The Council That Hates Solutions: A #Bristol Masterclass in Screwing Up Everything They Touch.
How Bristol City Council's Green Party administration demolished community trust along with youth centres.
You know what’s remarkable about our Bristol politicians? Their ability to identify a problem, understand the solution, and then do the exact opposite with complete confidence. It’s like watching someone realise their house is on fire and responding by dousing it in petrol.
Bristol City Council’s Green Party administration has perfected this art form. And when they’re not busy walking out of council meetings like toddlers who’ve been told they can’t have ice cream for breakfast, they’re finding exciting new ways to prove they have absolutely no business running anything more complex than a bath. You know, the hot tap is on the left, and the cold tap is on the right. Got it? Now, you have to turn the tap until the water comes out. Simple really. Or, at least you’d think so. What, you don’t know your left from your right? Okay, that answers everything where you Greens are concerned!
Eagle House: The Youth Centre Bristol’s Green Party Promised Then Demolished.
Let’s start with Eagle House in Knowle West.
This used to be a youth club. You know, one of those places where kids could go to not stab each other. One of those radical concepts like “give young people somewhere to be so they don’t kill each other in the street.” Revolutionary stuff. For the past decade, it’s been rented to an evangelical church. Fine. Whatever. Churches need buildings. But here’s where it gets beautiful—and by beautiful, I mean the kind of beautiful you see in a car crash in slow motion:
During last year’s local elections, Green Party candidates looked the good people of Knowle West right in their hopeful, trusting faces and promised—hand on heart—that they’d reopen Eagle House as a youth centre.
You know where Eagle House is?
Right near the spot where teenagers Max Dixon and Mason Rist were murdered in a stabbing in January 2024.
Not “got in a fight.” Not “had an accident.” Murdered. Stabbed to death. Kids. Teenagers who should have been worrying about exams and whether that girl from geography fancied them. Instead, they’re dead. In the street. In a community that watched its children bleed out on the pavement.
So you’ve got a community that just watched two of its kids get killed. You’ve got a building that used to keep kids off those same streets. You’ve got a political party that campaigned on being different, on listening, on giving a stuff about communities like Knowle West. A party that looked at those grieving parents and neighbours and said, “We promise. We’ll bring back the youth centre.”
According to the Bristol Post, guess what Bristol City Council is doing?
They’re going to knock it down.
Tony Dyer’s Logic: Demolishing Youth Centres to Prevent Antisocial Behaviour.
I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. Council leader Tony Dyer—that’s Councillor Tony Dyer, Green Party, champion of communities—says they’re demolishing Eagle House because empty buildings attract antisocial behaviour.
Let that marinate in your brain for a second.
They’re demolishing a former youth centre—a building specifically designed to prevent antisocial behaviour—because empty buildings attract antisocial behaviour.
You know what else attracts antisocial behaviour? Not having anywhere for young people to go. You know what tends to reduce teenagers stabbing each other? Youth centres. Community spaces. Places where kids can play football and hang out and be kids instead of joining gangs or getting stabbed by gangs or whatever happens when you remove every single support structure and then act surprised when things go to shit.
This is like a fire brigade saying, “You know, we’re really worried about fires, so we’re getting rid of all the fire extinguishers. Can’t have a fire extinguisher malfunction if there are no fire extinguishers!” And then, when the building burns down, standing in the ashes going, “Well, we did warn you about the fire risk.”
The logic is so backwards it’s making my brain hurt. It’s making my spine hurt. I can feel this stupidity in my bones like arthritis.
Bristol City Council’s Budget: No Money for Youth Centres, Plenty for Bureaucracy.
But wait—it gets better. Because there’s pushback, right? Labour councillor Lisa Durston points out that Filwood residents have been “pretty clear” they want the building saved. She notes—and get this—that refurbishing Eagle House would cost less than half a percent of the council’s current underspend.
Read that again. Underspend. Money they have. Money they’re not spending. Money that’s just sitting there. Half a percent of it would save this building and keep the promise they made to a community that just buried two children.
Half. A. Percent.
That’s not even a rounding error. That’s the kind of money that falls down the back of the sofa in the council offices. That’s nothing.
They have the money. The community wants it. They promised it. Two kids died in the kind of violence that youth centres are specifically designed to prevent.
Bristol Post commenters can connect these dots. User ‘Bristolrturkn’ remembers when Eagle House was “a great youth club back in the day with a really good football team.” Dirtystreets23 points out that “the demise of boys clubs and youth clubs have led to more youngsters getting involved in antisocial behaviour, this all started happening about 40 years ago.”
Even the public can figure this out. Even people reading the news while taking a shit can understand cause and effect better than Bristol City Council.
And Dyer’s response? He’s “open to exploring options” but warns that renovation costs might be higher than Labour’s estimate. He needs to “decide what’s best long-term for the area—and that may not simply be leaving the building there until we can find the funds.”
Translation: “We made you a promise during the election when we needed your vote, but now that we’ve got what we wanted, we’ve decided the best long-term solution for your community is a pile of rubble and your ongoing disappointment. But we’re thinking about it really hard, so that’s basically the same as actually doing something, right?”
Bristol City Council’s Parks Licensing Scheme: Charging People to Use Public Parks.
Now here’s where it gets truly magnificent. Because you might be thinking, “Well, times are hard. Councils are broke. Maybe they genuinely can’t afford half a percent of their underspend.”
Let me tell you what Bristol City Council can afford.
They can afford to create an entire new licensing bureaucracy to shake down dog walkers and personal trainers for using public parks.
No, really. I’m not making this up. You couldn’t make this up. Reality has lapped satire so many times it’s causing a traffic jam.
The £450 Licensing Fee for Dog Walkers and Personal Trainers.
Bristol City Council has discovered—and I need you to sit down for this revelation—that people are using public spaces. Professional dog walkers are walking dogs. Personal trainers are training people to do exercises. In parks. Public parks. Parks that these people have already paid for with their council tax. Parks that exist specifically for public use.
And the council—these financial wizards who can’t find half a percent of their underspend to save a youth centre—have decided this is a crisis that demands immediate action.
Specifically, a £450 licensing fee.
Let me paint you a picture of what this means: You pay council tax. That tax pays for the parks. It pays for the grass to be cut, the paths to be maintained, the dog shit bins to be emptied, the whole infrastructure. You’ve already paid for these parks. They’re yours. Public. That’s what the word means.
And now, if you want to hire someone to help you exercise in the park you’ve already paid for, or if you need someone to walk your dog in the park you’ve already paid for, that person—who is providing a service, who is trying to run a small business, who is probably barely scraping by—needs to pay Bristol City Council £450 for the privilege of using public space that everyone has already paid for.
It’s like going to a restaurant, paying for your meal, and then the waiter charges you an additional fee for the privilege of chewing the food. It’s like buying a car and then being charged a “driving licence” by the car manufacturer.
And here’s a delicious irony: The Downs—one of Bristol’s most iconic parks where many of these activities take place—isn’t even fully owned by Bristol City Council. The Downs have been jointly owned by the City of Bristol and the Society of Merchant Venturers since 1861, when the landowners combined their land to create a public space under a special Act of Parliament. An appointed Downs Committee, composed of representatives from both the City Council and the Society of Merchant Venturers, manages the upkeep and maintenance of the area.
So when the council talks about charging people £450 to use “their” parks, they’re being rather liberal with the definition of “their.” But that won’t stop them trying to extract money from dog walkers and personal trainers using land the council only half-owns and which was specifically created as public space by Act of Parliament over 160 years ago.
You couldn’t write this stuff.
From Cigarette Butt Fines to Park Licensing: Bristol’s Revenue Extraction Playbook.
And here’s the thing—Bristol City Council has form for this rubbish.
You remember the fag butt police, don’t you? The enforcement officers who’d lurk around Bristol’s streets waiting to pounce on anyone who dropped a cigarette end? That was supposedly about keeping the streets clean, about environmental responsibility, about civic pride.
Bollocks.
It was a revenue stream. Pure and simple. Fine people for dropping cigarette butts, use the money to pay for... well, more enforcement officers to fine more people for dropping cigarette butts. A beautiful, self-perpetuating cycle of extraction that had sod all to do with actually keeping the streets clean—because anyone who’s walked through Bristol knows the streets were still filthy.
But now that gravy train has dried up. Either they’ve run out of smokers to fine, or people have wised up and started carrying portable ashtrays, or the whole operation just became too nakedly obvious as the money-grab it always was.
So what does Bristol City Council do? Do they reflect on whether treating the public as a revenue source might be fundamentally wrong? Do they consider that perhaps their job is to serve the community rather than extract money from it?
Of course not.
They just find a new target.
Dog walkers. Personal trainers. People actually using public spaces for healthy, legitimate activities. People providing services that help others stay fit, help elderly residents care for their pets, help the community function.
The mentality is exactly the same: Find people doing something innocuous in public space, create a bureaucratic framework to regulate it, then charge them for the privilege. It doesn’t matter if it raises insignificant revenue. It doesn’t matter if it harms small businesses. It doesn’t matter if it’s fundamentally unjust to charge people twice for the same public resource. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t fully own the land you’re charging people to use.
What matters is that someone, somewhere, is doing something without paying the council for permission. And that simply will not stand.
You can almost see the thought process: “We can’t afford to save a youth centre where two teenagers were murdered. But we can afford to hire enforcement officers to patrol parks checking if dog walkers have paid their £450 licence fee. That makes perfect sense.”
This is the same council that claims poverty when asked to spend half a percent of their underspend on community facilities. The same council that can’t find the funds to keep an election promise to a grieving neighbourhood. But somehow, mysteriously, they’ve got the resources to build an entirely new licensing scheme, complete with application processes, enforcement mechanisms, and appeals procedures.
Because—and let’s be crystal clear about this—it’s not about the money they’ll raise. Mark Weston was right when he pointed out the sums will be “insignificant in relation to the budget.” This is about control. This is about bureaucrats seeing something happening without their permission and needing to regulate it, to license it, to get their fingers in the pie.
It’s compulsive. Pathological. Like a dog that can’t help but bark at passing cars.
Stephen Williams and the Parks Licensing Controversy.
The parks licensing scheme was announced by Bristol City Council in September 2024. There was immediate backlash—because even in Bristol, people can recognise when they’re being robbed in broad daylight. Even Green councillors said the fees were “inappropriate” and could harm small businesses. So they paused it.
But—and this is important—they didn’t cancel it. They’re not abandoning this brilliant plan. They’re just “analysing the information” so they can come back with a “better scheme.”
Which is government-speak for “we’re going to do it anyway, we just need to workshop the PR so you don’t riot.”
Liberal Democrat Councillor Stephen Williams is chairing this masterpiece of bureaucratic overreach. Yes, that Stephen Williams. The failed MP Stephen Williams. A man with so much political capital he can afford to piss off every dog walker, personal trainer, and small business owner in Bristol.
Williams told the Bristol Post that they need to license these activities because they “don’t really know the full extent of what was taking place in our parks” and there’s “a lack of information about whether these firms are insured.”
Let me translate that: “We didn’t know people were using parks to walk dogs and exercise until very recently, despite this being the primary purpose of parks since Queen Victoria was on the throne. And rather than simply requiring proof of insurance—you know, a single piece of paper, a document, something any legitimate business already has—we’ve decided to charge £450 and create an entire licensing bureaucracy.”
The Bristol Post also noted that The Downs will have different fees for licences—which is particularly rich given that the council doesn’t even have sole ownership of The Downs to begin with.
Conservative Councillor Mark Weston pointed out that “the sums raised will be insignificant in relation to the budget.”
He literally asked: “Is the pain worth it?”
And that’s the question, isn’t it? Is harassing small businesses and making life harder for working people worth the pittance this scheme will raise?
But here’s the thing Mark doesn’t quite grasp: It’s not about the money. Not really. It’s about finding new ways to justify the bureaucracy’s existence. When the cigarette butt fines dried up, they needed something else. Something to keep the machinery running. Someone to regulate. Someone to charge.
And if dog walkers and personal trainers get caught in the gears? Well, that’s just the price of good governance, isn’t it?
Bristol Green Party’s Governing Record: Promises vs Reality.
So let’s review what we’ve learned about Bristol City Council’s governing philosophy under Green Party leadership:
Problem: Two teenagers were murdered in Knowle West. Community is traumatised. Kids need safe spaces.
Green Party Solution: Demolish the youth centre we promised to reopen because half a percent of our underspend is too expensive.
Problem: People are using public parks for their intended purpose.
Green Party Solution: Create an expensive licensing scheme to charge them for it, even though it’ll raise insignificant money and harm small businesses. Bonus points for charging people to use parks the council only half-owns.
Problem: The cigarette butt fine revenue has dried up.
Green Party Solution: Find new people to extract money from. Dog walkers and personal trainers will do nicely.
Problem: Residents are asking uncomfortable questions at council meetings.
Green Party Solution: Walk out like petulant children.
This is what happens when you give power to people who are very good at complaining about how things are run but have absolutely no clue how to actually run things.
The Green Party’s Opposition Years vs Their Time in Power.
The Green Party spent years in opposition being brilliant at pointing out problems. “Not enough youth centres!” “Council should support small businesses!” “Listen to local communities!” “Stop treating the public as a cash cow!” They were the conscience of Bristol politics. The ones asking the hard questions. The ones holding power to account.
But it turns out identifying problems and solving problems are two completely different skill sets. It’s like being an excellent food critic but a shit chef. You can tell me everything wrong with this dish, describe in eloquent detail why it’s under seasoned and overcooked, write a devastating review that ruins the restaurant—but can you actually cook a better meal? Can you run a kitchen?
Apparently not.
Because they’re not just failing—they’re failing at the exact things they campaigned on. They ran on being more responsive to communities—and now they’re telling Knowle West to go screw itself while their youth centre gets demolished. They ran on supporting local businesses and the little guy—and now they’re inventing new fees to bleed those businesses dry. They ran on being different from Labour and the Tories—and now they’re using the same “we don’t have the money” excuses while sitting on an underspend that could solve the problem. They criticised previous administrations for treating residents as revenue sources—and now they’re developing the next generation of extraction schemes.
The hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife. You could package it and sell it. You could spread it on toast.
Why Bristol’s Green Party Administration Is Failing.
And the truly beautiful part? These are the good guys. These aren’t cynical operators or corporate shills or career politicians who’ve had their souls removed with a melon baller. These are true believers. These are people who got into politics because they care about the environment and social justice and community values. They probably recycle. They probably buy fair trade coffee. They probably feel really, really bad about all of this.
But feeling bad doesn’t rebuild a youth centre. Good intentions don’t help the dog walker who’s being charged £450 to do their job. Caring deeply about injustice doesn’t mean bugger all when you’re the one creating it.
Here’s what really happened: The Green Party looked at Bristol and said, “We can do better than this.” And you know what? They were probably right. They probably could have done better. Bristol was a mess. The previous administrations had screwed up royally. There was room for improvement. Space for change.
And then they got elected.
And they did this.
They looked at a community begging them to keep a promise—a promise that would cost half a percent of money they’re not even spending—and said no. They looked at small businesses trying to make an honest living and decided to shake them down for fees that won’t even make a dent in the budget. They looked at residents with legitimate questions and walked out of the meeting rather than face them. They looked at the cigarette butt enforcement model and thought, “You know what? We should do more of that.”
This is governance as performance art. This is what happens when ideology meets reality and reality wins by knockout in the first round. This is the sound of principles colliding with competence and competence not even showing up to the fight.
The Future of Youth Services in Bristol.
You couldn’t make it up.
But you don’t have to.
Bristol’s Green Party is doing it for you, one demolished youth centre and one harassed dog walker at a time.
And somewhere in Knowle West, in the shadow of where Max Dixon and Mason Rist died, Eagle House sits empty—waiting to be knocked down by a council that promised to save it, led by people who walked out rather than answer for it, governed by a party that can’t find half a percent for dead children but can create an entire bureaucracy to charge you for using a park they only half-own.
That’s your Green administration, Bristol.
How’s that idealism working out for you?
Sources:
Bristol Post: “Council under fire for ignoring ‘local needs’ with youth club demolition plan”
Bristol Post: “Dog walkers and personal trainers will be charged to use Bristol’s parks - and public will have no say”