19 November - Democracy Bexley style - Part 2
Mr. Bryant, the resident publicly insulted by Craske on Wednesday evening has been in touch with a link
that answers my question. Has Craske been very economical with the actualité about there being no £4m. contract
with Parsons Brinckerhoff or did the newspapers get everything wrong? Judge for yourselves.
Read the
council’s press release (see page 6) and in case that ever disappears I’ve extracted the
relevant bit
to be read here. Nuff said.
Questions from the public are written down and not read out at the meeting which
is fair enough but question No.2 was answered so quickly that I was still making
notes about question 1 when we moved on to question 3. From the agenda I see
that question 2 asked the leader of the council “…by how much the council
will be reducing remuneration of employees and councillors in view of the financial
restraints…” and how much “such reductions will save annually”.
I am informed that the leader, Teresa O’Neill, merely answered that there will be no reductions. Can’t
say I’m surprised; just because the Prime Minister and his cabinet took a pay
cut and a five year wage freeze doesn’t mean our local fat-cats will act
responsibly too. Things have also gone very quiet about her proposal to cut the
number of councillors. A good headline for the newspapers but just idle talk. I’m still making up my mind about leader Teresa O’Neill
but at present I feel that even with the paucity of talent on display at
Bexley council they could have made a better choice.
The council launched its public consultation on ‘the cuts’ yesterday. It got a
mention on Wednesday evening: councillor Ball for example thought there was a danger that
residents might give biased answers. Maybe he was suggesting their answers
should be disregarded, I don’t know, but obviously consultations of this nature
are likely to be from individuals and opinions will likely be their own and to
that extent biased. Does the council have no one capable of making a balanced judgement?
Councillor Catterall perhaps who was the only representative of the people who
stood out on Wednesday by saying something that got straight to the point.
I have been asked my opinion of the council’s consultation procedure, sorry Tom,
I really haven’t had the time to get to grips with it yet, but when I visited
Bexley Talks 24 hours after
its launch I was put off by the need to register and nobody had joined its forum.
At 5 a.m. this morning the situation hadn’t changed so I thought I should do
my civic duty. Bexley-is-Bonkers is now registered. Maybe it will help
me answer Tom’s enquiry - on the other hand my first visit took me
to a “bad link”. Whoops!