25 August - When black is white
A
couple of days ago Bexley’s Monitoring Officer revealed that Councillors could
accept any gift they liked if they considered it might be rude to refuse and
they made a suitable public declaration. I confessed to not seeing a lot wrong
with that. The public would police it and who cares if Councillor Hunt should be
presented with a free pass into Greggs or if the Leader is endorsed by Weight Watchers?
When the acting
Chairman of the Planning Committee voted twice to ensure the
Eastside Quarter blighted the centre of Bexleyheath there was no indication that
she was rewarded with a Penthouse;
that sort of thing only happens in Greenwich.
(Note: Not to be confused with regular Planning Chairman Councillor Peter Reader who
appears to be as straight as a die.)
Yesterday another pearl of wisdom from Bexley Council turned up. The Deputy
Director of Corporate Services effectively said that Councillors are free to lie
so long as they later claim they sincerely believed the lies to be true and felt their
actions were honest at the time the false claim was made. That one is not nearly as easy to accept.
The excuses come from Nick Hollier who once
threatened me with dire consequences
for using the word lie - just once - when complaining about a Council liar.
Maybe my bias is still showing but I believed Hollier to be an idiot which was
amply confirmed when the police referred the aforesaid liar to the Crown Prosecution
Service for the very lies I had tried to bring to his attention. Backing the Council against all
odds is his job and Hollier does it supremely well.
But enough of history, what caused him to once again defend the indefensible?
It is another Conservative Manifesto story in which they hilariously claimed to have fulfilled every Manifesto promise
since 2006, a boast which is a rich hunting ground for everyone who has been following their antics since then.
They may have got away with it, and in the sense that they fooled sufficient
electors in May, they did, but they got even more ambitious and the Leader repeated the claim on
the Conservative Home website.
I read it and dismissed it as yet another Tory lie
but that is because I have got to the stage when I accept Council lies as the norm.
Fortunately it tipped @tonyofsidcup over the edge and the still young and idealistic
Independent candidate for Sidcup is not yet ready to
accept that lying is what Councils do. He complained to the Code of Conduct
Committee that Councillor Teresa O’Neill knowingly lied on Conservative Home.
Backed by his own research he complained that not all Bexley schools were rated
Good or Outstanding by OFSTED. With an FOI answer behind him he also complained that
Bexley Council had not provided wi-fi hotspots or master-minded
the roll out of superfast broadband.
There had been no audit of children’s playground equipment and the Council had
not planted more than 1,000 trees between 2018 and 2020. Of the two
extra hectares of new green space, where is it?
Hollier’s
defence of this string of failures does not deny them all, which to my mind must be an acceptance that
the 2022 Manifesto and
the Conservative Home webpage were indeed based on blatant lies.
About schools he falls back on the excuse made previously, that the Council was
referring only to maintained schools and not mentioning most, being Academies, were excluded was not
a deception. (One maintained school did not reach the claimed standard until two months
after Teresa O’Neill’s Manifesto reached me.)
It is said that Ontix Limited
is now providing wi-fi in Bexleyheath, Erith, Sidcup and Welling and that a
“ring” of fibre for businesses is to be tendered in the “near future”. (But wasn’t when the claim was made.)
The 2018 Manifesto pledges more than a 1,000 new trees by 2020. Two years. Mr. Hollier
says that 1,058 trees were provided in the four or five years 2017 to 2021 but
fails to mention that 100 of them were provided by Network Rail in the vicinity
of Abbey Wood station and Harrow Manorway.
It is accepted that the extra two hectares of green space is currently cloud
cuckoo land. If it ever happens it will require a planning application and consent.
So let’s be generous, the wi-fi and superfast broadband has been encouraged by
Bexley Council and they will not stand in its way
as they did in Welling several
years ago. But it is far from being a Council initiative or achievement.
The schools boast was a straightforward deception. The majority of schools
were excluded and even then one school was late getting a Good.
It is accepted that the Playground survey did not take place.
Mr Hollier makes no attempt to defend the failure over street trees. He accepts
they took five-ish years to do what was promised in two and that the green space claim is simply not true.
So Leader Teresa O’Neill is guilty of stretching a point or two to the point of
untruthfulness and Mr. Hollier risks his career by admitting it?
Of course not. The Leader has done nothing wrong,
The reply may be read in full here.
Note: The photo of James enjoying something that might kill me (**) is used, in a manner of speaking, with his permission
and I happen to know that he paid for it himself. it came from the Gourmet
Sausage Man who can be found at most of the CCEvents markets. When I used
the photo once before James sent me a message to say how much he liked it. The photo not the roll. I told you he was a good sport didn’t I?
** Cheese used to be the only foodstuff that disagreed with me, always has done
since childhood and then the dreaded coeliac disease came and got me. A
hereditary condition. I have to cross the road to pass a branch of Greggs.