Tag Archives: Stephen McNamara

How to stop cuts the Steve Norman way

By The Bristol Blogger

I first came across Steve Norman in late 2004. Ian Bone, then editor of The Bristolian, called one evening: “You’ve got to meet Steve Norman and Andy Richardson. Top geezers! They’re running a campaign directly with the elderly and learning disabled to save their daycare centres, which are being shut down by the council.

“The protests are crazy. You’ve never seen anything like it. Steve was quoting Martin McGuiness’s ‘Armalite and ballot box strategy’ to me. They’re doing a protest next month outside the Council House. Make sure you get there.”

So that’s how I found myself outside Bristol’s Council House on a crisp January morning in 2005 at some protest to save something I didn’t know much about. Although that was about to change because Bone was right, I’d never seen anything quite like this before.

A protest over council cuts in those days would usually consist of eight – maybe ten – well-meaning socialists brandishing a few crappy placards and a fake petition for the public to sign. Maybe they’d be accompanied by someone flogging a badly written newspaper listing the crimes of the Labour government alongside an urgent plea to join their marginal socialist sect.

This protest consisted of about 20 elderly and learning disabled people accompanied by Andy and – as the public ringmaster-in-chief with a megaphone in hand – Steve. However, the genius of this protest didn’t lie with Steve’s quickfire Bristolian epithets aimed at various social service bosses and out-of-touch Labour councillors but with the 20-odd extremely vulnerable elderly and disabled people who were very, very slowly trooping across the pelican crossing on Park Street directly outside the Council House.

When a protestor finally made it to the other side, they would press the button to cross again and wait for the ‘green man’ pedestrian light. Meanwhile, the other nineteen would continue their ramshackle progress across Park Street. By the time they all finally reached one side, the green man appeared, allowing them to troop across the road all over again!

Few cars were going anywhere that morning. Traffic chaos engulfed the heart of the city directly outside its notional seat of power and there was fuck all anybody could do about it! Motorists might be fuming but they were hardly going to get out of their cars and start threatening a load of vulnerable adults, some with zimmer frames, others in wheelchairs.

The police arrived, mildly (and not very realistically) threatening arrests. Only to be told by Steve they would require full risk assessments and specialist lifting equipment before they attempted to remove anyone in a wheelchair into a police vehicle. The police seemed to accept this logic and drifted away to do something more useful or, maybe, they were trying to find their equalities policy and a disabled access police van with a wheelchair lift? (Steve knew perfectly well that the Avon & Somerset Police had no such vehicle in service. Police were therefore unable to arrest or legally remove wheelchair using protestors).

Meanwhile, the target of the protests, Bristol’s councillors and senior council officers remained hiding behind closed doors. Not one of them daring to venture the few metres outside to meet with their own vulnerable service users on a chilly January morning. Stephen McNamara, the council’s legal boss and town clerk, then at the height of his high camp wig-wearing “Look-at-me-I’m-a-very-important-man-I-am” phase, was even stationed in the lobby of the Council House to personally prevent any of his vulnerable adult service users accessing the toilets!

The protest broke up after a couple of hours when council transport arrived to return the service users to Lockleaze Day Centre for their lunch. Steve and Andy invited me to come to a ‘Campaign to Save Daycare in Bristol’ meeting.

These meetings happened most Thursday evenings in a back room at the – now – sadly demolished Wedlocks pub at Ashton Gate. From this disorganised ragbag of vulnerable service users, carers, political activists and anyone else who showed up – sort of led by Steve and Andy often with their heads in their hands – a ‘spring offensive’ of actions was devised and launched.

This offensive kicked off on the 1 March at the annual budget meeting of Bristol City Council. A meeting flooded with the elderly, disabled and their carers. So many attended that wheelchairs lined the length of chamber and a victory came early when it was announced that Labour’s piss weak and wimpy council leader, Peter Hammond, had thrown a sickie and his long-suffering deputy, Helen Holland, would be standing in for him. Lib Dem Councillor Simon Cook, that year’s Lord Mayor, provided further amusement prior to the meeting when he agreed to depart from tradition and let the public speak at a budget meeting “as long as you don’t mention Hitler”.

Helen managed to mumble through almost five minutes of her boss Hammond’s odious justification for cuts to the city’s most vulnerable at the height of an economic boom for the rich when the council chamber descended into chaos and the budget meeting – as planned by the council – ground to a halt. Kicked off by a single carer interrupting her speech and loudly accusing Helen “of trying to fucking kill me” in 2003, the Hitler speech was soon rolled out by another protestor as councillors, the Lord Mayor and town clerk, McNamara, resplendent on his throne in his absurd judges wig, were aggressively heckled into silence.

A full blown retreat by councillors from the chamber soon followed when Steve and Andy handcuffed themselves to a rail in the public gallery and McNamara was confronted with the reality that he had lost all control of his own council meeting and had no means of restoring order. He had no clue how to remove the handcuffs from Steve and Andy and couldn’t use his security to throw out any other protestors. Even he understood manhandling any vulnerable adults he was legally responsible for protecting out of his building might end badly.

The people had seized the council chamber and the Lord Mayor, councillors and highly-paid administrators from the UK’s eighth largest city were cowering from vulnerable adults in a back room unable to set a legal budget for the city. Mission accomplished.

Many of the “spring offensive” actions have now taken on a near mythical status. Not least, the Friday afternoon of March 18 2005 when twelve service users occupied their own day centre in Lockleaze after some of them handcuffed themselves to rails and refused to leave at the end of the day. Steve, Andy and friends remained outside all night, supporting the occupiers – and thwarting the plans of council staff, who had to remain on site to “protect” service users, to starve out the occupiers – by pushing fish and chip takeaways through an open second floor window on long sticks.

The occupation created a huge amount of high profile coverage from the press, TV and radio. While the council’s daft PR man, Simon Caplan, invited open ridicule and more publicity when he helpfully explained, from the front page of the local newspaper, that the protest “served no useful purpose”. Except introducing the daycare campaign to new audiences across the city through headline coverage on every available local news platform!With the wind in their sails, the campaign moved on to even more logistically complex protests. Within hours of the announcement by Tony Blair of the 2005 General Election on April 5, Steve and a number of protestors with major mobility problems had occupied the Labour Party’s first floor South West HQ on Portland Square with an ITV News camera crew in tow!

On May 3 2005, just days before the election, Steve and protestors targeted hundreds of bank holiday customers at @Bristol. Many of these punters were less-than-impressed that the learning disabled and the frail elderly were having to take the streets to campaign to keep their own services. Bristol’s Labour boss for social services, Robin Moss, however, insisted to reporters that the daycare protests were “political stunts”. Although the real political stunt arrived just a few days later when Moss was unceremoniously dumped out of his Easton council ward by the Lib Dems while his party was similarly dumped out of power in Bristol, again, by the Lib Dems.

Steve, Andy and the protestors weren’t done yet and continued putting pressure on the new Lib Dem administration that had promised a review of daycare services during the election. On June 6 2015, the group appeared on College Green directly outside the Council House for the day with a series of 10ft-high placards directly naming seven council officers under a large headline: “Bristol social services’ list of uncaring professionals”.

This produced an aggressive response from town clerk and part time Council House toilet attendant, Stephen McNamara. “If necessary,” the wannabe tough guy thundered from the pages of the Evening Post, “the council will take legal action through the courts to prevent any such activity. The council will not tolerate its employees being harassed in this way.”

Steve loved these kind of threats from puffed up bureaucrats. “This campaign will not be bullied by city council legal mumbo jumbo and empty threats,” he replied in the same article. While he told the BBC, “I would love a legal action for the publicity”. That same day, Steve publicly forwarded his name and address to McNamara, inviting him to take immediate legal action. Steve was only too happy to see this – or any other – pompous old fool, who habitually made the law up to suit the interests of the powerful, in a proper court where the real law would apply.

When Steve, predictably, received no response from McNamara, he borrowed a flat-bed truck and on June 11 2005 spent the day humiliating the council by driving around the city centre, followed by a convoy of the press, parading his ten foot placards publicly shaming the same seven council employees all over again.

And the council’s response? Immediate legal action? Police? Arrests? Injunction? ASBO? Er, no, unconditional surrender and an invitation to Steve and the protestors to immediately attend talks with the Lib Dems to try and settle the dispute. Within weeks of these talks, the Lockleaze Day Centre was officially saved and the campaign drew to a close.

Steve went on to fight many more battles after this one. But the basic template of the ‘Armalite and ballot box strategy’ altered little: use persistent and high profile PR-friendly direct action ignoring all police and legal threats from weak and desperate politicians until the useless fuckers surrender. And they always will.

RIP Steve.

WERE COUNCIL BOSSES SPOILING FOR A PUBLIC FIGHT WITH MARKETS WHISTLEBLOWER?

**** DEATH RIDDLE MARKETS BOSS PUT IN LINE OF FIRE BY SENIOR MANAGERS AND COUNCILLORS ****

The BRISTOLIAN has obtained a sensational letter from a Web ExclusiveMarkets Service whistleblower to the council’s former Monitoring Officer, Stephen McNamara sent in July 2012. The letter was also copied The Markets Fileto former strategic director Will Godfey and a handful of senior councillors responsible for financial oversight.

The letter is a formal complaint regarding suicide boss, Tony Harvey’s multiple failures in his treatment of a bona fide whistleblower and it particularly focuses on Harvey’s proposed ‘restructure’ of the markets service that he announced, in a remarkable coincidence, just days after the whistleblower came forward in 2012!

The letter explains that Harvey was undertaking this restructure of the department as a blatant means of getting the whistleblower out of their post while an investigation into serious financial irregularities in Harvey’s dodgy service had barely begun.

Remarkably, Harvey was refusing to suspend his dodgy restructure on the basis that “the [audit] investigation will not affect the review[/restructure]”. An absurd opinion. How could an investigation that would conclude with a considerable number of recommendations about the structure and practice of the department’s financial management not affect a review of the department’s structure and practice?

As The BRISTOLIAN has been told by a well-placed source, “Harvey’s restructure always looked like the act of some bent-as-hell management madman intent on sacking a whistleblower to cover up his own dodgy and incompetent management conduct rather than the cool-headed, well thought out professional restructure of a local authority department he was handsomely paid to produce.”

Stephen McNamara - another oafish decision someone else pays the price for?

Stephen McNamara – another oafish decision someone else pays the price for?

Indeed, the letter to McNamara highlights a number of major irregularities in Harvey’s restructure plan. Some proven accurate when the council later had to reach an out-of-court settlement with one of the whistleblowers due to the flaws in this very restructure.

The letter goes on to ask that Harvey’s restructure process be suspended until the financial investigation is complete and a proper, comprehensive restructure, including the recommendations from the investigation, could be produced. The whistleblower and his union even offered their wholesale help and support to such a process.

The conclusion of the letter is intriguing. Firstly it states:

You are entirely at liberty to continue on the course selected by Tony Harvey and I am at liberty to reach the conclusion that you’re not taking my complaints at all seriously and take them outside the organisation.

A clear indication that the whistleblower would make things public if necessary. They then go on to say,

My trade union representative and I are more than happy to discuss the issues raised in this letter with either yourself or Will [Godfrey] or another serious management representative that is not Tony Harvey.

A clear indication that the whistleblower was open to dialogue, discussion and negotiation. The letter concludes by saying,

I’m extremely persistent and deeply interested in the proper conduct of public affairs. I’m not going to go away and there’s certainly nobody in your authority capable of scaring me away. I’ve provided a number of reasonable ‘soft’ options worth pursuing in this letter. I would strongly encourage you to take one of them.

Alas, McNamara’s response was short, curt and dismissive. No discussion. No dialogue. No negotiation. Harvey’s dodgy process to remove a whistleblower from their job during a ‘live’ financial investigation would continue.

Unfortunately – for them – The BRISTOLIAN also does short, curt and dismissive. More effectively, many would say, than a jumped-up public sector lawyer like McNamara.

And so the die was cast. Senior council bosses proactively decided upon open conflict and a bruising public row rather than negotiation and compromise.

But did they bother to think through the implications of their decision? Did they consider the potential impact on their staff – such as Tony Harvey – on the frontline of any brutal and very public conflict? Did they consider their duty of care towards Tony Harvey?

Or was this another decision driven by sheer arrogance and the knowledge that someone else’s body could always be thrown in the way to deal with the consequences and to pay any price?

PAYOFFS TO FAILED COUNCIL MANAGERS NOW TOTAL NEARLY £900K!

The BRISTOLIAN has learned that in the last year the city’s council taxpayers have doled out an astonishing £875,000 to council leaders for leaving! That’s OVER HALF A MILLION QUID going to failed service directors, and MORE THAN £300K being forked out for two former council bosses to put their feet up at home!

Jan Ormondroyd: doesn't badly run councils for free, you know

Jan Ormondroyd: doesn’t badly run councils for free, you know

First up, Bristol’s former Chief Exec THE BRADFORD SUN QUEEN, Jan Ormondroyd. She mysteriously ‘quit’ in a bit of a hurry in July 2012 and was handed a SECRET CASH HANDOUT in of around £50k in pay for work she never did – a figure way beyond any redundancy entitlement for a post that wasn’t redundant anyway.

The 57 year old was also given a whopping pension enhancement that saw Bristolians stumping up a further £135k or so. So the total bill to the council taxpayer for the SUN QUEEN to sit at home retired is not far short of £200k.

Stephen McNamara - no wonder he's smiling with a six figure payout from YOU!

Stephen McNamara: with a six figure payout courtesy of YOU, no wonder he’s smiling

Former legal boss, STEPHEN ‘LYCRA’ MCNAMARA followed the SUN QUEEN out the back door last Christmas. Having reinterpreted the law to suit the city’s richest man Steve (“Tax is for the little people”) Lansdown and landed Bristol with an expensive and UNDEFENDABLE JUDICIAL REVIEW into the ASHTON VALE Town Green, Lycra was considered surplus to requirements – and allegedly made redundant. Although, strangely, the post of Chief Legal Officer and Monitoring Officer, Lycra’s old job, still appears to exist and is not redundant at all.

To ease 55 year old Lycra on his way, he was “retired” and given a pension enhancement worth around £60k, three months pay worth around £14k per month, and a further £40k in “COMPENSATION FOR LOSS OF OFFICE”. Of course, Lycra thinks he’s too good for B&Q, so he has a tasty post-retirement ‘consultancy’ with expensive law firm Veale Wasbrough Vizards – best known for (have we mentioned this before?) representing a Catholic private school facing a paedo priest scandal.

The BRISTOLIAN can also reveal that another FIVE council managers, all on six figure salaries, last year shared “exit packages” worth £548K – that’s almost £110k each!!! Obviously all these payments massively exceed pay outs available through the redundancy policy created by Ormondroyd herself to, erm, prevent “excessive pay outs to top managers”.

Perhaps Ormondroyd’s redundancy policy – like taxation, in the opinion of McNamara’s chum Lansdown – only applies to “THE LITTLE PEOPLE”?

Welcome to austerity – Bristol style.

MASSIVE PAYOUTS! MASSIVE CUTS! MASSIVE BELLENDS! …PLUS SOME GOOD NEWS TOO IN THE LATEST EDITION OF ‘THE BRISTOLIAN’!

The BRISTOLIAN #4.7 - coverOctober’s edition of The BRISTOLIAN is another PACKED ISSUE, featuring…

» NEARLY £900k IN PAYOFFS TO CRAP COUNCIL BOSSES!
Ex-Chief Executive and six Directors squeeze almost a million quid out of us

» FAT CAT GAGA’S DOSH SENSATION!
Second choice ‘City Director’ Nicola Yates’s well-funded departure from Hull

» GARGAN GETS FEAR OVER INTERNET PROFILE PIC!
Avon & Somerset Police’s Arch-Druid Nick Gargan confuses fictional copper for real thing

» INDYREDPANTS MAN AND THE AFFAIR OF THE ACCIDENTAL WORKFARE
PR guru Oliver Mochizuki fails to silence concerns over festival’s forced labour ‘volunteers’

» LABOUR’S NON-MAYOR: REES-KING RIDICULE?
Failed Shitty Hall candidate Marvin Rees shamelessly puts himself in same category as MLK

» HAVE A KITCAT? BREAK A STRIKE
Councillor Telford and Mayor Ferguson get chummy with Brighton’s binman-hating council boss

PLUS: NEWS IN BRIEF!!!

» BRISTOLIAN BITES
Tantalising titbits including…

  • MERCHANT VENTURER LANDGRABhow Fergo’s pals want your libraries and parks!
  • CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST who does John Hirst remind us of?
  • CABINET KNOWS BESThow Council leaders think they have nothing to learn

» VICTORY NEWS
Positive stories from across the city!

  • V FOR VALERIANpressure from The BRISTOLIAN helps trapped residents
  • ALLOTMENTS SAVED – Lynmouth Road gardeners don’t lose the plot
  • BLACKLISTERS IN RETREATsafety-hating construction companies on back foot

PLUS: COMMENT!!!

» BRISTOL’S BROKEN DEMOCRACY?
Outgoing Finance boss Peter Robinson leaves a ‘Zero Budget’ shit-in-a-box for Mayor Fergo

» TOWN GREENS: LATEST
Why you can’t trust councillors to do the right thing

PLUS: NEW D.I.Y GUIDES!!!

» TOP TIPS TO BEAT THE BEDROOM TAX!
Practical lawyer’s advice on how to survive the ‘Spare Room Subsidy’

Blimey! And all that for FREE!

See the Distribution page for your local stockist – and if there isn’t one near you, let us know!

CAN’T WAIT TO GET HOLD OF A PAPER COPY?

Then you can DOWNLOAD a PDF version here:

» The BRISTOLIAN #4.7 – October 2013

ALLOTMENTS FOR SALE! WHO’S GETTING RICH OFF THE GREAT GREEN SPACES LAND GRAB?

Battle lines are being drawn in St. Werburgh’s between green-fingered local residents and sharp-suited corporate vultures over a blatant INNER CITY LAND GRAB following the announcement that the Lynmouth Road allotments will come onto the open market next month.

The one-acre parcel of land, with a guide price of £20,000, is being AUCTIONED OFF on 25th September by Clifton-based estate agent HOLLIS MORGAN. Its brochure notes that “there may be some long term development potential”, and suggests the possibility of vacant possession – which would only happen with the eviction of allotment holders. To rub salt into the wound, Hollis Morgan made the announcement just after National Allotments Week!

The Lynmouth Road site had been owned by training provider SCOUT ENTERPRISES (which readers with long memories may recall was heavily involved in compulsory workfare schemes, from Project Work through to Work Programme) before it went tits-up late last year.

Since then the ‘independent assurance, tax and advisory firm’ GRANT THORNTON has been in charge, and now its crack team of ‘recovery and reorganisation’ specialists – Richard Hicken, Nigel Morrison and Lynn Taylor – is ready to ASSET-STRIP THE ARSE OFF THE ALLOTMENTS.

Of course, this being Ashley ward, they face stern resistance from BS2’s mighty Green Party councillor duo SIR AUGUSTUS ‘THE DORK KNIGHT’ HOYTY-TOYTY and his sidekick ROB ‘BOY WONDER’ TELFORD. By “stern resistance” we do of course mean firm promises to “ensure it is referred to the relevant planning committee”, the possibility of a petition, and the submission of “strong objections” – TAKE THAT, THE MAN!

Meanwhile, the legal side of the St. Werburgh’s land grab is being handled by none other than VEALE WASBROUGH VIZARDS, the current home to baldy-headed former Bristol City Council lawyer-in-chief STEPHEN ‘MAHNA MAHNA’ MCNAMARA, and – as we may have mentioned before – best known for representing Catholic private school St. Benedict’s during a paedo priest scandal.

Whilst it isn’t known if McNamara is directly involved in this deal, he has certainly in the past been connected to what you might politely describe as ‘odd’ green-spaces-to-developers deals. One notable one also involved GEORGE FERGUSON before he bought won the Mayoralty and appointed the never-knowingly-overinformed Sir Hoyty-Toyty to become his ever-loyal Minister of Blue Peter Appeal Milk Bottle Top Collections.

So the Lynmouth Road allotment holders might be wise not to put too much faith in the likes of Hoyty-Toyty to draw a particularly deep line in the sand over their green space.

THE BRISTOLIAN – WEBSITE SEARCH LEAGUE TABLES

It’s been little more than a month since The BRISTOLIAN was relaunched, and already we are seeing a lot of search engine activity on some of our new best chums…

Currently in the lead – if we bundle together searches for ‘Malfoy’ as well – is baby-faced out-of-his-depth council counsel LIAM NEVIN. He nudges just ahead of ‘acting up’ City Director ANGIE ‘PAIDWELL’ RIDGWELL.

Then in joint third place come buffoonish former council boss GRAHAM SIMS, and slash-happy Mayor HIS ROYAL GEORGENESS.

Meanwhile, pulling up the rear we have a three donkey race: accounts-troubled BCC Facilities Manager TONY HARVEY, incompetent ex-top cop COLIN PORT, and in a surprise re-entry, Nevin’s predecessor STEPHEN MCNAMARA.

Of course, we have no idea how much of this frantic googling is down to the individuals concerned making constant vanity searches on their own names – perhaps a Freedom of Information request is in order..?

HARRY POTTER AND THE USELESS SOLICITOR

Little change at the City Council Legal Department as keen ‘Bristolian’ reader McNamara replaced by Nevin

Liam Nevin as Malfoy plus Stephen McNamara

Can we at The Bristolian be the first to welcome Bristol City Council’s new boy wonder legal boss LIAM ‘MALFOY’ NEVIN to town?

The spooky fresh-faced former public schoolboy recently jumped ship as Town Clerk in Stratford-upon-Avon to take over from our old friend STEPHEN ‘LYCRA’ MCNAMARA, after the sweaty-crotched baldy-head took early retirement to spend more time with his cycling accessories and Bristol Rovers plaque of honour for his outstanding contribution to local stadium planning in the south of the city.

It will be a hard act to follow, even though McNamara’s ‘retirement’ takes him only 500 yards from his old office to a cushy CONsultancy at the gated complex of glossy law firm Veale Wasbrough Vizards – best known for representing Catholic private school St Benedict’s during a paedo priest scandal.

Following such an IMPRESSIVELY OAFISH predecessor, rosy-cheeked Malfoy really has to pull out all the stops in his drive to demonstrate he can be an even bigger tool of the law, while taking a very interesting approach to managing the huge cuts required in his fiefdom.

In mid-February, on discovering he runs a legal department that can no longer afford, err, lawyers, Malfoy thought it would be a terrific wheeze to send – instead of, y’know, a qualified solicitor or something – one of his secretaries down to the County Court to represent the council at a hearing.

Alas, the judge was less than impressed with this fine example of local authority “efficiency saving” and sent said secretary packing back to Shitty Hall to tell Malfoy that m’lud would hold him in CONTEMPT OF COURT if ever he dispatched an unqualified representative to his court again.

A contempt of court charge – that will definitely save Bristol’s taxpayers lots of money!

Well done, Malfoy. You’re going to be fun to have around aren’t you?