The EAST BRISTOL LIVING NIGHTMARE
- keepbristolmoving
- Jun 11
- 2 min read
Manipulative language, fanatical supporters, and what it's doing to mental health
Jun 09, 2025
The sticker pictured above speaks volumes.
Firstly, it has been placed just outside the café where concerned people who live in the EBLN area meet to share their very real anxieties and work out together what they can do to stop the scheme. This couldn’t be a bit of trolling, could it?
Secondly, look at the very simple phrasing and design. ‘LIVEABLE FUTURE’: the reader is clearly meant to accept the psychological nudge into thinking that the PRESENT is ‘unliveable’ and something needs to be done about it. That something, for the creator and applier of the sticker, is then clearly the EBLN, which is now being personified into something towards which one can express love, with a wee heart to show one’s affection. Doh! It reminds me of how many suddenly fell in love with those cold hard institutions of power of the EU and the UK government in 2016.
I have so many questions…
What is this expression of love really about? Is it actually love?
Are there really people out there who have been moved to create, print out and apply stickers expressing their devotion towards a system of roadblocks and surveillance cameras designed to make getting about our daily lives in our own streets more difficult, and be fined £70 for each non-compliance?
Do they love ‘parklets’ and square planters, gaudily and childishly painted streets and pavements, unfriendly ‘ROAD CLOSED’ and no entry signs?
Is this what makes them get up in the morning feeling like the world is now a better, happier, healthier, safer, more liveable place?
Do they honestly believe that the only way they can come together and meet their neighbours outdoors is by the council spending public funds on installing an LTN?
Is their love for and sense of identity with this particular top-down government policy implementation really so great that they feel justified in blindly ignoring (or even taking offence at) the many people who express their frustration at the huge disruption it is causing their lives?
Because this sticker does indeed imply a deep personal identification with such a policy, just as we were all manipulated into identifying with the binary choice of either Brexit or the EU. The attitude of the people who are apparently in love with the planters and cameras and fines appears to verge on the fanatical.
Behind any case at all of wanting to force through drastic and unwanted change to other people’s lives, refusing to listen to their concerns and distress, and gaslighting them around the level of ‘engagement’ that has taken place in order to legitimise the changes, will lie an ideological agenda. It becomes all the more obvious when blatant astroturfing is at play, making it look like there is as much consent for the measures as rejection of them, and deliberately stoking the very polarisation Ed Plowden is allegedly so concerned about. For full article and to see the video (timestamp 30:00) - click here
