According to Bexley Council’s website there will be a Council meeting in two weeks time but none at all in June.
Maybe they are just slow to update their meetings page but it currently looks like Bonkers will
struggle to report anything significant for a while. Maybe the Information Commissioner will rule against Bexley soon in
the vexatious
FOIs dispute but apart from that it looks like trivia will once again be ruling the roost here.
Yesterday’s suggestion that Bexley Labour had something to celebrate brought
forth a contrary view. Not so much on the LGBTQ+ issue but the fact that Bonkers
does not generally give Bexley Labour a particularly hard time.
The reason is not hard to find. 60 years of political observation taught me to be wary of left wing parties but there
can be no denying that locally Labour’s elected Members have always, since 2009 anyway when I began to take a closer interest in them,
been well intentioned and scrupulously honest.
The new complaint is that if you ask a Labour Councillor a question the answer will be the same as if you ask a Conservative. That is that you
won’t get a reply at all. And if you ask a Labour Councillor to help in a dispute centred on
a dubious policy exercised by the Conservative Council they wonְְ’t. Ergo; they are all the same.
I have no recent experience of that sort of thing but it certainly used to
be the case that Labour Councillors could be relied upon to do the decent thing
when their Conservative counterparts were lying their socks off. Maybe it is different
now. If I include just the odd word here and there I can still only muster six names out of
Bexley’s twelve Labour Councillors who I have ever spoken to or corresponded with. That’s 50%
but on the Tory side the figure falls below 30%.
I am pretty sure that if I emailed a question to either of the two most recent
Labour Leaders I would get a reply within 48 hours and probably a very
comprehensive and detailed one. We may not always agree politically but there
are no obvious signs that civility has flown out of the window.
One can only speculate on how it is that an anti-Tory
email sent to every Labour Councillor came to be totally ignored. Perhaps the
two parties are in some respects ‘all in it together’ as alleged or maybe there is a history of which I am not fully aware.
Perhaps it would be best not to fill in between meetings with trivia? Anyone
know who the next Mayor will be? Maybe it is time we had
a really poor one again to liven things up a bit.