4 November - Listening to the miscreants
I went to my second council meeting yesterday, a cabinet meeting to
discuss the cuts, along with about 15 other Bexley residents.
I don’t consider this website to be the place for formal reports of such events,
I’ll leave that to Linda Piper to report in the News Shopper or for the
council’s own website, but I must say I was totally unimpressed overall.
When I worked for a large
multi-national I was never near being on the board,
but I was senior enough to sit in on a few meetings and address them
occasionally if my area of expertise was under discussion. It’s chalk and
cheese. These couple-of-hours-a-week-for-nine-grand-a-year-merchants
and their overpaid managers would be
totally out of their league there and most were out of their depth in the council chamber.
Councillor Campbell
put his case clearly and with a degree of authority but
apart from that it was mostly waffle that added nothing but exposed the
shortcomings of the speakers. The women (I’ll get into trouble for this) were
all abysmal, councillors
Perrior and Bailey in
particular couldn’t get beyond heaping praise on the council and agreeing with what the other one said. Top expense
claimers too and utterly useless. Councillor Craske
(it really is pronounced crass!) spoke about transport issues.
He had decided not to scrap School Crossing Patrols
after all, or maybe not yet. Lollypop men and women are saved for a while.
I’d not seen Craske in the flesh before and he looked ill to me, his
face was the colour of a beetroot throughout. Whether it was the sight of me or
the parking permit campaigner in the public gallery I have no idea. Maybe he is
always like that but whatever the case I hope he is alright for without him I might run short of idiocies to report.
Councillor Deadman several
times expressed his concern for the staff and their jobs and was rewarded with
polite nods from other council members and applause from sections of the
listening public. Teresa O’Neill
who went on public record recently to say reducing councillor numbers was an option,
surprise, surprise, did not mention the subject at all. Nor did anyone else.
One thing I was surprised to see is that Chief Executive Will Tuckley actually
does exist. I had begun to think he was one of those fictional individuals that
some companies use in advertisements. Names that represent the brand with no
danger of ever losing them because it is all a charade. No; scrap that idea, these
fictional people reply to letters and emails. Tuckley never does that. In fact
as I left the meeting I passed a small group that had waylaid
Tuckley and I heard enough to know that their complaint was that he hadn’t responded
to their enquiries. So that’s good, no one is going to notice when he gets the chop.