Putting Familes First by cutting the budget by £65m and putting out a cheery self-promoting press release
As plans to hack £65m off the Children’s Social Care budget, called ‘Families First’, were hatched at the Counts Louse with the help of private sector consultants chasing a £7.5m payday, council boss “Tory” Tony Dyer featured in some University of Bristol PR on youth knife crime.
He gushed:“Bristol City Council and One City Partners are committed to working with young people and their families to make sure Bristol is a safe place where everyone can have opportunities to prosper.”
A ‘commitment’ committed to cutting cash to deal with the issue, then?
The Society of Merchant Venturers (SMV) have been running (or at least trying) to run Bristol since their ‘royal charter’ of 1551. Nearly 500 years of feathering their own fat nests.
This unelected, undemocratic ‘union’ of rich merchants and businessmen, landowners, property speculators and their ilk concentrated on controlling the port, overseas trade, the corporation (now the City Council) and of course they made a fortune out of slavery.
In the 20th and 21st century they are renowned for masquerading as a ‘charity’, whilst their members have their ‘fingers in the pies’ of the Port of Bristol, public utilities like Wessex Water, huge business deals such as the ‘Arena’, the Church of England, both Universities, healthcare, the arts, schools and institutions such as the Beacon (ex-Colston Hall) that have swallowed up hundreds of millions of public funds. The power of the SMVs purse dominates these areas.
As a manager at the Old Vic theatre explained to us a few years ago “you musn’t have a go at the Merchant Ventuers, nothing happens unless they say so”.
An important part of this historic control has been manipulating the local media and politicians for their own interests. For example, in the 2000s the journalists at the Bristol Post knew they could not write pieces which were critical of SMV projects, from academy schools, funding the ‘Colston Hall’ to buying the Port of Bristol for a £1.
This was because Post editors like Mike Norton were well-known for being up the arse of the Venturers. It was common knowledge amongst Post journalists that Norton desperately wanted to be invited to be a member of the SMVs and he suppressed any stories that might piss them off as a result.
In one case he even threatened to sack a journalist for exposing members of the Venturers trust (the educational arm of the SMVs) for defamation. Despite his sychophantic loyalty to the SMVs, Norton never made it to be a member and retired a few years ago.
Five years ago, under huge pressure after the city rejected the SMVs slave-trading idol Edward Colston, the Venturers realised they had to modernise in order to survive. In their minds this meant allowing a few women and ‘ethnic monorities’ to join… shocker!
Of course, these people weren’t normal Bristolians but had to be millionaire business owners with good political ties, seeking status amongst the big business people in the city. One of their targets was corporate lawyer, Marti Burgess of the Burgess family empire, inner city ‘entertainment’ property owners who made millions running clubs like Lakota in Stokes Croft.
Burgess, a close aide of Marvin Rees during his Mayoral electoral campaign in 2016, realised how powerful the SMVs were when she was asked by Rees to map out the power structures in the city. She recalled “I did not know who the Merchant Venturers were until I surveyed the city. The SMVs had interests in so many sectors I told Rees that, after the Council, they were the most powerful organisation in Bristol”.
The unelected, undemocratic and exclusive SMVs appealed to Burgess and Rees, as a powerful body to join and collaborate with.
As elected Mayor, Rees went along with most of the SMV members’ needs, continuing to pour money into their iconic baby ‘the ex-Colston Beacon’, handing the arena site at Temple Meads to Bristol University and the airfield at Filton to Malaysian corporation YTL.
Rees seemed to think that if powerful businessmen from the SMVs were nice to him, then that meant they liked him. Worried close associates in the Labour Party pointed out they were only being nice because he was the elected Mayor and they were after contracts, not because they actually liked him!
Rees even refused to engage with the campaign to remove the slave-trader Colston from representing the city, sending the cops after the Colston 4 statue topplers and claiming that the protesters were “privileged” and the SMVs were the “genuine anti-racists in the city”.
Meanwhile, despite the anti-racist rhetoric of Marti Burgess, she joined the SMVs in 2020, claiming she was going to ‘change’ the organisation from within. Fuck all has happened of course and far from leaving the SMVs Burgess has stayed in there.
In 2024, with the blessing of the “anti-racist” SMV Rees was paid off with an honorary degree from their (Bristol) university, given a ‘job’ travelling round the world to climate conferences. Earlier this year made it into the House of Lords, as Lord Rees of Easton. Not bad for a failed Mayor who managed to get the post of elected-Mayor voted out of the city.
However, there was a spanner in the works when Rees was asked to declare his business interests as a Lord. As Private Eyepointed out, Rees’ own ‘personal services’ company was being paid by Ameresco Inc, the US multinational that signed a billion pound contract (yes! £1,000,000,000) with Bristol City Council under Rees’ watch in 2021. Smoking gun or what? At the Bristolian press centre we waited weeks for a news organisation in Bristol to follow up the Eye article.
The only place it appeared was on a local blogger’s website and the blogger’s husband happened to be a leading reporter in the Bristol media organisation Bristol 24/7, but still there was silence.
Who is on the board of 24/7? Yes, you guessed it SMV member and close associate of Rees, Marti Burgess. It would be no surprise to us that Burgess suppressed this massive story.
As a result of the yawning silence over this smoking gun, The Bristolian broke the story on the streets of Bristol by publishing the ‘Robber Baron’ issue . 48 hours later the cat was out of the bag when the Bristol Post ran the story, and then surprise, surprise even the fawning Rees propaganda arm the Bristol Cable were forced to say something. This is nothing new to us at The Bristolian as we often have to lead the way with ‘difficult’ stories like this. To this day 24/7 have left it unreported.
They say nothing changes, everything stays the same…..in the newly ‘diverse’, ‘modern’ Bristol we have the same old power structures, political corruption, businesses leeching off public money and of course members of the SMVs like Burgess controlling our access to news to protect their business interests and their dodgy ‘high and mighty’ mates.
‘Bedminster Green-Wash’ development? What a palaver.
Bedminster hell site
A mortgage lender to the Bemmy student hell site project, Shawbrook, has been ordered by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) to repay £100 million fiddled from vulnerable pensioners who unsuspectingly invested in non-existent time-share properties. That figure could exponentially multiply next year following the conclusion of the FCA investigation.
Described as ‘local’ by the Bristol Post, Shawbrook’s HQ is in London and their parent company’s HQs are in New York and Berlin. Luxury holiday resorts in the Canaries, unfamiliar to the majority of Bedminster dwellers, were used to lure elderly investors and steal their money after a life-time of labour.
Not content with the constant pounding of pneumatic jackhammers and drills from dawn ‘til dusk, the chopping down of our trees and the persistent ‘beep-beep’ of vehicles reversing all day. These fuckers robbed our Nans and Granfers to prop up Bristol University.
Patrick Cotter O’Brien, “The Bristol Giant” born 1760 in Kinsale, County Cork; died Hotwells, Bristol, 1806, was over eight feet tall. He fought exploitation by showmen and opportunist medical careerists and was imprisoned for his cause.
He became his own promoter and to enjoy privacy ventured out in the hours of darkness to sometimes startling effect. His final wish was to be buried securely under 12 feet of concrete. This was difficult to achieve as the surgeon John Hunter was to steal his body before burial. He was forced to hand it back and Patrick’s last wish was granted at St Johns Chapel.
A century after his death the ghouls of Bristol University tried to rob his grave but were thwarted by the steel reinforcement and the outrage of local people. Another violation occurred in 1972 when the ghouls examined Patrick and re-interred him. The site was redeveloped in 1986 and Patrick was taken away. It is said that he was cremated respectfully although the Royal College of Surgeons still display one of his arms!
I ask the question, what was the purpose of these outrages? It cannot be scientific, as ample study was done on the sensitive Patrick when he was still alive. Also many people living today suffer his affliction. Can anybody enlighten me about the body snatchers who abuse us even after death?
Before the Reverend’s empty-headed State of City effort got underway, the event was interrupted by protestors against forced animal swim tests at the University.
Up front at the time was tedious know-all and obscure historian of the Renaissance, Evelyn “Rockerfeller” Welch, the university’s vice-chancellor, imported from the US to sell us their right wing bollocks.
“It’s not enough to have a banner. You need to make interventions that make lives better,” shrieked the snooty old fool at protestors as they were roughly ejected by her hired thugs.
Er, maybe this alleged expert historian should check out some local history before publicly sounding off? In 1989, when animal rights protestors decided on an intervention beyond waving banners, they tried to blow up the university’s Senate House!
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!!!
Can we be among the first to welcome horrifying racist snob Evelyn “Rockerfeller” Welch MBE to Bristol as the new Vice-Chancellor of the city’s wealthiest education corporate, the University of Bristol? Harvard educated US citizen, Evelyn’s down home credentials include being “a scholar of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period” and Provost and Senior Vice President at King’s College London.
The rest of the press has wet its pants with excitement because Evelyn is the mother of Florence Welch. She’s singer with posh band Florence and the Machine whose bland wailing is heavily promoted on rotation by the corporate music biz and is exactly the kind of posh shite for wankers that punk rock was created to destroy.
What the press isn’t telling you, however, is that Evelyn has run into a spot of bother at Kings College over a statue there of a slaver. Thomas Guy had links with the Spanish slave trade in the 17th century, which earned him £400 million in today’s money and his statue takes pride of place at the university. Seventy-five per cent of the student body told Evelyn as the mastermind of the university’s ‘People & Culture’ strategy and head of Equality, Diversity & Inclusion to get rid, which she hasn’t done.
Instead Evelyn demonstrated the kind of empathy only a Harvard education can provide. She announced, while on a panel of self-regarding snobs talking about ‘Statues and the Public Space’ at a ‘History Matters’ conference in London, that if students didn’t like the statue they should just “walk around it”! What a shame Evelyn wasn’t in Bristol two years ago to tell Black Lives Matter protestors that they should just walk around the city’s statue of Edward Colston.
Why is our city’s establishment importing yet more elitist racist dross into our city to replace the racist dross we already had?
Bristol City Council is using council tax money and government public health handouts for Covid to, er, promote nightclubs!
£15k from the Covid Outbreak Management Fund and £15k from the council’s Growth and Regeneration budget were used last year to pay the council’s ‘Night-time Economy Advisor’.
This year the money will come from the government Covid cash and from the council’s private sector partner, Sound Diplomacy, “an international consultancy” who are going “to develop a framework to capitalise on the cultural, social and economic benefits that night-time industries offer the city”.
Other partners in the Sound Diplomacy project include Master of the Merchant Venturers David Freed’s Deeley Freed; Merchant Venturer Marti Burgess’s Lakota nightclub; Motion nightclub; the University of Bristol; the Bedminster and City Centre BIDs and PfP Capital Limited
So who’s likely to benefit from the public money handouts that are likely to emerge from this corporate night time industry framework then?
Even by the Reverend’s underpowered standards, this year’s State of the City Address – where Rees shows up Bristol University’s Great Hall and delivers a lecture like a ponce – had very little to say.
The big policy announcement from this re-elected Mayor basking in second term glory with the city at his feet was, er, a plan to possibly close Park Street to traffic.
However, this bizarre little observation hidden in among the weeds of Reverend’s rambling caught our eye:
“In September’s Full Council, three people made statements, in turn. The first argued against housebuilding on Western Slopes and urban sprawl. The second, concerned about private rents, told me to sort out the housing crisis – that would require me to build homes. The third made a statement against children living in tall buildings and there is of course a wider campaign against height.
I suggested that they all need to talk to each other. All three made an argument, that to be solved, required compromise from the other two.
It’s fine to point at me but what’s needed is a city conversation.”
State of the City Address, 21 October 2021
In other words, leave me alone to make money licking wealthy arse and you argue between yourselves suckers
It looks like “Little Read” Olivette Otele, Bristol University’s new high-profile woke diversity hire brought in to foghorn A HARMLESS LIBERAL VERSION OF THE HISTORY OF SLAVERY at us, is going to be very good value indeed. One of Little Read Olivette’s first moves was to announce on Twitter that she wanted “to put together a list of UK based black scholars 1/ historians with a PhD in History or PhD students. 2/ working on the history of slavery, memory, memorialisation and legacies of the past (Atlantic, Transaharian, Indian Ocean).”
Unfortunately her request didn’t go
down too well with some chippy WHITE ACADEMICS who felt left out of the ELITIST
WOKE HISTORY PARTY. But they had no reason to worry because Little Read
soon returned to Twitter to explain, “I’m told that as identity is fluid, ONE
CAN CHOOSE TO BE BLACK. So white born can choose to be black and non white
born can choose to identify as black as in political blackness.”
So that’s all right then. Anybody white
can just pop on a black identity like A PAIR OF UNDERPANTS every morning
when they get dressed and become a black scholar. Who knew being a black
scholar was so accessible these days? Indeed WHAT THE FUCK IS BEING BLACK
ANYWAY if we follow Little Read’s advice to its logical conclusion?
And yes, before you ask, we are paying Little Read handsomely to educate our young people in this deranged drivel. Happy days.
Patrick Cotter O’Brien, “The Bristol Giant” born 1760 in Kinsale, County Cork; died Hotwells, Bristol, 1806, was over eight feet tall. He fought exploitation by showmen and opportunist medical careerists and was imprisoned for his cause.
