10 February - Manifesto claim. True or false?
Bexley Conservatives have been fighting the May elections since the beginning
of the year and their rhetoric is ramping up. This week they claimed to have fulfilled all their
2018 Manifesto promises.
Can that be true? Possibly. They didn’t promise much.
After referring to Labour Councillors as ‘Comradesְ’ on three occasions, the specific promises were…
Making each penny count.
Keeping Council Tax low. (Wrongly implying that Bexley’s Tax rate is not very
nearly the highest in London.
All Schools would be OFSTED rated as good or better.
Maintain the street cleaning schedule at once every three weeks.
To deliver ‘modern’ social care services. (What does that mean?)
To plant 1,000 new street trees by 2020.
Provide more than two hectares (over five acres) of new green space by 2020.
(Where is it? Untamed weed patches do not count!)
Provide superfast broadband. (Usurping Openreach?)
Fight for the highest quality local rail services.
Build 8,000 homes on brownfield sites.
Last year they
claimed to have fulfilled all those promises a year ahead of schedule so the
recent announcement could be considered as regurgitating old news. Among the
claims was that the 1,000 tree promise had been exceeded and that Bexley had
been top of the London recycling league “16 years in a row”. Pedantic I know but
that simply isn’t true, there have been some near misses but tell a lie often
enough and some people will believe it.
For the years claimed, the
total
number of trees planted failed to reach 1,000 and many of those planted were
part of regeneration schemes such as the Network Rail funded improvements at Abbey Wood station.
As always, by far the biggest Bexley lie is that it is a low tax borough. When
the new Council Tax rate is announced in a few weeks time it will be 23% higher
than the rate that immediately followed the publication of the Manifesto.
My present inclination is to vote Labour in May in the hope of delivering a
shock to the arrogant Teresa O’Neill who too often justifies her decisions on
being backed by her electoral majority. There is no hope of Bexley turning Red
in May and Keir Starmer appears to be on a mission to return this long time
Conservative to the Tory cause. He was in charge of the Crown Prosecution
Service when it failed to pursue Jimmy Savile. Johnson’s reference to it was an
unnecessary cheap shot typical of our PM but by blaming him for the Corbynite
thugs who hassled him earlier this week Starmer heads down the path of a
political chancer and is not PM material.