Public service for private gain

Posted on February 13, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Besides the various corporate interests that have their feet firmly under the table of the West of England Partnership’s BRT Project Board – the group continuing to do the work that will destroy the railway path – there’s also various people apparently representing the area’s local authorities.

At least one of these characters is maybe not quite what they appear however. Richard Rawlinson is listed on all the BRT Project Board minutes as attending the meetings as a representative of B&NES. But is this the whole story?

Before pitching up the West of England Partnership and before going anywhere near B&NES, Rawlinson was the head of transport at … Wait for it … Bristol City Council!

If you’re looking for the man behind the tram fiasco, look no further. Or if you’re looking for the man who helped nurture and create the current gridlock nightmare that is Bristol, look no further. And if you’re looking for the man who gave in to every ridiculous demand First Bus have ever made in Bristol, again, look no further.

After this unremarkable career of caving in to corporations on our behalf while gaining nothing, Rawlinson finally crawled away from Bristol a couple of years ago straight into the arms of private sector transport consultants White Young Green where he specialised in air quality.

For an undisclosed fee, Rawlinson worked from conveniently located offices just yards away from his old transport team on Wilder Street in St Pauls and next to the new Broadmead development whose developers had agreed to city council requests to pay £500,000 to “monitor and manage” air quality in the St. Pauls, Easton and St. Judes areas.

Now we find him, apparently having slithered conveniently back into the public sector, heading up transport policy for B&NES where he’s at the front of a queue that’s cosying up to corporate transport interests and promoting an insane BRT scheme for Bristol.

No doubt he’s making very good use too of all those contacts and the inside knowledge he obtained while supposedly working on our behalf in Bristol for all those years? And how long before he’s taking up some more lucrative consultancy work for the private sector?

And will it, by any chance, have anything to do with BRT schemes in Bristol?

Posted in Bristol, Developments, Environment, Local government, Privatisation, Transport, WESP | Tagged , , | There are 3 comments

Railway path: dates for the diary

Posted on February 13, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Kilroy-Silk meets a bucket of shit!Kilroy-Silk meets a bucket of shit!
An example of the appalling consequences of direct action involving a bucket of shit and a politician.

Here’s the beginning of a useful list of meetings where people against the BRT route on the railway path can get up, close and personal with the politicians responsible and let them see the whites of your eyes.

Remember almost all meetings are public and you are legally allowed to ask questions (as many as you like!) and make statements. Or you might prefer to just heckle and throw rotten vegetables at the elected fools, which you’re not technically allowed to do although you can rest assured it’ll really piss them off …

Details on asking questions and making statements are here.

21 February 2008, 4.00pm, the Council Chamber – Cabinet Meeting
Great opportunity to meet the whole hopeless gang in one go – transport boss Bradshaw, leader Holland and deputy leader Hammond should all be attending among others. Questions and statements allowed. The meeting takes place in the Council Chamber. It’s quite a large space but if you can muster a lively crowd of 100 or so you can pretty much own the place as there’s only seven of them and a few idiots in wigs to run the show for them. Some press usually in attendance.

25 February 2008, 2.00pm, (usually) a committee room TBC – Quality of Life Scrutiny Commission
Chaired by, the so far silent, Tory boss Bunter Eddy, it’s all about your quality of life apparently – so quite relevant. The rest of the committee is made up of backbench dullards who could do with being woken up. Sometimes cabinet members attend but this might be unlikely if they get wind that a howling mob baying for their blood might be in attendance. These meetings are usually held in committee rooms. If you can get 30-40 people in there then it can get very cosy indeed. Questions and statements allowed. Press unlikely to attend unless they hear of something interesting happening …

26 February 2008, 2.00pm, the Council Chamber – Full Council Meeting (Budget)

Big meeting this. If the council don’t get to set a budget they can’t run the council. As it’s a budget meeting no questions or statements allowed. It’s in the Council Chamber so a few hundred required to have maximum effect at this one as there should be all 72 councillors in attendance as well as a lot of senior officers milling around and a few press. The Campaign to Save Daycare used a budget meeting in 2005 to stage a protest very effectively. These are long, long meetings anyway; if they get disrupted then they can get really long and some of the councillors tend to start getting very shirty indeed. Potentially a lot of fun to be had especially as its down to the Lord Mayor Royston Griffey to chair and keep order – a man who’d struggle to control a WI sub-committee on needlecraft.

More to follow soon …

Posted in Activism, Bristol, Developments, Environment, Labour Party, Local government, Transport | Tagged | There is 1 comment

University challenged

Posted on February 12, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Toffs 'n' toughs

Great news just in! A recent parliamentary answer reveals that the city’s best known higher education college, the University of Bristol, continues to be one of the most ridiculously exclusive and elitist institutions in the country.

Latest figures show that over 35% of students at the university continue to be recruited from private schools, despite an ongoing barrage of soppy see-through PR and spin from the university about “widening participation“.

This means that the university is still very much first choice for Piers and Arabella from the Cotswolds who, despite the best education money can buy and daddy’s magnaminous string-pulling efforts, are way too fucking dim to get into Oxbridge but aren’t quite enough of a half-witted blueblood inbred to have to be hidden away from public view for their own safety at Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College.

To give you some idea of the the university’s actual record on “widening participation”, the only colleges with a higher intake of privately educated kids in the UK are those famous bastions of the working class power Oxford, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music, the Courtald Institute and, er … Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College!

So who the hell’s responsible for running this ultra-elitist establishment club in the middle of town then? Well, a brief glance at the membership of the university’s governing body – or ‘The Court’ as the snobs like to call it- reveals that no less than fifteen Bristol City Councillors, among others, are.

Surely these couldn’t be the same Bristol City Councillors responsible for running one of the worst education authorities in the country could they? An authority that also has a notorious – if hopelessly ineffective – political obssession with ramming diversity, inclusion and equality policies down our – and our children’s – throats?

So how come these councilllors are so keen on forcing equalities policies on us and very quiet when it comes to pushing similar policies on them?

The university’s boss, Vice-Chancellor Eric Thomas, is even worse. For starters he’s yet another of these unelected rich white men on the board of the SWRDA.

That’s the very same SWRDA, of course, that’s throwing hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money at organisations like Equalities South West to endlessly lecture us on the vital importance of “equality and diversity throughout the region”. A message hypocrite Thomas seems to take absolutely no notice of himself in conducting his day job.

Shouldn’t this silly old fart start practising what he preaches and get his own house in order first before he takes up lucrative public service roles pointing his overprivileged finger at other people?

Posted in Bristol, Education, Local government, SWRDA, Toffs | Tagged , | There are 5 comments

Railway path round-up

Posted on February 12, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

There’s a new summary of events so far at Conserve England, featuring many of the best of people’s comments from here and the BBC among others.

Yesterday’s Evening Cancer, meanwhile, might already have provided us with the quote of the week. An article about the threatened demolition of houses on the narrowest part of the Railway Path at Clay Bottom in Eastville produced this revelation:

The plan to knock down houses to make way for the BRT can be found in documents written by the organisation behind the plans, the West of England Partnership.

The first [Clay Bottom resident] Mr Tang had heard about it was when the Evening Post knocked on his door at 10.30am on Saturday.

Can Bristol City Council sink much lower? Probably not. But their press office is having a damn good try: “The proposal is at a very early stage and there has been no detailed analysis of any of the potential routes under consideration,” they’re now airily claiming.

Although documents released under the Freedom of Information Act directly contradict this claim and suggest that considerable analysis of the potential routes took place last year and the Railway Path was then selected as the favoured route.

Or are Bristol City Council now saying that they randomly plucked this route out of a hat without any proper consideration? I think we should be told …

And finally … Public Opinion Watch:

Number of people who have now signed the petition: 7294

Evening Cancer poll: For 6.5% Against 93.5%

Good to see our council and local newspaper really have their finger on the pulse of the city isn’t it?

Posted in Blogging, Bristol, Bristol Evening Post, Developments, Eastville, Labour Party, Local government, WESP | Tagged , , | There is 1 comment

The Holocaust, Israel and our Muslim spokesman

Posted on February 11, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

A couple of weeks ago the Blogger took issue with the Evening Cancer’s new Muslim columnist and self-styled “community leader”, Farooq Siddique, for hysterically comparing the State of Israel to Germany’s Nazi regime in a piece purporting to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Siddique, apparently speaking on behalf of Bristol’s Muslim community, said: “I am not going to debate who suffered more, the Jews in Europe during the war or the Palestinians since 1947. But the link with the Holocaust is very much clear.”

Is it really? Not according to Human Rights Watch’s 2008 World Report it’s not. Brett over at Harry’s Place has trawled his way through this 581-page report in some detail and his conclusions are revealing.

For instance the report says: “”Between January and October 2007, 245 Palestinians, about half of whom were not participating in hostilities, were killed by Israeli security forces.”

This is not the arithmetic of genocide. At this rate of attrition you could sensibly start making comparisons between the Holocaust – 6 million dead in around 12 years – and the situation in Palestine – around 400 violent deaths each year – in about 5,000 years time!

The report also says: “Palestinian armed groups, rival security forces, and powerful clans continue armed attacks on one another. At this writing, 318 Palestinians, including many civilians, had died in such fighting in 2007, most of them in Gaza. By far the worst round of fighting broke out in June 2007 and left 161 Palestinians dead, including 41 civilians.”

This means that your average Palestinian – they’re the ones that are desperate for peace; do not support Hamas; have no interest in driving the Jews into the sea and are overwhelmingly in favour of a two-state solution – has virtually the same chance of being killed by some gun-toting, holocaust denying, homosexual hating, ultra-sexist Palestinian Islamist fanatic as they do of being killed by Siddique’s new-fangled version of the Waffen SS – the Israeli Defence Force.

Where exactly is Siddique’s “clear link” between this low-level, ugly conflict described by Human Rights Watch and the Holocaust?

Siddique’s next column should be published tomorrow. Given his previous form, it’ll be interesting to see what view he takes on that leading establishment intellectual – with the ever-so up-to-the-minute and original liberal relativist outlook straight out the op-ed pages of the Guardian – the Archbeard of Idiocy and his call for Sharia in the UK …

Posted in Bristol, Middle East, Politics | Tagged , | There are 10 comments

The corporate takeover of the railway path

Posted on February 10, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

There’s some sterling research on the role of First Group and the BRT scheme over on Bristol Indymedia by Cyclopath.

They point out the guided bus used in the sketch for the proposed BRT route on Bristol and Bath Railway Path is of a type developed by First Bus and is exclusive to them. So it looks like it’ll make little difference at this point if Bristol’s lame duck transport boss, Mark Bradshaw, throws them off the planning team as he claims he will.

Cyclopath also highlights the relationship between the Labour Party and their secret donor Moir Lockhead, chairman of First Group. Although it’s doubtful this news this will come as any surprise to long-suffering Bristolians perplexed at the state of their bus service.

There’s little to be optimistic about when it comes to the other firms involved in this multi-million pound wrecking project either.

Some of you may recognise the name Atkins, the huge multi-national civil engineering group the West of England Partnership have employed to develop their BRT. They were part of the doomed Metronet group that took on the public/private partnership deal forced on Transport for London by Gordon Brown to run the tube.

A deal they bailed out of last autumn – when the government refused to give them any more handouts – landing the tax payer with a £300m bill for their incompetence.

A recent House of Commons Transport Select Committee report into the expensive disaster even said talked directly of Metronet/Atkins’ “pathetic under-delivery” on the project and concluded:

“The government should bear the Metronet debacle in mind if and when its parent companies next come to bid for publicly-funded work.”

Not a piece of advice being heeded by the West of England Partnership, any local councillors or their well remunerated transport officers then.

Meanwhile the other civil engineering firm with their feet under the West of England Partnership’s table are Halcrow, the firm behind the massively over budget Channel Tunnel Rail Link. A project described by parliament as “dogged by wildly optimistic assumptions” while the benefits were “marginal”.

That’s quite a team our leaders have assembled for us …

Posted in Bristol, Developments, Labour Party, Local government, MPs, Transport, WESP | Tagged , , , , | There are 16 comments

Railway path: the corporate priorities

Posted on February 9, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

One currently unexplored aspect of the West of England Strategic Partnership’s BRT Project Board – that has devised the plan to destroy the Bristol and Bath Railway Path – is the presence on it of a number of large corporations well-known for their good relations with government and consistent proximity to large public/private deals.

We all already know about First Group, our useless local bus monopoly, that weaseled their way on to the board to hoover-up another monopoly provider deal, but there’s others. Also inexplicably present are the the corporate civil engineering groups Atkins, Halcrow and Steer Davies Gleave.

And a brief look at the Internal Briefing (pdf), produced earlier this year by the BRT Project Board, is very revealing about what their collective priorities are:

The route is planned to use the existing former railway corridor, although retaining a high quality cycle and pedestrian corridor alongside. The route performs well in terms of patronage and deliverability, and will include careful design to ensure that it interacts sensitively with new developments in the Temple Meads and Temple Quay areas.

Yes that’s right, the concerned designers of our new BRT will ensure that it interacts sensitively with the corporate developments around Temple Meads and Temple Quay! They can’t go upsetting fellow big business interests like Temple Quay developers Castlemore can they?

Strangely these caring, sharing corporate interests, working directly alongside Bristol City Council “local experts”, express no such concern for established communities in Bristol that are likely to be wrecked by their route such as Easton and Whitehall.

You could end up thinking it’s because they don’t give a toss.

Posted in Bristol, Easton, Environment, Local government, Transport, WESP | Tagged , , , | There are 8 comments

NEWS FLASH: Dead body in office for over 10 years

Posted on February 8, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

A political body, which is believed to have been dead for at least a decade, has been found in a Bristol council chamber – where council officers had carried on working as usual.

The corpse, believed to be the city’s governing body, was found by council cleaning workers a few days ago after members of the public reported a “vile stench” emanating from the chamber.

Bristol City Council has launched an internal inquiry to establish how the corpse went unnoticed for so long.

Posted in Bristol, Local government | | There are 5 comments

Diversity news

Posted on February 8, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Diversity pic

OK. How many buzz words can you get in one title? Beat this:

SW Equality & Diversity Action Plan and SWRDA Draft Corporate Plan Consultation Event

Start: 19 Feb 2008 – 10:00
End: 19 Feb 2008 – 16:21
Venue: Somerset College of Arts and Technology (SCAT), Taunton, TA1 5AX.

Event facilitated by Equality South West to consult on the draft action plan in relation to implementing the Equality & Diversity Strategy for the South West …

Loads more of this utter bollocks on the Equality South West website. Here’s another sample:

Equality South West are the specialist (regional) lead on equality and diversity. We were asked by caapcity (sic) Builders – Consortia Development Fund, in partnership with other local and specialist consortia, to develop a regional Equality and Diversity Strategy for the Third Sector.

What the hell does it all mean? There’s nothing else for it; we’ll be reading the ‘regional Equality and Diversity Strategy’ soon to find out!

Posted in Bristol, Middle East, Race, SWRDA | Tagged | There are 3 comments

Cyclepath: Lib Dem press release

Posted on February 7, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Just in:

Here we don’ t go again – Wrong turning on Bristol Rapid Bus

Bristol is in danger of losing government funding for a rapid guided bus network, the Liberal Democrats are warning.

Bristol and surrounding authorities could lose the funding because of the controversial choice of routes made in June 2007.

By artificially restricting the choice of routes to just the Bath-Bristol cycle path, we could end up losing funding if this route does not go ahead.

Liberal Democrats are calling for cycle path to be rejected as preferred option, and for all the original possible routes to be properly investigated.

Liberal Democrat Environment Spokesperson, Cllr Gary Hopkins, said:

“It is unfortunate that following the Greater Bristol Transport Study, central government restricted the choice of transport systems that they would back to effectively just buses, ruling out trams and trains. However, albeit with a restricted choice of transport we had got their backing for making progress”.

Liberal Democrat leader, Cllr Steve Comer said:

“By going down a potential blind alley Councillor Bradshaw could well leave us in a position where we get no new transport improvements, and a lot of people will have been upset along the way.

Whilst it may be technically possible to squeeze the buses and cyclepath together for most of the route, we would lose the huge environmental and cultural benefits the path gives us.

We demand that officers are allowed to properly investigate the other alternative routes and that the public are not presented with yet another bogus ‘consultation'”.

The first key route was to link Emersons Green with Ashton Vale, and a choice of paths including one down the ring road and M32 were available.

Following the change of political administration in May 2007, the new Executive Councillors together with the representatives of various agencies, decided that the least problematic route would be down the cycle path, ex Bath-Bristol railway path. This was settled as the chosen route and all other choices were downgraded.

The ruling Labour administration did not inform other political parties or the general public for some months that they had a preferred route.

Since their preferred route came to light there has been widespread concern and anger. Bristol City Council Labour Executive Member, Cllr Mark Bradshaw, appears now to be trying to distance himself from the decision that he endorsed, despite the written records clearly showing his involvement since
June 2007.

Indeed, he chaired the meeting at which the decision was made.

Posted in Bristol, Developments, Environment, Lib Dems, Local government, Transport | Tagged | There are 35 comments