Bonkers was not always primarily a daily blog. Whilst blogs were published almost daily from 2011 the website was formatted more like a newspaper with an occasionally updated Front Page and Editorial, the blog itself was buried within the site. This is an example of an Editorial page written long before Smart Phones were a consideration. Many of them will be difficult to read on a mobile phone and links may no longer work and references to site banners will be invalid.
It remains here for historical purposes only.

Bexley is a London borough bordering the county of Kent. Like most London boroughs it has its good bits and its bad bits. The banner image above is from the northern end of town; the place where the council permits, and is too often forced to permit, warehouses, industrial sites, sewage works and rubbish incinerators. It may look quite nice to a town-dweller but it can smell very bad.

Bexley claims to be a good council that wins awards but it is good mainly at job creation and lining councillors’ pockets; it does not serve its residents well. Over the past 20 years it has risen from being almost the lowest taxing authority in London, beaten by neighbouring Bromley, to the very highest echelons of that league table. Past Labour administrations have boasted of the need to spend, spend, spend whilst Conservative ones have paid only lip-service to economies whilst indulging in wasteful extravagances and awarding themselves as much in tax-free expenses as the average man receives in wages.

Officials, ten of whom earn in the region of £200,000 a year (with a further 16 on £75k and 44 on £65k), indulge in ego boosting schemes designed to enhance their job security and generally degrade the quality of life of residents and will happily ignore the law when it suits them. In the words of a local newspaper; Bexley council has been “taken over by a mob of nasty, evil people who seem to thrive on other people’s pain and hurt”.

Some of the councillors thrive on an agenda of pain and hurt and are on record here for selecting individual residents who have crossed them for individual vindictive attention costing them hundreds of pounds; all to satisfy councillors’ wicked egos. They defy government guidance and publish documents in direct contravention of that guidance. Officials falsify surveys and present them to gullible councillors for approval. They deliberately flout the law to maximise motoring fines, repeatedly threaten residents who pay their taxes a single day late after a bank holiday with prosecution and regard the mentally afflicted as people to be punished for being difficult. It all happens in Bonkers Bexley, surely the most incompetent and corrupt authority in London which reports its critics to the police.

This is an archived copy of the Site’s Editorial page originally posted on 12th April 2011.