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News and Comment June 2013

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7 June (Part 2) - Hypocrisy and irony

News Shopper headlineBexley council seems incapable of getting on with its neighbours in Greenwich or for that matter its residents.

The former first became obvious to me two years ago when councillor Peter Craske said that a Greenwich councillor had blocked his County Gate proposals for his own selfish and personal reasons. He made the front page of the News Shopper but his complaint later proved to be groundless.

Since then they have fallen out with Greenwich over the Thames crossing proposals and ridiculed their supposed high parking charges when the truth was that all Greenwich shopping centres were cheaper for parking than Bexley’s. Craske is involved with both issues.

More recently Greenwich put in speed humps near Glenmore Road (which is in Bexley) and mistakenly strayed over the boundary. Instead of reaching an amicable agreement with Greenwich council, Bexley upset their own residents by insisting Greenwich rip the offending humps away.

Now Bexley Conservatives are using their website to highlight another spat with Greenwich. Greenwich council wants to introduce a Controlled Parking Zone around Avery Hill near Falconwood station which is very close to the Bexley boundary. Bexley claims, perhaps with justification, that it will displace parking into Bexley and they have organised one of their petitions. (It’s a pity they don’t accept residents’ petitions.)

The solution, some might say, is for Bexley council to put a CPZ on its side of the border but that isn’t possible because Bexley has a policy of no more new CPZs. They may have realised that charging three times as much as the previous Labour administration to park outside your own home is not a vote winner.

Bexley council’s preferred solution to the Falconwood conundrum is to invoke the same law to try to stop Greenwich council in its tracks that Greenwich used against Bexley two years ago and was labelled “disgraceful” for its pains by Peter Craske. Now he is one of the councillors behind the new campaign. Clearly Craske doesn’t do irony.

News Shopper commentWhat is needed is for reasonable people to sit down together and work these things out in a civilised fashion, but Bexley’s ‘swivel eyed loons’ regard everyone on Greenwich council as ‘loony left Trotskyists’. Instead of doing what is right for residents they would rather use their party website to score political points.

The reference to residents in the opening sentence is an allusion to a debate being played out on the News Shopper’s website. No one there likes Bexley council either, but I am a little concerned that ‘batey’ will soon find herself in the hands of the cops. Her remarks seemed just a little too close to ‘pitchforks and flaming torches’ to me. Maybe, as before, I will find myself threatened with arrest just for repeating it.

 

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