MARVIN MEETS HIS PUBLIC
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Category Archives: Culture Vulture
THE BRISTOLIAN PRESENTS … A TROUBLEMAKERS CHRISTMAS BASH
Thursday 21 December, Swan With Two Necks, 8 ’til late with Moshi playing Ska.
ALL WELCOME UNLESS YOU’RE NOT.
LIBRARIES GIVE US POWER
So Rees and Labour are wrecking them.
Here’s what the unions told a recent cabinet meeting:
“Printed newspapers and magazines were cut in all libraries in October 2022; a vacancy freeze has been in operation since August 2022 with no sign of an end.
“Currently there are 35+ vacancies across the city. The loss of hours amounts to 554.5 hours a week across the city.
“The Library service has also had five posts deleted, without any formal process or discussion with unions. Three of these posts are at the Central Library.
“These five posts amount to a loss of 137.5 more hours on top of the vacancy hours listed above. Total hours lost is therefore 592 hours a week. Due to staff shortages the standard of delivery is compromised. This is a disservice to the citizens of Bristol.
“These shortages have led to unplanned closures every day somewhere in the city since the summer.
“The lack of recruitment has also meant flexible working requests are being denied. This includes refusal of flexible retirement. The book/materials fund has been cut twice within a year and no new books have been bought since August 2022. It is unclear what the situation will be like in April 2023.”
Exactly how much does the Labour Party hate our libraries?
THE REVEREND FILLS HIS BOOTS
A gushing and not altogether clear media release arrives. From the pen of the massively overspent Bristol Beacon (formerly the Colsunall. Ed) we’re first treated to some introductory corporate word salad about “core values” and “sustainability, diversity and creativity” before the main event. An excitable announcement from the Beacon’s useless management, who have managed to spend £104m on a £54m concert hall refurb project that’s resulted in the venue being valued at, er, zero.
The big news from this whacko state funded culture gang is that their worthless venue is going into a “corporate partnership” with local TV production firm, Plimsoll Productions. Plimsoll will produce two videos to showcase and “raise awareness of the work done by Bristol Beacon” and they will collaborate with Bristol Beacon on a number of creative projects in local communities.
What this work might consist of isn’t made very clear. Neither is it very clear how much we’re forking out via the Beacon for Plimsoll’s “expertise in video production and storytelling”. And neither have the Beacon managed to tell us that one of the non-executive directors of Plimsoll Productions is the Reverend Rees. The man signing the £100m cheque for the 1000 seat venue’s inane refurb!
How nice that the Reverend has managed to get himself a paying gig out his own overspent crackpot culture project. No conflict of interest there at all.
BEA-CON?
The Reverend’ Rees’s not just an idiot. He’s an innumerate idiot. His amazing plan to spend over £100m on an upmarket concert venue for the city’s snooty culture set to hang around air kissing each other and talking pretentious bollocks in might not be going to plan.
In the council’s Statement of Accounts for last year that are just about to be signed off by our confused councillors, the Bristol Beacon is currently valued by the council’s external auditors at, er, ZERO.
What a great investment.
AND THE BANDS PLAY ON
Colston Hall: no cuts
So there’s less money to buy furniture for BATTERED MUMS lucky enough to get an unfurnished shell of a home off the council; a fifth of the CHILDREN’S CENTRES designed to support our city’s most vulnerable kids will be closed down and LOCAL COUNCIL OFFICES ideal for the elderly, infirm and isolated to easily access public services from will shut their doors but fans of mainstream music and comedy can, at least, rejoice.
Because the Rev Rees, with his laser-like focus on fairness and equality, has agreed to continue handing over £1m a year for the next three years to the BRISTOL MUSIC TRUST who run the Colston Hall. Phew! Guess we’ve got to keep those FAT FEES rolling in for millionaire musicians and the rolling roster of state-subsidised BBC/Oxbridge touring comedians haven’t we?
Meanwhile those all-important CREATIVES doing all that vital and well-paid marketing work for the entertainment industry, directly subsidised by the state, can’t possibly be expected to attend a JOB CENTRE when there’s a perfectly adequate pool of undervalued underpaid childcare professionals available for the task.
Priorities eh, Reverend?
HAPPY? CLAP ALONG IF YOU ARE A MUM WITHOUT A ROOF …
No sign of public sector cuts hitting the ridiculous HAPPY CITY organisation or their new-found creative industry friends at the WATERSHED. The organisations, both receiving healthy financial support from the council tax payer for their marginal activities, ran a course in January especially for the boss class called ‘Plotting a Happier Year Ahead’.
The course, promoting UTTER DRIVEL like ‘mindfulness in work’; ‘Embedding the 5 Ways of Wellbeing’; ‘Wellness programmes’ and ‘Leaveism’, delivered PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC JUNK for stupid well-heeled bosses to bamboozle underpaid, overworked staff with. Many, no doubt, suffering at the sharp end of the collapse in real wages, the housing crisis, the country’s ongoing multiple economic disasters and its public service failures.
Is this really how we should be spending PUBLIC MONEY and resources when the council claim they’re so skint they’re cutting our LOCAL CRISIS AND PREVENTION FUND by 55% or over £1m? This fund was there to buy food or pay utility bills for the most desperate and vulnerable in the city. It might have also helped domestic violence survivors setting up home with NOTHING after escaping an abusive relationship.
What is the Rev Rees’s planning to do for these people instead of giving out small sums of money for essential items? Maybe he’ll get Happy City and a few self-styled creatives paid on the rates to provide battered mums with some ‘wellbeing perks and rewards’ at the Watershed?
FILM FLAM
A dull photo-op last month of old men in suits vacantly sat around in an open plan office while the Reverend Rees waffled aimlessly to journalists about homelessness signalled the launch of the Reverend’s big idea – THE CITY OFFICE.
The ‘BIG IDEA’ is to get bosses from business, public services and the voluntary sector together to solve the city’s problems. So 75 bosses gathered at the Counts Louse on 29 September to have their photo taken in front of the local press while pretending to listen attentively to the The Reverend as he tried to convince us all that this was all terribly exciting and the whole world was watching and waiting on his initiative with baited breath.
The City Office, itself, we were told, would be focusing on homelessness and rough sleeping to start with. However, the noticeable absence of any CASH TO SPLASH or even any new policy to launch meant we had to settle for a PR RELAUNCH of the ‘Bristol Street Aware’ campaign. An initiative started by corporate retailers in Broadmead last year to clear rough sleepers off their doorsteps by ‘signposting’ them into unpopular homeless hostels run by the charity St Mungos.
This lack of money and ideas for the homeless starkly contrasted with the Vicar’s decision five days later at his cabinet meeting to hand over £692k to a Southville-based consultancy firm to continue running the BOTTLE YARD FILM STUDIOS in Hengrove. This is the film studio that’s already receiving about £1m in public money every year according to the council’s published expenditure accounts. The studios appear especially popular with BBC producers looking for cheap, publicly subsidised deals.
The Reverend and his Cabinet decided to HAND OVER MORE PUBLIC MONEY – grabbed from a restructured loan deal relating to the shadowy Hengrove Park housing development – to the city’s creative industries despite this council owned film studio and its firm of consultants providing NO MEANINGFUL ACCOUNTS or BUSINESS PLAN to support their large financial demands on the public purse.
The Rev and his cabinet have therefore handed over money earmarked for one of the city’s most deprived areas on the basis of UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIMS by council bosses that this studio will make a £100k surplus next year and – an even more UNLIKELY CLAIM – that it is generating £16m for the city’s economy every year.
Naturally The Reverend’s house-trained Cabinet agreed to this nonsense with no questions asked. HRH Helen of Holland, the cabinet member responsible, gushed that the EVIDENCE-FREE PIFFLE supplied by senior council bosses was “A GOOD NEWS REPORT“. While Deputy Mayor Estella “Tinkerbell” Tinknell only seemed bothered about “developing our media profile as a VIBRANT FILM AND MEDIA CITY“. Presumably regardless of the cost or the fact most of us couldn’t give a toss about “media cities,” whatever they are?
Moreover, the true cost of the council’s latest publicly funded creative industries VANITY PROJECT was carefully hidden by the Rev’s senior bosses who neglected to explain properly that a further £0.6m is also required to buy the studio’s FREEHOLD. That’s a total of £1.3m being poured in then. The same senior bosses also forgot to explain if there’s any RISK attached to their expenditure, projected to gain a paltry income of £100k a year from the studios. Is this the world’s first risk-free business?
The average whelk stall wouldn’t be run like this, let alone a MAJOR PUBLICLY FUNDED PROJECT. But who cares if we’re keeping creative industries bigwigs in the style to which they’ve become accustomed and we’re “developing our media profile as a vibrant film and media city”?
Meanwhile, as the Vicar shovels our cash into creative industries vanity projects, the homeless can make do with a grotty little PR relaunch and photo op can’t they
ART FOR AUSTERITY’S SAKE
Having run his election campaign promising to do something about inequality in the city, Marvin “The Vicar” Rees has wasted no time in feathering the nests of the UNEQUAL in the city.
At the Cabinet meeting on 29 June The Vicar signed off spending of around £3.3m in a combination of grants and loans to the city’s “WORLD CLASS CULTURAL VENUES“.
This means more HANDOUTS to the Bristol Old Vic, the Colston Hall and the St George’s concert hall from our pockets. And it includes a cool £1.6m going straight into the pockets of CONSULTANTS to draw up designs for the refurbishment of the Colston Hall.
It also means that a small impenetrable CULTURAL CLIQUE will continue to coin it in at our expense as the luvvies don’t work for the minimum wage. Plus it’s a very neat little direct SUBSIDY to the consumer choices of Bristol West’s well-heeled middle classes who make up the overwhelming number of customers at these upmarket venues.
These HANDOUTS TO THE POSH came just weeks before The Vicar finally admitted that the council is going to have to make 1,000 REDUNDANCIES to balance the books. This is at a council, which still has services reeling from the 500 poorly executed redundancies they made in 2014 that didn’t save anything like the money claimed.
The word coming from long-suffering staff at the council is that this next round of cuts will DESTROY many of our public services as going concerns. They will simply not be able to cope. Already phones are unanswered; homeless families are unhoused; council houses lie empty flytipping is not collected. What will this next phase of this AUSTERITY MADNESS unleash?
But don’t worry, at least you’ll be able to see a crappy play at the Old Vic produced by a sensitive Oxbridge prat about the appalling ‘state of the nation’ (if you can afford it).
COMING SOON: The Rev Rees’s multi-million subsidies to the, er, film industry!
UNIONS DEMAND MARV BACKS THE BRISTOLIAN!
Another candidate supporting vibrant news reporting
The “TRADE UNION VISION FOR BRISTOL” sounds like one of the most boring documents ever. Published by local unions to support Marvin “Luther” Rees in his effort to become mayor in May, it actually contains a few gems. Not least its call for Luther Rees to back The BRISTOLIAN!
“A DIVERSE AND STRONG MEDIA is essential for the lifeblood of Bristol. Local newspapers are under severe pressure and need the support of civic leaders,” thunder the union bureaucrats.
“We want a mayor who will: champion Bristol’s creative and cultural life; be an ambassador for Bristol’s arts and creative industries,” and … Wait for it … “support local media and a VIBRANT REPORTING OF NEWS and events”!
We’ll assume the cheque’s in the post then Marv …