13 December (Part 3) - It’s not paranoia, they are out to get me
I said yesterday I believed Bexley council’s priority was to prosecute Bonkers, not Olly
Cromwell. There is not a lot that is new in today’s report but it will help to
make the point if all the old news is brought together.
By the time Bexley’s obedient servants in Arnsberg Way threatened me with arrest
last April for “criticising Bexley council at a personal level” I had been
writing here for 20 months. Police files recently made available reveal that “on
8th March 2011 police were made aware [by Chief Executive Will Tuckley] that
comments had been posted on Bexley-is-Bonkers regarding
councillor Teresa O’Neill, namely, Personally I think we need to descend on Councillor Teresa
O’Neill with flaming torches and pitchforks as it would seem that she and her
scheming cohorts are impervious to reasoned argument." The police went on to
repeat another blog extract, “someone wanted to go to the last council meeting
with a petrol bomb, but I persuaded him otherwise”.
As all readers seem to know, the first comment was written by the Neighbourhood Watch
coordinator for Erith, the ultra-observant may have realised it wasn’t an
original Bonkers comment by the inclusion of quotation marks and a capital C for
councillors. I’ve never considered Bexley’s councillors merited a capital
letter. The second quotation was me reporting what a friend said.
I doubt the Neighbourhood Watch coordinator knows a local source of pitchforks and I
fail to see that I personally encouraged violence, more the reverse. I have already
accepted that reporting the friend’s comment was ill-advised - for one thing, he runs a
diesel car! - but the important thing to note is that neither of those comments were Olly
Cromwell’s. It was me Bexley council was complaining about.
The police file goes on to record the council’s complaint that both Olly Cromwell and I
have suggested that “the council has the police in their pockets”. How ironic is that? We
have six (according to another report) councillors demanding that action must be taken
against two bloggers and the police record that the councillors insisted they must “not
have their names released as complainants”. Then they have the gall to protest that
one does not live in the others’ pocket! If it wasn’t for those cowardly councillors
the police would not have needed to label the files RESTRICTED and put ‘not in the
public interest’ notices all over the case. It is because Bexleyheath are and
have been, at least since the days of their expensive lunching with former
council leader and convicted fraudster Ian Clement, in the pocket
of Bexley council that they now look to be thoroughly corrupt and vulnerable to
a charge of perverting the cause of justice.
So what in particular makes me think that it’s Bonkers that is in our bent council’s
sights, not Olly Cromwell? For a start, as shown above, all the ‘offences’ up to last March, the
date of the complaint, were mine. Nothing in the report to the police could
be laid at Olly’s door. It could hardly be otherwise, Olly had never mentioned Bexley
council until a few days before,
his first ever blog
about Bexley council was on 3rd March 2011. Little wonder that neither council
nor police knew much about him. That would be why his harassment letter accused
him of writing blogs on Bonkers. Totally wrong because no research had been done.
There wasn’t time; they were after me, Olly was an after-thought,
maybe the last straw, but not the first priority of a council scared witless that its wrong
doings were being exposed.
Since then Olly may have made himself an easier target than Bonkers because of his foul
language, but that is not a crime, a judge recently said so.
The police files additionally criticise Olly for
making all councillors’ addresses public knowledge but he didn’t. And if he did,
who cares? They always were public knowledge. Councillors are public people,
their addresses become available as soon as they put themselves up for election
despite Chris Loynes admitting to destroying the electoral records after they were FOI’d.
(Still with the Information Commissioner if I remember correctly.)
It was Bonkers that made councillors’ addresses easily available - but only after
Bexley council’s constitutional committee ruled that putting the address of any
resident on the web was legitimate. If private individual’s addresses are
OK for the web, those of public figures must be even more OK.
Another thing that makes Bonkers a bigger target than Olly Cromwell, maybe only a small thing, is that it
finds something bad to say about Bexley council pretty much every day - the amount of
ammunition Bexley provides is unending - and Olly wrote his blog comparatively rarely. As
a result the number of hits on Bonkers far exceeds You’ve Been Cromwelled. It probably
does far more damage to Bexley council than ‘Cromwelled’ ever did; the
statistics reveal Bonkers is regularly read in some rather important places.
Olly’s language makes some people wary about visiting his blog.
Despite my scepticism on the value of raw web hit statistics it still gives a certain
amount of pleasure that no other similar UK website has ever claimed more hits than
I see on Bonkers and every time Bexley council does something even more silly
than their last bit of idiocy the number climbs again.