The Reverend Rees told long-suffering journalists daft enough to attend his stillborn ‘CITY OFFICE’ launch last month that he planned to tackle “inequalities within leadership roles” by changing the people who are awarded the top jobs.
“This will mean having leaders from HARTCLIFFE and AVONMOUTH as well as Clifton”, he assured an audience invited and organised by his old, white, highly paid, Cambridge educated right hand man and personally appointed “leader”, council Chief Exec, Stephen “OAP” Hughes from, er, Birmingham.
Who thinks Hughes could even find Hartcliffe on a map?
The council’s Service Manager Energy, Mareike Schmidt who oversaw the Warm-Up Bristol BANKRUPTCY FIASCO, which left residents with half-finished building works on their homes last year, is apparently the South West’s Sustainable Energy Champion of the Year.
However that’s not stopped her finding entirely new ways to SCREW UP. A recent finance report to Cabinet explains:
“There is anticipated to be a shortfall in rechargeable income from the Housing Revenue Account and Trading for Schools in the Energy (utility) Purchase budget. This is due to the Energy price reduction in recent years being captured as a corporate saving without any corresponding reduction in income target for the energy service.”
In other words, another of Mareike’s department’s jobs is to buy gas, electricity, oil, and bio fuels for the council and other public sector bodies including schools in bulk and sell it on to them at a CHEAPER RATE.
Alas, when the price of energy DROPPED last year, eager pup Mareike was quick off the mark to record the savings and show her bosses how ‘efficient’ (and indispensable) she was. But, alas, she forgot to record that cheaper energy would also mean less income for her department as they would have to drop their prices.
The result? An inaccurate set of accounts presented to councillors for the 2016 -17 budget. That’s got to be worth another award surely?
The Reverend has a tasty destination in mind for his all-expenses spring jaunt
The Mayor’s PERSONAL OFFICE continues impress as they lead the way in savings at this time of austerity and cuts to vital public services.
In September, not only did the Reverend manage TWO TRIPS abroad – one to New York and one to Norway – to play at global mayors but he also returned home proposing to spend OUR MONEY on hosting the annual convening of the Global Parliament of Mayors – an enormous junket for mayors – here in Bristol next year at a minimum cost of £150k.
Other absolutely necessary expenditure emanating from his office in August included the purchase of 1,600 branded water bottles for over TWO GRAND, £448.00 of catering for people who can afford to buy their own lunch and £4,000 handed to an agency for a SINGLE translation.
He then popped off for some pre-Christmas junketing in Malaysia and China and says he’ll be visiting the notorious annual piss-up cum mass council land sell-off MIPIM in Cannes next year.
Good to see the Reverend leading from the front, eh?
The long and dull mayoral election campaign for 2020 briefly sparked into a bit of life at the end of January when the Lib Dems announced they would campaign in 2020 to SCRAP THE MAYORAL SYSTEM in Bristol.
The Lib Dems are yet to announce who their candidate will be but here at The BRISTOLIAN we think this has the sound of a very popular policy indeed. Will disgruntled and disgusted Bristolians sick to death of their underperforming and overpaid ‘city leaders’ and mayor deliver these clowns the ultimate KICK IN THE ELECTORALKNACKERS?
The news is especially bad for the Reverend Rees. He may not only FACE DEFEAT IN MAY 2020 after a miserable term in office promoting Tory policies but he also may be personally responsible for the REJECTION of the mayoral system altogether! What a humiliating – if deserved – legacy!
The Greens, too, running a long campaign fronted by DULL TECHNOCRAT, Sandy Bufton-Tufton (surely Hore-Ruthven? ed.), may also be disappointed at this news. Having tried to position themselves as the main challengers to Rees and Labour, they may now need to RETHINK THEIR CAMPAIGN quite radically.
The boring, technocratic campaign they envisaged with Bufton-Tufton endlessly bickering with Rees over MARGINAL ISSUES such as ‘social value tendering’, the best placement of cycle lanes in Bishopston and who is best able to get the buses to run on time by treating First boss, James Freeman, to lunch once a month, is DEAD IN THE WATER.
Instead the Greens will need to go BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD and devise some eye-catching policies for people to vote for. The Greens will also need to convince a cynical electorate that Bufton-Tufton isn’t another pillock interested in the foreign travel opportunities and photo-ops with his friends rather than running A COUNCIL FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL BRISTOLIANS.
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.
Remember when Mayor No More Ferguson flew to New York City in 2014 to deliver a speech via satellite link to gormless local climate protestors sat on College Green? The Bristolian got in lots of trouble at the time for calling out the marching morons of Bristol who went along with this farce.
Well, anything George can do the Reverend can do better. Because back in April the Reverend took a 9,000 mile business class round trip by plane to Vancouver to deliver a 14 minute lecture on, er, climate change! A lecture people in Bristol weren’t even able to hear until over a month later when the tedious lecture was finally uploaded for free to the internet.
This ridiculous little escapade created two tons of carbon dioxide per plane passenger. About the same amount of carbon dioxide that an average car would generate if driven for 7,000 miles. Rees later explained to the Nazi Post that the trip was worthwhile because he was shaping global thinking with, er, internet celeb Elon Musk!
When will it dawn on people that the best way to sort out the climate would be to put the vain, self-serving hypocrites of the political class against the wall?
It’s that time of year when we have to endure the laughable bullshit that is Bristol City Council’s Pay Policy. A wholly misleading yearly statement on high pay for the council’s useless boss class.
This year we’re invited to admire how the ratio of the lowest paid on a minimum wage to the highest paid, allegedly the Chief Exec (without including his generous pension contribution), has fallen to 8.93:1 from 9.26:1 last year. Conveniently below the council’s arbitrary target of 10:1.
However – as usual – the maths is faulty. A glance at last year’s Statement of Accounts reveals that the highest paid boss was Juliet Blackburn Consulting Ltd, Director of Adults Transformation, who trousered a cool £30,932 a month. Or £371,184 a year making a highest to lowest paid pay ratio of, er, 17.7:1.
Other lottery winners courtesy of our council tax include congenital idiot Nikki Beardmore, a Communication & Engagement Director, who had to struggle through the cost of living crisis on around £200k a year, and Alan Layton, Head of Financial Planning, who trousered £240k a year pro rata.
The Reverend’s increasingly fragile mental state was exposed again during a visit to Stapleton Road in February to stare at waste bins.
Accompanied by cabinet bozo Kye “The” Dudd, the local police team and local community representatives, it seems the Reverend hadn’t realised two of the Green councillors for the area had been invited too.
So he decided to start shouting at them, accusing them of spreading lies about him on social media, being backstabbers and moaning about the budget.
Exclusive report by The BRISTOLIAN on Horfield Prison, submitted by inside sources in-the-know including prisoners and prison staff
Readers may have heard recently about the current state of UK prisons? Or about how Germany refuses to extradite a wanted man to the UK because its ‘prisons do not meet acceptable standards’? Or you may have been unfortunate enough to have experienced Bristol’s own HMP shitshow yourself as staff, visitor or inmate.
There have been eight suicides and one murder in Horfield over the past year. Prisoners are incarcerated up to 22 hours a day, the majority squeezed two to a cell built for one.
Wings are run by drug gangs supplied daily by drones or throw-overs. Violence, arising from overcrowding, squalor and neglect of care and basic facilities, is a daily occurrence.
Governors are despised for being incompetent. Staff are demoralised, largely untrained with an extremely high turnover. ‘Trouble’ – not mundane assaults on addicts in debt by organised crime – is met with ‘extreme violence’ by ‘The Nationals’ (the screw national riot squad).
An August 2023 letter from the House of Commons Justice Committee to Tory Minister for Prisons and Probation, Damian ‘Himmler’ Hinds, states that both Bristol prisons (including Eastwood Park women’s prison) are among ‘the worst in the country’. And Himmler has done absolutely jack shit since then.
Sources have told us that recently three prisoners got up on HMP Horfield’s roof using the drainpipes. They stayed there until the National goons ended the protest with their favourite remedy – extreme violence. We were also told that many prisoners in the Segregation Wing are now on a ‘Dirty Protest’, where ‘it stinks to high heaven’.
The murder took place in a shared cell where one prisoner strangled another overnight. The victim’s absence was missed at roll call, and his body only discovered AFTER the murderer ‘got tooled up’ and injured another prisoner in the showers. Reflecting the abysmal level of prison care available, the culprit’s descent into psychosis went ‘unnoticed’.
The BRISTOLIAN demands that – at the very least – prisoners should have their full rights, and not have to endure torture fit for the Middle Ages. But this is not all. Prison is a BARBARIC, CRIMINAL institution of state violence AGAINST THE WORKING CLASS. It should be ABOLISHED.
We’d never tolerate such cruelties if HMP Horfield was a zoo. So how come we accept it for caging human beings?
Labour’s Southmead councillor and cabinet member for climate change stuff, working class man of the people, Kye “The” Dudd, has another shit idea in the pipeline that will dump on a working class community.
“With the Local Plan review, we’re looking at allocations in the Avonmouth area for wind turbines,” he blustered at the Nazi Post recently.
“Within our boundaries, that’s probably the best option. There are other options outside our boundaries, but obviously that’s not for us to decide.
Not strictly true. “Probably the best option” within Bristol is the Merchant Venturer-managed Downs, which have the best wind patterns in the city. How about the comfortably well-off posh of Clifton and Stoke Bishop lead on our climate emergency commitments for once and host a few wind turbines?
A direct challenge to the wealthy and influential of the city that great big pussy and bootlicker of the wealthy, The Dudd, is way too scared to pursue.
