Banner
any day today rss X

News and Comment May 2024

Index: 2009201020112012201320142015201620172018201920202021202220232024

9 May - Funambulism

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.

 

Return to the top of this page
Bonkers is a cookie free zone. Not a single one