Full speed ahead with no one left behind in Bristol’s ‘just transition’ to Net Zero!
Air source heat pump: free to a wealthy home!
The council’s applied for a grant of £3.3m to install 200 on trend air source heat pumps in leafy Westbury-on-Trym. A subsidy of £16,500 per Tory household!
Why this pilot has to be run in one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs isn’t very well explained by Labour’s dim Climate Change head honcho Kye “The” Dudd or his increasingly unstable boss, the Reverend.
Instead Rees explained away his loopy heating subsidy to the wealthy by telling bored councillors he was “going to be at the US embassy tomorrow to speak about a just transition”. Guess that’s one way to keep us all warm next winter.
The Greens, potentially the largest party in Bristol after next year’s elections, were also getting wet in the pants at news of Net Zero handouts to the wealthy.
West Bristol’s ridiculous national Green Party leader, Carla “Posh Princess” Denyer gushed that the scheme was a “fabulous solution”.
Before the City Leap deal ascended to the Reverend and his cabinet of all the chumps for rubberstamping, a cross party scrutiny committee got to take look at some of it.
Comments by councillors at this meeting were not positive. Among the complaints: * That the committee’s comments and questions over a period of years have not received adequate answers; * Every scrutiny meeting listed in the final report was either delayed, deferred or cancelled and reorganised; * Money spent on advice and procurement has been around £10million dwarfing the concession payments of £2.3m we may receive over five years from City Leap; * Scrutiny members were denied access to the detailed agreement with private partner Ameresco. How do you scrutinise something you can’t see? Enormous complexity’s involved. If something goes wrong, trying to enforce a secret agreement is difficult; * What happens to the loss in Bristol Heat Networks? Up to 31 March 2022 there was a £1m loss according to documents at Companies House. No member has been briefed on the loss. Who’s paying? The council taxpayer? Private sector partners?
Councillors got no answers. Instead cabinet member, Kye “The” Dudd openly laughed in their faces.
A crap win, by just 52 votes over the Greens, by Labour’s self-styled working class hero Kye “The” Dudd at the Southmead by-election had The Dudd’s team reaching for their copies of The Labour Party Book of Crap Excuses. Divide and misrule was the excuse of choice.
‘Gentrification’ was to blame, announced local Labour mastermind ‘Slo’ Kev Slocombe. Pesky unidentified incomers and the damned middle classes of, er, Southmead voting Green instead of Labour like proper working class people do were to blame.
Labour also claimed that their core vote on Southmead’s long-neglected council estate had held firm. So firm that less than 9 per cent of people living in a solid Labour ward based around a council estate voted for them. The former Labour heartland now enters ultra-marginal territory with the Green Party likely to seize the ward at the next election in 2024.
Is it time for the Rees administration to stop lecturing us about how working class they are and, maybe, start actually spending some bloody money on working class voters in the suburbs? Rather than pouring all the city’s cash into corporate coffers to fund big projects in the centre, attractive and convenient for the city’s real gentrifiers. The wealthy white professionals who dominate the inner city and the management of our local institutions.
Has The Dudd got the message that Rees and his corporate gentrification agenda need a hard kick up the arse?
Dudd and the comrades outside a library they closed
An otherwise dull by-election in Southmead, following the resignation of the Reverend’s cabinet member Helen “Oh My” Godwin to become an, er, consultant at dodgy big four accountants KPMG, was brightened up by the epic stupidity of Labour candidate Kye “The” Dudd.
Halfway through the campaign The Dudd, who lost his Central Ward seat last year to the Greens, took it upon himself to get himself photographed in the middle of Southmead’s Doncaster Road Park along with his gormless Labour colleagues Brenda Massey and Tom “Plasticene Man” Renhard. Together, they announced, they were “saving the park from development” by Bristol City Council.
All well and good, except, legally, the park is already “saved” from development like every other park in the city by virtue of it being designated important open space in the Local Plan.
Protection that Renhard’s loopey housing development droids programmed to build have zero authority to overturn without an expensive court battle they would almost certainly lose.
Therefore the only thing that The Dudd has “saved” is an enormous sum in legal costs had he supported such a daft idea.
Two Bristol City Councillors are the subject of a formal complaint from the council’s ridiculous pair of senior Human Resources bosses Mark “Bashar” Williams and John “Bedwetter” Walsh. This is the result of the councillors standing up for the Council’s cleaning and security staff, which Cabinet agreed last month should be outsourced to Bristol Waste Company to help disguise a large hole in the company’s budget.
The BRISTOLIAN hears that Tory councillor Richard “Bunter” Eddy and Lib Dem leader Gary “Meathead” Hopkins are presently being investigated by the Council’s Legal boss “L’il” Tim O’Gara after complaints were received from senior officers about the conduct of a Human Resources Committee on 18 February 2021. Both councillors expressed robust concerns about the outsourcing at the meeting.
The same two councillors were the subject of a formal complaint alleging breach of confidential information three-and-a-half years ago following the controversial departure of former Chief Executive Anna Klonowski. who bagged a reported ‘Golden goodbye’ from local taxpayers of £98,000. Following an expensive independent investigation, both councillors were cleared of the daft allegation made by present Cabinet Member Cllr Kye “The” Dudd.
Bunter has confirmed to friends that he is the “subject of a complaint under the Members’ Code of Conduct” and denies any wrongdoing. He also told friends, “I am particularly surprised to receive a complaint from senior officers with telephone-digit salaries with reference to my attempt to defend the interests of some of the Council’s hardest-working and poorest-paid staff at the Human Resources Committee in February.
The timing of the complaint has also raised eyebrows. No complaint was made in the month following the HR Committee or the outsourcing decision made by Cabinet on 18 March 2021. Instead the managers have waited until the Local Elections to lodge a complaint.
Are this pair of HR scrotes trying to interfere in our election?
Locals in North Bristol have come out against The Reverend’s cabinet transport supremo, Kye “The” Dudd’s CRAZED and EXPENSIVE plan to increase the height of the damaged grade II listed Kingsweston Iron Bridge on Kingsweston Hill to stop more high vehicles crashing in to it. The Kingsweston Action Group (KWAG) is instead SUPPORTING Historic England’s SENSIBLE and considerably CHEAPER plan to install sacrificial “goalpost” height restrictors at the junctions with Shirehampton Road and Westbury Lane to the south of Kingsweston Hill, and Kings Weston Lane in the north.
The damaged bridge could then be dismantled, taken away for repair and restoration, and rebuilt back in place as it now is and at a far cheaper price than the £2MILLION estimated for The Dudd’s plan. KWAG’s advisers, Dorothea Restoration, say it would take a week to dismantle the bridge, three months to strip, repair, re-cast broken sections and repaint and then a further week to reassemble back in place. Job done! KWAG say, “We genuinely need public feedback on these proposals before we develop them into a more finished form for planning”.
Support these plans and help get the bridge back in action sooner rather than later.
Is Bristol’s Labour Group at the council, led by the Reverend Rees, attempting to commit some weird form of RITUAL POLITICAL SUICIDE before the local elections next May? What other explanation is there for the STUPID DECISIONS and CRAZED OUTBURSTS emanating from the Reverend Mayor and his daft councillors?
The Reverend has already pissed off loads of communities throughout the city who are unlikely to vote for him or his party next year. These include WHITCHURCH where he’s proposed running a ring road through the community past a primary school; HOTWELLS, ASHTON and SOUTHVILLE where he wants to build his corporate high rise wet dream on their doorstep; STOKE BISHOP where he’s allowed their open space to be fenced off by Cotham School; TOTTERDOWN where his councillors voted through, contrary to the Local Plan, a hideous 15 storey tower block on the Bath Road; KNOWLE where he’s backed another tower block and WINDMILL HILL and BEDMINSTER where the Reverend’s been unable to get any grip on unruly private developers at Bedminster Green.
Then there’s the Reverend’s thicko cabinet sidekick, Kye “The” Dudd’s treatment of the FLY PROBLEM in Avonmouth. The Dudd has courted voters by variously accusing residents of planting dead flies to create a FAKE PROBLEM; blaming the flies on DOMESTIC WASTE left on St Andrews Road and, even, claiming there’s NO FLY PROBLEM and that fly levels in Avonmouth are the same as other areas of Bristol. A claim recently rubbished by the BBC who did their own tests for their ‘Inside Out West’ documentary slot.
Remarkably, things now seem to be TAKING A TURN FOR THE WORSE for Labour. At September’s Full Council, the Reverend, behaving like the last officer standing on a Pacific island as GIs storm the beach, raged about “SABOTAGE” by opposition councillors before burnishing his ANTI-UNION CREDENTIALS by refusing to allow his council to be involved in the Climate Strike on 20 September. The Reverend’s Labour colleague, Tom “Charming” Brooks, then PLUMBED FURTHER DEPTHS while responding to a petition from 3,979 voters calling for a moratorium on 5G rollout.
Rather than calmly quote scientific sources to rationally dispute the petitioners health claims, the Horfield councillor launched into a DEMENTED RANT instead. The petitioners were “naive people who had been taken in by MALICIOUS MISINFORMATION” and “conspiracy theorists fuelled by fake news and misinformation” and were “PEDDLING PSEUDO-SCIENCE using technical sounding words to confuse people”. However, Brooks dismally failed to cite ANY EVIDENCE to support his insults. Instead, he argued, he was right because he had “the ability to Google and was also as an engineer working in risk and safety”.
Lib Dem, Green and, even, Tory councillors were much CANNIER and CALMER towards this large group of potential voters. Explaining they accepted Public Health England’s view on 5G for now but agreed the health situation should be monitored as the technology was rolled out.
That’s another 4,000 votes down the pan for Labour next May then
Is there a city council news blackout about the large decline in bus passenger numbers in Bristol over the last year? Journeys are down 5.3 per cent compared to the same period last year and reveal the current administration, just prior to next year’s election, is bucking the trend of increasing bus use in the city over the last ten years. Self-styled “city leader” and “change maker”, the Reverend Rees appears to have delivered significant change in at least one important area then.
The Metrobus, which the Reverend strongly supports, contrary to all common sense, as a “first step towards an integrated rapid and mass transit network” apparently, is among services showing obvious signs of failure after just a year in service. Numbers on the M2 from Long Ashton Park and Ride are down. While the M1 service from Hengrove to the Centre has quietly had its service reduced from every 10 minutes to every 12 minutes due to a lack of passengers.
This must be classified as a significant personal failure for the Reverend who has twice taken on the cabinet transport portfolio during his reign of error. Then there was that ‘State of the City’ address last October. Remember his announcement and the accompanying gushing PR about a “flat fare” scheme in partnership with First Bus? This turned out to be a nonsensical mess, resulting in a variety of different fares and a price increase for the majority of passengers. Further compounded this summer when First hiked their prices again.
The Reverend’s current cabinet transport chief Kye “The” Dudd also remains silent on this failure. Preferring instead to waffle on about a pie-in-the-sky ‘Green New Deal’ and the “billion pound City Leap” prospectus, his sell-off of public assets to the private sector.
The Reverend, meanwhile, is now cooking up a pre-election ‘Bus Deal’ with First. Another woolly agreement between Rees and the untrustworthy corporate sharks, that commits public money to various road ‘improvements’ so that First can attempt to further increase their monopoly profits from our pockets. Meanwhile any talk of an underground or any other proper rapid transit system for the city appears to have been removed from the Reverend’s talking points by mayoral spin doctor “Slo” Kev Slocombe.
Hopefully the next stop for Rees and Dudd will be the Job Centre.
The Reverend Rees’s latest deranged ROAD UPGRADE PLAN, rolled out to a disbelieving public by his new cabinet transport supremo, The Former Socialist known as Kye Dudd, are some so-called “improvements” to the A4018 in North Bristol.
The road connects Cribbs Causeway and Filton to the Centre via Westbury-on-Trym and will become an important road link from the south and west of the city for the Reverend’s corporate friend’s FILTON SHED arena.
To accommodate large traffic flows to and from the proposed venue’s huge car park, The Former Socialist Known as Dudd is proposing to virtually SHUT Westbury-on-Trym to cars altogether while creating a MAZE of no left and right hand turns along the length of the A4018.
Much of the road will also be NARROWED to make way for 24 hours bus lanes and the usual ragbag of non user-friendly, deeply unpopular shared use cycle schemes. While these improvements might be a small benefit for through traffic and First buses heading to the Reverend’s corporate shed and the M5 from the centre, they will be a NIGHTMARE for local traffic, residents and businesses.
Residents, who are actual council tax payers, have pointed out that getting to their homes from this ‘improved’ A4018 will involve LONG and TORTUOUS journeys puffing out extra vehicle pollution into their neighbourhoods and children’s lungs.
Quiet residential streets will be transformed into BUSY RAT RUNS as locals endeavour to negotiate the council-designed maze to get to places such as Brentry and Henbury. Neighbourhoods that Dudd intends to DEPRIVE of direct access to the A4018 to facilitate faster through traffic to the Filton shed and the M5.
Meanwhile, businesses in Westbury-on-Trym predict the DEATH of the village once traffic is BANNED and customers from further afield abandon the shops there. The council has held a number of consultations on the plans in the area that have variously been described as “a farce”; “a fiasco”; “a shambles”; “pointless” and much else besides.
One reader describes a visit to Westbury Library where after a long wait he got to speak to a council officer “STRAIGHT OUT OF SCHOOL“.
“How long have you lived here?” he enquired.
“Nearly a year… I’m from the region though,” came the reply.
“Wait! So you’re not from Bristol and have no idea about past schemes?”
“I don’t feel comfortable answering that,” came the brave and honest reply.”
And off the officer scurried. Consultation presumably complete
Keeping his manifesto promises was always going to be challenging for the Reverend Rees, not least because we calculated at the time that it contained about 78 UNCOSTED PROMISES in all. However, what we couldn’t predict was how the Reverend would smash through any BARRIERS TO FAILURE quite so spectacularly.
Top of the list must come his promise to “COMPLETE THE ARENA“, which has now been downgraded to, “I will cancel the existing arena project I promised and instead support a global corporation’s efforts to build an arena in Filton named after an obscure dead bloke who owned our local privatised water utility scam”.
Meanwhile in terms of the Reverend’s highly contested housing promise – “WE WILL BUILD 2,000 NEW HOMES – 800 affordable – a year (by 2020)” – his housing guru, Paul “Wolfie” Smith continues to carefully calibrate the spin with the line that his PROJECTIONS are on target … Even if the actual number of houses being built isn’t!
Then there’s the recycling promise. The Reverend’s recently promoted former waste boss, The Former Socialist Known as Kye Dudd simply CHANGED THE TARGET and hoped no one would notice. We will “increase recycling, setting a target of 55% for all waste by 2020,” thundered the Reverend’s manifesto in 2016.
Fast forward to 2019 and we find The Former Socialist Known as Dudd’s waste overseer, Bristol Waste managing director Tony Lawless telling the Nazi Post, “We are delighted to see Bristol is on track to meet its ambitious RECYCLING RATE OF 50 PER CENT BY 2020.”
The comment came after the Reverend’s council managed to announce in January a measly ONE PER CENT increase in recycling rates since 2015 to 46%. Nothing like enough of an increase to reach 50 per cent, never mind 55 per cent, by 2020 as promised in their manifesto.
Have Rees and Dudd changed their promise in a vain attempt to claim they have courageously fallen a little short of a hugely ambitious target and hope we’ll not notice?
