Tag Archives: Marvin Rees

LEGACY? ISSUE 71 ON THE STREETS NOW!

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It’s all hands on deck for long-suffering Bristol City Council museum staff.

Under direct orders from the Reverend Rees and his office, they’re racing to get their Edward Colston statue exhibit complete and on display as part of an exhibition on ‘protest’ at the M Shed by a deadline of 16 March.

In the absence of much else to brag about, the Reverend seems to have decided the Colston Statue will be a key part of his effort to have some kind of legacy.

This is something of a u-turn for Rees. He began his ruinous reign distancing himself from anything to do with Colston on the advice of “creative industries advisors”. He therefore didn’t even bother getting a poxy corrective plaque on the statue prior to its fall and even enthusiastically supported the prosecution of the Colston Four ‘privileged activist’ statue topplers.

Now the desperate soon-to-be ex-mayor is trying to claim the toppled statue as his own!

TINFOIL HAT NEWS

Marvin-Rees tinfoil

Has the Reverend let the cat out of the bag? At a Full Council Meeting in September he was asked by a member of the public if he “agreed that planning decisions should remain nonpartisan in Bristol?”

Back came the bizarre response, “It is disappointing when planning applications are rejected on brownfield sites when we have a housing and climate crisis for political reasons.”

Is the Reverend just using the so-called housing and climate crises as convenient pegs to hang his pro-corporate developer right wing economic agenda on?

“The truth is out there, but so are lies …”

MEET THE ‘CLIMATE LEADERS’

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Lady Gaga: a leading bank balance

News just in from our You Really Couldn’t Make This Ridiculous Shit Up Department:

While hanging around looking for a job in Dubai at COP 2023, the global climate talking shop, the Reverend Rees got a gig on a panel at the UK Climate Action Forum & Dinner.

Rees was billed as a ‘UK climate leader’ along with another familiar face who got to deliver a speech. Please step forward the one and only Nicola “Lady Gaga” Yates!

This is the former Chief Exec at Bristol City Council who was rather unceremoniously ‘disappeared’ from Bristol with a generous £200k handout after running up a mystery £30m deficit in the council’s accounts in the lead-up to the mayoral elections back in 2016.

Is it a requirement of a ‘UK climate leader’ that they have a history of failure and being shown the door?

The electorate, of course, sent the Reverend packing last year. Scrapping the post of mayor after an abysmal performance pissing our money up the wall.

Is there some fail Bristol, become a ‘UK climate leader’ rule?

TOP JOB NEWS

City office Avonmouth

The Reverend Rees told long-suffering journalists daft enough to attend his stillborn ‘CITY OFFICE’ launch last month that he planned to tackle “inequalities within leadership roles” by changing the people who are awarded the top jobs.

“This will mean having leaders from HARTCLIFFE and AVONMOUTH as well as Clifton”, he assured an audience invited and organised by his old, white, highly paid, Cambridge educated right hand man and personally appointed “leader”, council Chief Exec, Stephen “OAP” Hughes from, er, Birmingham.

Who thinks Hughes could even find Hartcliffe on a map?

SPENDING WATCH

The Reverend has a tasty destination in mind for his all-expenses spring jaunt

The Mayor’s PERSONAL OFFICE continues impress as they lead the way in savings at this time of austerity and cuts to vital public services.

In September, not only did the Reverend manage TWO TRIPS abroad – one to New York and one to Norway – to play at global mayors but he also returned home proposing to spend OUR MONEY on hosting the annual convening of the Global Parliament of Mayors – an enormous junket for mayors – here in Bristol next year at a minimum cost of £150k.

Other absolutely necessary expenditure emanating from his office in August included the purchase of 1,600 branded water bottles for over TWO GRAND, £448.00 of catering for people who can afford to buy their own lunch and £4,000 handed to an agency for a SINGLE translation.

He then popped off for some pre-Christmas junketing in Malaysia and China and says he’ll be visiting the notorious annual piss-up cum mass council land sell-off MIPIM in Cannes next year.

Good to see the Reverend leading from the front, eh?

ELECTION 2020: KICK ‘EM IN THE KNACKERS?

ELECTION 2020- KICK ‘EM IN THE KNACKERS?

The long and dull mayoral election campaign for 2020 briefly sparked into a bit of life at the end of January when the Lib Dems announced they would campaign in 2020 to SCRAP THE MAYORAL SYSTEM in Bristol.

The Lib Dems are yet to announce who their candidate will be but here at The BRISTOLIAN we think this has the sound of a very popular policy indeed. Will disgruntled and disgusted Bristolians sick to death of their underperforming and overpaid ‘city leaders’ and mayor deliver these clowns the ultimate KICK IN THE ELECTORAL KNACKERS?

The news is especially bad for the Reverend Rees. He may not only FACE DEFEAT IN MAY 2020 after a miserable term in office promoting Tory policies but he also may be personally responsible for the REJECTION of the mayoral system altogether! What a humiliating – if deserved – legacy!

The Greens, too, running a long campaign fronted by DULL TECHNOCRAT, Sandy Bufton-Tufton (surely Hore-Ruthven? ed.), may also be disappointed at this news. Having tried to position themselves as the main challengers to Rees and Labour, they may now need to RETHINK THEIR CAMPAIGN quite radically.

The boring, technocratic campaign they envisaged with Bufton-Tufton endlessly bickering with Rees over MARGINAL ISSUES such as ‘social value tendering’, the best placement of cycle lanes in Bishopston and who is best able to get the buses to run on time by treating First boss, James Freeman, to lunch once a month, is DEAD IN THE WATER.

Instead the Greens will need to go BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD and devise some eye-catching policies for people to vote for. The Greens will also need to convince a cynical electorate that Bufton-Tufton isn’t another pillock interested in the foreign travel opportunities and photo-ops with his friends rather than running A COUNCIL FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL BRISTOLIANS.

Watch this space.

NETTING ZEROES: GEORGIAN MARV

Netting Zeroes

Remember when Mayor No More Ferguson flew to New York City in 2014 to deliver a speech via satellite link to gormless local climate protestors sat on College Green? The Bristolian got in lots of trouble at the time for calling out the marching morons of Bristol who went along with this farce.

Well, anything George can do the Reverend can do better. Because back in April the Reverend took a 9,000 mile business class round trip by plane to Vancouver to deliver a 14 minute lecture on, er, climate change! A lecture people in Bristol weren’t even able to hear until over a month later when the tedious lecture was finally uploaded for free to the internet.

This ridiculous little escapade created two tons of carbon dioxide per plane passenger. About the same amount of carbon dioxide that an average car would generate if driven for 7,000 miles. Rees later explained to the Nazi Post that the trip was worthwhile because he was shaping global thinking with, er, internet celeb Elon Musk!

When will it dawn on people that the best way to sort out the climate would be to put the vain, self-serving hypocrites of the political class against the wall?

MENTAL MARV

The Reverend’s increasingly fragile mental state was exposed again during a visit to Stapleton Road in February to stare at waste bins.

Accompanied by cabinet bozo Kye “The” Dudd, the local police team and local community representatives, it seems the Reverend hadn’t realised two of the Green councillors for the area had been invited too.

So he decided to start shouting at them, accusing them of spreading lies about him on social media, being backstabbers and moaning about the budget.

Stay classy and in control Marv!

PULLING OUR LEGACY

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Colston statue with ‘PRICK’ written in large blue letters

The final stretch of a dull and useless mayoralty, finds the Reverend looking at ‘legacy’ beyond the ugly tall buildings and failing public services he’s created.

How about Edward Colston? The slave trader his creative industries ‘advisers’ urged him not to waste ‘political capital’ on when he came into office in 2016?

Rees has now rustled up £250k to pay a fancy London agency to design a long term Colston display for the city’s museum. Presumably because his museum staff won’t come up with anything referential enough for a self-important mayor?

The ego is landing …