Edward Colston: right wing mass murderer
Walter Ayles: left wing pacifist
Call Mark Parsons at Bristol Waste on 07584581243 or email Mark.Parsons@Bristolwastecompany.co.uk and demand that Colston’s statue is removed. We want equality!
News release: for immediate release
It has been brought to our attention that Bristol Waste Company has removed a
board from the exhibition in the Bearpit which was jointly organised by the Bearpit
Improvement Group in conjunction with the national charity Journey to Justice which
also hosted a major series of arts and history events in Bristol this October.
We understand that Bristol City Council ordered the board to be removed following a
complaint by Councillor Mark Weston (Henbury and Brentry), the leader of the
Conservative group on Bristol City Council.
We request the immediate reinstatement of the board and an apology from those
responsible for its summary removal.
We also request further information about the process that led BCC to order the
board to be removed without consultation with the Bearpit Improvement Group or Dr
Madge Dresser of UWE and the University of Bristol who jointly curated the
exhibition with the Group’s organisers.
The board in question is a piece of art celebrating the role of Walter Ayles in fighting
for social justice and in particular his role as a leading campaigner against the First
World War. Ayles was a Bristol councillor before the First World War and was sent to
prison for his opposition to it. Soon after his release he was elected MP for Bristol
North.
The information for the board was researched by Journey to Justice trustee and
Bristol Coordinator Madge Dresser (a Senior Research Fellow at UWE and Honorary
Professor of History at the University of Bristol) and by Colin Thomas author
of Slaughter No Remedy: The Life and Times of Walter Ayles, Bristol Conscientious
Objector. The board was created by artist Bo Lanyon who worked with the Creative
Youth Network to inspire their boards in the Bearpit.
For your information, Journey to Justice is a group of educators, youth, community,
human rights and faith organisations, artists, film makers, lawyers, musicians,
historians, curators and trade unionists. It aims to inspire and inform social
engagement through history and the arts. Its patrons include Dr Paul Stephenson,
one of the leaders of the Bristol Bus Boycott, who this week received a Daily Mirror
Pride of Britain Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in fighting racism and
intolerance.
This exhibition sought to celebrate some of the untold stories of Bristol’s past social
campaigners and should be seen as stimulating debate and interest in Bristol’s
distinctive history. Ayles has also been written about by other Bristol-linked
academics including Professor Emerita June Hannam of UWE and is featured in the
authoritative Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The removal of the board is a clear act of censorship by Bristol City Council that has
no place in an open and democratic society. It is ironic that it was taken down during
the same week that George Orwell’s statue was unveiled at the BBC in London with
the motto: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they
do not want to hear.”
In an unprecedented move, Bristol’s co-operatively owned indie newspaper, The Bristol Cable, has REMOVED an entirely accurate article from its website following COMPLAINTS from the Reverend Rees and his bent coterie of very shy high-earning council bosses.
The article, published YESTERDAY, drew attention to a the council’s Draft Statement of Accounts, originally highlighted by the Bristol News Facebook page last week, that the Reverend’s council was employing more people on salaries exceeding £50k a year than they were a year ago.
The Reverend failed to comment to the Cable yesterday but did tell a Full Council meeting last night that the salary figures in his Statement of Accounts were INACCURATE and MISLEADING because they included the redundancy payments received by departing bosses.
This seems UNLIKELY since the Rev’s statement doesn’t list the gross salaries and benefits of his highly paid managers but the general ‘Remuneration Band’ they fall within. A ‘Remuneration Band’ would not ordinarily include one-off redundancy payments.
And if it did, why aren’t the twenty-one high-earning bosses – who shared out £2.5MILLION between them in redundancy pay-offs last year – listed and named in the report as earning over £150k last year as the law requires?
Regardless of these facts, the Cable has pulled the article and replaced it with the following statement: ***PLEASE NOTE THIS ARTICLE IS SUBJECT TO A COMPLAINT AND UNDER REVIEW***
Why has this article been pulled? It’s based on figures published in June by the council that were signed off by their Audit Committee on 27 June. If the figures are wrong, it’s the council’s job to explain this and publicly correct them. There is absolutely NO PRECEDENT or GOOD REASON for The Cable to pull a whole article published in good faith quoting publicly available official figures. Especially when these figures are yet to be formally denied anywhere as inaccurate.
It’s also laughable that The Rev Rees has put out a call across the city for “ideas” to deal with his budget deficit. However, when an “idea” involving not paying his bosses such large sums of money for sod-all appears, he tries to ban it!
If Bristol City Council wishes to attempt to censor information that makes the mayor look like a powerless twerp, then that’s their affair. But why are the Bristol Cable making fools of themselves by being bullied into supporting the council in their efforts to censor the truth?
The Cable article, obtained from the web’s cache is published below:
331 employees are now paid an annual basic pay of between £50,000 and £124,000, compared to 216 people in the financial year of 2015/16.
At the same time as general public sector pay caps and cuts has battered the council, almost every band of executive salaries at the council has seen an increase in numbers in the past year. Of the 21 senior pay categories that changed over the year, 18 have seen increases in the number of staff receiving top salaries.
These figures include the £160,000 a year council chief executive Anna Klonowski. It also includes at least three other executives who have seen their pay packets swell over the year by around £7,000 each, taking them to well above £160,000 a year including pension contributions.
Under pressure for implementing drastic cuts, Mayor Marvin Rees, who was elected in May 2016 has challenged anti-cuts protesters to come up with solutions, rather than just criticise. Defending the council positions on cuts, Mr Rees has written: “If we do not make a saving in one area we have to make it in another area. The consequence of one person’s priority is the de-prioritisation of another person’s priority.”
Responding to this latest information, Tom Whittaker a spokesperson from Bristol People’s Assembly, a coalition of trade unions and activists, said: “Clearly there can be no justification for executive pay rises when services are being cut, when many of Bristol’s poorest residents are struggling to survive under the impact of austerity and when ordinary council workers are enduring a long pay freeze.”
Mayor Rees was asked what involvement he had in these decisions, and how it fitted with his priorities agenda. He did not respond to the request.
The figures come from the 2016/17 unaudited annual accounts published by the council, available here.
As the latest corpse of a young clubber is fished out of the docks and a dead rough sleeper is discovered in a Broadmead shop doorway, the Reverend’s Corporate Health and Safety Committee has swung into action and had an EMERGENCY MEETING.
And what was the number one item on the agenda? Making our docks and waterways SAFE for Bristolians? Helping rough sleepers stay ALIVE during the April frosts? PROTECTING Avonmouth residents from unlawful levels of pollution from the Port of Bristol? ENSURING young people, slaves and exploited workers are living in legal, safe and sanitary conditions in empty council properties run by cowboy contactors?
Er, no, none of these issues were discussed. Probably because they only affect the little people and might make our failing mayor look even more crap. Instead this absurd committee of OVERPAID TWERPS in suits has spent hours and hundreds of pounds of tax payers cash leafing through the city’s favourite newspaper, The BRISTOLIAN, to discuss the cartoons in it!
And it turns out that our hugely popular ‘Best cut of all’ cover is now officially a “CREDIBLE DEATH THREAT”! Really? A death threat so “credible” that no attempt has been made on the life of the ridiculous vicar in the last three months by anyone anywhere. Evidence – for most normal people – of the exact opposite of “a credible death threat” and more of “an incredible death threat”.
However, not ones to let reality get in the way of their war on cartoons published by the plebs, this nauseating little bunch of useless and under qualified COUNCIL PLONKERS have reported The BRISTOLIAN to the police on behalf of the mayor! Presumably the Reverend’s not noticed any REAL CRIME in our city then? Or, rather than get real issues investigated to protect us, the struggling Mayor and his outsize ego prefers that the local constabulary – who have also suffered swingeing cuts – urgently investigate a NON-CRIME against him committed by cartoon?
By an extraordinary coincidence, the object of this urgent high-level investigation (us!) has consistently exposed CRIMINALITY and WRONGDOING at the Reverend’s council and has exposed the Reverend as weak and futile with a PATHETIC record of protecting Bristol and its people from Tory austerity. The latest education cuts mean that each pupil will receive £600 less funding next year. A cut of nearly one third. So what’s Marv doing about that? Less than fuck all, while worrying about a cartoon everyone else had forgotten about.
No doubt local coppers are also thrilled, having just pulled another body out of the docks, to get stuck into an investigation of ZERO PUBLIC INTEREST for a piss weak paranoid mayor who can’t handle criticism?
And what’s our mentally erratic city ‘leader’ hoping to achieve with this COSTLY FARCE cooked up entirely for his own benefit? Have any of the mayor’s highly paid ‘expert’ strategists explained to the Reverend you can’t stop local people photocopying a sheet of paper with cartoons and stories in it about his council’s dodgy activities and handing it out around town?
Nobody really wants to hurt this poor little DELUDED FOOL. After all, we do know where he lives. Perhaps we should pop round for a group cuddle and inject him with a bit of backbone before there’s nothing left in Bristol but understocked food banks, ex old people’s homes full of slave labour and dead kids face down in the docks?
It’s not funny really is it?