In praise of Peter Goodwin

Well done to the Green Party’s Peter Goodwin who’s proving himself to be a fully paid up member of Bristol’s depressingly small political awkward squad.

Goodwin made good use of Freedom of Information legislation last autumn to obtain information from the city council on the number of flights their staff were taking. Now Goodwin – sensibly ignoring the council’s fatuous and self-serving cross-party spectacle of faux-concern on the same day, ‘The State of the City’ debate – has instead tabled a number of tricky questions (pdf) to Mark Bradshaw and Helen Holland at the proper meeting of the full council next week.

Goodwin has tabled questions to Bradshaw on Labour’s highly secretive ongoing plans for a south Bristol ring road and on Bradshaw’s intention to hand a lucrative PFI contract to some of the Labour Party’s corporate City of London friends to build and run an environmentally destructive and vastly overpriced waste incinerator in Avonmouth.

Intriguingly Goodwin will also be asking Holland about the conduct of her council tax funded political assistant Roger Livingston. Roger you may recall is the local government officer reported in The Blogger who spends his time researching the political affiliation of council tax payers who contact Labour councillors asking them any questions.

Unfortunately it’s unlikely Goodwin will get his questions answered. Instead he’ll be bored into submission with jargon by Bradshaw and patronised to death by Holland before the pair of them clear off to plot, along with the rest of their sleazy Labour colleagues and unethical local government officer supporters, new ways to shaft us.

But well done anyway Peter