10 October (Part 2) - Kevin Fox. Head of Committee Services and Scrutiny
Elwyn Bryant’s plan to take advantage of
Bexley council’s stated ‘Protocol and Regulation’s
and take a photograph before yesterday’s Public Realm meeting didn’t get off the ground. I had
passed him a copy of the email from Mr. Kevin Fox, Bexley council’s
favourite jobsworth and as instructed Elwyn emailed Mr. Dave
Easton to say he wanted to take a photograph before the meeting.
Should be a formality. Dave Easton is a decent enough guy and Elwyn and I would be in the
council chamber 15 minutes before the scheduled start time so he could take a picture of me and my note book.
100 minutes before meeting start time he received a reply from Fox, the council
lackey who invented the totally untrue excuse which resulted in the signatures
of 2,219 Bexley residents going straight in the bin. This is what the excuse inventor said to Elwyn…
There is a Protocol to allow photography
before a meeting he said, all you have to do is ask. And when you seek permission to
take a picture five ten or fifteen minutes before a meeting begins you
can’t because it will disrupt it and the subject of the photograph
(which Elwyn intended should be me), might object.
Kevin Fox and his elected masters have little intention of complying with the spirit of the
new transparency law or - as we will see
later today - even its actuality.
It gets worse…
I wrote to Mr. Fox (copied to Easton as requested) seeking permission to photograph
the chamber before next week’s Cabinet Meeting started. Anticipating the reaction of the
cunning Fox I offered as many assurances as I could.
Short
of asking Mr. Easton to take a photograph of what he liked when he liked and
presenting it to me later I don’t think I could have done more. What did Easton
say? Well, err, nothing for six days. Then the lying arse licking Fox took over.
He sent me the same email as Elwyn received. (see image 1 above.)
So to sum up, the council says their rules allow photography before meetings,
but in practice there are no circumstances in which they will allow it. When, at
a council meeting, the pen jabbing mayor trots out his mantra that photography is not
allowed without permission and “no such permission has been granted” you know that the
implication is just another of Bexley council’s bog standard lies.
There is still scope to take this further and I have; and I imagine that before
long news of these developments will reach Eric Pickles’ ear. If there was a
single brain cell in Bexley council’s corporate body you would have read today how
they had taken their first hesitant step towards running an open democracy accompanied by
a picture of an empty council chamber or of me; instead I can only offer for
your delectation a stock image of our esteemed pen jabbing mayor. Councillor Alan - I hate deaf people - Downing.
Note: ‘Library photograph’ kindly supplied by a reader.
Ditto jabbing mayor.