28 May (Part 2) - Her obedient servant
Whatever happened to that pre-election petition to restore CCTV
monitoring in Bexley? It showed every sign of being an important Labour versus
Conservative election issue, vote one way and make the borough safer, vote the
other way and see Bexley’s steadily worsening crime statistics continue their current trend.
On 3rd May Bexley’s voters fell for the lie about Labour locally being “hard left” and the
Conservatives dishonest claim that they have managed a low tax borough when it is fairly
close to being the highest taxing borough in the whole of London. Perhaps
because of that Bexley voted for more unsolved crime.
But what of that petition? Unfortunately Bexley Council fell back upon their
tried and tested version of democracy. They threw it out unread.
Bexley
employs a man whose job it is to shield his bosses from scrutiny. His name is Kevin Fox.
Long ago when BiB was assisted by five helpers it was possible to keep more
pressure on Bexley Council than now through the medium of both public questions and petitions.
It was Kevin Fox who was charged with concocting reasons to reject the questions
and his name appeared in these pages regularly.
The excuses were not particularly clever, if a question had to be submitted a
week before a meeting, and it was, he would say he had gone home without seeing
it and by the time he looked the deadline was passed. Sometimes he would stall by asking silly questions, like
asking someone he knew very well to confirm his name or agree that the then
rules allowed photographs to be taken at meetings but refusing
permission nevertheless.
A
petition which quoted from Bexley Council’s website was rejected because Kevin Fox
claimed that the figures quoted were wrong. If they were so was Bexley’s website
because the figures on both were identical.
The CCTV petition suffered a similar fate at the hands of the same Kevin Fox. He
ruled that some residents who gave their address as Sidcup or Bexleyheath were
not valid signatories because they had not added their post code. I was not
aware that any part of Bexleyheath or Sidcup fell outside the borough boundary.
So now the petition has to be run again and to get it before July’s Council meeting
it will have to pass the 2,000 signature threshold by 2nd July.
Get your skates on.