8 April - Bexley Council’s lie machine goes to court
With nothing much going on I thought I would check with John Watson how his
Judicial Review tussle with our lying Council was getting on.
You may recall that John took Bexley Council to task following their
stitching up of Councillor Maxine Fothergill in revenge for her reporting a
Conservative party official to the police for theft. As you would expect, he got absolutely nowhere
because Councillors fear retribution from Leader O’Neill if they spill any of her secrets.
It was perhaps in desperation that he wrote to Chief Executive Gill Steward to
ask if she would kindly confirm that Bexley Council would always comply with the law of the land.
It was probably a bit of a ‘when did you stop beating your wife’ style of
question but you would think an honest Chief Executive could have sent a one
sentence reply that said “always” even if it would be taken with a degree of scepticism by those who know better.
Ms. Steward refused a reply of any description and if she had done that to me
I would have simply seized upon the confirmation that Gill Steward is an
over-paid Chief Executive willing to break the law whenever circumstances demand
it, and trumpeted that fact at every opportunity.
But John Watson thought that Steward should be embarrassed further than that and
he asked for her refusal to confirm that Bexley Council is a law abiding
organisation to be Judicially Reviewed.
This is his application which is clear and straight forward and probably stood a
good chance of success if he could get it to court. Which court would agree that
Councils obeying the law or not is optional?
John should have known better. He knows as well as I do that Bexley Council has a track record of interfering with
judicial processes whenever it has been caught out breaking the law. I’ve given
him information about nobbling the CPS and pressurising the local police several
times. John knows that the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards has
uncovered a lot of information about both activities and given me reason to be
optimistic about the outcome. Yet he went ahead with his Judicial Review anyway.
What stunt would Bexley Council pull to subvert justice this time?
Well according to John earlier this week they hired a QC and told him to
intercede with the judge with a story that John wished to overturn the decision
taken at the Code of Conduct Committee against Councillor Fothergill.
Bexley Council’s own meeting Agenda confirms their intention to lie. (See associated image.)
I suppose John might well have wanted to see Councillor Fothergill’s difficult to justify conviction overturned
but that was not what he was asking the Judge to consider, that was the simple question displayed
above. The Judge took the word of the QC against a nobody being abused by a corrupt Council and refused
John Watson’s application. Didn’t even look at it according to him. If he had read as far as
Section 3 he may have seen that he had been hoodwinked by Bexley Council.
The current situation is that Bexley Council’s solicitor, not their Head of Legal Akin Alabi
who is not UK qualified, has written to John Watson
giving him two weeks to cough up £1,400 (I have forgotten the precise figure).
And you might wonder why BiB so often says that Bexley is a Council built upon lies?
And it is almost impossible to fight back when officialdom has a Common Purpose.