21 April - Bonkers is closing down - but only for the Easter break
The main anti-democratic event of the past week in Bonkers Bexley has been
the proposal to stifle questions
at council meetings. The effect will be that the council need not answer any
question that it doesn’t want to and allow those who have asked difficult
questions and been dissatisfied with the answer to be permanently banned from
asking more. One of the Bonkers team had put forward the
revolutionary idea that the next constitutional review meeting should consider
recommending that councillors answered questions at council meetings instead of
giving irrelevant speeches but there is no sign of that being adopted.
Someone who questioned
the powers that be on that issue and the new restrictions was immediately rebuffed with, “No
decisions have been made in relation to changes to the Council’s Constitution”.
True, but that disguises the fact that the proposals are known only because of
a leak and that there is no opportunity for objections to residents being silenced again.
In yet another example of council deviousness, it proposes to suspend the
existing constitution and immediately substitute the new one. All this to be
decided by leader O’Neill, four of her co-conspirators and the leader of
the Labour opposition Chris Ball. If he does object what chance does he stand?
One cannot help but wonder if the rush to introduce these changes has anything
to do with the fact that the Bonkers team intends to attend planning meetings in
future and had formally requested to be informed of the questioning procedure.
The next planning meeting is scheduled for 28th April, the day after the
constitution is likely to be changed. Never mind, we can sit and take notes and
see if we can eventually make sense of any “funny business” that may
be going on.
Maybe the loss of question time will be no great loss after all. One of the
questions at last month’s meeting was to request a breakdown of councillor
Craske’s estimated £783,200 cost of operating the borough’s Controlled Parking
Zones, to see where the money was going. Craske either answers questions
untruthfully - “No £4m. contract”, “parking enforcement costs less than
answering FOIs” etc. - or doesn’t answer them at all. This time he chose a
combination of the two. The full and thorough written reply from Craske was “This
information has been provided already”. I can understand this particular
response, he has fudged so many figures in the past that their contradictions became a
huge embarrassment. Best to say nothing. Soon it will in effect be official policy and all
questions will have to take the FOI route.
The blog is going to take a few days off over Easter; I shall be spending the
weekend with the head of the Transport Research Laboratory department that
issued the report that Bexley’s road planning department told me justified one
of their mad-cap schemes. I got it straight from the horse’s mouth
that that was another Bexley council lie. My road safety expert friend after looking around
town once said that whoever planned this is “either incompetent or malicious”. I
think he was wrong and Bexley council is both. Just to be absolutely fair to Craske as I always am, this comment was made in the very earliest days of
his reign of terror, when most of what my friend saw was the result of
someone else’s incompetence.
Before I disappear I must mention that Bexley council had second thoughts about releasing
the electoral registration details
for Alex Sawyer and produced the information. If they hadn’t blocked the website from
their server they would have known that the required information had already been extracted
from another source. Also some news which I have only just been authorised to place here, the
Industrial Tribunal pre-hearing of the
whistleblower sacked from the Thames Innovation
Centre is to be heard at Ashford House, County Square Shopping Centre,
Ashford on Wednesday 27th April at 10:00 am. Case No. 1102704.
I hope everyone has a happy holiday, Craske included for who needs Redemption
more than him? Bonkers will be back,
probably by Easter Monday.