31 August - Belvedere By-election
Daniel Francis who was elected MP for Bexleyheath and Crayford on
4th July has resigned as Councillor for Belvedere thus causing a
By-Election in October; nicely timed to be outside the holiday period.
He was first elected in 2000 and served as Cabinet Member for Transport for the
final years of the 2002-2006 Labour administration and Labour Leader from 2017 until 2021.
Despite him being my local Councillor our paths crossed only once on a local
issue (†) but he was always to the fore at Council meetings where his encyclopedic
knowledge of the Council’s constitutional rules and regulations was frequently
used to good effect against the would-be rule dodgers in the Tory ranks.
The one local issue was of course the demolition of Ye Olde Leather Bottle
public house when both of us were called as witnesses by the Health & Safety
Executive prior to their
prosecution of developer Kulvinder Singh. Fines and costs for the unsafe
demolition totalled £27,000.
[P.S. I seem to have overlooked the sterling work Daniel put in trying to
save the Belvedere Splash Park from the Conservatives’ downgrade of
the facility.]
I voted for Daniel in both 2018 and 2022 because I felt the Conservatives in
Bexley needed more opposition but I doubt I can vote Labour ever again.
Supporting the tyrannical Starmer regime is never going to happen but neither
will I vote for a Conservative candidate stupid enough to use
photographs taken inside Kulvinder Singh’s house in her publicity material.
Maybe they will choose someone else.
The Labour candidate wil be Jeremy Fosten.
† Help has come from Danny Hackett (who eventually decided that Labour politics was not for him). Dave Putson, who was thrown out of the party when
Labour applied a rule change retrospectively (PDF), and Sally Hinkley.