Tag Archives: Mark Bradshaw

SUPER STUPID SUPERHIGHWAY

Crash! Victoria Park cycle path latest …

The latest effort by Sustrans/Bristol City Council Sustainable Transport Team to build a POINTLESS road through Victoria Park for cyclists as part of a ‘Filwood Quietway’ has even been slammed by Bristol Cycling Campaign for having “no noticeable benefits” for cycling!

The original plan – that had to be hastily pulled by former Labour transport boss Mark “Dead Duck” Bradshaw after HUNDREDS of locals and park users objected – proposed a pointless five metre wide road through the park that provided priority for cyclists commuting through the park.

Now, following another poorly publicised local consultation, Bristol City Council has put a new plan before a Bristol City Council planning committee proposing a pointless three metre wide road through the park with pedestrian priority. This too, following a planning consultation in August when we were all away, is HUGHLY UNPOPULAR with locals and park users who know a shoddy compromise when they see one.

As do the Bristol Cycling Campaign, it seems. Last time around they created a torrid and aggressive public row with park users after they accused them of being part of a mysterious CAR LOBBY operating out of Windmill Hill.

This time around the cycling campaign seem to have finally noticed that this is a plan for a ROAD TO NOWHERE that concretes over one of the city’s finest parks so that cyclists can arrive at a dead end half way down York Road on the New Cut. From where there’s NO MEANS of crossing the river to get to the Quietway’s stated final destination in the centre.

The reality slowly dawning on everyone is that this section of “quietway” is a sloppy VANITY PROJECT from underemployed and unskilled sustainable transport hobbyists at Bristol City Council who are desperate to spend government grant money by March next year regardless of whether it benefits the city.

Scrap this stupid path through our green space now and send the money back to the government.

RESHUFFLE KERFUFFLE

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Bizarre Cabinet reshuffle from the Reverend Rees last month. The highlight of which was a BLATANT LEAK to the press of his decision to fire his Labour rival for Mayor and transport chief Mark “LAME DUCK” Bradshaw days before the official announcement.

Quite what the Reverend and his PR point man Kevin “Don’t mention the private school education” Slocombe thought they might achieve by publicly firing Bradshaw is anyone’s guess. Maybe it boosted the pair’s FRAGILE EGOS and helped them feel like they were actually in charge of something?

The Reverend also took the opportunity to PROMOTE his close friend, hapless incompetent Asher “The Slasher” Craig, to Deputy Mayor alongside yes-man Craig “Crapita” Cheney, the cabinet’s overpromoted finance man.

Slasher’s promotion came just days before another LEAK to the press appeared. This one claiming Close-It’s enormous £5k council tax DEBT, run up over a number of years and still outstanding when she was elected councillor last May and promoted to Cabinet in the autumn, was paid off by the local Labour Party!

The LEGALITY of any of Slasher’s financial decisions while having an undeclared debt with the council is being carefully studied. As is her new portfolio extended to include public health and public transport alongside her existing and disastrous responsibilities for demolished kids’ playgrounds, collapsing Neighbourhood Partnerships, underfunded leisure centres, closing libraries, decaying community assets and up-for-sale parks.

“Even those on the right wing of the Bristol Labour Party think she’s A TORY!” is how one insider described Slasher to us recently.

Meanwhile, the Reverend is taking on PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for the ongoing Arena non-appearance project and for elements of the TRANSPORT brief, particularly congestion. Effectively splitting responsibility for the city’s difficult and badly managed transport brief between himself and useless Asher the Slasher. Of course, neither have any EXPERIENCE whatsoever of transport.

The Reverend and Kevin “Don’t mention the private school education” Slocombe are desperately touting this reshuffle as a “CONSOLIDATION OF POWER“. However, the press leaks; the Reverend’s new responsibility for two poisoned chalices and the promotion of an idiot – Asher the Slasher – look more like an administration UNRAVELLING.

There may be trouble ahead …

SELLING OUT, CASHING IN

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It’s not taken long for Labour councillors in Bristol to get their feet under the table and use their large new majority on the council to begin the enormous political challenge of, er, lining up LUCRATIVE CONTRACTS and work for their employers!

Please step forward Craig “MR CRAPITA” Cheney, a junior employee of hellish public sector contractors and serial outsourcing cock-up artists CAPITA. He currently masquerades part time as ‘Cabinet Member for Finance, Governance and Performance’, wandering aimlessly around the Counts Louse accompanied by a chorus of whispers of “this one’s totally out of his depth isn’t he”?

But now it looks like Mr Crapita has taken his first key decision. To appoint a new Treasury consultancy team from, er, CAPITA!

The Treasury team basically takes decisions around borrowing and investments at the council. Although why a private firm at a further COST to us now needs to do this work rather than the council’s highly paid “EXPERT” in-house finance bosses is not made clear by Mr Crapita, who is yet to publicise his self-serving, private sector career-enhancing decision.

Meanwhile on 24 November at the Counts Louse, the Rev Rees PERSONALLY HOSTED ‘The Big Conversation: Development by Bristol City Council’.

“Help shape the future development of Bristol,” gushed the publicity, squarely aimed at big money CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT INTERESTS who were promised ACCESS to not only the Rev Rees but the opportunity to “Join Cabinet Lead for Homes and communities Councillor Paul Smith; Cabinet Lead for Place Councillor Helen Holland; and Cabinet member for Transport, Councillor Mark Bradshaw.”

Among the agenda items was ‘De-risking the development process and the role of planning’. Presumably the aim being to simplify things for corporates wanting to BUILD SHIT quick for a FAST BUCK in Bristol? However, what really caught the eye about this event, held at the Counts Louse with Bristol Labour politicians and Bristol City Council bosses in attendance was that it wasn’t organised by Bristol City Council.

Instead, THIS INVITATION-ONLY EVENT to meet influential senior Labour politicians and council bosses for “TABLE DISCUSSIONS” was organised by a corporate lobbying firm, JBP. Who happen to specialise in … Wait for it … “complex planning and construction projects in retail, house building and major infrastructure development.”

How terribly cosy for all involved. Even more so when you realise that the JBP employee who organised the event at the council was one Nicola “LA LA” Beech. La La, when she’s not shilling for corporate development interests, also happens to be a LABOUR COUNCILLOR for St George Central!

It’s a small world isn’t it?

REES AND BRADSHAW: A WARNING FOR THE FUTURE

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It’s been announced today that the council is withdrawing its plan to build a 4.5m wide road through Victoria Park for the benefit of posh cycle lobbyists in West Bristol.

This is the article we intended to publish in the next issue of The BRISTOLIAN on the issue. We leave it here as a warning to the Reverend Rees, and his idiot cabinet sidekick for transport, Mark “BEAR” Bradshaw, and any other Labour Party vandal who think they can fuck with our open space.

Try it and we will make you pay …

VICTORIA PARK: DIRECT AND TO THE POINT

There’s dark mutterings about “direct action” emerging from Windmill Hill and Totterdown if the Rev Rees, Mark “BEAR” Bradshaw and the cycle lobby fanatics running their transport department go ahead with their plan to build a road for cyclists through Victoria Park.

The economics of this are pretty straightforward. How much extra money is the Rev Rees prepared to throw at a pointless £500k cycling project to secure it? Five per cent? Ten Per cent? £50k doesn’t go far in repairs and security these days does it? Metrobus has reputedly spent more than £1m securing their Stapleton allotments site from protestors.

And remember, while the £500k for the road may come from central government, Rees will have to find any overspend on the project from his own shot-to-fuck council budgets. So if Rees wants to take the piss out of local residents; local residents can easily take the piss back and hit him where it really hurts – in the wallet.

To the barricades park lovers!

LEAKED DOCUMENT!!! BRISTOL MAYOR’S CHRISTMAS DINNER REVEALED

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Your caring sharing BRISTOLIAN does it again! Bringing you all the news that matters right up to Christmas …

Our spies on the third floor sent us this earlier today. A copy of THE ACTUAL MENU that’s been prepared for Mayor Fergo and his really unlucky minions invited for Christmas Day. Enjoy!

Merry Christmas to all our readers. we’ll be back smiting in the New Year!

FERGO’S ‘TOP TABLE’: TOO GOOD FOR EQUALITIES!

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The Equalities, Access and Inclusion team at Bristol City Council has been running various training courses for employees.

However, Mayor George Ferguson, his Cabinet and Deputy Mayor ‘Mutton’ Geoff Gollop have snootily said they “didn’t need this training” and have OPTED OUT of it.

An interesting attitude from an all- white, 70 per cent male Cabinet made up entirely of people from Bristol’s political establishment!

Presumably this is because they really do consider themselves torch-bearers for anti-racism, disabilities, anti-sexism etc – and think that BCC employees are the racists, sexists and the rest.

What will Hibaq Jama have to say about this after her recent ‘chat’ with Fergo?

MISSING MARKETS MONEY, GAGS, CHEESE AND MARK BRADSHAW: WHAT I DID IN THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS BY AUGUSTUS HOYTY-TOYTY AGED 37¾

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MONDAY:

Bumped into our brilliant new Chief Executive Mrs Yates today while I was wandering around on the third floor trying to find something useful to do. She was at the photocopier running off a considerable amount of paperwork headed ‘GAGGING ORDER’. I asked her what she was up to as a bit of a conversational opening gambit and apparently she was just doing some early preparatory work to pop in the top drawer of her desk. Then she gave me a little grin, grabbed the paperwork and headed off to her office – sorry, I mean flexible work space.

I must say she seems very professional and efficient and she can operate a photocopier! Certainly an improvement on Mr Sims, who seemed to need a PA to switch a light on for him never mind operate a Blackberry or that iPad he was given that he thought was a clipboard for the first three weeks. I sense already that Nicola is the person to lead the new hi-tech open City Hall culture George and I are embedding. Good times!

TUESDAY:

High-level meeting with new Cabinet member, Labour’s superb Mark Bradshaw today. To be able to work alongside such a supremely gifted and able politician and first rate intellect is a privilege. Mark and I discussed very important matters relating to George’s proposed RPZ scheme that I can’t tell you about. Although we will inform the public at an appropriate time. As Mark said, car parking is far too important to discuss in public.

WEDNESDAY:

Had an excellent two o’clock with George today. I must say he’s in a far better mood since he went up to Harley Street to see his doctor about his anxiety issues. He’s now installed a comfy sofa in his office and he was lying on it wearing only his favourite Fairtrade silk dressing gown (red, of course) with his feet up reading Fifty Shades Of Grey! He’s also mentally firing on all cylinders again and has had yet another brilliant idea – ‘City of Cheese’

Apparently he bought a particularly ripe and vibrant brie at our first Make Sunday Special food market and he thinks Bristol Brie could be a really amazing international place-making tool for the city. I could only agree and promised – as the Cabinet lead on food – to get on it right away. I then had to leave as he needed to take his Effexor, whatever that is, and relax for a while.

THURSDAY:

Finally got in today to see Mr Mann, our transport boss, over at Brunel House. What a strange meeting. When I walked in Mr Mann was holding a small teddy bear at his face level and appeared to be having a conversation with it. “Hello Sir Gus,” he said, “this is Teddy. He helps me with policy.”

Thinking I had better change the subject sharpish, I pointed at a large green safe in the corner of the room that seemed to be wrapped in about four toughened steel chains secured by around six padlocks. “That’s where I keep the Greater Bristol Bus Network performance statistics,” explained Mr Mann. “We can’t be too careful. We don’t want them getting out to the press or public, do we?” he muttered quietly.

If nothing else, I suppose we should be impressed by Mr Mann’s commitment to information security. The rest of the meeting was about RPZs, which I can’t tell you anything about because car parking is quite rightly a top-secret issue.

FRIDAY:

Had a row today on Twitter with those horrible, nasty, beastly people at The BRISTOLIAN. They keep banging on about this missing £165,000 missing from the Market Service that I’m ultimately responsible for. It is of course all complete nonsense. As George has kindly explained to them there is no evidence of any wrongdoing at all. So come on guys, sometimes you just have to accept that £165,000 just disappears from public sector organisations without any explanation. Mankind isn’t perfect, is it? We just can’t explain everything, can we? Like how bees fly; UFOs; the Loch Ness Monster; the Bermuda Triangle; Alastair Sawday; homeopathy and David Lynch films. Some things are simply pure mystery.

Besides I’m happy to confirm that Mr Harvey, the Facilities Manager responsible for overseeing the money, has fully investigated himself and has confirmed nobody has done anything wrong. The Metropolitan Police seem to be able to investigate themselves without all this fuss. What more do these people want?

They should join UKIP with all the other racist stirrers and RPZ resisters who want to destroy mine and George’s progressive coalition for Green progress in Bristol with their relentless focusing on silly little details and small amounts of missing money rather than looking at the big canvas of Bristol George and I are busy colouring in green.

LABOUR GOES ‘HIBAQ TO BASICS’ IN LAWRENCE HILL

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As the dust settles on the May local elections, Bristol Labour has been crowing about its polls success, having picked up six new councillors at the expense of the Lib Dem collapse to now make it the biggest party in Shitty Hall. Indeed, so excited are they that they’ve put aside their differences with Mayor Gorgeous and now have two senior councillors, Mark ‘Bear’ Bradshaw and Brenda Massey, in his ‘rainbow coalition’ cuts cabinet. A victory for social democracy indeed!

One of their best results came in the hard-fought, seven candidate LAWRENCE HILL election. There former Easton Lib Dem councillor Abdul Malik was beaten into an embarrassing third place by UKIP, with the Greens’ Chloe Summers coming in second from bottom with barely two hundred votes, despite earlier boasts by her pal Rob Telford that the sandal-wearers would romp home.

And who did win? Well, congratulations to Hibaq Jama, who despite FREEWHEELING through most of the campaign scooped more than half the vote to hold Lawrence Hill for Labour after Brenda Hugill stepped down (or rather, had her legs done in by party bosses).

As the city’s first elected politician of Somali origin, Jama is already something of a Bristol Labour poster girl, and given George Fergo’s fondness for dynamic young women, it seems possible he could find a special role for her despite her inexperience. Whether he manages this whilst keeping his new best chum, the anti-female genital mutilation (FGM) campaigner Nimko Ali – whose antipathy towards Bristol Labour now approaches near-legendary status – onside remains to be seen. But if there is juggling of opinionated, politically ambitious women to be done, El Fergo is not a man to shirk his reponsibilities – such was the Mayoral Vow he swore.

In the meantime, The BRISTOLIAN hopes that being in the public eye will put an end to the rumours circulating about Jama’s management style whilst working at Lawrence Hill’s education hub, the Beacon Centre.

After all, when phrases like “blasé absenteeism”, “bullying” and “unprofessional personal relationships” are being bandied around, even the brightest star starts to fade.

Due to an oversight in the production process the original print version of this article wrongly stated that Jama replaced Margaret Hickman – who remains Labour’s other Lawrence Hill councillor – not Brenda Hugill. The idiot responsible has been taken out the back of the milking sheds and shot.

WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE: BRADSHAW GOES QUACKERS OVER B.R.T.

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8 out of 10 Bristolians can’t tell the difference – can you?

News that Gorgeous George now has a dream team cabinet complete with Labour Party members has been met, on the whole, with barely stifled yawns across the city.

However, here at The BRISTOLIAN, we’re rather excited by the appointment of Labour Deputy Leader MARK ‘BEAR’ BRADSHAW as George’s transport supremo, as he has long had a penchant for crap ideas, political ineptitude and panicked u-turns as good as any in Bristol.

After all, this is the man who just a few years ago not only decided that BRT was the transport solution the city really needed, but then proposed to run the useless bus service up the Bristol and Bath Railway Path – the one genuine world-class cycling facility we have! This resulted in a world-class about-turn from Bradshaw when virtually the whole city, with the exception of FirstBus and Bradshaw’s own USELESS transport officers, told him where to stick his plan.

And now Bradshaw’s back – and guess what? He’ll be fronting the latest version of the BRT fiasco for George. And this promises to be very interesting as Bradshaw is now on record as saying that BRT is “A LAME DUCK PROJECT WITH VIRTUALLY NO SUPPORT”!

So that’s both the Mayor and his transport supremo against BRT. Now just sit back and watch the pair of them execute a perfect 180 degree u-turn and deliver the expensive and unwanted white elephant…