19 March (Part 2) - Bexley’s malign influence gets everywhere
Unusually I didn’t pay much attention to yesterday’s budget speech. Nothing
George Osborne might say was likely to have as much effect on my finances as the email that
came from my bank earlier in the day to say that the interest rate on my current account balance
was to be reduced from 1·1% to absolutely nothing.
With savings rates being so low I have been lazy and left more money in the current account
than might be considered normal. Having seen 16% mortgage rates when I had no money and 0%
savings rates after I accumulated a little I should probably find it hard to believe that those
still aspiring to get on the housing ladder are having an even more difficult time, but that does appear to
be the case. While small minds argue in Bexley’s council chamber as to whose
fault it is, the fact remains the country as a whole is in as big a mess as Bexley is.
Times have changed and a willingness to live in a house with no television and only two chairs (borrowed deckchairs
actually) and never eating out appear to have evaporated so now we will have
fewer libraries, parks and playgrounds instead. Money doesn’t grow on trees, apart perhaps for the supplier of
the £7,000 a year specimen in the council offices.
But I digress too much; I should have taken more notice of yesterday’s budget because it is only now
that I am waking up to the fact that it was almost a Bexley budget.
The
Treasury Team posing for the cameras outside Number 11 included councillor Sharon Massey’s
brother Gareth Johnson (MP for Dartford) and Mrs. Alex Sawyer (Priti Patel).
Maybe I shouldn’t think about voting Tory again at the next General Election if
there is any chance at all of the Massey’s having an input on policy.
Presumably the Chancellor did not find time within his speech to complain about his inadequate
remuneration (as Sharon did at the
last Bexley council meeting) but if Priti Patel follows the Sawyer line it
could be that neither Hyde Park nor the Serpentine is any safer than Bexley’s parks and water features.
Bexley council has form for infiltrating the upper tiers of government. It
formed the core of Boris Johnson’s election campaign teams in 2008 and 2012
which may explain why Boris has looked favourably on Teresa O’Neill and the
Metropolitan Police which Boris controls through the Commissioner
has had a tendency to look the other way when Bexley council breaks the law. (Ian
Clement, obscenities associated with Peter Craske’s phone line, illegally closed
bridleways and false allegations of misbehaviour in the council chamber.)
