14 January (Part 2) - Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Half way, as we are, between
the last Cabinet meeting in
mid-December and the next one at the end of this month there is unlikely to be
any startlingly new news about Bexley council. It will no doubt be months before the Local Government Ombudsman looks at
Cheryl Bacon’s illegal exclusion of the
public from her meeting and the lies that she told about it and the refusal
by council officers to interview councillors who knew the truth and were prepared
to report it. I don’t think Mick Barnbrook has yet had time to send his
allegation of Misconduct in Public Office to the police, so we are probably in
for a lean time. On top of that councillors may be on their best behaviour with the election only four months away.
To fill in the awkward information gap I am going to occasionally regurgitate some
stories from the distant past. Stories that current readers will never have seen
before and others will have long forgotten. Stories that show just what sort of
people Bexley folk have been prepared to elect and which may persuade some of them to do
something different next time around.
This website used to be tagged for search engines and the like with ‘Dishonest,
incompetent, vindictive’ and whilst the description may have fallen into disuse
nothing much has changed. It may have been a relatively trivial dispute
between a resident and Bexley’s King of Spite but my favourite
example of that search engine tag leads me naturally to councillor Peter Harold Craske. Who
else could it be? (Err, several of ‘em actually…)
In
2010 Mr. Felix Akele obtained permission to have the kerb dropped outside his
house in Northumberland Heath. Somehow or other he misunderstood what Bexley
council said and thought it was up to him to get the work done. Now that may not
have been Bexley council’s fault, other residents have not commonly made the
same mistake, but Mr. Akele went ahead and had the work done himself.
Along came Bogeyman Craske on his High Horse and instead of insisting the job
was done to his standards by the council’s contractor, which might have been entirely
reasonable, the nasty little runt of a man dreamed up a very special punishment for poor Felix.
He insisted the footway be reinstated to its former glory and only then should
it be ripped up again and a council approved cross-over be installed.
This spiteful and unnecessary act authorised and defended by Sidcup and Lamorbey
councillor Peter Craske meant that poor Felix had to pay three times for his mistake instead of just twice.
The story is still on
the News Shopper’s website.
Something
else stolen from the News Shopper many years ago was a nice summary of Bexley council
I spotted in its pages. It said Bexley council had been “taken over by a mob of nasty, evil
people who seem to thrive on other people’s pain and hurt”. Nothing much has
changed, remember that when a Bexley Tory knocks on your door over the coming weeks.
Councillor Peter Harold Craske, protected by Bexley council over you know what,
was an shameless little blogger bugger in 2010. If you find
Craske or his cronies on your doorstep, they might tell you what good things
they have done and will do but try to look below the surface. The leopards do
not readily change their spots. Not in 2014 or any other time.
Original blog.