A couple of brief updates on some stories:
Bush Rat Ali, the Lawrence Hill Labour Photoshop faker
Whispers reach The Blogger that The Evening Cancer is declining to run the Photoshop faker story because “it is too sensitive” for election time. That’s an interesting set of news values they have there.
Deliberately withholding information from the city’s electorate concerning the suitability of a candidate for office. Whatever happened to the press’s supposed role in liberal democracies of holding power to account?
The Cancer should also bear in mind that it was these very same ‘soft focus’, see-no-evil-hear-no-evil news values – when they last deliberately withheld information about a person blatantly unsuited for power – that helped foist John Astley on this city. And we all know where that ended…
And here’s what The Cancer’s Chief Political Reporter, Ian Onions, eventually got ’round to telling us after Astley was convicted:
“Within three months of being elected councillor gossip was rife in the corridors of the Council House that Astley was attracted to young girls and pregnant women.”
Ian Onions, Bristol Evening Post, September 28 2004
So if the Bush Rat is elected and it all goes predictably tits-up we’ll know who to blame won’t we?
“I’m the daddy” Beynon’s rotten boroughs
Meanwhile Alun “I’m the daddy” Beynon has taken to the blogosphere to defend himself against charges of nepotism. He comments on Charlie Bolton’s blog:
“For the record, the T&G is fighting an extremely serious industrial dispute and it is a dispute which involves Bristol City Council. Home care workers have produced and distributed many thousands of leaflets, two thousand into Southville and many more in other wards across the City. So, sorry Chris, no corruption or nepotism involved, just T&G members fighting to save the Home care service.”
So that’s all right then. It’s not nepotism ’cause Beynon says it isn’t.
Leaving aside the fact that Alun seems to be a little confused about the difference between an industrial dispute and an election campaign why are his home care workers so keen for Alun’s friends and family in the Bristol Labour party to sweep to victory in these elections anyway?
The Bristol Labour Party privatised 52% of their service when they were in power and unaminously voted in 2005 in favour of the ‘Parrot Report’ a blueprint for the wholesale privatisation of social services in Bristol. Nationally Labour Party policy also promotes such privatisations. What did the T&G do about any of that?
What’s in a Labour victory for the home care workers exactly? On Beynon’s orders they’re spending time and money campaigning for Beynon’s friends and family who are actually members of a party who are on the record as being committed to the privatisation of their jobs.
Will Bristol Labour really defy their own party policy and save the home care service? Or is Alun telling his members some convenient porkies?
What happened to John Astley after he did his porridge?