The above is a racist incident on a bus, here in this country, where at one point, the racist shouts, “Get out of my country, get out of my country” at a man whom he believes to be Nigerian.

This strikes us as very similar to the alleged incident occurring on 7th October in Sorrento, Italy, which involved Elaine Foulkes as the alleged perpetrator.

The stark difference here is that Elaine Foulkes, unlike your average “Josephine Bloggs”, is connected very closely i.e. married to Wirral Councillor Steve Foulkes.

Here is a list of his achievements:

• Former Wirral Council Leader for 12 years
• Former Wirral Mayor
• Currently serving on the Wirral Council “Executive” of senior councillors
• Currently serving on the Board of Merseytravel
• Currently serving on the Board of Magenta Living

As followers of this blog will know and appreciate, he was also council leader throughout a time when cultural failure and foul abuse of learning disabled people and tenants of supported living accommodation was raging, unaddressed.  Statutory obligations towards the care of vulnerable people were being ignored, but seemingly quite routinely and without any of the ostensible checks or balances being allowed to take place.

Put simply, under leader Foulkes, the place had transmogrified from a once respectable local authority into a goddam broken, wayward and moribund basket case with deeply-embedded links to council-accredited gangster ‘care’ providers.

Alarmingly, if we then fast forward to 2017, despite the frequent and quite bizarre proclamations that the place is now the ‘most improved council’, it hasn’t improved one tiny bit, and certainly not enough to prise itself clear of the filthy gutter that it plunged itself headlong into over a decade ago.

Children’s Services has experienced sackings and resignations and the Children’s Department is breaking all the wrong kinds of national records for its own abject failure.  This was all KNOWN years ago by Chief Executive Robinson, but despite having a window of opportunity and experience in Social Services, he did absolutely nothing positive, just simply kept shtum, sat there, concealed it, and waited for the Ofsted Inadequate report to come in – which duly slammed him – making no attempt whatsoever to get his or his senior staff’s hands dirty fixing it and improving the lives of the children.

Instead, he got the step ladder out and climbing up, draped the usual f*cked up window dressing from pillar to pillar of the council shop front, prettifying it further by putting out media friendly, damage limitation press releases that mangled the truth, concealed the seriousness of what was going on, and did nothing to promote or defend the wellbeing of the children to whom they’d apparently forgotten they owed an ongoing statutory obligation.

But this was all pre-ordained.  Put simply, it was bound to occur where a culturally broken organisation was involved, populated by failed senior villains, dodging accountability.  Especially one like Wirral Council, that’s been thrown completely out of kilter and is top heavy with bullying socio and psychopaths who believe they’re untouchable.

The unretractable problem always was… they’ve been getting their own dishonest way for so long now, hacking away at the body corporate and grabbing their greedy slice of the action, that pure, undiluted, demented entitlement, is still running ragged and ruling the roost.

Anyway, that kind of sets the scene, a little bit.  We’d need a LOT more time and space to go into this in detail and comprehensively.

We can see that Foulkes (as well as the questionable Claughton voters who keep returning him to the gravy train) is largely responsible for where the council finds itself today.

But we also  believe his “dead hand” remains firmly on the guiding tiller at Wirral Council, albeit behind the scenes.  The so-called members’ “Executive” has its collective clenched fists tightly on the purse strings that “protect” our council tax money, frequently loosening them to dip into it and fund their abuse of power, as has long been customary.

A particularly corroded strand of this concerns the gathering of the local media – somewhere in the shadows – to negotiate whatever deals need to be reached as far as the reporting of council affairs go.

Although this is never reported upon (WHY?), the way this should work is presumably relatively straightforward.  The corrupt “executive” want what they would term ‘a fair hearing’ in both The Wirral Globe and The Liverpool Echo.

But let’s ask ourselves, “Do long-term abusers, no-marks and good-for-nothings deserve a fair hearing?”

This requirement for spinning the message clashes with ostensibly what the owners and editors of these newspapers want, and certainly with what the readers of these newspapers want.

An unhappy compromise will need to be reached because the council is a valuable and lucrative source of advertising income and not exactly a customer that newspapers can afford to lose – although we would argue that the bastards need to be rapidly lost when they are long-term thieves, liars, crooks and abusers of vulnerable people.

Anyway, they get together.  Exactly HOW, WHERE and WHEN nobody knows.  So that’s not done in the public interest, is it? And the process therefore crashes on take-off and flies into the face of this double whammy (if that’s not a horribly mixed metaphor):

Exhibit A. We are the electorate to whom councillors are responsible, because we put them into power and we are the paymasters who provide the funds that they use to pay themselves, their staff and to provide our services

Exhibit B. Newspapers themselves state that they are there to serve their readers, to provide them with news, and to do so in the public interest

So what we want to know now is… in light of the above two exhibits, M’Lud…

Where is the reporting of one of the biggest and most scandalous stories of recent times?

View the disturbing video at the top of this post again and let’s ask ourselves…. what the hell happened to the story about Elaine Foulkes’ ugly, alleged racism – also on a bus – in Sorrento on 7th October 2017?  It was expertly scooped and covered here by the excellent Lord and Lady Leaky of Wirral Leaks fame…

https://wirralleaks.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/sorrento-shame-holidaymakers-claim-they-faced-racist-abuse-from-ex-wirral-mayoress/

But the Wirral Leaks scoop is a couple of weeks old now, and there is no way on God’s green earth the captured Liverpool Echo or the snaffled up Wirral Globe are going to meet the terms of Exhibit B above, and carry out their journalistic function.  NO. WAY. WHATSOEVER.

That ship has sailed.

So we can only assume that this story was just too big, and too threatening to vested interests, the ones to which they now appear to be closely and irredeemably shackled …and instead, the terms of their collective cowardice that got written into the latest crappy compromise – whatever, wherever and whenever that was – have gotten the better of them.

Here’s the first article we wrote recently on the subject of these local newspapers’ uncharacteristic shyness:

Radio Silence

But happily for the people of Wirral, the spectre of an angry and exposed Councillor Foulkes, tearing his hair out both municipally and personally didn’t deter everybody, oh no…

Here is an excerpt from the latest edition of Private Eye, Issue No. 1456.  This is London-based, but immediately they saw not just the importance and newsworthiness of the subject of #racism…  but the building threat that such an issue represents to society if it’s left unaddressed and unreported.

Yes, The Liverpool Echo and The Wirral Globe, your public money-funded refusal to report the news is damaging to our society.  Cheers for that.

Toodle Pip!