#Bristol - The Disparate and the Desperate: How Political Parties Become Psychiatric Wards With Council Budgets.

What Happens When the Bins Don't Care About Your Pronouns and the Council Stops Caring About the Bins.

(A deliciously spoof image, provided by

Chris McEvoy

@Bristol Uncovered, I’ve unashamedly purloined for the purpose of this article)

I remember some years ago when I first joined UKIP. Yeah, UKIP. Before you start frothing at the mouth (I’m not a fascist, but thanks for the diagnosis, Doctor Twitter), let me be clear: the Bristol branch of UKIP wasn’t racist at all – fighting racism was the one thing we were absolutely committed to. We represented a very broad selection of the Bristol population who felt disenfranchised by all the other parties. We’d gathered around a straightforward proposition about EU membership and not having Brussels dictate what shape our bloody bananas should be.

What we didn’t anticipate was that creating a political home for the disenfranchised is rather like opening a hostel with no admission criteria and a sign outside that says “Everyone Welcome, Especially the Mad Bastards.”

UKIP started attracting people with varying views on subjects that had bugger all to do with European treaties. The party was forever booting people out for extreme views – endless political whack-a-mole, suggesting we’d completely lost control. The pattern was beautiful in its predictability: attract the politically homeless, watch them fight over unrelated issues, spend all your time managing internal civil wars, and implode spectacularly.

Now I look at the Green Party, and it’s the same bloody film playing on a different screen with different misfits.

I Call These People the Disparate and the Desperate.

The disparate: people with wildly incompatible views who believe they’re part of the same movement. The desperate: people whose political engagement is driven by the need for somewhere – anywhere – to belong.

When you’re politically desperate, you’ll overlook massive contradictions because the alternative feels worse. Traditional environmentalists tolerate economic policies that would cripple the green industry. Evidence-based policy advocates sit quietly whilst ideology contradicts years of data.

There’s no intellectual coherence. It’s purely emotional – shared resentment of the mainstream. Perfect for opposition politics. Catastrophic for actual governance. Because when you’ve got the keys to the council offices, choices must be made. Hard ones. And the desperate nature of your coalition means those internal fights become existential.

When Symbolic Politics Meets Reality.

On one side: normal politics. Housing, budgets, planning applications. Unglamorous work requiring difficult choices.

On the other side: emotional incontinence. People for whom politics is primarily about validation. “It’s all about me. My pronouns. Whether I’m wearing a suit or a skirt. Whether people recognise my particular brand of special.”

Here’s the thing: your bins don’t care about your pronouns. The potholes don’t give a toss whether you’re gender-fluid. The housing waiting list doesn’t sort itself based on how many identities you’ve collected like Pokémon cards. The planning backlog doesn’t pause whilst you validate someone’s lived experience. The budget deficit doesn’t shrink because you’ve held up a placard.

The street repairs don’t happen because you walked out of a council meeting in solidarity. The school places don’t materialise because you changed your email signature. The social care crisis doesn’t resolve itself because you spent three hours debating whether “chest-feeding” should replace “breastfeeding” in council literature.

You cannot simultaneously run a functional local authority dealing with bins and potholes whilst serving as a therapeutic space for identity validation. These are mutually exclusive functions.

Bristol’s Green administration demonstrates this perfectly: on 8th July 2024, when three members of the public presented gender-critical views during a full council meeting, 18 out of 27 Green councillors walked out of the chamber – three separate times, once for each speaker. They held up handwritten placards and performed theatrical displays whilst actual constituents tried to address their elected representatives.

Former Lord Mayor Paula O’Rourke resigned over the incident, stating: “Walking out is a refusal of democratic duty. Holding placards in the face of members of the public is intimidating.”

That’s what symbolic gesturing over actual governance looks like in practice. Decision-making is paralysed not by complex policy challenges, but by fear of causing offence to internal factions who view any disagreement as an attack on their existence.

The Housing Catastrophe: When Promises Meet Power.

MAY 2024: Cllr Barry Parsons, Chair of Homes and Housing: “To meet Bristol’s vast housing need we need to build 1,000 affordable, carbon neutral, biodiversity-positive homes every year.”

JANUARY 2025: Same councillor announces plans to sell 1,222 council homes and cancel 135 new builds, losing £300,000 in sunk costs.

Want to see what happens when the disparate and desperate get actual power? That’s it. Eight months from promise to betrayal.

The Green administration published plans to sell 1,222 council homes in what Labour accurately called a “fire sale.” Not to social housing providers. To the highest bidder. George Ferguson faced protests trying to sell 40 council homes. The Greens are flogging off 30 times that number.

They also pulled out of contracted schemes at New Fosseway and Dovercourt Road. The housing revenue account faces an £8 million shortfall because older properties need expensive maintenance, and the Greens inherited a backlog of repairs.

So the party that campaigned on building council homes is instead selling existing stock whilst cancelling new builds.

22,000 families on Bristol’s social housing waiting list 1,222 council homes being sold 1,000 homes promised annually 135 new builds cancelled.

Over 22,000 families are waiting. The Greens’ solution? Sell off the housing stock and hope for the best. Because nothing says “environmental justice” quite like a fire sale of public assets.

The Transport Debacle: Democracy Optional.

The East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme is a masterclass in Green governance.

69% don’t support the scheme 77% opposition in Barton Hill 760 objected vs 427 supported in consultation Council pushed ahead anyway

When the initial consultation closed, opposition was clear. The council’s response? Traffic restrictions were “necessary to support transport objectives.” Translation: we don’t care what you think, we know better.

The scheme launched in October 2024. Since then, traffic congestion worsened, journey times increased, disabled residents report being trapped in their homes, shift workers can’t get to work on time, and emergency services face blocked routes.

Samira Musse, who runs Barton Hill Activity Club, says the scheme “has discrimination and inequality written all over it.” The council needed police and private security arriving in the middle of the night to install planters because protesters had physically blocked the work during the day.

Think about that. A Green administration using police at 3 am to force through an environmental scheme that actual residents – many in one of Bristol’s most deprived wards – are physically trying to stop.

But some Beaufort Road residents love it because they no longer have rat-running traffic. Classic Green politics: benefit the middle-class residents with flexible jobs and cargo bikes, whilst screwing over working-class people who need cars to survive.

The Greens’ response to 69% opposition? They’ll “analyse the evidence after six months” and “engage with the public again.” Translation: we’re doing it anyway, and we’ll keep consulting until you give us the answer we want.

The Faux Trans Problem.

This is where people stop reading and start composing furious emails. So let me be clear: I’ve worked with transsexual people in my former industry. A good 60 to 70 per cent were real, proper transsexual individuals.

They didn’t rock up with three days of facial growth and a badly-fitted wig. Most had been through years of psychiatric assessment, hormone treatment, and many were post-operative. They lived the experience every day. They wanted to pass, to integrate, to get on with their lives.

Just yesterday in Bristol, I saw some poor bloke in his late fifties, masculine-looking with broad shoulders, whose wig was sitting on his head like a dead cat someone had flung at him.

These are what I call faux trans people – f-a-u-x. Some guy who turns up looking entirely male – broad shoulders, masculine face, three days of stubble – throws on a skirt and a wig that’s sitting crooked, and expects everyone to pretend this constitutes a genuine presentation. Who makes absolutely minimal effort to present convincingly as the gender they claim to be.

It’s a kick in the teeth to real transsexual people. The ones who had hormone injections and endless psychiatric meetings and saved for years for surgery. They’ve done the graft. Not just because wearing a dress seemed like a fun way to get attention.

The Green Party appears desperate for members and terrified of being called transphobic, so they’ve removed all gatekeeping, all distinction between genuine dysphoria and what might be fetish, mental health crisis, or political posturing. Anyone can self-identify, and questioning anyone becomes heresy.

This reflects a broader pattern where personal validation takes precedence over practical governance. Meanwhile, actual trans people get tarred with the same brush as the badly-wigged blokes in crop tops who decided being trans looked like a fun political identity.

Nobody in the Green Party has the bollocks to say it.

The Pattern: UKIP Redux.

The cannibalisation is inevitable because the factions’ needs are mutually exclusive. The housing activist wanting council homes conflicts with the middle-class green opposing development. The cyclist wanting car restrictions conflicts with the disabled resident needing vehicle access. The identity politics activist conflicts with the working-class voter who just wants functioning services.

UKIP cannibalised itself over nationalism versus libertarianism, racism versus respectability. The Greens are following the same path over identity validation versus practical environmentalism, pronouns versus potholes, and symbolic politics versus actual governance.

Bristol’s showing us the preview. Labour’s Zoë Peat accurately noted the Greens tried to sell council homes in “behind-closed-doors meetings – making a mockery of the transparency their administration was meant to bring.”

These aren’t bugs. They’re features of a coalition held together by shared grievances rather than any practical philosophy of governance.

What Happens Next.

Here’s what happens: they continue. They’ll keep selling homes whilst promising to build them. They’ll keep forcing through traffic schemes whilst claiming to listen to residents. They’ll keep walking out of meetings and holding placards whilst basic services collapse.

Because that’s what the disparate and desperate do when they gain power. They can’t govern coherently because they were never a coherent movement. They were a collection of political refugees united only by what they opposed, not by what they could actually build.

The housing waiting list will grow. The traffic schemes will spread. The council meetings will continue to be dominated by performative walkouts and placards. And the actual residents – the ones who just want their streets repaired, their housing applications processed, their council to function – will keep waiting.

Whilst councillors validate each other’s feelings and hold up handwritten signs.

UKIP took a decade to fully implode. The Greens might be faster because they’re imploding whilst actually in power, where the contradictions can’t be hidden behind opposition rhetoric.

Watch Bristol. This is the future the Greens are building everywhere they gain power. The same pattern will play out in every council they control: big promises, bigger contradictions, complete inability to choose between competing factions, eventual collapse.

The tragedy is that by the time they’re done, they’ll have damaged both the Green movement and local government itself. They’ll have proven that identity politics can’t run a city when it takes precedence over actual service delivery. That symbolic gestures can’t replace actual governance. That being the opposition is easy, but being the government requires making choices that will disappoint people.

And the disparate and desperate can’t disappoint anyone, because their entire political identity is built on finally, finally, being validated.

Your bins still won’t get collected. Your potholes still won’t get filled. Your housing application still won’t get processed. But at least everyone walked out in solidarity, held up their placards, and felt morally superior whilst your street flooded because the drains haven’t been cleared in two years.

22,000 families. 1,222 homes sold. 69% opposition ignored. 18 councillors walked out. That’s not governance.

That’s what happens when political homelessness becomes political power, when the desperate discover they can walk out rather than face uncomfortable truths, when holding a placard becomes easier than making a decision, when validating feelings becomes more important than collecting bins.

That’s what happens when the bins don’t care about your pronouns, the potholes don’t care about your identity, and the council has stopped caring about either.