15 July - Judge, Jury and Executioner
I hate to say “I told you so” but the day after
suggesting that @tonyofsidcup might
be labelled vexatious for daring to ask Bexley Council a succession of probing FOIs, he was!
@Tony has been considering organising a road safety petition and is well aware of what happened to
the last borough-wide
attempt to surpass the 2,000 signature
threshold. Bexley Council refused to accept it, saying that the statement on which it was based, the
excessive level of senior staff salaries, was incorrect.
Although I was not directly involved with the petition; that honour goes to
Elwyn Bryant and Michael Barnbrook, it was me who insisted that the figures
they quoted were lifted directly from Bexley Council’s website, and they were.
So unless Bexley Council was lying on its website the salary figures were 100% correct.
Bexley Council’s immediate reaction when caught out is always to lie.
@tony is very aware of Bexley Council’s proclivities and does not want to risk
falling foul of Bexley Council’s less than clear, in fact contradictory, protocols on
petitions. Needless to say Bexley Council does not want 2000+ people to support a statement
that might embarrass it and has been busy erecting barriers.
The protocols refer to rejecting vexatious or inappropriate petitions. @tony
asked what sort of thing would render a petition “inappropriate”.
The same protocols state that a 2000+ signature petition will be “discussed at a
meeting which all Councillors can attend”. @tony asked if that meant a Full Council meeting.
He also noted that a separate publication, ‘London Borough of Bexley Petitions
Scheme’ only said that the petition MAY be debated at Full Council but
with exceptions. @tony asked for a list of reasons why a petition might
not go before Full Council.
@tony was not going to trudge the streets of Bexley as Mick and Elwyn did only to be
rejected at the hands of one of Bexley’s habitual liars. Twelve years may have
elapsed since the last big petition but the same set of advisors is still in place.
As noted by a Councillor at the last Finance meeting, Bexley Council very often
does not answer questions fully and @tony suffered that same fate.
And for questioning the response he was promptly labelled vexatious, the defence of a
cowardly Council. A Gina Clarke, whoever she might be, has said that his follow
up questions are “part of a series of overlapping requests which makes your requests vexatious”.
How can trying to get a straight answer on which of two contradictory Council
documents relating to petitions is correct be vexatious? I think I can hear the Information Commissioner laughing already
unless of course Bexley Council repeats its trick of telling the ICO that @tony is a racist. A corrupt
Council stops at nothing. Trawl BiB and you will find they have stooped that low twice already.
Every time I come around to the view that Bexley Council is not as dishonest as
it used to be someone comes along to prove that our Tory led Council remains dishonest to its very core.