Blessed Solicitor Bails Out

Hairy Davies, the Blessed Solicitor and Monitoring Officer has decided to call it a day, after a record breaking 28 months in the post.

The resignation came a month ago, but Blessed Chair Temper Turtle decided not to inform Blessed Members for security reasons, and because none of them would be interested anyway. “He’s only the solicitor” he said. “It’s not like he’s had much to do these last few years”.

Routinely forced to risk his professional reputation by ignoring the law and abusing the Authority’s own processes, Davies finally threw in the towel when asked to make new rules to clamp down on complaints. “I’ve had to re-define so many words that there’s now a Blessed Dictionary on every desk” he said. “‘Defamatory’ now means ‘anything that makes us cry’ and ‘unreasonable’ operates on a sliding scale depending on who’s doing the accusing.”

“The new policy is caused by changing public attitudes rather than our actions” said sacked Chair and so-called “Professor” Granny Burgess. “So we must do more to explain to stakeholders why they are always wrong.”

Her apprentice Temper Turtle agreed. “Unfortunately, the number of complaints has exploded, so we must find new and imaginative ways of dismissing them without investigation, rather than trying to understand why so many people are complaining about us” he said.

Blessed Benevolence

“As a responsible employer, we have a duty to protect our staff from criticism, no matter how justified it might be” commented Dr Pikeman. “Under the new rules, we can dismiss complaints out of hand rather than waste time covering up incompetence.”

“Intimidation of Blessed Officers has always been unacceptable,” he said “and now, under my new rules, we are redefining ‘intimidation’ to mean ‘disagreeing with an officer or pointing out that they are wrong.’ Better to dismiss the complaint than the officer - we have more than enough people leaving as it is.”

Shoot the messenger

“We must remain free to bully people and make up arbitrary policy on the hoof without the risk of being held accountable” Pikeman explained to a group of Blessed Sheep last week. “So we should always focus on the person doing the complaining, and where they got their evidence. Any complaint which refers to unofficial recordings or photographs taken in public places will automatically be dismissed.”

Other grounds for ignoring a complaint include mentioning it to your MP, DEFRA or the National Audit Office, speaking to the press, publishing your concerns on social media or telling your Mum.

It’s been confirmed that anyone using all three stages of the Authority’s complaints process will automatically be deemed a persistent complainant. “I get seriously bored with the repetitive inanity in these intemperate and highly objectionable complaints” grumbled Dick “Vice” Bilson. “All criticism is intolerable and the Authority will decline to engage with anyone who indulges in it.”