I have discovered a way of getting into more trouble than reporting evidence
of a noisy party at a Bexley Councillor’s house,
it is to blatantly take sides during the build up to an election or referendum. BiB took up a very obvious
pro-Brexit position and an anti-Conservative one for St. Michael’s. No one will
be surprised at the latter, Bexley Council needs something to give it a kick up
the backside before they become as distant from the population at large as the
two big parties have nationally. The leaders of both are probably now all too
well aware of that. Teresa O’Neil is still spouting, ‘I’m in charge’ at every opportunity.
Failing to sit on the fence provoked comment from all three parties represented
in Bexley. Conservatives asked favours, so did both UKIP and Labour but the
latter also expressed their dismay in the strongest of polite tones when they believed I had gone
beyond BiB’s remit, as if there is one written in stone. Political passions run high.
As a result of that exchange of views one of the blogs posted
during the past two weeks was an attempt to redress the alleged imbalance. I
wasn’t proud of it at the time and looking back on it I still have misgivings
about whether it was wise to post it. Maybe you can guess which one it was, it
demonstrated to me that it would be all too easy to be ’bought’ by vested interests.
Fortunately
nothing I heard of in Bexley sunk to the level seen nationally. There was silliness and misuse of statistics on both sides of the EU
debate and sheer idiocy from George Osborne and his Treasury pals and perhaps that was to
be expected. However I was sickened by the poisonous bile spewed out on Twitter
against Brexiteers, some of it from sources I thought I knew well. Apparently I’m a racist
and voting OUT is racist. Maybe I am
pre-programmed in the ‘wrong’ direction but I didn’t see its counterpart.
I read Boris Johnson’s German history lesson in the Sunday Telegraph at seven
o’clock in the morning of publication and didn’t falter for a moment as I
absorbed his words. Hours later it was being reported widely that he was supporting Nazis.
I read his article again and still couldn’t see a problem. Maybe others took things out of context. I
listened twice to Michael Gove’s recent faux-pas too and couldn’t really see
what all the fuss was about.
It was in the middle 1950s as a very young teenager that I began to lean towards the political right, long before I
was in any serious way politically aware. The reason was simple, I thought that
people who would scrawl ‘TORIES OUT’ on so many brick walls must be bad people.
Good ones don’t deface walls. Good ones do not spew bile on Twitter either.
The same poisonous stuff has been seen since the referendum result became clear
except that it is coming from the Neanderthal element of those who voted LEAVE. I
don’t mean the sizeable number of jokers who said they were never going to drink
in a Weatherspoons pub again - the fact that I bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner yesterday
is sheer coincidence - but those who are frightening immigrants and sickening me again.
I told one this morning that he had nothing to worry about if he is here legally and
not in trouble with the law. There is no way he will be kicked out, it would not
be the British way of doing things and decent British people wouldn’t stand for
it despite what that idiot Tim Farron the Lib Dem leader was saying on LBC yesterday while I was
stuck in the Blackwall Tunnel queue. Iain Dale the
presenter took him apart big time.
So having gone all political in recent weeks, would I do it again? Well despite
getting my knuckles rapped I don’t see how BiB can turn back and while Teresa
O’Neill leads Bexley Council guessing which party will not be supported won’t be difficult,
not that I have entirely lost sight of my Conservative inclinations. Generous as always, I am hoping that the
Conservative spokesman on Parliamentary affairs for
Erith and Thamesmead can rest easy now that her party leader has announced
what we already knew. That he is not the right man to lead this country.