The Buck/Palmer Con

I was contacted by the MP’s office, Mr Buck, for my home phone number in Amble for a Mr Palmer and I was content to talk to him as the last message from her office was:

Quoting Emma Lewell-Buck: Date:23/12/2019 (16:09:38 GMT)
Good afternoon Mick,
I am aware Angela and David are dealing with this, 
please can you let me know if there is anything
needed from me.
Best wishes, hope you have a lovely Christmas
Emma

Angela Hamilton and David Francis were 2 of the Beacon and Bents Councillors who were sympathetic to my case against UK Docks. The third, John Anglin who had backed the expansion of UK Docks’ business on the slipway off River Drive no longer represented the people living in the ward. He was replaced by a Green Party Councillor, Sue Stonehouse in May 2021, the election in 2020 having been cancelled.

I had been corresponding freely with the MP’s Office for some years and that was mostly via her previous Office Manager, Rebecca Heath but latterly with the Ward Cllrs Hamilton and Francis but not Mr Buck. Emma was busy with more important matters such as saving the South Tynside Hospital from the grasp of developers.

I had only given permission for Mr Buck to give my home phone number to Mr Palmer on condition that we should discuss UK Docks and when I returned a call to her office in South Shields he made it very clear that was the last thing he wished to discuss.

I had severe doubts about what Mr Palmer was saying over the phone and naturally complained to Emma about him and copied it to the Ward Councillors as a warning to them to be careful about any dealings with Mr Palmer.

Re: Complaint: 248789 - Unplanned Development on River Drive
From: mick.dawson@theharbourview.co.uk
Date: 13/01/2020 (22:05:29 BST)
To: Emma Lewell-Buck MP
Cc: Keith Palmer, Cllr Angela Hamilton, Cllr David Francis, Cllr Anglin
1 Attachment: 8DLL.pdf (108 KB)

The main part of the complaint was:
What I really needed from you was your support and Mr Palmer has indicated by our exchange over the phone that he is not prepared to give it. At the end of the day the Council are misusing the Ombudsman’s Office to hide malpractice then use their findings to deflect any enquirers after the truth. I understood from Mr Palmer that this was no longer a matter for Parliament but I think it is.

I received an auto response, 13/01/2020 (22:30:50 BST) from the MP’s office which was not suprising consdering the time:- “Thank you for contacting Emma Lewell-Buck, Member of Parliament for South Shields. This reply is to confirm that your message has been safely received. I receive a large number of emails, letters and telephone calls each day, but will respond to your enquiry as soon as I am able.

It was obvouis that Mr Palmer’s opinon about UK Docks conflicted with Emma’s, and mine and the facts and been conversing with her only a few days before, I added the following morning:- Is it safe to assume he is your Office Manager in South Shields and we should write to him on any issues we have with UK Docks?

I recieved yet another auto response, 14/01/2020 (07:37:17 GMT):- Thank you for contacting Emma Lewell-Buck, Member of Parliament for South Shields. This reply is to confirm that your message has been safely received, but the same afternoon Mr Buck does respond:-

From: "BUCK, Simon" <simon.buck@parliament.uk>
To: "mick.dawson@theharbourview.co.uk"
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 14:37:06 +0000
Subject: Correspondence with the Office of Emma Lewell-Buck

Dear Mr Dawson,
Thank you for your email sent this morning following from Mr Palmer's
telephone conversation to you yesterday afternoon.
I wish to address two points you raised. I was present during the
conversation between Mr Palmer and yourself. I am afraid your 
recollection of the conversation was not a true account. Mr Palmer
was polite, informative and accurate.
Mr Palmer correctly informed you that MPs have no influence over the
Local Government Ombudsman, and he suggested that a possible course
of action may be to complain further to the Local Government
Ombudsman and suggested you take legal advice.

The first thing to notice is that Mr Buck has responded to the second email but not the first and this reminded me more than anything else of the corrupt handling of complaints by some of the staff at the Town Hall.

I immediately requested a copy of any recording because Mr Buck’s response implied that I had been neither polite nor accurate over the phone to Mr Palmer. No record of the call was ever received is so you can take it that Mr Buck deliberately misrepresented what was said to over the phone and reminded me of the rigged meeting at the Town Hall in July, four years before.

There was also the possibility that Mr Palmer was a fiction. I had never met Mr Buck nor spoken to him and may actually have been speaking to him when I returned a the call to the MP’s Office on Westoe Rd, 13-Jan-20. Either way there are more giveaways in Mr Buck’s response which indicated that he was acting under instructions from someone, other than the MP for South Shields:-

1.  the change of subject from misuse of the Ombudsman’s Office by the Council to the suggestion/implication that it was I who had been trying to pursude an MP into giving misinformation to the LGO:- “Mr Palmer correctly informed you that MPs have no influence over the Local Government Ombudsman“;
2. “and he suggested that a possible course of action may be to complain further to the Local Government Ombudsman” – Mr Buck should have been sitting, unless that had been deleted,  on a copy of the letter sent to the MP in October 2016 outlining very clearly the shortcomings of the LGO.
3. “and suggested you (Mr Dawson) take legal advice” – Mr Palmer was by then sitting on a copy of the letter from Peter Dunn and Co which I had sent to Emma and copied to Mr Palmer on 13-Jan-20. The parting comment was more of a reference to the methods employed by STC to hide the truth behind UK Docks’ Shed which were renewed in April 2021 by Ms Abbott under the direction of the Leader of STC, Cllr Dixon.
4. to ensure that letter sent to the MP in October 2016 was known to the Legal and Monitoring Officers of STC, my email of 14-Jan-20 was copied to them as well as Mr Mr Palmer. What I did not know was that Mr Harding had been replaced by Mr J Rumney a year earlier. He would have been in place when Ms Abbott had been instructed by Ms Hoy to renew the policy of closing down all converstion about UK Docks instigated by the Council’s Corporate Lead, Mrs H Johnson at the behest of the then CEO, Mr M Swales in 2016.

I have never said or even implied that MPs can influence the Ombudsman but I had  complained about Council staff misleading the Ombudsman to the CEO. His response was to get his staff to deny any misconduct and stop any reposts by misapplying methods normally employed against unwarranted attacks against Council Officials.

To ask for an answer to the question “Why your staff should misrepresent the facts to the LGO is for you to determine. That they have misinformed the LGO should be admitted and corrected and that is what this letter is about.” is reasonable to the point of being bland and easily missed but it still need answering.

Instead he calls for me to be sectioned to stop me asking awkward questions and it is very obvious that Mr Palmer or Mr Buck would like to ‘Shoot the Messenger’ but that option is not available to them so they block emails to an MP from one of her constituents which is questionable but one of my emails does touch a sore spot. It is the one where I describe in some detail and why I was later to call, the review of the six years prior to 2020, Shed and Corruption.

For the first time in my life my correspondence was described as vexatious:-

Dear Mr Dawson,
Thank you for your recent emails. However, I must draw your attention
to your continued vexatious, slanderous and personal attacks on a 
valued member of staff working from the Office of Emma Lewell-Buck MP. 
Staff employed by Members of Parliament are protected under the 
Parliamentary Behaviour Code which is put in place to ensure a safe 
working environment and to safeguard them from bullying and harassment. 
It is now my belief that your continued emails denigrating Mr Palmer 
have breached that code.
Continued emails of this nature will be forwarded to the relevant 
Parliamentary Counsel for advice and direction.

Yours sincerely,
Simon Buck

It was of course, an empty threat:-

Mr Buck had ‘deleted’ the email of the 13th January 2020 and responded to the email of the 14th.

Six years before, the questions raised by the email of the 10th January 2014, to Planning Enquiries had been ignored by the Principal Planning Officer, Mr P Cunningham, and the email of the 14th was answered with what turned out to be a fraudulent misrepresentation.