Category Archives: Marvin Rees

‘LEFTY WOKE NONSENSE’?

Gissa job
The fourth most powerful person in the UK?

Obscure website, Powerful Media’s UK black powerlist for people of African or African Caribbean heritage raised a few eyebrows when released last autumn with the Reverend Rees in fourth place.

Neither Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, now Home Secretary, nor Tory leadership hopeful, Kemi Badenoch, Trade Secretary, appeared on the list despite, on the face of it, being quite powerful.

This has led some commentators to brand the whole fiasco “lefty woke nonsense”. Powerful Media responded by explaining they had inexplicably banned parliamentarians from being listed.

But not mayors too weak to get selected for a seat to become a parliamentarian?

PHOTO OP WATCH

Bris meadows (1)
  1. 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).
  2. 23 June 2023 Bristol Labour politicians had their photos taken at Yew Tree Farm insisting they would save an SNCI.
  3. 12 September 2023: Bristol Labour politicians had their photos taken at Blackswarth Road Wood at Crews Hole Road insisting they would save an SNCI.
  4. 30 November 2023: Bristol Labour politicians vote to develop South Bristol Crematorium next to Yew Tree Farm, an SNCI – no photos available.

NUTS CUTS

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The £20m of cuts announced by the Reverend Rees for next year mainly seem to confirm that he has now gone totally insane. Among the nutty highlights we’ve spotted so far:

  • An inexplicable £4m cut to the Adult Care budget will appear if HomeChoice prioritise people with adult social care needs on the housing register.
  • A proposal from an unnamed member of the Labour administration to cut trade union facility time by 75 per cent. That means union reps will have no time to represent staff directly affected by cuts from a Labour administration.
  • Lots more cuts are proposed by HRH Helen of Holland overseeing Adult Care. This is despite her failure to deliver £4m of the £6m cuts she proposed last year.
  • Transport guru, “Tweedle” Don Alexander, will attempt to increase council revenue by about £2.5m from Residents Parking Zones (RPZ) and car parking. Tweedle Don has lost about £5.4m in income from these so far this year.
  • Asher “The Slasher” Craig proposes charging a fee to parents who are contacted by her Education Welfare Service about their child’s school attendance. Will she discover parents are suddenly uncontactable?
  • Finance kingpin, Craig “Crapita” Cheney, officially the stupidest man in Bristol, is opening a rooftop bar at the M Shed to make £85k a year.
  • Asher the Slasher is supporting young people by slashing youth services budgets by £400k.
  • Government money for Public Health will be spent on wages for the Reverend’s evangelical pals in his City Office instead. He will also pass a begging bowl around ‘external partners’ to see if they’re up for funding an office full of evangelical loonies at the Counts Louse.
  • Cabinet Pied Piper Nicola “La La” Beech is to deliver pest control in “different ways”.

We’ll let you know as we find more of these inanities over the coming months.

ROCKERFELLER’S TERROR ERROR

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A thick American in Bristol

Before the Reverend’s empty-headed State of City effort got underway, the event was interrupted by protestors against forced animal swim tests at the University.

Up front at the time was tedious know-all and obscure historian of the Renaissance, Evelyn “Rockerfeller” Welch, the university’s vice-chancellor, imported from the US to sell us their right wing bollocks.

“It’s not enough to have a banner. You need to make interventions that make lives better,” shrieked the snooty old fool at protestors as they were roughly ejected by her hired thugs.

Er, maybe this alleged expert historian should check out some local history before publicly sounding off? In 1989, when animal rights protestors decided on an intervention beyond waving banners, they tried to blow up the university’s Senate House!

Is Evelyn promoting terrorism?

THE STATE OF IT

Gissa job

October: and another hectoring ‘State of the City’ lecture delivered from the University of Bristol’s snooty Wills Memorial Building shithouse by the Reverend Rees as he finally nears that door marked ‘for god’s sake go’.

Nothing much new worth reporting really. Relentless boasting; tedious homilies on ‘leadership’; ill-disguised paranoid and embittered ranting at the latest set of perceived enemies; the ego-inflated right wing economic ramblings we’ve suffered for over seven years now; narcissistic claims about his ‘global leadership’ role and a lecture to the rest of the city’s politicians about his ‘corporate concrete will cure climate change’ approach.

He will not be missed by many.

PROGRESSIVELY WORSE

Full speed ahead with no one left behind in Bristol’s ‘just transition’ to Net Zero!

Air source heat pump
Air source heat pump: free to a wealthy home!

The council’s applied for a grant of £3.3m to install 200 on trend air source heat pumps in leafy Westbury-on-Trym. A subsidy of £16,500 per Tory household!

Why this pilot has to be run in one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs isn’t very well explained by Labour’s dim Climate Change head honcho Kye “The” Dudd or his increasingly unstable boss, the Reverend.

Instead Rees explained away his loopy heating subsidy to the wealthy by telling bored councillors he was “going to be at the US embassy tomorrow to speak about a just transition”. Guess that’s one way to keep us all warm next winter.

The Greens, potentially the largest party in Bristol after next year’s elections, were also getting wet in the pants at news of Net Zero handouts to the wealthy.

West Bristol’s ridiculous national Green Party leader, Carla “Posh Princess” Denyer gushed that the scheme was a “fabulous solution”.

What the fuck’s wrong with these people?

WASTED?

bristol waste

What happened to Bristol Waste managing director Tony “I Am The” Lawless and his sidekick, finance director Adam “Dumb” Henshaw? Why did both suddenly quit on July 18 and disappear without working their notice?

The story goes that last March the rubbish bosses got their business plan signed off and approved by council boss Stephen “Preening” Peacock and the Reverend Rees. That business plan was based on holding a pretty strong line on pay in order to keep another of the council’s struggling businesses solvent. 

So, when the unions decided they needed a better pay rise they bypassed Bristol Waste altogether and went straight to the Reverend and his ex-union baron sideman “Slo” Kev Slocombe. The Reverend then instructed Bristol Waste (despite having no authority to do so) that they needed to make a better pay offer despite knowing full well they didn’t have the money. to pay for it.

Eventually Bristol Waste did make an improved offer. Not good enough to satisfy what the unions wanted but high enough to mean that it was double the amount of this year’s contract increase from the Reverend. Bristol Waste would now have to eat into their reserves and implement major cuts that formed no part of March’s business plan.

Soon after the pay hike announcement Lawless and Henshaw quit. Chris Holmes was quickly transferred over from Bristol Holding to take on the finance role, and a new interim MD was headhunted and appointed.

Last we heard Bristol Workplace (the recently outsourced cleaners and security from Bristol City Council) have already seen workloads substantially increased as the company attempts to deliver more for less. 

This month the new management will be launching a public consultation. Designed to be as boring as possible, one of its objectives will be to test out ideas that sound like they will be better for the environment but, in reality, will also save BWC lots of money. The preferred option being to go to three week rubbish collections rather than the two weeks currently in operation.

General word is that the Reverend doesn’t much care what the company does as long it doesn’t go bust before the end of his term in May 2024

CIL-LY GAMES

CIL

To that most boring of events, the council’s annual budget meeting. Where 70 councillors argue for hours over a few million quid of a £400m budget that gets passed largely unscrutinised.

Last year, the Green’s longwinded Redland Councillor Martin “Yoda” Fodor – “Ramble for hours at a tangent, I can” – spotted that there was £12.5m of CIL (Community Infrastructure Levy) funding from corporate developers sat there doing nothing.

So he popped in an amendment suggesting that the money be spent on improving parks and the city’s national laughing-stock public transport system. This was voted down by Labour who claimed the money was earmarked for projects such as: City Centre/Castle Park, Whitehouse Street, Frome Gateway, Green Infrastructure (inc tree planting & biodiversity improvements), City Region Sustainable Transport Strategy and Avon Flood Strategy.

At this year’s budget Yoda reappeared, he did, and popped in another amendment asking for £1m for parks and liveable neighbourhoods after he discovered there was £12.1m of CIL still sat there doing nothing. 

And Labour’s response? “The money’s earmarked for projects such as  City Centre/Castle Park, Whitehouse Street, Frome Gateway,blah, blah, blah.”

Yoda’s amendment got through this time but then the Reverend’s took five days “to think about it” and then rejected it!

What a joke.