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News and Comment December 2020

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4 December - Birds, Buses, Budgets, Breaches and Bad Boys

This blog continues mainly as a lockdown time filler and because every time I suggest it must stop people offer kind words and urge me to continue. However sometimes there is little to report and a break is welcome.

Bird tableOne of the advantages of living near a fly tipping site is the occasional availability of timber, sometimes totally unused and complete with bar code stickers. Pallets are especially useful, rough bits go to my son for his wood burning stove and some is stored on my garage floor.

My old bird feeding table is on its last legs and I have been making a new one. I am appalled at how slow I am doing such things these days and I am going to have to hunt around for oddments to make its roof. There is going to be a lot more to it than what is seen here and it will be capable of easy disassembly and adjustable shelf and feeder heights. Maybe I should patent it.

The postbag has brought forward a mixture of the serious and maybe silly as you will see if you continue. The first of these took me back a few years but has almost nothing to do with Bexley Council


The wheels come off in Bexley!
Bus 557 TrolleyOne of my earliest memories is waiting for a bus to Hackney with my parents half way along the Lea Bridge Road where we lived. It must have been 1948 or early 1949. A six tandem wheeled trolley bus came over the humped railway bridge and as it did so the rear nearside wheel fell off, tipped over and rolled backwards over the hump of the bridge and disappeared doing what damage I know not.

The one shown here bears the correct route number and is preserved by The East Anglia Transport Museum near Lowestoft.

Something similar happened to a school bus in Erith on Wednesday. The wheel simply fell off. Not a TfL vehicle I hasten to add but GN07 EUU which I think looks something like the one pictured here and sub-contracted to Bexley Council

My wood burning son is a bit of an expert on bus safety and I have heard a few stories about bus accidents in my time, but not about TfL.


Breach of contract?
From within Bexley Council comes another tale of discontent. Apparently some staff have contracts which provide pay increments dependent on a good standard of performance. Seems fair enough.

This year the complaint is that although performance standards have been more than satisfactory there will be no bonus or increment on the grounds that “we can’t afford it”. Will that apply to the Chief Executive who is also on an incremental scale? Maybe it is academic because she has not reached the standard required. Who would make that judgment?


Medium Term Financial Statement
Reading through the Medium Term Financial Statement, as one does, I was glad when I got to the end of it.
MTFS
The end showed it had been written by an unfamiliar name. Simon Little.

I would guess that Bexley Council has hired in a new Mr. Fixit.

Simon Little has recently been briefly employed by Surrey Heath Council (Camberley), East Essex County, Broadland (Norfolk) and the notorious OneSource (Newham and Havering).

Either he is very good and in demand or it is another example of jobs for the boys and girls handed out by existing former OneSource and Newham staff.

Let’s hope it is the former.


A look back in time
TwitterI don’t think I have ever initiated a Twitter thread except to announce a new blog because I fear I might be dragged into deep water. Yesterday I answered someone’s question and it led to a load of old history being re-examined.

A new follower going by the name of @shantazhir had found an old and outdated reference on a page (not a blog page) written in 2014 and I answered him as best I could within Twitter’s 280 characters.

He responded by implying that all Councillors are disreputable having found some even older web pages. He did well to find them, the years 2013 to 2019 inclusive have been mainly absent for ages and the Indexing facility which can assemble groups of old blogs on the fly is currently disabled except for 2013 and 2020. It is needle in a haystack time trying to find old stuff right now.

I don’t think Councillors are crooked but if I was asked to name one who I am sure would always tell the truth when within ear shot of the Leader, I am not sure I could. Away from prying ears? Two. Maybe four if I stretch things to the limits of trust.

I once had a written apology from a Councillor for ignoring me because the esteemed Leader was close by.

To save @shantazhir the bother of hunting for that elusive needle, here are a few facts and statistics from the dim and distant past. I doubt we will see the like of it again.

• Number of times a Bexley Councillor has maliciously reported a resident to the police for something they most definitely have not done. Four.
• Number of nights a Bexley resident has spent in police cells because of a totally untrue accusation by a Bexley Councillor. One.
• Number of Bexley Councillors and staff reported to the police by residents because of crimes committed against them. Six.
• Number of Councillors and staff referred to the Crown Prosecution Service for alleged crimes. Five.
• Number of Councillors arrested by police who had proved their crime to their own satisfaction. One.
• Number of Councillors who have stood in a Court Witness Box and sworn statements against a resident which they absolutely knew for certain was untrue. Two.
• Number of Council legal staff who have stood before a Judge in support of their malicious persecution of a resident. Two. (The Judge did not believe them.)
• Number of Councillors appearing on TV for a significant amount of time reporting on incidents of which they had no direct knowledge and which every single word was a lie. One. (I still have the recording.)
• Number of times an at risk child has died in Bexley after Council staff ignored reports from doctors and school teachers. Two.
• Number of times a vulnerable adult has died alone in Bexley as a direct result of poor managerial decisions and subsequently covered up by senior staff and Councillors. One.
• Number of times that Bexley Council has put out a totally false Press Release in defence of their dubious and possibly criminal actions. Innumerable.

All the foregoing has at one time or another been reported on this blog without challenge. Very few of those referenced remain as Councillors. Only one of the foregoing was Labour and is no longer in post. All of the incidents are from 2015 or earlier. Whatever @shantashir thinks, Bexley is not what it was.

In my opinion the current Mayor is entirely innocent of any aspersions cast by my new Twitter follower.

 

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