Expertly climbing up the arse of wealth and privilege.
Sniggers all round at “Tory” Tony Dyer’s first assignment in June as leader of the council – an arse-licking session with Business West at the grand temple of council overspend, the Bristol Beacon.
Spies tell us that Tory Tony accidentally referred to himself as ‘mayor’ twice! He also told the local business crew he had “expertise in local government finances, housing, and urban planning.”
Areas he’s never worked in and has no qualifications in according to his thin public CV.
Baltic Wharf: prime location – no council houses please.
The city’s largest council house building programme for a generation has been scrapped by Green proclamation.
At a Housing Committee in September, its chair, community arts twat, Barry “Goldwater” Parsons announced that council housing projects at Baltic Wharf and Hengrove Park were cancelled with immediate effect.
Parsons explained that this multi-million major policy decision was taken by council officers after a grubby deal between Parsons and his Tory wanker vice chair, Richard “Bunter” Eddy.
The cancellation of these two projects wrecks the council’s HRA business plan, which was supplying funding for council housing over the next 30 years. The plan relies on building council homes and borrowing against the income generated to build more homes. No increased income: no homes.
Parsons refused to let his committee take this major decision. Instead, he used a recent judgement from the government’s Regulator of Social Housing regarding the poor condition of council homes to unilaterally scrap the programme.
Parsons claimed that unknown council officers had instructed him that any housing money must be spent on improving existing homes rather than building new ones. Figures or financial information to back officers’ claims was absent.
Is it a coincidence there was zero mention of council housing in the Green’s manifesto in May?
Green council boss, “Tory” Tony Dyer, is proving to be highly flexible in power. Before the election, Tory Tony was an enthusiastic supporter of south Bristol’s Yew Tree Farm. The nature reserve and city’s only working farm was under threat from a council plan to expand South Bristol Cemetery into it.
Cometh the moment, cometh the man and now Tory Tony has concluded that expanding the cemetery onto the farm is a great idea. He’s even brokered his own ‘compromise’ between himselves to only use the land for a dirty great drainage pond.
Tory Tony was also an enthusiastic supporter of the victims of the SEND spying scandal. Supporting public demand for a proper investigation into senior council bosses’ surveillance of parents of children with SEND. To score a few political points over Labour, he even helpfully leaked an unredacted version of the council’s internal whitewash report to SEND victims so they could stir the pot for him.
Now, there’s no sign of any investigation from Tory Tony and he’s blocking legal action by the victims against the council by refusing to respond to a pre-action letter issued to his council months ago.
What will the courts make of his clueless dickheadery?
Bristol City Council’s Children’s Services has a deficit of £23m this year, excluding the car crash SEND deficit. Efforts at ‘transformation’ of the service have predictably failed to make the savings touted by bosses and consultants.
According to a recent report to councillors about Home to School Travel, “The Children’s Transformation programme is currently forecasting a delivery of £4m of the £6.2m [savings] target in 24/25.”
Undershooting target by 35 per cent, thanks, are due to corporate consultants PwC who, in 2022, council bosses paid £444k for a secret unpublished report into, er, savings in Home to School Travel.
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?
Artists impression of Bristol’s forthcoming Merchant Venturers Zone
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.
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?
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.
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?
