7 April - Cuts are for the riff-raff not for us says the Council Leader
I
didn’t expect a large turnout for last night’s council meeting, but I was
wrong, the Bexley Council for Equality and Diversity (BCED), no longer supported
by Bexley council, turned out in force and swelled the numbers in the public gallery to at least 150.
When the meeting started chairman Mayor Clark’s first priority was to remind everyone that she had no intention of following
government guidelines on open and transparent local government and had banned
filming of meetings nor would she ever grant permission to anyone who sought it. She said this
was to protect members of the public from being filmed without their permission.
So now we have two liars, Craske and Clark. When a video camera
was used in the council chamber a few members of the public had the backs of
their heads captured on tape; if Clark is so concerned for public
privacy maybe she should turn off the town’s CCTV system.
There were deputations from the BCED and on behalf of parents and carers of
adults with learning disabilities whose activities have been slashed by the
council’s cuts programme. A Mr. John Stanton spoke movingly of the impact on
people whose lives had revolved around the lost social activities while I
surveyed all the councillors to try to judge by their expressions if they were
in the slightest bit interested in what was being said. Most I will give the
benefit of the doubt but councillor John Davey (Lesnes Abbey, £9,543 + £7,782 from the Bexley Care Trust)
appeared to be in a dream-world staring into space every time I looked. Another exception was
Clark herself whose eyes were darting all around the chamber at councillors and public alike
as if she was a bag of nerves and after the mess she made of last month’s
meeting that might be understandable.
Following the charade of deputations the meeting moved on to questions from the
public. My view of this section is that it is another waste of time, the answers
are worthless but the antics surrounding them may be entertaining. The
procedure is that 15 minutes is devoted to reading out answers to questions that
(in contravention of
the mayor’s favoured book on chairmanship)
are not read out. If the questioner is present he is allowed to ask a subsidiary question
after his first one is answered and if a question is unanswered because of lack
of time the questioner gets his answer in the post. That procedure, inadequate
as it may be, is abused. Clark doesn’t accept questions which are too
difficult to answer. One of my associates had his rejected totally this month
and Clark didn’t have the courtesy to let him know. Mine was watered down to
the point that a simple fobbing off answer will be possible without getting to the heart of
the matter. Last month my question which should have been answered by post is still unanswered
and questions that do get through are often not answered properly at the meeting. In
all the time I have attended council meetings Craske has never yet answered a
question and instead filibusters, prevaricates, throws around insults and lies.
Yesterday the council tried a new trick, the planted question, and its
associate, the queue jump. Last month my contributor
Phil thought the council might be shuffling the order of questions to ensure
only the easiest got an airing at meetings. I still don’t believe this is the
norm but there may be signs of change. Do you really believe that any ordinary
Bexley citizen would be so concerned about the prospect of Ken Livingston
becoming Mayor of London again that he would write in with a question about the
likely effect on Bexley and stand at the lectern to hear the answer?
Do you believe that any ordinary citizen would ask how well the borough has
worked with the Mayor of London on transport issues? Does a question asking what
discussions the council leader has had with government ministers on the Localism
Bill sound like the sort of genuine question a Bexley resident might ask? No,
neither do I and the game was carelessly given away by mayor Clark who
addressed the questioner as
councillor Leaf.
Yes, they are so desperate to avoid answering questions that they dragged an ex-councillor into the chamber to
pose fake questions and cause genuine ones to go unanswered.
There was just time for resident Michael Barnbrook to get in two questions. He
asked Leader O’Neill if councillors should not “cut their allowances so
as to suffer the same pain they are inflicting on the public” and when she indicated that pain
was reserved for the public and not the ruling classes he asked “Do you have no
shame?” I did not hear the answer because the public applause was too loud.
Mr. Barnbrook also addressed a question to councillor Craske (TLC)
to the effect that the one thing the recent public consultations had shown clearly is that
residents (74.2% of responses, the highest level of consistency for any response) wanted to see a reduction in the spending on
parking controls and made reference to Bexley’s fatuous slogan “Listening to
you”. Craske’s downfall is that he has lied so often (and so differently on
occasions) that he knows that every figure he offers will be contradicted by one
he has given earlier so he had little option but to fall back on the tried and
tested ‘I refer the gentleman to the answer I gave earlier’. When pressed a bit
harder he couldn’t resist an outright lie. He said that he was now spending less
on parking controls than what was spent on answering Mr. Barnbrook’s questions
under Freedom of Information legislation. This is typical of the irreverence
with which the council treats public question time. As I said at the outset, I
am more interested in the way the questions are answered and their excuses for
avoiding them, than the answers themselves; by and large they are lies.
Was there anything good to report? I have to admit there was. Clark had made
good use of her stop-watch and the timing of questions
was meticulous. She even cut off a councillor in mid flow when he ran out of time; that has never
happened before. Councillor Campbell (St. Mary’s, £22,650) seemed to make a decent job of explaining
why there is a £100,000 loan facility for the Thames Innovations Centre and said
that it had made a profit this year. Given the amount the council itself spends
there I would expect nothing less. Councillor Campbell also spoke in praise of
the co-operation given by MPs and how it was a
two-way operation which provoked
councillor Deadman (North End, £12,114) into making a very strange comment. He bemoaned
the fact that the borough was not represented by any Labour MPs. I expect the
MP
for Erith & Thamesmead, Teresa Pearce, will be having a quiet word in his
shell-like.
Photograph taken at a Cabinet meeting before Mayor Clark’s latest attack on democracy.