15 September - Smoke and Mirrors
I didn’t remember until this morning that Bexley-is-Bonkers is eight years old
today. 4,265 blogs under the belt and a total of 5,318 pages.
It all started with a Bexley Council lie posted to the BiB Home page. I naively
thought it was a one-off but big enough to deserve some publicity and then found
myself deluged by Bexley residents keen to show me that Council lies were a commonplace. To this day
the Home page remains a repository for the biggest of lies while
the blog, which was tacked on as an afterthought, has largely taken over the site.
A small number of Bexley Tory Councillors are responsible for the majority of the lies but some come from the
Council too, presumably on the direction of the governing party. In recent
months Councillors have become much more careful and outright lies are now usually
replaced by deceptions and omissions designed to fool the electorate. The amount of explanation required
to expose them is usually too much for a blog on which readers will want to spend no more than a couple of
minutes. A clever strategy by head spin doctor Peter Craske and coupled with the fact that Bexley Council can
justifiably claim a number of successes it is probably enough to keep the
Conservatives in power.
Councillor Philip Read posted the following to the Erith & Thamesmead
Conservative Association website a few days ago, it’s quite hard to pull it apart.
I have no idea how many people recommend Bexley to friends, probably no one
knows. Accommodation is cheaper than neighbouring boroughs and I moved here from
Greenwich and wouldn’t want to go back so let’s give Bexley the benefit of the doubt.
Are Bexley’s schools in the top five? Hard to say because there are so
many different ways of measuring performance. The Daily Telegraph’s list of top
Comprehensive Schools shows no Bexley School in the top 100 and Bexley’s
highest rated in the Selective category is at No. 80. Unless Councillor Read is
prepared to provide the source data for his claim it is no more valid than my
assessment is, but it’s a nice soundbite.
The crime rates in Bexley have definitely been low. It has been in the top spot
in five of the last six years and no worse than seventh this millennium.
Presumably that is primarily a credit to the police and a law abiding population?
It’s a
pity that Bexley Tories have to lie and claim they have been in top spot for all of the
past ten years. As well as being first five times they have been second once,
third twice and fourth twice. All the figures are available on
the gov.uk website. There was no need to lie but Bexley Tories just can’t help it.
Bexley has certainly done better than nearby boroughs in attracting inward investment; a
shame perhaps that so much of it has been spent on wrecking roads.
Bexley has also shown itself to be better at the recycling game than other
Councils, however they cannot claim all of the credit. It was the 2002-2006 Labour
administration that introduced the recycling boxes and rocketed Bexley into the top recycling spot.
The Tories took things further when they swapped the black sack based weekly
rubbish system for fortnightly green wheelie bins. It was a good scheme bearing
in mind the EU inspired punitive landfill tax. Unfortunately the refuse
collection service has become gradually worse. First the standard bin size was
reduced, then we had the rules prohibiting raised lids and two years ago garden
waste charges were introduced.
Despite everything Bexley’s refuse service remains among the very best and neither can one
really argue with the claim it has a good collection of tourist attractions.
The
claim that Bexley residents are the happiest in London is of course total
nonsense. The Office of National Statistics goes around wasting your hard earned
cash collecting that statistic and recently put Bexley in 21st place in London
and virtually out of sight nationally. Maybe the figure 2 got lost somewhere
- or maybe it is a big fat lie.
So Bexley Council is doing a generally first rate job is it? Well maybe not if you scratch
the surface. Some of the cuts imposed are horrific.
Cuts to the Adult Social Care budget range from £860k. last year to £7·9 million
in 2020! Presumably Bexley Tories are banking on there being little chance of
vulnerable adults costing them votes.
But there might be votes to be lost over street cleaning cuts so voters are
having to be told the budget is being increased. Lying comes easy to Bexley Conservatives.
Quite how Bexley can become cleaner by spending less money than when they were elected remains to be seen.
The cleaning budget is down £348k. this year, £418k. next year and £438k. in 2019.
The figures (and images) shown above are from a Labour Party summary of the situation circulated at
the Council meeting of 1st March this year and certified
by the Director of Finance as being wholly correct.
Despite the increasingly expert cover ups, Bexley Council is still lying to you.