21 July - The Full Council meeting that wasn’t
Bexley Council failed to webcast last night’s Council meeting unless you
count a still picture every five seconds accompanied by a snippet of audio as a
webcast. And I failed to heave my backside from the comfort of my sofa to one of Bexley’s hard plastic chairs.
The broken file has been placed into the webcast archive presumably by someone
with the same mindset as the one who placed a homeless family into a house with no roof.
Looking
on the bright side, I can comment in this report with little fear of contradiction
and I will never know if new Mayor Nick O’Hare made a bigger or lesser mess of
the Chairmanship than expected. Usually new Mayors start their year
reasonably well and deteriorate as they increasingly exploit and possibly abuse their power.
Sidcup resident Dimitri Shvorob asked Richard Diment, Cabinet Member for
Education, why Bexley’s ‘Good’ OFSTED ratings are between two and three times
less than both Bromley and Greenwich but thanks to the technical gremlins we did
not hear the excuses. I hope Dimitri’s follow up question was how the 2022 Conservative
manifesto claimed that all schools were ‘Good’ or better when the claim was a blatant lie.
He then asked Disc Jockey Craske what the claimed “successful Crayford superfast
broadband” was all about when there was no obvious sign of it.
Another resident, Stuart Mackenzie, asked how much Bexley is paying towards the
administration of the Crematorium Committee which is a joint Dartford, Greenwich,
Bexley affair and why the Committee cannot be run more efficiently by just one authority on a rota system.
If Cabinet Member Leaf did not filibuster away the allocated 15 minutes the
Council may have been questioned about what it is doing to protect residents
from the noise created by London City Airport for which they have plans for more.
Councillor Howard Jackson stooped to asking a creepy question about the newly
opened Barnehurst Golf Course and Councillor John Davey banged the
anti-ULEZ drum.
Moving to Motions, new Councillor Chris Ball (Labour, Erith) put forward an arguably pointless
one congratulating Her Majesty on her Jubilee. Hasn’t Bexley Council done that already?
Labour Leader Stefano Borella took a more practical line pushing for the
endorsement of Money Saving Expert, Martin Lewis’s opinion that people will have
to “choose between eating and heating”. The Conservative Government is utterly
stupid for dong nothing about, and even exacerbating, the inevitable disaster
which will envelope them in just a few months’ time. The price of Sainsbury’s own brand blackberry jam
has leapt up by 92% this week. The Conservatives will deserve everything they get.
Did Bexley Tories bury their heads in the sand too? Probably. Loyalty to the party is always the priority.
Labour Councillors put forward five more Motions and the Conservatives five in total. More
than enough to keep us bored stiff for the next four years. Food banks, fly
tipping, LGBT, BAME, and anti-ULEZ. All the usual claptrap, or not, depending on your point of view.
And then there was the Leader’s report which is always much shorter than the
formal version recorded in the Agenda. Whether she chose to speak about
Crossrail, CountryStyle, Children’s Services or Ukranian refugees is anyone’s
guess but it is more than likely that everything was “fantastic”.