Tag Archives: LTN

GREEN MANIFESTO: GHOST OF THATCHER HAUNTS TREE HUGGING HIPPIES CONFINED TO THE ATTIC

2024 Manifesto vs.2 14pp.indd

Following Labour’s lead, the Greens have gone some of the way to ditching the long list of expensive and undeliverable promises approach to manifesto writing.

Perfected by their centrist dad mayoral candidate last time round in 2021, Lord Sandy Bufton Tufton of India seemed to promise everything from reopening your local corner shop as boutique vegan food pop-up to sending an ambassador for Bristol to the UN. The Greens, this time, have gone for a stripped down version of the Bufton Tufton list approach.

‘Disappeared’ leader, Emma Edwards – confined to the attic for the duration in case she disturbs anyone from Business West with some dangerous off-message tree hugging hippy shit – has been briefly reanimated and wheeled out for the manifesto’s Foreword written for her by bland copywriters.

“Bristol Green Party has a vision of hope for the city and highly experienced candidates,” she enthusiastically assures us. That’ll be ‘highly experienced candidates’ like their current councillors who don’t understand the basic legal responsibilities of company ownership or the necessity to take action when the council acts unlawfully. There’s a thin line in local politics between ‘highly experienced’ and ‘reckless amateur’ isn’t there?

The main manifesto is divided into ten sections beginning with a ‘Getting the basics right‘ section. Here we’re threatened with that old chestnut “genuine engagement on key Council proposals” and decision-dodging “demographically representative Citizens’ Assemblies.”

“Ensure decisions about community facilities and community asset transfers have a more consistent and transparent process,” also pops up. Meaning community facilities and assets will be transferred to the Greens’ mates rather than Labour’s.

On to transport where, like everyone else, they’re going to improve the buses and – this is their one standout policy – they’ll fund this from a Workplace Parking Levy, if, presumably, Business West lets them?

Other keynote transport policies are the introduction of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, which will “make traffic flow better on main routes”, apparently, and reviving Mayor No More Ferguson’s residents’ parking schemes, now redesigned as high tax revenue earner for the council.

In housing, the headline is to increase the city’s target of affordable homes from the current 600 homes per year to 1,000 per year. As no housing target in the city ever gets reached you wonder what the point of this actually is?

There’s also an odd and unexplained major outsourcing plan sneaked in, to set up an “arms length company to own and rent out council-owned housing”. This, the Greens allege, will create more “genuinely affordable homes” while also, conveniently, achieving the Thatcherite dream of moving social housing out of the council’s hands altogether. An old Lib Dem policy and one to watch.

Under the heading ‘A Great Start in Life’ we get a load of retreads of Labour’s failing Children’s Service policies where costs are going south fast. So they’ll increase special school places; somehow reduce costs of home to school transport and recruit more foster carers as they’ve been doing unsuccessfully for the last ten years. 

Despite being a major budgetary pressure, there’s nothing on the subject of the rising costs of private sector out-of-county children’s care placements at all. Neither is there any mention of the Tory ‘Safety Valve’ SEND cuts programme the council is now signed up to for the next five years if it doesn’t get cancelled immediately.

For young people, there’s a vague “aim” with no resource attached to “increase the provision of youth services”. On knife crime it’s equally vague and totally under-resourced. They’ll “work with young people themselves, with the police, schools, youth services and other community organisations.”

On adult care there’s some warm words for staff and social workers and then this, “investigate a council-funded capital grant programme or loan scheme to assist care homes to be more efficient to save money in the long run.”

Are they really proposing to use our money to subsidise private care homes’ profits?

Sections on public health and “a clean city” provide airy lists of stuff “aiming to”; “exploring”; “enhancing”; “joining up” with no firm commitment to anything very much. The language indicating the lack of resources to make any of it happen.

On culture we get that old manifesto money-wasting favourite, “lead a Bristol regional bid to become the UK’s city of culture” along with a vague threat of a raid on the Local Government Pension Scheme to fund pet culture projects.

The final section of the local authority manifesto is on our old corporate friend ‘net zero’. Basically the ‘billion pound’ City Leap is still the only game in town delivering small scale  publicly funded insulation, energy and EV projects. But it wouldn’t be a Green manifesto without developing a way to waste money the council hasn’t got on a pointless ‘net zero’ measure. So please step forward “a carbon budget process alongside the annual financial budgeting process.”

The idea here seems to be to employ people to add up the carbon costs of what the council does each year while cutting actual useful public services to the bone. Bravo!

WHO’S RIGHT? THE CABLE, DAVOS AND LOW TRAFFIC NEIGHBOURHOODS

Malcolm X  Media

Self-styled, community newspaper, The Bristol Cable continues to throw bizarre conspiracy theory smears at working class opposition to the Low Traffic Neighbourhood in East Bristol. A meeting opposing the LTN in early July found Cable journalists seizing on a comment by a speaker from London who said, “we need to think about the needs of local people rather than “what they say at Davos.””

This comment “blurred into conspiracy theories” explained investigative experts at the Cable without bothering to explain why. Although we do know that ‘conspiracy theories’ soon blur into ‘right wing’ in the centrist lexicon of smears (with ‘anti-semite’ not far behind).  

However, a brief look at the website of the World Economic Forum, a powerful, inarguably, right wing economic lobby group of unbelievable wealth who meet annually at the exclusive Swiss resort of Davos to lobby governments in the interests of US billionaire oligarchs, global corporations and the international banking and finance class, reveals they are openly promoting a series of ‘net zero’ policies. Including, er, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and ’15 Minute Cities’! Why is mentioning this a conspiracy theory?

Informed progressive commentary on the subject suggests that the Davos billionaire club is running a self-serving ‘net zero’ PR campaign aimed at protecting their own wealth and interests rather than the climate. Most of their proposals will have a marginal effect on climate and will not challenge the existing global economic order that’s driving it. But the charade might make the billionaires look like they’re doing something as they shovel more cash from another scam into their bank accounts. What’s wrong with calling this shit out?

It was pointed out on Twitter to Cable journalists that they were doing billionaires a favour by smearing people who draw attention to them. Along with the observation that one of the Cable‘s funders, Bill Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, was an ‘Agenda Contributor’ to the WEF, so maybe the Cable‘s views on Davos and the WEF are a little untrustworthy?

All sniffily rejected as more conspiracy nonsense by Cable contributors whose expensive educations seemingly didn’t stretch to the simple study of ‘what is a conflict of interest?’

The haughty snobs at the Cable want us to believe that Somalian taxi drivers and some bloke who runs a bar in London campaigning against traffic calming in East Bristol are an imminent right wing threat to your future and wellbeing. By contrast, the US billionaire oligarch class organising the world economy for their own benefit and trashing the planet are cuddly teddy bears in need of protection from dangerous ‘conspiracy theorists’.

Go figure.