will now be responsible for delivering youth services in south Bristol. What on Earth qualifies him in any way for this role is not clear.
Mystery, meanwhile, surrounds the sudden departure of Youth Moves’ former CEO, experienced Knowle West youth boss Ali Dale who suddenly quit in May explaining “it is time for me to move on” after 13 years running the popular charity.
Having wrecked a generation’s education in South Bristol, are the Merchant Venturers and their friends and relatives about to wreak their incompetent havoc on youth services in South Bristol?
Watch this space.
***CORRECTION*** an earlier version of this story said that Guy Cowper and Heather Frankham were partners. This is not the case.
ONE WEDDING SUIT AND AN ENGLISH LANGUAGE FUNERAL: THE LABOUR MANIFESTO
Introduced in full colour dull PowerPoint by their newly minted leader, Tom “Plasticine Man’ Renhard, togged up in his wedding suit at a swanky conference room at Ashton Gate stadium on Saturday, Bristol Labour Party are first out of the blocks with a local election manifesto.
The manifesto cover features a cheery little cartoon cover of multicultural pedestrians, happy cyclists, beaming schoolchildren, helpful coppers, trams, buses, windmills and, er, dead trees plastered onto a local independent retail backdrop. Produced in shades of red, it’s a bit George Ferguson on acid with the manifesto’s title, ‘Building Bristol’s Future’ providing mild threat for the paranoid.
The manifesto itself spells a departure from the Rees years. Marvin’s manifestoes provided a shopping list of promises he would then proceed to fail to deliver. His 2016 effort contained 78 uncosted promises and 38 vague commitments. The 2021 model slimmed things down to just 91 uncosted promises. Largely undelivered.
Renhard seems to have learned from this almighty mess of broken promises and has created a fuzzy document of vague aspiration instead. Delivered in hackneyed cliche with few indicators of how he would deliver on any of it, maybe Renhard knows he won’t have to?
Our team has combed through the 28 pages of English language wreckage and identified five stone cold, nailed down actual promises from Labour. These are: ‘build 3,000 council homes in the next five years’; ‘roll out more school streets’; ‘have more visible and responsive police and embedded PCSOs’; ‘protect the 100% Council Tax Reduction Scheme’ and ‘tackle anti-social behaviour, including fly-tipping, littering and graffiti tags, by hiring more enforcement officers and increasing fines‘.
We also discovered three almost promises in the manifesto. These fall short of actual promises as there’s little detail provided and few resources committed so it will be hard to hold them to account. These are: ‘upgrading and restoring our ageing infrastructure, including Bristol’s historic bridges and harbour’; ‘invest in road maintenance and pothole repair’ and ‘reduce violence against women and girls’.
Pretty much everything else in the document is vague aspirational waffle. In social care, which, according to Labour’s own figures is 43% of council spend, the big offer is, “We are partnering with Bristol’s public services to help ensure you can access the care you need, when you need it.”
From the party that has just tried (and failed) to remove disabled adults from their homes and shove them into residential care to save money, this is a pathetically weak policy response.
On education and children’s services, 22% of council spend, it’s hard to find much concrete. Just some waffle about “Helping children get the best start in life with more school places and better provision for SEND children; improving access to education and skills in our colleges and universities.”
Another weak response from the party that fucked up SEND provision years ago and is currently fucking it up all over again having signed up to the Tories’ vicious ‘Safety Valve’ SEND cuts programme.
On the big issue of youth knife crime, the Labour offer moves beyond pathetic. Promising to “improve CCTV and partner on youth engagement projects” alongside a further uncosted promise without detail to “support and invest in youth services.”
Is that it?
On transport, Labour commit to, “exploring ways to bring buses into public ownership”. Currently impossible under existing legislation. And they will “start now on the transport solutions of tomorrow” whatever that means. Their most interesting policy may be “seeking ways to take back control of our highway maintenance work through insourcing.”
On Green issues, the offer is more of Rees’s underpowered over-publicised City Leap. Originally a promise of a ‘billion pound’ private sector investment, this promise dropped to £500m recently. The Labour manifesto now introduces a new figure of “£771m planned investment in decarbonisation”.
The reality of City Leap last year was about £23m of public sector grants and city council cash spent on overpriced heat pumps in schools and some small retrofit pilots, which Labour’s US corporate partner trousered a profit from.
The final section of the manifesto is a section unoriginally called ‘Our City, Our Future’ where the big promise is “creating a safe, attractive, well-lit and welcoming city centre.”
Does that mean neighbourhoods outside the city centre can expect to be unsafe, unattractive, badly lit and unwelcoming?
I think we should be told.
LOSING THE PLOT
Allotments? So what if the council doubles the rent? They’re for the chattering classes to grow rainbow chard while talking bollocks to each other about shit they read in the Guardian.
Wrong. Allotments have a history.
Our right to an allotment is the only compensation we have for the loss of our right to work common land that’s been systematically robbed from us over the last 1,000 years.
This robbery of land by the rich from the poor can be traced back to Norman Britain; was attacked by Sir Thomas More in ‘Utopia’ published in 1516; was directly challenged by the Diggers (they really did dig) after the English Civil War and caused the 1885 land reform campaign where ‘Three Acres and a Cow’ was the demand in the fight against poverty.
A series of laws followed. The 1887 Allotments Act, the 1892 Smallholding Act and the 1908 Smallholding and Allotments Act gave local authorities the power to create allotments. It’s not much in exchange for the robbery and privatisation of virtually all the country’s land by the wealthy but allotments and the odd tract of scrubby ‘common’ is all we have left.
When our money-grabbing Labour council casually announces it’s doubling the rent on our allotments, it’s the latest attempt to drive the country’s poorest from the remnants of our shared common land.
They can fuck off.
WHO’S GOT YOUR MAIL?
A handy source tells us that at a recent community meeting, low key, low effort Labour councillor for Central Ward, Farah “Way” Hussain, turned up with two Labour members and told residents they would be ‘replacement’ councillors and would be taking on casework.
One of these Labour bods then said something like “yes, we are already responding to councillor emails”. And, sure enough, in recent weeks “Farah” has magically started responding to her councillor emails.
This is all dodgy as fuck. Why is she allowing unelected individuals access to her private councillor emails?
PHOTO OP WATCH
- 16 April 2021: Bristol Labour politicians had their photos taken at Brislington Meadows, insisting they would be saving a Site of Nature conservation Interest (SNCI).
- 23 June 2023 Bristol Labour politicians had their photos taken at Yew Tree Farm insisting they would save an SNCI.
- 12 September 2023: Bristol Labour politicians had their photos taken at Blackswarth Road Wood at Crews Hole Road insisting they would save an SNCI.
- 30 November 2023: Bristol Labour politicians vote to develop South Bristol Crematorium next to Yew Tree Farm, an SNCI – no photos available.
WATCHING THE WATCHMAN
Has Bristol City Council’s posh clown Monitoring Officer, “Li’l” Tim O’Gara, broken the law? A recent meeting of the council’s optimistically named Value and Ethics Committee revealed that Bristol has not upheld a complaint against a politician in over six years. Not impressing residents who’ve made complaints.
One complaint was about Asher “The Slasher” Craig’s private company receiving payments from Bristol City Council that personally involved “Li’l” Tim. Another revealed that “Li’l” Tim kept two separate registers of interest for the mayor. One public, one private with different entries!
Oversight of “Li’ll” Tim’s handling of complaints, so far, has been from a so-called “independent person”, appointed by ‘Li’l’ Tim whose identity is a secret.
When grilled by residents why the “independent person” wasn’t appointed in public at Full Council as required by the Localism Act, “Li’l” Tim explained, “it would be a complete misreading of the legislation to think that the appointment would need to be made by Full Council.”
Such a “misreading”, in fact, that at Full Council on 14 November an “independent person” was set to be hurriedly appointed by councillors as the law asks!
Has “Li’l” Tim been caught red-handed breaking the law?
DOG WHISTLE WATCH
Highly paid consultant blames parents and asylum seekers for huge overspends in SEND
Enormous overspends emerging in the council’s SEND budget are not the fault of council bosses squandering money on private sector rip-off artists; spying on parents or paying providers not to deliver SEND services we’ve paid them to deliver.
Turns out, instead, the overspend is the fault of parents and, er asylum seekers. At least, that’s what Vanessa Wilson, a well remunerated management consultant employed on a large undisclosed fee, claimed at a recent council meeting.
“Due to a lack of provision in our area, we’re placing more children in schools out of area. There’s parental choice as well. That’s meant that we’ve seen, in this last year, a doubling in costs of our transport,” she shamelessly explained.
But, as parents are liable for transport costs at a ‘parental choice’ of school, any doubling in transport costs is down to Vanessa’s department’s failures and nothing whatsoever to do with parents.
Vanessa then went after asylum seekers: “We’ve got a large number of children and families coming in who are asylum seekers. We’re seeing an increase in those families where not just the children have complex needs, but also the parents.”
With only 1,500 asylum seekers in Bristol, is it likely this tiny number are responsible for Vanessa’s ballooning costs?
Or is she using them as a convenient scapegoat for her department’s ongoing management failures?
TINFOIL HAT NEWS
Has the Reverend let the cat out of the bag? At a Full Council Meeting in September he was asked by a member of the public if he “agreed that planning decisions should remain nonpartisan in Bristol?”
Back came the bizarre response, “It is disappointing when planning applications are rejected on brownfield sites when we have a housing and climate crisis for political reasons.”
Is the Reverend just using the so-called housing and climate crises as convenient pegs to hang his pro-corporate developer right wing economic agenda on?
“The truth is out there, but so are lies …”