29 January - Money grabbers, vandals, more vandals, xenophobes and criminals
Hall Place admission charges
It’s only three months since Bexley Council announced that
they were
going to introduce a £1 or £2 charge for admission to the Hall Place gardens and
already the price has doubled. It will be £4 with discounts for senior citizens, Bexley residents and children.
Some parts of the garden will remain free and a family ticket is being
considered. Parking will remain free and various Cabinet Members have been very
emphatic about that. If compared with other ‘tourist attractions’ it is hard to
deny it is relatively cheap and £620,000 of improvements are in the pipeline.
More details will come in the full Cabinet report when it is published, by the
end of the week probably, I don’t like publishing major items just before a month roll over.
238 Woolwich Road
A planning application (18/03147/FUL) has been made by Kulvinder Singh’s unfortunate neighbour
to legitimise the huge quantity of soil he dumped on their garden
while constructing his nuclear bunker at 238 Woolwich Road.
As the notorious Bexley house developer has filled the hole it came from with copious amounts of concrete it cannot go back there and
the landscape has been changed for ever. The unfortunate neighbour is left to pick up the bill.
Nobody seems to know what Bexley Council plans to do to resolve the situation
and Kulvinder’s neighbours can only sit and watch while the rain continues to be
determined to wash a bungalow over the newly created mud cliff.
Much the same situation prevails at another of
Mr.
Singh’s building sites in Heron Hill. Once again it is next to impossible to get any update on the situation from Bexley Council.
It was only a matter of time
Before the Abbey Wood station lifts were vandalised. The glass is shattered.
The B word
At the beginning of the month my friend Elwyn Bryant was becoming more than a
little agitated at his MP ignoring all his communications relating to Brexit. He
was particularly upset with the
pro Brexit
Withdrawal Agreement propaganda that appeared on the Old Bexley & Sidcup
Conservative Association website. I speculated that it was placed there by Tory
HQ and should not be interpreted as the OB&SCA being anti-Brexit. This guesswork
has since been confirmed as being correct.
One only has to have listened to prominent OB&SCA Councillors over the past two
and a half years to realise that many of them are hard line Brexiteers and some of them aren’t.
Brexit divisions are everywhere. Some who sincerely believe that only Leavers
offer abuse are apparently happy to label Brexiteers “slimy, fascist, racist,
xenophobes”. I know; have suffered it at first hand and it is painful coming
from people you have regarded as friends.
The OB&SCA Committee will have had to steer a difficult path balancing such
disparate views as will their MP James Brokenshire. With 63% of his constituents
voting to leave the European Union he has little option but to respect the
decision although he personally seems to back the ill-fated
Withdrawal deal, backstop and all.
He will have upset some people taking that line, I know he has, but at least he
has not descended to the depths plumbed by his colleagues Dominic Grieve,
Anna Soubry and the reliably incompetent Amber Rudd.
Bexley council - dishonest, vindictive, criminal
I went to yesterday’s Cabinet Meeting equipped with my long lens and hoping to get a more up to date
picture of Council Leader Teresa O’Neill to adorn the Bonkers’ banner.
I particularly wanted one of her looking to her right (left as pictured) and preferably smiling.
Things did not go according to plan because I had forgotten something. To her
right sit the Labour Members and there is no way she is going to smile at them.
She smiled towards the Tory benches but flipping the photo over would probably look odd.
The best image I could get should appear to the right of the site banner before
very long. Maybe both old and new for a while for comparison purposes.
Since the very early days of BiB its strapline has been
‘Bexley council - dishonest, vindictive, criminal’ and arguably that is as out of date
as the Leader’s portrait. It is about five years since Bexley Council was last
found to be engaged in serious law breaking.
Dishonesty on Social Media still afflicts some Tory Councillors and examples surface once or
twice every month. Council Officers are frequently vindictive so there is no
reason to rethink that description, but if I can find all the occurrences,
‘Criminal’ will disappear before the day is out.