15 April (Part 2) - Political stooges reconvene in Bexley
I found myself getting very annoyed with what I heard at last Wednesday’s
Council meeting. It was bad enough to be reminded of the monstrosity opposite
the cinema as I drove into town; a carbuncle for which we have to thank
the
double voting planning Chair Councillor Clark but the meeting itself was
reminiscent of the worst days of her being Mayor.
The current Mayor was perhaps not beyond reproach but he did at least correctly remind Councillors they were in election
purdah and should refrain from political point scoring. Neither side paid heed and the Mayor fell back upon the excuse it is guidance and not a rule.
Basically it was a waste of his breath to mention it at all.
The first 30 minutes were devoted to questions with a maximum of 15 from Members of the Public - or as they are better known in Bexley, Pathetic Planted
Political Patsies. The first of them was the Conservative election candidate for Falconwood ward who wished to curry favour with Cabinet Member David Leaf and
see if he could provoke the usual problem Leaf has with verbal diarrhea. Not a
particularly high bar even for an amateur in a pin striped suit.
Andrew Curtois is Conservative candidate for Falconwood and happy to be associated with Bexley’s band of deceivers.
You may notice that this barely qualifies as a question and would not be
admissible from an ordinary member of the public.
Cabinet Member Leaf began the bragging session at four minutes and forty four
seconds into my recording and said he was “delighted” with Mr. Curtois’s question - as well he might be! It was probably his.
We learned nothing new while Leaf droned through his pre-prepared script and
actually “welcomed the opportunity to go through his budget once again”.
Again! Presumably you may assume that Mr Curtois, if elected, is going to be the sort of useless
Councillor who neither watches webcasts nor reads the minutes of meetings or even the budget itself.
For the benefit of our inattentive election candidate, there is to be more
investment in services, more spending on capital projects, the “outstanding children’s services” and recycling.
Including no less than six separate digressions into attacking the opposition
contrary to purdah rules Leaf rambled on for five minutes and 26
seconds. No one who had paid attention to previous Leaf speeches would have
learned anything at all so Andrew Curtois had wasted everyone’s time by asking Leaf to repeat it all.
The procedure is that members of the public may bowl a googly in the form of a
surprise secondary question. The Tory stooge lost no time in asking one. “Could
the Council say what action it was taking in response to cost of living
measures”, apart from raising fees, charges and Council Tax presumably.
Cabinet Member Leaf rummaged in his briefcase to read from the carefully
prepared script (see Photo 2). David Leaf, the Cabinet Member for Resources who
could not see the need for a Capitalisation Order coming but is able to precisely
anticipate a secondary question. A genius.
At 10:31 into the recording he began speaking. He reiterated the
benefits of the Council Tax reduction scheme but had forgotten that it was
this Conservative administration
that slashed it
ten years ago. He had distributed all
the Government pandemic support grants in an efficient manner to the few who qualified for it.
Even I would not accuse him of financing another party in the park!
Only three attacks on the opposition party this time but in better news he said the £150
government Council Tax rebate would be paid within days. By then eleven of the
15 minutes allocated to public questions had gone by, just enough time for
another Tory stooge to ask a question of the arse licking variety. “What are the Council’s achievements?”
The ample arse he had in mind was the Leader’s and everyone in Bexley must be anxious to know
the answer to that question but all we heard was that she had delivered her manifesto which is
manifestly untrue as numerous Freedom of Information requests have confirmed. We
also learned that Bexley residents had rescued the borough from some of the worst
consequences of Covid by volunteering for jobs, which is good, but maybe not the
sort of Council achievement most of us were waiting to hear.
There was also a claim that Bexley had
the best vaccination record “right the way
through” which is once again known to be disputed by several other boroughs. At
that point the Mayor interjected that questions had passed the 14 minute stage
so nothing much new was learned thereafter.
Apparently the Broadway area in Bexleyheath has
been “decluttered” but the provision of wi-fi services has been deferred to
2023. An official admission that not all the manifesto pledges were delivered -
but celebrate the fact that the Leader’s answer did not descend into purdah busting.
Basically a corrupt Council had squandered the little time available for
questions but neatly avoided the more thorough probing that would have come from
Dimitri Shvorob.