Tag Archives: Tracey Morgan

THE BRISTOLIAN SAYS … HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT RUBBISH

As the amount of homeless people on our streets grows due to government austerity measures, the Reverend and his mates have a plan.

So, who’s in charge? Social Care? No. Health? No. Er, Bristol Waste are carrying out the new procedure. They’re now threatening to steal what little property rough sleepers have in an attempt to clear the streets of homeless people so that shoppers can consume without having to trip over them.

People don’t choose to become homeless. This is a direct effect of austerity that has cut funds to services.  The Nazi Post did a study of rough sleepers and discovered people who had lost their business, broken their back and couldn’t work or got kicked out of a flat when their dad died of cancer.

Most of these human beings are at their wits end. They have tried to get help but to no avail. So they’re sleeping on the streets with their worldly possessions. Many have been beaten up. One comrade was dragged from his tent, beaten with a golf club and told to “fuck off back to his own country”. Do they mean Somerset, which is where he came from? Others have had their possessions burned.

Now the Council are joining in. One young woman told a reporter that she was scared to go to the toilet in case council bullies stole her stuff. This is theft. She was even trying to sell a few trinkets, so that she would not be forced into prostitution and the Council stopped her doing that. This is just bullying people who lack the resources to fight back. Why is Bristol Waste even handling this? Human beings are not garbage. The remaining stuff they have is theirs, just like ours in our homes.

Maybe, the next time our Mayor leads the “masses” on another march against his austerity measures, he doesn’t want to trip over the casualties of his own endeavours? Spend some of your reserves you cunt! We also understand that when he has his jolly for fellow global mayors later this year, they do not want to see people lying in the streets. It might put them off the canapes and champagne as they discuss what a terribly difficult job they do.

Stealing people’s stuff will not make them go away. Until the authorities in this city stand up to central government, it will get worse. Bullying is not the answer. They teach you that at school Marvin. Also, remember, many working class people are one paycheck away from becoming homeless themselves. It can happen to anyone in Tory Britain, which is a sobering thought.

Please try to give some cash to the homeless. They do not choose to sleep out in a damp sleeping bag during winter. And if you see the council bullies stealing property from the homeless, stop them. Talk to them. See where they are taking the stolen property and try to help the human being who is being attacked.

They are not a problem, the inequalities of wealth are. The Mayor is a fucking hypocrite.

MEET THE TORY WASTE BOSS RUNNING BRISTOL

What the fuck is going on at BRISTOL WASTE, run by, officially, the thickest bureaucrat in Britain, Bristol City Council’s Tracey “Beaker” Morgan, appointed Managing Director of this shitty little council  firm in 2016 by half-witted councillors?

In November, Beaker, a dim Tory from Portishead, instructed her staff to REMOVE from the Bear Pit an artwork celebrating Labour pacifist MP Walter Ayles, which formed part of the nationally acclaimed Journeys to Justice exhibition hosted by the city in the autumn.

It appears that Beaker PERSONALLY decided that this artwork, produced by the Creative Youth Network, had no value and should be binned after she received a request to remove it in the lead up to Remembrance Day from her FAT TORY TURD mate, Henbury Councillor, Mark “Lard Arse” Weston.

Following UPROAR on social media and the personal intervention of the mayor, Beaker was forced to quickly restore the work to the Bear Pit and the mayor issued an apology explaining that Beaker and Bristol Waste had removed this private property without his or anyone else’s authority. Surely a disciplinary matter?

Fast forward two months and guess what? Just one day after UPROAR in the newspapers after Bath City Council issued their homeless with threats to REMOVE their belongings from the city centre, reactionary thicko Beaker issued notices of dubious legality to homeless people in Broadmead, er, threatening to REMOVE their belongings from the city centre.

Yet again, the mayor had to personally intervene and make an apology explaining that Beaker and Bristol Waste had acted without his or anyone else’s authority! What the fuck is wrong with this North Somerset piece of TORY SHIT, Beaker? What makes her think she can do what she likes in our city, such as judging our children’s artwork as rubbish to be dumped or treating our homeless as SUBHUMAN WASTE?

This latest piece of blatant right wing fuckwittery from Beaker, targeting vulnerable people in the city while totally misreading the mood of Bristolians regarding homelessness, came just weeks after she personally FUCKED UP the city’s rubbish collections over Christmas.

Having decided NOT to print and deliver leaflets listing altered household rubbish collection times over Christmas, Beaker then published a load of INACCURATE information about these collections on the internet. This resulted in rubbish being left out on our streets for days on end in the new year and made the city – she conveniently doesn’t live in – look like shit.

Isn’t it about time that the Reverend fired this incompetent right wing twat who thinks she can do what she pleases in our city? Let’s send her packing back to Portishead to die the long, slow, painful death all Tories deserve.

MAYOR GRASS FARCE

A right royal game of lawn-acy!

Park maintenance policy - Bristol City Council style...

Park maintenance policy – Bristol City Council style…

Despite being told by bosses to stop any lawnmowing as the council can’t afford fuel for lawnmowers any more, there was no shortage of gardeners or fancy kit at Easton’s FELIX ROAD ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND last week.

Up to twenty men and ten vans were seen there working all day. Indeed, so keen were parks bosses to get a quality job done, one worker was dispatched to collect the top-class mower normally reserved for use on Queen Square – and once finished the loose grass was carefully boxed up and taken away in a gas-guzzling van!

And the cause of this sudden flurry of attention and resources for this neglected corner of the inner-city? A visit from his ROYAL REDTROUSERNESS Mayor George Ferguson the next day, of course!

Alas, it was all in vain as George cancelled his visit at the last minute and never got the Royal-style tour of the playground. How the brown-nosing middle managers and Environment & Leisure Service Director Tracey Morgan (she of £300k-and-rising park kiosk fiasco fame) must have kicked themselves when they realised their feeble attempts to ingratiate themselves with the big boss had come to nothing, and that they’d wasted their efforts on mere kids and parents.

The only thing that could have added to the Alice In Wonderland feel of proceedings would have been for the Queen of Hearts herself to show up and announce she wanted all the flowers individually painted!

 

REVEALED: THE KIOSK CAFÉ FIASCO THAT BLED BRISTOL’S PARKS DRY

Outsourced park café scheme meant to earn us money costs Bristolians in excess of £300k; redfaced councillors & officials brush it under the carpet

Castle Park kiosk – providing “an important income for re-investment” by costing £54,000 and being shuttered

As the cuts keep on coming, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the people making the ‘tough choices’ are invariably the idiots who caused the problems in the first place. A case in point: KIOSKGATE.

No one in the council wants to talk about it, yet this ill-thought out plan to increase revenue from Bristol’s parks actually ended up COSTING US MORE THAN £300,000.

The whole sorry saga begins in 2010, when the council decided to BOOT OUT small licensed food and drink concessions from a number of city-run parks, and replace them with custom-built new kiosks, to be operated by whoever offered the most money.

Licensees were not told about this. Christophe Moron, who had sold freshly-made pancakes from his ‘La Bonne Crêpe’ van in Castle Park for more than three years, only found out in early 2011 because local Parks Project Manager, ALBERTO PALMERIO, came round to measure up for a shiny new café kiosk.

The trader subsequently discovered that the lease for his pitch had been quietly re-advertised, and that he had only a few weeks to put in a new bid. Predictably, he was not able to meet the higher offer put in by the council’s preferred bidder, the Gloucester-based DIAMOND CATERING.

Diamond had applied to take on all four of the new kiosks – in Castle Park, St George Park, Oldbury Court Estate and Canford Park – and won them all in a five-year contract. It also took over the pre-existing café at Ashton Court Estate when a previous caterer pulled out, and was poised to run the snack bar at Blaise Estate as well.

The new deal, which was supposed to put the council quids-in, was heralded with a splash story in the Evening Post in March 2011. Councillor GARY ‘HEFTY’ HOPKINS – himself no stranger to a cheeky slice of cake and a four sugars coffee – gurned for the camera whilst declaiming that “these kiosks will provide a range of high-quality drinks and snacks [and] provide an important income for reinvestment in parks.”

One slight problem – Diamond Catering went bust in October of that year, and within a month had GONE INTO LIQUIDATION, leaving unpaid counter staff locked out of their workplaces, and creditors out of pocket – Bristol City Council to the tune of more than £92,000. The cafés then stayed empty for more than seven months until the following summer, when they were brought ‘in-house’ and operated directly by the council – though Castle Park kiosk remains shuttered.

So what went wrong? Well, a good person to ask is the Environment & Leisure Service Director ‘LAZY’ TRACEY MORGAN, for whom Alberto Palmerio worked. She appears to have authorised Palmerio to fly to Rome (on council expenses) in June 2009 to research the kiosks made by Asteco Industria Srl, “Italy’s leading designer and manufacturer of bespoke steel kiosks and modular buildings” – and coincidentally a company to which he had family connections.

Whether Lazy Morgan knew that Palmerio was RUMOURED TO BE RELATED TO KEY PEOPLE IN ASTECO is not clear, but either way – whether she knew about the conflict of interest and ignored it, or if she failed to find out about it and was negligent – it doesn’t say a lot for her abilities as a manager. In which case, she has a bright future in the upper echelons of Shitty Hall!

On Palmerio’s recommendation, four kiosks were purchased, at a cost of £54,000 each. Then came the deal with Diamond Catering – a company which boasted of working “on a global scale, having fed members of The British and Foreign Royal Families, provided banquets and intimate dinner parties in a multitude of settings, operating multi million pound budgets.” That is slightly at odds with the words of council spokesman James Easey, who in trying to manage the fallout from the Moron eviction in February 2011 claimed that Diamond was a “small business” in a bid to reverse the perception of BCC siding with Goliath against David.

Quite why Diamond collapsed so spectacularly and so soon after securing the sweetheart deal for running refreshment kiosks in Bristol’s parks isn’t clear – not least because, as the Legal Services department claims, “THERE IS NO WRITTEN RECORD”.

But whatever the reasons, Diamond’s directors were certainly more fortunate than the workers they put out of jobs. Both RAY CHISHOLM and JEFFREY BAYNE set up their own new catering companies (Chiz’s Catering and A&J Catering & Cleaning Solutions) in September 2011 – a whole month before Diamond went under.

Alberto Palmerio was similarly fortunate. Privately educated in Dorset, he joined Bristol City Council in 2002, and there he stayed until October 2011 – around the time Diamond went under. Like the Diamond directors, he too had planned ahead, and had just the previous month set up his own company, AP2 (2011) Ltd, a “consultancy and agency service” of which he is sole director.

Oh, and in November 2011 Palmerio became an authorised UK agent for Prestige Kiosks Limited, “the exclusive distributor in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland for Asteco Industria Srl” …Now there’s a turn up for the books!

Naturally, with so many people implicated in the mess, including council managers, senior directors and elected councillors, all of whom signed off on Diamond’s tender bid and on the Asteco deal, no one is especially keen to revisit it in public. How fortunate for the then-ruling Lib Dems, on whose watch it happened, that their ever-reliable Councillor SIMON COOK caught the Leisure brief in Fergo’s ‘rainbow cabinet’.

Because it would be mighty embarrassing for this one to leak out…

HOYTUS INTERRUPT GUS: APRIL’S FOOL

Welcome to the Hoyty-Toyty World of Bristol Politics!

MONDAY:

My amazing plan to transform Neighbourhood Partnerships into MODERN SUSTAINABLE DEMOCRATIC MOOTS OF THE PEOPLE where they can have a proper inclusive say in how this fine city is run has taken a great leap forward.

The very nice people from the consultation team have set up an excellent online survey for people to have their say about their Neighbourhood Partnerships – and judging by the smashing comments we have had from all seven people who engaged with this inclusive process, it’s all looking really positive and exciting indeed for democracy in this city.

Not long now before every neighbourhood from Stockwood to Henbury will be able to ‘cry freedom’ and decide everything from which potholes they want repaired to what colour they want their park benches painted (well, if there are any park benches left once we start chopping them up and burning them in the City Hall biomass boiler to save on fuel bills). Because as the lovely and clever Parks supremo Mrs Morgan explained to me when I bumped in to her in the corridor, “the parks amenities furniture transformation sub-budget has been reabled for cultural regeneration initiatives, and the transformated budget will be expended on the long term place making objective of delivering a contemporary continental green capital streetscene scenario through the promotion of non-permanent sculptural practice.”

I was confused too but then Mrs Morgan said, “George is going to spend the money on large inflatable vegetables, dear”.

Sometimes it’s all really bananas at George’s City Hall!

TUESDAY:

Had hoped to get started on my brilliant plan to transform equalities in the city today, so I popped down to the Equalities Unit at about 9.30am but no one had arrived for work yet. When I popped back at 1 o’clock they had all gone to lunch, and then in the afternoon they were all on a training course. Still, it is good to know that we’re investing so heavily in equalities training. It really underlines my commitment, don’t you think?

Even without my amazing equalities plan to make us all more equal I think there’s the buzz of equality in the air right now in this city. I saw two black men across the street in St Paul’s yesterday who looked perfectly happy. They even stopped and greeted me with some of their traditional street jive moves. One I had not seen before. They both raised their right arm and flicked their wrist from side-to-side while chanting “KING ANCHOR, KING ANCHOR”. Not sure what it means? Probably traditional patois? Or is King Anchor a popular dancehall artist?

We’re nothing if not streetwise hepcats at George’s City Hall!

WEDNESDAY:

Went over to the Create Centre today just to breathe some amazing sustainable air. Touched base with lots of the green sustainable thinkers this council has. It gives me a lot of hope for the future when I meet a staff team where hemp clothing’s the norm and who think nothing of still wearing their bicycle clips in the office.

While I was staring out of the window with not much to do, I saw the Property Services guys from the sixth floor all heading out for lunch. Does anyone know why so many of them take their golf clubs when they go out to lunch?

Sometimes it’s a confusing place, George’s City Hall!

FRIDAY:

After spending yesterday helping my good friend Dr Jon sort out his bottle recycling (it soon mounts up), today I met with finance boss Mr Robinson again. I wanted him to go through the figures for my brilliant plan to save the Homeless Prevention Fund by scrapping adult education. He must have been there for ten minutes punching figures in to his calculator, scratching his head and swearing under his breath. Eventually he got up, said, “I won’t be a minute” and disappeared. He reappeared ten minutes later with a sheet of paper full of figures and confirmed it all added up. He also told me he thought it was a great idea and A FINE EXAMPLE OF CREATIVE THINKING from a politician and made a funny little laugh.

I also asked him why we couldn’t collect the £165,000 worth of market licence fee arrears the Lib Dem administration were responsible for, and then spend that money on the homeless. Mr Robinson went very quiet for a minute while his mouth open and closed like a goldfish before explaining that this “wouldn’t be possible for all sorts of reasons”. He then had to go as he was attending a house warming party for Mr Morris the Market Service Manager at his big new house in Weston-super-Mare and he was already running late.

Reflecting on Mr Robinson’s explanation, I must say it’s very convincing. We’re right on top of the accounts at George’s City Hall!