Tag Archives: Mayor

CRUEL SPORT

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The WECA man with WECA dog

Dan “The WECA Man” Norris is a very busy WECA man indeed. As well as being the Metro Mayor and an MP, Dan is also the Chair of the League Against Cruel Sports where he has been served with legal papers for an Employment Tribunal claim by the charity’s former chief executive, Andy Knott.

Former army officer, Knott, alleges that “Dan Norris asked him to keep quiet if Labour dropped its commitment to close loopholes in existing fox-hunting laws.”

Knott then claims that when he raised concerns about this political interference to the board and senior management, “they refused to investigate”.

GAGGING FOR IT!

West-of-England-Combined-Authority-logo

Huge sums of money dished out to ‘disappear’ WECA bosses by clown man regional mayor

It’s been a very busy time down at WECA for tasty payoffs and gagging orders. Since hapless clown man, Dan “The WECA Man” Norris, was elected in May 2021 there’s been the following exits:

June 2021: David Gibson, Director of Infrastructure exited with a pay off and gagging order;

September 2021: the Director of Governance exited with a pay off and gagging order;

February 2022: the Director of Finance exited with a pay off and gagging order. 

And let’s not forget Chief Executive, Patricia “Psycho” Greer disappeared in 2022 too. Later paid off in August 2023 with a £219,000 golden handshake with a gagging order in place.

Into 2024 and we’ve said goodbye to Rachel Musson, Director of Resources, with rumours of sex discrimination circulating. She exited with a pay off and gagging order.

Another Director of Infrastructure exited with a payoff and gagging order and Alex Holly, Director of HR exited with a payoff and gagging order.

The term ‘basketcase’ doesn’t do the Weca Man’s organisation justice.

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.

THE STATE OF IT

Gissa job

October: and another hectoring ‘State of the City’ lecture delivered from the University of Bristol’s snooty Wills Memorial Building shithouse by the Reverend Rees as he finally nears that door marked ‘for god’s sake go’.

Nothing much new worth reporting really. Relentless boasting; tedious homilies on ‘leadership’; ill-disguised paranoid and embittered ranting at the latest set of perceived enemies; the ego-inflated right wing economic ramblings we’ve suffered for over seven years now; narcissistic claims about his ‘global leadership’ role and a lecture to the rest of the city’s politicians about his ‘corporate concrete will cure climate change’ approach.

He will not be missed by many.

LOCAL PLAN: HOW TO DEMAND A SLAVE TRADE MEMORIAL

Local Plan  Seamans Chapel

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!

THE REAL STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS

Last night the Reverend Rees delivered his final State of the City speech from the University of Bristol’s shithouse Wills Building. Here’s a response:

Marvin, your State of the City speech seems to be a list of things that haven’t been delivered or resolved in your time in office. 

Most of the key infrastructure projects that previous Labour council’s failed to invest in remain uninvested in but with a tab left to be picked up by the next administration. 

There’s no funded mass transit proposal. It’s stalemated due to a lack of agreement between two bickering Labour Mayors who have prioritised their own personal animosity and egos above the needs of the city and region. 

The city continues to have deep divisions along race and class lines despite all the talk about diversity, equity and inclusion and tackling the “issues”. Where are the measurable outcomes showing improvement? 

But then you did watch the Colston statue come down and spot a self promotional media opportunity rather than a chance to trigger a real attempt to tackle the city’s long standing divisions. 

Congratulations Marvin, you built some homes (the vast majority at market rates with many being bought by private landlords) and yet still managed to miss every housing target you set yourself. 

The housing waiting list has increased to 20,000 families. The highest it has ever been, despite officers actively discouraging residents from going on the list “because it’s a waste of time”. 

Homelessness remains noticeably present everywhere, except, maybe, in the Bearpit, despite your promise to solve it. 

The vast majority of the 14,000 homes with planning permission are not being built and you try to blame a minority opposition party for this failure to deliver.

Still no arena, public or privately funded, anywhere. And tens of millions in public funds sunk into an elitist city centre cultural venue because of a binding legal contract signed on your watch. All while deprived suburbs lose community/cultural facilities.

City Leap has potential but so far isn’t unlocking any private investment and is falling behind its real investment plan, never mind this unsubstantiated £1bn you constantly quote at the press.

Goram Homes also has some potential but your planning delays means it’s falling massively behind schedule.

Bristol Waste is a basketcase with a revolving door board of directors. A direct result of poor corporate oversight. Your political interference in its business planning, meanwhile, has undermined any efforts to reduce costs. 

Elsewhere, your council is still complicit in developing SNCIs despite declaring an ‘Ecological Emergency’ and creating plenty of photo-ops of Labour politicians standing in fields saying how important green spaces are. 

There’s still no real plan for achieving net zero despite declaring a ‘Climate Emergency’. 

Then there’s the poorly implemented CAZ, almost as if it was designed to fail and disrupt. 

You are creating only one Liveable Neighbourhood and this is being poorly implemented and poorly consulted on with middle class neighbourhoods getting disproportionate input while poorer neighbourhoods are ignored.

Local CiL projects, especially transport and parks, are not being delivered partly because staff are being taken away to work on “headline grabbing” strategic projects.

The budget gap is currently larger than the Bundred one under Ferguson and there’s still no realistic plan to address it beyond service reduction and selling off council property. 

SEND?!?!! Say no more. Your “Deputy” Mayor hasn’t a clue what she is doing just like the chain of useless Labour education leads before her. Our kids and, increasingly, their parents are paying the price of this serial incompetence. 

The Dedicated Schools Grant is effectively in special measures and your administration is just crossing it’s fingers and hoping the government doesn’t pull the plug on this ever growing debt.

Basically Marvin, you have left behind a stinking pile of crap and then have the nerve to lecture the councillors who will have to clear up your shit about how the city should be run!!! 

Get da fuck!

FOUR JOBS TAKES THE FIFTH

Gissa job

Great news just in. Our four-jobs mayor, the Reverend Rees, has now declared his fifth job!

He’s now picking up an honorarium from 17 Rooms, part of Centre for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC and the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. An honorarium is payment for services rendered and Rees has registered it as a pecuniary interest under ’employment’ .

This latest little income uplift fits alongside being chair of the Local Government Association’s (LGA) City Regions Board (1.5 to 2 days a week), chair of Core Cities and a non-executive director at TV company Plimsoll Productions.

We know he gets £83k as mayor (plus a councillor allowance of £14k) and that his LGA allowance is £17.5k. However, the rest of his pay is undisclosed.

This new Brookings Institute/Rockefeller gig seems to involve the Reverend pursuing his Atlanticist interests and promoting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. A self-interested US-led global free market template for the ‘free world’. A long way from Bristol.

You have to wonder when the Reverend finds any time to be the executive mayor of Bristol?

OLD GIT WATCH

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“Do you know who I am?”

Who’s this “rude old git” getting thrown off the Cross Harbour Ferry? Step forward Mayor No More George Ferguson! It seems the daft sod in the stupid trousers recently shouted at the driver of the ferry, “get on the boat, you’re holding people up” as the driver waited a while for some more passengers. 

“I’m not holding anyone up,” came the retort from the worker for the Harbour’s well-run ferry company, “you’re holding everyone up now because I’m not driving this boat ’til you get off it.” 

Cue foot-stamping and “do-you-know-who-I-amming” from the red-trousered nobody before the other five people on the boat finally told George he was ‘a rude old git’ and could he get off the boat!  The failed mayor (and ferry boat operator) finally did get off, muttering darkly that he would get the Harbour Master to shut them down.

Unlikely, as the Harbour Master is a thick lazy cunt and shutting a ferry down would involve some brains and effort. 


MANIFESTO WATCH: THE REVEREND GOES BONKERS

Labour manifesto

Taking some much-deserved time off from wandering aimlessly around the city lying and bullshitting to long-suffering residents (surely spearheading a modern and professional election campaign? ed.), the Reverend Rees has taken an especially large dump and evacuated a stinking pile of an election manifesto on to the public. And yes, we’ve read it all and our research team are now in recovery.

Yet again, we’re treated to the, now, traditional Labour shopping list of promises off the back of a fag packet. We’ve counted a total of 91 of these promises and hardly any of them are costed. Starting with the unfeasibly bonkers plan to “deliver a mass transit system … in the form of both an underground and an overground” because, we’re assured, Marvin’s “laid the foundations for a mass transit system.”

What foundations has Marvin laid? A demented assertion in a couple of interviews and some orange lines on a Google Map? Where, for starters, is the feasibility study for an underground he promised three years ago? He’s, literally, done nothing about this plan he can show anyone. Why would anyone sane believe a word of it? And how much will it cost?

Another tactic from Marvin is to promise again things he promised in his 2016 manifesto. So having failed to deliver ‘2,000 homes a year, 800 affordable’ as plastered on billboards all over the city in 2016, this time we’re assured the Reverend will be “building over 2,000 homes a year, of which 1,000 are affordable, by 2024.”

Another gem recycled from the 2016 manifesto, “Complete and open Hartcliffe Way recycling and reuse centre”. Why hasn’t it been completed already as promised five years ago? Why believe it in 2021 if it was patently untrue in 2016? 

Or how about this one? “We’re delivering on our 2016 promise to get an arena built”. The only thing Marvin delivered on this subject was the exact opposite by cancelling getting an arena built. Who believes they’ll be an arena open in Filton by 2024 then?

In all, there’s 14 pages of this crap. Some appears stolen from the Greens in a blind panic: “Provide free travel for apprentices and students under-25”. Some is appearing in everybodies’ manifesto as the essential uncosted promise du nos jours: “Deliver a London-style one-touch integrated ticketing system so that your ticket can be used across different types of public transport.”

Some is peculiarly clueless: “Deliver a Green Spaces and Allotments Strategy which encourages local food production in every ward to help tackle food poverty”. As if local food production has something to do with low cost food.

Similar economic illiteracy abounds throughout. Another big idea is, “work with the City Funds to deliver the economic priorities in the One City Plan”. Why the fuck get a small charitable grant making trust run by your evangelical looney mate to deliver an economic plan for the eighth largest city in the UK? It makes zero sense. Who thinks this shit up?

We’ll conclude with the Reverend confirming his five years of useless failure in style with the promise to “Expand the Community Toilet programme and introduce an app that provides their location”. In other words he’ll not be bringing back the public toilets he closed. Instead he’ll spend our money on useless private sector provision with a pointless tech solution thrown in.

That just about sums the Reverend’s politics up.