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News and Comment May 2018

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28 May (Part 2) - Her obedient servant

Whatever happened to that pre-election petition to restore CCTV monitoring in Bexley? It showed every sign of being an important Labour versus Conservative election issue, vote one way and make the borough safer, vote the other way and see Bexley’s steadily worsening crime statistics continue their current trend.

On 3rd May Bexley’s voters fell for the lie about Labour locally being “hard left” and the Conservatives dishonest claim that they have managed a low tax borough when it is fairly close to being the highest taxing borough in the whole of London. Perhaps because of that Bexley voted for more unsolved crime.

But what of that petition? Unfortunately Bexley Council fell back upon their tried and tested version of democracy. They threw it out unread.

FoxBexley employs a man whose job it is to shield his bosses from scrutiny. His name is Kevin Fox.

Long ago when BiB was assisted by five helpers it was possible to keep more pressure on Bexley Council than now through the medium of both public questions and petitions. It was Kevin Fox who was charged with concocting reasons to reject the questions and his name appeared in these pages regularly.

The excuses were not particularly clever, if a question had to be submitted a week before a meeting, and it was, he would say he had gone home without seeing it and by the time he looked the deadline was passed. Sometimes he would stall by asking silly questions, like asking someone he knew very well to confirm his name or agree that the then rules allowed photographs to be taken at meetings but refusing permission nevertheless.

A petition which quoted from Bexley Council’s website was rejected because Kevin Fox claimed that the figures quoted were wrong. If they were so was Bexley’s website because the figures on both were identical.

The CCTV petition suffered a similar fate at the hands of the same Kevin Fox. He ruled that some residents who gave their address as Sidcup or Bexleyheath were not valid signatories because they had not added their post code. I was not aware that any part of Bexleyheath or Sidcup fell outside the borough boundary.

So now the petition has to be run again and to get it before July’s Council meeting it will have to pass the 2,000 signature threshold by 2nd July.

Get your skates on.

 

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