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News and Comment February 2021

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2 February (Part 1) - A sheltered life

Councillor John Davey was my Councillor In Lesnes Abbey before Bonkers started. I voted for him but we did not get on very well. The parking arrangements in Abbey Road were changed, lines were painted and drivers ticketed before the Traffic Order was published. Bexley Council answered my question by saying that it wasn’t practical to paint the lines on the day an Order was published and if the lines were painted afterwards they would lose PCN revenue. Instead they preferred to break the law. Councillor Davey wouldn’t talk to me about it.

When Abbey Road was narrowed and I argued that it would be dangerous he became what might be described as ‘shifty’. Eventually I joined the late Brian Barnett in being added to the list of residents to be ignored. What I didn’t know at the time because I was not a student of Council politics is that John was Vice Chairman of the Transport Committee while Councillor Craske was Cabinet Member for Road Wrecking.

Councillor Davey was caught between a rock and a hard place but to his credit he described one of Bexley’s road schemes as Bonkers, hence the name of this website.

It took some years for relations to thaw. I was occasionally a bit rude about John’s performance at Council meetings but when our paths crossed in 2014 he shook me by the hand and was as friendly as anyone could expect. A bit different to the only time I ever met Craske in public. He said he had never seen me before and had no idea who I was. A man who obscenely blogged about me and had his collar felt for it had no idea who I was after attending every Council meeting over several years.

I doubt he noticed but John Davey was not reported unfavourably again and when he handed me a Brexit leaflet while standing outside the Abbey Arms he became one the good guys, well better guys at least.

Twitter gamesJohn can be witty on Twitter and last Sunday we batted a certain ball back and forth between ourselves. The exchange pictured here was addressed to newcomer @tonyofsidcup and John responded to it by saying he had never met anyone in Bexley Council who was either dishonest or corrupt.

Presumably he never saw the letter which called the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and Bexley Council together to see how they could come to an arrangement that might get an arrested Councillor off the hook.

Maybe he has forgotten the Abbey Road incident in which I was told in writing that it was to be reconstructed entirely in accordance with Transport Research Laboratory guidance and I brought the author of that guidance to the site and he said that no effort whatsoever had been made towards implementing the guidance. “Your Council has not even tried”, he said.

Bexley Council responded by promoting the man who lied to me.

A weekly series of blogs to convince John Davey that he had led too sheltered a Council life looked like being fun. Examples of Bexley Council dishonesty are almost unlimited but I have decided against it. John may not yet have entirely lived down his bonkers comment which led to this website’s creation and I wouldn’t like him to carry the can for me raking up the past again.

I can do that on my own initiative now and again when news runs short.

Note: One of the link backs above is to the 2014 to 2019 period which is for the most part off line. For that reason it may not display entirely correctly and the link backs within such blogs for the most part do not work.

 

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