30 September - Of snowflakes and melts

Bexley’s Code of Conduct Committee held one of its rare meetings last week; the usual waste of time. Without names and the ability to check out what Councillors supposedly did wrong, just what is the point? How can residents get any insight into the character of the Committee, the accused or the accuser? It might as well not be held in public at all.

At the last meeting I attended, more than a year ago, the accuser was the Labour Group keen to seek revenge on the Independent Councillor for Thamesmead East. Their complaint was out of time and a decision was promised within two weeks. In February we were still waiting for that decision. There is a probable reference to it in the Agenda extract below.

Last week the complaints were mainly about Tweets, no one will be surprised, but who are the snowflakes who get worked up about the musings of Councillor Davey and the like?

He gets it in the neck regularly for arguing with the Left while the poisonous duo who post deceptions regularly under the pseudonym @bexleynews are untouchable because of their cowardly anonymity.

I used to welcome Councillor Read’s Tweets and miss them now that he has gone a bit quiet and I will always defend Councillor Davey while he continues to make me laugh at the expense of the Left.

I slightly regret my comment in January 2018 that Sadiq Khan is the worst thing to hit London since the Luftwaffe because John Davey used the same turn of phrase a couple of weeks later and finished up being a news item in the local rag.

But not for the first time, Councillor John Davey was right on the money.

Extract from last week’s Agenda.

 

28 September - The Loony Left and their tolerance of state violence

Twitter can be a cesspit. With rare exceptions I have used it only to advertise some of the blogs published here and even then delete them a few weeks later when I judge they have served their purpose.

Three months ago I decided to take a rest from it and Tweeted no more, I even withdrew the icon that appears on the banner above and considered cancelling the account altogether. However on Saturday I returned to the fetid pool.

I had posted a blog which included a video of a police officer flooring a woman with a vicious punch.

I am very aware that I am old school but I cannot find any excuse for doing that to any woman even though, as has been widely reported, she had been waggling her Selfie Stick in the police officer’s face.

The associated Tweet said that the Met. Police was out of control and deserved no respect. However according to some they are not and they do because of the tragic events in Croydon on Friday. The logic is the same as not being able to complain about the trains being late the day after a railway accident far away.

Twitter is full of people who do not possess any powers of logic. I called the protesters in Trafalgar Square lunatics and nuts although in retrospect I should have made it clearer that was a reference to their stage acts and not the people in attendance who when interviewed appeared to be sane and rational.

Calling them lunatics and nuts did not stop Daniel Jenkins from saying I was a sympathiser. My sympathy lay only with the younger generation not having their lives ruined in order to save the geriatrics like me and I said so. I know of no one my age who disagrees with that view.

But there are bigger idiots on Twitter than those who cannot read properly, there are total ignoramuses who know nothing and are proud of it.

They are the blinkered individuals who believe the police can do no wrong and wouldn’t go around arranging murder, planting drugs and stealing the proceeds of armed robberies. It is all well documented and in books you can buy on Amazon. None of the authors have been challenged.

A couple of them I have met and they are merely seekers of truth. All a bit too far to the Left for my taste but good men nevertheless. They have produced TV series and award winning Podcasts on the subject too.

Most famously is the Daniel Morgan case and the long series of cover-ups of the circumstance of his murder. After a succession of Labour Home Secretaries of the same persuasion as Christine Harwood refused to disbelieve their saintliness, Theresa May saw that something odd was going on. She authorised an enquiry which was asked to report a year later.

Attempts to thwart it by the establishment wasted the first few months and saw its Chairman leave his post after its original aims were apparently subverted. As a result of that and other obstructions placed in its path the enquiry is still ongoing nearly eight years later. The most senior officers named in the media daily are responsible for collaborating with the enquiry which is probably not helping it uncover the truth one little bit.

Christine Harwood is not only ignorant but keen to insult those who know better than she does, but jibes about mental health issues is relatively mild compared to some.

This delightful individual somehow likens me to Oswald Mosley, his Brown Shirts and the British Union of Fascists. How can any fully functioning brain link the abhorrence of violence to Facism?

I’m a Fascist for calling those on the stage at last Saturday’s rally lunatics and nuts and firmly believing that police officers who punch women are thugs and along with their leaders who accept it deserve no respect; whatever precious day of the week it is. Violence is violence on a Saturday as well as a Friday.

Madam Lovelace displays a total lack of knowledge of political history which is perhaps unsurprising when her own Profile boasts of a closed mind. “Those who don’t follow me your (sic) blocked.”

With the moniker ‘No time for Racists’ you can be pretty sure that we have the sort of person the Labour Party has always been so very unfortunate to attract.

Another of that type but with a particularly vindictive streak is Sidcup4Remain who is probably wise to remain anonymous although I am pretty sure it must be a Labour Party activist.

For objecting to police violence at a protest led by people who I thought were on the lunatic and nutty fringe it is apparently a good idea to get me into the trouble with the police by referring my views to them - four times over!

Throughout my lifetime politics has attracted unpleasant individuals and never more so than now when too many of them end up in Parliament. Sidcup4Remain is the very essence of obsessive and ignorant politics.

I had considered blocking all of the accounts mentioned here today but upon reflection that is not sensible. The ignorant need educating so why cut them off from the truth?

 

27 September (Part 2) - The Left is just plain nasty

As someone who has had a family member murdered on the instructions of police and being very aware that they have been prepared to murder officers who speak up about their own wrongdoing I freely admit I have no respect for the police whatsoever. The Metropolitan Police admits they are corrupt, I have a copy of the letter that admits to it and fairly recent events in which I was involved confirm it absolutely.

Recent events in Croydon do not make that history go away. The Left leaning lot who run the anonymous Twitter account @Sidcup4Remain take a different view and they are entitled to it, probably they have not been subjected to police harassment, obstruction and lies as part of my family has for the past 33 years. Lucky them.

However I do take exception to my legitimate view being referred to the police. (See Tweet.)

The Left wing of politics is plagued by unpleasant people. @Sidcup4Remain will shortly become the only account on my Twitter Block list.

 

27 September (Part 1) - Only too predictable

You didn’t need to be Mystic Meg - why do we say that? I don’t even know who she is - to predict that the Conservatives would slump in the opinion polls two weeks after ratcheting up their Police State. (“The next set of opinion polls should be interesting.”)

Their Rule of Six is totally arbitrary as the Clown Party has freely admitted; the two metre rule is not what the World Health Organisation recommended and the pubs shut at ten edict has backfired spectacularly by creating a crush on the streets now that people cannot drift home at a time to suit themselves.

Nothing the Conservatives have done has made total sense. Covid test facilities miles away or completely unavailable. Test results slow and inaccurate and mobile phone apps that don’t work. The Prime Minister is in thrall to false statistics and is making far too many mistakes, many of which lead to premature deaths.

The weird thing is that you can find opinion polls that suggest more than 70% of the population think the Police State should be extended further which is not exactly compatible with Westminster voting intentions. I suspect the former poll results are from people who do not believe restrictions should apply to them

Goodness knows what the figures would be if the Leader of the Opposition had not proven his ineptitude as a Director of Public Prosecutions and has the charisma of a tub of Play-Doh.

 

26 September - Lunatics and wild animals

I had some boring letters to write and attempted to make the job less tedious by at the same time watching the live stream from Trafalgar Square where the lockdown protestors were holding some sort of rally.

I confess to having some sympathy with their cause; I cannot see the sense of ruining my granddaughter’s future to save me from a fairly minuscule risk of dying from Covid19. If you asked me if Boris Johnson had lost his mind and been bamboozled by false statistics I would have to say, “yes, most definitely”.

What I saw happening in Trafalgar Square from midday onwards was very disappointing. There were juvenile and mildly vulgar songs, references to some New World Order which are probably a little far fetched, references to doing away with cash so that the population can be more tightly controlled, which may have the ring of truth about it and then Jeremy Corbyn’s brother blaming everything on 5G telephony.

All pretty much nuts and nothing really relevant to Covid19, nothing sensible anyway. And so it went on for two hours and 55 minutes before the allegedly prominent German Doctor Heiko Schöning was rolled out to hopefully inject a little more sense into the proceedings. And all hell broke out.

Uniformed thugs plunged into a peaceful crowd in order to silence the doctor in the way the Metropolitan Police know best. They set about men, elderly women and mothers protecting their children with batons to the head, although what sort of mother takes a young child to such a gathering is a little beyond my comprehension.

Ultimately the German doctor was arrested for trying to address his concerns about Coronavirus while those who wanted to listen to him were verbally abused by a policewoman who successfully achieved her ambition to appear on video as an ugly aggressive bitch.

What is happening to this country? The police kneel before Black Lives matter protestors and ignore Extinction Rebellion, Muslims marching in Oxford Street and hooligans defacing statues and the Cenotaph.

Maybe the lockdown protestors should have been fined and asked to leave as Councillor Danny Hackett (Independent, Thamesmead East) suggests but that is a far cry from indiscriminately splitting skulls which is Dick’s thug force’s preferred mode of operation.

Yesterday the police were seeking sympathy for the events in Croydon but thuggery like this shows them in their true light. Never ever trust any police officer.

Images such as this will be circulated around the world and the reputation of British policing will be trashed forever, and deservedly so. Whatever the lady did, provocation or not, does not deserve that degree of viciousness.

 

25 September - Who would you believe?

Bexley Conservatives have been putting out an awful lot of propaganda recently most of it aimed at showing Bexley to be a better managed borough than Greenwich which some will think is not such an enormous achievement.

Their claims are not all wrong but some are near impossible to follow, such as this one.

Lachlan Leeming the BBC funded Democracy Reporter for the three local boroughs says that Bexley is the worst Covid19 performer while Bexley Conservatives imply that all is well. A 32% improvement on the previous week.

Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph said that Bexley’s positive tests per 100k rate was 20·5 with Greenwich at 13·3 and Bromley 14·4. Croydon and Merton were the best in :London at three points lower.

Let’s be generous and recognise that Bexley Tories were on 21st September probably basing things on the previous week’s figures and that the data for the 19th September really was 32% lower than the previous week.

Whoops! I don’t think so. (Left hand image below.)

I suppose it is always possible that Bexley Conservatives were looking back even further, so better check that.

No, go back another week and there is stil nothing to support the Tories claim. (Right hand image.)
Source of left hand image: https://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/18732079.coronavirus-london-boroughs-highest-infection-rate/
Source of right hand image: https://www.mylondon.news/news/health/london-coronavirus-cases-latest-update-18896532

So there you have it. The infection rate in Bexley has been 11·7, 12·9, 20·5 and now 21·8 but according to Bexley Tories somewhere along the way we have scored a 32% reduction. Ignore the Tory propaganda; masks on and in bed by ten o’clock please.

Lying and setting up a false sense of security is downright dangerous and the Conservative duo who put out such rubbish are a menace to our state of health.

The Telegraph map shows that Bexley is a sole isolated non-green borough in the South East.

 

23 September - A snitch down the line results in a fine

I thought I would risk a short spell in prison by turning on my unlicensed television to watch the buffoon on the box but after two months of disuse I couldn’t find the remote control. The radio came to the rescue.

I might have more time for him if he wasn’t so keen to listen to the discredited Halfwhitty and Unbalanced. Their grasp of statistics appears to be as poor as Neil Ferguson’s.

As Chris Kirk-Blythe says is his the letter to the Daily Telegraph, if that hapless pair are right and everything is getting twice as bad every seven days then we are all dead by Christmas.

But is everything doubling every seven days? It seems not. It is just another scare tactic.

The Office of National Statistics says that Covid19 deaths were 1% of the total in the first week of September and the second lowest since March.

There were 3,330 new cases (positive tests) on 13th September and 3,889 a week later.

Another of their so called facts is that we are two to three weeks behind France which had 9,406 cases on September 11th and 13,215 a week later so maybe we will get around 10,000 in another couple of weeks. 10,000 is a long way short of 50,000. Where did that pair of chumps get their figure from?

France is not in national lockdown. My BBC journalist daughter is working from home. Her childhood friend who does the same job for French TV is back in the office. She was not given a choice.

If Boris Johnson is following the wrong science no wonder he is making such a mess of things.

His latest round of restrictions don’t affect me directly and won’t unless he changes the bubble arrangements although his cancellation of two cancer related hospital appointments may eventually.

What I simply will not forgive when it comes to voting time is his eagerness to impose punitive fines.

If Bexley Council issues you with a parking fine you can appeal, to the adjudicator if necessary. If someone snitches on you for having six guests in your garden the penalty can be £10,000 without any right of appeal.

Boris Johnson is behaving like a banana republic tyrant who is too fond of the bottle.

 

22 September (Part 2) - It’s not only Bexley that is Bonkers

The Low Bridge sign which has just gone up in Felixstowe Road a car’s length beyond the boundary with Greenwich had me fooled for a moment. The obstruction 110 yards ahead is a width restrictor and someone has carelessly put the sign up the wrong way round.

The bridge referred to is the Harrow Manorway flyover which represents a hazard for tall vehicles. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. At one of the Crossrail Liaison Panel meetings the Bexley Council representative said the road would be lowered to allow free passage. It has been to a limited extent but unfortunately not by very much.

Far sillier is that the dip is offset from the flyover such that at its western edge the road beneath is not lowered at all. Not even a little bit.

Theoretically a tall vehicle could approach from the eastern direction, squeeze under the flyover thanks to the dip but not be able to get out at the far side.

Bexley is bonkers but so very often is Greenwich. Worse is Brighton keen to push its Green credentials. It is a bone of contention among EV drivers down there that the Council installs electric vehicle chargers but doesn’t designate the associated space as EV only so as chargers they are virtually useless.

Now it has gone one further, the latest tranche of lamp post chargers has been installed along roads on which you are not permitted to stop at all.

Why are Council staff so consistently stupid? They wouldn’t last five minutes if their job security was not virtually bombproof.

 

22 September (Part 1) - Nothing much changes

In odd moments I have been restoring old blogs. For technical reasons it makes sense to start on the oldest first and I am now up to November 2010. Some of the old stuff looks to be very trivial in retrospect but probably no worse than today’s. Councillors back then were always prepared to bend the truth if they could get away with words carefully chosen to deceive.

For example, the Council hired Parsons Brinkerhoff to advise them on road design and paid them around £4 million. What did we get from that? Nothing discernible.

However at a Council meeting Councillor Craske denied there was a £4 million contract and on that basis refused to answer questions about it claiming that there was no such contract.

The truth was that there was more than one contract and the total cost was £4 million. So no single £4 million contract. Clever, devious or dishonest? Untrustworthy certainly.

A similar device was employed yesterday by Councillor John Davey (Conservative West Heath). I enjoy reading John’s Tweets, usually amusing, frequently putting the boot into Sadiq Khan and recently making mincemeat of a would-be Labour MP. But then he engaged with someone who was advocating taking Bexley back to the 1950s when cars were few and far between. John said he was happy to use his car for which he was accused of listening to black cab drivers at the Conservative Club. John replied that he was not a member. Why would the master Tweeter do that?

But he can claim it is true because he is Chairman of the Association, not a Club.

Yesterday TfL sent me an email to inform me that today is Car Free Day. I think I might celebrate by driving to Sainsbury’s instead of walking. London will not survive on pedal power and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. There’s a contradiction if ever there was one. They cause gridlock and are a massive blow to the economy.

 

21 September (Part 2) - Golden oldies

The Summer of 1959 was a good one and from every open window the Light Programme and every Dansette record player was belting out Cliff Richard’s Living Doll. Not quite 16 at the time the song was imprinted into juvenile minds and, you can laugh if you wish, I acquired a liking for Cliff and the Shadows.

It’s probably why I bought his 1979 album Rock ‘n’ Roll Juvenile. It’s not all up beat stuff and a couple of tracks found success as singles. ‘Carrie (doesn’t live here any more)’ and ‘We don’t talk anymore’.

Not likely to be one of Boris Johnson’s favourite tracks. It’s a prophetic album predicting Sadiq Khan’s mayoralty. The third track is ‘Cities may fall’.

If I speak frankly, I must tell you that I don’t own any albums by Christian Zacharias.

(Whatever is he going on about now?)

 

21 September - Not as Smart as they think

It’s not only on Covid19 that the newspapers are full of scare stories. Just a couple of days ago they were telling us that the energy companies are planning to remotely close down any household devices that use a lot of electricity. Car chargers (32 amps) and heat pumps, the favoured replacement for gas boilers.

Heat pumps are a sort of reverse refrigerator. Powerful compressors use a lot of electricity but can push three times as much back into your radiators. That’s the theory anyway and a friend who has one seems to be happy with his.

But the newspapers are asking where the electricity is coming from. The National Grid says there is plenty available but it might be necessary to smooth out demand a bit.

A year ago I was asked to trial the rationing system known as Flexible Responsive Energy Delivery but I declined. I didn’t think my electricity use was anywhere near typical.

In theory it can switch off car battery charging as described in the Telegraph article last Saturday. In practice it can’t, at least not for now. All you have to do is pull the Cat5 cable from the router. Job done.

Presumably in due course such systems will work via the mobile telephone network. How much does a decent Faraday cage cost?

A better way of smoothing electricity demand is to use batteries and that is already being done to some extent in the UK and on a much bigger scale where they can be more reliably charged from solar energy. Australia is the most quoted example.

When electric cars are widespread big batteries will be ubiquitous and the technology already exists to let them power your house. The Japanese charging protocols allowed for it but unfortunately the EU standard which is a loosely designed mess doesn’t, but there are sure to be revisions to the standards before too long.

Unfortunately if the Loon of London gets his way we won’t have cars and bike batteries probably won’t run a kettle for long. Politicians and joined up thinking? There’s a non-sequitur if ever there was one.

 

20 September - de Pfeffel the Clown has finally lost it - totally!

Who would have believed that it would be a Conservative government that introduced the police state? OK to celebrate the life of a foreign career criminal, I thought that was only for my Lefty MP. OK to bring London to a halt and ensure its speedy demise, I thought that was the job of extreme Left Mayors, but not OK to campaign for Freedom.

Despite my 100% lifetime record, Danny Hackett excepted, never ever will I vote Conservative again.

I don’t suppose Dodo’s test and trace people will ever call me because I don’t see the need to go to pubs and restaurants right now. However, just in case, the number they call contacts from is blocked by both my phones.

Right, I am off to celebrate my birthday, One two, three, four, five, six…

 

19 September (Part 2) - A Cabinet arse elbows his way into the realm of false statistics

I listen to too much talk radio, not nearly as much LBC as a few months ago although it is on right now, because far too much of the Monday to Friday schedule has become so unrelenting left wing. I could listen to James O’Brien for a couple of hours but not the same drivel all day long.

Yesterday morning I was listening to the gabble-fest which is Julia Hartley-Brewer’s breakfast show on TalkRadio. She was interviewing a man who claimed to be the Health Secretary but maybe I got that wrong because his knowledge of anatomy appeared to be zero. Certainly he did not know his arse from his elbow.

When asked how many Corona victims were in hospital in the allegedly worst Covid19 hotspot, Bolton, he didn’t know but it was “a lot”. The official count was two.

The test numbers are all over the place daily but being treated as if they were Gospel and I was confused by all the statistics relating to test accuracy. I have heard doctors arguing about Hancock’s figures and how he is abusing the statistics to confuse the gullible and the easily confused, i.e. me. I didn’t really understand the discrepancies under discussion.

Then I stumbled across this graphic. Ignore the accuracy figure in the yellow box because it is nonsense, but just follow the arithmetic to establish the principle.

A thousand people of whom 5% are, or thought to be, infected makes 950 healthy and 50 with the bug. That’s the easy bit.

But there is a 10% failure rate so the 50 divides into 45 infected and five healthy. On the other side of the equation the 950 drops to 855 negative with the other 95 assumed to be positive tests.

Now swap the wrong results into the correct box, the third row down on the graphic. 140 out of a thousand are now said to have tested postive but only 45 definitely are. False positives rise to 68% of those deemed to be postive by the test.

I am not convinced the graphic is exactly right because I don’t follow every last detail but I get the general idea. Let’s move on to real figures.

On 7th September the number of tests (Government figures) was 169,930. 3,447 were positive. Matt Hancock said on TalkRadio that the false results were under 1%, a quick bit of research says it might be 0.8%.

0.8% of the 169,930 tests creates 1,359 false positives. 1,359 false out of 3,447. That’s 39% of reported cases being wrong.

I’m not sure why I bothered with the graphic now, it suddenly makes sense.

In April the Government was keen to scare us all with the death numbers but the numbers have thankfully fallen to barely double figures and as everyone knows only big numbers make an impression.

A big number is needed to keep the the paranoid sufficiently paranoid. The way to do that is to publish the number of positive tests rather than deaths as was the case during the peak. Then inflate the largely meaningless figure by about 40% and include people who are showing no symptoms at all.

I assume that Matt Hancock is not so stupid that he does not know the truth, although no one can be sure, but he appears to be knowingly engaged on an underhand deception. 0.8% false positives sounds as if it might be really impressive, but it isn’t.

 

19 September (Part 1) - A return to Ebbsfleet please

Over the past week or so Bexley Council has been bleating on again about extending the phantom railway otherwise known as the Elizabeth Line through Slade Green to Ebbsfleet. The image to the left is stolen from the News Shopper, click it for their report, but it must have been from a Press Release, you can find the same thing on KentOnline.

I can’t help thinking that Bexley Council was stupid to not lend their support to the project when they came into office in 2006. It was the time when they were against transport infrastructure. They campaigned for no river crossing and did sweet Fanny Adams about a better railway. Instead they stood by while financial pressures following the 2008 melt down put the Abbey Wood extension in jeopardy.

It was left to the then new MP Teresa Pearce to plead the case for the railway in Parliament, but Bexley Council eventually woke up and now they are boasting about the £4·85 million to be spent on how a Crossrail extension might be achieved.

They first boasted about the money seventeen months ago. The project is not going anywhere fast is it?

When I used to speak to Crossrail engineers almost daily they thought it might happen but not perhaps for 35 years or more, the Harrow Manorway flyover is a major impediment.

The magazine New Civil Engineer reported the same view.

 

18 September - Rebellion or financial Armageddon. Which will it be?

The country seems to be divided in two, the incredulous becoming ever more annoyed with the incompetence of government and a smaller number who are paranoid about Coronaviruses. I met my oldest friend a few days ago, oldest only in the sense that I was five years old and she was three when we first met and took up positions at opposite ends of her garden.

As must be apparent by now I am in the ‘life must go carefully on’ category and cannot quite get my head around how incompetent government can be. Who in hell appoints Dodo Harding to be in charge of anything? She earned her deserved reputation as Chief Executive of the worst ISP in the country and nepotism did the rest.

A friend who owns my chosen ISP and has done successfully for twenty odd years relies on buying in connectivity from bigger players. I have several times been told that TalkTalk is absolute barge pole territory.

Then there is Professor Neil Ferguson. Why is the Prime Minister still acting on the predictions of someone who did not cover himself with glory over Foot and Mouth Disease in 2001 or the various influenzas that followed?

Remember how we were all going to die of vCJD; variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease? The human form of mad cow disease. The people who got that so hopelessly wrong now advise Bozo on Coronaviruses. Hasn’t the man got a brain of his own?

Why is the Prime Minister listening to a host of discredited people? As a result he has wrecked the National Health Service which is now not much more than a Covid only service. I have had two cancer related appointments cancelled, one in March and one last week. My childhood eczema has returned presumably due to too much hand washing and nothing can be done about it. All minor stuff compared to some but disgraceful nevertheless.

Then there is the economy. Stay at home, get back to work, stay at home. Which is it today? If working at home is good and effective why are the telephone waiting times for banks and insurance companies so long? I had to phone both yesterday following fraudulent use of my credit card. Saga had a data breach apparently, they kept that quiet didn’t they?

Working at home doesn’t work in all sorts of ways. My son recently took part in a Zoom call with participants stretching from California to Japan. Government regulatory business. It didn’t achieve much, the real business is usually done in the bogs and the coffee shop.

If I was a bit younger I would probably be joining the various freedom marches due soon. The sense of rebellion is on the rise and I don’t see Boris Johnson as Prime Minister material. Actually I never did.

Note: vCJD, the type of CJD linked to mad cow disease BSE kills on average five people a year in the UK. I knew one of those five, lady friend’s brother. I do not know anyone who has died of Coronavirus if I don’t count the suicide caused by the lockdown.

 

17 September - White van man. KR68 ONK

It is eleven months since I registered my dropped kerb for enforcement after a spate of being blocked in by inconsiderate, maybe brain dead, drivers and it has worked like a charm. No one knows my exit has been registered but somehow or other I have not been blocked in since then. Until today.

16 September - Lawless BexleyCo

I suppose the worst thing that Bexley Council has done in the past ten years that is not actually criminal is to sell half of Old Farm Park. I said at the time that the vandalism would be something that would never be forgotten and come back to haunt them at regular intervals.

The publically announced reason for selling the park was that without the money raised the Council would not be able to afford to cut the grass in the remaining parks and they would soon become jungles, along with unflattering references to Greenwich’s parks.

The park was destroyed anyway and the event was celebrated by the smirking faces seen below. There were attempts to pacify local residents with a promise that noisy work and heavy vehicle movements would not extend past 3:30 p.m. Picture below taken four hours later than that. Where is the banksman?

15 September - The rule of (hit it for) six

Bonkers eleventh birthday and there is nothing to celebrate, it will be difficult to string six sentences together.

Today I trimmed my neighbour’s hedge and cut his lawn, if I don’t do it it will never get done because he can’t do it. I have also loaned him a waste bin, a hammer and a garden rake. Somehow I doubt he will be silly enough to snitch on me when it is my birthday next week. A disgraceful Marxist government is trying to destroy any sense of community.

The website is still here, by popular demand one might say, because I had planned to to take it down but was persuaded that no one else would hold Bexley Council to account should that ever be necessary again.

Instead the 2009 blogs and most of 2010’s are restored. Even those few comments reveal shocking antics by Bexley Council ten years ago. And it got worse in later years.

 

14 September (Part 2) - A deceptionist’s delight

If you are not on Twitter, and from tomorrow I might not be, you may not know that a new facility was introduced last month; you can restrict who can reply to your comment.

This is an absolute boon to liars, crooks and Bexley Conservatives. They are now free to lie their socks off content in the knowledge that no one can correct them on Twitter.

It is the sort of dictatorial Conservatism that has unfortunately become the norm.

So the local Labour party cannot counter the Tory’s dishonesty. Bexley-is-Bonkers, while a shadow of its former self fortunately can.

Ten years ago Bexley Council sold its Howbury Estate in Slade Green for £14 million to Redrow Homes and decided that nearly half of the proceeds should be spent on the wealthier parts of the borough leaving only around 8 million for Slade Green.

2,280 residents protested about the loss of facilities and the price increases proposed on those that were to be reinstated.

What the Labour Councillors voted against was the effective theft of £6 million by Bexley Council from the most deprived area in the borough.

In 2011 it was reported that 36·5% of children in Slade Green were living in poverty, 36% left school with no qualifications at all and that the ward was in the top 5% of most deprived wards in the country. Bexley Council had not consulted sufficiently and was reducing their investment below what was possible choosing to spend their windfall where there were more votes to be had.

 

14 September (Part 1) - Choose your dictator

There is some dispute over whether Adolf Hitler ever said this himself or was quoting someone else and not being a German speaker myself I cannot easily find out. Fortunately you don’t need to be a German speaker to know that Government Minister Kit Malthouse is a keen student of German history of the 1930s.

I have been asking friends and acquaintances if they will ever vote Conservative again now that the party so vigorously supports state tyranny to defend us against a bug which is currently killing fewer people than good old fashioned flu and which overall has killed approximately half the number of the last influenza epidemic. The next set of opinion polls should be interesting.

Fortunately for the Conservatives the Labour Leader is even less attractive.

At 77 years of age I feel I am not so stupid that I cannot decide on my own precautions and the youngsters must be allowed to live their lives as fully as possible. If I had teenagers living in the house I might ask them to restrict their visits to the pub but does the whole country have to suffer because of a few old ’uns like me who if suffering ill health are probably not going to live for many years anyway and it is not as if it is a guaranteed death sentence.

The mother of my children is the same age as me and in a pretty bad state health-wise while locked away in a Glaswegian high risk care home. She got the dreaded bug and wasn’t at all good for a couple of days but is now better than she used to be because the hospital not only got her through the Covid but set her up with an improved drugs regime. Apart from that my friends and family have suffered only, only!?, a suicide brought on by the pressures of Boris Johnson’s lockdown.

 

11 September - Lord of Twitter

I have been asked anonymously if the Michael Barnbrook who used to Tweet under the name @sleazebuster is the same Michael Barnbrook who Tweets using the new account @LordBarnbrook. I am afraid it most certainly is.

Twitter effectively robbed Mick of his 17,000 followers and for a while he took the view that it was a blessing in disguise and he told his friends he was not going to get involved with Twitter again, or indeed with chasing his corrupt former employers.

His last foray in that direction was to get Cressida Dick’s office to admit that her appearance on Westminster Bridge was not something that just sort of happened while she was passing by on other business, it was actually a planned appointment listed in her desk diary. Is anyone surprised that someone in high office lies? It is the way into high office.

Mick reported the misconduct to her boss Sadiq Khan and never heard back. As he said and I know very well, you can spend years, literally, chasing corrupt police forces and all you discover is that they always lie confident that no one has the money to chase them through the courts. And judges can be bent too. Probably not as commonly as police are but it happens. Want the details?

I doubt Mick will be as forthright on the new account as he was as @sleazebuster, he has other things to worry about at the moment. I’ll ask him next Thursday when he will be back in the borough.

I am still unsure whether to close my own Twitter account, it’s not been used since mid-July. If you want to get advice of new BiB blogs and can’t be bothered with the RSS feed follow @Mario426 who always Tweets about new material on Bonkers. It’s an automated service that comes from Australia.

 

10 September - Systematic country wrecking by the Bozo

Until the Chinese flu arrived I used to walk to the newsagent to collect a copy of the Daily Telegraph each morning but Project Fear initially persuaded me that it might be too big a risk for a non-essential purchase and in any case it was becoming outrageously expensive. Some belt tightening was required and I came up with another plan. I shared the subscription cost with a friend. She gets a paper copy delivered each morning and I look at the digital version. Not taking the morning walk has done nothing for the belt tightening, quite the reverse, but that is a different issue.

Telegraph readers are probably perplexed when ignorant Lefties call it the Torygraph, it is nothing of the sort and this morning’s issue confirmed it in Spades. It is almost 100% anti-Johnson and quite right too. He is not a Tory, he is nearer to being Communist.

Travel bans, free speech restricted, health pass cards, identity cards, curfews, birthdays cancelled, grandparents banished and street marshals. Before long, mass unemployment and everyone a criminal.

The Telegraph’s front page - Wholly negative about Johnson complete with unflattering picture.
Comment - “Irrational and inconsistent policies”.
Sketch - A ground down nation trapped in a Groundhog Day.
University advice - “Irresponsible”.
Rule of six applies to 38 million people where the virus is at a safe level.
Lord Sumption - “Pandemic fear was excessive”.
Brussels correspondent - “A blunt instrument approach”.
Hunter Davies - Christmas at home or eleven of us down the pub?
Silkie Carlo - “Democracy is sacrificed on the altar of Covid19”.
Michael Deacon - This time they have gone too far and I don’t think people will stand for it.
Editorial - “The strategy of fear is not sustainable”.
Letters - “Unbelievable”.
Cartoons - Anti-Johnson again.

Nowhere does Johnson get any support and the speech radio stations this morning reflect the same views. The Prime Minister has annoyed his most loyal supporters and I know four years is a long time but he seems to be intent on handing power to Captain Hindight.

I have been asked where events referred to yesterday took place. One in Dover and two in Sheffield. Kent Police is a force I am happy to call reedeemably corrupt because I have more than enough evidence of it and Yorkshire is the force that is happy to collude with Councillors to cover up child rape by the culturely diverse community which we are supposed to welcome to our formerly civilised land.

View a video of one of the people hospitalised by uniformed thugs in Kent. Their victim is said to be five foot four inches tall and weighs eight stone.


Note: The list within this blog should appear in two or three columns dependent on screen width but not all browsers support multi-column mode.

 

9 September (Part 2) - The dope on the ropes

I have seen some shocking things on Twitter in recent days. Large numbers of police descending on elderly men and dragging them to the ground. Uniformed thugs throwing a man waving a banner into the air to the extent he needed CPR to save his life following a head injury and five or six surrounding a woman apparently leaning on a wall chatting to a friend. What she was saying was inaudible but I doubt it justified punching her in the chest. None of these thugs will be brought to justice just as none were when a cop organised the murder of my son-in-law’s brother.

It must be 30 years since I first decided that police officers are very often bone heads. The tipping point - I had around the same time offered a police constable temporary free accommodation when he found himself homeless - was fining a young woman trapped in her car on a road I knew well, for eating a Kit Kat while stuck in a traffic jam.

I argued with a friend that if the police were intent on making enemies of law abiding people it would at some time in the future come back and bite them. That time has probably arrived, they have annoyed so many people that respect has largely gone.

I spent last weekend with five people I had never met before but their opinion of the police was much the same as mine and none have criminal records.

When I have occasionally seen one of those wild life documentaries where half a dozen lions stalk a thousand wildebeest I always wonder why the wildebeest don’t turn on the lions and trample them to death. Probably they do not think strategically as humans might but it makes me think of our politicised police selectively attacking the easy targets and fear their wildebeest rebellion moment might not be all that far away.

If the videos easily found on Social Media and the comments they attract are any guide the country seems to be on the edge of an abyss and the politicians don’t help, Johnson and Hancock in particular. I used to think Prime Ministers couldn’t get any worse than Blair, but then we had Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson all intent on proving me wrong.

Government Tweets tell everyone to get back to normal and when young people do something like that the politicians go into panic mode and attack everyone while freely admitting that they do it because it is the easy option. Police tactics again.

It reminds me of my school days when someone blew a drain out of the ground with explosives found on the army ranges in Aldershot. Every one of us was punished. One expects Conservative Ministers to be able to govern better than a school teacher. Sadly the last six months have shown that to be a vain hope.

The latest panic reaction to extra positive Corona tests, not cases as lying Ministers would have you believe, cases is a medical term to describe those being treated for a disease, is to make it unlawful to be in a group of more than six people. Unless you are at work, in school, at a funeral or a wedding.

In a few weeks time I have a birthday. I won’t say when but a small celebration is planned. I will not say where nor whether it is at a restaurant or somewhere else; but I will say the number invited is six and I will make it seven.

I have the choice of booting someone out, not going myself or raising two fingers towards the clown I misguidedly helped to elect last December.

Hmm, a difficult decision.

Johnson just like the police is stoking the fires of a dangerous rebellion by those already keen to take to the streets. He is a failure and embarrassment as a Prime Minister but I would rather take him down by democratic means.

 

9 September (Part 1) - Systematic road wrecking in Bexley

Bexley Council may well be a little less dishonest than it used to be and school transport issues aside, it is quite a long time since it was caught out committing criminal acts or being unlawfuly vindictive towards specially chosen residents, but the one thing that shows no sign of improving is road design. It was of course their Head of Highway Services blatantly and provably lying to me that caused this website to be created.

A reader who presumably shares my view of Bexley’s idiotic road designs solved a mystery for me yesterday. I had wondered why there was so often congestion on Danson Road (A221) which I didn’t recall seeing until recently.

He sent me these before and after photos. The morons have removed the feeder road into the park. Maybe morons is too mild a word for them.

You can still just about see the old road markings.

I can still hardly believe what they did to Harrow Manorway. Their idea of increased road capacity to Abbey Wood station as originally promised was a dual carriageway but instead they halved the road width and halved the speed limit. Then as if that was not enough put the pedestrian crossing at a roundabout so that it fools drovers into thinking the green means they have right of way on to the roundabout.

Morons really isn’t a strong enough word is it?

 

8 September - A stay of execution

Since making it clear that I didn’t think this blog could continue due to changed circumstances (and an ambition to move out of London) not to mention a lapsed enthusiasm for Council matters, I have received quite a lot of messages thanking me for keeping Bexley Council on its toes over the past eleven years and in the opinion of many forcing it to be more honest. Certainly their dishonest and sometimes criminal activity until five or six years ago was beyond belief as was the lying, although I am unconvinced that the latter is hugely improved.

There were also many pleas to keep BiB going, several from people I had never heard of before which was especially pleasing, so I have decided, accompanied by some embarrassment over the dithering, to announce that BiB will not suddenly disappear on 15th September, it will continue as it has in recent months; that is with an occasional comment rather than any in-depth reporting on Council activities.

I was also reminded that with the Mayoral election due next year it would be a shame to not put the boot into the utterly useless Sadiq Khan who appears to be intent on killing the capital’s economy stone dead and showing every sign of succeeding.

It is unlikely that there will be any more regular Council meeting reports because including the attendance time, getting them on line can be eight or nine hours of work and the readership is no longer large enough to justify the effort. The much reduced numbers is largely due to the regular supply of Council scandals (which attracted thousands daily) drying up and search engines delisting websites that do not have a security certificate (https). There is no chance of BiB being at the top of the search results for Bexley unless I shell out quite a large sum of money for a certificate.

Another economy is that bexley-is-bonkers will be confined to its co.uk domain. The .uk, .com and .info variants which all used to do something different have either gone or will do soon. The BiB Twitter account still attracts new followers but has not been used for two months. My finger frequently hovers over the delete account button.

So that’s it although I am trying to bring back the old blogs as the technical problems are gradually tracked down. It will take a very long time and maybe the job will never be finished although the relatively few 2009 blogs are already fully restored. (See News/Comment menu.) There are good practical reasons for doing the oldest first.

The old blogs now adopt the post-May 2018 technical standards and have slightly improved image quality.

 

5 September - Before we were a nation of scaredy cats!

Maybe I follow the wrong social media accounts but it seems to me that at this late stage in the Covid business that most people regard the government imposed tyranny as being well over the top and indisputedly muddled and illogical.

Life is not risk free and only because most of us are law abiding citizens are we wearing masks in shops or on near empty trains. The resentment against power crazed politicians is building and this government masquerading as Conservative is very lucky indeed to have so far faced only a pathetic opposition.

This is not the first Corona crisis I have lived through. I was at school when the Asian Flu struck in 1958. Nine million of us went down with it and 14,000 died.

As far as I can remember no one took a blind bit of notice but it is historically reported that around 110,000 London school children were off sick. As is the case now the school authorities got a bit jumpy.

But not all that jumpy as the document below may indicate.

My parents were supposed to certify that I was bug free before I was allowed back into school. From the look of it they didn’t bother.

We were made of sterner stuff back then. Many of us still are, with of course the exception of the low grade politicians who have wormed their way into power and seek to control our every movement.

 

3 September - Pokey or what?

Following last month’s report on the mysterious and unexplained bulk house sales in Bexley someone suggested I take a look at 300 Bexley Road in Erith. A tiny terrace house that went for £450,000 in May 2019.

Council records sent to me say it was subsequently registered as six separate flats. Who expects people to live in such cramped conditions?

Bexley Council presumably. Six Band A Council Tax bills must be much more lucrative than just the one.

So Bexley Council encourages living in inadequate spaces. Who would have thought it?

The picture is of people allegedly waiting to look at or maybe move into the house.

 

1 September - London is finished. So is BiB

And it is tempting to add that London’s fate is well deserved.

If a vote for Sadiq Khan doesn’t kill it directly then his Covid related activities aided and abetted by the most incompetent Government of my lifetime surely will. Keep off public transport, pay £15 a day to use your car but get back to work right now or the country will go bust. What sort of mixed message is that?

I think it is more than likely that London will slowly die. Who would want to travel into or even live in Khan’s hell hole? Almost daily stabbings, everyone expected to travel by bike and journey times for most of us increased three fold compared to peak lockdown in March and April. Politicians know that slower traffic means a declining economy; why else do you think they propose an 80 m.p.h. national speed limit every few years only to be thwarted by the ignorant who have wormed their way into positions of power?

How many cycling commuters will be left riding during prolonged periods of rain or after their steeds are stolen? Incidentally, as someone who had to drive daily throughout the lockdown I came to the conclusion that it was not pedal cyclists who were the menaces on the road but their powered brethren.

Instead of recognising that efficient transport systems are a prerequisite of a thriving economy, the idiot minister Grant Shapps provided £250 million to lunatic Councils to encourage them to block the capital’s arteries.

I used to think Shapps was one of the least stupid of the Conservative ministers but last Friday I heard him - several times - relishing the idea that people breaking his irrational Covid rules will get a criminal record. Is that the sort of Government I voted for? Definitely not, it makes me ashamed to have called myself a Conservative all my life.

It’s a tragedy for the country and the opposition parties show every sign of being worse. Nothing would persuade me to vote for Starmer.

I have had enough of it and as has probably been obvious for a year or two I really cannot be bothered with London and Bexley-is-Bonkers any more. The time when Bexley Council committed criminal acts - examples on request - and allowed vulnerable residents to die due to neglect and penny pinching have probably gone so maybe the last eleven years have achieved something. On the other hand I no longer go looking under their carefully placed stones so who knows?

My thoughts have turned towards getting out of London for my remaining years and a very few steps have been taken towards that end already. The loft is being progressively emptied of accumulated rubbish and the days when there would be no more than one bag of rubbish in the green bin have definitely gone. Bits of carpet, a pillow, old suitcases and even a TV set have gone in the green bin in recent weeks.

On a similar mission I hauled a suitcase full of books to the Oxfam shop in Greenwich at the weekend, my first trip on a train since 6th June. Almost no one was wearing a mask and the reason eventually became clear. The mask rebels were going to the Freedom Rally in Trafalgar Square, the one where Piers Corbyn was fined £10,000 but Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter and the Muslims marching down Oxford Street were not.

If authoring Bexley-is-Bonkers has taught me one thing it is that the police are irredeemably corrupt to the very core and a minority of Councillors are extraordinary liars. It’s time I packed up this blogging business before I become any more bitter about the authorities that are intent on steering this once great country on to the rocks.

There was a scheduled 30 minute wait for the train back from Greenwich so I jumped on a bus handily waiting outside the station and the journey home showed me how a Loony Left Council was spending their share of Shapp’s £250 million. Hold ups all the way. It would have been quicker to wait for the train. Don’t gloat, Bexley has plans to do the same.

On the 15th of this month (BiB’s 11th birthday) this once daily blog which at its peak saw up to 50,000 hits a day will draw to some sort of conclusion. It is nothing like that busy now that there is not a regular supply of Council scandal to report. To be fair and honest as BiB always tried to be, 50,000 was exceptional and four or five thousand was nearer the mark.

I am undecided at present whether to take BiB off line in two weeks time or leave it for a while. Probably the latter but it is more than likely that my various @bexley-is-bonkers.co.uk email addresses will cease to operate and the only means of contact will be via the Contact form.

Readers who have become friends over the years will be given an alternative email address and regular readers known to me are welcome to to ask for it.