Continuing the history of the journalism of Julian Saunders. The full stories can be found at thesandwellskidder.blogspot.com
2015
After the sturm und drang of 2014 the following year started relatively quietly for the blog although the Twitter trolling campaign against me and my wife began to ramp up. Darren Cooper and a Unite Regional Organiser continued to open accounts. As one was eventually taken down after much effort with Twitter, another sprang up. There were posts - all untrue of course - that I had killed a child whilst drink-driving, defrauded a firm I used to work for and it was strongly implied that I was/am a paedophile. My wife was attacked as a woman who had multiple sexual encounters. The Police - very close to Darren Cooper who was, incredibly, the Chair of the West Midlands Police and Crime Panel - refused to take any action to protect us.
2015 saw a curiosity. Neither John Spellar MP nor Tom Watson MP would have anything to do with me and would not answer correspondence or communications. But I was approached by Labour Cllr John Tipper to provide information about Cllr [A1] and his family as Watson was “preparing a dossier” on him (this later became known as “the 70-page dossier”). I also had some “secret” meetings with a local Labour Party figure, Gurinder Singh Josan, a puppet of Spellar and Watson, who supplied me with piles of documents about Cllr [A1] to assist me in “bringing him down”. (Josan is now a member of Labour’s NEC). Much later Josan took me to the Chance Glass site in Sandwell where he asked me to help the operators of a skip company there who were in dispute with SMBC. I used the blog to oppose a plan to turn the industrial site into housing (the site is wholly inappropriate and this still an ongoing issue). Suddenly the skip company moved and then made a financial donation to Tom Watson MP.
Some things in Sandwell are just weird. One Labour Councillor (who had obtained a small grant from SMBC for a non-existent “charity”) had inexplicably claimed he was renting the house he owned. After I showed the true position he amended his Declaration of Interests to show the true position. Meanwhile one “hard-left” Labour Councillor, John Edwards, was demanding that private Landlords should be subjected to rent controls. I exclusively revealed that he co-owned a rental property in Oldbury where he specified “no DSS” tenants.
A questionable deal arose in respect of the proposed sale of land at Black Patch where the site had not been offered on the open market.
I have explained that Tom Watson MP had inordinate influence over SMBC in general and Cooper in particular. Several Councillors told me, “whatever Tom says, goes”. Thus his career was also a matter of considerable interest. In Parliament he was fronting an anti-gambling campaign. In a national exclusive I revealed that he was being funded by one Derek Webb whom I showed to be a millionaire ex-gambling game entrepreneur now running certain anti-gambling organisations. Watson had not publicly declared the connection. (After leaving office, Watson took a position with bookmakers Paddy Power.) Watson became an influential and very dangerous enemy.
At around this time I also questioned the large donations to Watson by Unite the Union members to fund his anti-Rupert Murdoch campaign including a trip to Australia (especially as he was claiming his co-written Murdoch book was a "best-seller").
By now the Police Regional Fraud Team investigation was under way and there was a general upbeat feeling in Sandwell that the fight-back against corruption had begun. As we shall see, this view was misguided.
Certain ongoing blog classics rumbled on with regular updates provided for my local readership - Cashmore, Rouf, the land deals, the statue etc. Meanwhile Cooper and his associates kept attacking me as being a supporter of UKIP which was particularly odd as I was a very vocal advocate for "Remain"!
I wrote in detail about the Trolling campaign showing, for example, that Cooper had been the only follower of one troll account before the first published Tweet. Another SMBC employee and close associate of Cooper and Jan Britton joined in attacks on me, Paul Reeves, and he will appear prominently below. Cooper also had friendly local mainstream media journalists attack me, notably Dan Wainwright, then of the Express and Star.
Around this time Cooper linked with a Twitter troll called Andrew Hipkiss, a computer nerd resident in Sandwell whose wife had left him and who had a visceral hatred of Sandwell community activist, Darryl Magher. Hipkiss was a particularly dangerous troll since he was unemployed and was active on social media for 16+ hours a day. He originally concealed his identity under accounts such as @OdgenW and @ennabran but he and Cooper became so confident that the Police would continue to turn a blind-eye to their trolling that they went "public". They put a photo up of Cooper shaking Hipkiss's hand in his living room. Cooper even said after visiting Hipkiss's home that he had seen some travellers on nearby land and would have SMBC move them on. Hipkiss was also known to Cllr David Hosell (now ex-Cllr) and we will also come across him later.
Cooper and associates put up a particulalry nasty Twitter account called @Gemmawool15 (followed by a handful of his cromies including a GMB Union rep). On a trip to London my wife and I attended Twitter's offices to protest at the treatment we were getting and I tweeted a photo of my wife outside. This led to 44 abusive tweets in that single day just from the @Gemmawool15 account - many making false allegations about my wife's sexual behaviour. And 12 of these 44 vile tweets were tagged to my wifes's employer. I was once again referred to as "my boy" and also falsely accused of assaulting a former work colleague (see further below).
It is noteworthy that exclusive stories were thinner on the ground at this time. This was partly because of the incredible amount of time I was spending trying to get Twitter to take accounts down (much harder then than now) and partly because I did not want to write anything that might prejudice the ongoing police enquiry (a mistaken approach as it turned out).
I mentioned above the allegation by a troll account that I had assaulted a former work colleague. In fact, someone had set up a Twitter account and started communicating with Cooper via the non-public direct message system. On being told this I fed the person deliberately false information which was duly forwarded to Cooper, who immediately repeated it via his troll accounts - including @Gemmawool15. Thus there was a clear and provable link between Cooper and the troll accounts. I exposed all this in an important post, “Cooper Exposed”, on 11th April, 2015.
In 2013, SMBC took a minority stake in “Sips”, a not-for-profit “partnership” between SMBC and local schools. I revealed that Sips had taken a 10-year lease in the most-expensive office block in West Bromwich from a company controlled by Paul Bassi, a supporter of Labour in Sandwell and occasional donor to Tom Watson MP.
Cooper had been a former mental health nurse and was technically still an employee of the local health trust though on some sort of secondment. Nevertheless he continued to advertise himself to the electorate as a NHS worker eg. via his Facebook page. I explained to the local readership that he was not practising. I also wrote to the Trust exposing his hateful trolling campaign. Not long afterwards his contract was terminated “by mutual agreement” and his nursing registration lapsed.
At some point, Cooper’s vehicle had been involved in an accident outside Brandhall Labour Club. There were widespread rumours that the accident had been “hushed-up”. Curiously, this was probably the only time that Cooper wrote to me, saying that the police had fully exonerated him from any blame for the incident. He did not take the opportunity to deal at the same time with two other stories about him in the very same post ie, that he had told a number of Sandwell Labour Councillors he had obtained a loan from Cllr [A1] to extend his house and that he had sexual intercourse with another Councillor in a toilet cubicle at Oldbury Council House (a story denied by the female allegedly involved who had, nevertheless, spoken to Cooper immediately after I contacted her).
I have referred to the incestuousness of Sandwell. In 2015 Tom Watson’s election leaflet featured a “local resident” supporting Tom who I identified as an employee of SMBC. Exactly the same happened with a different employee in his 2017 leaflet.
A surprising number of Labour Councillors were, or had been, having financial problems. Nevertheless some of them had influence on the spending of multi-million pound budgets. I revealed that when Cashmore (see above) had to give up her seat she was replaced by a Councillor subject to an Individual Voluntary Arrangement.
I have written above that [A2] was working in Nick Bubalo’s department. I disclosed that in addition to his “day” job he was also involved in various planning applications to his own employer. Further he managed to find the time to be involved with at least seven limited companies and The Rickshaw Restaurant (which features in possibly the biggest scandal of all - see further below).
The mainstream media were under the thumb of Sandwell Labour and simply ignored serious issues. In April, 2015 a truly damning report was published relating to spectacular incompetence (at best) by SMBC who had been taking out long leases on clapped-out 1960’s office buildings often without even a survey. Once again it was left to me to disclose this scandal to the public. The buildings were not maintained so that potential dilapidations costs were astronomical and, in some cases, SMBC bought the freeholds outright. Many key documents concerning these commercial leases had negligently been “lost” altogether. Where key legal documents had at least been put in computerised form they were “automatically” wiped from the system after 7 years due to yet another "error"!
The explosive report also recorded that in 2008 SMBC had agreed to lease a new building at Roway Lane even before the costs of doing so were finalised. There could well have been further fraud here but there was, at the very least, stunning incompetence. SMBC agreed a 30 year lease with no break clauses. When the lease commenced the building was not fully suitable and extra accommodation had to be rented at other locations.
Meanwhile Cooper was denying that SMBC had plans to move to Providence Place even though, as I disclosed, he had chaired a Cabinet meeting envisioning the £20m white elephant building as the Council's new "flagship headquarters facility".
Concerns arose in late April, 2015 about the Regional Fraud Team investigation. Potential witnesses were not being interviewed and it became evident that the enquiry was very limited and confined to just a few of the issues mentioned above (and that does not, of course, include many other issues which the police were aware of but which I had not written out). I was the first media outlet to disclose problems with the ongoing enquiry. At the same time Jan Britton would not provide any information outside the Council, not even via FOI's, "because of the ongoing police investigation". As we shall see, I was right to be concerned.
One story the mainstream media did cover to an extent, and which also featured in the blog, was the disastrous state of SMBC's Children's Services where Ofsted inspections produced a series of damning verdicts. Eventually, the Government had to intervene and the failed service was reincarnated as a Trust away from the failing direct control of SMBC.
Tom Watson continued to appear in my journalism. I followed up on a national story that in the years 2010 to 2015 he had the joint worst voting record of any MP. A local Unite Union Regional Organiser was openly referring to him on social media as "Lazy Tom".
The Twitter trolling continued unabated and Mr Hipkiss even posted a photograph of how easy it was for him to fool Twitter with fake identity documents using photoshop software.
In June, 2015 I was tipped off about Lion Farm Fields. As I wrote in a post at the time, "As the Police and SMBC are not conducting proper investigations into various matters involving ... [ Cllr A1] the small Skidder team have re-started investigations." Lion Farm, as I will call it, is still very much an ongoing story in February, 2021. There are complicated issues which can be read about in my posts and a separate blog is a work in progress highlighting the actual documentation - such as it is - at savelionfarm.blogspot.com
I do not want to go over more detailed work set out elsewhere but it is necessary to mention some of the salient facts to gain an understanding of just how horrendous this "deal" is and serious issues will arise later in this story. The Lion Farm estate is a large "council" estate with tower blocks and other rented accomodation. Next to it is a massive area of open green space called Lion Farm Fields. Lion Farm is the home of the Warley Football League and is a vital "green lung" for locals, especially flat dwellers. The Fields are a whopping 19ha close to the dreaded Birchley Island, a notorious traffic blackspot which, inter alia, provides access to Junction 2 of the M5 motorway.
[A2] acquired The Rickshaw Restaurant near Dudley adjacent to his father’s taxi office. A developer wished to buy the property and bought out [A2] at a very large profit. Cllr [A1] then “introduced him” to SMBC with a view to him acquiring Lion Farm and building a “designer shopping village” on it.
On 19th December, 2012 the Asset Management & Land Disposal Committee convened with its minimum quorum of two, Cllr Hackett and Cllr [A1]. There was a lengthy agenda and Cllr [A1] did not declare any interests in the matters discussed - in particular that he had had dealings with the developer. Had he done so and recused himself for that particular item it could not have been passed as the meeting was then inquorate. But he didn’t and he and Cllr Hackett raced through the whole meeting in just 7 minutes. Happily they also decided in the meeting that the Smethwick Coroner’s Office was surplus to requirements (and, as we have seen, this ended up in the hands of Cllr [A1's] son).
The public did not pick any of this up as the agenda item was - deliberately - misleading referring to the project as “Junction 2 Development” when it was no such thing. Further, all documents were heavily redacted. We shall keep returning to this story.
A review of Cooper’s Twitter revealed his desperate shortcomings save that most days one tweet would be a grammatical and topical comment on contemporary matters. I had always assumed that SMBC’s Press Office - which I disclosed was costing taxpayers half a million pounds a year - had written this for him but was able to reveal, thanks to Gurinder Josan, that he was, in fact, simply cutting and pasting from John Spellar MP’s daily newsletter.
Yet again concerns grew about the police investigation. The Regional Fraud Team had specifically requested four months before that I did not blog about the alleged cancellation of parking tickets upon the orders of Cllr [A1]. An ex-police officer confirmed that he had offered to give evidence about this but had not been interviewed. The DI in charge now said the investigation had a narrow remit and this allegation would not now be investigated - as I was now able to exclusively disclose.
The trolling continued with at least 14 abusive accounts linked to Cooper plus a number of other suspicious ones. Yet I was sent information that when his “personal" Twitter account was suspended SMBC staff helped him get it reinstated.
In another journalistic coup I broke the “Wednesbury Celebrates” (WC) scandal which ran for several months and can be read in detail in my blog. Suffice to say that certain Labour Councillors set up a secretive “association” and SMBC did all the donkey work for them to apply for grants. Receiving a large grant from Sport England, over £100,000 was allocated over three years as pay for the son of two Councillors. I later disclosed that SMBC had issued invoices to WC for use of Wednesbury Town Hall at the end of one financial year and then cancelled them at the start of the next. As with most such “organisations” connected with Sandwell Labour the public was not even allowed to know who the “Trustees” were although one was Cllr Costigan. No accounts were ever made publicly available. When the organisation was wound-up - which is very largely due to my revelations - any remaining funds were seemingly passed to an equally secretive clone “organisation”, The Knights of Wednesbury who, again, are not publicly accountable. Ironically at the same time, the mainstream media failed to report a damning Charity Commission investigation concerning SMBC’s “default … to file accounting information” where it was sole trustee of a charity and, yet again, I filled the gap.
I wrote a story showing that Sandwell College - where Jan Britton was a Governor - was publishing misleading advertisements about its Ofsted rating. The police investigation declined to investigate The Public deal (see above) and at this time I belatedly established that a senior WMP officer had been a Governor and present at some of the meetings setting up the “odd” transaction.
Jan Britton’s staff hijacked a photograph from my Twitter account believing it to me of me with staff of my wife’s employer (a charity). In fact it was of me with a group of volunteers who had worked on an arts project. All the volunteers I spoke to were outraged that their images had been used in an attempt by SMBC to harm me.
There followed the first attempt by SMBC to criminalise me. Cooper was widely-known as a wife-beater having “knocked about" his first wife (except some of his close associates deny knowledge of what was common currency). I had repeatedly referred to him as a “woman-bullying thug” and somehow he found out that I was closing in on him and had traced a key witness. He immediately went to the police alleging that I was harassing him. He did not, apparently, complain about me making these allegations which is odd in itself.
For some time SMBC had been running a vulgar campaign against misplaced canine excrement called “No Shit Sherlock” and I invented a satirical name for him linking this theme with part of the name of the leading official in German cities. Thus I called him “The Turdmeister”. He responded by calling me “Skidmark” and “Shithead”. But someone at WMP told him that all he had to say was that he “felt” harassed and this caused him “distress” for me to automatically be guilty of a criminal offence. So Cooper gave his statement and then encouraged Jan Britton to do the same. Britton was then a large, obese, man and I was already writing about his weakness and inability to act independently of the political leadership. He put in a risible statement saying that he felt “alarmed and distressed” by me (a) calling him “the giant amoeba” (ie. because of his perceived lack of a spine) and (b) putting up a picture of a doppelganger in a pancake costume (a supermarket promotion) suggesting that this was where his career would end up.
The Unite the Union Regional Organiser also advertised on Twitter for others I had written about to make a police statement (none did). But I was still forced to endure a very long police interview where I was again told (and I had no lawyer present) that I had no legal defence because Cooper and Britton felt upset and that was all that mattered. This misconception still seems to be in the psyche of SMBC even to this day.
Cooper was aware that I was doing quite a bit of voluntary work at the time and his troll accounts went to town crowing that I would not have a clear DBS check when I had a criminal record. As it was I sent information to the DS who interviewed me and this first police episode petered out. The other thing to note was that I gave information in the taped interview about how I had found a key witness, and that someone had helped me with this. It soon became apparent that this information had, mysteriously, been fed back to Cooper. And then WMP flatly refused to give me a copy of the interview tape.
Many people in Sandwell have supplied me with information over the years not least from the Muslim community. A range of concerns were raised with me about a small charity, The Smethwick Pakistani Muslim Association, where Cllrs Rouf and Ahmed were trustees and the Manager was a relative of Councillor Husssain. Curiously, and inexplicably, the small charity felt it necessary to have two bank accounts at different banks. I was unable to substantiate many of the more lurid stories but did show that the Charity was appealing for more funds because it said it was suffering from local government cuts whereas SMBC had actually increased funding (which went up from 55% of total income to 74%). And as with many charities associated with Labour it was holding unusually large cash reserves relative to its income and, indeed, expenditure.
The saga of the failing Children’s Services was rumbling on and, for once, Copper himself was receiving flak. Instead of trying to deal with the root cause of the problems SMBC did the usual local government trick of commissioning and funding a “review” themselves which suggested things were not as bad as was being claimed. (See above about the eventual Government intervention.) It was unusual for several members of SMBC staff to contact me about the same issue but this happened after Jan Britton awarded a contract to iMPower to improve matters, fulfil the Ofsted requirements and to help “staying ahead of the curve “ in terms of national standards. The procurement procedure by Britton for this contract was opaque and the complaints from staff came when Britton publicly said that the contract had cost around £1m to £1.15m whereas staff told me it was “much more”. Even with my limited investigative power I was able to show VAT exclusive payments of £1,796,219.21 which is well above Britton’s claim and almost certainly still an understatement. In any event this expensive and divisive contract completely failed in its stated objectives.
Cllr Eling has yet to feature much in this History yet, although he will come to dominate it in later years. He was the “money man” and as he continued to work as an officer at far away Rotherham Council was deferred to as a local government “expert” - a misguided approach which led to the disastrous humiliation in the High Court with the Council Tax Benefit case. On an infamous occasion which I reported in the blog I had a long conversation outside The Council House with Cllrs Cooper, Hussain and Ian Jones. When I asked them detailed questions Cooper kept responding, “ask Steve Eling”, “you’ll need to ask Steve about that” and similar. At this time Eling was close to Cllr Hussain who was best man at his wedding. Publicly, he stayed under the radar but he was reputed to have a vicious temper and most staff were afraid of him. I usually gave satirical nicknames to characters in this tale. At this time the only notable feature was Eling’s appalling and deadly dull public speaking style so that I dubbed him “The Talking Corpse”.
Despite the failings of Children’s Services and the money thrown at iMPower by Britton there was general incredulity when Eling announced at this time that the departmental budget had not been fully spent and that he would actually cut it by £7.16m!
Long-running stories continued to feature in the blog as further information became available and a FOI request finally revealed that SMBC had not paid £20m for the freehold of Providence Place (see above) but £22,750,000 plus all the ancillary costs and taxes.
An anonymous informant confirmed that the lifting of a restrictive covenant (see above) by SMBC in respect of land adjacent to the Plough Inn, Tividale, was being investigated by the Regional Fraud Team. The Police were still refusing to investigate the scandal of Rouf’s mansion but I exclusively revealed that SMBC had paid over £200,000 for the houses it then paid to demolish. It had then sold the cleared plot (after Cooper ordered it be removed from auction and where there was considerable local interest from would-be credible purchasers) to Rouf’s son for just £65,000.
I have written about false declarations made by various councillors including Cllr Cashmore and [A1] (regarding the valuable taxi contract). As above, WMP let the time slip for potentially bringing any prosecutions as they claimed “they didn’t know the law”. I reported the outcome of a complaint I made to the IPCC which was upheld by them. The IPCC confirmed that WMP had done nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing - in respect of any of the complaints. There had been no investigation whatsoever. It should be noted that it was widely stated (included by, for example, staff at the BBC) that a Councillor who features prominently in this tale was, at least at that time, a police informant.
WMP also refused to investigate the “Wednesbury Celebrates” (WC) debacle (see above). At this time I also disclosed that two Councillors were on the secret “management board” [sic] of WC, including Cllr Costigan. The same two then approved a WC grant application on behalf of SMBC as Town Lead and Vice Town Lead respectively for £5,000, without declaring any interest.
Here a (then) senior Director of SMBC makes his first appearance in this History - Mr Adrian Scarrott. He was widely referred to as Cllr [A1's] “bagman”. He was also in a relationship with a WMP Inspector. I referred above to the mysterious cancellation of SMBC invoices to WC but at this time it was in debt to SMBC in a sum over £20,000. And yet Scarrott still authorised the payment out of the £5,000 grant to WC!
Living in Sandwell at this time was an amazing man, Bob Woods, a lifelong Labour Party member, trade unionist and campaigner for LGBT+ people right from the start of that movement. Bob had worked with children most of his life after Barnardos bravely employed him at the time as an openly gay man. He was now semi-retired. He worked for an organisation helping those suffering stress at work and worked on its stalls at union conferences. He was also a representative and chair on fostering panels (and much in demand). Bob had settled in Sandwell late in life and was shocked by the corruption at the Council involving his own Party. As ever with Bob, he bravely spoke out and was a strong supporter of my blog (although disliking the tone on many occasions). This led to him being physically threatened in a restaurant connected with the family of Cllr [A1] and suddenly there was a spate of incidents of petty vandalism to his house and car. As ever, complaints to WMP were ignored.
Bob had been shunned by local Labour people despite his activism save for one or two (rare) decent people like Cllr Dhallu. Cooper regularly trolled him on social media via his own account and associated troll accounts but the police fraud investigation was putting him under immense strain. At this time he seemed to be perpetually chain-smoking outside The Council House. Just as he had written to my wife’s employers trying to get her sacked this monster now turned on Bob and via his own account and others questioned - to the whole world - whether Bob should even be a member of fostering panels. He then said on Twitter that he had located the body employing Bob with the heavy hint that he was contacting them directly (just as he had done with me regarding my wife’s employers). Once again I published this disgusting chain of tweets but Cooper faced no censure whatsoever from anyone. I sent all these details to the West Midlands Police and Crime Panel asking how Cooper could possibly remain as Chair but only one member (councillors from around the West Midlands authorities) expressed any concern at all about his appalling behaviour.
The limit on Twitter at this time was 140 letters which Cooper was incapable of stringing together in a coherent form. And yet he continued to insist that he was the author of the Leader’s Blog on the SMBC website. In fact, the blog was written by Sandwell’s large press office but SMBC said they were unable to calculate the wo/man hours (and cost) spent in preparing this party political propaganda.
By now, the political class in the West Midlands were fully aware of Cooper’s shortcomings and behaviour yet continued to back him so that, astonishingly, they made him Vice Chair of the putative West Midlands Combined Authority. He seemed bomb-proof.
I then disclosed that in June, 2015 Cooper had chaired a Cabinet meeting wherein it was agreed to make a grant to “Black Country Consortium Limited” without declaring an interest ie. that he was a Director of that Company.
What I consider as one of my finest journalistic efforts came next although, after some flickering interest from national media, there was very little follow-up despite the extraordinary facts. Tom Watson MP, then Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, had at least four millionaire donors including the aforementioned Derek Webb and, more surprisingly, author J K Rowling. It seemed odd to me that two small local companies should suddenly show up as having donated £20,000 to him and I was able to disclose that the person with significant control of both companies was Gerry Poutney, a high-profile pawnbroker. I was (and still am) frankly amazed that the story that the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party was taking cash from a pawnbroker was not widely aired by the mainstream media.
One feature of the Cooper era was Labour’s determination to pump money into sport. We have seen above that money was ploughed into the charity The Albion Foundation, the private statue scheme and even into the wealthy football club itself. Cooper memorably described “the arts” as “shit” and set about destroying much arts provision in the Borough whilst sports expenditure continued to rise.
Sandwell is an amalgam of six towns and insofar as Cooper was capable of sentience his doctrine was to provide identical facilities in each town with no regard to the expense and no thought being given to whether the facilities were needed or viable. This was particularly the case in respect of sports centres. Cooper wanted each town to have a nice shiny new building - especially his home town of Smethwick and, as we shall see, this story has a long tail.
The existing leisure facilities were operated by what was supposed to be an “arms length” charity, Sandwell Leisure Trust (SLT), which also became effectively responsible for The Public (see above). SLT had two Labour Councillors on its board which was chaired by a former SMBC employee. Its existence relied upon funding from SMBC. Cooper fell out with the guy running SLT. As punishment he prevented SLT from operating the new leisure centre in West Bromwich, outsourcing the contract. But Cooper then told SLT that they could have the contract to run a new centre in Wednesbury if they agreed to support the closure of The Public - which they duly did. Whilst attacking Government austerity and slashing arts provision Cooper and Co. borrowed a further £8.1m for the Wednesbury build. No new centre was built in Smethwick before Cooper’s death but I shall return to this subject later.
More Cooper hypocrisy was disclosed when I disclosed his rantings on Twitter about academy schools although he himself had been a director of one for two years (in the incestous world of Sandwell the finance person at the school was the wife of the SMBC Finance Director who walked out suddenly after mismanagement by Cooper and Jan Britton - see above).
Another recurring theme of these and subsequent years is the utter contempt of Labour for green spaces and the green belt in Sandwell save for two areas which were deemed to be sacrosanct - The Sandwell Valley and Warley Woods. I wrote about the curious case of Labour agreeing to the erection of two massive advertising signs by the motorway on green belt as a “matter of urgency”. There were serious questions about the procurement process and why Labour forced this through so speedily.
With this constant diet of sleaze it was “almost” light relief to report that Labour Cllrs Downing and Crompton were sharing “Britain First” - a British fascist organisation’s - Facebook posts.
A quite extraordinary situation occurred next which I exclusively reported. My wife and been constantly complaining to West Midlands Police since January about the trolling - particularly when the obscene posts were copied to her employers and a well-known Birmingham arts charity where she was (and is) a trustee. A female officer at WMP finally had the file dumped on her but, to her great credit, took action. Cooper was compelled to attend Steelhouse Lane Police Station in Birmingham (although, and fatally, my wife was never asked for a proper statement and WMP did not have the evidence well recorded in my blog of Cooper’s clear involvement with the troll accounts eg. see “Cooper Exposed!” above).
This was a purely personal matter for Cooper and nothing to do with SMBC but, unbelievably, Jan Britton arranged for one of the SMBC chauffeurs to drive him to Birmingham and back in the Mayoral Limousine at taxpayers’ expense. Further, a SMBC solicitor, Maria Price, was delegated to represent Cooper and travelled with him in the limo. Britton later claimed that Ms Price had volunteered to help Cooper off her own bat and that she had taken a day of her annual leave to do so. You couldn’t make it up!
Inevitably, WMP said there was no evidence that Cooper was linked to the troll accounts - even though this was plastered over my blog and the Skidder team held hundreds of incriminatory screenshots which the police did not request - and decided to take no further action. As above Cooper was Chair of the Police and Crime Panel at the time and on good terms with the (then) Deputy Chief Constable - who now has the top job. No disciplinary action was taken against Jan Britton for this gross misuse of taxpayers’ funds.
Not long before this Cooper and Jan Britton had objected to the proposed creation of the West Midlands Combined Authority but the egotistical Cooper changed his mind and decided he wanted to be the “Metro Mayor”. He promised Britton the top admin job if he won (although Labour Party sources hinted that they would not tolerate his candidacy). Meanwhile Cooper came top in an Express and Star poll of favourite Labour candidates although I was able to disclose the tweets of Mr Hipkiss where he couldn’t resist boasting that he had used his computer know-how to rig the process and vote multiple times for Sandwell’s failing Leader.
Indeed it appears that Cooper at least had the insight that the net was closing in on him in Sandwell and was looking for pastures new. He even tried to delete some of the “worst” tweets from his personal account but, thanks to my helpers, I was able to disclose what he was up to.
After a long time I was finally able to exclusively reveal terms of the lease for The Public building showing beyond any doubt that the College were not paying any rent, Nevertheless the Express and Star and other mainstream media outlets ignored this and simply repeated Cooper’s big lie.
I then reported an unpleasant incident in Oldbury. A car drove towards me at speed but stopped very close to my legs. A man got out claiming to be a son of Cllr [A1] and started to threaten me with violence. In a bizarre twist a traffic warden appeared and told the ranting man to move his car. The aggressor continued with his threats and I said to the warden, "are you hearing this" but the driver said, "he's not hearing anything. We run Oldbury" and continued with threats of violence. The warden started to write out a ticket and the driver left the scene. I had his registration number and took the warden's number before reporting the matter to the police. Surprisingly they actually gave the matter a crime reference number and said a few days later that they had a suspect. Suddenly they said that the car's registered owner was not the aggressor and they could not identify him! They had apparently not talked to any of Cllr [A1's] sons and they told me that the traffic warden had refused to give evidence!
The year ended with high comedy. I exclusively disclosed that Labour Cllr Bill Gavan, a sort of personal servant and driver for Tom Watson MP when he deigned to visit Sandwell, had run at least 13 companies that had been dissolved (nicknaming him Alka Seltzer). His partner had also been involved with at least four dissolved companies. Nevertheless, Cooper had just appointed the notoriously foul-mouthed man as SMBC's "Business Ambassador".
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