20 January - Is a week still a long time in politics?
I don’t think Bonkers has been a whole week without comment before but life somehow got in the way.
There is a dispute with a service company with a lot of money at stake and which has been going on for
months. I keep giving them a second chance and they respond by letting me down again.
If I go to the County Court it will ensure they never fulfill their obligations
but I fear that will be the eventual outcome.
I have too much technology in the house and when something goes wrong it can
take time to fix. Same again this week. It’s about time I learned my lesson but still I buy more.
I started to build a new website and things did not get off to a good start but are back on course now.
I forgot about the Transport Users’ Sub-Committee meeting and that is one of the few I
find interesting, but I doubt we are any closer to persuading Southeastern that
they should be running a more passenger friendly service. Thanks to them I will
have to take a circuitous route tomorrow that used not to be necessary. The
Police report to the Transport Sub-Committee may have been interesting or it may have simply confirmed that the
Met is as bad as the newspapers - and personal experience - tell us.
The meeting Agenda indicates that the Met rates Hate Crime above the targeting of
pickpockets and tackling violence against women. (What has any of that got to do with
Transport?) In more relevant news they reported
that there were four fatal road accidents in the borough in the year ending
August 2022. Blackfen Road, North Cray Road, Maidstone Road and Eastern Way on
the Harrow Manorway slip road.
In better news
the unofficial Council tip in my road was cleared last Wednesday
afternoon. It was for the past couple of weeks impossible to access the
containers for their intended purpose so would-be recyclers were thwarted.
Rubbish removal must have been a difficult and expensive job and probably everyone who
had washed their tins and plastic trays will see their efforts come to nothing
while they are sent to landfill.
The basic problem remains. Residents with no moral compass and SloppyStyle’s failure to lock the
paper bin and placing it back to front against a wall being contributory factors .
In better news again my garden waste bin was emptied this morning after a six week interval.
Is it worth £50 a year?
I can report that Bonkers is unlikely to be reporting anything about the
appalling Bexley Group Practice again . The GPs there never did phone me after the doctor at
Erith Urgent Care Centre asked them to call me urgently on 9th December. A
month later Google told me that my GP review (not the blog) had been read 100 times.
My newly registered surgery seems to be very different; friendly and
professional. I left a positive NHS review despite a seriously ill friend being
referred to hospital by his doctor and sitting in the proverbial corridor for 44 hours.
The observant may have noticed that the promised
Episode 2 of the pro-ULEZ report never materalised. It must be difficult to
come up with something in defence of Sadiq Khan’s money grabbing ego trip after
the revelations this week about his exclusion of around 5,000 submissions to his sham consultation.
There would appear to be few honest politicians left and those who rock
the boat are shown the door. Previous ramblings here will have shown me to be
no Sunak supporter; far from it. A disaster for the country and
probably his party too. But what can one do apart from shut one’s eyes and
change the habits of a lifetime by ignoring everything political?
A difficult question wormed its way into my head this morning. If I stumbled
across both Sunak and Starmer facing certain death, tied to a railway line for
example, which one would I save first before the approaching train did its
worst? Some might say walk away and leave them both to their fate but I doubt
my conscience would let me do that. I would take my knife to Sunak first, I mean
the rope attaching him to the railway line, not him obviously.
The difference is that both are intent on a course which will bring Britain to
its knees but Starmer is planning a course from which there could be no recovery.
And I don’t like Richard Tice either. Maybe if he ran a political party, but he
doesn’t. Reform is a limited company that asks for donations and coughing up
does not confer any rights on so called members at all. A bit like the
Conservative party when its MPs disagree with their members.
Democracy is dead. Next Wednesday I will go to listen to some rather
left wing speakers going on about the NHS and food banks. Politically lost; that’s me.
