20 April (Part 1) - Council meeting Round 2. Seconds out
After the farce which was Question Time at
Wednesday’s council meeting it was
time, appropriately enough, for motions. The always reliable: to be utterly ridiculous that is,
councillor Philip Read had come up with a pathetic motion of no value whatsoever to any Bexley
resident. He proposed a debate to put on record that “Bexley council
recognises and appreciates the value that Boris Johnson the present Mayor of
London has brought to the Borough of Bexley and outer London generally in the
past four years”. Just the sort of nonsense you’d expect from someone who
registered bexley-is-bonkers.com
and did nothing with it, and who maliciously and wrongly
reported Olly Cromwell to the police for breaking his bail conditions.
The opposition party argued that such a motion put forward during
the ‘election purdah’ period was legally wrong. They were overruled. The debate
began and pandemonium soon broke out, I’m not absolutely sure who was shouting
what. Councillor Alex Sawyer went into one of his machine gun delivery speeches
given far too quickly for an amateur note taker to keep up; and didn’t stop for
fifteen minutes. Literally fifteen minutes’ worth of non-stop
pro-Johnson and anti-Livingstone propaganda.
Undoubtedly a bravura performance of which his wife, Ms. Priti Patel MP, would be proud. Probably she wrote it.
Livingstone
had “been to Havana more often than Havering” and Johnson had promised another Thames
tunnel from Greenwich to faraway Silvertown and to plant 20,000 trees. I began to doze
off to the sound of the constant drone but recall a reference to North Korea and the
response from the public gallery to the 20,000 trees comment. Someone thought that 63 trees
was all we needed. It takes a certain amount of talent to write a speech like that and even
more to deliver it with panache. Alex Sawyer could well be going somewhere; and I rather
wish he would. To somewhere where verbal diarrhoea is appreciated. It may be clever, it
may even be impressive, but what use is it except to amuse the small minds that surround him?
Our celebrity councillors, Sandra Bauer and Melvin Seymour
of dog-poo fame sat quietly through Sawyer’s non-stop twittering
probably wondering where all the crap being spouted was likely to be posted and
whether it was a threat to family life. But like so many words delivered in a
hurry, if ignored they will be forgotten as quickly as they are uttered. They
appear here on-line but you can be pretty sure that
they won’t make the News Shopper and get shoved through anyone’s letterbox
When
Sawyer was eventually made to sit down councillor Gareth Bacon launched his
own personal appreciation of the great Boris Johnson’s achievements. He is not an
orator in the Sawyer mould but we learned that Boris had single-handedly
‘Oysterised’ the suburban railway lines, provided free travel for 40% of journeys on the buses and
best of all, free travel for himself as a GLA member. Oh no, that comment came from
both the public gallery and the opposition more or less simultaneously. Councillor
Bacon said he was taxed on it so it wasn’t free travel. Wasn’t it Bacon who argued
that transport staff shouldn’t travel free?
The opposition decided they didn’t like Philip Read’s motion and who can blame
them? So they came up with one even sillier. “Bexley council recognises and
appreciates the value that Ken Livingstone the former Mayor of London brought to
the London Borough of Bexley and outer London generally from 2000-2008”. Am I
missing something or is that four years late?
Ken had introduced the congestion charge and the Overground system. He reduced bus
fares and the Prime Minister wants him to be Mayor again - or at least doesn’t
want Johnson. Now we have sky high fares and a 1 to 6 Zone Season Ticket costs only a whisker less than one which would cover the whole of Switzerland,
according to councillor Borella. Everyone would be another £500 worse off if
Johnson became Mayor again.
When councillor Malik rose to his feet he was almost immediately slapped down by
Mayor Sams, as is the tradition, for opening his mouth. “Councillor Sawyer spent
15 minutes talking about Bojo”, said councillor Malik, “I am going to talk about Livingstone and
Credit Card Clement”. I
always thought that the initials CCC stood for the Central Criminal Court where the Bexley fraudster
finished his political career. That’s a good one Malik, far more memorable than anything Alex Sawyer
came out with. May I use it again? Did Clement ever pay back the money that council leader
Teresa O’Neill allowed him to run off with in Bexley; the last I heard he didn’t?
Saint Livingstone had put CCTV on every bus and made the biggest transport
investment in London since World War II apparently. A pity that Bexley saw none
of it. An even bigger pity that Johnson supports a criminal shelterer. How can
anyone vote for a man like that? Oh that reminds me…
During
the debate, councillor Malik I think it was, had a little dig at those Bexley Conservative councillors
who would personally profit from Boris Johnson’s election campaign and even more from his election. A
shot aimed at Katie Perrior and her public relations company no doubt. However councillor Teresa
O’Neill rose to the bait and said she had many times been offered a job in the
Mayor’s office but had selflessly turned them all down preferring to be queen
bee in Bexley. Similarly she wasn’t going to run to Bojo’s side after the
election either. That’s a shame, if the police eventually get to feel her collar
for perverting the course of justice or the Local Government Ombudsman drop on
her like a ton of bricks, it would be so much more entertaining to read it in
The Times rather than in The Bexley Times.
The debate ended in the customary vote entirely along party lines. There is no
need to tell you which motion won.
After that the leader was due to make her Report to the Council. To be
honest I had heard about as much as I could take from Foghorn Fanny in one
evening and left the chamber; as did about half the remaining observers. I have however been sent a
report on what went on later so a return to the subject cannot be entirely ruled out.