Tag Archives: TED Talk

NETTING ZEROES: GEORGIAN MARV

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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?

CUTS NEWS

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Rees Ted Talk
Look! Man in a shirt from Top Man doing a Ted talk.

Not much information emerging from the Rev Rees on the scale of cuts in public services he’s proposing over the next year*. Instead the inane egoist seems to be focussing his PR efforts on boasting about how many ‘hits’ his ridiculous Canadian TED Talk is getting on Youtube and his fantasy plan for an underground network in Bristol.

What we do know is that of the £11.7m of savings planned for delivery in 2021/22, only 46% were achieved.Leaving around £5.5m to be brought forward to this year. We also know around £29m of ‘efficiencies’ and ‘transformations’ were announced in this year’s budget. That’s a total of about £34.5m cuts to be made to public services this year then.

But what will be cut? Council documents, carefully hidden from view, have identified “six key areas for service reviews”. They are: property and capital; be more business-like and secure more external resource; improving efficiencies; digital transformation; reducing the need for direct services and, er, redesigning, reducing, or stopping services.

Property appears on these cuts lists every year and delivers nothing; the council being “more businesslike” is a hollow joke and that last time they tried digital transformation it delivered a £30m deficit senior bosses tried to hide from the mayor and public.

It’s therefore likely all the cuts will come from “improving efficiencies”, euphemism for staff cuts; reducing the need for direct services, which means trying to stop the public accessing services they’re entitled to (see SEND) and redesigning, reducing, or stopping services, which means scrapping services altogether.

So the Reverend’s plan is to fire staff, bully council taxpayers into not taking up services and cut anything else that’s not nailed down to save £34.5m

No wonder he wants you to look the other way at his stupid TED Talk.

*Since this article was published Bristol City Council has published a press release acknowledging they may need to make £31.1m next year. What they didn’t mention was an annex to a finance report to cabinet that suggested these cuts might be as much as £87.6m!

CREATIVE ANTI-UNION NETWORK

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Sandy-scaled
Bufton-Tufton: posh bloke who hates uppity workers?

There was a bit of a fuss recently after the Reverend instructed one of his idiot sidemen, Craig “Crapita” Cheney to veto a multimillion WECA grant to the Creative Youth Network, the former protectorate of failed Green mayoral candidate, Sandy “Bufton-Tufton” Hore-Ruthven.

Unfortunately the Reverend was unable to personally deal the deathblow to the grant himself as he was otherwise indisposed. Destroying the planet by jetting to Vancouver to deliver a live and pointless TED Talk for the benefit of billionaire clown Elon Musk.

A lot of people are claiming the veto was revenge by the Reverend on Bufton-Tufton for daring to run against him in last year’s election. And there may be some truth in this. However, trade unionists can take a small crumb of comfort from the Reverend’s latest display of thin skinned pettiness.

Mark-Coates
‘Mussolini’ Coates leading ‘Rainbow Lanyards Against the Workers’

Because, we learn that, during his time as CEO at the Creative Youth Network, the city’s great Green progressive alternative, Bufton-Tufton, consistently refused to enter into a voluntary  recognition agreement with a union. Instead, in typical Tory bully boss-with-head-up-his-arse style, Bufton-Tufton told the union that their services weren’t required as he had set up a staff forum where staff could raise any issues they had. 

No doubt, Bufton-Tufton’s “door was always open” too? So far, Creative Youth’s new chief exec, Oxbridge twit, Mark “Mussolini” Coates, hasn’t done anything to change Creative Youth’s robustly anti-union approach either.

Hands up who gives a toss if this kind of right wing shit is turned down for grants from the public purse?