13 December - Arrogance, lies and corruption
The postal services are getting back to normal after Bexley council’s
failure to grit the snowbound roads and my delivery today included the
response of the Standards Board to whom I referred councillor Craske’s unwarranted
personal comments to someone who questioned him about the council’s contract with
transport consultants, Parsons Brinckerhoff. A question which was derailed by Craske saying
there was no £4m. contract.
Look here
to judge whether that is a deliberate and calculated lie or not.
I wrote to the Mayor to ask about that and why she had permitted Craske to deliberately
attempt to belittle a member of the public. The Mayor
replied on 30th November
to tell me that Craske had done nothing wrong and that she was God’s gift to chairmanship.
She couldn’t bring herself to mention Craske’s false statement about the £4m.
contract presumably because even she might not want to deny in writing an obvious attempt to deceive.
The Mayor may believe she is an expert chairman but anyone who goes to a council meeting can see first hand that she
deludes herself. However the fact that the Mayor is as talentless as most councillors appear to be
is not the issue here, it is that she told me Craske was innocent of breaking the code of practice the day
before the Standards Board was due to meet.
The people who
warned me that Bexley’s Standards Board is rigged
and corrupted by that rigging were right. How did councillor Val Clark, the Mayor, know their verdict in advance?
The Standards Board does not deny Craske said what he said but their report
proclaims him innocent. The summary is in paragraph 2.3. The board, made up of a majority of councillors, believes
that making a totally misleading statement about a contract with Parsons Brinckerhoff and then immediately
and without any reason telling the assembled members of the public that the questioner once came bottom of
the poll in a council election is not an attempt to belittle him. It is so ridiculous it doesn’t
really require further comment from me. What possible alternative explanation can there be? It
was a totally irrelevant comment made with only one thing in mind. Malice. Paragraph 2.3 claims that Craske sees a “correlation”
between a question which he answered dishonestly and his decision to bring up the
result of an old election; as if that excuses digging up the past. I may well seek a further explanation
and ask if my interpretation is correct.
Meanwhile we have confirmation that councillors Cheryl Bacon and Nigel Betts are willing to
stand behind Craske’s deception and bad behaviour. I was wrong about Bacon, I thought
she was totally selfish and had little interest beyond grabbing her slice of the near £100k.
expenses flowing into her household. Now we know she has an affinity with more direct forms of dishonesty too.
Betts we already know is in cahoots with
the whistleblower sacker so his integrity rating
couldn’t go much lower anyway.