31 January - The Mayor is green, but not in a good way

With no TV to watch I often find myself scrapping the barrel of YouTube for interesting snippets of information. I have recently been ensnared by a number of American channels which marvel at the way we British have beaten them to so many inventions and very often do things better than the Yanks.

However the staple diet is transport in the UK generally and London in particular and that subject boasts a number of high quality channels. One that I would not put in that category has covered hydrogen powered buses and how their introduction has been troublesome. It has proved difficult to get confirmation from a wide range of sources and I would guess that TfL has gone into cover-up mode. Consequently what follows is limited by the need to restrict things to the few clues available on the web if excessive speculation is to be avoided.

One obvious fact is that our dictatorial Mayor is not good when it comes to TfL finances or finance generally. It is as though he is intent on impoverishing London and Londoners. In the associated photograph he is celebrating the introduction of 20 hydrogen powered buses to Route 7 in West London in 2021. A Freedom of Information request revealed that they cost more than half a million pounds each which is about twice as much as a battery powered bus.

It was probably never a good idea except as an excuse for more virtue signalling at your expense. French bus companies cancelled their order for hydrogen powered buses and they did not last long in Germany either.

Not being as stupid as the Mayor of London, overseas operators worked out that using electricity to make hydrogen (by electrolysis of water) and using a hydrogen fuel cell on board a bus to run its electric motor is horribly inefficient compared to bypassing the electrolysis and charging a battery directly instead. Six times more expensive according to the French and three times more expensive than the most optimistic UK estimates I can find.

But clever Dick Khan had a plan. He would use the hydrogen that is a byproduct of chlorine production and get somewhere near that three times as expensive estimate.

But not for long. Eleven million quid’s worth of buses have been parked up in Acton for the past year doing nothing while good old diesel plies the streets of London.

TfL’s website says nothing about it but the aforesaid obscure YouTube channel provides confirmation of my suspicions. Its viewers’ comments are varied but include the reason why.

The bus withdrawal is almost certainly associated with the easily Googled fact that swimming pool operators are having difficulty with the supply of chlorine gas. A chlorine shortage would mean a hydrogen shortage too.

If the Mayor is saying anything about the eleven million pounds down the drain you can be pretty sure he will be blaming the bus manufacturer for “technical shortcomings” (as operators of the same bus in Scotland are). Anyone but himself.

Unless electrolysis costs fall dramatically Sadiq will belatedly find the same as his French counterpart did. Hydrogen powered buses cost six times as much to run as batteries.

 

27 January - The end may be nigh

I didn’t take any notes at Dave Putson’s meeting because it might appear to be intimidating if I sat there scribbling away but I wish I had done. Someone briefly explained who owned what in the NHS and if I heard him correctly it led to the GP services in Thamesmead being owned by an American company. I haven’t anything good to say about my NHS experiences over the past three years, longer if I include looking after my late aunt. I have two potentially life threatening conditions which require monitoring and neither have been done properly or even at all since the Covid excuses first became available.

Dave himself dropped the name Doctor Bob Gill into the conversation; not sure why but apparently a local GP. I Googled him and he can be found all over the place and I am unsure as to how I came to miss him before. I even discovered he follows me on Twitter!

Yesterday evening I planned to watch a film which I had to specially import from the USA but instead found myself glued to Doctor Gill’s feature length video on my biggest screen. I had expected to dip in for a few minutes and drop it but it is very well produced and interesting throughout. You may occasionally notice local landmarks. It seeks to demonstrate how the NHS is being lined up for Americanisation where things are not good unless you have pots of money, and not always then.

It reminded me of my days working in International telephony. People would complain that British services were not as good as they had found in the US of A. Maybe true if they had been on a business trip to New York or holidayed in L.A. but if you went to Hill Billy land there might be no service at all or at best twelve people on a party line. The UK had a country wide universal system much the same everywhere.

I think I preferred the British way.

Note: I have yet to find a way to embed a YouTube video into a Bonkers page such that its size varies to fit the window as is the BiB norm. YouTube appears to lack the flexibility. Probably easiest to click on the video and watch it in a separate window.

There have been two Bexley Council Scrutiny meeting this week and I had allotted time for reporting over the weekend. However I have been called out to remedy a family tech problem so I will be listening to both meetings in the car and listen out for bits that might be slightly interesting.

 

26 January - Tuppence for ’em

I went to Dave Putson’s (former Belvedere Councillor) ‘Cost of Living Crisis’ meeting yesterday evening but some of the regular attendees had not braved the freezing rain which is a shame.

Why does it take an ex-Councillor thrown out of Labour for doing nothing that would upset any reasonable individual, to be the only local politician to take an active interest in the plight of our poorest residents? (He is backed by Labour Councillors Nicola Taylor, Erith and Larry Ferguson, Thamesmead East but largely shunned by the remainder).

During the formal part of the meeting I learned that Greenwich Council is funding warm spaces for those no longer able to heat their homes with free meals thrown in but it was alleged that a penniless Bexley Council has looked away. It does however feature community funded warm spaces on its website.

Dave on the other hand had produced a series of leaflets designed to help people in difficulties find their way out of trouble. (Extract below.)

Probably Dave is as perplexed by my continued presence at his meetings as I am but it is interesting to hear views that I do not find in The Daily Telegraph (†). I also share many of the views expressed by his followers none of whom will have ever voted Conservative.

Should I admit (again) that I have at every General Election since 1964 and still believe that in the last century the alternatives were unthinkable; but no longer. Somehow we have got to the point where the country is in a worse state than I ever saw in those intervening years. The financial situation is clearly not great but it’s not that which worries me most. The lunatics have been allowed to take over every aspect of the asylum and it can only be blamed on 13 years of Tory misrule. (Where have I heard that before?)

Why have the Conservatives not put a stop to the nonsense that has infected so much of the country? Gutlessness, corruption, too individually rich, WEF? How can one man (the PM) be blind to so many injustices, not to mention his inevitable fate?

Last night I was at one with the various speakers who believe that Rishi Sunak’s government should not be allowed to continue. Quite obviously he doesn’t see the profound damage he is doing to the fabric of the country, but I am uncomfortable with their proposed solution. Strikes, strikes and more strikes.

I similarly take issue with Dave’s supporters’ belief that taxing energy companies is the financial Holy Grail that would fund the NHS and give everyone employed by the state a major bump up the pay ladder. No one explained if the term energy company was confined to BP and Shell etc. or included the retailers such as Octopus and Scottish Power. Only two years ago the oil companies were making an enormous loss. What would happen to the NHS if it relied on oil money and the losses were repeated? Fewer diversity managers perhaps.

Click image to follow the Citizen’s Advice link.

† Maybe not for much longer. A Telegraph subscription now costs four times as much as the most expensive Netflix subscription.

 

25 January - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 2 - Soldier of Fortune

Below is the long awaited Part 2 of @tonyofsidcup’s continued defence of the imposition of the ULEZ Tax on our green and pleasant outer London boroughs.

Two things have happened in the ULEZ Universe since the previous post.

First, the Tory-controlled Harrow council and the LibDem Sutton announced that they formally declined TfL’s request to facilitate installation of ULEZ cameras on borough-managed roads.
Bexley promptly joined the group. “We have withheld permission for the Mayor to put his ULEZ cameras on our street furniture or work on our roads”, Teresa O’Neill wrote on January 23.

On the same day, however, an Evening Standard article suggested that TfL did not need councils’ permission to install cameras alongside existing TfL equipment, the case for two thirds of all planned sites, according to TfL.

Meanwhile, TfL reminded the boroughs that it was their legal responsibility to comply with the mayor’s Transport Strategy, now including the expanded ULEZ. (Ever polite, TfL did not say that it was “local implementation” of that Strategy by London boroughs that got them TfL funding). The independents of Havering, though unhappy with ULEZ, accepted the point and promised their co-operation; the Conservatives of Hillingdon, Croydon and Bromley stayed put, muttering about blocking cameras and suing the City Hall, but not doing anything visible.

In a second ULEZ-related development, that unique group of people who make Bexley Conservatives look competent and honest, the Conservatives of the London Assembly, had a second go at inflating #UlezScandal. Recall that in September 2022, The Torygraph reported allegations of anti-ULEZ responses being excluded from the results of the Mayor’s consultation.

By January 2023, the GLA Tories, led by “our own” Peter Fortune, the Assembly Member for Bexley and Bromley, used FOI to obtain a 200-page trove of City Hall emails related to the consultation. They used it to construct a story of Sadiq Khan anxiously watching the percentage of anti-ULEZ consultation responses (all the while feigning ignorance of it), seeing the public opinion go against him, trying to turn the tide by boosting participation of pro-ULEZ groups, and in the end manipulating the percentage by removing a chunk of anti-ULEZ responses on a flimsy pretext. This is essentially the description provided by Peter Fortune himself at the end of his 32 minute questioning of Sadiq Khan at Mayor’s Question Time, available on YouTube. I don’t buy it.

It helps to remember that the consultation was run by TfL, but the responses were analysed by an outside consultancy, AECOM. When Fortune insinuates that Sadiq Khan threw away anti-ULEZ responses, one can simply counter that neither the City Hall nor TfL handled the process, and no “smoking gun” email from a Khan henchperson to AECOM, directing them to take a particular approach, has ever been produced. AECOM made their own decisions - as they were supposed to, since avoiding perceptions of bias was the reason for TfL not doing the work in-house in the first place.

It also helps to remember the consultation’s timeline. The public was consulted for ten weeks, from May 20 until July 29. When Fortune alleges that Khan was aware of intermediate results in August or September - but refused to admit it - one answers “So what? The consultation was closed by then, and Khan could not have influenced it”.

What about the July publicity push for youth participation, Khan’s alleged manipulation? I accept the Mayor’s explanation that the youth outreach was appropriate, and see no evidence of it being either special - an AECOM report referenced later gives a long list of ULEZ-consultation publicity campaigns - or a panicked response to the public’s rejection of ULEZ, as insinuated by Fortune. (Fortune’s implicit admission that young people support ULEZ might sound awkward for him, but hey, we already knew the Conservatives favour a different demographic).

Khan’s explanation for why he did not disclose seeing the intermediate analysis results was that only the final report, presented to him on November 18, was “results”. A sensible answer or evasive word games? I would cry foul if “intermediate results” were explicitly queried, but if Fortune et al. had just asked for “results”, I am ready to give Khan a pass. Fortune may be right, he just does not lay out enough evidence to prove his claim - and lacks the credibility to be trusted without it.

What about those discarded anti-ULEZ responses, the stuff of the original #UlezScandal? Let’s understand what it’s about. Imagine that you run an online survey. You build an online form with, say, twenty questions, including questions about respondents’ backgrounds, and ask people to fill it out. You also allow people to email you - and end up with a bunch of emails that skip all the questions, including the demographic ones, and answer just one. Now, you need to summarize the responses to your survey. The “proper” survey responses are “nice and clean” - but how do you handle those emails?

A reasonable approach is to use the information in them where possible: count the emails with regard to the question they answered, and ignore them on the questions they themselves ignored. Now, you need to tell people how many responses you received for each question, and what the split was. Easy for all but that one question, but what do you do there? To be safe, just give the reader the full information: tell them how many survey responses and emails you received, and what the split is if you exclude or include the emails.

… and this is exactly what AECOM did. You can see the details in Section 4.13 of the clunkily-named but extremely interesting “Report to Mayor on ULEZ expansion and future Road User Charging proposal”. Note that the percentage of responses choosing “ULEZ should not be implemented” is *higher* (68% vs. 59%) when those “organised responses” are excluded. That’s some “manipulation”! In my opinion, only people devoid of any integrity could look at this and allege wrongdoing. Have I mentioned that GLA Conservatives make Bexley Conservatives look good?

“Well, 59% or 68%, no matter - clearly, majority of Londoners oppose ULEZ, and that’s why Khan ought to cancel ULEZ!” No, and no. This is actually the key point in the whole ULEZ consultation business, and one that Fortune and Friends try hardest to avoid. Let’s hit it on the head in the next post.

AECOM Report.

P.S. One more thing. Section 4.3 of AECOMs report mentions five petitions (not to be confused with organised email campaigns) submitted to TfL. Not one, but two of them come from Bexley! The first one, with 245 signatures, appears to be by Bexley Tories. However, there is a second petition, with just 36 names, saying simply: “Objection to the Mayor of London’s proposal to extend the Ultra Low Emission Zone London-wide. We support Bexley Council!” Good for you, folks.

Links
Councils refuse camera installation
https://www.mylondon.news/news/east-london-news/ulez-full-list-london-councils-26018487
Evening Standard: no council permission needed
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/ulez-expansion-council-challenge-cctv-cameras-sadiq-khan-tfl-powers-b1054878.html
Statement by Bexley
https://twitter.com/LBofBexley/status/1617482534530564097
Peter Fortune’s GLA profile
https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/london-assembly-members/peter-fortune
GLA Conservatives’ YouTube video 1
https://twitter.com/GLAConservative/status/1615319861088980993?s=20&t=Yl6xDA5WskOLnKB61uwgYQ
(Note the email shown at 1:17)
GLA Conservatives’ YouTube video 2 (Fortune vs Khan)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSkSuukO6SU
#UlezScandal 1.0
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/09/30/leak-reveals-two-thirds-londoners-oppose-expansion-ultra-low/
AECOM “Report to Mayor on ULEZ expansion and future Road User Charging proposal”
https://haveyoursay.tfl.gov.uk/15619/widgets/58629/documents/34558

More to come.

 

24 January - Things can only get bitter

There is a good handful of subjects on which one could write an essay on how successive governments have managed to wreck the country such that nothing much works. Transport, health services, devolution, the relationship with the European Union, Local Government, postal deliveries, the police, the justice system, innumerable quangos and one could argue that pretty much everything started to go wrong when Labour was elected in 1997. They hammered the banks and pensions and sold the gold reserves at a knock down price.

Don’t even mention signing the Lisbon Treaty in secret which upset at least 52% of the population.

As if that was not enough Labour built fewer Council houses than Margaret Thatcher, encouraged mass immigration, went a bit mad with John Major’s Private Finance Initiative and they set in motion the plans for Net Stupid and all the Green taxes that entails.

Today everyone can see that energy policies have been insane for many years past. Who decided that wind turbines made more sense than maintaining a nuclear industry and that dynamiting coal powered power stations was such a brilliant idea?

It’s easy enough to blame Labour for initiating the mess that we are now in but that is to ignore the fact that the Conservatives have been running the show for more than twelve years and instead of changing direction they dug the hole even deeper. Useful maybe for burying the people they are happily freezing in their homes but not a lot else.

Nothing illustrates the idiocy of current policies more than people being paid to switch off their electrical appliances between 5 and 6 p.m. The National Grid did it yesterday and is repeating the wheeze this evening and extending the time to between 4:30 and 6 p.m. I have been offered £4 for every kilowatt hour of electricity I save.

Last year I opted in to the first test run of the system and earned myself 19 pence which was barely worth the effort but I did it again on Round 2 too. That one was more profitable. I received the opt in confirmation notice but a day or two later Octopus Energy’s phone App said I had not bothered to register so I had earned nothing. I submitted the evidence that they were wrong and I was given £6 in compensation. Much better!

Since then I have earned nothing and don’t think I ever will.

The reason is that my evening peak electricity consumption has been pushed down to almost nothing. About 10 watt hours for the critical hour yesterday and unless I throw the main breaker switch it cannot go any lower. So only those who have not yet reduced their consumption can benefit from the National Grid’s largesse which I suppose is logical despite being superficially unfair to those who have already taken action to curb their usage.

The central screenshot is from a third party app which does not reflect the correct tariff, The actual cost of the day’s electricity was 59 pence including the standing charge of 32 pence. (The Octopus app provides the cost as a pop up which cannot be screen grabbed.)
The gas bill was unfortunately not in the same ball park.

As anyone interested in this subject will recognise. Most of my electricity consumption is at the off peak rate and for the remainder of the day the house is running off a battery.

Note: The data provided and participation in the payback scheme requires a SMET2 Smart Meter.

 

23 January (Part 3) - Choose with care

As I write my radio is telling me what a bad idea electric cars are and if you do long journeys every day that is pretty much the case. The charging infrastructure is just not up to the job and most EVs take far too long to fill up. An EV evangelist who I met up with several years ago recently checked out the ten charging sites nearest to his house and found seven of them to be out of service.

Thanks to idiotic government policy EVs are no longer always very cheap to run although the figures bandied around in the press are very much worst case scenarios. Another EV evangelist with whom I once shared a coffee (when EVs were a novelty and owners would arrange to meet and compare notes) put out a video this morning which took all the official statistics and showed that electric vehicles were still cheaper to run than both petrol and diesel equivalents by several pence per mile - which is not enough to recoup the higher purchase price.

But his worst case scenario was that all charging was done at the super expensive chargers found at some motorway service stations and increasingly elsewhere. Regular long distance driving is not something for which an EV is a suitable vehicle, maybe it never has been although I do know someone who does 50,000 miles a year in his and buys a new one every year.

I can get to Bristol and back without charging away from home if the conditions are OK by which I mean a dry day without serious traffic congestion. A steady moderate speed is an advantage but constant stop and start would not be helpful.

For run of the mill driving EVs can still be really cheap to run. Despite the silly prices currently charged for electricity mine is working out at less than three pence a mile (off peak rate) and if the sun shines pretty much nothing.

EVs should not be ruled out despite what the press articles may say but the choice between them and petrol must be made with care. With no possibility of home charging EVs are almost certainly the wrong choice and it’s probably always been that way.

As I have always said here, the plan to stop selling new petrol cars in 2030 is the sort of total lunacy I have come to expect from this government. And the alternative loons are worse.

In December 2022 EVs were 39·4% of new car sales, a figure which has been used to demonstrate their popularity. I’m not sure it does any such thing. Most of those cars will have been ordered a year ago when the economics of EV driving were very different.

There are three Scrutiny meeting to be held in Bexley before the end of January. Looks like I will have proper work to do soon.

 

23 January (Part 2) - The plans came to nothing

The anonymous message facility is occasionally quite useful and whilst I remain cautious that it could be abused I have only rarely found it to be so. And this message doesn’t warrant the use of the word abuse either.

There’s no way that it was going to fool me. If Councillor Hunt was really in possession of interesting information about Sidcup Manor House he would most likely say nothing to me but if bean spilling was on his mind he knows my phone number and is certainly not averse to the occasional Twitter Direct Message.

Now that Danny Hackett has gone I can probably say that all Councillors can be devious when they have to be - like toeing the party line - but James is not the first name I would think of when considering the D word.

Far from it actually.

Is there really funny business going on at Sidcup Manor House? Whatever happened to Jane Richardson’s scheme to turn it into a boutique hotel? Whatever that may be. Nearly six years ago I went to to a Council exhibition held there. Quite impressive inside, but a hotel?

 

23 January (Part 1) - A narrow escape

Two questions. Would you employ any tradesman who is so unconcerned about inconveniencing fellow citizens that he blocks a total of five residents from driving into or out of their drives and parking spaces? (Westside Windows, 020 3887 2772. KL129 )YM.)

The second question. For how much longer will Bexley Council fail to impose any sort of incentive to park responsibly?

The area shown is designated as a turning circle on the official Council plans. Does that not warrant double yellow lines?

The enforcement lady showed up 45 minutes after I noticed the van below totally blocking my exit which was only about 15 minutes after it was reported. A good effort but unfortunately not quite quick enough. The driver showed up at exactly the same time so he was allowed to get away with it.

The different van on the footpath has been there for at least a couple of hours.

 

22 January - By luck or good judgment?

I have fiddled with electrical things ever since I swapped the single power outlet in my bedroom for a double one aged about 15 at the time. By definition I knew everything. Dad was not entirely happy with my DIYing and unenthusiastic about straying outside one’s area of expertise. His was repairing Merlin engines in the middle of the Sahara and improving gas turbines. Schoolboys - and jet engine designers - were definitely not supposed to play around with 240 volts. Or it may have been because it was a 1940s Council house. Strictly one socket per room, two in the kitchen.

65 years later nothing much has changed but I do like to be sure that such jobs are done properly; to which end I subscribe to various websites which explain the constantly changing electrical regulations.

It was from such a source that I learned last week that Councils and the like can now buy an LED bulb which is a direct replacement for an old style Sodium Vapour lamp. It is designed such that it suits the Sodium optimised reflector and it is not necessary to swap over the entire lamp head as Bexley did way back in 2016.

The change was controversial at the time and not helped by Bexley Council’s propensity for lying. They claimed the new lighting was brighter when anyone with a light meter or access to the specifications of new and old lamps (18,000 lumens for Sodium, 8,800 lumens for LED) could instantly see it wasn’t true.

According to Council sources there were so many complaints about the LED lighting that Bexley stopped answering them and more worryingly relatively senior staff were talking about skullduggery with the replacement contract.

As you might imagine, Bexley Tories were more than a little defensive of their LED lighting which had gone down with many residents like the proverbial lead (sorry!) balloon and even went as far as Tweeting that I believed them to be dim almost two years after I went against popular opinion by admitting that I’d grown to like them.

The 2016 claim was that LED street lighting would save £300,000 a year which no one could substantiate at the time but with the price of electricity rising five fold since then it no longer matters. The fact that the replacement programme ran £200,000 over budget is the same. Just for once Bexley Council backed the right horse. The aforesaid website aimed at electrical contractors calculates that the new lamps can save £120 of electricity per year - each! There is a YouTube video which provides all the details including the payback period being only eight months. The comments say that swapping out the whole head unit can still be the cheaper option.

Three months ago Cabinet Member Peter Craske was ridiculing Greenwich Council for having no LED replacement programme. Too busy wrecking that borough with unnecessary bus lanes, 20 mile an hour limits and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods presumably. It is almost enough to drag a voter back to the Tories.

But not until the party clears out the all too obvious corruption at the most senior levels.

 

21 January - Freedom to Obfuscate?

Bexley Council replied to my Freedom of Information request about web addresses that are black listed on its servers well within the statutory timetable. A list of banned addresses and the categories into which they fall was provided and on the surface at least the information given was unremarkable; but it failed to answer the direct question. Is BiB still banned?

It was banned in 2011 when a similar FOI provided the details and presumably nothing had changed by 2018 when a Councillor sent a complaint to the police about this website and cited the ban as evidence that I was a thoroughly bad boy.

I suppose the easiest way to get an honest answer is to ask a friendly Councillor or wander into a library. Maybe an FOI requesting the approximate date that the Bonkers ban was lifted would be justified and if it hasn’t been a complaint to the Information Commissioner? Dishonestly responding to an FOI request is a serious matter.

 

20 January - Is a week still a long time in politics?

I don’t think Bonkers has been a whole week without comment before but life somehow got in the way. There is a dispute with a service company with a lot of money at stake and which has been going on for months. I keep giving them a second chance and they respond by letting me down again. If I go to the County Court it will ensure they never fulfill their obligations but I fear that will be the eventual outcome.

I have too much technology in the house and when something goes wrong it can take time to fix. Same again this week. It’s about time I learned my lesson but still I buy more.

I started to build a new website and things did not get off to a good start but are back on course now.

I forgot about the Transport Users’ Sub-Committee meeting and that is one of the few I find interesting, but I doubt we are any closer to persuading Southeastern that they should be running a more passenger friendly service. Thanks to them I will have to take a circuitous route tomorrow that used not to be necessary. The Police report to the Transport Sub-Committee may have been interesting or it may have simply confirmed that the Met is as bad as the newspapers - and personal experience - tell us.

The meeting Agenda indicates that the Met rates Hate Crime above the targeting of pickpockets and tackling violence against women. (What has any of that got to do with Transport?) In more relevant news they reported that there were four fatal road accidents in the borough in the year ending August 2022. Blackfen Road, North Cray Road, Maidstone Road and Eastern Way on the Harrow Manorway slip road.

In better news the unofficial Council tip in my road was cleared last Wednesday afternoon. It was for the past couple of weeks impossible to access the containers for their intended purpose so would-be recyclers were thwarted. Rubbish removal must have been a difficult and expensive job and probably everyone who had washed their tins and plastic trays will see their efforts come to nothing while they are sent to landfill.

The basic problem remains. Residents with no moral compass and SloppyStyle’s failure to lock the paper bin and placing it back to front against a wall being contributory factors .

In better news again my garden waste bin was emptied this morning after a six week interval. Is it worth £50 a year?

I can report that Bonkers is unlikely to be reporting anything about the appalling Bexley Group Practice again . The GPs there never did phone me after the doctor at Erith Urgent Care Centre asked them to call me urgently on 9th December. A month later Google told me that my GP review (not the blog) had been read 100 times.

My newly registered surgery seems to be very different; friendly and professional. I left a positive NHS review despite a seriously ill friend being referred to hospital by his doctor and sitting in the proverbial corridor for 44 hours.

The observant may have noticed that the promised Episode 2 of the pro-ULEZ report never materalised. It must be difficult to come up with something in defence of Sadiq Khan’s money grabbing ego trip after the revelations this week about his exclusion of around 5,000 submissions to his sham consultation.

There would appear to be few honest politicians left and those who rock the boat are shown the door. Previous ramblings here will have shown me to be no Sunak supporter; far from it. A disaster for the country and probably his party too. But what can one do apart from shut one’s eyes and change the habits of a lifetime by ignoring everything political?

A difficult question wormed its way into my head this morning. If I stumbled across both Sunak and Starmer facing certain death, tied to a railway line for example, which one would I save first before the approaching train did its worst? Some might say walk away and leave them both to their fate but I doubt my conscience would let me do that. I would take my knife to Sunak first, I mean the rope attaching him to the railway line, not him obviously.

The difference is that both are intent on a course which will bring Britain to its knees but Starmer is planning a course from which there could be no recovery.

And I don’t like Richard Tice either. Maybe if he ran a political party, but he doesn’t. Reform is a limited company that asks for donations and coughing up does not confer any rights on so called members at all. A bit like the Conservative party when its MPs disagree with their members.

Democracy is dead. Next Wednesday I will go to listen to some rather left wing speakers going on about the NHS and food banks. Politically lost; that’s me.

 

13 January - Friday the 13th

There was once a time when I would have three working PCs and a laptop in reserve in case of a main computer failure but they have been neglected and are all far too out of date to be useful any more. And then this morning the only newish computer I own made a loud pop when switched and an expensive (Corsair modular) power supply has given up the ghost.

If it has not caused consquential damage Bonkers may be back tomorrow, if Amazon meet their delivery target but quite often they don’t.

Meanwhile email will not be answered.

Note: Restored to service mid-day 14th January.

 

11 January - Bexley Council. A disappointment to all

When a rubbish truck stopped outside this morning I had high hopes that our unofficial Council dump was about to be cleared but my optimism was misplaced. It blocked my drive for half an hour or so and then disappeared. I never did get to see the driver.

There’s Thames Road, Footscray and now we have Coptefield Drive.

The unofficial Council tip has been augmented since it last featured here. Two of the three big bins are totally inaccessible. SloppyStyle’s ten year contract is a disaster zone. There have been no bin collections in my road since before Christmas. (Checked with neighbours to be sure it wasn’t just me.)

There were fewer illegally parked cars today but by mid-afternoon (i.e. now) none had been ticketed. One of my neighbours has her drive partially blocked, She is probably used to it by now.

The car that blocked my drive on Monday stayed overnight and was eventually driven away around mid-day Tuesday.

 

10 January - Parking. The good news and the no good at all

Yesterday was a good day for Operation Zero Tolerance. Two cars immediately outside my house were given parking tickets and a third one 100 yards away as well.

The car pictured here represents a bit of a problem. It was left there by a woman, or to be more precise I saw a woman standing next to it at 7 a.m. yesterday morning, while the car’s lights were still on. I assumed a short term stop to give a friend a lift or some such thing but it is still there more than 24 hours later partially blocking my own drive and preventing several people nearby from getting their vehicles out of their rear parking spaces.

SloppyStyle’s refuse trucks cannot get access to their overflowing bins either. Incidentally, the bins shown in Photo 1 have all been there unemptied since before Christmas.

Meanwhile the residents of New Road are being abused by Bexley Council which is imposing additional parking restrictions (and costs) on them in order to allow buses to run unimpeded. Buses that arguably should be going up and down a re-engineered Knee Hill. Residents everywhere come a poor second to ever more buses and Bexley Council appears to be unable to understand that parking restrictions in one place merely displace the problem to somewhere else. Especially when the somewhere else is closer to Abbey Wood station.

Because Bexley Council’s intentions are not very clear from the proposed Traffic Order, one persistent resident took himself off to the Contact Centre as directed by Michael Wenbourne, a name familiar to me because it was attached to correspondence which said I did not have a dropped kerb to my house even though it has been there since 1987. Photo 2.

Having made the journey he was told that the Contact Centre does not hold a copy of the Order and associated map but they did offer to send one through the post.

The resident had taken the precaution of phoning 020 3045 3943 beforehand to warn them of his planned visit but unfortunately no one answers the phone in Mr. Wenbourne’s department.

 

8 January - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 1 - Men of Honour

When Bonkers started in 2009 it tried to present the facts and where appropriate both sides of the argument and leave readers to draw their own conclusions. Bexley Council was then at the height of its dishonest phase and there wasn’t really any need to point out the obvious with opinions. Over the intervening years BiB’s original tagline of Dishonest, Incompetent, Vindictive; stolen from The News Shopper, has become less appropriate than it used to be.

One subject upon which Bonkers has not been fence fitting is Sadiq Khan. Councillor John Davey (Independent, West Heath) once said that Khan was doing more damage to our capital city than the Luftwaffe in 1940. In the sense that London was able to recover from the Blitz but is unlikely to survive the Khanage of the past few years, the former Conservative Councillor was right.

However there is a minority view (the disregarded ULEZ consultation confirms it) that Khan is some sort of Super Hero for his blinkered attack on the city’s economy which ignores various reports that he will do almost nothing for air pollution. The reductions have come and will continue to come naturally. There was a 94% reduction in pollution between 2016 and 2020 (Imperial College figures) as older vehicles are replaced.

Because I am interested in how contrary views are justified the first of a multi-part analysis by @tonyofsidcup is published below. It is unedited although I personally feel some discomfort at the way the premature death of James Brokenshire from lung cancer has been used as supporting material.

His loss cannot sensibly be used to justify ULEZ in the way that smoking was restricted following the death of entertainer Roy Castle whose demise was blamed on performing in smoky environments. Polluting vehicles will be gone within a very few years with or without Khanage. Smoking is still killing people 29 years after non-smoker Castle died from lung cancer.

Note: Photos above from my own collection.

The premature death, from lung cancer, of the Old Bexley and Sidcup MP James Brokenshire shocked his friends and acquaintances among Bexley Conservatives. So it came as no surprise that when in 2022 London’s mayor Sadiq Khan proposed to expand the capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zone to include Bexley, the local party rallied behind the plan. “I welcome the mayor’s efforts to clean up London’s air”, Brokenshire’s successor Louie French stated, “We simply cannot tolerate avoidable deaths from respiratory disease”. Sidcup Ward councillor Richard Diment reminded his colleagues that a 2021 study by Imperial College London named his ward London’s worst-affected by air pollution in terms of lives lost. “As the Cabinet Member for Education, I regularly meet with the borough’s parents. I simply could not look them in the eye if I failed to support ULEZ”, he said.

Falconwood and Welling councillor Frazer Brooks agreed: “Living next to A2, my constituents suffer from the borough’s highest levels of NO2 pollution, and it would be unthinkable for me to oppose ULEZ expansion”. Councillor Smith of St Mary’s and St James Ward mentioned his post as the communications director of the national Conservative Environment Network, and said: “We may disagree with the mayor on many things, but protecting Londoners’ health is our common priority. Yes, times are tough and everyone is feeling the pinch, but you cannot tell an asthmatic child “Sorry, it was too expensive to give you clean air”.

“For me, it is a matter of Conservative principles”, Council Leader Teresa O’Neill remarked, “A true Conservative is serious about personal responsibility. If your vehicle pollutes the air that other people breathe, you accept your duty and pick up the bill. I would do this readily”. Councillor O’Neill recalled that back in 2007, the council declared the borough an Air Quality Management Area, citing high levels of nitrogen-dioxide and particulate-matter pollution. “Air quality has been Bexley Conservatives’ priority since day 1”, she said, “Every year, the Cabinet debates the annual Air Quality Action Plan, and we always ask: What more can we do to make our air cleaner?”

Ok, let’s snap out of this daydream. All of the quotes above are made up. Without exception, Bexley Tories have toed the party line and opposed ULEZ expansion, not once acknowledging Bexley residents living with respiratory disease. (Clearly, Brokenshire was an exception). The “green” Councillor Smith read out an anti-ULEZ statement in the council chamber. After Mayor Khan announced, in November 2022, that ULEZ expansion was going ahead, Bexley joined Tory-run Outer London boroughs of Croydon, Harrow and Hillingdon in opposition. In her statement, Teresa O’Neill insisted that the “decisive” victory of Bexley Conservatives in the May 2022 local election - Tories’ 51% of votes vs. Labour’s 44% - gave the council the mandate to oppose ULEZ.

(In the following month, the “rebel alliance” indicated that it was going to block TfL’s installation of ULEZ camera equipment on borough-managed roads. One wonders if, defying TfL, the councils would be able to keep the money they receive from TfL. Each year, Bexley receives hundreds of thousands of pounds from the City Hall, to fund things from bridge repair to the salaries of lollipop people. In 2020, in a Covid-related development, TfL funding went away, for six months. So did the lollipops, as Bexley failed to pony up).

A late-2022 Freedom of Information request for Bexley’s latest Air Quality Action Plan was met, incredibly, with “We don’t have one yet”. Why “incredibly”? The Bexley Air Quality Management Area has been in place for 15 years, and devising and maintaining an AQAP is, to all appearances, a legal requirement. One can only wonder if Bexley is breaking the law (and Defra doesn’t care), or if the senior officer who responded to the FOI did not have a clue. Either way, it tells you something about the council’s - and its Conservative leadership’s - attention to air quality. Asking these people to react to the ICL study that put Sidcup, Bexleyheath, Crook Log and Blackfen and Lamorbey in the top 20 of London’s wards most affected by air pollution seems to be a pointless exercise.

As confirmed by another FOI request, Bexley did not carry out a formal analysis of the impact of ULEZ expansion before publishing anti-ULEZ articles in The Bexley Magazine, and did not even ask TfL how many Bexley-registered vehicles would be caught out by ULEZ. (I did - and was shocked to find that just over half of Bexley vans were non-compliant).

Two Sidcup residents and stars of the Bexley Conservative scene, Louie French MP and Gareth Bacon MP, made YouTube speeches against ULEZ expansion, and ran HQ-supplied anti-ULEZ petitions on their HQ-supplied web sites. Louie never answered an email question about a claim in one of his anti-ULEZ videos. In fairness, he never answered any question I have emailed him - while a made-up “Fluke Kelso” received a prompt response to his adoring email. Our MP appears to operate a “black list” of undeserving constituents. If I weren’t on it, I could ask Louie about AQAP - after all, as Bexley’s Cabinet Member for Growth, he was likely responsible for it before moving to Westminster.

Most of the anti-ULEZ noise has appeared to originate with the Conservative members of the London Assembly. There is a Russian expression about someone “getting fired from the Gestapo for cruelty”; adapting this saying to British realities, I could say that most Tory Assembly members could be fired from Boris Johnson’s cabinet for lying. The small group spent months inflating what they called #ULEZScandal, based on a set of falsehoods which spread across the Tory anti-ULEZ discourse. In the next post, let’s look at some of these lies.

55% of light commercial vehicles registered in Bexley are not ULEZ compliant.
Seven years ago pollution levels on Bexley were not especially good.

I promised myself that I would avoid further comment so will confine myself to saying that Louie French should seriously consider firing his office assistant.

 

6 January - Has SloppyStyle failed Bexley yet again?

I feel a bit of a fool if I reply to an email and it comes bouncing back to me. Maybe even more so if I have failed to notice that the email came via the Contact form and the sender omitted to include an email address causing my own to be substituted. Hence the bounce back.

Maybe I should console myself with the thought that composing a useless response may not be quite as silly as posing a question without a reply address.

For the record my reply read as follows…

Happy New Year to you too.

Thanks for reminding me that the 2023 Recycling Guide is missing from BiB. The archive has come from the copies posted through my letter box by the Council and as yet nothing has been received for 2023.

Like you I have searched the Council’s website for it without success. I suppose one must accept that the paper copy may have fallen victim to financial cuts but that’s not really an excuse for there being no PDF copy. I will see if I can get an answer from someone. You will presumably be aware that my copies are only valid for half the borough, i.e. so called Schedule 1.

The question is probably self evident. Possibly the lack of a Guide for 2023 is further proof that SloppyStyle is simply not up to the job of providing an acceptable recycling service.

 

5 January - The square root of sweet Fanny Adams

Today’s rail strike has made no discernible difference to the commuter parking situation around Abbey Wood station. The Elizabeth line is presumably operating normally and attracting even more commuters to the area. Meanwhile Bexley Council is doing its level best to make the situation worse. It had two extra years to plan for Crossrail but what did they do apart from blaming Sadiq Khan for the delayed opening? Absolutely nothing apart from reducing the number of Free parking spaces.

Its most recent act of pure genius was to imposes a £15 charge to park on the wide streets nearest to the station and did not have the brain power to recognise what the knock on effects would be.

Whilst photos of poor parking in my road have been posted here for many years, I first formally raised the issues with Bexley Council on 6th September 2022 but got nowhere with it. My Councillor suffered similarly. Bexley Council is still stuck in the mindset which was official policy six years ago. That is do nothing.

One of my neighbours (@nickyevansbsl) is doing rather well on the publicity front having got the parking issue into a couple of regional newspapers.

What bothers me more is not the parking as such, it is the consequent road blocking, nose to kerb parking which causes me to drive on the footpath occasionally and the parking on blind corners.

Bexley Council’s lame excuse for doing nothing to help residents and improve safety standards is that it requires public consultation. It may be true that there is a huge amount of red tape to be navigated before a Controlled Parking Zone can be implemented but there are no such impediments to enforcing the Highway Code with double yellow lines on corners.

I sent the final photo below to Parking Enforcement in the hope that the owner will get a ticket and learn his lesson. The car is more than 50 centimetres from the kerb.

Whilst out taking the photographs shown here one resident came out of his house to suggest we get together and write a letter of complaint to Bexley Council. Obviously someone unfamiliar with the ways of Bexley Council. When our Councillors get nowhere with them, what hope is there for the long suffering residents?

Note: At a time when parking was not an issue, the late 1990s, Bexley Council consulted residents of the roads pictured above but did not implement a CPZ. Now that things are far worse they won’t get off their backsides.

 

3 January - Wishful thinking

A New Year message asked why Bonkers had not commented on the ‘Pull out and Keep’ section of Bexley Council’s Winter 2022 Magazine which received a generally favourable report here. The honest answer is that I don’t know; I must have skipped over it because it looked a bit boring but I find myself agreeing with my correspondent that it is a load of old, err, wishful thinking.

At a time when I was refused any appointment for a potentially serious condition, Bexley’s Magazine supplement claimed that appointments are available early in the morning, during the evening and on Saturday.

The sting is in the tail, simply contact your GP practice. I accept that Bexley Group Practice may be in a class of its own when it comes to inaccessibility but contacting a GP is the Achilles Heel of the NHS and second only to the incompetence of successive Health Secretaries as the reason for the collapse of all health services.

Then the supplement goes on to say that to register with a GP you do not need to supply proof of address, immigration status, ID or NHS number.

This is I believe what the law says but it is not true in practice. I can say that having just gone through the process myself in an attempt to escape the clutches of Bexley Group Practice. I had to provide my NHS number, state my nationality and birthplace and upload a current bank statement and driving licence as proof of address and identity. For good measure I had to scrawl something approximating to my signature using my computer mouse. Not once but twice.

It was a 20 minute process and worked well enough except that it didn’t like spaces in post codes but as the new GP’s receptionist warned me, it is not for the faint hearted.

Nothing works properly in the NHS. Not very long ago I was sent a copy of a letter addressed to my GP by a consultant at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The named GP retired many years ago but it tells him that the consultant phoned me to update me on a treatment plan. He most definitely did not and that was more than two months ago.

Just like Bexley Council the NHS is a confirmed failure and condemns people to die unnecessarily. 500 a week from bed shortages alone was reported only yesterday.

 

2 January - Van d’Lies

While waiting for a promised report in support of Sadiq Khan’s tax grab on the poor (who may rely on their old car to get to work), my mind wandered to who else might be in support of restrictions on motoring. Not MPs and former Bexley Councillors Louie French and Gareth Bacon obviously but what about Bexley’s Council Leader and Boris Johnson’s most admired politician in London? (His words not mine.)

The Baroness, recently rewarded by her close friend, was a supporter of emission zones back in 2011 when the two of them celebrated the extension of the Low Emission Zone such that it outlawed small traders’ vans.

The situation was a little different back then of course, I recall that you could not walk along Oxford Street without risking premature death from dozens of mainly static TfL buses belching black smoke.

Progress has been made and it is now rare to be aware of exhaust fumes while walking Bexley’s streets because people are gradually replacing old cars with new as they can afford them.

The democratic freedom of choice way of which Sadiq Khan does not approve.

Note: Revised title from a long term BiB reader.

 

1 January - Children of the Damned

Let’s trawl through the mainly anonymous messages that have recently arrived via the Contact form.

A handful of readers (well at least one!) are unimpressed with the Leader of Bexley Council becoming a Baroness.

Will 5 jobs Tess announce she’s resigning in the New Year message to Bexley? Would be a great gift to the people of her Kingdom. Maybe she could add bin collector to all her other jobs. She’s paid over £300 a day now, plus Councillor, Council Leader.

And a week or so earlier from a different name but in reality the same source֙…

Bexley making residents poorer. Now she’s got another job, Tessa O’Neil must be quids in. She knows how to milk the system while all the time the people of Bexley suffer.
Have you noticed each time she gets a new role services get worse? Now she makes £300 a day brown nosing in parliament. 5 Jobs Tess has to go.

I can’t get too worked up about that myself. You have a thoroughly dishonest Prime Minister lavishing riches on the Leader of a thoroughly dishonest Council. What does one expect?

Did I mention the message that simply said “Did you know that Louie French has his own YouTube channel? Can’t remember. https://www.youtube.com/@louiefrenchmp. Gareth Bacon has one too. https://www.youtube.com/@GarethBaconMP.

There have been the usual complaints about Bexley Council not providing Social Housing and about Thames Water disrupting the borough and Sidcup in particular.

Finally and perhaps intriguingly another old resident of Hoblands surfaced a few days ago. Hoblands was a children’s home run by Bexley Council and notorious for the allegations of child abuse made by several of its inmates. It was first mentioned here in 2013 when Bexley Council was busy covering up its involvement - or perhaps their lack of involvement - in the death of Rhys Lawrie and again in 2021. The Minor Attracted Person, or pervert to you and me, who ran Hoblands was jailed for ten years after being accused of 41 offences against children.

Bexley Council failed to learn. In 2011 they dismissed an employee of the Thames Innovation Centre (now The Engine House) who whistle blew on its manager for various acts of naughtiness. He later pleaded guilty at Woolwich Council Court to ten charges of paedophilia. The Cabinet Member who failed to sack him following serious complaints has thankfully long since left Bexley Council but the woman who appointed him is now a Baroness.