The Greens are shutting Prince Street Bridge to cars travelling south. This will shut the bridge entirely to cars.
Reasoning and evidence for the closure are thin on the ground beyond that the Greens are ideologically obsessed with cars and want to snarl up traffic in the centre to piss off car drivers.
Disabled people, especially, are unhappy that another car route out of the centre is blocked with nobody asking them about it. Fit and healthy posh blokes on bikes have loudly voiced approval, however.
Council bosses want to wire St Nicks Market food traders up to Electronic Point of Sale (EPO) units and grab 15 per cent of their turnover for themselves.
What’s the extra income for? The council’s own figures say their running costs were £591k last year while they earned £646k in fees. A tidy £55k profit giving a return of 8.5 per cent.
Not enough for our greedy council who’ve set a turnover target of £761k for 2025. Potentially a profit of £170k at a whopping return of 22 per cent.
No such returns are likely for traders, however. In the struggling hospitality industry 15 per cent of turnover is likely to be their entire profit.
“Tory” Tony Dyer continues his deranged odyssey to the outer reaches of corporate madness.
A breathless press release from pension fund Legal & General (L&G) recently announced, “[L&G] has submitted a planning application for Bristol Temple Island, a £350m masterplan regeneration project that will transform a derelict, former diesel depot site into a vibrant urban quarter.”
The council, in a dubious deal, actually handed over Arena Island to L&G in exchange for a free lease of an office block for 40 years while agreeing to spend £32m decontaminating the land all over again.
Tory Tony enthusiastically appeared in L&G’s PR dross describing this totally shit deal on land originally earmarked for our arena as “great to see”!
It isn’t. It’s monumentally depressing to see our money being pissed up the wall to benefit a wealthy corporate.
Remember the global economic crash of 2008 when American banks deliberately lent mortgages to folks they very well knew couldn’t repay? Ooh! The ecstasy of home ownership
Of course we do… It’s the reason we’re in the shit we are now. Despite us bailing banks out with our taxes and suffering two decades of sub-standard public services through austerity policies.
One of Bemmy Greens’ development mortgage lenders, ‘Shawbrooks’ has again been slammed by the Financial Conduct Authority for lacklustre scrutiny on their terms for loans to the self-employed. For, you guessed it… home ownership!
These crooks were exposed in the last ‘Bristolian’ as fraudsters to the tune of at least £100 million.
Is there no end to the tenacity of these city council sanctioned developers?
The city’s business press got all hot in early November over the announcement of a new Managing Director for Bristol Waste. Step forward “Rubbish” Richard Williams from, er, Aldi.
Williams cheerfully jotted down for the copy and pasters of the city’s press that he would be “driving innovation in the sector” and that he wanted “to enhance Bristol Waste Company’s reputation as an industry leader.”
Shame, then, that by the end of the month the press was announcing, ‘Bristol Waste fraud probe concludes with five people referred to Crown Prosecution Service’.
Currently Bristol Waste are an industry leader in fraudulent conduct then.
We look forward to Rubbish Richard further enhancing that.
Desperate times at the top of Bristol City Council.
A recent question to Full Council from a member of the public – ‘The Chair’s confidence in the work of the Monitoring Officer’ – was unceremoniously banned by, er, “Dumpty” Tim O’Gara, the Monitoring Officer!
Dumpty Tim claimed the question was ‘offensive’. Although from where we’re sitting it looks more like the chair, “Tory” Tony Dyer, didn’t fancy having to tell the truth to the public.
Which is that his legal brains Dumpty Tim is obviously a useless lying bent incompetent that it’s impossible to publicly state you have any confidence in.
IT AIN’T HAPPENING! WORKING CLASS BARTON HILL KICKS MIDDLE CLASS GREEN ARSE AS DERANGED SCHEME IS HALTED BY PROTESTORS
‘CORRUPT CESSPIT’
In a packed field, the best question to Full Council in December came from Jamie Bolley.
He asked for a breakdown of EBLN costs to be published “so the public can be reassured that the council isn’t the corrupt cesspit that it is appearing to be!”
The council’s expensive PR team aren’t working are they?
The gift that keeps on giving
Posted on Facebook in December:
“Last night I had to call an ambulance for my husband. I thought he was having a stroke. The ambulance didn’t know how to get from Salisbury Street back to the main road and had to double back twice due to road closures and parked cars. They only got to hospital before me in the car because they were on blues and twos. I left after them. The ambulance reported that it’s not the first time they’ve been delayed. Someone is going to die if this crazy scheme doesn’t stop.”
FAKE CONSULTATION
The wheels have come off claims by Bristol City Council officers that their public consultation for the EBLN was some sort of top quality engagement process.
Transport Committee Chair “Dick” Ed Plowden has had to admit, after being asked publicly, that one of the council’s community group consultees – The Barton Hill Disabilities Group – was entirely fictitious. Apparently invented by dodgy transport officers to tick some boxes.
Lo and Behold! One of the main groups now objecting to the EBLN are disabled people struggling to get out of their homes and around their own neighbourhood.
Who would have ever guessed?
LAWFARE?
Council officers thought they were on to a big winner on the streets of Barton Hill back in January.
They requested the coppers remove local anti-EBLN protestors from the road for ‘obstructing the highway’ and preventing council contractors installing their liveable neighbourhood street furniture crap.
“Er,” came the response from Avon and Somerset’s finest, “they aren’t ‘obstructing the highway’ because the council has closed the road to carry out its works. Protestors are doing nothing illegal. They can’t obstruct a closed highway.”
Ain’t the law a bitch?
ONE RULE FOR US: ROAD BLOCKS
Green Windmill Councillor, Lisa Stone, is demanding that Hereford Street in her ward is made two-way again after being turned into a one way street as part of the Bedminster Green regeneration shitshow.
She also complains that the Hereford Road one-way scheme was implemented after plans were drawn up after a consultation which only mentioned changes to Whitehouse Road and Whitehouse Lane.
Shame Councillor Stone and her Green colleagues remain silent on the concerns of residents suffering in the East Bristol Liveable neighbourhood where numerous roads have been blocked and made one-way after poor quality consultation with residents.
Congratulations to Lib Dem Councillor Andrew Brown, the former chair of Bristol City Council’s Audit Committee, on his promotion. He’s now Chair of the Economy and Skills Policy Committee at the council.
When asked by a member of the public at one of his final Audit Committee meetings to name Nolan’s Seven Principles of Public Life, he managed three.
Just the man to be in charge of the city’s economy then.
The BBC excelled themselves recently as slave-trade apologists when the panel of ‘Politics Live’ on BBC 2 collectively cut off and chastised a Colston Four defendant when they had the gall to suggest that Bristol City Council decision-making was dominated by a cabal of the unelected, super-rich and prejudiced descendants of slave-traders.
It seems that the Merchant Venturer mafia are more influential nationally than we may have imagined. Whoever we elect Washington calls the shots. Strange days indeed.
