Unfortunately 2017 saw me becoming "part of the story" as Labour Leader Cllr Steve Eling and SMBC Chief Executive, Jan Britton, started a malicious campaign to destroy The Skidder blog.
2017
It must be remembered that as this year started Cllrs Eling and Marshall (a Cabinet member) were feeding me confidential information via a WhatsApp account. It was rapidly becoming apparent that the information was highly partial and directed at Eling's enemies - most of whom were fellow Labour Party members. I became increasingly queasy about what was going on particularly as I was now aware that SMBC's Assistant Chief Executive, Melanie Dudley (a Labour Party member), had been bullied out of work by Eling and Britton (at huge cost to the taxpayer) because she refused to alter a negative finding against Cllr Simon Hackett in a Standards Investigation (see further below).
The blog started with a partially inaccurate story. Sources grossly estimated the pay-off to departing Director Adrian Scarrott. But, incredibly, he did still receive a pay-off. I understand that he was never interviewed under police caution (though he was - and is - in a relationship with a West Midlands Police (WMP) Inspector (now working in Sandwell).
Melanie Dudley had investigated 5 allegations against Hackett (there was a sixth which need not concern us.) He was found not to be in breach of the Councillors' Code of Conduct in four of the matters but "guilty" of one. But far from being "exonerated" Ms Dudley made some interesting observations ...
Hackett's mother had bought a small property from SMBC (quite legally). SMBC introduced a scheme to "buy-back" properties and Mrs Hackett applied. There was an allegation that Cllr Hackett used undue influence to try and force the transaction through.
The Director of Homes and Communties at the time, Kerry Bolister, gave adverse evidence against Hackett and he responded in the investigation with the very serious allegation that Ms Bolister, a senior employee, was "a liar". And although he was cleared of the charge Ms Dudley seemed to side more with Bolister, writing in her report (which SMBC have attempted to suppress):
"On the balance of probabilities he knew of his Mother's application sooner than he accepts."
(Mrs Hacket withdrew her application. Ms Bolister left in 2015. It is believed she signed a confidentiality agreement but, in any event, she declined to provide information to me in respect of this affair.)
I wrote above that Cooper is alleged to have secured a loan for his house extension from Cllr [A1]. We know he was trying to "muscle-in" on SMBC deals and mysteriously told colleagues about the corrupt ice rink deal that "this one's mine". Yet after his death his net estate was valued at £387,740 - a veritable fortune in poverty-stricken Sandwell.
It is surprising that Labour Cllr Bob Piper had not appeared in the blog until now. Piper believes that he has a superior intellect to most of the human race. He hit the headlines - even nationally - by (a) making a lewd joke on Twitter when Margaret Thatcher died from "a stroke"; and (b) also on Twitter putting up a picture of a "blacked-up" David Cameron saying, inter alia, "Yo Niggahs".
Piper was the class clown of the Sandwell Labour Group. Just as I use foul language in the blog I put up a series of Piper's social media posts wherein he regularly used "fuck", "shit" and "twats" whilst berating a Conservative on Twitter - without apparent irony - as a "foul-mouthed fat Tory twat". He was also happy to attack fellow Labour Party members such as Jess Phillips MP and even, very surprisingly amongst the Sandwell Labour grovellers, Tom Watson MP.
Various long-standing scandals rumbled on. In Boggate a key figure, by now ex-employee David Willetts, declined to give evidence and there were threats by Labour that they would look into doing him financial harm if he didn't play ball. This becomes relevant later on.
And shocking details came out - from me - about the paucity of the supposed Police fraud investigation (which, as above, was simply abandoned for the useless, and powerless, Wragge investigation. Via a Freedom of Information Request I exclusively revealed that in all the time of the so-called investigation the police had only conducted four interviews under caution lasting (1) 4 hours 4 mins; (2) 1 hour 55 mins; (3) 1 hour 48 mins and (4) just 15 minutes.It is known that one of the interviewees was [A2] but none of the main players from SMBC - Britton, Sharma, Scarrott, Bubalo, Willetts etc were interviewed under caution about, at best, the reasons they claim they didn't know what was going on.
The Audit Committee popped up raising concerns about the CPO on land at West Bromwich Street which I had raised in the blog sometime previously saying: "the Council has found indicators [which they listed] that suggest potential collusion and fraudulent practice against the Council may have taken place". However, this matter was now 18 years old and evidence had been lost. It did turn out that WMP had known about these issues for some time but had failed to investigate (and thet refused to answer a FOI request about this).
During the corrupt deal involving The Public, Tom Watson MP had been pressured by constituents to look into the matter. He publicly claimed to have sent his findings to Darren Cooper but SMBC reported to me that "no correspondence from Tom Watson MP was received by Councillor Cooper in his official council email address , or by officers of the Council between Ist April and 23rd December, 2013". And so it appears that one side or the other was lying about this or that Watson sent it privately to Cooper knowing his hatred of The Public and that the findings would go straight in the bin.
The response from the Council is interesting in itself in respect of the alleged search of Cooper's email address. There was panic when Cooper died about what would come out and Jan Britton ordered his email account to be instantly wiped. Why would a search be undertaken on a wiped account?
This became a feature of the late tenure of Jan Britton eg. Melanie Dudley's email account was also wiped even though she was the Acting Monitoring Officer. When I brought cases before the Information Tribunal (see below) Britton's staff at SMBC - including at least one senior solicitor - lied to the Information Commissioner that once they had (deliberately) wiped the accounts the contents were irrecoverable. This turned out to be an absolute lie but the ICO declined to criminally prosecute those responsible under s.77 FOIA 2000.
I referred above to "the 72 page dossier". Gurinder Josan (now on Labour's NEC) held covert meetings with me and handed me piles of documents to use to bring down Cllr Hussain. Josan is a puppet of John Spellar MP. Meanwhile Watson used John Tipper to have me assist in preparing the "72 page dossier" which Watson then handed to the Labour Party, also with the intention of damaging Hussain. Publicly Spellar and Watson were saying everything I wrote was "lies" whereas I was assisting them via their intermediaries for their political ends.
I wrote above how Cllr Frear had concealed that he was living in a SMBC council house by falsely claiming in his Register of Interests that he owned the property . But my investigative journalism showed the truth. The Audit Committee found that there had been nothing wrong in a single man being given a three bedroom house at a time of desperate shortage in the Borough. But my research also indicated that he had intentionally made himself homeless so that there were further doubts about his eligibility. Happily his application was approved by the Director of Housing himself - Adrian Scarrott! (We saw that Frear moved in with his step(?) brother, the foul-mouthed troll, Paul Kerton (see above) - a well-paid employee of SMBC.) SMBC not only liked to play fasr and loose with the rules but to rub people's noses in it when they were caught out (usually by me). Thus, despite this scandal, Frear was given a position (and extra allowance) on the Housing Scrutiny Board.
Cllr Rowley (incredibly the ex-Mayor of Sandwell) was no longer a councillor. We have seen that in 2016 I exposed that his associate was advertising SMBC portable buildings and containers for sale on his personal Facebook page (which WMP again refused to investigate. It was disclosed at an Audit Committee meeting that the ex-Cllr (a very close associate of Tom Watson MP) still held keys to the compound where these items were and was still going on site. I called for him to return the keys forthwith or for SMBC to immediately change the locks (I think the latter was done).
SMBC Director, Darren Carter, appears for the first time in early 2017. I have written about the scandal of Cllr Rouf's 7 bedroom house built on a much-sought after plot in Smethwick. On the orders of Darren Cooper the property was taken out of auction to be sold to one of Rouf's sons. For reasons unknown this deal did not go through but there was another "infamous" sealed bid process and the plot was, happily, won by a different son of Cllr Rouf. Many interested parties I spoke to in Smethwick were totally unaware of the sealed bid process (and SMBC staff used a ruse to say the property was not for sale due to a technical issue - an outright lie). The temporary Monitoring Officer and the biddable Carter (see further below) pronounced the sealed bid process to be "all above board". This was patently not the case but, yet again, WMP refused to investigate.
There were also issues whether members of Rouf's family were actually entitled to be on the voters roll in Sandwell as they were not residents - and I showed that one son was living in Erdington, Birmingham.
My FOI request on the ice rink scandal produced some interesting results. The proposed developer had been "introduced" to SMBC at an unrecorded meeting by a Labour peer. It now transpired that he had no site in mind but Jan Britton & staff set about scouring Sandwell for a plot. An old car park in West Bromwich was selected - it was in poor condition but still generated an income of £189,000 per year. SMBC told the local media - which of course, simply printed what they were told - that the developer would pay to demolish the car park and then develop it. Now I was able to show that this was a lie. The original plan was for the Council to pay for the demolition and grant the developer a 150 year lease at a peppercorn rate. They would give him £300,000 for unknown reasons.
Even SMBC realised there might be problems with EU state aid rules and proposed to hide the grant by passing just unter the EU limit direct to the developer and the balance would be expressed as being for "environmental improvements". I exclusively disclosed that there was no options appraisal for the project and the Council's own "scorecard" produced a very low score of 54% (against the desired 100%). Cllr Eling was directly involved in all this but, as we have seen, eventually pulled the scheme (he and his colleagues at some point also changed the "plan" at some point to sell the land to the developer outright for a nominal sum). From the very beginning Jan Britton and his staff had flouted all normal standards and procedures.
Darren Carter had come up through the ranks at Sandwell and became a senior accountant before promotion to the post of statutory s. 151 Officer. He was widely perceived to be "one of the boys" and unlikely to present even a modicum of challenge to the conduct of the political leadership. In a prescient piece I wrote:
"I recently questioned the fitness of the new s.151 officer to be making decisions on possible fraud and corruption when he had apparently failed to notice it on his watch as a senior accountant at SMBC."
Unfortunately, his shortcomings would not become apparent until later and he survived until 2020.
Curiously the Cllr Cashmore story popped up again. A well-known Sandwell figure stated that WMP had - some years previously by now - deliberately allowed the time limit for investigating her false electoral declarations of residence to lapse. All hearsay evidence but the person telling me the story said he got it directly from a WMP Inspector (who was not involved in the actual investigation). (I had previously established that, eventually, WMP had made a pre-arranged appointment to meet Cashmore at the property where she was NOT living and it will come as no surprise that she was there - the home of her mother and father, also Labour Councillors - when a DS turned up.)
I reported above that there had been an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) review of my initial complaints about non-disclosure of interests. My complaint was upheld and the IPCC stated that there had been no investigations whatsoever into any of the individuals. But this finding was cast into considerable doubt when a senior WMP officer wrote:
"In the [A1] case, the failures to declare interests were [my emphasis] part of the investigations undertaken by the police. However, unlike other criminal matters, there are time limits to bring proceedings. These are both in relation to when the alleged offence occurred and then in relation in time after the alleged offences were reported. The latter requires that charges must be brought within a year of the allegations being reported within the required time period. In this case, the alleged offences were reported within the required time, but the police appear not to have understood that there was the one year limit to bring charges after the report to them. They failed to bring any charges within the time limit and consequently the allegations fell".
There are matters that should be mentioned here. [A1] was believed to be a WMP informant. When I made the complaints I had photocopied the statutory provisions and physically handed them to WMP. These were relatively simple investigations and why had this matter not been dealt with inside 12 months? Finally these were relatively minor issues in the light of what else was coming out but the investigation into the much more serious matters was deliberately halted so that Wragges could "investigate" instead.
It was interesting given what soon happened that Cllr Eling saw the WMP quote above and described WMP as "idiots".
I reported that the first houses at Lodge Street were sold and [A2] - son of Cllr [A1] was on course for a huge profit having bought the land cheaply from his employers, SMBC (see above).
Eling and Marshall continued to drip poison to me via the WhatsApp account as civil war within Labour broke out. Allegations were made that Cllrs (I) Jones, (O) Jones and Lloyd had intimitated a "frail pensioner" in an ugly incident and Eling's forces suspended the party whip from them. It transpired that the "victim" was actually Maggie Dorsett, an ageing groupie of Cllr Elaine Costigan and her clique (Costigan have switched sides and joined the Eling camp).
There seemed a moment of rapprochement now as Cllr Piper contacted me to ask if I would attend and speak at an Audit Committee meeting - with the proviso that I did not swear! I agreed and an invite was duly forthcoming but only for a "private session". I declined this as this whole raison d'etre of this blog is openness and transparency against SMBC's corruption and secrecy.
Trawling through social media I discovered that brave anticorruption campaigners in Mexico City had organised a tour of the City pointing out examples of corruption. I communicated with the organisers and they were delighted to let me copy their idea. This the UK's first ever "Corruptour" took place. A small coach was hired and a small band headed off to visit, inter alia, Cashmore's fictitious home, Frear's council house, numerous land sites connected with [A1] and [A2], and Providence Place. The tour finished on foot with a short walk in Oldbury to the defunct Albert Street public lavatories, the epicentre of the BogGate scandal. The main incident was before the trip when Cashmore's mother, Cllr Linda Horton, tried to get WMP to stop it and they actually jumped to attention and phoned me. Perhaps a perfect example of precisely why the trip was absolutely necessary. (The "class clown", Cllr Piper, had wind of the trip and joked that Cllr Horton might invite us all in to view "Lucy's Phantom Bedroom"!)
Curiously many people did not book as they thought the whole thing was a wind-up and I am still getting requests to organise "Corruptour 2".
Once again, Parks Department hit the headlines. I sent allegations from a whistleblower to SMBC and WMP. Inevitably the latter couldn't be bothered (at best) to investigate. The principal claim was that staff were routinely over-ordering stock and selling the surplus for personal gain. The Police were informed of two named staff members said to be the major culprits. SMBC itself found "a number of cases of non-compliance with SMBC's Procurement and Contract Procedure involving "significant sums"". Additional "measures" were promised to address this but no apparent disciplinary measures taken and the whole thing brushed under the carpet. Ironically most of Jan Britton's limited experience before getting the top job was in Parks Management and many staff used a derogatory nickname for him referring to this.
The Hackett saga rumbled on - and, incredibly, is still going on as I write - see further below. At this stage SMBC refused to answer my FOI request principally asking why the original "guilty" finding by Melanie Dudley in respect of Allegation One had been overturned after she was forced out for refusing to change her report?
A tale from 2014 raised its very ugly head. Two 19 year-old Tipton men had been convicted at Exeter Crown Court of sexually assaulting two 12 year-old girls. In mitigation, a letter were produced from the Tipton Young Women's Forum saying one of the sex offenders had been volunteering there helping young Asian women (this, in itself, prompted me to raise safeguarding issues about the Charity with SMBC which were duly ignored). It transpired that the offender was a close relative of a senior Labour Councillor and that his Mother - apparently a letter signatory - effectively ran the Forum, a fact that was not made known to the sentencing Judge. Further, a Labour Councillor told the Police that s/he had been pressured into signing the letter by a figure who appears elsewhere in this history. The trial judge was now unavailable and Devon and Cornwall Police referred the matter to WMP who appointed Superintendent Martin Hurcombe to investigate. The Cllr witness never heard anything from WMP and all my attempts to contact the senior officer were simply ignored without even the courtesy of an acknowledgement.
I attended a meeting at Oldbury Council House as Labour threw open the Council Chamber for an event by the Chance Glassworks Heritage Trust. Many Councillors including Leader Eling turned out to promote the scheme. The slick presentation made me start to suspect that the Project was/is a major property development scheme. And in a very curious coincidence the wife of a Trust Board member was also connected with a company renting the old Albert Street public conveniences of Boggate infamy. And another member of the company signed a planning application showing the owner as Abdul Nayeem Hussain - also heavily involved in BogGate. (Much later Gurinder Josan - now a Labour NEC Member took me to the site where a company operating there claimed they were being harassed by the Trust and the Council. They eventually moved from the site and, in another strange coincidence, suddenly made a cash donation to Tom Watson MP.)
A Freedom of Information Request came back totally blanking my request why Cllr Hussain’s non-disclosure had not been included in the Wragge “investigation” by Jan Britton.
I write about Labour in Sandwell because they are a corrupt dictatorship that has run the benighted Borough for 46 years. This is not simply blind prejudice despite the attacks on me by the Party and some trade unions, principally Unite and the GMB, and I pointed out that the would-be Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, was talking a lot about homelessness when he owned at least three and a half properties - two and a half outside the West Midlands.
Although I didn’t know it for some months the shit was about to hit the fan big time with the start of a major campaign by Eling, Jan Britton and others to criminalize me. As we have seen, Eling and Cllr Marshall tried to recruit me at a meeting in a Birmingham pub. It became apparent fairly rapidly that I was being used. All information was about fellow Labour Party members perceived by Eling as enemies or about SMBC employees who had crossed him like Melanie Dudley.
At the pub meeting I had asked where he lived when he was doing his other job as a Local Government Officer in another Labour basket-case council, Rotherham MBC. He told me he stayed a couple of nights a week “up there” which I took at the time to mean in Rotherham. It should be remembered that Elings wife, Pam Pulsford/Eling, was a vocal member of the Labour Party in Sandwell and that she and her husband owned - in his sole name - a small flat near Warley Woods.
In true Sandwell Labour-style, Mrs Eling had also been employed at Sandwell Council. In a notorious TV interview later on, Eling told the massive lie that Sandwell Council did not use confidentiality agreements for departing staff whereas the opposite was true and, in fact, it was very rare that staff were not obliged to pledge secrecy when leaving. Worse still, Eling’s own wife had signed one when she left!
I was now able to disclose that Eling not only worked a long distance from Sandwell whilst claiming the full Leader’s allowances but he also spent much of his week living in his wife’s cottage in a pretty north Derbyshire village.
Eling went mad about the disclosure that he was not spending much time in his beloved Smethwick and at some point he and his wife made a complaint to WMP about my disclosure of the truth. He also encouraged others to also make spurious complaints about me including Marshall, Sarah James (a Labour Party member, close associate of Tom Watson and a full-time GMB Union Member paid for by the taxpayer via Facility Time) and Cllr Elaine Costigan. Jan Britton and Surjit Tour of SMBC assisted Eling by providing a “dossier” to WMP but I was oblivious to all this until some time later.
Tom Watson had hit the jackpot again with that famous "Friend of The Lawyers", Max Mosley, who donated half a million pounds to the MP. And I revealed that his much-publicised 2017 jolly at the Glastonbury Festival was funded by mobile phone company EE.
I have not specifically mentioned the local media yet. The local media were in thrall to SMBC particularly the Black Country newspaper, The Express and Star, [the E&S] and the local BBC. I did mention that, to this day, the E&S peddle the lie that the College is paying rent on The Public even though they have seen the relevant clause in the lease. I mentioned above that Cllr Marshall had been taken to Court for non-payment of Council Tax and in the WhatsApp feed he boasted how he had persuaded Alex Homer of the BBC not to run the story. I have no financial resources nor their contact lists and accessibility and yet I was writing exclusive story after exclusive story just by following my nose and digging out the truth. They could have done the same but didn't.
The election for the first West Midlands Mayor was imminent and I wrote about the Labour candidate, Sion Simon and how he had been caught up in the MP’s expenses scandal. Also that he was professing a deep and abiding love for the West Midlands conurbation but had actually moved from London to a cottage in a village near Nuneaton. In a comedic episode, his election leaflet for Wolverhampton included a photo of West Bromwich Albion football ground - an anathema to most Wolvo folk.
Meanwhile, Tom Watson was much more exercised about matters near his London home than issues in his far-off constituency campaigning about a land deal near Millwall FC.
Watson and Spellar’s war on Cllr Hussain continued and there were ructions within Sandwell Labour when the other local MP, Adrian Bailey, supported the Cllr in a High Court legal action against SMBC (in which Mr Justice Green quoted my blog). (At the following June General Election count - see further below - the civil war was made flesh when the Watson and Spellar contingents would not even speak with Bailey’s clan and all left the count before his result was declared!)
I was contacted by Mr Lee Garmston and an extraordinary story emerged. Lee lived in a semi with his family and the other half was owned by SMBC who let it to persons known to have histories of anti-social behaviour. This story is a rare example of me specifically naming a relatively junior member of staff because of her truly shocking conduct. The nub of the story was that Employee X called Lee to a meeting on Council premises allegedly to try and resolve issues. When he arrived, Lee was surprised to find Police Officer Y also present. SMBC then issued a “no notice” injunction against Lee backed by statements from the employee and the WPC stating that he had threatened them at the meeting. (SMBC also unlawfully misused its powers to make enquiries to the local Community Health Team about Lee’s medical records and his mental health.)
The whole thing unravelled dramatically when Lee produced a tape of the meeting (which the Police themselves checked forensically and declared that it was genuine and not tampered with). He supplied me with a copy and it is absolutely clear that no threat was made. A hearing of the matter was adjourned due to the WPC being off sick but Lee produced photos from her Facebook page which showed her to be on holiday in New York. The case collapsed and Lee started a long battle to have WMP discipline the errant officer. Employee X left the employment of SMBC soon after this incident.
In a blog about a departing journalist I put up a redacted piece showing the process of how I tried to obtain stories - attempting to give people the right to comment before publication. Most of the time there was no response - particularly from Watson and Spellar. And, later, it was disclosed that there was a specific order from the Labour Group that councillors were not to speak with me at all.
Despite the vehement attacks on private education by Sandwell Labour I disclosed that one of John Spellar’s paid-for foreign jollies had been to Cairo to open a new “branch” of English Public School, Malvern College.
Despite the efforts of Gurinder Josan (and I was physically present when he was ringing around trying to thwart her) Sandwell Cllr Preet Kaur Gill had become the candidate for a parliamentary seat (which she won).
Sandwell Labour had been fierce critics of Free Schools and I asked Ms Gill what her attitude was. She failed to respond and I queried whether this was because her own children attended one?
Before the election I also reminded the voters of West Brom East of Tom Watson’s vicious campaign against Leon Brittan (a disgraceful episode widely reported nationally).
As above, I did not know that Cllr Eling and SMBC were going to try and use the police to shaft me but a clue came in an extraordinary incident at the 2017 General Election count. Firstly, many Labour councillors were incensed that I was a guest at the count and I was greeted by several individual Councillors with abuse such as, most frequently, "what the fuck are you doing here?" John Spellar MP swore at me as did Tom Watson's minder. Secondly, the strict rule was that there was no photography allowed in the counting hall. Thus I went in and out and did several live broadcasts on Twitter Periscope from the seating area outside. Later Jan Britton claimed I had been filming in the hall itself which was a lie and which was easily disproved as the Periscope footage was still available. This was a direct attempt by Britton to stop me attending future counts, which didn't work.
But the third at most amazing incident was the threat from Mr and Mrs Eling as reported immediately afterwards (from the anteroom) on Twitter Periscope and written up in my blog post of 10th June, 2017, "Out For The Count". And it is noteworthy that my contemporaneous film and blog posts were never disputed by the Eling's. And there were a whole host of witnesses whom I told about the incident immediately after it happened.
I don't think I had met Mrs Eling/Pulsford before this event but she knew who I was and I knew of her fearsome reputation. I walked back into the main counting hall and she rushed towards me shouting and swearing. I was a bit taken aback as there were two police officers standing very close by who said nothing. She was using the "f" word at me. Eling then joined her and said, "watch out or she will punch you on the nose and we'll tell the police you provoked her". This was a threat of violence and a clear indication that Eling was quite prepared to lie to the police about me. I also knew they were trying to engineer an incident with a view to me being thrown out of the count. Thus I walked out to the anteroom and made my live broadcast about this extraordinary behaviour.
For the sake of balance many other Labour Councillors were perfectly pleasant. At a later count I sat with a whole group of them laughing and joking until the early hours of the morning. Some, like Cllrs Carmichael and Dhallu, even introduced me to family members. At the 2017 count Cllr Trow was unwell with a heavy cold and sat talking with me in the anteroom about arts funding and such like for well over 30 minutes. There was a TV in the anteroom showing the national results and I even had discussions with a "sworn enemy", Cllr Gavan, about different results as they came in.
I mentioned above how Cllr Linda Horton (mother of errant Cllr Lucy Cashmore) had asked WMP to investigate and stop my “Corruptour” but I was able to discover that Cllr Eling and Marshall were present when she did this as were other Councillors including Preet Gill (now an MP) and even John Spellar MP! No wonder WMP jumped to attention and contacted me.
Following the incident at the count I told Cllr Marshall that Eling had crossed the Rubicon and that, as I had always suspected, he could not be trusted. I then disclosed the story of Marshall's court case - and this was not just out of prurient interest since it became a major factor in forthcoming political events.
In short, Marshall got it into his head that he was going to do a property deal. Despite constant protestations of fidelity to his wife - including, falsely, to WMP - he had a "reputation". More specifically, he provided in a court statement a lurid account of a sexual relationship with a widow. He was already financially-challenged but persuaded the widow to lend him money for the fantasy property deal which, needless to say, was a non-starter. He refused to pay the money back claiming it was a gift. He lost the subsequent court case and was bankrupted.
We saw that SMBC had to issue Marshall with a summons for non-payment of Council tax. Now he was bankrupr but Eling clung to him for reasons unknown. This soon became "political".
The first line of a blog I wrote in July, 2017 is worth repeating since it sums things up very succinctly: "Nothing is apolitical in the Soviet State of Sandwell."
The first stirrings of the Wednesbury Business Improvement District (BID) scandal surfaced and I questioned the absurdly close relationship between Cllr Costigan and Wednesbury Police dubbing her their "Gold Commander". I also questioned the close relationship of Costigan and other local Councillors with the management of the Gallagher Retail Park to the extent that the publicly slammed Cllr Lloyd when he raised problems residents claimed to be having with the operation of the site.
And Tom Watson claimed to be campaigning for more regulation of the event ticket companies but I disclosed that yet another of infamous Glastonbury jollies had been funded by the parent Company of Ticketmaster.
I disremember exactly when, but a Labour Councillor told me to my face that he was a police informant along with Councillor [A1]. In the Eling/Marshall WhatsApp feed the pair also alleged that two Councillors "have high-ranking [police] officers still in their pockets".
I drew attention to the situation where false declarations of ownership had been made on planning applications. I raised the point some time before with Nick Bubalo who replied, "so what?"
A note from Cllr Piper to the Labour Group came into my possession saying, “The information is very personal and damaging to Cllr Marshall’s reputation and if widely circulated is also very damaging to the Labour Group as a whole.” The “information” was not specified (though see above).
I also became aware that an employee very close to Jan Britton called Tara Malik was actively making enquiries about me. This was another rare occasion where I named a relatively low-level employee since (a) she was clearly acting on the instructions of Britton himself and (b) it was not at all clear how this activity was lawful. (I wrote to her after she left SMBC but she did not reply.)
In the Eling/Marshall WhatsApp feed they wanted me to investigate a fellow Labour Councillor who they claimed was living outside the Borough. They told me the make of his car and the registration number to assist my investigation. They added that he was in a relationship with a transgender person or, as it was put to me in writing, “do you also know he has a cock in a frock?”
I wrote how Cooper's troll friend, Hipkiss, had boasted of rigging an Express and Star "poll" showing Cooper as the favourite candidate for the West Midlands Mayor candidacy but now I was able to disclose that Cllr Peter Hughes, as Secretary of the Sandwell Labour Group, had also urged all local party members to vote for Cooper.
In August, 2017 I published selected extracts of Eling and Marshall’s WhatsApp messages since it was clear that this pair were out to destroy anyone who opposed Eling. The Labour Party was informed. Amongst other horrific content the pair had envisioned Cllr Ian Jones “spunking over Maria” [Cllr Crompton] as this would be preferable to Ian “doing his wife”. Maria organised a meeting in Harborne, Birmingham with xxxxxxxxx present. They informed me that Maria had demanded a meeting with Eling who told her that the WhatsApp feed was a fake. He later told her that I had invented the whole thing (hundreds of entries). I was able to show them that the account was genuine and Maria took screenshots. Clearly Eling had lied to a senior Labour colleague (and at the time Cllr Crompton was also an employee of the Party).
And up popped BogGate yet again. Two copies of what purported to be the same document - the original and one with annotations. Yet I was able to show - thanks to a sharp-eyed informant that the signatures were different on what was supposed to be the same document.
The MSM reported that in the last 5 years Sandwell had over 6,226 reports of child abuse.
Cllr Bob Price announced he was leaving the Party because of Eling citing bully, intimidation and "recent social media revelations". Eling carried on refusing to resign.
Meanwhile the statue story rose again with the private entrepreneur refusing to say how much and had raised from the public and how much had actually been spent.
Back in April there had been ugly scenes at the Sandwell Labour Group meeting. Cllr Marshall had asked to make a “personal statement” about his bankruptcy. Cllr Yvonne Davies tried to intervene and tell the Group the full story but was howled down. A vote was taken to eject her from the meeting and she was reported to the whips. The minutes of the meeting came into my hands and were duly published. Despite a large amount of the information being in the public domain the meeting laughably recorded criticism that Cllr Davies had “sought to impune his honesty”. In September, the whips were still hounding the Cllr.
The 2016/17 SMBC accounts included an extraordinary note that a sum of nearly £16m accounts had been “omitted” from the accounts since 2011/12 in respect of SMBC’s absolutely disastrous contract with BT. I questioned how the external auditors had also managed to miss this.
Even The Public story came back to life with allegations that Tom Watson had, in fact, been one of the instigators of the whole proposal to gift the building to the College. As ever he refused to answer my query about this. And I exclusively disclosed a new email from 2013 showing that Jan Brtitton was in cahoots with Val Bailey at the College:
"Just so you are aware, Val Bailey of Sandwell College has asked me not to raise The Public at this afternoon’s meeting - because she hasn’t yet discussed it with her Governing Body, who will be present at the meeting."
Given the civil war raging within Sandwell Labour I was able to say that, before the split, 46 Councillors had signed a petition to Labour’s West Mids Regional Office decrying the “appalling treatment and discrimination against Cllrs Hussain and Ian Jones”. This included many names of people who changed their tune, not least “The King of the Trolls” David Hosell, plus Costigan, Peter Hughes. Trow, Carmichael and last, but not least, Preet Gill (the undistinguished Councillor who became an MP.) No signatures though from the Eling clique.
The Council used a FOI reply to refute the statement in the Eling/WhatsApp feed that they had been forcing Council staff to investigate Eling’s enemies. Given what has come out since the veracity of this reply is very much in doubt!
Information became available in respect of Cllr Marshall’s finances. He told the Court in a bid to reduce payments to his victim that his income was only his Councillor’s allowance (which was mysteriously being paid into his wife’s bank account). Just a week later, Eling promoted him to the Cabinet which significantly increased his income (and there are doubts that he reported this later to the Trustee in Bankruptcy.) And, despite his protestations to the contrary, I disclosed that his finances were in a parlous state irrespective of the case. It is inconceivable Eling did not know about the Court case but he had raised him to Cabinet rank regardless.
The WhatsApp feed was becoming a constant source of material and I recorded how Eling & Marshall had attacked staff at SMBC saying there were “some dodgy f*ckers in Democratic Services” and they were going to weed them out.
There was yet another twist to the BogGate saga. Back in the early days of the scandal - exclusively disclosed by The Skidder blog - Cllr Ian Jones had lied on local BBC Radio about a key fact. I had reported this extensively. But I was now passed his actual briefing sheet from Jan Britton’s paid service which clearly showed that he had only repeated what he had been told to say. Indeed he had been forwarded a note on the subject originally sent to Nick Bubalo. For reasons unknown, Cllr Jones had never made this plain to me but now I was aware of it, I offered him an apology. This still left the question of who within the paid service had provided the false information to him in the first place. The email had come from the press office but had clearly been prepared by someone else.
I now dropped a bombshell from the WhatsApp feed where Eling and Marshall had suggested that Cllr Jones should "sp*unk over Cllr Crompton in her bikini" as it would be preferable to "doing" his wife (a fellow Labour Councillor!) Eling was lying to fellow Councillors about all this and getting desperate. Jan Britton wrote to all Councillors claiming there was an ongoing police investigation and so they should not communicate with me in any way. This was just a very crude attempt by the Chief Executive to attack the blog and try to protect Eling.
Meanwhile Eling had two new recruits in his war against Yvonne Davies when Cllrs Ann Shackleton and Carol Gould made truly pathetic complaints about her. Shackleton had been “upset” when Cllr Davies told to get out when she blundered into a private meeting. Gould made a similarly trivial complaint to the Whips when she had been barred by Davies from the AGM of a charity on the basis she was not a trustee! There seemed to be no level of pettiness to which Eling and cronies would not stoop.
By now the local Tories were taking a serious interest in the corruption and the incompetence and were producing a fine blog of their own. Unfortunately the MSM remained almost totally indifferent as one scandal quickly followed another.
By now I had visited the site of the proposed Chance Glass project at the request of, and in the company of, Gurinder Singh Josan. I liked Gurinder and he purported to be my friend though was very quick to turn his back on me later on when I needed his help. Gurinder was/is a puppet of Tom Watson and John Spellar and now on Labour’s NEC.
I wrote above that the Chance project appeared to me to be a property development masquerading as a heritage project. When I walked the site with Gurinder I was shocked. The land is directly underneath the elevated section of the M5. The noise and air pollution was horrendous when I visited. (Later, Mark Davies of the Trust told me the flats would be triple-glazed which is only fine until you step outside. And parts of the site were still in industrial/logistics use which seemed the best thing for it, particularly as Sandwell desperately needs actual jobs.) If I did not have qualms about the scheme before, I certainly did now. I was also concerned that there were allegations that underhand tactics were being used to acquire leases already in existence on the land. I rechristened those behind this project “Chancers”.
“Documents before the Court refer to a "culture" which pervaded the authority whereby members were " the bosses" and the Council was "open for business". Documents also refer to members bullying employed officials and officers who were compliant in carrying out the members wishes."
By now, Britton had lost any semblance of control (if he ever had any) and the elected membership was running riot. I also disclosed that Eling and Marshall had briefed against Melanie Dudley prior to her being forced out by Eling and Britton. In particular they fed me a grossly defamatory story about her designed to embarrass and humiliate her and urged me to print it. Happily I didn’t as it was totally untrue. (Obviously this was redacted from the later “published version” of the WhatsApp feed but is available still as evidence. I also made Ms Dudley aware of what the pair had been up to.)
I admit to becoming enraged when I heard from very reliable sources that Eling was lying to people about the WhatsApp feed. Bizarrely, he had initially claimed it did not even exist but when that was shown as being patently untrue he claimed that the entire feed - including highly confidential information - had been invented by me and that I had literally sat down and faked the feed. I was used to the cascade of lies from both sides of SMBC but this took the biscuit. With suitable legal redactions I put the whole feed on the blog, using intemperate language about Eling’s egregious lies. I swiftly followed this up with a standards complaint against both Eling and Marshall.
This should have been game, set and match but, astonishingly, a number of Labour Councillors, Watson and Spellar circled the waggons around Eling and he tried to hang on. You have to question the judgement of those Labour people given the stark nature of the incontrovertible evidence. Britton and the Monitoring Officer, Surjit Tour, also did their level best to save him for reasons which seem inexplicable.
I made a standards complaint about Cllr Elaine Costigan. She was friendly with a local company. They erected two large silos on their site without planning permission. They were moved and an application for retrospective planning permission made. Cllr Costigan tapped the company up for donations to one of her pet (and very secretive) projects and they did donate. She did not declare an interest or recuse herself at the subsequent Planning Committee meeting when the application was swiftly agreed. Further she did not declare her connections with the owners/operators of the local Gallagher Retail Park.
In the case of the Retail Park there was found to be no case to answer as some 20 decisions had been made via delegated authority.
She was exonerated in respect of failing to declare an interest at the Planning Committee as she “believed” she asked the Head of Development and Regulatory Services if she needed to declare an interest and “he” said “no”! Happily for her, “he” couldn’t remember whether she had asked him or not. The Monitoring Officer managed to find that emails she sent and received for the donations may have not been actually sent by her. In the latter regard I was able to show an email sent to the company she was tapping up via her private email address and signed “elaine x” and so I am not sure how this might not have been sent by her?
The blog had already shown that she had lied about a former employee “LB” and I opined that this investigation had been a “sick joke”.
On 30th November, 2017 I put up on the blog a standards complaint about Eling and Marshall to include the WhatsApp feed and in respect of Eling alone, in respect of the incident at the general election count. I will return to this further below.
Eling’s campaign against Ian Jones continued. Shortly before a hearing, SMBC served him with 400 pages of documents whilst, without irony, stating via their lawyers that the matter was “document-light”. Jones asked for more time but SMBC refused to adjourn and brought expensive lawyers up from London for what was intended to be a Stalinist show-trial, held in the Council Chamber and live streamed. But it was inevitable that there would have to be an adjournment and there was - with consequent wasted costs picked up by the taxpayer.
This nonsense came about due to the Cllr Rouf house “deal” and I was able to show that there were also questions about who was supposed to be living at a couple of addresses connected with Rouf. This will be referred to again below.
I reported a curious tale next when Andy Street, the Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands, held an event called “Ask Andy” in the Council Chamber. It was sparsely attended but sitting opposite were Cllr Peter Hughes (a sworn enemy of me and the blog), Cllr Pam Hughes and the infamous “frail pensioner” from Wednesbury, Maggie Dorsett. Myself and Darryl asked about corruption in Sandwell whereupon Peter Hughes got up and ordered his companions to follow him as he stormed out of the Chamber. Not for the first or the last time, Hughes made himself look absolutely ridiculous. (He even wrote a letter of complaint to Jan Britton about this incident.) Had he stayed he would have seen me grill Street about his 3.5 properties and whether this qualified him as an expert on homelessness to the general approval of those attending.
Ian Carroll was at the Ask Andy event - Sandwell’s indefatigable “Gooseman”. Ian writes a great blog about the scandal of polluted sites in Sandwell, notably the Rattlechain Lagoon, and is a tireless campaigner for the protection of local wildlife. Where possible my blog tries to give Ian’s great work a plug.
In 2017 the ineffectual Cllr Preet Kaur Gill became MP for Birmingham Edgbaston. She stayed on as a Sandwell Councillor and missed various meetings. (In the incestuous world of SMBC her husband works for the Council.) I exclusively disclosed that rather than set up a Constituency Office in her constituency she rented premises over the border in Sandwell (though did not declare this in her Register of Interests). Thus SMBC was getting an initial three years rent from the taxpayer via a Birmingham MP.
I wrote about Cllr Haque’s son running a school in Tipton which did not comply with the law and was closed down. Haque himself had been a director of a company applying for planning permission to open a new school in West Bromwich but failed to declare his interest in the application. There were serious questions about fundraising for the school and when work started a very large unpaid bill to the builders. The application was for a school but the fundraising campaign stated there was to be a prayer hall for 2,500 and a conference hall for 1,000.
There was public outrage at a plan by SMBC to dissolve cadavers in an alkaline solution, so-called “Bio Cremation”. Local folk were horrified that the resultant “trade effluent” as the dissolved corpses were described would simply be tipped down the public sewer. I wrote this up with a rather tasteless headline: “Sandwell Labour’s Final ‘Solution’”.
The year ended with a quiz which many members of staff told me privately they greatly enjoyed. And so the year ended with Eling still clinging desperately to power - but not for too much longer!
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