Skip to content

Titbits – Full Stops

Read this month’s column that pecks at the crumbs of news in the borough

Titbits bird
Titbits bird

Table of Contents

Hackney’s former planning committee chair took umbrage at a local cycling campaign’s alternative designs for Pembury Circus, saying they “take bicycles and run them round on the pavement”.

Cyclists pointed out that a cycle track can’t be on the pavement, because it would then be a cycle track.

It reminded Titbits of a photo taken last year that showed Mr Stops riding along Lea Bridge Road.

Was he on the cycle track or the pavement? Neither actually – he was on the road!

◆ Next on Stops’ watchlist was Green councillor Alastair Binnie-Lubbock, who he criticised for “waving a flag” during a recent pensions committee meeting when the subject of divestment came up.

“Grandstanding,” said Stops.

Cllr Binnie-Lubbock later revealed that Stops had put in a code of conduct complaint against him that was thrown out. The Green councillor asked Stops: “So you’re saying the pensions committee has no trigger when it comes to the ethics of the investments it stewards? Do you think Islington and Waltham Forest [councils] are breaking the law too?”

“If they are doing what you suggest, then probably,” Stops replied.

Binnie-Lubbock responded: “I look forward to you submitting code of conduct complaints against those Labour councillors too. I assume they’ll go nowhere either.”

“I am not a lawyer,” Stops confessed. “My complaint against your conduct was about your dishonesty and lack of integrity.”

“So I assume you seriously believe the Labour councillors in those boroughs are being dishonest and lack integrity,” said Binnie-Lubbock. “Or maybe councillors who are pursuing divestment are honestly trying to do all they can to halt a genocide, because that’s what their integrity demands.”

“I don’t know the circumstances,” Stops admitted. “Perhaps they got harangued by Greens?”

“There are no Green councillors in Waltham Forest (yet),” Binnie-Lubbock replied.

And that was the end of that!

Latest