10 March (Part 2) - The Guilty and the Gullible
At
every council meeting I have been to in the past you walk in with brief case,
shopping bag or whatever and sit down more or less where you
like. Last night was different; Will Tuckley (CEO) had sprung into action for maybe
the first time in his career, probably at the behest of Fat Controller
O’Neill and her Monitoring Officer.
Someone had let it be known that they planned to exercise their government encouraged
right to video a council meeting and suddenly young mums with disabled children
in tow and harmless elderly gentlemen of Indian descent together with their ladies
are transformed into would-be terrorists.
In the space of three days bent Bexley’s bureaucrats had also gone into
over-drive and hired the services of a security company (I asked two who
employed them) and convinced a gullible police commander that they were under threat from a video
camera wielding maniac - in fact a local resident with a passion for open
government. It wasn’t even an HD model so the shy Mayor
was under no threat at all - unless perhaps she planned on
being stupid again.
Perhaps someone should tell Commander Glyn Jones (see Blog part 4) that his writ extends to
protecting citizen’s rights and that government policy should take precedence
over the wishes of a motley crew intent on hiding their failures from an
inquisitive public - but then we know from correspondence with the Crown
Prosecution Service that shielding Bexley councillors from the consequences of
their sins is something Bexley’s police happily do.
As well as hiring in a couple of dozen bouncers to intimidate the public,
Tuckley and his merry men had produced flyers to stick on windows telling
residents what they could and could not do at a public meeting. Never before have
protestors been banned from carrying placards and apart from the No Smoking
instruction everything on the list of banned activities was specifically
encouraged by central government. O’Neill and her band of guidance ignorers went
further, they spent your money on
a little leaflet to reinforce their
anti-democratic views. The leaflet is dated March 2011 and quite likely all
council activity stopped in an effort to get it produced in time. The council
officer forced to do this was Chris Loynes, it says so on the leaflet. Someone pointed him out
to me standing alongside a couple of tattooed thugs. My unkind colleague
said his name was “Liar Loynes” and I at first assumed I’d misheard Lyle or some
such name. But it is none of these things, he is Chris Loynes and he has deliberately disregarded the Minister’s letter.
Before the doors were unlocked we were treated to a council lackey with a
megaphone telling us under what conditions we were going to be allowed in,
specifically “no photography” which I assumed meant ‘no photography’. In fact he
meant no cameras which should have excluded almost everyone with a mobile phone. When
I went through the door with my large camera in its case deep inside an old
shopping bag I was herded to one side by one of the heavy mob to be searched
by another member of the heavy mob. I was told I couldn’t come in despite the
camera being so obvious compared to a mobile there’s no way it could be used
without someone noticing. I’d taken the camera equipped with one
non-zooming lens
capable of getting a picture of a banner from a couple of feet away (see below);
it was not the right gear for snapping away at a chain wearing dominatrix 100
feet away. My account of my exchanges with the grossly over-weight bouncer is contained in
my complaint to my MP
so I won’t repeat it here except to say that councillor Ball quickly realised how stupid
Loynes’ instructions were and saved me from the threat of arrest that had been made.
He graciously took me to his private office when the meeting ended and returned my camera after I had
been initially shoved away from him by a council heavy.
Incidentally, one of my associates asked one of Loynes’ men where the bouncers
had come from and was told they were council staff helping out on a busy evening.
So it’s not only Loynes who should be nick-named liar,
they are all at it. Everyone could see what these large men and women were and me asking
them where they were from and getting the real answer wasn’t really necessary.