1 April (Part 1) - It may be April 1st but Bexley Tories are lying not joking
It’s been said before that the Twittering of some of Bexley’s Conservative Councillors is quite amusing but that doesn’t mean they have cleaned up their acts and stopped lying.
Yesterday Councillor Craske (Conservative, Blackfen & Lamorbey) announced that cutting the number of Bexley Councillors to 45
had been approved in Parliament which was moderately interesting but what followed was far more so.
A flutter of Twitter activity from Councillors Philip Read (Conservative, Northumberland Heath) and John
Davey (Conservative, Crayford) trod the all too familiar Tory path; they lied. They said that Labour was against the reduced numbers.
Labour Councillors Stefano Borella and Daniel Francis protested but Councillor
Davey insisted they were wrong. In a rewriting of history he insisted that the
Labour group was against cutting the number of Councillors from 63 to 45.
I suppose in a sense John Davey is correct, Labour’s preferred number was 42.
The first talk of reducing
Councillor numbers came from Council Leader Teresa O’Neill in
October 2010 in a newspaper interview, but it was all hot air. The subject was never mentioned again until
Councillor Seán Newman (Labour, Belvedere) put forward a
Motion in 2014.
His Motion was for the number of Councillors to be reduced by a third.
The Tories didn’t like it one bit and voted against it. Councillor Davey’s mumbled
response included references to Stalin and Karl Marx.
Councillors Read and Craske summoned up rather more intelligent responses which would not be especially difficult.
Labour Motion rejected by Tories in 2014.
The Conservatives threw out the Labour Motion and substituted their own which avoided the mention of any specific number.
It
doesn’t suit the Conservative’ 2017 propaganda but the News Shopper reported how the Tory Turkeys refused to vote for Christmas. The report is still on their website. (Click image.)
The message being put out by Bexley Councillors now, that Labour Councillors did not back the reduction in Councillor numbers, is basically a lie.
Tory lies do not stop at claiming that the Labour group was against reducing Councillor numbers of course, they are very keen
that you should think that the street cleaning budget has been raised. The truth is rather different, it is being slashed.
Any extra investment in the coming election year has come from under spending last year’s budget. They are giving back a little of what was ‘stolen’ last year and most residents will fall for it.