Category: Basildon Borough Council

This blog should start with an apology, as I realise it is my first one since November of last year. Happy belated New Year to you all and I hope you all had lovely Christmases. It means I did not write up the meeting of Full Council in December or January. I am not sure…

Those who follow my activities on social media will be aware of a lot of fast-moving developments at the solar farm site off Outwood Farm Road in my Billericay East ward and, as I received a lot of correspondence about this from numerous sources, I thought it would be prudent for me to post a…

As I come to write up last Thursday’s meeting of Full Council, I would just ask readers to bear with me, as this was a mammoth SEVEN-HOUR meeting that went on until two o’clock in the morning. The meeting started at 7pm, earlier than usual, with a special Extraordinary Meeting to consider two nominations for…

So, thought I’d write-up the Basildon Council Annual Meeting held on Thursday. These are normally quite civil, set-piece affairs, where we elect our Mayor and Deputy Mayor for the municipal year and also pass the winning party’s Order Paper, enabling them to form an Administration. The Order Paper confirms the Leader and Deputy Leader of…

Believe it or not, it has taken me about a week to recover from Polling Day. I have never fought a General Election campaign before – in 2010, I stayed up with a friend and watched the result coming in on the telly – so to do so as an agent, running an MP’s re-election campaign,…

It is now officially Polling Day and chronic insomnia allows me this opportunity to make some election night predictions and speak briefly about the elections before us – not just the General Election to Parliament but also our own local borough council elections. Every politician says at every election that it is “the most important…

The events at last week’s meeting of Full Council were fairly hum-drum, considering the backdrop and the huge changes to the Council’s composition over the past few weeks, and I therefore anticipate this blog will be more ‘gossipy’ than usual. So, if political gossip and intrigue does not interest you then read no further. First,…

I don’t generally write up Planning Committee meetings but, as Tuesday night’s one has proved controversial and I’ve been getting lots of questions about it – both via e-mail and directed to me on social media – I thought it’d be simpler and easier to write it up for my website.  So here goes. For…

My last blog on Full Council (sadly since disappeared due to technical issues) proved popular, so I thought I would do another quick write-up of last Thursday’s meeting of Full Council, which proved almost as hot-tempered as the last one. We knew from the get-go that it was going to be a long meeting because…

Here is my letter, recently published in The Enquirer regarding Basildon Labour’s ongoing tit for tat over whether or not the Conservatives and UKIP have gone into coalition on Basildon Council (we haven’t, for the record). ONE can only wonder at what your readers must make of the recent flurry of letters from Labour politicians…