6 January (Part 1) - Sandwell Council on the skids
Some rather disturbing events in Sandwell which is near Birmingham made me
think back on how exposure to scrutiny by Social Media appears to have changed Bexley
Council very considerably. The past couple of years, false Harassment charges aside, have been verging on the uneventful.
When Bonkers began in 2009 Bexley Council was almost unimaginably nuts,
some might say crooked. I thought so before I was reported to the police for “criticising Councillors”
which merely confirmed it. Another blogger was reported for using the C word on Twitter without aiming it
at any identifiable person. In no particular order, let’s list some more funny business.
• Bexley Council blocked a Bridle Way without notifying the Secretary of State
as required by law. They persuaded a Police Officer to provide some false
crime statistics to support their extraordinary decision.
• The parking department drew up a phoney contract with their enforcement
contractor and their bailiffs which included unlawful incentives alongside a
legal contract to bamboozle the gullible. When Bexley’s finance people found
out they were mad about it. I have a copy of their internal report which I
chose not to publish. Too late now I suppose.
• Bexley Council was unable to produce the certification for the first of their
camera equipped parking enforcement vehicles and without it they were operating
and penalising motorists illegally.
• Two children and an adult died in part due to Bexley Council management
failures. The cover ups nearly succeeded but a couple of pricked consciences came
to the fore and upset Bexley’s apple cart.
• Bexley Council employed a charged - and later convicted - paedophile in an office to which
children had access but sacked the employee who complained about their inaction.
• A Bexley Council manager used its CCTV system to monitor a colleague who she was not getting on
with. When the victim took action to restore her reputation the manager falsified the records - which I saw for myself - and her victim was sacked.
• Councillor Craske thought he would get away with writing obscenities about
me and three other people. He did get away with it despite or maybe because of evidence of a crooked
relationship between Bexley Council and Bexley Police. A Detective Sergeant also
referred to the political interference. All that remains of the case is
Councillor Craske’s stained reputation.
• Councillor Cheryl Bacon made a silly procedural error while running a
Scrutiny meeting, a mistake which would have been long forgotten except that
Bexley Council decided it should lie about it and send those lies
to the local press. Their legal people, the Chief Executive and the HR
Manager all repeatedly lied in support of Cheryl Bacon. Unfortunately for them the Police report did not support
their untruthful accounts and neither did the Councillors who
witnessed events. Not one of them supported the lies and four made written
contradictory statements. A year after the event the Police were made to
alter their report to better fit in with the Council’s story. Unfortunately
for everyone who had lied it didn’t fit very well and resulted in a formal
complaint to Scotland Yard. Naturally it was air-brushed into oblivion.
• It was discovered that the Council’s Monitoring Officer did not possess the
qualifications required by his job description and Bexley Council sheltered
itself from scrutiny by labelling their principal critic vexatious.
• It labelled another critic vexatious when he asked the Chief Executive if
Bexley Council always obeyed the law of the land and she refused to reply. They
also employed an expensive lawyer to silence him.
• The former Deputy Leader went on BBC TV to describe how a resident had run amok in the
Council Chamber. It was a tissue of lies and the Deputy Leader couldn’t have
known what he was talking about because he wasn’t present at the meeting he described.
The good news is that with only one or two exceptions the managers
who pushed through all the dishonesty have gone, with fat payouts no doubt,
but gone nevertheless. So has the aforesaid Deputy Leader.
Looking back on those events I wonder if those involving the police had just
one thing in common and that thing gave Bexley Council the confidence to widely flout decency and the law.
The former Chief Executive Will Tuckley came from Croydon to Bexley and
brought along with him Croydon’s Police Chief Superintendent Dave Stringer. When Will Tuckley
moved to Tower Hamlets guess who went with him? Chief Superintendent Dave
Stringer. A year or so ago Will Tuckley was caught up in a £2 million
bribery scandal in Tower Hamlets, not that he was directly implicated of
course but the allegation was that he knew about it for six months before
finding himself with no alternative but to report it to the police. By that
time Chief Superintendent Stringer had left Tower Hamlets under a cloud.
Three identical job location moves seems like one hell of a coincidence.
Maybe reporting me to the police in 2011, charging the blogger who used the
C word, letting Councillor Craske off the hook for his obscenities and
falsifying the Police accounts of Cheryl Bacon’s Scrutiny meeting were all
linked to a cosy relationship between Tuckley and Stringer.
Certainly after the pair of them left things resumed a more normal course.
When Chief Superintendent Peter Ayling was asked to investigate the lies told on
behalf of Councillor Bacon he wisely shunted it over to Greenwich Police.
When Councillor Don Massey reported me to the police for harassment I wrote
to the then Chief Superintendent Jeff Boothe to ensure he knew the facts of the
matter and the case was dropped.
Since then there have been two more Borough Commanders neither of whom has
from my viewpoint put a foot wrong. The police in Sandwell may also be slowly learning
that jumping at every command of the local Council is not a good use of resources.
In Sandwell a blogger by the name of Julian Saunders has been making
Bonkers’ style comments about his local Council and its Labour Leader Steve
Eling threatened his police chief with a report to the Home Office on
contempt charges if he did not immediately arrest Mr. Saunders.
James Morris MP has said in the Commons that Sandwell Council is “synonymous
with incompetence, corruption and cronyism”. Mr. Saunders has been
interviewed by the police on three occasions and he has in the past accused
it of using the police for “purely political reasons”. Just like the Bexley Council of old.
Mr. Saunders may have been unwise to call people Dickheads (†) even when they
act like one but is it really that much worse than ‘twerp’ which has been used
both by me and Bexley Councillors recently?
The police have asked Labour Leader Steve Eling to stop wasting their time and that
it was not their job to stop someone posting “upsetting information that
does not pose any wider threat to you or other Councillors”. Can we say thank goodness
for a police force which still acts sensibly as Bexley’s may have been
doing since the Tuckley/Stringer relationship ended? It looks like that may be premature.
Mr. Saunders’ blog is
The Sandwell Skidder.
In it he claims that he was interviewed under caution and after the police had
told Mr. Eling to go away for the Tweet shown here which if true would appear to
be an extreme abuse of power by the West Midlands police force. Mr. Saunders
thinks they are acting under political duress.
Despite the belated recognition by at least one West Midland officer that the
Labour Leader should grow up Mr. Saunders has been charged with using a rude word on Twitter.
When the C word was used in Bexley the judge in Woolwich Crown Court said it was
no longer considered to be grossly offensive.
The Sandwell case being sub judice I will make no comment here except to say it all gets
very complicated, as no doubt the Harassment case did for many people.
Probably Julian Saunders’ blog uses rather stronger language than Bonkers did
even in its heyday but the basics remains the same, a Council that does not like being in the spotlight.
Bexley still doesn’t and I don’t know why. Its policies
are almost never criticised here as I regard that as a matter for the ballot box
and whilst it may have one of the highest Council Tax rates in London it is a
very long way from being its worst Council.
Would I rather live in Tory Barnet or Labour Greenwich or Newham? No I definitely would not.
It’s just the constant lying that lets Bexley down.
† The asterisked word c*ksucker comes into the case somewhere.