Kerry McCarthy has this to say about Labour’s new foreign office GOAT (Government of all the talents – geddit!), Mark Malloch Brown:
he clearly has a huge breadth of knowledge, gained from years of working at the UN. I think he’s a real asset
Some things are just doomed to come back and haunt you aren’t they?
Can it only be last week that Labour’s deranged multiculturalist guru Peter Hammond announced:
he believed school was a place we went for the opportunity to meet other cultures that lived around us.
But oh dear. What a shock. How could it be? Somehow it turns out that a huge proportion of parents in the city appear to be declining Hammond’s kind offer of enforced Diwali celebrations, DJ workshops and homophobia awareness lessons for their children in favour a proper education instead.
The Cancer reports today that Bristol’s parents are overwhelmingly voting with their feet and that over 40% of kids in the city are now being educated without the involvement of Hammond’s daft and incompetent education authority. 20% of kids are traveling to other authorities for their education, we learn, and a whopping 20% of kids are now being educated privately in the city.
So even if you want the opportunity for your children “to meet other cultures that live around us”, it ain’t happening in Bristol I’m afraid.
Hammond’s sidekick, Labour’s education supremo Derek Pickup – who’s personal preference is for “learning through play” (no really, we’re not making this up) – has been wheeled out to offer an explanation for this abysmal state of affairs.
He seems to think that more parents are beginning to put their faith in the city’s schools. Yes Derek, of course they are. You and Hammond both inspire faith don’t you?
As expected Labour’s Deputy Leader, the bearded fool, Peter Hammond is destroying yet more of Bristol’s Social Services because the hopeless incompetent can’t understand – let alone control – expenditure in his department (again).
Back in 2005, as leader of the council, Hammond ditched Bristol’s day care services – and those using them – to plug an £18m budget deficit. Fast forward to 2007 and we find Hammond needing to balance another budget he’s fucked up, this time by allowing home care costs to spiral upwards, instead of being six months into a reform process he canceled without another plan.
The target now is the city council’s residential care services for the elderly with extremely vulnerable and ill residents being put on the line so that Hammond can dig himself out of the shit. His plan is for eight city council care homes are to be closed – and the complex needs of the clients instead met by Hammond’s trusty in-house home care service – while the rest of the homes will be handed to the private sector to run.
All well good and until you hear what Tory Geoff Gollop has to say about this. He points out that Hammond’s cost cutting proposal has been drafted by comparing the high costs to the council of complex needs-based residential services with the low cost of the private sector’s charges for low-intensity home care-style services. They’re not the same thing.
And the result? Just what Hammond wants to hear at the moment. The council can make huge savings by closing homes and handing services to the private sector.
This plan and the budgetary disaster it entails is expected to start unraveling in January next year.
Looks like Bell’s Diner’s luvvie chef Chris Wicks, darling of the Venue reading classes, hasn’t been telling the whole truth:
Bell’s Diner have decided to stop selling Foie-Gras after only one demo against them! Bristol animal rights activists were very happy when they noticed this so we called off our 2nd demo and visited Juniper,a restaurant which was also selling foie-gras.
Bristol Animal Rights Collective, 15 May 2007
I’m soon purring about the wood pigeon with foie gras that arrives on a square plate with a smear of apple chutney, but Xanthe thinks the chutney is too young and needs time to lose some of its harshness.
Restaurant Review: Bell’s Diner in Bristol, Daily Telegraph 10 November 2007
New community festival for 2008!
A brand new festival is being organised for 2008 by volunteers who feel it’s what the community needs, especially in light of the unfortunate demise of the Bristol Community Festival (at Ashton Court).
Built from the ground up, Bristol Festival aims to involve YOU, the general public at every opportunity to ensure the people of Bristol get the community festival they want celebrating the region’s music, performing arts and local culture.
We are currently inviting everyone to get involved and tell us what you want in a festival. Take ownership, make suggestions and make a difference by joining in the discussions on the online forum:
http://www.thebristolfestival.org/forum
Where would you like it to be? What music would you like to hear? What would you like to see? How much corporate sponsorship would you like to see? What size would you like it? What would you like it to be called? It’s your festival – get involved!
See the official website at www.thebristolfestival.org for more information or to get in touch! We always need more volunteers to help out!
Please spread the word… its about time we combat the apathy of today’s culture. Have your say, support the arts, get involved in your festival! Lets keep this party alive people!
We’re having regular fundraisers, every Wednesday night at Joe Publics, featuring a mixture of local bands and performers, DJs, open mic, drinks promos, fun and frolics!
This week we have a Christmas Fair and Charity Auction, Sat Nov 24th at the beautiful grade 2 listed building Armada House, Telephone Avenue (just off Baldwin Street) so come along and get into the festive spirit whilst supporting your community festival for 2008. (free entry 10-6)
Focusing on local traders, small and independent businesses and local arts, crafts and food, it will be a really enjoyable day out with mulled wine, mince pies, live music, holistic therapies, luxury raffles, fantastic auctions (many gifts such as spa days, holistic therapies, days out, works of art and sculpture) and a wide range of stalls all from south west based companies with everything you need for Christmas, and a Rodeo Rudolph ride outside!
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5947264514
The Blogger’s attention was caught by a report posted on Bristol 2007’s Weblog about a recent brief debate on the issue of black only schools for Bristol. Here’s a part of it:
Cllr Peter Hammond [a key member of the Abolition 200 Steering Committee] was not keen on the idea of black schools. Since he believed school was a place we went for the opportunity to meet other cultures that lived around us.
There you have it. The city’s dominate liberal-left consensus view of education. And what a load sanctimonious wishy-washy liberal drivel it is. Hammond is openly admitting that our city’s education system is virtually a vehicle for an experiment in multiculturalist social engineering. And where exactly has this got us then?
Are we to believe that the rich, influential and powerful send their children to Eton “for the opportunity to meet other cultures that live around them”? Of course they don’t. They send their children to the best schools to get the best results and then get the best jobs so that they can inherit the country’s wealth, influence and power and continue to run the show for their own benefit.
Hammond’s leadership and mongrel vision provide no threat to this order whatsoever. Rather than seeking aspiration, achievement and success in our schools, Hammond is more interested in promoting nice-sounding multiculturalist banalities and using our education system to deliberately foster divisions between our children and then demand they spend their school days engaging in endless bouts of navel gazing about it.
Wonderful. And what do you get at the end of all this? Probably a load of happy multiculturalist Morrisons wage slaves just about capable of commanding £6 an hour in perpetuity.
Sod these differences the likes of Hammond want to construct for us, where petty choices over things like diet and dress and a few minor quibbles over religious belief are blown out of all proportion to form untouchable and venerated cultures demanding special treatment. Meanwhile those powerful and consuming social, economic and political realities that actually bind us together are quietly shunted to one side and ignored.
If you really want to look at the root causes of why Bristol’s schools are failing, look no further than to Hammond and his gang of liberal multiculturalists whose ideas now dominate the management of our education system. They couldn’t give a toss whether your children succeed or fail in conventional terms, so long as they’ve had their dose of fashionable multiculturalist, anti-homophobic, anti-obesity medicine.
Bristol 2007 is a bit unsure where to turn when confronted with the idea of these distinctly anti-multiculturalist black-only schools:
In our 2000s mentality in the UK, it doesn’t sound right to the ear. Surely that’s what we’ve been fighting and legislating against isn’t it? Leaving us all confused.
Indeed. On the one hand there’s Hammond’s multiculturalism. It’s been rammed down our throats at school; it dominates HE (and teacher training) and it’s all over the BBC and most other government institutions too. How could it possibly be a problem? Besides, isn’t rejecting multiculturalism the same as being – gulp – racist?
On the other hand lies reality. The reality of failing schools and, even – despite this obssession with multiculturalism – failing races. What is to be done? Continue to fail people because it feels good for white liberals?
Do you at least try to give kids a real chance at success or do you continue with a feel-good ideology of known failure? Bristol 2007 probably already knows the answer to their quandary. They just haven’t thought to apply it as a solution to this problem:
By any means necessary, comrade. By any means necessary . . .
Predictably the Labour Cabinet nodded through on Thursday the £25m Museum of Bristol project on the site of the Industrial Museum.
And just in case any of our elected representatives – not in the cabinet – might have wanted to ask a few much-needed questions about the project – like why it’s £5m overspent already and why there’s no coherent plan to fund the place into the future – the cabinet then went ahead and signed the building contract with developers HBG first thing Friday morning.
This has effectively deprived councillors of their only legal role in the council’s decision making process – the right to scrutinise decisions the cabinet has taken. It also means that a project is going ahead where costs have already inflated by 25% without proper explanation.
This is not looking good.
The latest blog to appear in Bristol is Bristol 2007’s Weblog. This appears to have been set up to look at the legacy left by the city’s controversial Abolition 200 events this year.
The city council’s Abolition 200 Steering Group, which has been effectively boycotted throughout this Abolition 200 year by the majority of the city’s black groups unhappy with the city council’s plans for “stagey insensitive activities”, has already laid down the official marker and published a Draft Legacy Report(pdf).
And although it does make a passing reference to the boycott, it prefers instead to dwell on the likes of David Lammy, who as minister in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, visited Bristol this year and apparently declared Bristol is at “year zero” with the slave trade now behind us.
The report also makes the extraordinary claim that the obvious divisions in the city are a problem of poor marketing and expends most of its efforts on special pleading for more public cash for narrow interest groups.
Bristol 2007’s Weblog looks like it may take some stronger and more challenging lines than this.
The Blogger will be returning to Bristol 2007’s Weblog tomorrow to discuss black only schools, multiculturalism and Peter bloody Hammond.
Not ones to pass up the opportunity to put a semi-naked teenager on their pages, today’s papers are full of stories about teenage supermodel sensation Lily Cole becoming the new face of Marks & Spencer.
Cole is currently the posh totty of broadsheet choice because, having had the benefit of an expensive private education, she currently has a deferred place to study politics at Kings College, Cambridge in 2008. Proving rather nicely that wealth and success in this country tends to provide er, more wealth and success!
Marks & Spencer, meanwhile, are in PR overdrive. Not only have they got a prime slice of bankable teenage flesh to sell their undies with but we learn that “[Lily’s] commitment to environmental issues makes for a great partnership with M&S”.
Indeed, this beauty with the brain, we’re breathlessly informed by gushing M&S PR cretins, has a “social conscience” and recently wrote the foreword for Tamsin Blanchard’s ethical fashion book – no doubt named by the razor sharp wits of Hodder & Stoughton’s marketing department – Green Is The New Black.
Pity then, that where Cole’s concerned, green is in fact the new load of old bollocks for marketing an image to a target demographic. Because the nineteen year old, signed to the Storm model agency, has already amassed a mere £11m fortune largely by flying from “catwalks and photoshoots in Paris to New York or Rome“.
It’s nice to see the young new members of the British establishment are every bit as hypocritical as the old ones isn’t it?
Well, well, well. Who’s this slithering back up the greasy pole into the higher echelons of Bristol’s public life?
Those fine and honourable fellows of our local creepy millionaires’ misogynist sect, the Society of Merchant Venturers, have only gone and gotten themselves a new head honcho. This year’s keeper of the holy Colston toenail and “The one that you must call the master” is none other than Nicholas Hood. Whoopee! Get those trouser legs up boys!
“Hood, 71,” explains the ever informative Evening Cancer “was educated at Clifton College and was chairman of Wessex Water. Among his other posts, he is life vice president of @Bristol.”
Unfortunately this anodyne description is not the whole story. This former Chairman of Wessex Water made one fortune out of Thatcher’s water privatisation in the 80s and then another fortune when Wessex was sold to Enron to create their ‘global’ water business Azurix in 1998.
Hood was then installed as vice-Chairman of Azurix where he would have worked alongside the convicted Enron crooks Jeffery Skilling and Kenneth Lay. Here again he earned another small fortune and his boss Rebecca Mark walked away in 2000 with over $100m while the obvious questions went unasked by her fellow directors led by Hood. Of course ordinary Enron employees and investors later lost jobs, homes and pensions at the hands of the fraudsters running the bent energy business.
Hood also chaired @Bristol until 2001 before scarpering quickly in the wake of the Enron scandal. In this post he again dismally failed to provide simple financial oversight and squandered around £40m of public money on building an unsustainable personal vanity project instead. The doomed enterprise has recently had to make staff redundant and closed two-thirds of its operation to avoid bankruptcy after a halt was finally called to the millions in public subsidies Hood’s poorly planned and executed attraction required.
Having kept his head down for a few years, it now looks like Hood – who used to like styling himself as “a friend of Prince Charles” to the local press, although references to Tampon Charlie have been rare in recent years – is returning to public life. No doubt he’ll be bringing that selfless public service ethos of his along with him too.
This being Bristol – “The European City of Smug Brownosers” – don’t expect any awkward questions to be asked, however. Instead sit back and watch those entrusted with the city’s welfare happily socialise, dine and lavish ill-deserved praise upon him for the next year.
