Bristol City Council's Artwatch

Posted on November 4, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

Philip Street graf
Photos by _saturnine

On the very day The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones nimbly said of the only graffiti artist with a Bristol City Council seal of approval, Banksy:

This man has achieved something original, something uniquely of our time: he has found a visual style for self-congratulatory smugness and given a look to well-heeled soi-disant radicalism.

Charlie Bolton’s blog announces the evil plans of four local councillors to do away with some landmark graffiti on Philip Street, Bedminster. The four councillors – Windmill Hill Lib Dems Mark Bailey and Alf Havock and the Southville councillors Bolton and Labour’s Daddy’s Boy Beynon, aged 23 going on 53 – have already met with officers to get rid of the work.

Presumably this doesn’t count as art then? Although admittedly the work is not as apparently well-executed as Banksy’s popular Naomi Klein-with-a-spraycan anti-globalisation agit prop.

But how does Bristol City Council decide what stays and what goes? Do they ask Brad Pitt? Do they wait for people from London to tell them? Or are their artistic criteria, like everything else at the city council, made up as they go along?

Say no, say yes

Posted in Banksy, Bedminster, Bristol | Tagged , | There are 11 comments

Gone richbashin'

Posted on November 3, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

Bash the rich

The Blogger is away until the Met decide to release us.

Since The Blogger has got into some high-falutin’ chit chat about Yeats over on The Secular Backlash, here’s The Second Coming to ponder over the weekend:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Posted in Bash the rich | Tagged , | There is 1 comment

Who'd have ever guessed it?

Posted on November 2, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

Bristol City Council is looking for urgent savings in this year’s budget of up to £2 million. It is overspending on waste services (£1.5m), care for the elderly (£1.5m), taxi services for special needs youngsters (£400,000) and concessionary bus fares (£500,000).
“City Council’s urgent hunt for £2m”, Bristol Evening Cancer, 2 November 2007

The facts are: if you want to keep home care in-house then something else will have to be cut. We need to know what that is now. It’s no good taking spending decisions now and then trying to find the money in 6 months. We’ve been there before.
“There are going to be some stark choices ahead”, The Bristol Blogger, 17 May 2007

Posted in Bristol, Bristol Evening Post, Home Care, Labour Party, Local elections 2007, Local government, Politics | | There are 4 comments

An experiment in e-democracy: Tomlinson must go!!!

Posted on November 1, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

One of our readers attended Bristol’s E-Democracy Day yesterday – ‘Modern Methods of governance – democracy in action or mob rule? – and reports that the city council will be

encouraging things like petitions even if they could be seen as “inconvenient”.

Here at The Blogger, where we don’t get out very much, we will of course be testing this claim to destruction; starting soon with an attempt to set up a petition on the city council’s e-democracy website to get rid of our utterly useless Education Director Heather Tomlinson.

Just to recap briefly about Heather: she’s paid £140k a year; she spends a further £1m a year on her management team; she squanders a further £1m on consultants; she’s now worked at Bristol City Council three years; there’s been no improvement in results; truancy rates have increased; her strategy to rebuild secondary schools under the government’s ‘Rebuilding Schools for the Future’ scheme is, as predicted, leaving the schools undersubscribed but the PFI corporate money men developers quids-in; the city council’s only non-PFI build, the in-house Redland Green School development, came in £6m over budget this year; the city’s long-term secondary school strategy – such as it was – is in chaos after two independent schools (Colston Girls and the Cathedral School) unilaterally decided to become academies; a new primary school strategy is currently being designed around the needs of PFI developers and their desire to maximise profits through new school developments; the education budget is already £2.2m overspent this year and so kids with Special Educational Needs are being targeted for cuts; at the authority Tomlinson came from, Nottingham, results have actually improved since she left and, the ultimate insult, when she left Nottingham three years ago, she brazenly announced in a press release of her reasons for coming to Bristol: “I am looking forward to fewer hours on the road and a little more time on my boat.”

Enough is enough. Tomlinson is simply not worth the money. She must go! Therefore after a few enquiries to our e-democracy office regarding the absolute confidentiality and exact nature of the information people have to provide to them when signing their petitions – we don’t want all those teachers and heads rushing to sign up only for their bosses to be handed this personal information do we? – a petition will be put forward, probably by the end of next week, demanding the resignation of Tomlinson.

Anyone care to predict the odds that it’ll be allowed?

Posted in Bristol, Education, Local government, Redland | Tagged , | There are 10 comments

Bristol education: even the kids have given up hope

Posted on October 31, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

The number of pupils who played truant from Bristol secondary schools last year was almost double the national average. And it has been claimed that 2006-07 could go down as the worst ever school year on record for secondaries in the city, following the release of new figures.

Says the Evening Cancer heralding yet another expensive disaster for Bristol City Council’s education department. Since 2005 – after a School Attendance Select Committee had spent over a year meeting together to suggest ways to improve truancy rates – the city council has spent a fortune establishing an Attendance Change Team and launching various initiatives to improve school attendance.

This has included expenditure on the usual overpriced must-have IT software for techno-fix purposes; expenditure on a very well paid and clearly underperforming Attendance Initiatives Officer; vast sums paid out on a total failure of a marketing campaign – Every Day Counts and even more money forked out for various glossy leaflets to give to parents, kids and teachers on regular basis.

And what do our glorious education leaders have to say about their latest failure? Well in the case of our £140k a year education director – who is directly responsible for this – sweet fuck all. As usual, when there’s bad news, Heather is simply nowhere to be seen or heard.

Meanwhile Labour’s education boss Derek Pickup is left mouthing one of the daftest excuses of all time: “It’s not that the figures are actually rising, the reason for any increase is because we are using more robust systems to measure absence,” he bleats.

Is Pickup really claiming there’s a more robust method of measuring absence than the good old-fashioned class register? In which case what is it exactly? Or is he claiming that the city council has only just introduced class registers? I think we should be told.

The city’s official spokeswoman on education Kate Hartas came out with an entirely different excuse to Pickup’s – nothing like consistency of message is there? She claimed the figures could not be compared to last year’s because they only covered part of the year and had not been fully checked!

Jesus. They really think we’re stupid don’t they? Do they really think we believe this bollocks? Why can’t they just face up to the issues, admit there’s a problem and say how they’re gonna deal with it rather than come out with these unbelievably pisspoor PR excuses every time?

Perhaps they should start by ending the blame free culture in the education department and identifying the people who have failed to deliver on the truancy issue over the last few years and ensuring some heads roll?

So who’s the well-paid senior council officer responsible for truancy then?

That’d be Attendance and Behaviour Consultant right?

Uh huh . . .

Who’s that then?

Er, Esther Pickup-Keller, wife of Labour education supremo Derek Pickup!

Posted in Bristol, Bristol Evening Post, Education, Labour Party, Local government, Politics | Tagged , , | There are 15 comments

Bristol Labour: corruption one of "our problems" admits former councillor

Posted on October 31, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

A former Bristol City Labour Councillor who was recently shortlisted as a potential candidate for Doug Naysmith’s Bristol North West seat has responded to allegations of corruption in Bristol Labour Party by agreeing “we have our problems”.

Kelvin Blake the former councillor for Filwood Ward who was recently disabled in a motorcycling accident was responding to an allegation that:

In this city whenever you find the Labour Party or its friends and business partners around government funding you can also discover appalling bad practice, nepotism, poor accounting, favouritism, cover-ups, dodgy references, redeployments, gagging orders etc. It’s so rife, it’s a waste of time pretending otherwise.

While firmly distancing himself from such conduct – “I can’t be implicated,” he said – he went on to agree that: “We have our problems but the other [parties] outshine us in the problem department everytime.”

So that’s all right then!

This shocking admission comes after many years of unrest regarding the conduct of certain Bristol Labour Party members, former members and their close associates working, volunteering and on occasions randomly interfering in the city council funded voluntary, community and regeneration sector.

Many voluntary organisations including Filwood Community Centre, Southmead Development Trust, Easton Community Centre and CEED have developed inexplicable and confusing financial problems over the last ten years.

The city council department responsible for the provision and monitoring of grants to these organisations – Community Development – has also come under fire on a number of occasions for its apparently persistent inability to properly monitor the public funds it disburses and for an almost non-existent record at detecting and preventing poor financial management and fraudulent activity.

Voscur, the city’s supposedly independent representatives for community organisations, also funded by the city council, has been criticised in the past too for supporting the Bristol Labour Party view over that of its members.

Bristol Labour Party has run the city now – except for a short break 2005 – 2007 – since the mid 80s and Bristol is often informally referred to as “a Labour Rotten Borough”.

Blake failed to explain how Bristol’s other political parties “outshine us in the problem department everytime”

The Bristol Blogger’s school truancy report, complete with – wait for it! – the Labour’s Education Exec’s blatant and undeclared conflict of interest – is coming soon.

Posted in Bristol, Labour Party, Local government, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | There are 14 comments

Choose the ineffective, low-cost PR option day

Posted on October 30, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

Choose Day logo

Fancy that! The latest supporter of the mindless and ineffective ‘Choose Day’ Christian eco-scam is none other than Mark Bradshaw, Labour’s Transport exec.

He tells The Cancer: “Choose Day will help to make Bristol a leading city in addressing th[e] environmental challenge.”

Yeah right Mark. Really cutting edge. Trying to guilt trip the working people of the city on to your shitty, ramshackle old bus service run by corporate profiteers First.

Rather than engaging in doomed PR stunts with Christians, wouldn’t Bradshaw’s time be better spent getting together with his new super-rich Merchant Venturer buddies – who’ve made an awful lot of money out of this city- and creating the rapid transit system this city – if it was properly run – should have had 30 years ago?

Even The Cancer ain’t falling for Bradshaw’s latest “I’ll-support-anything-me-if-it’ll-get-in the-paper”cheap shot. Here’s their editorial on the matter:

What is the point of Bristol City Council backing a campaign encouraging people to choose to leave their cars at home to get to work?

Is their intention to prove that the vast majority of people who drive to work each day don’t have any choice?

Or is it that they are so prejudiced against car users that they will grasp at any opportunity to make them feel uncomfortable?

The truth is that campaigns like Chooseday will work only if people have a viable alternative to driving their cars. That means an efficient and cheap public transport system.

This is something we simply do not have. The choice is, therefore, drive your car or take a day off.

It really should not be left to individuals to sort out the city’s traffic problems. For running the city is, after all, why councillors seek office.

Rather than trying to pass the buck they should be coming up with innovative ideas to try to help people get to work.

Well done Bradshaw. You’ve associated yourself and the city with an idea so dumb even The Cancer says so!

Update: Charlie Bolton says on his blog that he too was there today along with Lib Dem leader Comer and Tory North West candidate Charlotte Leslie. What a shower of pathetics. Do your jobs properly, stop hectoring us and get us a decent transport system together you lazy tossers. Moral lectures and photo ops with vicars aren’t going to do shit for the planet are they? Although they’re cheap, easy and give the impression you’re doing something when you’re patently not don’t they?

Posted in Bristol, Bristol Evening Post, Environment, Global warming, Labour Party, Local government, Merchant Venturers, The Centre, Transport | Tagged , , | There are 9 comments

Quick off the mark again at the BBC

Posted on October 30, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

The Bristol Blogger September 29 2007:

the council’s recent citizen’s jury on waste . . . appear to have decided to introduce a charge – for the first time – for the collection of extra waste, which the council’s press release [has] attempted to disguise.

BBC Bristol October 30 2007:

Residents in Bristol could be charged for producing more non-recyclable waste than they can fit in their bin.

Best news organisation in the world the BBC . . .

Posted in Blogging, Bristol, Local government, Media, Recycling | Tagged | There is 1 comment

The strategic genius of Peter Hammond

Posted on October 30, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

As the bearded moron, Labour’s social services executive member, Peter Hammond sets about reorganising the city’s home care service under the personal direction of his friends in the trade unions, perhaps now is the time to recall the brilliant strategist’s hand in the city’s less than successful £270m Building Schools for the Future programme.

Back in 2002 Hammond was again deputy leader of the city council as well as executive member for education and lifelong learning. Talking about his plans for Bristol’s schools he confidently told the BBC:

“These plans have been put together very carefully to make sure pupils will enjoy high quality educational facilities, strategically located to meet the demand for places across the city.”

Fast forward five years and here’s the result of Hammond’s careful planning. Again from the BBC:

Pupil numbers at Portway School, which reopened with brand new facilities in 2006, have fallen by almost a third since 2003, to just over 700.

Just the man with just the track record to reorganise our home care service then!

Posted in Bristol, Education, Home Care, Labour Party, Local government | Tagged | There is 1 comment

The Blogger breaks America!

Posted on October 30, 2007 by The Bristol Blogger

Juxtapose mag logo

It looks like The Blogger is set to succeed where Oasis and Robbie Williams failed and break America . . .

The Blogger’s post yesterday on Tangent Books’ Banksy’s Bristol has virtually taken the US by storm or at least their popular Juxtapoz – Art and Culture Magazine Online site.

The magazine has picked up on The Blogger’s Banksy post and is describing it as a prime example of “that British Humour”. Mind you, they’re sensitive souls these yanks; they also call the post “properly derisive”. Pah! That’s not derisive. It’s a bit of harmless knockabout. If you want to see derisive log-on tonight for the feature on truancy in schools. (It’s particularly suggested that the Pickup household prepare themselves).

Meanwhile Yanks have been pouring in overnight on to The Blogger’s site! Destination Bristol, US to Bristol airlines and other tourist related businesses who wish to take advantage of this exceptional opportunity to target a highly sophisticated ABC1 American audience please get in touch to discuss our competitive advertising rates.

The Blogger’s now off to discuss their percentage cut of US sales with Tangent…

Posted in Banksy, Blogging, Bristol | Tagged , | There are no comments yet