Bristol 24/7’s new deputy editor from London is shaping up to be quite the entertainer. Seun “Scoop” Matiluko kicked off her career in Bristol with an exciting three hour book promo interview with the Reverend Rees.
Much of Matiluko’s scribblings were a lengthy repetition of the Reverend’s neo-Dickensian back story, which we’ve all heard before. However, she also briefly unexplains the Reverend’s eight-year run-in with “Twitter trolls” and local reporters. “This is what we end up going back-and-forth about for the majority of our chat,” she says.
Neutrally calling local Twitter users “keyboard warriors”, Seun says, “some describe [Rees] as a career politician or self-promoter,” without bothering with any of the detail unearthed on Twitter about Rees’s administration over the last eight years.
On local reporters, Seun helpfully explains, “some of the local reporting on Marvin’s tenure could very much be described as racist.”
Unfortunately she doesn’t bother to very much identify what reporting and we are very much left with an impression that any journalist in the city, including Seun’s subordinates at 24/7, could very much be racist.
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?
“Where funding is granted and where it is not, is not directly comparable”?
Please find attached statement from Youth Moves regarding the Youth Zone: All The Wrong Moves Article which I have been asked to forward to you. [signed by the admin manager]
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.
The welcoming architecture of Trinity Road Police Station
Passing by the piles of rubble that were once Trinity Road police station in east Bristol the other day took me back to some nightmares of the 1980s. Opened in 1979, the station was built in with riot in mind or as one Bristolian described it:
Is this the barracks of some continental-style gendarmerie, which takes to the streets only in armoured cars and with plenty of truncheons, riot shields and tear gas? Are we looking at the headquarters of some Soviet bloc secret police, with its interrogation rooms and execution cellars? No, this inscrutable, windowless, doorless, inward-turned building is the new Trinity Road Police Station, put up at the end of the 1970s for the greater convenience of our increasingly deskbound, paperwork-ridden policemen …or “police officers” as they like us to say now. Somehow this building is the perfect expression of modern policing, with its high-powered pursuit cars, speed cameras, shapeless bulky uniforms, hi-vis jackets and Heckler & Koch semi-automatic submachine guns.
In April 1980, Trinity was where the battered Avon and Somerset police officers retreated and regrouped after being chased out of St Pauls after their overpoliced and disastrous raid on the Black and White Café. Over the following years the station began to develop a dark reputation for weird, ritualised violence against those who ended up in its cells.
In 1986 after the bombing of Libya by the US Airforce a mate of mine went out to graffiti against the escalation of what looked like a coming war. He was nicked in the Bear Pit and taken to Trinity where he was banged in a cell overnight. After refusing to give his finger prints (which had been a right in those days for minor offences) a bunch of cops came into the cell, grabbed him and began singing a song whilst an older, grey-haired officer used him as a punch bag.
The senior cop was no fool, never hitting him in the face but hitting his body ‘til it was black and blue. My mate still refused to give his prints, so they dragged him out using some keys to smash his finger nails as he desperately held on to the cell door frame. By this stage he had enough, gave his prints, was released without charge the next day, and staggered home.
You might say it was a one off? A few years later, one evening another mate who I played football with was walking back from the pub along Stapleton Road when he was kerb crawled by a police car. After refusing to stop, saying he was on his way home, the two cops grabbed him and in the scuffle that followed he kicked the car door shut. This was enough for them to nick him, and he was soon in a cell at Trinity. That night, once again a load of cops came in to the cell, held him and sang a song whilst a senior officer beat his body black and blue. He was released without charge the next day.
The experiences of what happened to my mates soon got around. Many of us knew that Trinity was the last place you wanted to be taken if you were nicked. Far better to be in Bridewell, where at least there were senior cops who might not want beatings of prisoners (or worse) on their hands.
On Saturday 10 July 1994, Mark Harris a 31-year-old black man from Cardiff, was arrested for ‘suspected cheque book theft’ at 8.30pm and taken to Trinity Road police station. Three hours later he was found unconscious on the floor of his cell and rushed to the BRI where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
The results of a postmortem were not released to the public and a coroner’s inquest found an ‘open verdict’, meaning that jury confirmed the death is suspicious but could not find a cause. The suggestion was that Harris had hanged himself.
In 1995 there were protests outside Trinity Road led by Harris’s family, but like almost all deaths in police custody the killer cops were never brought to justice. I like to think that the only good thing to come out of the death of Harris is that it might have brought the ritualised beatings at Trinity Road police station to an end…but who knows?
So goodbye and good riddance to Trinity Road police station, and its dark history.
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?
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.
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.
