MARVIN MEETS HIS PUBLIC
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Tag Archives: Marvin Rees
TOP JOB NEWS
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?
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
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
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 …
HOUSING FAIL
Back in the dark ages of March 2016, months before the Reverend Rees and his ego climbed down from his personal Mount Olympus to become Mayor, there were 27,402 council homes in Bristol.
By March this year, after seven years basking in a Reesian age of light with a laser-like focus on housing, there are now 26,687 council homes in Bristol. A fall of over 2.5 per cent!
Undeterred by conventional measures of failure, however, Rees has got the housing waiting list down. Simply by reorganising the list and throwing people in bands three and four off it altogether!
Success Rees-style.
BARTON HOUSE: HOW BADLY HAVE REES AND BRISTOL CITY COUNCIL FUCKED UP THIS TIME?
On 5 September 2017 Tamara Finkelstein, Director General for the Building Safety Programme and Department of Communities and Local Government, wrote to all local authorities. This was after 3cm-wide cracks between concrete panels were identified in large panel system (LPS) buildings on the Ledbury estate in Peckham, south-east London.
Finkelstein told local authorities:
“It is important with all large panel system buildings that their structural history is known, and that their condition and continued structural integrity are understood and monitored. This should include desktop studies where necessary to establish what strengthening work has been undertaken, and to assess the original design of the building. In undertaking desktop studies, building owners may not be able to rely solely on their own records. They may also need to explore records prior to them taking ownership of the building and explore the accuracy of them. Depending on the records available and findings from non-intrusive investigations, building owners may wish to commission more intrusive forms of investigation to check condition and strength of critical connections.”
So how come Peter Apps and Robert Booth at the Guardian report today:
“Bristol city council said there was no record of any structural surveys of Barton House after remedial works were carried out around 1970.”
Why did the Rees administration disregard government advice for six years and allow one of their buildings to deteriorate to the point where its 400 residents need to be evacuated at a few hours notice and made homeless?
This was avoidable and heads need to roll.
LOCAL PLAN: HOW TO DEMAND A SLAVE TRADE MEMORIAL
The city’s political class and self-styled ‘leaders’, with strings openly being pulled by the Society of Merchant Venturers, continue to undermine any chance of memorialising the city’s links to the slave trade. Any site proposed for a memorial over the last seven years has been knocked back by the mayor who has chosen to prioritise boozy food halls and gastropubs as his legacy.
One way to get around the mayor and the city’s ragbag of crap ‘leaders” intransigence is to get a site for a memorial agreed in the forthcoming Local Plan. Potential sites available in the centre include: the Old Seaman’s Chapel (SA403) on Royal Oak Avenue on the corner of Queen Square and Prince Street, ideal for an abolition museum and history centre; 16 Narrow Quay (SA404), the empty space between Arnolfini and the YHA, ideal for a memorial garden and The Grove Car Park (BDA0801) by the Thekla, a, potentially large space to develop.
All the sites can be found in the Draft Allocation document going to Full Council this week: https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s89151/08.2%20Appendix%20A2%20Development%20Allocations%20Annex.pdf. Old Seaman’s Chapel (SA403) is on page 68; 16 Narrow Quay (SA404) is on page 70 and The Grove Car Park (BDA0801) is on page 58.
Details of the sites are in the document and all you need to do is respond to the forthcoming Local Plan consultation and request that each site is designated for “Community Facilities, in particular a museum exploring the history of slavery and it’s abolition from a Bristol viewpoint.”
Simple. Go tell the city’s useless self-serving ‘leaders’ what you want!