29 August - Can civil unrest be far away?

While you stand shell shocked at the prospect of energy bills rising by another 80% in just a month’s time take a look at this quotation issued by Octopus Energy to a public house this week. More than a pound a unit plus 20% (not 5%) VAT and the Climate Change Levy.

When the 80% increase kicks in businesses will have to pay well over £2 for a unit of electricity. I remember my Dad complaining that the price had gone up to a penny halfpenny (not much more than half a penny in decimal currency) in the late 1950s after the forecast was that the coming of nuclear power would reduce the price to almost nothing.

Inflation over those years has increased prices by sixteen times so assuming my memory is correct, and the government website suggests it is, one kilowatt of electricity should now cost less than ten pence.

One would have thought that more efficient generation would have reduced prices but the idiotic decisions of the past fifty years have put paid to that. Nuclear on the decline, no coal and massive subsidies to renewables plus VAT.

Why could no one in government see that coming? But it could be worse, at least we are not Germany who put all its eggs in Putin’s basket.

With the radio on all the time I have heard many reports of pensioners in particular talking of “heat or eat” and of course the media lap up such scare stories. Most of my friends are retired and I have spoken to some who are getting to be a little worried about the projected £3,549 energy cap. But some appear to have forgotten that is an average dependent on consumption. A single person living alone in a small house will be unlikely to reach that level.

My supplier consistently estimates my consumption to be around twice what it actually is but even their dubious estimates put me under the £3,549 level. I am currently paying around £60 a month (£1·79 yesterday for gas and electricity including standing charges) and that will go up by 80% in October. £108. Even if the Winter consumption doubles between November and March the annual charge will be ‘only’ £1,800.

To offset that the Government will give pensioners their Winter Fuel Allowance which is said to have increased to £300 per household and this year every household will get a £400 rebate delivered via their bills.

But the prices will go up again in January. And in April.

Things are clearly not good but the elderly should perhaps not get totally despondent as economies may be possible. One of my friends called yesterday to ask what he could do to reduce his bill. I learned that he keeps his immersion heater running for at least seven hours a day with the thermostat set at a scalding 70°C.

What is the point of heating the water to such a temperature and mix in cold to make it usable? Try 55°C and an hour and a half was my suggestion. The heat losses from the tank must be enormous. Always remember that heat losses are directly proportional to the temperature difference. Those who claim it costs less to keep the central heating on all day than allow overnight cooling and switch it on again in the morning should get a job Tweeting for @bexleynews. They are talking total rot. (†)

In all probability the new Prime Minister will rapidly address the situation and get our grandchildren to pay for it.

† My A level physics practical examination required me to construct an experiment to prove that assertion and I scored 93% overall. A lesson I have never forgotten.

 

28 August (Part 2) - Bexley Council. Built on lies

I suppose once caught out lying, the sort of politician we elect in this country will simply lie some more. Isn’t that what got Boris Johnson into big trouble?

Only a few days ago Bexley’s Deputy Director of Corporate Services admitted that several 2018 Manifesto promises are yet to be fulfilled. A couple may be in future but several have passed the cut off date and are irretrievable failures.

He excuses the lies and deceptions by saying they may have been sincerely held views at the time. What sort of Leadership has such a tenuous grasp on reality?

Bexley’s. Obviously.

 

28 August (Part 1) - Now wriggle out of that one!

On Thursday it was a pretty safe assumption that @tonyofsidcup would not take Nick Hollier’s whitewashing of the Conservative’s untruthful Manifesto claim (every pledge fulfilled since 2006) lying down. Leader Teresa O’Neill had repeated it under her own name on the Conservative Home website thereby leaving her open to a specific complaint.

Yesterday @tony posted his response on Twitter and has given permission for it to be repeated here.

I think it hits several nails squarely on the head and it is good to see that Bexley appears to have a worthy successor to Mick Barnbrook. I am waiting for Councillor Read to refuse to answer one of his questions on the grounds that @tony is Russian. (Belarus.)

Note: Read refused to answer one of Mick’s questions because he had once tried to change the direction of the British National Party by leading an opposition movement against its leader, for which he had to be a BNP member of course. A bit like Read being a member of the Conservative Party so that he can have a role in installing a new leader.

 

27 August - The sting in the tail

This short blog should have come to you yesterday but a couple of unwanted problems got in the way.

I had left some tools in the loft after I changed a ball valve up there at the beginning of the year. I opened the trap door and found the space above buzzing with wasps. Under a cloud of aerosol killer spray I retrieved the tools unscathed and shut the door.

Pest Control is one of those services dropped by Bexley Council many years ago so if anyone knows of a reliable expert in a white suit…

The tools were required because I decided it was time to give my gas boiler its annual check. It has been turned right off since March because it is more than 35 years old when pilot lights were a thing and it makes no sense to burn it through the summer when the solar panels take over water heating.

Spare parts are not easy to get hold of but mainly it only needs cleaning and mine being the only boiler in the cul-de-sac not maintained by British Gas it has been the only one never needing replacement. One neighbour is on his third gas boiler.

However my luck has run out and something has gone wrong with the burner. It looks like a carbon monoxide generator to me.

So if anyone knows a competent engineer who might have to fit a new unit into a tight space…

For the record, my Smart Meter said that fiddling with the boiler for at most a couple of minutes, cost 22 pence.

I know of two people who have Air Source Heat Pumps and very pleased with them. The latest ones seem to be quiet and more efficient than before but there is no point in having 300% efficiency if electricity costs four times as much as gas per kilowatt hour.

The only way around that is a battery filled on an overnight cheap tariff to run the ASHP during the day. That is a serious amount of money and I suspect I am too old to ever get the money back.

What should have been reported yesterday was the feedback from Thursday’s report on Manifesto lies. I was reminded of the fairly obvious. If the excuse for spinning lies is that the mistake was made honestly and sincerely is actually true then the Leader of Bexley Council is totally incompetent and far too gullible when it comes to reports from senior Council officers. I am expecting @tonyofsidcup to vigorously contest the whitewash.

I think I too prefer the original explanation whereby the Leader relies on her Directors to write lame excuses for lies. But that sort of loyalty comes at a price.

Depending on which of Bexley’s out of date web pages one consults, the value of the Chief Executive’s pay package went up from £220,205 to £236,535 this year (†) with similar increases right across the board. The Taxpayers’ Alliance put the figure at £244,972.

† Part of the difference comes about due to changes to the Employer’s National Insurance contribution.

 

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.

 

23 August - Anything goes

A couple of weeks ago Bexley’s two-timing former Mayor James Hunt perhaps ill-advisedly added his twopennyworth to a journalist’s implied criticism of Boris Johnson. (I had better say straight away that I refer only to James being Mayor for two years during the pandemic.)

A number of local commentators interpreted his comment as touting for freebies and him being open to bribes which - risking losing a few friends here - I regarded as some sort of idiocy.

I would not count myself as one of James’ close friends but I suspect I have spent far more time with him than his public critics. An hour or two at a time in a couple of cases.

The man is good company and loves to joke about pretty much everything especially about himself, junk food and Rishi Sunak being the best choice for PM. To be honest I don’t think you have to know him at all to guess that James was joking when he referred to donors paying for holidays. (See associated Tweet.)

Nevertheless he was on the receiving end of an official complaint. It acknowledged that James was joking but said his follow up comment showed that he misunderstood the Code of Conduct which states “The presumption should always be not to accept significant gifts or hospitality”.

At some cost to the Council Taxpayer the Monitoring Office has provided clarification. She adds a qualifying statement. “However, there may be times when such a refusal may be difficult if it is seen as rudeness in which case, you could accept it but must ensure it is publicly registered.”

I can sort of understand that but with rudeness impossible to define it appears to open up the possibility of all gifts to Councillors being acceptable so long as they are declared.

I doubt there is any way of closing that loophole, one might more simply allow all gifts so long as they were declared and let residents judge Councillors accordingly.

 

20 August - Manifesto promises. “We delivered every commitment since 2006”

@tonyofsidcup with his FOIs has done a pretty good job of demonstrating that Bexley Conservatives’ claim to have delivered on all their 2018 Manifesto promises was pure bunkum. The fact is that they failed to meet any of them.

One thousand trees were not planted in four years. It may have been 906 if you count those planted in the year before the pledge and add in those planted by Network Rail. The town centre wi-fi did not materialise and some schools continued to fall short of a Good or Outstanding OFSTED rating.

One might also ask what happened to the promised two hectares of new green space.

It is more difficult to check the rather far fetched claim that every promise since 2006 has been fulfilled (see below left) as I do not have a copy of the 2006 Manifesto but I have tracked down the one for 2010 and added it to the archive of Election leaflets.

In it Council Leader Teresa O’Neill is critical of Labour’s 40% Council Tax increase and then rather disingenuously basks in the glory of being able to use that windfall to keep the following years’ increases below the rate of inflation. “We will manage the situation calmly and continue to deliver high quality services at a price we can all afford.” Failed on both counts!

Cancelling the Thames crossing was seen as a boon for Bexley and not the drag on its economy and contrary to the wishes of local residents that proved to be the case.

The Conservatives planned to spend £7 million with Siemens on modernising the CCTV system and selling the monitoring service to neighbouring boroughs. That never happened and Bexley has failed to the extent it has not even got the resources to monitor itself. The promised Improved transport options in Bexleyheath proved to be illusory too. (Thanks to Crossrail at Abbey Wood we got the 301 bus, the first to run a reasonably direct route into Bexleyheath from the North of the borough. On the other hand some areas of Thamesmead lost their connection when the B11 was curtailed.)

There was a pledge in 2010 to improve the recycling rate to 55% but the best achieved during the following twelve years was 54·2%.

There was an unexplained implication (see below) that the Oaklands Car Park would somehow become free. On the contrary, 24/7 parking charges were introduced across the major town centre car parks.

The 2010 Manifesto has always been on BiB but for reasons unknown omitted from the menus and therefore effectively inaccessible.

 

19 August - Death by ice-cream

From time to time I am asked why I am so critical of Mayor Sadiq Khan but to my mind it is self-evident that he is an utterly useless politician and I despise everything he does and stands for.

It has been tempting to go further and suggest Khan is not just the worst the political classes has ever offered for election but among the worst of humanity; but then I remember Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Vladimir Putin. Khan doesn’t directly kill people but cannot be very concerned by those who do.

He clearly has given the subject no serious thought whatsoever.

His pronouncement on LBC Radio yesterday that the recent spate of murders in London is due to school children being on holiday and the Summer being a good one indicates a total inability to think beyond the next convenient sound bite.

Over the past four or five days under Khan’s watch there have been four brutal murders in London. Aziza Bennis was knifed more than 30 times in Acton and her 21 year old daughter has been charged with the murder. Sonny Booty was murdered in Lewisham and a 53 year old man has been charged. 60 year old Stephen Goodman was murdered in Dagenham and a 23 year old has been in Court.

In Greenford Thomas O’Halloran was murdered in his mobility scooter and a 44 year old man will appear at the Old Bailey next Tuesday.

But Khan is blaming school kids and in this hot weather a surfeit of ice-cream is well known to cause decent law-abiding citizens to pick up a knife and lash out in a frenzy of hatred.

Note: There were six murders in London this week but as yet two are unsolved with no one arrested.

 

13 August - From Russia with more love

When I first took an interest in Bexley Council more than a dozen years ago I never dreamed that the whole edifice might be built on lies. The man since promoted to be Bexley’s Head of Highways, Traffic and Infrastructure for his dubious achievements wrote to tell me in 2009 that my criticism of his road wrecking exercises were ill-informed because his schemes were fully supported by Transport Research Laboratory reports numbered 641 and 661. The idea was to firmly put me back in my box.

So I invited one of the report authors to Bexley for a really professional opinion and he said that Bexley had not even paid lip service to the TRL recommendations.

I once made a complaint about a Councillor and the official reply excused him. When I drew attention to the fact that I was supported by the minutes of a meeting the Councillor invented a different excuse. It was Councillor Craske, but you will have guessed that wouldn’t you?

I have pretty much given up on reporting every lying statement by Bexley Council; they may be less blatant than they used to be, most people are not interested in Council business until the bins are not emptied (oh dear!) and I have lost enthusiasm for it. Anno Domini and all that.

Fortunately I have a possible successor in the shape of May’s Independent candidate for Sidcup otherwise known as @tonyofsidcup. He has exposed a number of Bexley Tory lies and in particular the false claims made in the Conservatives May 2022 election Manifesto. Every promise made since 2006 fulfilled 100% and similar BS.

Last week he sent me a lengthy essay on the subject with an interesting introductory passage of him growing up in Russia in a family closely affiliated to the Communist Party.

Being the father of a young daughter, @tony has a particular interest in education and naturally critical of Bexley Tory’s claims for it. (All schools rated Good or better.)
When @tony first asked appropriate questions he didn’t get answers but later he was told that the claim only applied to schools that actually achieved a Good or Outstanding rating. The few Council “maintained” ones and not something mentioned in the Manifesto. To be pedantic even that was not achieved until after the Manifesto was circulated.

The excuse is no consolation to parents whose children go to the ‘wrong’ school. Wrong schools are 78% of the total.

@tony has dug deep into the OFSTED figures and among other things noted the inconsistency of OFSTED reports. Only 31% of pupils at Erith’s Parkway Primary School met the expected standard in reading, writing and maths. Just down the road the John Fisher Catholic Primary School has pushed that score up to 95% but both are said to be Good.

Whilst critical of Bexley’s false school accounting; @tony is not entirely negative, he concludes his three page PDF with a summary of what newly appointed Cabinet Member for Education, Richard Diment, might wish to look at. Only a third the number of Council run primary schools in Bexley compared to Greenwich and a third of them described as being in pretty bad shape by OFSTED despite their Good rating.

Twitter users will know that @tony is not very popular with Bexley Councillors. One can understand why but so far he has not been honoured with an interview by Bexley Council’s military wing or been maliciously prosecuted by them. Presumably if it happens his mother will be able to offer useful advice.

Those who didn’t read the PDF will not know what I am talking about.

 

12 August - Another service reduction by Countryslop

It’s only a month since I responded to a complaint from a resident that bin collection times had crept forward to 6 a.m. It used to be 06:45. Now it is 5 a.m.

I don’t know exactly when Countryslop visited my road today but it must have been very early. My bin wasn’t out in time but there isn’t enough in it to even fill a carrier bag.

The £55 garden waste bin is still festering after goodness knows how many weeks of no collections.

 

9 August - The internet and why is the extreme left so full of hate?

It’s amazing what you can read on the Internet and one way or another I have been playing with it for more than 40 years. Not as we know it now, I refer to the Post Office Prestel system which I browsed on my 1200 bit per second modem. That’s 1·2 kilobit, forget any thoughts of megabits, cloud cuckoo land in 1981. I can’t remember when I gave up on Prestel, but in the middle nineteen nineties I began to pay Demon Internet a tenner a month for a primitive internet connection. The basics were much the same as today but slower and largely static.

Memories fade but I think I remember modems improving from 9·6 kilobits per second through to 56 kilobits before ADSL broadband was introduced with a staggering half a megabit download speed; if you were lucky.

For reasons that are mainly forgotten I introduced several sceptical friends to the internet by signing them up myself. Somehow or other I finished up paying for four net connections in addition to my own, but it is reduced to only two now. It has gone on for so long that I suspect the users think it is just a free service that is there by magic, if they think about it at all.

One of the connections is used for posting what I regard as pretty extreme political material. It began with Brexit hatred and everyone not in love with the EU was a fascist and a Nazi which I found difficult to accept but bit my tongue. Now I find myself paying for a stream of extraordinary anti-Tory invective which must be verging on hate crime status.

The last straw for me is that it has recently escalated to a “campaign” to get all Conservative MPs to volunteer for Dignitas. The suggestion received a considerable amount of support among the hate mongers. There were volunteers ready to crowd fund the fees to get the job done. Carried away by their own death wish enthusiasm, the dregs of humanity wanted to see Conservative Party Members included in the cull and inevitably the scheme was then extended to all Tory voters. That’s me and I am paying for it!

Conservatives may well be self-serving, putting their mates before the general population etc. lying crooks but unmitigated hatred for everyone who doesn’t share their views appears to be thankfully absent from their scheming.

If Sadiq Khan tripped and fell under a double deck bus I would once I’d recovered from the shock remember that every cloud has a silver lining but I have never dreamed of crowd funding a shove in the right direction; but for the the rabid Left, the fringe elements anyway, such things are an all consuming perverted obsession.

It shouldn’t need saying but no local Labour elected politician would condone the proposed mass extermination although of course, two years ago, one of their activists endorsed something similar for Nigel Farage. Nigel by the way has also been nominated for Dignitas.

I have never been so appalled at what goes through the head of someone who I thought I knew reasonably well. The question is, should I pull his plug?

 

8 August (Part 3) - In Liz we must Truss

I am no longer a member of The Conservative Party and don’t often regret it. I came to the conclusion it was for the most part a Darby and Joan Club where the principal activity was inviting members to poor quality meals at extortionate prices. An allegory perhaps for the poor services and high taxes we now have to endure under the present Government.

As such I have no input to the Leadership election but it is interesting to observe which way friends and Councillors are swinging. I get the impression that Liz Truss is favoured by those prepared to go public but not all of them. Their logic can be hard to fathom.

If just for example someone was backing Penny Mordaunt to the hilt but she fell at the penultimate hurdle who would be favoured next?

A Penny enthusiast might be expected to follow her to whoever she thought was next best. (Liz Truss.) If they voted otherwise would that not mean they thought that Penny’s very first decision was mistaken?

So why were they going to vote for such a poor decision maker in the first place?

 

8 August (Part 2) - Hampshire Police are Institutionally Corrupt

With Hampshire Police deservedly in the headlines after they arrested an old soldier in Aldershot for the heinous crime of causing anxiety and more recently their idiotic attack on motorists it is probably the right time to issue a reminder that Hampshire Police is officially Institutionally Corrupt. Maybe I was the only person to read the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report as far as page 1070, but there it is.

Hampshire Police were charged with checking whether or not the Met’s Investigations were honest and above board and allegedly because of a less than honest relationship between the senior management of both forces, decided that everything was fine and dandy. The equally dishonest Police Complaints Authority welcomed the report despite it being an obvious whitewash.

Thanks to the obstruction put in their way by Met Commissioner Cressida Dick the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel took eight years to uncover the truth and label all three organisations Institutionally Corrupt.

That fact never reached any part of our Main Stream Media and despite the damning verdict on many named police officers, not a single one has been sanctioned. It is reasonable to conclude that the IOPC is every bit as bad as its predecessors.

I have long believed that there is no such thing as a completely honest copper based on their reluctance to take a stand against the corruption they find within the senior ranks. The only one I knew of who tried had to resign which explains why there is no honesty left.

 

8 August (Part 1) - Just as bad in Bexley? Probably

BiB related on 19th July how it was impossible to get any information about Building Regulations out of Bromley Council. Following the intervention of local Councillors it has been established that Bromley Council has entirely abrogated responsibility for controlling and regulating construction standards across the borough. And it has allegedly been legal ever since Mrs. Thatcher decided that selling everything possible was a sensible idea.

Bromley Council has appointed the Construction Industry Council to be judge and jury on all building related matters. To get any information when the occupant of the terraced house next door removes his downstairs internal walls and rear external wall, builds over the shared sewer and shores the shell up with girders, the only source of information about the inspection regime is the body that represents the builder.

Cicair Ltd. will now be asked a large number of questions and Bromley Council will receive a Freedom of Information request in an attempt to discover when and who decided that their Council Taxpayers should be held at arms’ length and not able to simply turn up at the Civic Offices and ask a reasonable question.

 

7 August - Asking questions can be risky

Before 2010 I had never been to a Council meeting and was therefore totally confused when I showed up to witness one in March 2011 just before 7:30 and saw it apparently already in progress.

I learned eventually that what I was seeing was the tail end of the Civic Recognition Awards but not knowing what it was all about, ignored it. So did fellow Council watcher Nicholas Dowling who was known to the Council because of his inclination to ask awkward questions. I didn’t do that, seeing myself more as a reporter than activist.

A few days later Nicholas was honoured to receive a letter at his home address from the worst Mayor of the past twelve years which complained that he did not enthusiastically clap the awards recipients that he knew nothing about and didn’t go to see.
So that was my introduction to Bexley’s Civic Recognitions Awards at which Bexley Council might recognise the work of their favourite property developer and I have ignored them ever since.

Nicholas Dowling has almost disappeared from the Bexley Council Appreciation Society but there is a worthy successor in the shape of Mr. Dimitri Shvorob who was the Independent candidate for Sidcup a few months ago.

It was Dimitri who winkled out the fact that there was no tendering process before Bexley Council spent nearly forty grand on a post-Covid thank you party and in similar vein he has been nosing around the Civic Recognition Awards.

At £3,886·74 it is not the biggest waste of money in town but even so it may not be value for money, All the successful contenders are awarded an elaborate plastic trinket at a cost of £92 a go. Thirty of them. What’s wrong with only the paper certificate?

Should I warn Dimitri that sooner or later persistent FOI requesters are in line for a ban? The Information Commissioner said that Michael Barnbrook could be lawfully banned from further FOIs because his question related to a black member of staff and therefore pursuing it was racist. The ICO’s knowledge of Mick could only have come from Bexley Council.

Britain is not corrupt at every level. Oh no!

 

6 August - CountryStyle Recycling recycling recycling story. Experts in waste

The recycling saga is on repeat.

Compared to a week ago CountrySlop have replaced the local bins in a different sequence which temporarily confuses the law abiding and does nothing to help the situation in which far too many people are simply using the first bin they come to.

Both paper and plastics bins are, as usual, unlocked and offer an open invitation to anyone with a sack of rubbish.

There are many such sacks in the paper bin again because CountrySlop Recycling are too lazy or most probably too stupid to realise that a lid which is fairly easily lifted allows pretty much anything to be dumped inside. Especially when it is replaced back to front as the paper bin has been consistently for the past couple of months.

Which is why the back to front blue bin once again bears a Contaminated flag.

After things get worse over the next few weeks CountrySlop will get their brain into gear and come and empty the contaminated bin but while they lack the intellect to fix the source of the problem the operation will repeat ad nauseam. Inevitably the Council Tax payer ultimately foots the bill. And the same is probably happening in lots of places. Serco were never this bad. Another Crass decision.

 

5 August - Woke Britain’s reputation trashed worldwide

When I knew the North East Hampshire garrison town of Aldershot well it called itself The Home of The British Army. Throughout the 1950s I would change buses there on the way to school. The artillery barracks in the town centre were unchanged since my grandfather was posted there in 1913 and the smell from the stables would sometimes gently waft across the town centre which was the area’s biggest shopping centre; so much so that my young sister thought it was called Alltheshops.

I bought my first house in Aldershot in 1965 for £3,400 and sold it four years later for £4,200 which at the time was thought to be an extortionate price I was lucky to get.

Aldershot is now a shadow of its former self thanks to the British Army being reduced by a succession of political pygmies to the point the military could not fill Wembley Stadium. I still have friends living there but the town is now an unloved backwater which the world can safely ignore.

Until last week that is. A former soldier and Aldershot resident Retweeted a picture created by the Reclaim Party leader Laurence Fox. The police took no interest in Fox’s original picture.

The abridged version is that seven policeman turned up at the old soldier’s door followed by his arrest, handcuffing and being slung in a cell. So unprofessional that they couldn’t even be bothered to read him his rights.

Aldershot is now world famous again. Newspapers from New York to Sydney and across Europe have seized upon the story as a prime example of how Britain is now a lost cause; corrupt from top to bottom and woke beyond belief at every level.

Maybe I should remind readers that it was not only the Metropolitan Police that was labelled corrupt by the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel; so was the Hampshire force that blatantly lied when asked to look into the Met’s failed murder investigation.

It may not be in quite the same league but the idiotic abuse of power on display in Aldershot is not a world away from what happened here in Bexley in 2011.

Bonkers repeated something put out by Hugh Neal on his Maggot Sandwich blog but it was me who was on the receiving end of the unwelcome attention of Bexley police while they rightly ignored Hugh. I was immediately threatened in writing with arrest and later accused of threatening arson because Hugh Neal quoted, and I repeated, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley’s metaphor about flaming torches and pitchforks.

The police claimed that the officer who threatened me with arrest had moved on and was untraceable, an obvious lie, while documents in my possession are divided on who prompted him. One says a Councillor who wished to remain anonymous and the other strongly indicates it was the Leader herself. The most plausible deduction even without the police documentation.

Eventually Bexley Police apologised for stepping out of line and in Hampshire the Police and Crime Commissioner has said the action by her force was disproportionate. I think she means it was contrary to the guidance issued by the College of Policing and should never have happened. Abuse such as that on display in Aldershot should result in instant dismissal for the police concerned if there is to be any chance of public trust being restored.

But just like Cressida Dick who was severely criticised by the DMIP and acknowledged by the IOPC to have breached professional standards walks away unpunished, except by public opinion, nothing will happen and the slide towards totalitarianism continues unabated.

 

3 August - Whitewash by the bucketload

If you have been with BiB for a year or more you will know that it has tried to bring you news of the infamous Daniel Morgan murder, the involvement of Metropolitan Police officers in that murder and their failure to properly investigate it. This is because Daniel and I would have had family connections had he lived beyond 1987.

Persistent wrong doing ultimately led to the Metropolitan Police being officially labelled Institutionally Corrupt in 2021 by the Home Office sponsored Daniel Morgan Independent Panel and former Commissioner Cressida Dick being personally criticised for obstructing the Panel from its beginnings in 2013 right through to early 2021.

The Metropolitan Police rejected the 1,200 page DMIP report within minutes of its publication and in doing so demonstrated that it is indeed Institutionally Corrupt.

Today the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) issued its one page report into the Met’s many failures. It reveals that no one in the Met or the Hampshire force - similarly labelled corrupt - has been sanctioned and all pensions are intact. It totally fails to mention that the IPOC’s predecessor, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, was also implicated in the corruption by accepting a very obviously corrupt report by the Hampshire force.

The IOPC accepts that Commissioner Dick breached professional standards without mentioning the collusion with the first Chairman of the DMIP which was designed to subvert it. The Home Office was so appalled by it that there were dismissals - but the IOPC deems corruption of that magnitude does not warrant disciplinary action.

Proof positive I would suggest that there is corruption at every level of British policing.

Daniel’s brother Alastair has made a brief statement on the IPOC’s verdict. 35 years of dogged determination to expose non-stop corruption brushed under the carpet.

Sky News report. (Dick denies everything.)
Daily Mail report. (“There is no evidence that she intended to protect corrupt officers.” So why was evidence suppressed?)
Evening Standard report. (Requires registration so you may not wish to bother.)

 

2 August - It’s party time in Erith

As you may have noticed if you took the link to Hugh Neal’s blog yesterday, he too has carefully skirted around the discovery of a cannabis farm in Pier Road, Erith. Hugh referred to excessive electricity consumption being a factor in its discovery but my understanding is that there were cables running across roofs which were reported to Bexley Council as long ago as last January and that safety checks were requested.

Bexley Council has more recently been asked what checks it carried out, and when, because almost unbelievably it has been using the same premises for its own children’s holiday activities since 25 July, the same day that the police announced the raid.

Bearing in mind how long a Council would take to plan such an event, all the indications must be that Bexley Council ignored warnings of a possible fire hazard and went ahead and invited children to go to the same address, albeit in a different part of the building.

Erith residents tell me that advertisements have appeared in the town promoting an event next Saturday at the same address.

I am no expert at checking licencing applications but I failed to find one.

Is this further evidence of Bexley Council turning a blind eye to illegal activities by a particular group of people?

The last time BiB looked into an illegal entertainment event it discovered that it was organised by a Councillor and the Mayor had entered the engagement in her official diary.

Labour Councillors kicked up a stink about the Conservatives running a pub event expressly forbidden in the pub’s licence but got nowhere with it.

It’s one rule for them etc., as always.

 

1 August - Common assault in Crayford

The commotion caused by Bexley Council’s decision to hire a drag artist to host their children’s Story Hour was a little more exciting than my random lucky dip into the three hour video suggested.

Just after the one hour 34 minute mark into the YouTube video a bad tempered individual wearing a security uniform makes an unprovoked attack on a man holding a microphone.

The standard of photography is appalling and it is difficult to be sure who the guard is working for but he appears to later hide inside Timpson’s shoe repair shop and may, or may not, bear a Sainsbury’s ID. Even on my big TV it is too blurred to make out. The final letter appears to be a y. Surely not Bexley?

As is to be expected of our utterly useless police force, they did nothing in response to the assault and the protesters did nothing to help themselves by resorting to some particularly bad language.

Why no one at Bexley Council has the intellect to realise, especially after the protests in Bristol and elsewhere, that unnecessarily bringing Drag Queens to Bexley to preach their gospel to small children may not be the best idea. I have yet to understand it. What is wrong with librarians reading stories?

Maybe I should not be surprised, the worst management always seems to gravitate towards the public services. An impoverished Bexley Council must truly be Bonkers to walk into such a controversy, not to mention spending our money on it.

With thanks to a reader who has the patience to trawl through the video.

Photographs by permission of Hugh Neal (Arthur Pewty’s Maggot Sandwich) who was by coincidence in Bexleyheath at the right time.