10 November (Part 2) - Bexley council shows it is frightened of criticism
If you think we are finished with
last week’s council meeting I am going to
have to disappoint you; it was a three hour meeting and we are only 45 minutes into it.
Agenda item 7 was a Motion put by councillor Mabel Ogundayo…
The
Conservatives didn’t like that and their newly appointed useful idiot Graham
D’Amiral stood up. I don’t know what his official title is but he now stands up
at frequent intervals proposing anything that might be required. You can
almost see the string being pulled by the big blue chief. Until this year D’Amiral said almost nothing, perhaps this new Jack in the Box job will be the
pinnacle of his political career. One can but hope.
The box automaton moved that the press and public be removed in case Labour’s “rebuke”
struck a few nerves. The proposal was seconded by another newly appointed
numbskull called Brad Smith whose job it is to second all proposals like a
mindless robot, so just the man for the job.
The leader of the opposition councillor Deadman said there was no intention to name anyone but every Tory
must have thought he was as untruthful as they are because all their hands went up against him.
Even those of decent ones on the grounds that they “would be shot at dawn for dissent”.
So out we all trooped where I was able to engage the News Shopper reporter in a
conversation on the difficulties of running a newspaper in an internet age and
generally lending an ear to all the conversations going on around me. I believe it was
former councillor Ray Sams who hoped that the next time that UKIP leader Nigel Farage took a flight in a light aeroplane it would crash with more final
results than last time. Whether he knew the man he was talking to is on the
UKIP
Bexley Branch Committee I do not know. Definitely the nasty party, Tories that is, not UKIP obviously!
To
find out what may have happened during yet another Closed Session I had to turn
to Twitter and I provided a selection
of Tweets last Thursday, but there were more.
The gist of things is that Bexley Tories saw no public and no webcams as an
excuse to revert to type, i.e. personal insults and false claims.
Councillor Mabel Ogundayo came in for a particularly vicious attack on account
of her youth and I emailed her to ask if the impression I had gained was
anything near correct.
• You were told you weren’t qualified to make any comment about Bexley’s failures
because you are a new councillor and too young.
• Your educational standards were brought into question.
• You were ignorant because you hadn’t recognised Bexley’s improvements from
absolutely abysmal to merely being worst in London.
Councillor Ogundayo told me that was basically correct adding that she had lived
in the borough since she was a very young girl and had attended every child
related council meeting to learn as much as she could on the subject.
Maybe
she won’t thank me for passing the information on but it was the past her
sell by date councillor Sybil Camsey who is envious of Mabel’s youth and it was
councillor James Hunt who thought the motion must have come from someone else
and Mabel was not bright enough to have thought of it and it was cabinet member
Philip Read who had deluded himself to the extent that he thinks that Bexley
council is doing OK now.
Camsey has long struck me as a nasty piece of work and must have spent too much
time in the presence of fellow Brampton ward councillor Teresa O’Neill. Read’s
similar reputation is well known whilst I have always been a fence sitter where
James Hunt is concerned. Thanks Mabel for helping to make up my mind.
I’m not sure how long we were shut out of the meeting, somewhere between 35 and
45 minutes is my best estimate and when I was allowed back in the public
presence had fallen from around ten to four. Probably the lonely webcast viewer will
have given up too. What a fiasco.