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News and Comment April 2024

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21 April - How do you solve a problem like Dimitri?

Bexley Council has renewed its vendetta against Mr. Dimitri Shrovob. An opinionated piece about it might lose the few Council friends I may have; so what follows is strictly factual with comments restricted.

Mr. S. is one of the very few people remaining who tries to hold Bexley Council to account and without someone to watch over them they might wholly revert to their old ways. Dishonest, Vindictive and occasionally Criminal.

For his pains Mr. S. has been  declared vexatious and banned from submitting Freedom of Information requests. The law is that a question may be deemed vexatious but not an individual. A complaint is currently with the Information Commissioner but like all quangos they cannot be relied upon to act impartially. When Bexley Council refused to answer a question from Michael Barnbrook about whether or not a Council employee had the qualifications demanded by his contract of employment, Bexley Council told the ICO that Michael was a well known racist. The employee was black. This despite Michael spending a lot of money on a young black boy who might otherwise have drifted towards Council care and having chosen to accept the position of police mentor to Stephen Lawrence. (I have wondered why a black teenager needed a police mentor but that is different can of worms.)

Last November Council Leader Teresa O’Neill devoted several minutes of a Full Council meeting to an attack on Mr. Shrovob for trying to get a straight answer to his question about the Petition Scheme. He was acutely aware that the only other petition held in recent years was kicked into the long grass with a last minute rule change and a big lie thrown in for good measure. He was concerned that if he ran another petition it would suffer the same fate. The Leader said that Mr. S’s questions were costing the Council too much money and exaggerated the quoted numbers to ‘prove’ her point. A follow up letter said that answering FOIs causes staff unnecessary stress.

Subsequently all of Mr. Shvorob’s FOIs were rejected immediately after submission. The initial excuse note said that he had made a total of 115 FOI requests in 18 months. More than 100 had been answered without complaint but the final dozen brought down the shutters.

Having illegally banned Mr. S. from submitting FOIs, Bexley Council has taken what might be considered the logical next step. They have rejected his questions to Full Council. Mr. S. thinks this is unprecedented but it is not. Dimitri should count himself lucky not to have been banned from being on Council premises because that is a weapon in their armoury too.

If I may interject a comment into this hopefully factual report it is that Mr. Shvorob does not know when he is beaten by a dishonest system. To my mind there comes a point when you have to accept that Bexley Council is crooked to its very core and move on to finding the next set of facts to prove that very thing. The trivial should not be pursued to the ends of the earth.

The questions submitted to Full Council were…


Can you please explain the mysterious demise of the council’s ULEZ Task and Finish Group, which was supposed to come up with ways to soften the ULEZ expansion’s impact on Bexley residents?


and


Do you have any information about why in 2021, a two-year-old, and soon-liquidated single-employee company owned by a Lucy Beckwith was selected to bid for a £40,000 unadvertised catering contract for Bexley’s Volunteer Event?


I would not have asked either of those questions. In the case of the former I phoned the Chairman of the ULEZ Task and Finish Group and he was more than happy to tell me what happened. As I have said before, the Council Leader took over the job of fighting against Khan’s air tax and the Group was effectively side-lined and overtaken by events and I do not imply any criticism of what the Baroness decided to do.

The Lucy Beckwith question is ancient history but rooted in a suspicion that there is a family connection with former (Brian and Aileen, deceased) Councillors of the same name. I was assured at the time that there was not and more recently that a Lucy was not in evidence at Brian’s funeral. Maybe I am too forgiving but I’m not sure it matters very much if Lucy Beckwith was dragged in at the last minute to help out when Bexley Council was in danger of falling into a hole of its own making.

Apart perhaps from an element of sarcasm which found its way into the final question rejection email I don’t see it as being out of order. A question that has been accepted for next week’s meeting, however, may be.
Question
You may perhaps deduce that Mr. S’s questions were veering towards the petty but anything he can do Bexley Council can do better. They have found a loyal supporter to attempt to blacken Dimitri’s name by broadcasting his alleged sins via the medium of the webcast and subsequently their website.

Mr. Chapman’s name is not among the nearly two thousand Bexley residents who have contacted BiB over the years nor is he an X follower so how did he get to know of Mr. Shvorob’s activities? It will be hat eating time if this is not a contrived inside job to malign a Council critic. It stinks of Teresa O’Neill’s leadership.

Nevermind, it is probably better than reporting critics to the police or making false allegations which result in criminal charges and a Councillor committing perjury in both a Magistrate’s and a Crown Court. I remain hopeful that such depths of Council depravity are truly consigned to history.

Probably I have not entirely succeeded in my attempt to fall out with no one to which I can only say “tough, I am not going to write it out again”.

 

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