At 2.00 a.m. this morning British Summer Time (BST) came to an end, the clocks were turned back one hour and the UK reverted to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and evenings that get dark earlier.
This for me marks the gloomiest time of year – at least until we’re over the winter solstice and the day of least daylight!
However, the changing of the clocks is a major job for some. For instance, for the curators of the Palace of Westminster’s Great Clock (which bongs Big Ben. Ed.), the process involves careful precision and split-second timing. As well as re-setting the time, it gives them an opportunity to make close inspection of the clock mechanism as part of a rolling maintenance programme. The process is described in detail on the UK Parliament website.
On a lighter note, the Stonehenge Twitter account decided to have some fun with the change, as shown by the following screenshot.
It would appear that the communities of South Bristol are also getting fed up with fly-tipping too and want the long-promised Hartcliffe recycling centre opened as they believe it could help cure this local environmental blight.
Local campaigners have now made a video to assist their efforts in securing this much-needed facility (at present Bristol has 2 main council-run recycling facilities, both north of the River Avon and miles away from Hartcliffe. Ed.)
One would have thought that with the amount of waste produced by the city increasing and recycling rates declining, Bristol’s most senior elected official would leap at any chance of reversing this during Bristol’s year as the alleged European Green Capital, but it seems like he refuses to do anything at all to help improve the city’s poor, deprived and blighted communities.
This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.
Kindly disclose the number of:
a) fixed penalty notices issued
b) prosecutions brought
in the last 5 years for fly-posting
1. within the entire local authority area
2. within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards
Yours etc.
The council has now replied. The salient part of the response – minus the copyright notice and procedure for those dissatisfied with the reply – reads as follows:
You sent us a Freedom of Information request on 12/08/2015
Your request number is CRN00017905
Our reply to your request is:
FPNs – 68 with 2x in Easton/Lawrence Hill wards
Pros – 6x with 3x in in Easton/Lawrence Hill wards
This response should answer your request in full.
Considering that Bristol is a city of 430,000 people, these figures do seem rather small, but then again so is the city council’s enforcement team (posts passim) which deals not just with fly-tipping, litter dog fouling and the like, but also fly-posting.
In a move that will put yet another black mark against they city’s undeserved year as European Green Capital, the streets of Bristol are set to get even filthier than they are already.
Today’s Bristol Post reports that the number of street cleaners in Bristol has been cut by nearly a fifth since Bristol City Council took waste management and street cleansing back in-house last month from contractors Kier Group, those well-known supporters of former worker blacklisting outfit The Consulting Association.
Fly-tipping on Pennywell Road, Easton
According to the Post, the council-run Bristol Waste Company (BWC) has notified “30 to 40” agency workers at the Hartcliffe depot that they would no longer be required as of yesterday (Monday). This will cut their numbers by about one-fifth. These workers deal with street cleaning and collecting fly-tipping.
In addition, the Hartcliffe staff claim they have not been consulted on the cuts and accused the council of trying to save money at the expense of cleanliness (Bristol City Council has a long and proud tradition of avoiding and/or messing up consultation. Ed.).
Furthermore, the Hartcliffe depot staff also claim they been provided with inadequate equipment to do the job. One anonymous worker is quoted by the Post as saying:
Some of the guys haven’t been given clean gloves or protective gear, and many are still working with Kier equipment. The protective clothing is not adequate, and we have to deal with needles and dog poo and stuff.
If there are insufficient staff available at BWC for the job in hand, perhaps Bristol City Council could reassign staff from elsewhere: ideal candidates for redployment and kitting out with a fluorescent uniform, safety gloves, boots and a broom would be those working in the local authority’s overstaffed press and PR department.
In other Greenwash Capital news, it would appear that Bristol Mayor George Ferguson couldn’t really care less about the city’s cleanliness according to the tweet below from Kerry McCarthy MP.
Synonyms for unimpressed include apathetic, disinterested, unconcerned, undisturbed, untroubled and unmoved.
If Kerry’s report of her meeting with the Mayor is accurate, that is a most disturbing development in the person whose supposed job is to take care the best interests of the city and its welfare.
As a fan of Private Eye’s Lookalikes section, the other day I couldn’t help noticing there was more than a passing similarity between Michael Fabricant, the implausibly-coiffed Tory Member of Parliament for Lichfield, and Iggy Pop, that occasional insurance salesman and singer-songwriter, musician and actor, better known to the US Internal Revenue Service as James Newell Osterberg, Jr.
One feature that Microsoft has been really making a great fuss about is the implementation (finally) of virtual desktops for the first time in a way that can be accessed easily by users.
A virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces to describe ways in which the virtual space of a computer’s desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen’s display area through the use of software. This compensates for a limited desktop area and can also be helpful in reducing clutter.
Microsoft is calling the Windows 10 implementation of virtual desktops Task View.
Windows 10 with Task View virtual desktops shown near the bottom of the screen.
Whenever a new release of Windows comes out, users of other operating systems such as Mac OS X and the various distributions of Linux, always wonder what baubles will be ‘copied’ from their OS of choice.
This time, it’s virtual desktops.
On Linux systems both major window/display managers – GNOME and KDE – have had virtual desktops for well over a decade.
Indeed, the first version of KDE, released 17 years ago in July 1998, included them, as shown in the following screenshot.
KDE version 1 showing 4 virtual desktops in use. The virtual desktops can be accessed via the taskbar or pager in the desktop’s top right-hand corner.
GNOME also included virtual desktops as early the GNOME 2.0 release which appeared in 2002.
Windows has actually had API support for virtual desktops since Windows NT 4, which was released back in 1996, which just shows how long it takes a lumbering quasi-monopolostic behemoth to get round to implementing things.
I’d sooner use an operating system that was a pioneer, rather than a laggard that attempted to imitate the best of others. 🙂
Thank you for summiting [sic] your statement to Full Council in regards [sic] to the fly-tipping and litter issues you are currently experiencing in Easton.
Easton has historically been an area where greater resources have been needed, and this is still the case today: the Council provides more resources for this area to remove waste and litter than in most other parts of the city. The introduction of communal bins seems to have improved the situation in Easton; prior to their introduction there was more widespread fly tipping [sic] throughout the area. In some cases, however, this measure has led to fly-tipping occurring around the bins, as it has been observed in other parts of the city, from Clifton to St Pauls. The communal bin areas are proactively patrolled by our contractor, who responds to fly-tip and street cleansing reports made through Customer Services or submitted on webforms throughout Bristol. Training has been provided to our contractor’s operatives to search waste for evidence of its potential source & evidence is passed to Streetscene Enforcement Team to investigate.
We require the support of the public to help us identify offenders and would encourage all residents and visitors to Bristol to report incidents of fly-tipping they observe to Bristol City Council as soon as possible. To take enforcement action against offending individuals or businesses requires evidence and the more information we receive, the more likely we can build a case and target them. Recruitment is currently underway to return the Streetscene Enforcement Team to a full complement of 6 officers. This will allow for the officers to concentrate their activities within smaller areas and allow for more proactive work and operations. For instance, all businesses on Stapleton Road are currently in the process of being visited to check that they have relevant commercial waste contracts and make them aware that we are searching for evidence of commercial waste being deposited in the domestic communal bins. The Streetscene Enforcement Team continues to explore new ways of working with partners, both within the Council and local community, to target environmental crime and support improvements to the local environment. For this reason, we appreciate your efforts in working with us to achieve a cleaner Easton, and thank you for your patience while we effect the necessary improvements.
Yours sincerely,
(signed)
George Ferguson CBE
Mayor of Bristol
Having carefully examined the text of Hannah’s reply and the one I received, it can be confirmed that the two responses are identical, even down to the same typographical errors.
Whilst I am pleased to learn that IT skills in the Mayor’s office have now reached a level equivalent to those of novice computer users, it is disconcerting that the staff in the Mayor’s office still think it appropriate to draft the same response to 2 statements on the same subject that raised different points. This illustrates the continuing contempt by council officers for residents of the inner city – a contempt that should never have been allowed to develop in the first place, let alone persist down the decades.
Bristol City Council should not be allowed to get away with this.
At the same full council meeting there were 3 statements from campaigners trying to prevent part of the River Frome flood plain being used for luxury housing by Colston’s School. I wonder if they received identical responses too. If any of those campaigners did, kindly mention it in the comments below.
England won the toss, elected to bowl first and put Australia into bat. Before lunch Australia were all out for 60 runs (including extras), clocking up the worst batting performance by an Australian team in an Ashes match for some 8 decades.
If I couldn’t believe my ears, one can just imagine how well such a shambolic performance with the bat went down in the Australian media.
The Sydney Morning Herald‘s sports headline writer perhaps encapsulated feelings best with the back page headline “It’s Pomicide“, as per the photograph below.
Whilst I take a rather ambiguous attitude to newspaper headline writers and their frequently inappropriate use of puns, the invention of Pomicide strikes me as most apposite. Should I recommend it to the Oxford English Dictionary for its word of the year accolade?
Bristol Mayor George FergusonFollowing my submission of a statement to last month’s full council meeting (posts passim), at which Hannah Crudgington’s video statement on fly-tipping received a standing ovation from Labour councillors, I’ve now received a written reply to my statement from Bristol’s elected Mayor, George Ferguson. Even though I had no opportunity to present my statement verbally to councillors due to the incompetent and thoroughly dreadful chairing of the full council meeting by Lord Mayor Clare Campion-Smith, all those submitting statements were promised a written response.
The response to my written statement has now been received and is reproduced in full below for the information and amusement of passing readers.
Dear Mr Woods,
Thank you for summiting [sic] your statement to Full Council in regards [sic] to the fly-tipping and litter issues you are currently experiencing in Easton.
Easton has historically been an area where greater resources have been needed, and this is still the case today: the Council provides more resources for this area to remove waste and litter than in most other parts of the city. The introduction of communal bins seems to have improved the situation in Easton; prior to their introduction there was more widespread fly tipping [sic] throughout the area. In some cases, however, this measure has led to fly-tipping occurring around the bins, as it has been observed in other parts of the city, from Clifton to St Pauls. The communal bin areas are proactively patrolled by our contractor, who responds to fly-tip and street cleansing reports made through Customer Services or submitted on webforms throughout Bristol. Training has been provided to our contractor’s operatives to search waste for evidence of its potential source & evidence is passed to Streetscene Enforcement Team to investigate.
We require the support of the public to help us identify offenders and would encourage all residents and visitors to Bristol to report incidents of fly-tipping they observe to Bristol City Council as soon as possible. To take enforcement action against offending individuals or businesses requires evidence and the more information we receive, the more likely we can build a case and target them. Recruitment is currently underway to return the Streetscene Enforcement Team to a full complement of 6 officers. This will allow for the officers to concentrate their activities within smaller areas and allow for more proactive work and operations. For instance, all businesses on Stapleton Road are currently in the process of being visited to check that they have relevant commercial waste contracts and make them aware that we are searching for evidence of commercial waste being deposited in the domestic communal bins. The Streetscene Enforcement Team continues to explore new ways of working with partners, both within the Council and local community, to target environmental crime and support improvements to the local environment. For this reason, we appreciate your efforts in working with us to achieve a cleaner Easton, and thank you for your patience while we effect the necessary improvements.
Yours sincerely,
(signed)
George Ferguson CBE
Mayor of Bristol
What strikes me about the response – apart from its occasionally abysmal English usage – is firstly its emollient, placatory tone: to begin with, it commiserates with me for the “fly-tipping and litter issues you are currently experiencing in Easton“. It’s not just now that I’m experiencing those so-called issues; I’ve watched the area get filthier for the last 4 decades!
Secondly, the response manages to duck a couple of major points, namely the disparity between the number of enforcement officers compared with the Council’s excessively large press, PR and communications staff (posts passim), as well as the response (if any) of council officers and Assistant Mayor Daniella Radice to ideas from elsewhere around the UK and world for combating fly-tipping (these have probably been kicked into the long grass by both the Assistant Mayor and officers under time-honoured “not invented here” rules. Ed.).
As the response was unsatisfactory, I shall be attempting to make another statement to full council in September and will draw the Mayor’s attention to the shortcomings in the response.
Finally, Hannah Crudgington received a reply to her video statement that was almost identical to mine. Isn’t it good to know that IT skills down the Counts Louse have reached the cut and paste level? 😉
