The Bristol Blogger

“Bristol City Council still plans to introduce “pay-as-you-throw” rubbish collections - and residents could end up having to buy bags for their waste,” thunders today’s Evening Cancer.

Who’d've thunk it?

Er, anyone who read The Bristol Blogger nine months ago for starters!

In recognition of this, The Bristol Blogger - in a little recycling initiative of our own - will spend the time between now and next February reprinting all its own stories all over again and call it news.

The Blogger wrote a letter recently to Venue in response to an article on local bloggers, which featured this blog. Of course I can’t link to the actual article because they still don’t put their editorial on the internet …

They featured a fairly random selection of blogs although, oddly, the article was fronted by two Tory blogs - James Barlow and Charlotte Leslie - while they found no space for Labour’s Kerry McCarthy, one of the few blogging MPs in the country.

Of The Blogger, they said because it’s written anonymously it wasn’t accountable, which elicited this response:

Thanks for the free plug in the blog article last week.

I was a bit bemused, however, by your claim that the Bristol Blogger “is anonymous and therefore unaccountable…”.

How does that work then? The last time I looked bloggers are subject to exactly the same laws - slander, contempt, copyright etc. - as any other publication such as yourselves.

And let’s be honest, even the dim and overpaid Oxbridge tossers at Carter Fuck and Partners or any other set of fancy city libel lawyers could find out who I am in the space of two phone calls if they needed to.

As for public accountability; while it ain’t perfect, I’m directly accountable to the public through the operation of an open and unmoderated comments system on my blog, which - as far as I can tell - is vastly more accessible and directly accountable to the public than anything offered by yourselves.

However much you ostentatiously publish your bylines and talk about accountability, the truth is that you - like any corporate-owned media - aren’t accountable to the public in the slightest. You’re actually accountable to a group of wealthy and anonymous Northcliffe shareholders aren’t you?

Oh, and when are you going to put your magazine on the internet?

Regards,

The Bristol Blogger

So guess what happened? The self-styled experts on media ethics didn’t print it! So much for their accountability and my right of reply then.

“[The Bridge Cafe at the Clifton Gorge Hotel] is essentially Modern British - whatever that means these days - and it’s unfussy and unpretentious,” writes Cancer food critic Mark Taylor.

And here’s a sample of the menu to prove it:

Pan-seared scallops with pea purree and crispy pancetta

Whole lemon sole with purple sprouting broccoli, sautee potatoes and parsley beurre blanc 

Smoked salmon and avocado tian with chilli and coriander dressing

Free-range duck breast with a celeriac rosti and spiced jus

Pina colada pannacotta with pineapple crisps and coconut tuille

Seems a bit more pretentious than a rack of barbecue ribs from Franky and Benny’s at Hengrove Park …

It’s Tuesday. Must be time for Cancer editor News Bunny Norton to wheel out his Islamo-looney, Farooq Siddique to give us his highly personal take on Islam in his ‘A Muslim in Bristol’ column.

Strangely enough Norton’s stopped posting Siddique’s column on the Cancer website now, which is an especially nice touch this week as Siddique, in the wake of Ibrahim Mousawi’s visit to Bristol (Blogger passim), has called his column “Our rights to free speech” - which is obviously not a suitable subject for us to freely speak about on the Cancer website.

And what do you know? Siddique’s in favour of free speech. Apparently “It’s essential for the discovery of truth.”

But wait! There’s more … There are in fact limits to free speech. “Of course freedom of speech has never meant the ‘freedom to offend’,” he says as he explains why he thinks the notorious Danish cartoons mocking Muhammed are beyond the pale and should be banned.

Presumably, then, Siddique thinks nobody is offended by his Islamist friend Mr Mousawi and his Hezbollah organisation with its commitment to the destruction of the State of Israel; it’s nasty little anti-semitic TV station; it’s blackshirted Nazi saluting paramilitaries; its random firing of missiles into civilian areas of Israel and its attempts to get a notorious child killer released from prison?

What could possibly offend anyone about any of that compared to a few silly cartoons in an obscure foreign newspaper?

It’s been another big week for Bristol journalism …

“Dream Jobs! How to get them by those who know,” announces the front cover of this week’s Venue.

Sounds good. We could all do with a dream job. Here at the Blogger we’re ready and waiting to take on the chairmanship of the Committee of Public Safety (Bristol Area). So how do we do it?

To answer this burning question, Venue consults none other than “Festival Organiser Emily Eavis”. Although quite what’s so exciting about spending your life producing endless Health and Safety risk assessments so that 100,000 students can listen to Paul McCartney is anybody’s guess.

Emily is, of course, the daughter of Michael Eavis, the former organiser of, er … Glastonbury Festival! So how on earth did she ever get this dream job?

Luckily Venue hacks are on hand to interview Emily and explain this mystery: “There’s no course or qualification as such,” explains Emily helpfully.

“Get some work experience, work on different events, see how other people do it,” she sagely advises.

Oh and also make sure daddy’s a wealthy landowner who can just hand you a job on a plate …

Meanwhile - in this busy week for top journalism in the city - over at Harry’s Place they’ve been taking an interest in the vice-chair of the Bristol branch of the NUJ, Tony Gosling.

Apparently the brilliant investigative hack and public representative for the footsoldiers of our city’s media army in their endless battle to bring us the truth has decided that Wednesday’s earthquake in Lincolnshire was in fact covert underground nuclear testing conducted by the MoD at a secret airbase!!!

Blimey. If this is the best our hacks can do then you begin to see how Cancer editor New Bunny Norton has risen so far. Compared to the rest of them, arriving in town two years ago and completely not transforming the city’s ailing rag by changing its font slightly and introducing a horse and pony page on Saturdays begins to resemble journalistic genius.

Here’s the latest example of the kind of leadership found at the top of our city’s most influential institutions these days …

You might remember that the Evening Cancer, the newspaper Mike “News Bunny” Norton is supposed to be in charge of, couldn’t move fast enough to support the plans to build a rapid transit bus route on the railway path back on 1 February.

“While many … concerns may be valid to the individuals, we have to look at the wider picture. If we are serious about developing a better public transport system for Bristol then we have to accept that it comes at a cost,” the newspaper thundered.

Until, that is, they eventually noticed the major public outcry, the huge petition on the council’s website; the reams of angry letters arriving at the paper every day and finally their own poll where it turned out over 94% of their readers were actually against the scheme.

So what does the big brave News Bunny do next as realisation of this disastrous cock-up dawns? Why he blames everything on his deputy, Rob Stokes, of course!

Over the last few days rumours, quite transparently emanating from Norton himself, have been circulating that the leader in question was nothing whatsoever to do with him. Instead we’re being told the paper’s editorials are also written by News Bunny Norton’s deputies and sometimes even the subs so - get this! - editorial consistency won’t necessarily be there!

How brilliant is that? Our city’s newspaper of record, despite having what’s supposed to be an editor, apparently has no clear editorial line on major issues affecting the city and there’s apparently no communication going on at senior management level. Instead, it seems, various staff just write whatever takes their fancy in editorials.

What are we going to be told next? That the Cancer’s news room cleaner wrote the offending piece? Readers can, however, rest assured there’s no such editorial confusion here at Blogger HQ where even the fucking cat’s aware it’s a stupid idea

Norton meanwhile, presumably in attempt to shore up his shredded credibility on this issue, is now also putting it about that he’s personally decided to run the railway path story from “a different angle”.

So this week we’ve already had a ludicrous report marked EXCLUSIVE claiming that a rare breed of glow worms on the path might mean conservationists can put an end to the scheme.

This is utter bollocks of course. No sane and rational person - which is pretty much everyone in the city who doesn’t occupy a private office at either the Council House or the Lubianka - is going to attempt to stop a major multi-million pound public transport scheme on the basis that it might disturb a small colony of glow worms are they?

Besides, had the Cancer researched the matter a little further, they might have discovered that the West of England Partnership’s BRT Project Board has already done some research on nature conservation issues with regards to the railway path and declared in their big boy builder way that “there are no showstoppers”.

Norton further continued his embarrassing climbdown today with another article finally admitting his own poll found almost 95% of his readers against the plan and quoting key railway path activist Steve Meek at length.

What Norton’s up to here is what’s known as the “reverse ferret”. A term credited to former Sun editor and sick genius Kelvin Mackenzie - the man, who by a strange twist of fate later went on to invent the News Bunny.

Mackenzie, in possibly one of the most sensible pieces of advice ever handed out in human history, used to tell his political team the way to deal with politicians was to “shove a ferret up their arse”.

A strategy, that while generally commendable, could go disasterously wrong in the hands of Sun hacks and end up with that famously “hands-off” owner Murdoch getting personally involved, the odd writ arriving or even the occasional injunction being served.

At this point Mackenzie would enter his newsroom and run around shouting “reverse ferret” while hacks would urgently perform the required Orwellian-style rewrite of the paper’s entire position.

Former Bristol South MP Michael Cocks, even in the twilight of his long parliamentary career, still manages a small walk-on part in high Tory journalist Peter Oborne’s surprisingly impressive attack on contemporary parliamentary politics, The Triumph of the Political Class.

The - now - enobled ‘old Labour’ Lord Cocks of Hartcliffe makes his brief - and entirely characteristic appearance - in 2000 when New Labour were going all out to nobble the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Elizabeth Filkin, who was just a little too keen on doing her job properly.

Having already conducted thorough and effective investigations on our behalf in to Keith Vaz and his financial relations with the notorious Hinduja brothers; in to Gordon Brown’s wealthy benefactor, the Paymaster General Geoffery Robinson and in to John Reid’s unusual employment practices with regards to his son, Filkin’s looming investigation in to Tony Blair’s New Labour pin-up boy, Peter Mandelson and his bizarre home loan arrangements was considered a step too far for the government.

Initially - we’re told by Oborne - Mandelson himself attempted to prevent Filkin’s investigation by using his “charm”. When this inevitably failed, we then learn that Mandelson tried bullying tactics and dark threats to Filkin regarding his friends in the press. This in itself tells you an awful lot about the endemic private schoolboy culture of New Labour. Can you imagine a soppy little prick like Peter Mandelson bullying anyone in a genuine party of the working classes? He’d wouldn’t last five minutes before he was taken outside and given a well-deserved kicking.

However, whatever his tactics, Mandelson dismally failed to stop Filkin in her tracks as he had planned. So a number of particularly loyal and ambitious backbench Labour MPs were tasked with dealing with Filkin by briefing some of the more soft-headed and impressionable members of the parliamentary press lobby that Filkin was ‘a mad alcoholic’ among other things. Still Filkin bravely refused to budge.

What was to be done? It was time for New Labour - in a last desperate roll of the dice - to wheel out their parliamentary big guns. A call went up to the Lords for old school Labour Party enforcer Michael Cocks - described, not entirely inaccurately, by Oborne as “a Labour fixer who had been a notoriously thuggish chief whip in the dying days of the Jim Callaghan government” - to have a word with Filkin.

Alas. It’s not clear whether Cocks’ persuasive skills were on the wane or whether Filkin was exceptionally brave and focussed on her public service remit, but remarkably Filkin still refused to back down and her Mandelson investigation went ahead.

Filkin even managed to hang on to her post for a further two years - in the face of an extremely personal and brutal mauling in the press inspired by government sources - before eventually being forced out when her contract was not renewed in 2002.

While this will not probably go down as Cocks’s finest moment, at least he had what it takes to make it into a book about contemporary power politics. Unlike the current Bristol South MP, Dawn Primarolo. Despite being constantly touted as a member of Gordon Brown’s ‘inner circle’ and allegedly a leading New Labour light, Oborne makes no mention of Dawn at all. But then why would he bother with someone who’s little more than a glorified admin assistant for Gordon and his charmed circle of elite Oxbridge boys?

COMING SOON: Is Oborne a class struggle anarchist in disguise? 

The term “fab” in this flyer may be laced with a certain irony since the address beneath it places Venue’s new offices on the 2nd floor of the Evening Cancer’s terrifying HQ - that rarely mentioned eighth circle of hell, the Brown Lubianka.

Indeed the never-less-than-excellent Advanced Circuits website’s (”Join over 14.408 Engineering Customers and 838 PCB Assemblers”) must-see Printed Circuit Manufacturing Glossary even defines “fab” as “fabrication”. Spooky or wot?

But then maybe if you don’t mind the company of ghoulish Northcliffe accountants dressed in pinstripes; you urgently need access to cancer charity press releases by the crate load and you don’t mind bumping into a slightly deranged looking Cancer editor-in-chief, Mike Norton, in the lift with his Nazi armband dangling out his pocket as he makes his way to the terrace garden for the ritual burning of the day’s supply of letters from dangerous local lefties, you could well think the place is “fab”.

‘ Tis the end of an era and more bad news for the remnants of journalism in Bristol I’m afraid.

“I, for one, wasn’t put on this earth to make life easy for British farmers, who are a reactionary and misanthropic lot as a rule - gaily destroying wildlife, backing blood sports, feeding animals the remains of their relatives and driving them mad. The EU has done enough to feather their nests; I don’t need to add to their nest eggs when I go shopping. This sort of backward thinking, taken to its logical conclusion, would also see the return of morris dancing, inbreeding and operations without benefit of anaesthetic.”

It’s enough to make you go out and buy The Guardian - Madeleine Fucking Bunting ‘n’ all.

It seems “The Greatest Living Bristolian’”(Hint to da kids: she left town fast at seventeen), Julie Burchill, has come out of retirement (again) and taken time out from her theology degree to slam the middle class useless brigade, their cloying moralising tendencies around food and their tedious obsession with “small shops”.

Julie instead offers up warm praise for her local Tescos. Enjoy - because it’s not often you’ll find a Bristolian writer nailing their subject:

“That I might go looking for proof of my worth over the wet fish counter seems quite eye-wateringly daft.”

The master at work can be found here.

Another big shout out to Evening Cancer editor Mike Norton and his super smart newsroom boys.

“PAY AS YOU THROW” thundered the front page of our ever so good local newspaper yesterday.

“ A “pay-as-you-throw” scheme charging householders £2 per sack to take away rubbish they cannot fit in their bins could be introduced in Bristol,” they explain.

What a revelation. Indeed The Bristol Blogger only told you about this over two months ago. And it was contained - albeit cunningly disguised - in a press release sent to the Cancer by the council on 17 September.

It’s good to know that the Cancer journos don’t even bother reading the press releases they type out now.