29 February (Part 4) - Left wing trolls

I have been informed that the loony left who misguidedly think their antics benefit the generally good and decent people who occupy the opposition benches on Bexley Council have accused me of making a tasteless joke. Very possibly. Joke it may have been but it was also a wholly truthful anecdote. However more seriously the trolls accuse me of being friends with Louie French, MP for Old Bexley & Sidcup.

Quite a change from the not very bright Conservative Councillor Read calling me a Labour stooge! (Or as here, a troll.)

May I place on the record that my only conversation with Louie was fewer than ten words long and if he did reply it was no more than a grunt?

Examination of my email folders would reveal 35 contacts with Bexley Councillors and MPs (not all current) and none of them is the MP for Old Bexley.

I follow Mr. French on X to better see what his opinions are but he doesn’t follow me back. If I make a joke or post something more serious on X, Louie is unlikely to see it. The chance of a reaction from him is zero.

No one at all ‘Liked’ my X/Tweet despite what one of the Trolls said on Facebook, certainly not Louie, and very few saw it. The same Troll, as it happens, who called me a fascist.

While I might vote for Louie if I lived in his constituency I have two friends living there who think I would mad to do so.

I hope that makes things clearer for the hard of thinking.

 

29 February (Part 3) - Worrying words

Among the recent feedback to BiB was comment about the new mystery disease. Only two and equally divided. One agreed it is worrying while the other referred me to a very out of date Fact Checker. Who are these people so arrogant as to dismiss the concerns of those who report their observations as soon as they put their head above the establishment parapet?

18 months later there is ample statistical evidence to show that the self-appointed Fact Checker may be wrong.

“Embalmer Richard Hirschman claimed to have found abnormal long white fibrous clots in corpses, which he attributed to COVID-19 vaccines. The fact-checking organization PolitiFact, which evaluated the claim at the time, found that such an association was unsupported by scientific evidence.”

If only they had waited.

It is not one embalmer it is hundreds across all the developed world, or at least the English speaking part of it. The persistent story is that the phenomenon was first seen some six to eight months after mRNA vaccinations commenced and it peaked and tailed off following the same trend as vaccination numbers. Very significantly it is not described in any pathology text box. Ergo, it is new.

Eminent mathematicians have shown all the statistical links between the new disease and what began to happen in 2021.

Families of the deceased confirm their mRNA vaccination and the fibrous growth is not seen to any significant degree in less developed countries which could not afford to vaccinate their populations. It is irresponsible to dismiss what is clearly happening but it is understandable that it takes a brave man (and some women) to talk about it.

Doctors who would not see a patient for fear of succumbing to a virus lined up, for fifteen quid a go, to inject a minimally tested substance into millions of arms. The pharmaceutical companies were given immunity from prosecution if their concoctions killed people but the administrators were not. If they accept that they were reckless with their jabbing how many manslaughter charges might they face?

Meanwhile it is not difficult to find YouTube comments by people who have undergone clot removal (they are not blood clots, clots are dark in colour not white) and some refer to friends who died shortly after enduring the procedure.

‘Everyone’ lies these days but who would you rather trust with your life? A lot of fellow citizens relating their experience or any government agency?

I personally know two people with strange vein blockages and the NHS is investigating both as best they can. Similarly helpful was the lady who booked me in for my flu injection a few months ago. “Do you want your Covid booster?” she said to which the answer was “No way!”

Perhaps I should quote her memorable words verbatim. “That is the right decision.”

I have not had any significant flu-like symptoms since December 2019.

 

29 February (Part 2) - Michael Barnbrook

Mick Barnbrook was cremated in private as was his wish early this morning after fighting valiantly against a circulatory disease that struck him down two and a half years ago, the origins of which we can only guess at.

I printed the readers’ comments that arrived via the BiB Inbox and posted them to his wife who has asked me to thank the authors. “They are much appreciated.”

Only one from a Conservative Councillor which probably says something about the longer serving ones, but thank you Steven.

 

29 February (Part 1) - Fickle

There is a Parliamentary By-Election in Rochdale today and our old friend Danny Hackett is there in support of the Reform UK Party, or more correctly the Reform UK Party Limited owned by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice. (The so called Membership fees are simply donations to wealthy men.)

With the cotton industry gone Rochdale is well known for only one thing, Young white girls and Pakistani men. (Is that two things?)

Readers with their memory cells in good working condition will remember that Danny was once a Labour Councillor in Bexley - a good one too - but the Labour Party didn’t agree and threw him out. There are parallels there with Rochdaleְ’s Reform UK candidate. Labour threw Simon Danczuk out too.

Over time I have seen Danny campaign - or at least distribute leaflets - for Labour, Lib Dems, Conservatives and now Simon Danczuk of Reform UK, but why? There is one thing I can think of, the candidates he supports have all been long time personal friends.

I’m not sure how that saw him supporting Hilary Clinton in the U.S. of A. but maybe he thought he might bump into Monica Lewinski.

Simon was until his expulsion, MP for Rochdale but came under the spotlight more than once for Tweets of a dubious nature, such as a reference to the size of his former wife’s breasts. (For the record 34E and she had no objection.)

It may be that Simon would be my best bet in Rochdale but I don’t think I could bring myself to vote Reform UK while Richard Tice is in charge. Advocating mandatory Covid vaccinations makes him a malign dictator not a democrat. Additionally I consider his tendency to appoint candidates who have been thrown out of other parties to be a high risk strategy. In Rochdale it is probably borderline OK but others are dishonest has-beens who most definitely donְ’t deserve anyoneְ’s vote.

 

28 February - From the BiB post box

There are no Council meetings until next week so once again it is fill in as best one can time.

If you ask me why I try to keep BiB going I’d say that without it there would be no quick and relatively easy way of finding out what Bexley Council is plotting, there being no local newspapers worthy of the name left. Meeting reports are not quick to write and take at least four times the duration of the meeting to knock comprehensively into shape. (Some of the less interesting ones get the short treatment but it still takes around twice the meeting duration to write.)

And for what? I don’t recall even one occasion when a resident came back with a comment on a meeting and it is very rare for a Councillor to respond with anything useful, or at all. Not even a complaint. I’d like to think that is because they are far more carefully written than meeting minutes knocked out by a biased Deputy Council Leader.

I can only hope that having one’s actions at risk of being reported here keeps Bexley Council’s worst excesses in check - or are they driven underground?

There is however no great shortage of comment on BiB fillers of which there have recently been a fair number. They can be wide-ranging. The SL3 bus. The brown bin scam. Telephone Directories. Covid vaccinations. Amazon taking over the Post Office and the huge price rises by both companies. (It needs to be said again that the Post Office does not set the price of stamps); and finally the divided opinions on Lee Anderson and his remarks about Sadiq Khan.

Let’s see if they can be turned into another little filler.

Superloop SL3
There are are approaching 40 buses an hour using New Road since the coming of SuperLoop.  A once quiet and leafy largely residential road which serves as a free commuter car park. Yesterday just before 5:00 p.m. I was on my way to Chingford and five buses were clogging the bottom of New Road. Two 301s, two SL3s and a single decker were all trying to use Bexley’s beautifully designed T junction at the same time. Temporary gridlock.

Politics
At my quiz venue, a pub in Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency. I was on a table of four with four more quizzers on the table to my right and a team of seven behind me. During the interval one of the other group of four said something derogatory about Keir Starmer. The comments were enthusiastically taken up by my former Labour supporting cousin and I did my bit to stir things up a little. (What me? Surely not?)

In Duncan Smith’s pub (apparently he has been known to drink there) everyone thought that Lee Anderson’s comments on the Mayor were broadly correct. My contribution was something like…

“A time of suffering under the worst Prime Minister of all time is the ideal moment to elect Kneel Starmer, if we really have to, as every new generation of the gullible and naive should learn, the hard way if necessary, that a Labour Government will always be worse and in any case, Momentum will have Keir out of office within 18 months.” This ancient wisdom may not hold true when the alternative is Sunak but nevertheless there was universal agreement among my 14 fellow quizzers. For the record we won £116 between the four of us and for the first time in ages it was my contribution that pushed us over the line.

Telephone Directories
I am not the only one to have some nostalgia towards Phone Books. Who else had the knack of tearing an A-D in half in one go? And one reader remembers Maze Hill telephone exchange by the North Eastern gate of Greenwich Park. It was very dark and dingy inside when I used to visit in the 1960s but too well used to be closed.

By now regular Maggot Sandwich readers have probably seem my thesis on Telephone Directories but for those who might prefer to see it in a different format a PDF copy is here.

Garden waste
From Maidstone came news from a Bexley émigré who says that their bins are cheaper than Bexley’s and their Council is relaxed about black sack overspill. From nearer to home comes the advice that a shredder and compost bin is the appropriate response to Bexley Council’s avarice.

Mary Poppins
A local joker (probably) says that Mary Poppins should be banned totally because it portrays men dressed as chimney sweeps with blacked up faces. Don’t give them ideas sir!

mRNA vaccines
I think I will leave this one for now.

 

27 February (Part 2) - Am I a skinflint?

I spent the morning filling my brown bin with weeds and a few shrub trimmings because there are only two collections left before my garden waste subscription expires. I would probably have continued with Bexley Council’s bin scam if it was not for their announcement that they would, in the words of Labour Chancellor Dennis Healey, keep on raising the price “until the pips squeak”. Unless residents take a stand there will be no end to well above inflation price rises.

My subscription expires a week before this year’s price hike but it would still be more than I paid last year and principles must count for something.

I have reached an informal agreement with a neighbour to share but because peak demands will coincide I will have to set up a storage facility so that we might better exploit the winter collections.

Ironically neither of us would need a bin if it were not for neighbours. Mine is a generally good one with a hedge and front garden lawn but are from a culture that sees no point in maintaining a garden. The cul-de-sac layout means that it becomes an eye-sore for me more than him. No one but me has cut either hedge or lawn (daisy patch) since 2006.

The bin sharer has neighbours of the thoroughly unpleasant and abusive variety who 30 years ago planted a dozen Leylandii trees ten inches from his rear boundary. The action of an inconsiderate moron who issues threats whenever the overgrowth is cut back. If it wasn’t for that awful couple I probably wouldn’t have anyone I could bin share with - but might not need to.

The principle/skinflint debate cropped up in Sainsbury’s last week too. Own brand orange juice had gone from £3·75 to £5·75 in a week. I had the assistant remove it from the till when the price flagged up. There is no way I will tolerate a jump which makes it more than four times as expensive as the milk I bought at the same time. Support British farmers not Brazilian ones! (Research told me that bad weather has forced commodity prices up by 115%.)

Then there is Amazon. They jacked up the price of a Ring Door Bell subscription by 43%. (£3·49 to £4·99.) Doesn’t affect me as there have always been perfectly good subscription free alternatives to Ring but 33% extra for maintaining a Prime subscription does - except that I cancelled it on principle.

If I didn’t cough up another £2·99 a month they would shower me with advertisements and take away Dolby Atmos from their audio streams and Dolby Vision from the video. No great loss because it seemed to me that Amazon’s streaming service has rather too much foreign language soft-porn for my tastes.

What have they got from me for attempting to rip me off? Instead of 196 orders in 2023 (many of them multi-item orders) there have been two in 2024. One was to complete a set of identical items which had been delivered last November and the other direct from Amazon USA. A postage free blu-ray disc not available in the UK.

In only six weeks £471·88 has been spent with alternative suppliers plus £54·99 spent in the Broadway, breaking years of never shopping there. Amazon is far too big to notice that trying to rob me of £2·99 a month has cost them £500 in a matter of weeks.

Whether cancelling the Direct Debit to a local charity because I was unable to give them a fairly large donation when I called into their premises last month is principle or the skinflint tendency coming to the fore I am as yet undecided.

 

27 February (Part 1) - If you don’t like my excuse, I have more

One of Richard Diment’s ward residents emailed him about pedestrian crossings last Friday evening. On Monday he replied explaining what a Public Consultation means after the decision to go ahead has been taken. Don’t worry, it is to inform rather than seek feedback.

So Richard’s response is no big deal except that perhaps it is. We have the Cabinet Member for Places responding next working day to a resident officially labelled vexatious by Bexley Council. Quickly, politely, comprehensively and honestly. Contrast that to his predecessor when asked to explain himself.

Following some less than honest comments in the Council Chamber garnished with unnecessary insults an excuse was offered. The official Minutes of the meeting proved the excuse to be a lie so a new one was manufactured. (Hence this blog’s title.) It may not be totally honest even now but Richard demonstrates how Bexley Council has come a long way since 2011.

Where the Hell is Councillor Craske anyway?

26 February (Part 2) - I was a Hotten Tot

This country has gradually become one over-populated lunatic asylum over the past 30 years or so. Everyone in charge of any tin-pot quango or Government Department has gone right off their collective trollies. From Sunak downwards with no exceptions that readily come to mind.

Today the BBFC (Britain is Besieged by Flaming Cretins?) has decreed that the 1964 film Mary Poppins is unsuitable for children and uprated its certificate from Universal to Parental Guidance because it makes an innocent reference to the South African tribe of Hottentots. Who knew that that was a term of abuse?

Does any adult know about the Hottentots let alone a young child? Michael Caine will be getting very worried about Zulu, full of blood and violence but the same PG rating as Julie Andrews and a magic brolly.

What has become of us? Probably I only knew the word Hottentot because my 8x Great Grandfather was Hugh Hotten, born 25th March 1654 in Cornwall with the name preserved until 1941 when my mother swapped it for something else. I think that makes me a Hotten tot and descendent of a Dutch immigrant.

When I was into reading Telephone Directories I knew every one of the very few Hottens in the London book. There was one living just four stops away on a 301 bus until fairly recently, closely related, but an unfriendly sod. Must be dead by now. Most of the London ones are.

 

26 February (Part 1) - Gaslighting Council is not good enough

I found this on Bexley’s website. What could that be all about? (It is reproduced here because it is the sort of thing that they quickly remove. Check out the original while you can.)

Which may be summarised as…

• Bexley Council is committed to doing its best but it wasn’t good enough.
• Some inspectors said some things were not too bad but we agree that overall it wasn’t good enough.
• We already knew we weren’t good enough.
• We are going to listen to clients in future because until now we have not been good enough.
• We must try harder because we are not good enough.

What is that all about then? (You may have read something similar last year, but that was the Local Government Ombudsman saying much the same thing as Ofsted.)

Ofsted has published a new set of home truths on its website. No need to copy them here as they will remain on line in perpetuity.

March 2014 (Children’s Services) - Requires improvement.
October 2016 (SEND) - Variable. Too many exceptions. Not rectified. Do not know. Do not monitor etc.
July 2018 (Children’s Services) - Much better than in 2014.
January 2020 (Child protection) - Not too bad overall but too many children go missing or sexually or criminally exploited. Management not robust enough.
February 2023 (Children’s Services) - Pretty good.
December 2023 (SEND) - Widespread systemic failure. Significant concerns. Problems must be addressed urgently. Priority Action Plan demanded.

SEND services are fortunately not something I have ever needed to use but I know a man who has not been so lucky. I passed Bexley Council’s excuse sheet to him to see if he had an opinion more authorative than mine. (I found he’d already seen it.)

If you read the latest report and Bexley's response you will still never appreciate the level of gaslighting that SEND families have been subjected to by Council officers.

I don’t really know what gaslighting is but it sounds as if he has a very low opinion of the integrity of Bexley’s SEND team.

Definition: Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.

Wow! Bexley to a Tee.

 

25 February (Part 5) - Riku Fryderyk. Queen of buses

As if you haven’t had enough of me on Bonkers today here is yesterdayְ’s bus ride with the junior YouTubers on board. (Best to click it for Full Screen.) The young lady who has edited her video in record time is really very good at it. I think I mentioned before that I once made a film that got a one-off screening at the BFI theatre on the South Bank for being runner-up in a national competition but that was way back when we had to cut film apart and glue it back together in a new order and even a fade to black was near impossible to achieve. Sound? Forget it. By comparison with Riku’s effort mine was total c**p!

She is an extremely talented young lady and her expertise with the editing and getting exactly the right shot puts nearly all the other YouTubers I follow to shame.

If you are looking for me, then I am seen briefly about three times, downstairs, two seats back from the middle door. I come and go because I got off in Bexleyheath and as locals will recognise the editing of the shots is anything but chronological.

And then there is the maggot sandwich in which I contribute about a quarter of Hugh Neal’s weekly blog. Contrary to what you might read there I did not work on Phone Book production until I retired but only until 1972. There was an acrimonious falling out with a senior manager who said I could only visit the Forest Gate Directory Enquiry unit, which was very much my baby, if the Union agreed to it. I said I would go anytime the local manager said I could. And so I found my newly acquired computer skills put to good use in Telegrams. It wasn’t all bad, I got a promotion out of it.

 

25 February (Part 4) - One oak. Few blokes

A New Road resident who must have wondered where the sound of labouring diesel engines had gone this morning kindly sent me these photos of the lack of progress achieved in the three hours since I climbed the wooded hill.

He suspects that Bexley doesn’t have an in-house tree surgeon. As it hasn’t got so much as an in-house dustman or Registrar or park gardener or traffic warden he will not be wrong. Always ready to help he suggests https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/tree-surgeons-near-me.

It’s not been easy to find out what the SL3 has been doing today and TfL’s website is no more useful than the Mayor himself. Dependent on where you look TfL has given up on running the SL3 to Thamesmead but is not stopping at the Florence Road stop which suggests it is, but on diversion.

Yesterday the one I was on really didn’t like the climb up New Road and Wikipedia says my little car has very nearly twice as much power as a new Routemaster (Boris Bus). At 37 feet long it is ten feet longer than an old RM so no wonder that it kept mounting the kerb on corners. One day someone with more sense than the average politician will take the kinks out of Knee Hill and make it a couple of feet wider. The impact on the woodland would be minimal. It is not as though there is a shortage of woodland around here.

 

25 February (Part 3) - Bexley is in “a very sad place”

And so we come to the final part of the report on last week’s Cabinet meeting. Labour Leader Stefano Borella voiced my own view of the 2023/24 budget with; “Members opposite know very well that their government has let them down and is not funding demands. They know that; they may not want to say that at a meeting but they know it extremely well.”

He then drew attention to Page 211 of the Agenda.

Extract from the Children’s Scrutiny meeting Minutes allegedly written by the Deputy Leader of the Council.

“Bluntly, these comments are a lie” said Stefano. Exactly why is uncertain because as a quick summary they are, as I recall, in the right ball park but “nothing to do with” is probably something of a stretch.

The Labour Leader went on. “They were a lie and a distortion of the truth and that is true.” He asked how the Deputy Leader had the time to write the Minutes of the Children’s and Education Scrutiny meeting which is a fair question to which I might add, why is he allowed to do it? “It is disgraceful and he should apologise. There has been a failure of process.”

The Cabinet Member has apologised to the two Labour Councillors and the meeting Chairman so he must have accepted that he went too far. Council Leader O’Neill said that Councillor Leaf was “trying to be transparent” and warned Stefano to be “very careful with what he said”.

So David Leaf is less than 100% accurate in reporting a meeting, Stefano Borella said the variance from the truth amounts to deception and a lie. David feels an apology is in order but it is Stef who gets the warning. There must be a job somewhere for Teresa O’Neill in the Metropolitan Police.

I approached the Labour Group for a fuller explanation but none has been forthcoming so one might assume that it could be another piece of political theatre.

For the record this blog has never been able to use the word lie against David Leaf and doubt I will ever have to. The same goes for Stefano Borella. I regard David Leaf as a competent Deputy Leader but I had no idea that he doubled up as Committee Clerk. A man of many talents that go far beyond verbosity.

Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour) reminded the Cabinet that they had form for rewriting critical comments from outside bodies so they better suit their political agenda. “Is it common practice?” he asked. He then stated clearly that taxpayer’s money had been used by Bexley Conservatives to repeatedly libel a Councillor with things she has never said. Nonsense had been taken by the Council from the handwritten notes of a Cabinet Member which were based only on an interpretation of why a Labour Member’s head had silently moved

“This Council is in a very very sad place.” We have the highest budget gap in history and the responsible Cabinet Member has spent his time running round rewriting Minutes.

Teresa O’Neill said he hadn’t rewritten the Minutes, he had amended them. The real question is what is he doing anywhere near them?

For the record, quotations can be difficult. Comments within quotation marks on BiB are not always verbatim. They will often drop redundant words and repetitions and may draw together two time-separated comments as if they were one. What look suspiciously like quotations but without quotation marks will be my own summary of a much longer statement.

 

25 February (Part 2) - Superflop cancels Superloop on Day 2 while Superloon has a Sunday lie in

Fated isn’t it? Occasionally defeated by Bexley’s traffic problems on Day 1 the potentially useful SL3 Thamesmead to Bromley Express is currently not able to run North of Bexleyheath Library. A tree fell and blocked New Road overnight. At 10 a.m. no diversions in operation, no chain saws anywhere, just one man in an orange jacket but no tools.

The final photograph shows where TfLְ’s 20 buses an hour are destroying Bexleyְ roads.

A fun read about the SL3.

 

25 February (Part 1) - Crossing Yarnton Way

It took six hours from publication time for it to arrive, but a message came in from a Conservative Councillor who wished to comment on the blog about Richard Diment’s report to Cabinet. I never know whether to name such Councillors and thereby - with any luck - enhance their reputation in their ward or refer back to a police statement I have on file which says that after every election Councillors are taken aside by the Tory Leader and lectured on the importance of never engaging with me or reading Bonkers as I am an absolutely poisonous influence on the borough.

I have no idea if Teresa O’Neill really does that (though she has banned BiB from Council servers) because the individual who signed the statement was by far the biggest liar to ever grace (disgrace?) Bexley’s Council chamber. Long gone fortunately but if the name ever reappears on a ballot paper, avoid it like the plague. Such characters never reform.

So do I reveal the new contactְ’s name and risk wrecking their political careers, or not? Maybe I should simply refer to the latest one as Smith to preserve some degree of anonymity.

Mr. Smith puts forward the informed opinion that the Yarnton Way crossing is delayed while a flooding issue is investigated. I have no reason to cast doubt on Councillor Smith’s word, Thamesmead is one enormous flood risk but on the other hand there must be at least three flood-free pedestrian crossings in Yarnton Way already.

There should be more Councillors like Mr. Smith. One of the increasing number of good guys. Can he assure us that after investing in four crossings elsewhere, there will be money left for our Northern outpost?

 

24 February (Part 3) - Superloop SL3

Encouraged by a neighbour who got up very early and took the new SL3 to Bromley North and arrived 54 minutes later, I thought I would take one to Bexleyheath. I forgot to put on my wrist watch and accidentally left my phone at home but a bus aficionado from Upper Belvedere exploiting his phone app to the full showed me the registration number of the next bus which arrived 25 minutes later. His timings, not mine. All I know is that I let three 301s go by.

On board entertainment was provided by a number of people who were unaware it was a limited stop service and kept ringing the bell and nine or ten youngsters filming proceedings for their YouTube channels. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzjUvesqJms)
 
It was very pleasing to see that these very young people were so enthusiastic about a ride on a Boris Bus. I thought that sort of thing had died along with my Ian Allen train spotter’s book.

They were very polite asking permission to have us on camera and they singled out the oldest looking passenger for interview. He told them about his first ride on a Routemaster and reminisced about trolley buses. If they had come to me I could have told them about trips through the Kingsway tram tunnel and the double deckers that ran through Blackwall Tunnel. The conversation revealed that I am four years older than their chosen interviewee. Maybe I should be pleased that they didn’t interview me.

When I got off the bus at Bexleyheath Library I asked them if they planned to usurp Geoff Marshall or Jago Hazzard (well known transport YouTubers) and they looked at me in amazement as if an old codger was not supposed to know about such things. When I said I had spoken to Geoff Marshall face to face they almost swooned.

The outward journey took 31 minutes (using the bus’s clock) and two Thamesmead bound Superloops were stuck within 50 yards of each other on Albion Road. Thanks to the SuperLoon who designed Bexley’s roads the Boris Bus mounted the kerb four times en-route to Bexleyheath. Bexley Council designed the Wickham Lane roundabout such that no bus could get around it and a couple on the SL3 route are not much better. The young YouTubers were not locals and had filmed all the SL routes introduced so far and said that Abbey Wood to Bexleyheath was by far the worst journey they had seen. (Maybe they should try Thamesmead to Abbey Wood at about 4.45 on a weekday.)

The journey home was rather better. I came out of the Broadway shopping centre just as an SL3 was pulling away from the Library stop. I dashed across the road and the driver kindly stopped and opened the door for me. We made Abbey Wood station in 29 minutes and only mounted the kerb three times. Two Bromley bound SL3s were tailing each other in Avenue Road.

The buses were mainly full of tourists and as a Bexley resident I really did feel embarrassed about the state of Bexley’s roads and got close to apologising to the driver. Congestion is engineered in. Something really should be done about the abomination at the bottom of New Road.

The bus has a scheduled stop at Florence Road which is good for me - the nearest point to home - but also for those going to the station. It is quicker to get off there and climb the steps to the flyover than wait for the SL3 to get through the traffic. Between five and six in the evening that can be a ten minute drag on a crawling bus.

My neighbour took 84 minutes to get back from Bromley North. He described the Bexleyheath section as “horrendous”.

 

24 February (Part 2) - Crossing swords

I suggested to Cabinet Member Richard Diment when he accepted his appointment almost a year ago that it was a poisoned chalice because every decision affects every resident. Roads, parking, bins etc., all things that no one can ignore. He didn’t agree but if he doesn’t go the same way as his predecessor he will have proved himself to be of a very different calibre to Peter Craske. Not perhaps the highest bar but ‘Places’ is no easy job.

On Thursday his speech to fellow Cabinet Members recognised that the proposal to increase fees “will not be overly popular” but the overall package “is a good budget for Bexley”. Increasing investment was the proud boast.

His aim was to “cover the cost of parking and enforcement from revenue”. Carefully omitting the fact that the last parking charges increase was 30%, he said “parking charges have not increased since 2021 since when inflation has been 18%.” This was the justification for another average 6% increase. “We are keeping the charges less in real terms than when they were last reviewed” which must rank amongst the biggest deceptions in the Council chamber since Peter Craske was a Cabinet Member.

As you will already have read here, even Southeastern are charging less to park than Bexley and where they are in competition charges will be reduced in April. An overnight charge of £1·50 will be introduced at all car parks apart from the most popular ones where it will be £2·50. He once again rejected his colleagues’ pleas for a short free parking period. The Council cannot afford to lose the revenue and would rather local businesses lost it instead.

CPZ charges will be raised by either £7·50 or £15·00 a year (dependent on location) and this time his claim that it was less than the inflation rate since the last review may be close to the truth.

The recycling services which were so badly affected by strikes and lock downs are slowly recovering. The average resident reduced its general waste by 54 kilogrammes each last year which amounted to 5,000 tonnes less going to landfill. He said that garden waste charges must rise to cover the costs. (Am I the only one who remembers that when charges were introduced, Bexley Council said the new system would save £440,000 a year and bin charges were the icing on the cake?)

This was unfortunately followed by another deception; that Bexley’s charge is lower than most. This ignores the fact that many boroughs make no charge at all. He hoped there would be a minimal loss of existing customers. Fines for littering and fly tipping will be increased.

Councillor Diment acknowledged that potholes were a concern but they are not all dangerous. (Tell that to a cyclist.)

A review of pedestrian crossings using a nationally approved formula resulted in 36 proposals being ranked. Four will be implemented. “The highest ranked schemes are outside Bedonwell School (Bedonwell Road, Belvedere), outside Old Bexley Primary School (Hurst Road, Bexley), outside St. Fidelis Catholic Primary School (Bexley Road, Erith) and outside Northumberland Heath Primary School (Wheelock Close, Erith).” For unstated reasons installation will be preceded by a public consultation.

When listening to the live webcast the cynic in me uncharitably said “where Conservative Councillors were making a fuss about crossings” which having checked the addresses more thoroghly was definitely over-egging the pudding somewhat, but I find the omission of Yarnton Way in Thamesmead mystifying to say the least.

I still think that being Cabinet Member for Places is a position that invites criticism. If the Council is broke services will be cut and charges increased and there is no way any Councillor can come out with the whole truth at a public meeting and survive the next selection committee.

Richard Diment is a decent man trapped by circumstances. It still doesn’t explain Yarnton Way though. Could it have been sneaked in unannounced?

 

24 February (Part 1) - Well this is a little embarrassing

Bexley Labour may have come up with the perfect description of this borough over the past ten years and more. ‘Managed decline’.

I am sure that the ruling Conservatives would argue that they have done amazingly well under the malign rule of various Chancellors such as Osborne, Hammond and Sunak. The man who went on to be the worst Prime Minister in living memory - exactly as predicted - but one struggles to find any aspect of life in Bexley that the local Tories have managed to improve.

We now pay for a recycling service which used to be free and the bins are collected less often. Libraries have much reduced opening times and some are smaller than they used to be.

When Councils were allowed to set Council Tax Benefit at a level to suit themselves Bexley Council reduced it for several years in a row and for everyone else Council Tax has risen a little more steeply when compared to other London boroughs.

Car parking charges have gone up massively everywhere but Bexley Council is one of the few to introduce through the night and Sunday charges to the detriment of local residents and the struggling night time economy.

Street lighting is dimmer than it used to be and Keep Lefts on pedestrian refuges are no longer illuminated, both being the inevitable result of Government energy policies.

CCTV surveillance has been abandoned and Registrar and Licensing Services have been given to other local authorities to manage.

Street cleaning and grass cutting schedules are all reduced but not the number of potholes and blocked drains. School crossing patrols have almost disappeared and SEN parents pay for their children’s transport.

Maybe Bexley Council has not been directly responsible for the decline of the biggest shopping centres but their parking policies haven’t helped. Many a time I have heard councillors call for a free 30 minutes but their pleas fall on deaf ears.

Bexley’s Conservative Council was instrumental in getting our river crossing cancelled which has hit the local economy hard.

Has anything improved? Children’s playgrounds perhaps if one overlooks the loss of Belvedere’s Splash Park and a few things funded by outside bodies. Tennis courts recently and Lesnes Abbey Park funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The Council gifted itself a new Town Hall but the plan to put a big Tesco on the old Broadway site fell through and replaced by the monstrosity which is Eastside Quarter.

Transport facilities are generally better but that is down to the London Mayor and No Thanks to Bexley Council which didn’t even bother to push for and plan for Crossrail. (Elizabeth line.) Whilst I personally have fewer buses than 30 or even two years ago I don’t have to go far to find much quicker services to Bexleyheath. From today there is a new limited stop service (SL3) to Bromley which restores and improves on the 269 route which used to serve my nearest bus stop when I first came to Bexley. A time when only Westminster. Wandsworth and Merton (by £1) had a lower Council Tax. (Community Charge.)

 

23 February (Part 2) - The financial future. Starmageddon?

There was a Part 2 to the Cabinet meeting. Part 1 was the past and present but Part 2 was crystal ball territory, nevertheless Miss Holland was absolutely sure of one thing. Bexley Council has no interest in abandoning its mission to remain for ever the highest taxing Conservative borough in London and she hoped that the limit of 1·99% on annual increases would be abandoned by a future government.

As if it was something to be ashamed of she said that some of Bexley’s fees and charges “were in the lowest quartile in London” and the plan was to “put them on a more equally footing”. I think that is code for fleecing residents left right and centre.

She said she was aiming not to “price ourselves out of the market” although for me she has done exactly that.

Once again Cabinet Member Leaf responded with the word “challenging” and promised not to go on for more than another hour (nearly 40 minutes actually.)

Did he say anything worthwhile other than repeat the word challenging 50 times?

• The Russian invasions of Crimea and Ukraine has had a cost impact. 400 Ukranians are guests of Bexley Council.
• The opposition indulges in the politics of division but Conservatives - let me summarise half a dozen sentences - are brilliant.
• £143 million of savings have been delivered since 2012.
• Council Tax has been kept down. (No one shouted liar, that came later.)
• The UK economy is growing faster than our principal European competitors despite “a shallow [UK] recession”.
• Next yearְ’s Council Tax rate would be lower in real terms than in 2006.
• In 2024/25, £215 million would be spent on services. £25·9 million more than in 2023/24 but it will mainly go on inflation and the lock down legacy.
• The average spend would be around £1,500 per Bexley resident.

A lot of time was taken up by repeating what had happened at several recent Committee meetings nearly all of which has already been reported here. Councillor Leaf referenced an error he had made at the recent Children’s meeting an detailed in an Addendum to the Agenda which has not been made available to the public.

He alleged that the Labour Group had said that Covid was “an excuse” for the Children’s overspend and it “was appalling” that the excuse had been used. Labour Councillors Perfect and Amaning both went down that road at the Scrutiny meeting but Councillor Leaf admitted to misquoting both of them in “the original papers”. In which papers I am not quite sure. Enquiries continue.

If Labour didn’t like his budget he hoped the opposition could submit a “radical alternative” and not fiddle around the edges.

 

23 February (Part 1) - Costs up, reserves down

Last nightְ’s Cabinet meeting was - just for once - not only about the money but it started that way.

The new Finance Director, introduced as Miss Holland, gave an admirably clear statement of the present - that is end of December - situation. A £9·3 million overspend, some £750,000 worse than a month earlier. Children’s services have soaked up £1·889 million more than expected but fortunately slow progress with Shenstone School and redevelopment in Erith has in part compensated for it. (A £1·03 underspend there.) Housing demand has fallen too which runs counter to experiences elsewhere in London.

The overspend on Children’s Services is the highest in London.

Contract inflation has exceeded predictions and £467,000 will have to be taken from reserves and pay increases have suffered the same fate. Another £185,000 out of reserves.

Cabinet Member Leaf (Resources) spoke in more general terms. the situation was “very challenging and adverse” with inflation, Covid and care services all slipping easily from his practiced tongue and all Councils are in much the same boat.

Cabinet Member Munur (Growth) confirmed what most people will have guessed, that the huge demand on children’s services was coming from the poorest areas of the borough and it was therefore right to focus early intervention in those places. New job starts being an important part of that effort.

Cabinet Member Seymour (Adult Social Care) reiterated that the repercussions of the Covid lockdown continue to have a profound effect on care services.

Cabinet Member Diment (Places) said that the parking budget, despite the constant disruption caused by the utilities, is going to break even this year but sports and leisure lags a bit.

Councillor Borella asked how long it would take to get the budget back into control and is Bexley an “outlier” compared to its neighbours? (It is “middle of the table.”) If there was an answer to the first question I didn’t hear it.

And that concluded the Budget monitoring report.

 

22 February - Ancient and Moderna

It’s been a funny old day. Yesterday I was asked to write up a piece of GPO history which may appear elsewhere before long. I was awake half the night thinking of how it could be structured and lots of old memories came flooding back. Even so it took more than six hours to poke into shape despite the initial draft being complete in less than a couple of hours. I think I have had enough of keyboard work for today.

While I was doing that the landline phone rang several times from an anonymous number. I don’t usually answer anonymous numbers, they are usually solar panel scammers but I relented after a while and found it was Bexley Council reacting to my Brown Bin cancellation - or rather the complaint about being unable to do so.

The lady did her best to be helpful and we agreed a bin cancellation date and she accepted that the instructions to cancel on line were of no use to the average resident without a Bexley Council account. She was similarly sympathetic to my complaint that calling from an unidentified phone number was none too clever when it is simple to generate an ID of any number they like, such as 020 8303 7777 perhaps. Even Indian fraudsters can do that. Iְ’m not sure where Bexley got my land line number from, not that I am bothered by it.

I have already received offers to do a bin share.

Something that is a bit more concerning is the health issue highlighted here eleven days ago.

A reader (not a local one) who looked at the videos said that the photos of the white vein blockers looked to be rather too similar to those shown to him by his consultant following a scan. He was told it was a build up of cholesterol in his veins and needed to be flushed out as a matter of urgency.

Maybe the reader was mistaken because Google tells me that cholesterol does not accumulate in veins. Arteries, yes. Veins no.

I do seriously wonder what damage this government has inflicted on a panicked population and maybe I can guess why they have had to fiddle with the excess deaths statistics.

Maybe Councillor Leaf should be more circumspect when bragging that Bexley vaccinated more people than any other borough as he did at the last Children’s Scrutiny meeting.

Maybe not an appropriate place for an announcement but the basic site text size when in portrait mode on a smart phone was increased by 16% today. It may take a while for it to overcome your browser cache etc. Will anyone notice?

 

21 February - “Eye-watering sums”

“Whatever happened to the Children’s Services and Education Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting report?, said no one ever!” I listened to the webcast so that you didn’t need to but did not detect anything particularly exciting in it.

I learned that the number of exclusions from a couple of secondary schools was at a worrying level which may explain the following reader’s comment.

Must be 95% of pupils in Bexleyheath awaiting a bus are of African descent. They were competing so strongly to get on a 301 to Thamesmead that the driver closed the door and pulled away half empty.

Another snippet of interest was that the [unspecified] number of “exploited” children in Bexley is at worrying levels. As a child of the fifties I remember child exploitation fairly well. Two shillings for polishing every glass pop bottle in the local grocery store and a little more for pumping Esso into ancient Austins in all weathers but I have no recollection of the issue being debated by Mr. Mackey (†) who was in charge of Farnborough Urban District Council.

Presumably the problem in 2024 is on a whole different level to what it was in 1954.

Councillor Ward-Wilson (Conservative, Crook Log), making her BiB debut, was presumably paying attention at the last Cabinet meeting (29th January) because she summed up the 90 minutes of Scrutiny pretty well by saying that the child care costs were “eye-watering”. (More than £4,000 a week for every one in residential accommodation.)

Someone who took a slightly different view was Councillor Wendy Perfect (Labour, Northumberland Heath) who somehow missed Cabinet Member Read on the 29th saying the number of children requiring care was at an all-time high because of Covid. (Covid caused lockdowns and lockdowns caused mental health issues, and mental health too often led to domestic abuse. Domestic abuse is driving child care numbers.)

Instead of asking a question about the £11 million child care overspend she launched a 122 second long soliloquy (Chairman Lisa Moore's description) blaming the Tory Government for the situation which may well be true but It is not something Bexley Council can do anything about. They have already said their lobbying for a fairer Local Government Grant has failed. Presumably Councillor Perfect’s solution would be a higher Council Tax rate. (Who’s for another 40% increase?)

The Chairman asked for her question three times but it never quite came. Councillor Perfect was scrutinising H.M Government and not Bexley Council and was unwilling to wait for the election.

Cabinet Member Philip Read was not best pleased with her. The overspend was a consequence of Covid and to say otherwise was “ill-informed nonsense”. It is not unique to Bexley and it will not go away quickly. “It is time to be honest about it.”

Cabinet Member David Leaf who habitually has all the figures at his fingertips said that the Government had provided extra funding for child care (another £500 million this month) but Councillor Perfect argued otherwise.

† I remember the name because his son Michael was in my class at school.

 

19 February (Part 2) - Another “diatribe”

When I checked the Finance webcast the day after the Scrutiny meeting I was relieved to see that it lasted only an hour and seventeen minutes but when I checked back yesterday it had become two hours and thirty four minutes. Double to the very last second. Seems too much of a coincidence to me but whatever the case there is now an extra hour of (probable) boredom to sit through.

Letְ’s see if I am right.

Cabinet Member Leaf, whilst denying it was a political point, said that the reserves and climbed from £5·5 million to £14 million since 2006 and Bexley is not the only Council that has had to eat into reserves to cover over-spends which are at about 5%. A lot less than some of our neighbours.

Councillor Daniel Francis quoted the CIPFA report which said Bexley had the lowest reserves of any comparable Council.

Councillor Leaf plans efficiency savings of £250,000 in each of the four Directorates mainly by cutting back on run of the mill things. He mentioned paper clips but maybe not altogether seriously.

Fees and charges raise about £45 million a year and they are to be hiked above the level of inflation yet again, generally by around 6%. Keen to contrast Bexley with Greenwich, Councillor Leaf said theirs are going up by 6·7%.

A watchful eye is being kept on the financial balance between BexleyCo building in Felixstowe Road (final section of Part 2 of PDF) and keeping the land as a car park.

Towards the end of the meeting Chairman Steven Hall invited Cabinet Member Leaf to present his formal “diatribe” but he didn’t have a lot to say, preferring to keep his powder dry for this week’s Cabinet Meeting but he was looking forward to every Councillor supporting his budget in March.

Councillor Stefano Borella (Labour Slade Green & Northend) congratulated the Council on their support for LGBT History Month and contrasted it with Bromley which offers none.

Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour, Belvedere) said the Direct Debit reminders were not functioning correctly and he had tried the opt out facility three times, apparently successfully except that the reminders kept on coming and the email Reply address bounced. It was, he said, not compliant with GDPR. Councillor Leaf said he would get it fixed; which is what he said last July.

 

19 February (Part 1) - June the 1st

Three weeks ago Councillor Slaughter asked a TfL manager if she had any statistics on bus accidents. Predictably she did not but I guess that June Slaughter must have been on to something because reports are that 63 people were killed or seriously injured by or on London buses in the final three months of last year.

I have known for a long time that riding London buses is among the most dangerous modes of transport and presumably the majority of drivers know that because most take great care to ensure that the elderly are sitting down before moving off.

But not the driver of a 301 last Thursday afternoon who took off like a rocket from the Yarnton Way roundabout stop in an effort to turn me into another TfL statistic.

 

18 February (Part 2) - A little bit of finance

Believe it or not there was a discussion on Finance at the Finance Scrutiny meeting but only at the end after the sessions on Comms and Customer Experiences. (†)

Councillor Brian Bishop (Conservative, Barnehurst) asked about investment training for the Pensions Committee and found that it is fully compliant with the regulations but none is provided for the Audit Committee. Councillor Bishop asked if he should be worried by that but Cabinet Member David Leaf said no because training for Members was in the pipeline.

Councillor Stefano Borella (Labour Leader, Slade Green) thought the subject of borrowing was very important with the Council’s debt standing at £223 million, some of it with very long maturity dates - up to 50 years - and asked if that was a normal situation for Councils. He was told that the loan portfolio was “well constructed” and entirely normal. There was some optimism about the Council getting its money back from a bad £12·8 million investment in the Lothbury Property Fund once it is rescued by UBS Triton. Councillor Leaf said that £6·2 million should come back to the Council but that was better than if the money had simply been left in the bank.

† I have just realised that my recording of the Finance meeting cut off after one hour and seventeen minutes. Precisely at the half way stage. The software automatically aborts after a transmission break. Back to the drawing board!

 

18 February (Part 1) - We plan on ripping you off until you rebel

A week after Bexley Council announced that it would whack up bin taxes every year for as long as residents continued to pay I cancelled my Direct Debit. Yesterday I received the annual renewal letter from ‘The Garden Waste Team’ complete with idle threats about what might happen if I failed to cancel the service in the approved way.

This is to go to www.bexley.gov.uk/gws and press the Cancel button. Not wishing to offend against their rules I did exactly that only to find that the Cancellation facility is only available to those who have a Bexley Account. I haven’t got one so I sent a complaint instead.

I noted that my expiry date is 25th March even though I signed up for the Autumn 2015 start. Have we really had six months of strikes (and consequential extensions) since then?

£27 in 2015.

£70 in 2024.

The Bank of England says inflation has been 31% since 2015. The bin charge should be no more than £36.

Presumably it makes sense for three (for example) neighbours getting together and paying a maximum of £70·40+£48·80+£48·80 and in effect getting the bin charge down from £70 to £55.

 

17 February - Labouring the point

Before Dave Putson was elected as my Councillor in Belvedere one of his colleagues emailed me to say he was extremely Left wing and implied I wouldnְ’t get on with him. Compared to me he is pretty far to the left but then nearly everyone is but as I have said before I found him very likeable and much more likely to get up and do something useful than any of his colleagues. He was rewarded by the Labour Party with The Order of the Boot.

I suppose it is inevitable that BiB is occasionally biased; it is very difficult to forget being reported to the police for “criticising Councillors” or having to watch one lie under oath in a Magistrate’s Court in order to secure the conviction of a friend. And it works the other way around.

Dave Putson has asked me to publicise something I am not entirely comfortable with. I have already referred to him campaigning on behalf of the innocents being killed in Palestine following their terrorist governmentְְ’s avowed intention of eliminating the state of Israel.

Personally I can applaud the elimination of terrorists while being unhappy with the consequent loss of innocent lives but when the obvious solution is that Hamas stops murdering Israelis I think I know which side I must take if pushed into such a decision.

Before I get myself into any more trouble, back to Dave Putson’s request; publicity for three local branches of the party that refuses to have him as a Member. They voted for a Motion for a ceasefire three weeks ago which translated into a demo outside Labour Party HQ.

The approved Motion was…

This branch/constituency notes the interim report of the the International Court of Justice, that there is plausible evidence that Israel is committing genocidal acts. Considering this countries like the U.S and the UK, are complicit by virtue of the fact that they are supplying Israel with the weapons and military intelligence, that makes this possible. It is blatantly obvious that the Tory government is guilty of supporting, and continues to support, despite the ICJ interim decision, Israel’s heinous crimes. The leadership of the Labour Party has adopted an unacceptable position in relation to this issue, supporting the government and therefore Israel. In view of the ICJ interim decision, and the fact that Labour are likely to form a new government later this year, we call on the leadership of the Labour Party:

• To recognize the implications of the ICJ’s interim report, condemn Israelְ’s war crimes and support the call for an immediate ceasefire.
• If elected, to commit to halting all UK weapons sales to Israel.

(If this motion is passed to be conveyed to the all NEC members)

And they took it to Labour Party HQ as agreed.

And this is where Dave and I may part company. Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East and the only civilisation of the type we used to enjoy in the UK.

Israel is an advanced country in the technological sense. I have quite a lot of electronic bits and bobs marked Made in Israel and their Iron Dome defence against Hamas rockets was home developed as is the proposed laser replacement.

If Britain stopped supplying arms (mainly components) to Israel, how long before the creeping aggression of terrorists finds its way here even more than it does now, like every Saturday in London?

Appeasing terrorists is never a good idea and for once Keir Starmer is correct. Obviously when he is elected following Sunakְְ’s disastrous Premiership the rank and file will chuck him out.

At least Dave’s arm twisting of BiB proves he does more for the Labour Party outside it than those who run the show locally from within. Their senior officers would rather report me to the police for being against their violence (which they claimed to have actually done more than once) and threatening to sue me if I mention it again.

I have to go up to London later today and divert to avoid the no-go area terrorist supporters are going to occupy. That is where appeasement gets you. Khanage.

 

16 February - Everything is broken

Good News but Bad Debts
By September of last year Bexley Council had accumulated £2·7 million of PCN debt and wrote a quarter of it off.

They later excused it by saying that offenders simply disappear and chasing them is a hopeless waste of money.

Locally we had a ‘family’ of five men and two women living in a two bedroom flat. They ran a small fleet of clapped out vans, five at one time but more recently only three.

Between them they would be issued with three or more PCNs a week and residents assumed they never paid them because they appeared to care not one jot and would pavement park even when they knew the CEO was due imminently.

On Wednesday evening all the vans were taken away, at least one on a low loader, by the owners. Some say it had a DVLA clamp on a wheel though I didn’t see that myself and the DVLA website suggests it was taxed. None of the people involved spoke a word of English and probably they have left an unpaid landlord behind.

Broken Bexley
Abbey Road has flooded regularly for as long as anyone can remember.

Today I lazily accepted a lift to shorten the walk to search for a post box. I opened the car door in Abbey Road and found myself staring down a gully.

Totally clogged by the silt of ages.

FixMyMuddyStreet Bexley!

Broken Britain
I try not to use Royal Mail services, over-priced and unreliable, but occasionally needs must and I use a left over Christmas stamp. This time a sympathy card to Ramsgate.

At lunchtime today none of the local postboxes displayed a Next Collection flag before next Monday. (If you are coming to this late; it is Friday today.)

I had to queue in the Post Office to ask if they would kindly accept my envelope, which the lady did.

The stamp shown here is from my last remaining pre-barcoded set. It neatly sums up the privatised Royal Mail. Run by a bunch of scheming Trotters intent on becoming millionaires.

Note: I printed out all the received condolences messages and included a copy in the card sent to Mick’s widow.

Broken BT
Yesterday I had an invitation to afternoon tea with the old lady who had been compulsorily purchased out of her Wolvercote Road tower block into a new one which looks down on Lidl on Harrow Manorway. She wanted to thank me for helping to push BT into restoring the phone number she had had for more than fifty years.

Ridiculous that BT hadn’t done it as a matter of course. She told me that she is the envy of her new neighbours who have been similarly displaced from nearby addresses. Every one of them has had to accept a new number. She is very grateful to her new friend at BT, Andrew.

My whole time in BT and the GPO before that was spent trying to improve the customer’s lot. Whatever happened to that idea?

 

15 February (Part 2) - Customer Experience

Bexley Council has been reviewing its ‘Customer Experience’ and Councillor Andrew Curtois (Conservative, Falconwood & Welling) chaired a sub-Group.

Cabinet Member David Leaf thanked him for his work on it and spoke about a recently closed survey on the subject which has consulted with “stakeholders” including Age Concern and the deaf community.

Councillor Nick O’Hare (Conservative, Blendon & Penhill) said there was still work to be done to improve telephone contact. “The average wait may be only 84 seconds (†) but waits of six or seven minutes and cut-offs are not uncommon. Then callers are directed to voice mail inboxes which are full.”

Councillor Larry Ferguson (Labour, Thamesmead East) asked if Bexley’s FixMyStreet system could be linked with Peabody’s (which has a quasi town council role in Thamesmead) as residents in his ward are not able to easily check whether the Council or the Housing Association is responsible for a particular problem. The Council Officer said she would look into the possibility but Chairman Steven Hall didn’t think Peabody was a participant in FixMyStreet.

Cabinet Member Leaf confirmed there was a third party problem with FixMyStreet and manhole covers etc. being reported to the Council which are a utility company responsibility. However Council staff do pass them on to their contacts within those companies.

† 84 seconds average and they are relatively happy! When I was manager of what was in effect a huge Contact Centre I would be compelled to write a report for the top brass if either my night or day average waiting times (measured separately) exceeded five seconds.

The Places Scrutiny meeting, from which the foregoing is extracted, is chaired by Steven Hall (East Wickham). It was Steven who Mick Barnbrook came within eight votes of beating in a Welling by-election and he was first off the block to send the most gracious tribute to Mick Barnbrook and the good political banter that they enjoyed together. Thank you Steven. I will pass your message on to Sharon Barnbrook.

 

15 February (Part 1) - Michael Barnbrook, 25th March 1943 - 14th February 2024

As you will have guessed if you noticed the black site banner yesterday evening, Michael Barnbrook has died.

Fit and healthy until two years ago and competing internationally as a race walker until his early seventies he began to complain of breathlessness in July 2021 and was found to have blood clots in various dangerous places including a big one lodged in his heart. In the early stages he was warned not to move in case he dislodged it but it became a fixture wreaking all sorts of circulatory damage on his body.

Not one to give up on anything he carried on with life while he could, even earning the dubious distinction of being thrown out of a hospice for not dying quickly enough. He was readmitted last week and phoned me on Friday planning my next visit to see him. But there was no hope of recovery, the blood clots had damaged his body beyond repair.

Mick was born in Plaistow across the river where he joined the Metropolitan Police by accident. He accompanied a friend to an interview, but the police persuaded him to join up instead. He was an Inspector in Bexleyheath until retirement and lived In Blackfen until 2015.

He twice got close to becoming a Bexley Councillor and he was banned from asking probing questions when Bexley Council was at the height of its dishonest phase.

Mick was a stickler for honesty and many were his tales of police malpractice and his interest in politics led to him bringing down local MP Derek Conway; followed by 16 others some of whom went to prison as a result of Mickְ’s intervention.

He persuaded the police to send a file on Bexley’s Chief Executive to the Crown Prosecution Service for blatant and evidenced dishonesty. (The CPS lost it.)

The pictures are of him (right side of picture) arresting a streaker at Millwall football ground when he was in charge of security operations there and with Nigel Farage outside a Brussels café.

Mick leaves a wife in Ramsgate, a son in Dartford and a Grandson in Thamesmead. He will be sorely missed by several of us.

 

14 February - We have a plan; to spend another £55k.

The Finance Scrutiny Committee is more correctly known as Finance & Corporate Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee and so it was appropriate that it discussed Council Communications issues this week.  The omens were not good when the microphones failed three minutes into the meeting but fortunately normal service resumed six minutes later.

There is a new (former NHS) Comms Manager, Gill Amas (†), and maybe she will have some new and original ideas. But perhaps not especially self-generated as external consultants had been hired at a cost of £13,000 to suggest how things might change. Their plan will cost an additional £55,000 to implement. The audio failure ensured that the first question from Councillor Ferguson could not be heard but whatever it was Ms. Amas was unable to answer it.

The agreed Comms requirements are stated below…

The plan itself may be found on pages 15 to 21 of the meeting Agenda (PDF).

Labour Leader Borella (Slade Green) wondered how we could possibly afford so much money (it has been taken from reserves) and noted that The Bexley Magazine is pretty much the same now as it was 25 years ago. What alternatives are there to the magazine? He suggested several including leaving it in supermarkets. Cabinet Member Leaf spoke up for “the digitally excluded who welcome a magazine through their letterboxes”.

Among the recommendations is one to adopt OASIS. Neither Councillor Borella nor O’Hare (Conservative, Blendon & Penhill) knew what it is and why should they when the new Comms strategy had fallen at the first hurdle by not providing an explanation? The acronym translates to Objectives, Audience, Strategy, Implementation and Scoring and “widely used by Communications Professionals in the NHS”. Maybe Communications would be improved if people simply spoke in plain English and is NHS management renowned for itְs effectiveness and efficiency?

Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour, Belvedere) thought that Faith Groups may be able to help spread the Council Gospel. Councillor Leaf later agreed with him. Daniel noted that the Comms Team is small but it still manages to overspend its budget.

He asked for any reason that might explain why some Council Members are given publicity via official borough Retweets and others never were and referred back to last November’s argument about official Council photographs being used in party political material. Staff are contracted to appear in Council publicity material when appropriate but can they complain when it is used by third parties, including political parties?

The overspend is due to falling Magazine revenue and [internal] printing and graphic design costs. It was accepted that the Council’s Social Media policy was inconsistent and if staff photographs are used beyond Council purposes their permission should be sought and of not legal redress might be appropriate.

no one else had any questions and the new Comms manager left the building,

† An appropriate name for Valentine’s Day if you are a Latin scholar.

 

13 February - Enough is enough. Too much actually!

Dear Councillor Ball,
You are right, there comes a point when the only conclusion is that we are being ripped off. The free garden waste service you introduced 20 years ago became £27 a year in the Autumn of 2015 and is now £65 with a threat from the Head of Waste Services that the fee will go up again every year while residents show a willingness to keep on paying.

I cancelled my Direct Debit today and will see how I get on. I last filled my brown bin in mid-December and have managed to find a few twigs for next Friday. I may have to stop trimming my neighbour’s hedge and mowing her small lawn and if the incinerator cannot cope there is a free bin in Socialist North London provided to a cousin who has concrete for a garden.

Yours sincerely,
Malcolm Knight

 

12 February - How to cripple Bexley’s Night Time Economy

The final Places Scrutiny meeting report is all about the money.

Councillor Chris Ball (Labour, Erith) opened the batting by asking if the Council was confident that hiking the bin tax by another 10% would produce more income. The price has gone up by nearly two and a half times in nine years while inflation would have taken it from £27 to only £36; then he made the mistake of thinking that Bexleyְ’s bin tax is among the cheapest in London. No it is not, none of my family living in London pay anything at all, although one of them pays £15 a year Band D Council Tax per year more than we do in the highest taxing Conservative borough in London.

He went on to say that the parking charges review had produced some “extraordinary results”; some reducing by 30% and others being raised and he didn’t think the new night time charges will go down well with anyone. For a relatively small return Bexley Conservatives are hitting businesses.

The Council Officer said that as they had got away with raising waste charges steeply over the past two years he “was confident” that there are enough well off suckers [my word not his] in Bexley prepared to keep on paying. So there you have it. If you pay the new charges they will definitely go up again next year.

On car parking the same logic applies, where motorists have shown a willingness to cough up the price will go up and vice-versa to some extent.

Cabinet Member Richard Diment said that where car parks are in competition with station car parks an attempt had been made to make sure Bexleyְ’s charges are competitive for the all day tariff. Some of Bexleyְ’s charges had been “significantly ahead” of Southeastern’s.

Councillor Ball said that even small charges where there had been none is irritating. Cabinet Member Munur thought that spreading the misery more widely is more acceptable than further increasing the day time charges.

Councillor John Davey (Conservative, West Heath) said that the Elizabeth line continues to create congestion and parking problems in his ward (at 4 p.m. yesterday - Sunday - Wilton Road was congested and cars were parked all over the Gayton Road footpath). He said he had been in contact with Council officers “for some time but got nothing back from them. More than £15 for less than two hours in New Road suggests it is set up wrong.” Councillor Diment said it was to discourage the all day commuter.

Councillor Cameron Smith (Conservative, St, Mary’s & St. James) asked what had been done to assess the impact of night time car parking charges on businesses and residents who cannot park on the streets and why is the Ringo charge £1 less than cash when elsewhere the cost is the same? The answer is that Bexley Council is anti-cash (†) and the Officer will probably not be too popular for making it clear that the new charges were a Cabinet decision and not his department’s. There was no answer for the impact of charges on businesses, presumably because it was a Cabinet imposition and there was to be no debate. Cameron was sceptical about the willingness of motorists to keep paying more and reminded the Committee that the Felixstowe Road car park at £15 for four hours had fallen £178,000 short of expectations.

† The Cabinet Member nevertheless said that the aim will be to keep at least one cash machine in each car park and he also ruled out “astronomical charges like in Greenwich where a diesel can cost £7 per hour to park”. Some mad things go on in Bexley but at least it is not yet Looney Left.

 

11 February - Sunak is not a Looney

A week ago Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the Covid vaccines are perfectly safe which is rather strange when the Government acknowledged a year ago that they had killed some people.

If you think the excess deaths statistics, which include previously healthy young people dropping dead, need an explanation you may wish to watch a YouTube discussion between a doctor and an undertaker. The latter says that thrombosis deaths are up across the country by 600% and around 25% of all corpses have arteries and veins clogged with a white rubbery substances which has never been seen before. The doctor says there is nothing like it in any of his pathology books.

Undertakers are officially banned by coroners from discussing the issue which is reported in all the countries that vaccinated on a large scale and absent from less developed countries.

The discussion does not point the finger at the mRNA jabs because YouTube does not allow vaccine criticism.

There are similar videos at https://youtu.be/4rAoqhTUU0g (US based) and https://youtu.be/z06xBRCwGp0 (the first one). They are perhaps not for the squeamish because they include images of the rubbery material that has been flushed from dead bodies.

The embedded video is at https://youtu.be/wwdRfbPrGIY.

I do not recall ever being told a friend or acquaintance had died of a stroke. There have been two reported to me this week, one did not survive.

Note: The blog title is explained by the embedded video.

 

9 February (Part 2) - More ‘Places’

It appears to be mandatory that politicians must bow down to the God of Climate Change occasionally and Bexley Council is no different. It has already made a Climate Change Statement but in practice the only influence it has is to recycle as effectively as it can. In that, as we know, they have one of the better track records despite being blown off course in recent years by strikes.

Progress has been made towards giving flats better access to the food waste collection service and Councillor Lucia-Hennis (Conservative, Crayford) said that food recycling has gone from 30% to 42% in less than a year. She was corrected, it is now 45% and the improvement is due to “engagement with residents and managing agents”. The importance of recycling is a planning consideration too. Expect to read more on this subject in the forthcoming Bexley Magazine.

Cabinet Member Richard Diment alluded to his well known ‘recycling costs a lot of money’ theme without going through the actual numbers again.

Councillor Sally Hinkley (Labour, Belvedere) referred to the brown box supply problems brought to her attention by one of her residents and BiB. It was confirmed that a new box supplier had provided adequate stock.

Councillor Cameron Smith (Conservative, St. Mary’s & St. James) correctly said that there was little Bexley Council could do about transport or domestic heating so it was sensible to concentrate on areas where it could have an impact - like recycling and EV chargers which encourages the switch from fossil fuels to clean electricity. It is more difficult to get owner occupiers (the majority of housing in Bexley) to decarbonise than it is in boroughs with a much larger proportion of social housing.

Cameron said that the government had given quite a lot of incentive to householders to decarbonise via grants and the removal of VAT and thought Bexley Council should be doing its bit by providing some publicity for it.

Councillor Davey (Conservative, West Heath) said that it is often best to reduce consumption and that may impact recycling rates. He has given up The Daily Telegraph because it is too expensive. Join the club John. He asked when we are going to see the post-ULEZ air quality data. He predicted we will see minimal difference.

Cabinet Member Diment said that Bexley is currently the fourth best recycler in London but the only borough at the top of the table which is still on the increase. Watch out Bromley which has plateaued and still behind what Bexley was pre-strike.

No one answered Councillor Davey’s ULEZ question and he wasn’t going to let anyone get away with it. Unfortunately no one knew the answer but it was confirmed that Bexley has reached the air quality requirements every year since 2019 when measurements began.

 

9 February (Part 1) - Who is the clown?

I have a friend who drives from Bromley to Abbey Wood three times a week and if one asks “How was the journey?” the answer is very often, “OK until I got to Bexley”. Not surprising when Bexley’s idea of road planning is to make them narrower than they need to be and to engineer unnecessary pinch points.

Next week and for six weeks Bexley Council has allowed SGN (Southern Gas Networks? - their website doesn’t say) to block Blendon Road and Penhill Road which will severely restrict Abbey Wood to Bromley traffic; and in case that does not create enough chaos Bexley Village has road works too.

I wonder what our esteemed Mayor has to say about that? His SL3 Superloop express bus from Thamesmead to Bromley is due to start on 24th February.

The full SGN statement (I rather like their reference to Damson Underpass) says that Penhill Road will have to be closed Southbound too and the SL3 route uses both. Fortunately I don’t think the SL3 stops in Blendon or Penhill Roads so it can easily divert via Bexley High Street.

Oh! 😒

 

8 February - Hayley the Unhelpful

Listening to and reporting on more of the Places webcast today was always going to be a tall order but the tin-hat was put on things when Queen Elizabeth Hospital called to say my next appointment had been brought forward by eight days. No real problem except that my preceding blood test had to be done today instead of early next week as planned. Again not a big problem because I needed to get into central London today and breaking the Liz line journey home at Woolwich is an easy option. The Liz was a mess as usual but there is not much they can do about a fatality beyond Paddington. Fortunately the announcements saying there was no eastbound service beyond Whitechapel were a load of nonsense.

I have been going to QEH phlebotomy every six months since 2006 and have always chosen to visit round about 4 p.m. I don’t remember ever having to wait very long and many a time I have been in and out quickly enough to be on the very same bus home that took me there; the turn around point being only a couple of hundred yards further up the road.

The waiting room was almost full at 1 p.m. and a sign said the likely waiting time was 20 minutes, soon amended to 30. OK, so my luck ran out, it happens, so why mention it here?

With 57 minutes gone and me only three calls to go, the whole department closed down. Treatment rooms in darkness (except for Room 1 for priority patients) staff coats on and they all walked out.

After 20 minutes the waiting throng began to get restless and a man knocked on the manager’s door. A lady who had been in and out every few minutes but hid herself away the moment a problem appeared opened the door and waved her arms around and those surrounding her asked questions loudly. I didn’t clearly hear what excuse she may have offered but another manager with a power complex walked around telling non-priority people, for which it was by now standing room only, to get off the green seats. They had to stand while the seats remained empty but Rules is Rules for the intellectually challenged.

After 30 minutes of inaction two phlebotomists replaced the previous four and a surly mute jabbed my arm. Usually they are the chattiest and friendliest of people.

On the way out I thought I would ask at the PALs kiosk what had gone wrong. Had there been an emergency that had taken staff away or had some idiot manager scheduled everyone for lunch at the same time? “Is there a way of finding out please?”

Hayley withdrew and I assumed she would make enquiries, but no she simply didn’t want to deal with questions.

The National Health Service really is as badly managed as you imagined.

Places Scrutiny meeting report tomorrow with any luck.

 

7 February - The electric tube is coming to Bexley

UK Power Networks has been burrowing under London and yesterday they updated the Places Scrutiny Committee on progress. The sixty five year old oil filled distribution cables have to be replaced and a tunnel has been bored between Crayford via Hurst Road, Kidbrooke and New Cross to Wimbledon. It should be fully fitted out by 2028. In North London 35 kilometres of tunnelling and cable is complete and cost around a billion pounds. The South London section will be another 32·5 kilometres of tunnel, another 200 kilometres of cable and another billion pounds.

The tunnels should allow the cabling infrastructure to be updated as demand for electricity increases without disrupting life above ground.

Councillor John Davey delved into the technicalities. “The cables under full load will generate a lot of heat. What happens to it?” The ventilators are in Crayford and Hurst Road (and in Eltham) and the cables will not be especially warm all the time. The fans will only run when required. The tunnels are around 50 metres below ground so the soil is unlikely to get warm.

Councillor James Hunt asked what will happen to the old oil filled cables. Will roads have to be dug up to reclaim them? No, the oil will be drained but where removal would cause disruption the cables will be abandoned.

There is a set of slides to illustrate the work being done.

5 February - If it ain’t broke, break it

There was a second health meeting in Bexley last week, the travelling circus that is the South East London Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee pitched up in Bexley which means it had the benefit of a webcast. Incidentally, many thanks to whoever it was who turned up the wick for the Public Cabinet meeting a week ago and kept it that way. Webcasts have been much easier to hear ever since.

To say that the SELJHOSC is a travelling circus is perhaps a little wide of the mark because the representatives of Bromley. Greenwich, Lewisham, Lambeth and Southwark Councils mainly chose the ‘work from home option’ as did the health professionals. Understandable when one was from the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton. The reason for that soon became apparent.

Once again the key points only approach will be adopted for this report…

• The Royal Marsden Hospital is under threat because of “reconfiguration”. It has no intensive care facilities on site and this is a new NHS requirement. The consequence is “relocating the principal treatment centre for children’s cancer in the South East”. (Not just SE London.)
• The proposal was to move it to The Evelina London Children’s Hospital (part of Guys and St. Thomas’ and near to Waterloo station) and the preferred option, or St. Georgeְ’s Hospital with radio therapy at UCL Hospital.
• The public consultation concluded in December.
• There was critical feedback about transport issues because the need to satisfy the needs of long term child patients and bring in their siblings usually demands the use of a car.
• Car parking facilities are likely to be lost.
• Long term care frequently demands a parent stays nearby for the duration of hospitalisation and central London hotel costs will be prohibitive. On the other hand there will be better access to shops etc.
• Existing staff who live locally within walking and cycling distance will be put to additional inconvenience and expense but some looked forward to enjoying the facilities found in central London.
• Some staff may migrate to other London children’s hospitals such as Great Ormond Street.
• All options are expensive and the changes cannot be made before 2026.
    More generally
• The target of a one hour ambulance turn around time at hospitals (“handovers”) has not yet been achieved and A&E waiting times remain poor.
• About 50% of medically fit patients are stuck in hospital because Council provided discharge arrangements are not in place. (Bexley was said to be doing relatively well in this area.)
• Some A&E patients return two or three times a week probably due to mental health issues.
• GP availability remains poor which exacerbates the A&E issue.

 

4 February - Black Lives Matter

Taking time off from watching glue dry - literally - I listened to Councillor Chris Taylor’s mercifully short Health Scrutiny meeting this afternoon and found it marginally more interesting. The notable bits were as follows…

• The Health budget is under pressure from the elderly. (There are not more of them but their demands are rising.)
• The same is happening at the other end of the age spectrum, children in care being an extra burden since Covid. (For details see blog for 1st February.)
• It would not be legal to deprive people of care because of budgetary constraints. “Bexley is not in that place.”
• The make up of Bexley’s population is changing “dramatically” especially in the North of the borough where the proportion of “black African residents” has risen. In Bexley as a whole it is growing far faster than nationally.
• The black population has had a disproportionate impact on mental health facilities in other parts of London and the phenomenon is being studied to see if it applies in Bexley too.
• The black population generally is less likely to seek mental health help but go on to be more frequently admitted to hospital.
• To counter the problem “black specific services” are being provided and also more general services trained to tackle the issue.
• Barbers are being trained to spot and advise on mental health issues.
• Councillor Bola Carew (Conservative, Bexleyheath) said she had not seen any black barbers’ shops in Bexley “and I wouldn’t think a black man would take themselves to a white barber’s saloon”.
• It was confirmed that so far no black barbers had expressed an interest in the project. Ten had in total and are being trained in Bexley by Mind.

As usual the guests at the meeting promised to provide Councillors with extras information later but it is unlikely to find its way into the public domain.

 

3 February - It has to stop

Did you do the arithmetic two days ago? 140 child asylum seekers in Bexley and £4,000 a week minimum for those in care homes. £4,000 a week! My children’s mother is in a good quality nursing home and the charge is a little under £6,000 a month. Why so much more money for a child? Is there a separate full time guard for each one?

Probably the cost is met by central Government but whatever the case the bill is picked up by taxpayers.

It has to stop but most of the time we are too frightened to talk about it; cowed by extreme left wingers throwing the R word around like confetti, who are supported by woke senior police officers and encouraged by politicians of all persuasions who pursue policies with which most people do not agree. Everyone I speak to off the record thinks this country has reached a tipping point and importing alien cultures is changing Britain irretrievably.

It is more than 25 years since the British born wife of a Muslim told me that he was plotting in secret with a multitude of like-minded individuals to take over the country and impose their laws and their traditions on the indigenous population.

They are well on the way to having achieved their ambition and the names of various city Mayors and nationalist leaders are no longer those I encountered at school rather more than 60 years ago. It tends to confirm ‘Mission Accomplished’.

Bonkers highest profile Twitter follower (to say X follower might give rise to confusion) summed up my own feelings pretty well last Thursday. (Extract below.)

Whenever we suffer another outrageous imported crime one can guess the likely nationality involved from the nature of the crime and the colour of their skin from whether the police decide to mention it or not. They may ask us to look out for a man but do not dare mention the most obvious distinguishing feature. In doing so they lose our respect and the Met. Commissioner confirms that we are right to do so by supporting an Officer who believes that is illegal to sing hymns except when in church, and poking out a tongue is grown up behaviour.

Thanks to a judge in Newcastle who is not too bothered about sexual assaults and a priest who is willing to state that a Muslim is a Christian, twelve people went to hospital and six were maimed near Clapham Common by someone legally in the country due to idiots in the Home Office. Surely we have reached the point when drastic action must be taken? I have mentioned my alternative to the Rwanda scheme to several friends and no one disagrees that it would be just as effective and cost very little but in Not So Great Britain to discuss it publicly might be illegal.

Allison Pearson says that Britain is no longer the relatively peaceful country we used to know. A country where as a child I had access to an air gun and a crossbow and none of the gang ever dreamed of shooting at anything but a paper ring adorned with red white and blue concentric circles.

In the 1950s we had access to dangerous chemicals too, you could buy them in the local chemist’s shop. Scroll down for the proof.

Daily Telegraph article. ← Link.)

As a precocious twelve year old I used A.N. Beck & Sons in Stoke Newington High Street to deliver test tubes and bunsen burners and any chemical that I could not buy over the counter in Farnborough. Sodium Hydroxide, the weapon of choice of Abdul Shakoor Ezedi in Clapham could be purchased for 4½ pence (less than 2 pence in ‘new’ money).

No one used it maliciously and the only accident I recall was when my bottle of sulphuric acid leaked and burned a hole though a shelf in my mother’s cabinet.

If you discount stink bombs at Sunday School Christmas parties nothing untoward ever happened. I think it was something to do with what are now widely discouraged and disparagingly referred to as ‘British Values’.

The price of a stamp adjusted for both inflation and decimal currency would be 12·5 pence in 2024. Exactly one tenth of the price of a Royal Mail stamp today.

 

2 February - Shangrila on Thames

Cabinet Member Diment ploughed an independent furrow at the Cabinet meeting but never far from money. He opted to talk rubbish.

“The number of missed bin collections continues to fall. Down to 130 for every 100,000 collections in 2023 an improvement of 32% on 2022. Textile collections have passed 20 tonnes and food collections are at 450 tonnes a month and we must do more to encourage residents not to put it in residual waste which costs a lot of money to incinerate.”

“More than 3,600 tonnes of dry waste was taken to the new facility in Crayford in its first three months of operation.”

Councillor Richard Diment forgot to mention that the garden waste service is about to rise to £65 a year and for that price Amazon will sell you six small incinerators or two of its larger higher quality units. (The current government has suggested that garden waste collection should be a statutory service.)

From land fill to pothole fill Richard mentioned a £275,000 government grant for road maintenance both this year and in 2024/25 and indicating a distrust of Sadiq Khan, the cash is being sent directly to Councils. Khan would likely cream it off, direct it to his favoured places and influence how it is to be spent.

The Lawn Tennis Association has provided nearly £200,000 to renovate old tennis courts in seven different parks before Summer.

100 roadside EV charge points are being installed by Ubitricity and on top of that £474,000, with another £300,000 to come later, has been awarded by other bodies; all of it to be spent on more charging points. “These are some of the things we are spending money on to make sure residents continue to enjoy the highest possible quality of life”.

If the Tory government leaves you with enough money to buy an electric car you may be able to charge it a couple of streets away. You lucky people! (© Tommy Trinder.)

 

1 February (Part 2) - Council intent on impoverishing voters

An announcement was made at the beginning of Monday’s Cabinet meeting that it would be all about money. No change there then.

The latest forecast is that Bexley will overspend by £8·581 million which is £405,000 higher than the previous month’s forecast. £1·6 million of debt has had to be written off in this financial year.

Cabinet Member Leaf did his best to defend and excuse the present undesirable situation. He said the overspend was 4% of expenditure and pretty much the same across Councils generally and Social Care was the main culprit. Inflation, Covid and war (which he referred to later) were factors. Cabinet Member Read added that the overspend on Children’s Services was nearly £11 million because of additional staff costs and residential accommodation. Once again other Councils were said to be in exactly the same boat. Children in care numbers were up from 233 in 2021, 255 in 2022, 289 last December and up again since then. Domestic abuse is the main factor and those in residential care cost taxpayers upwards of £4,000 a week. One a staggering £16,000 a week! (Another local Council is paying £24,000 a week per child.)

In Bexley 140 children in care are asylum seekers.

Greenwich has a £32 million overspend, Lewisham £35 million and Redbridge £41 million totalling £500 million across the 32 London boroughs.

Neither Councillors Leaf nor Read got around to mentioning the names of the architects of the crumbling edifices that are local Councils. Cameron, Osborne, Hammond, May, Javid, Sunak, Zahawi and Hunt. Nearer to home one might add the names Campbell, Massey and O’Neill. Bad decision after bad decision has led to the inevitable consequence. In the immortal words of Liam Byrne, “there is no money”.

The Labour Leader sought to dismiss the overspend by the Labour boroughs noted above and concentrate on Tory Bexley. When was there last not an overspend? (It was in the year 2021/22.) For how long can we keep blaming Covid? Councillor Borella additionally ridiculed the Leader’s constant requests for a Fair Funding Review after 14 years of Conservative Government. Instead it has reduced Bexley’s grant by 66%.

“The budget is out of control and if it is not dealt with the overspends will come out of our reserves.” Leader Teresa O’Neill agreed and “the Fair Funding Review is not going to happen”.

Cabinet Member Read responded with - or at least strongly implied - that Covid caused lockdowns and lockdowns caused mental health issues, and mental health too often led to domestic abuse. Domestic abuse is driving child care numbers.

Councillor David Leaf came back to say that Councils were “experiencing unprecedented pressures”. Expenditure was up and income, notably parking revenue post-Covid, was down. Health Service strikes impact the budget too and the budget gaps get wider. I have seen David criticised for a lack of financial qualifications but he appears to have a better grasp of financial affairs than any former Bexley Cabinet Member for Resources that I have listened to over the years. It is of course a low bar or we may have avoided being where we are now.

Bexley’s Council Tax will go up by 4·99% again (subject to Full Council approval) whilst Sadiq Khan will grab another 8·6% which makes for 71% of additional profligacy in eight years. The ultimate proof perhaps that whilst the Conservatives have been abysmal it is possible to elect worse.

Then David went all Socialist on us by announcing a 100% Council Tax surcharge on second homes and further penalties on empty homes from 2025. The result of 2023 so-called Conservative legislation.

Further impositions will see most Council fees and charges rise by between 3 and 25% from April. Garden waste up another fiver and charity shops hit with increased waste collection charges. Families trying to be self-sufficient in vegetables will be hit with an 11% higher allotment fee. And then the big one…

Car parking charges are up yet again by varying amounts but commonly around 10%. The £15 over four hours charge in Abbey Wood will rise by 80 pence. I can see the logic of that. If someone is ready to pay fifteen quid you may as well take the suckers for 16. To Hell with any knock on effect on parking misery in surrounding streets. Probably the strategy is to stoke up a clamour for CPZs and a £150 per annum parking tax on residents.

The few car parks that have been free overnight will now cost £2·50.

It is an appalling situation when the electoral choice nationally is between bad and worse. The consequence of electing to Government leaders with little interest in the welfare of their populations has recently been seen in the Netherlands, Germany, France and now Spain. Sooner or later patience is exhausted.

 

1 February (Part 1) - “Self-entitled bastard”

I am several Council meeting reports behind the times which I shall blame partly on my disabled daughter who is skilled in the art of screwing up computers big time. If I claimed to have been involved in a certain amount of wheelchair pushing too it wouldn't be absolutely true because she has just had one made to measure - she is tiny - and electrically driven and imported from the USA. I am not joking when I say that it cost about the same as my car is worth.

On the way to the Liz line for a rare faultless trip to Farringdon I took this picture and while there showed it to my daughter. “Self-entitled bastard who gives disabled people a bad name.”

It happens regularly. Someone who thinks a Blue Badge is a passport to lawlessness (parking on junctions contravenes the Highway Code) forces traffic exiting Carrill Way to be on the wrong side of the road while waiting at the Stop Line and then legs it up the hill to the Abbey.

Those with wheelchairs or genuine disabilities generally park in New Road where there are disabled parking bays and a relatively flat route into the ruins.

Note: Photo for illustrative purposes only. I do not know if this one was a Lesnes Abbey visitor.