Time for Change: Campaign for an Independent Green Thanet MP and Ramsgate Mayor

Our politicians wouldn’t allow the removal of safety measures from Manston would they? Nor the civil servants? These are the people supposed to both represent and protect us aren’t they? Then how can it be that in 10 years of Manston as a normal commercial airport the requirement for mobile noise monitors has never been provided? The public have requested them. KIACC and the parish councils have requested them. Penny Button of TDC is even photographed with a hand-held mobile noise monitor checking noise levels in the local Tesco. Yet Brian White and our local councillors have never provided one mobile noise monitor in 10 years. They aren’t expensive. A few hundreds of pounds. A few thousand if you wanted a top of the range one, or a few of them to take noise readings. The reality is that mobile noise monitors would be deployed to the towns and the readings taken on a regular basis. As with Manston and other airports you could move them to the wrong positions or fudge the data for a whi...

How to Vote? An issue that affects us all with the new Town Council and County and European elections next week. This is my view: The new Town Council will be powerless unless it obtains funding from TDC or KCC: taking funding from TDC makes TDC even more ineffective and a burden on the taxpayer. With the Gang of Four sacked, TDC should be abolished with direct funding from KCC to the various Town Councils. County elections have produced little in the way of manifestos for improvement of the County for Thanet as a deprived area and with one of the UK’s worst councils: the mix of District and County responsibilities ensures Councillors only represent their small patch. The time is coming when a Conservative County Council in power since 1930 and Labour councillors around the relatively poorer coast is unsustainable and undemocratic. European elections: it couldn’t be more confusing could it? I don’t understand the electoral process for candidates: Europe’s powers have reached their limi...

Not just TDC for once. Deal Council: 2 councillors resign and auditors call for further 2 councillors and a civil servant to resign. No copy of the auditors sleaze report from the East Kent Audit partnership Report published as yet. Kent Police called in to investigate maladministration, fraud and theft. Shouldn’t TDC be subject to a sleaze report? The Audit Commission highlights the failures that are a national scandal yet TDC ignores the findings for its own reasons: with incompetence or corruption can be the only responses. Either incompetence or corruption means a change is required. Taxpayer funded time and money simply cannot be frittered away or deliberately bloated to safeguard careers built on incompetence and corruption. #ManstonGate: night flights and no night fines #ManstonGate: 106 breaches and no fines #ManstonGate: noise and air breaches and fines #ChinaGate: the £25k donation and 2x £12k donation to the political parties from the developer for Thanet’s largest-ever Plan...

Letter in the Thanet Gazette: With MP's snouts in the trough, when are our district and county councillors - and civil servants - going to publish all their salaries, expenses, allowances, pensions etc? They should be published each month in a Scores on the Doors by department. Ans with the County elections upon us which councilors are voting for night flights at Manston, ChinaGate, Thor, Sericol and Infratil pollution? Update: * I've received KCC councillor allowances/expenses from County Cllr Alan Poole: c.£1.6M out of a £2B budget: lots spent on car mileage but why no meetings in East Kent? * Audit Commission to open TDC's books and budgets in June for annual audit: FOI and EIR though enables any financial information to be provided at any time and within 20 days: I'd like a copy of the payroll for staffing and salary levels - home addresses etc can be blacked out as with MP's * EA want to meet me to "walk me through" their information on Thor: 3 months...

Policy #1: sack the Gang of Four. With Messrs Ezekiel and Latchford facing another leadership challenge the time is right to introduce a public vote of no confidence – and schedule another council leadership challenge. 2 more years of incompetent government is simply pointless for our lame duck MP’s and Councils: as with Westminster’s MP’s they should go and go now. Clearly our MP’s have indulged in the Westminster culture of using the ACA allowance as a top-up of salary. Only now under FOI are the last 4 years receipts about to be released. The previous 10 or 20 years worth of claims will never be released. Only now are all expenses claims required to have a receipt rather than those over £250.00. Only now are salaries of all staff required to be detailed and one of the last grey areas of hiring family as another secret top-up of salary be detailed. Derek Conway is the first high-profile MP who was unable to detail why a high salary was paid to a family member – and no work was ever p...

Very bizarre how all the councillors and civil servants at TDC and the local MP’s keep quiet on the removal of noise monitors by Infratil. Removed from Clarendon school and one of the tower blocks throughout 2005 and 2006 with the assistance of TDC on the authority of a Mr Gunn, of the Infratil Board of Directors. Clearly this raises issues over Infratil’s liability for noise damage and overall approach to safeguards at Manston. Rogue corporations are not unknown: Thor, and Union Carbide or Northern Rock or Enron or Parliament to name a few. But of more concern is TDC’s involvement: Brian White and Richard Samuel are both direct reports and - during this period even Chair of KIACC. And authorised the removal of monitoring at an internatrional airport that was expanding. No mention is made of providing noise and air monitoring for over 3 years. Nor the removals. The only noise data – subsequently in a bizarre situation from an Infratil employees garden – shows huge dangers as you’d ex...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8048626.stm Toxic waste dumping in Holland and Africa by a company called Trafigura subcontracting to a company called Tommy as detailed on Newsnight (see web article and video clips) following the Margate Apprentice debacle. The waste was shipped for USA to Tunisia who barred it from their country where the waste was part-processed (at sea!) by mixing with oil and other chemicals off Gibraltar and then shipped to Holland. The industrial waste was attempted to be disposed of in Holland but the smell and toxicity alerted the authorities who acted immediately to confirm how to dispose of it safely. This was ignored and the toxic waste shipped and dumped in the Ivory Coast, West Africa. Trucks then moved the waste at night to several dumps around the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan. As the death toll increased, the issue came to light. Thor mercury at Margate was investigated in 1988 and closed for poisoning the water table and several workers. ...

Tonight’s TV programme with Alan Sugar’s Apprentices regeneration Margate surely marks the final nail in the coffin for Margate. But what happens tomorrow after the show is aired? Imagine a town of 2M visitors plummeting to zero, burning down and then the final ignominy of Alan Sugar’s trainee Apprentices advising the council on what to do next. It’s hard to imagine a more desperate – and foolish – strategy from the Gang of Four. What will the Apprentices say tonight on prime time national television? How wonderful the seafront looks? How more visitors should come down to enjoy the fire sale of seafront properties? How clever the council are for inviting them down to comment in front of the nation on the decline of the world’s first seaside resort? What innovative strategies each of the Apprentices will provide in their day in Margate? Perhaps asking Jeremy Clarkson to review a Lada or Simon Cowell to review a pub singer would attract a better reaction. Car crash TV. And tomorrow? Afte...

Not just his words in February, before the mystery BA contract that never happened, as the sheep-councillors hustled through night flight changes - but now his words just last week in another emergency presentation to Thanet Council. Matt, Infratil's Manston Chief Exec, goes further and says in his report that sudden influxes of freight traffic is urgently required. Of course. But it's rarer than scotch mist. Hundreds of freight flights. 24/7. The question now is how many days and weeks do Infratil have left? And how will TDC and KCC not be left holding the baby in terms of clean-up of Infratil's mess? A bargain-basement land sale, dodgy planning permissions for passenger terminals but cargo sheds instead, dumped jumbo jets, 3 years of water pollution, air and noise pollution on the local populations at Ramsgate, Sandwich, Broadstairs, Herne Bay and Canterbury and repeated breaches of the S106? All opposite Ostend Cargo Airport and the world's largest passenger and frei...