From the Bristol City Council’s Environment Committee’s ‘Approach to Corporate Estate Decarbonisation’ report:
What they said:
“it is proposed that the council adopts a proactive and data led approach to avoid new fossil fuel linked asset installations and help the council to make informed decisions that will link the investment decisions for net zero with wider asset management strategy.”
What they mean:
“we’ll make a list of our buildings that have gas boilers.”
The council officer produced report mentions ‘business’ 178 times while lowly ‘public services’ are mentioned twice. If that doesn’t convince you this is a business charter from the Greens, then how about the 100 mentions of ‘growth’; the 32 mentions of corporate-coffer filling ‘net zero’ and 8 mentions for an unexplained ‘just transition’?
Looks like another right of centre coalition aligned to local business grifters has set up at the Council House to shovel public money to the private sector.
MORE BLOODY ‘GROWTH’
The Reverend’s meaningless buzzwords ‘inclusive growth’ are revived by the Greens in their economic plan. “We will grow our global reputation for innovation, creativity and sustainability [yawwwwn, Ed.] and attract investment aligned to our inclusive growth principles” they gush.
This ‘inclusive growth’ nonsense term appears a further eight times in their strategy. Nowhere do they explain what it is or how it differs from old-fashioned growth and its reliance on “trickle down theory”. The ridiculous belief that if the rich get richer the poor benefit by magic too. They don’t tell us what these ‘inclusive growth principles’ are, either.
The report rambles on, “[We will] use our role in the Bristol Temple Quarter LLP to support the implementation of the Bristol Temple Quarter Inclusive Growth Strategy.”
Naturally, there’s no such thing at present as the Bristol Temple Quarter Inclusive Growth Strategy. Although we’re promised, “[it] will be published in early 2025,” a date that has now passed.
It’s all a load of bollocks isn’t it?
FILM FLAM
“The health and social work sector is [Bristol’s] largest employer, providing 16% of local jobs in 2022,” say the Greens. Almost one in six workers in Bristol. This huge employment sector gets just seven mentions in their economic strategy.
Meanwhile, an obsession with the film industry continues. ‘Film’ gets 17 mentions, although the Greens forget to say what percentage of local jobs their Hollywood dream actually delivers. Instead we get a tired old stat: “the Bottle Yard Studios contributed almost £21 million to the city’s economy”. £21m is a little over a tenth of one per cent of Bristol’s £15bn annual turnover.
Why the exposure and subsidies for a marginal industry while the sectors people actually work in get downplayed and underfunded?
DOWN SOUTH: After a few crocodile tears about inequality in south Bristol, the Green economic plan announces nine ‘designated areas of growth’ for the city for the next ten years.
Seven of these are north of the river. Two – Bedminster and Brislington – are in the south. Bedminster is gentrifying fast while the selection of Brislington along the Bath Road looks like a sweetener to help get the greenbelt built on at Hicks Gate.
Little support from the Greens for South Bristol, then.
The ascension of the Reverend Rees to the House of Lords will not leave him short of cash and having to rely on just the £361 per day in attendance allowance with travel expenses and subsidised restaurant facilities.
His recently published register of interests to Parliament reveals he also has some other income streams. Including US multinational Ameresco, Inc, who have paid fees to the Reverend’s ‘personal services company’, Three and Two Ltd.
Ameresco was awarded a £1bn contract by Bristol City Council in 2021 on the Reverend’s watch after winning the tender to run his ‘Billion pound City Leap’ net zero nonsense.
Nothing to see here!
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!
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.
The council’s applied for a grant of £3.3m to install 200 on trend air source heat pumps in leafy Westbury-on-Trym. A subsidy of £16,500 per Tory household!
Why this pilot has to be run in one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs isn’t very well explained by Labour’s dim Climate Change head honcho Kye “The” Dudd or his increasingly unstable boss, the Reverend.
Instead Rees explained away his loopy heating subsidy to the wealthy by telling bored councillors he was “going to be at the US embassy tomorrow to speak about a just transition”. Guess that’s one way to keep us all warm next winter.
The Greens, potentially the largest party in Bristol after next year’s elections, were also getting wet in the pants at news of Net Zero handouts to the wealthy.
West Bristol’s ridiculous national Green Party leader, Carla “Posh Princess” Denyer gushed that the scheme was a “fabulous solution”.
What the fuck’s wrong with these people?
The appearance of a thin City Leap summary business plan for the public is another outing for a proposed ‘Strategic Heat Main’. To run from Avonmouth where UK-wide waste is burned on an industrial scale to Bristol city centre where the shiny new heat networks are being built for the shiny new people.
This pipe dream pipeline run euphemistically on ‘low carbon heat’ is currently touted to cost around £100m out of the £200m or so the private sector may invest in ‘decarbonisation’ in Bristol.
Because the best way to get to net zero is definitely to burn – in working class Avonmouth – shitloads of polluting rubbish imported from London then use the energy to cheaply power a heat network for wealthy folk in the centre.
A net zero noose is tightening around the centre of the city. A disorganised council mess of road closures, bus gates and half-arsed signage devised by the cream of shit-for-brains council transport officers has made navigating the Centre a near impossibility for motorists. Next year comes the Clear Air Zone, bringing road pricing to the city centre travel party.
But not to worry. You’re not cut off from the centre of your own city in the slightest as you can always follow the net zero apostles’ gospel and hop on a bus to town instead.
That’s what Worst Bus shareholders will be hoping, anyway. As, to celebrate this bright new dawn of Net Zero travel in the sustainable city, Worst have hiked the cost of a day ticket 18 per cent from £4.50 to £5.30.
Net zero is a nice little earner for some isn’t it?
Business West – where that pair of old Merchant Venturer public sector looters, Colin “Toryboy” Skellett and John “Ignoble” Savage, have recently joined the board – announce that this whole ‘net zero’ schtick could provide a £9.2bn “opportunity” for local business.
What are these “biggest opportunities since the coming of the railway” for the wealthy then? One of them is the council’s City Leap programme where a lucky multinational get’s to build and own unregulated heat networks in the city and charge customers – who are forced by planning regulations to sign up – what they decide.
Horror stories about heat networks are already emerging. At Sutton Council’s SDEN heat network, residents who paid up to £600k for new homes were promised cheap, clean and reliable heat and hot water.
Instead they are paying twice the price of any other heating on the market for a gas powered system that broke down twelve times in a year!
Yesterday saw another poorly attended march around Broadmead as part of a “global day of action for climate justice.”
The usual liberal suspects bearing ‘witty’ homemade placards were joined by unions, the Labour Party and the Green Party, all touting a version of “the Green New Deal”. Where large sums of commercially confidential public money will be handed over to struggling corporations with no questions allowed to provide profitable market solutions to the climate crisis.
Under the ubiquitous straplines “net zero” and “just transition”, some of the most unjust organisations and institutions on the planet – that created climate change in the first place – are now going to solve it for us (for a fee)!
The BRISTOLIAN’s position on this hasn’t altered on this since 2014 when there was also a “a global day of climate change action” during a UN conference in New York City to organise a climate conference. We said then:
Any response to climate change requires a new mass social movement and the dismantling of existing elites and their interests, not some crude rearrangement betweeen these elites (who have already trashed the planet) backed up with a novelty global PR campaign aimed at GUILT TRIPPING US.
If we want to protect humanity from climate change, we have to TAKE CONTROL of business and industry ourselves, not leave it to profit-hungry corporations or a bunch of rich hippy clowns. We don’t want a nicer shinier ‘green capitalism’, we want to DESTROY it, their class system and protect our future in one shot. You know it makes sense