20 August (Part 2) - Sad, Bad and Mad
I suspect I go to more Council meetings than any Councillor but maybe not as often as another
Bexley resident. It might be a close run thing but where John Watson would
easily beat my attendance record is in the time he has been doing it. I first
went to a Bexley Council meeting in 2010 but John claims to have been studying
Bexley Council for 35 years. Like me he discovered they are fundamentally
dishonest and was not prepared to look the other way.
Over those 35 years John has made a lot of contacts and he frequently teases me
with snippets of information he is fed by friends within the
Council. I never know whether to believe him because he claims to get more such contacts than I do.
John has always believed that Bexley Council is seriously concerned about a group of old
men who will not stop exposing their dubious behaviour. I suppose there must be
some truth in it or they’d ignore us instead of reporting us to the police or
going on to TV to lie their socks off or simply
refusing to answer questions
when a bit of honesty would defuse the situation. Sometimes they are just plain
vindictive for no obvious reason. Maybe they are terrified the truth might leak out.
I
suppose the readership of BiB may be big enough to damage Bexley Council but most residents of the borough are still in ignorance of the
dishonesty rife among most of the top Tories.
Bexley Council recently claimed to be getting two million visits a year to their website which didn’t seem very high
to me; it’s fewer than four times as many as Bonkers. Perhaps BiB does seriously worry them after all.
One of the things John claims to have been told is that the old fogies who give
the Council a hard time are known as the Sad, the Bad and the Mad. I have no idea if all three epithets
refer to the whole group of Council critics or they are individual references to the three who attend public meetings most often.
I
don’t much mind being labelled Sad. Exposing Bexley Council to scrutiny daily is
as hobbies go, undoubtedly fairly well up the Sad Index and it is certainly sad that someone needs to do it.
However the Bad must surely be Council Leader Teresa O’Neill and the Mad has to
be Chief Executive Gill Steward. Mad to come here and
mad to do stupid things with no thought for the consequences.
Teresa O’Neill is undoubtedly Bad but she is also very cunning. Never once in
the time I have been watching has she laid herself open to direct and serious criticism even
though she must have approved every bad or unpopular decision her Council has ever
taken. She got close to being in trouble when her predecessor abused his
Council Credit Card and left about £2,300 unaccounted for. She was his Deputy at
the time and claimed to know nothing about the card. Most people took that with a pinch of salt.