Category Archives: The BRISTOLIAN Says
ISSUE 57: ON THE STREETS NOW!
WE’RE HERE!
On the streets next week …
All the news that’s unfit to print!
SLEEPWALKING INTO TOTALITARIANISM
While MPs and the media wring their hands and weep over a stabbed tory, it was not lost on us that during the same week it was reported in The Guardian that “[a] University of York study found that there had been 57,550 deaths due to austerity in the four years following 2010.”
This is slightly less than the British Medical Journal reported in 2017. They linked an extra 120,00 extra deaths to austerity cuts. These are not the only studies and the figures differ slightly but they all show a lot of deaths of the poor and ill.
This MP, who everybody said was a good bloke and cared deeply for his constituents, voted time and time again for cuts to welfare and services. But there’s hardly a word in the mainstream press about any deaths due to this. Not a single crocodile tear was shed in Parliament. No one minute silence for any human being lost to their families early due to decisions in Parliament.
What this one death means, at the hands of a lone nutter, is more security measures and less opportunity to engage directly with your MP. Not that that achieves much anyway.
The eagle-eyed might have noticed that the Tories are also trying to curtail our rights to judicial review. Even David Davies – remember that old twat? – calls it “an assault on the legal system” and “an attempt to avoid accountability”. But why the need to hold our leaders to account?
Well, deaths from austerity might be one reason. Another is that the Tories have just voted not to stop pumping raw sewage into our rivers. Apparently, it’s too expensive for the poor companies in charge of our water supplies who have already paid out billions in dividends to wealthy shareholders.
This vote came after our new-found freedoms thanks to BREXIT and the end of European environmental protections. Now we are free to swim and fish in our own shite. Not that we could have known because the government are refusing to allow access and scrutiny of any legal advice relating to BREXIT.
How has BREXIT gone so far? We have Northern Ireland, labour shortages, empty shelves, increase in prices, businesses going bust and disputes about fishing. We also have the £350m per week for the NHS but the Tories forgot to tell us that we would be paying that with National Insurance increases, which hits the low-waged worse. So that’s alright then.
And who needs scrutiny over the government’s response to COVID, the worse pandemic in living memory? That all started with the lack of PPE in care homes and the overstretched NHS releasing COVID positive patients into care homes.
The contract to oversee test and trace was given to Dildo Harding. The app did not work. They did not employ enough tracers but did spend £22 billion on consultants. Some racking up more than £6k a day, while Dildo Harding didn’t do too bad in her pocket either. I wonder how many of these twats vote Tory? In the meantime we have the highest death rate per head in Europe.
All through the pandemic the Tories handed their mates and donors contracts for millions of public money. Mainly to do stuff that they couldn’t do while ignoring the underfunded NHS who had the skills and resources to complete the tasks the private sector fatcats couldn’t.
Like testing. We have all heard about the 43,000 wrong results given for PCR tests in the South West. But then we are told that this has nothing to do with the sudden surge in cases. Really?
Who suffers? Us. Again. If they bring back a lockdown, it will not affect those in their country piles, fancy townhouses and gated communities. It will be us, in our tower blocks, terraced houses and apartments with a lack of living space. All watched over by state sponsored muggers, better known as the old bill, trotting about giving out fines.
There’ll be no chance of public scrutiny and don’t think public protest will be welcomed. Instead, the Crime and Policing Bill is curtailing your rights to peaceful protest. Not that the old bill ever lets you have a peaceful protest. They wade in as soon as it’s dark.
Like the recent Kill the Bill protests in Bristol. Remember how cops claimed to the press that they were provoked and injured by the violent protesters? Then later they had to admit that there were no significant injuries among the coppers on duty that night? A fact which received considerably less press.
Although the press did manage lots of outrage against anyone caught up in the police attack. Some have received serious prison time, including two women, who were kettled and needed a piss. Nine months each. Needless to say they were not granted Legal Aid and, like most working class people now, they had to defend themselves in court against a criminal charge.
It’s all a right mess and we are the victims. At the beginning of COVID, a leaked after dinner speech by a chinless Tory spoke of “useless eaters” in the care homes. They mean you and your family.
Is it enough yet?
SMART CITY WATCH
On September 12 the Reverend Rees launched the city’s Smart
City Strategy at the ‘Bristol – Sweden Future Cities Summit’. This five-year
strategy, “sets out how Bristol City Council will support Bristol’s smart
city journey” and, “aims to ensure smart city projects will provide
opportunities to more people and communities to assist in the city’s inclusive
growth and help towards solutions to issues such as public safety, traffic
congestion, energy poverty and health and social care”. But what is a
‘Smart City’ and what are ‘smart city projects’ and why do we need them?
When you see the word ‘smart’ prefixing an object it means one thing. Deploying
the internet – originally devised by the US military as a weapon – to collect
as much behavioural data about the ‘Smart’ device owner as possible so that the
data can be used to predict, suggest and, increasingly, control the user’s
actions. Often through ‘nudging’ victims into better corporate citizenship if
not outright threatening them with extra-judicial sanctions.
It began with the smart phone. A mini computer in your pocket beaming detailed
behavioural data about your life back to unaccountable tech firms and their
government and corporate partners. This is the ‘big data’ you hear about or
what Google call ‘data exhaust’ as if it’s a harmless waste product without
value. If you’ve got one of these phones, then you’re likely to be providing
real time information to unaccountable corporations about where you are and
what you are doing. And, rest assured, this information is being stored and
analysed by tech companies, the government, security services and various
corporate third parties.
The smart phone has been so successful at collecting your data and making tech
corporations money through the ruthless competitive dynamic unleashed by big
data that there’s a huge economic imperative to produce more ‘smart’ products
to collect more data about you and your family. Silicon Valley has given this
all out assault on your life and privacy a cuddly name, ‘The Internet of
Things’.
Cars, homes, public services, exercise aids, finance, shopping, health products, utilities, white goods and much more are all in the firing line for a ‘Smart’ makeover. Google even owns the tech to know what’s in your smart fridge. (Imagine visiting your GP and being told you have been struck off because you had too many pies in your fridge contrary to your ‘Smart Health Agreement’?)
However, to collect this huge amount of behavioural data from the digital crap being foisted on us, you need a ‘Smart City’ infrastructure. A dense mesh of 5G transmitters and receivers throughout the city that can upload and manage the huge amounts of real time behavioural data the ‘Smart City’ prophets require for their big data society.
This is sold to you as “innovation” that will create “jobs and sustainable growth” while delivering personal benefits such as faster internet speeds to download a movie to your handheld screen or the quicker uploading of holiday photos for gran.
Don’t be fooled. The internet is a weapon and the smart city aims it at you.
COMING THIS AUTUMN: SMART CITY WATCH
(We might even have finished drawing the logo by then)
“ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE”
The quote above was used to condemn
the victims of Josef Stalin in the 1930s show trials, recently given a new
lease of life by US President Donald Trump in reference to Julian Assange,
independent journalist of international repute and founder of WikiLeaks.
As the South-West’s lone voice of bold, independent and uncompromising
journalism, The BRISTOLIAN here makes a public editorial statement of SOLIDARITY with fellow journalist JULIAN ASSANGE, who, after having his ASYLUM at the Ecuadorian Embassy REVOKED in a CLEAR, UNPRECEDENTED BREACH
of international law, is now being held in 23HR
PER DAY SOLITARY confinement in Belmarsh Prison under an absurdly DRACONIAN interpretation of bail law.
Refused LEGITIMATE ACCESS to his
defence lawyers, solely FOR DOING HIS
JOB AS A JOURNALIST, Assange is furiously fighting extradition to face a SECRET ‘grand jury’ court in the USA,
where a potential sentence of 175 YEARS
for alleged ‘espionage’ awaits him.
Assange has been consistently hounded, smeared and abused in the mainstream
media, simply because his organisation broke the TRUE STORY OF US WAR CRIMES COMMITTED IN IRAQ IN 2007. The Guardian and the New York Times at the time made lots of
publicity (and money) from assisting his revelations. Yet both the “LIBERAL” AND CONSERVATIVE voices of
mainstream media opinion have since fused into ONE SINGLE CACOPHONY OF GRUNTING PIG-HUMANS straight out of George
Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM.
Both Assange and CHELSEA MANNING
(his heroic, principled source for exposing the 2007 mass murders) have been
alternatively IGNORED, CONDEMNED, RIDICULED or DISMISSED in
the mainstream press, Manning’s Trans-status notwithstanding (normally a
favourite cause in the identity-politics-focused Guardian – but oddly NOT in relation to THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FOR PRESS FREEDOM TODAY).
The
BRISTOLIAN therefore exhorts its readership to support and show full
solidarity with Julian and Chelsea. For if they can come for Assange and
Manning in such a way and get away with it, then ONE DAY THEY WILL COME FOR US ALL.
* The latest news from WikiLeaks,
suppressed by the mainstream media, is that Assange has fallen seriously ill
and is in Belmarsh Prison Hospital, thanks to his 7 year confinement in one
room with no access to medical attention. We say that he should be RELEASED forthwith, and allowed to
recover fully from his illness and ordeal WITHOUT
FURTHER HARASSMENT OR PERSECUTION.
YELLOW VEST LAUNCHES RACIST/SEXIST ATTACK ON DEPUTY-MAYOR SOCK
By Lucy Balderdash, recently reassigned to the BBC (stop press)
Following on from the (alleged, ed.) persecution of Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees last weekend by a group of ‘disgusting anarchists’ and covered by The Guardian, the BBC can reveal that his deputy Asher Craig’s socks (are you sure? ed.) were brutally attacked by a yellow vest left on a wall outside the upstanding citizen’s home.
Bristol Deputy Mayor Asher Craig takes up the story: “I came out of my home on the very same morning as Marvin was savagely told to dye wool,” she explained breathlessly, “to find my socks engaged in a fight to the death with a racist/sexist yellow vest that had been lying on my wall in wait for me to come outside.”
“Luckily my socks got there first and overpowered the terrorist garment before I set foot outside. I hope my socks get an OBE for their bravery – one of them sustained severe dye damage and has some pulled threads that it sustained in the battle (so was this a sox-attack? ed.).”
The police are currently investigating links to the ‘Bob The Builder’ cartoon character, and any sexist/racist thought crimes regarding Asher Craig that he may have (are you quite sure Bob is a he, Lucy? ‘He’ may identify as a woman, ed.).
Owners of this white supremacist cartoon character in toy or video format are advised to come forward and surrender it to New Bridewell police station for immediate interrogation, or face the consequences.
(Err, could this story not arise out of a Grauniadesque typo in the headline, Lucy? ed.)
BRISTOL HIPSTER MAKES MAYOR GAFF-ITTI ERROR
By Lucy Balderdash reporting for The Guardian
The city of Bristol was in shock last weekend after Bristol Mayor, The Reverend Marvin Rees, discovered the shocking words MARVIN MUST *censored* written on the road in front of his house. But in a dramatic new development yesterday, the CID arrested Bristol ‘artisan dyer’ Marmafluke Twatt for what appears to be a small business self-publicity stunt gone horribly wrong.
The Very Rev. Rees and his trusty curate Asher Craig were quick to point the blame at ‘a small group’ of ‘disgusting anarchists’ occupying The Bearpit roundabout in the city centre and providing help for Bristol’s legions of homeless, accusing these heartless ragamuffins of making a ‘sickening racist attack’ on The Mayor.
“It’s another attack on me,” said The Reverend from the safety of his office, accompanied by a (cost unknown) outsourced violinist in the corner. “Just like what happened in Poland! Yet another hate crime against my good name, committed by those domestic extremists of BHAM and The Bristolian”.
When asked why he thought the attack might be racist, the defensive mayor-priest responded, ‘Well… it’s obvious! I’m black… er, aren’t I?’ At this, The Reverend looked to his deputy for confirmation, who quickly nodded in agreement. ‘And they’re white,’ she added with emphasis.
PUBLICITY RUNT
However, after exhausting their hit-list of disgusting anarchists to no avail, the CID got a tip-off that led them to an artisan clothier’s workshop in Snowflake Crescent, Montpelier, where the suspect quickly confessed. It turned out that the Reverend Rees had been the target of a poorly-conceived publicity drive by ‘artisan clothier’ Marmafluke Twatt of Dyeing 2 Please U plc, who hoped to get The Mayor’s attention and a subsidy from his overflowing slush fund for ‘Bristol Arts and Crafts’.
‘It was all a terrible mistake,’ said a manicure-bearded and tearful Twatt from his police cell yesterday. ‘I hit on this innovative, daring idea to promote myself and hired a spray paint can-armed prole from Hartcliffe at the minimum wage, but sadly didn’t believe him when he told me he was dyslexic and couldn’t spell the word “Dye”. Hence he painted an eye after MARVIN MUST and the letter D, and this dreadful misunderstanding all stems from there. I’ve never ever been a racist, please believe me, and I’m innocent!’
‘No toleration will be tolerated in multi-cultural Bristol for disgusting anarchist hate-rape-crime-trolls against minorities or radicalised anti-Semitic domestic extremist narco-gang people-trafficker economic migrant members in collusion with far-right racist, xenophobic, sexist, anti… (cont. p. 96),’ commented Asher Craig afterwards from the Mayoral pulpit.
Comrade Joe Stalin was unavailable for comment.