Time for Change:
• Time for UNMDG2 reform: included in every public sector organisation and adapted. The Philippines does it already. Time to include Tobacco (5M deaths each year), road accidents (1M deaths each year) and a Global Space Programme. And before 2020 not 2030: too slow.
• Time for a Zero Pollution Law. Vietnam does it. Bury the electricity pylons. And a specialist Environment Court. India does it.
• Time for a ban on tobacco. 50 years after it was proven to kill we are still allowing cigarettes to be sold with 100,000 UK deaths every year. Plain packaging required. A ban on new retail outlets selling tobacco. Permits for the remaining outlets. A ban on under 25’s smoking and a complete ban before 2020. Tighter counterfeit cigarette controls. Aid for Malawi to divest tobacco agriculture.
• Time for a UN Parliament elections in 2015: this missing layer of democracy has been approved by the UN and EU but nothing has happened. The usual delay of Big Bureaucracy protecting their own interests.
• Time for a Global Vote at 16. Why should Scotland or Brazil or Austria already vote at 16 but not UK or USA or Japan? And in a world of the overwhelmingly young, the ageing populations exercise disproportionate rule.
• Time for the vote in Brunei and Dubai. Why are these the last two nations in the world to refuse any of their citizens the vote? And funded by the UK with guns and Gurkhas? Time for Amnesty reform: where are the lists of political prisoners or gay and disabled abuses in the 21st century?
• Time for a minimum 40% women equality law for business and parliament. Norway has done it already. In UK 50% of the workforce is women yet 90% of directors are men and only 20% of women are in parliament. Time for Saudi women reforms and UN Women.
* Time for a ban on fatty foods especially transfats and full-fat soft drinks. With horrifying levels of obesity and diabetes our food is killing us. The USA has done it already.
Corrupt Kent falls. Britain stumbles.
Carter and the Toxic Three of Carter, King and Wild must go. Allowing TDC corruption and Kent pollution. Latchford and Twyman remain silent on KIACC.
Sandys resigns two years early and Gale will go too.
Bayford and Hart to go for FerryGate and ChinaGate and Pleasurama and Manston and Thor.
Arrest the Infratil Directors: Bogoievskki, Baker and Fitzgerald and Clarke for pollution.
Arrest McGonigal and Moores at TDC for the 0% salary fraud and missing monitors.
They have polluted us. They have stolen from us. They have lied to us. They have failed us.
They must go. We deserve better.
Time for Change.
Thursday, 12 December 2013
Friday, 6 December 2013
Kent corruption. Sandys resigns. Carter must go.
A broken county.
Sandys resigns as MP two years early(!).
Another failed parachute candidate.
Only silence for the last 3 years on the contamination and corruption from Infratil and KCC and TDC.
And now the disgusting spectacle of Carter welcoming Gloag knowing the dangers of the airport.
The Toxic Three must go. Carter, King and Wild.
Hart and Macgonigal and Moores must go.
We need a clearout.
No votes for poisoning you own citizens.
Gale must be stripped of his pensioned-off-knighthood for 30 years of failure.
Silence on the missing monitors and 0% salary fraud.
Time for a Police investigation and corporate manslaughter charges for Infratil and KCC and TDC.
We pay them and they pollute us.
Corrupt councils rotten all the way down.
A broken county.
Time for Change.
Time for a tax strike.
Time for a ballot boycott.
No tax: short pay and wrong pay and delay.
No votes: cancel your voter registration and reduce the turnout.
Time for arrests.
Time for Change
Sunday, 10 November 2013
We will not remember them.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will forget them.
In fact let’s not pretend.
We already have forgotten them in Kent.
The sacrifices of our troops and citizens in WW1 and WW2 has been forgotten already.
Sure on Remembrance Sunday there’s a few warms words and faded flowers.
But the millions killed have been forgotten.
D-Day last year was forgotten in Kent. Not one piece of activity in East Kent.
And in previous years, the disgusting spectacle of the veterans having to scurry around to obtain funding from KCC, for what would most likely be their last visits to Normandy to see their pals graves.
Or the Ramsgate British Legion veterans besieged by skateboarders and vandals and tuppeny food vouchers requiring Mayor Green and Kent Police to step in.
Or the feeble preparations for the WW1 Centenary next year.
There are no preparations – yet Flanders and Mons are remembering the British dead already – a year in advance.
And only the War Graves Commission, what Rudyard Kipling described as “better than the work of the pharoahs”, tend the monuments and graves from Kohima to Kwai across Asia.
A contrast to the shame of the Long Tanh Australian memorial in ruins or Bien Hoa Cemetery or the failure to recognise Operation Masterdom of UK troops in Vietnam 1945.
And in Vietnam the millions of spotless graves from Ben Tre to Qui Nhon, so many dead from the French and American War that they are buried by village in the cemetery and dedicated women’s cemeteries.
And if the appalling war crime of the Royal Marines in Afghanistan – not just the murder but the video clips as war trophies passed around -becomes nothing next to the American massacres of My Lai or even the sickening routine of 400 villagers executed by the French in My Tho.
Then the failures of Bloody Sunday and Deepcut Barracks will be forgotten or whitewshed too.
And still in Syria we have the horrific plume of banned chemical weapons and banned napalm and phosphorous burns on children even today.
But the Korean veterans have been forgotten in this year of remembrance for the 60th anniversary before they too fade away.
Yet the Koreans remember our troops with over 1,000 dead in securing freedom for their nation.
And we forget.
And worse.
We ignore the wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan with horrific injuries and the thousands of troops that end up in prison.
Canada, always first to answer the call, from the military hospitals in Ramsgate and bloodshed of Vimy Ridge onwards, has a huge Veterans Department that puts us to shame – even in the Canadian Embassy in UK.
And Kent as likely cannot even be bothered to secure the memorial paving stones for our 10 Victoria Cross veterans of WW1.
And little done for the Channel Dash suicide-by-air pilots against the German warships and Luftwaffe.
And simply ignoring the Little Ships of Dunkirk in Ramsgate.
And nothing done in Dover for the White Cliffs and Battle of Britain and hundreds of Polish and Czech and Canadian and American Spitfire pilots.
A grubby little county, the shame of England, prepared to deny the memory of the veterans that secured our liberty.
What would the veterans in the trenches of Flanders or the beaches of Normandy or the jungles of Burma make of Kent now?
They’d likely ignore the failure to remember them.
The veterans of Burma and Korea are used to being forgotten.
They would likely just get on with it.
But the democracy they gave their lives for would certainly concern them.
Imagine fighting and dying in trench for corruption and deceit on the scale of Infratil and Thor. Or the 0% fraud or waste of EKO. By your own Kent councils?
Imagine being willing to be buried in the desert far from home, for your children to have pollution on the scale of the Medway and Stour or asbestos in schools.
Or your grandchildren funding stagnant organisations like the Environment Agency or TDC or Southern Water, featherbedding their salaries with your money for failure.
Or lawyer trash like Glick QC and Hollingworth and their clerks and solicitors using your courts as a cashpoint – and it being accepted as routine by the LSB and BSB regulatory bodies.
Imagine sitting in a POW camp for years but not having the vote at 16 for your children – yet Scotland has and Brazil and Austria and even the USA in local elections already.
Imagine not having equality laws like 40% of women in Parliament or business Boards – as they have in Norway a country we helped liberate, and they do not forget.
Or even fripperies like free internet access in Finland or essentials like free tablet PC’s for children in Thailand, again a nation we helped liberate and our Allies and they do not forget.
Or even a ban on payday loans and 10% interest rate cap in a Germany we helped liberate.
And never mind 57M children still not in school – a huge number but not impossible to resolve with the UNMDG2.
Or 91% of malaria victims African children under the age of 5 – for want of a $3 malaria net. Or TB epidemics blazing in London and Romania for want of a few pennies on injections.
And we cannot even provide the right boots and bullets yet fund white elephants like the new NATO Headquarters or delay removing troops from Germany when we have no enemies except dictators like Gadaffi or in Saudi banning the vote and even women drivers.
Or we support Brunei and Dubai former UK colonies refusing the vote to everyone - or Bahrain another UK former colony buying enough Korean tear gas to give each of their citizens a cannister for demonstrating for the freedoms we fought for.
And Britain still refusing to provide FOI on Police bullets and guns or even something as basic as costs and staffing for all civil service departments after 7 years of the FOI laws.
A democracy run by the civil service for the civil service – fought for and funded by you.
Or the Great British Flu Vaccine Farce that runs out in the first week of winter allowing us to stack the corpses of our pensioners higher than most battle defeats.
Imagine being torpedoed by a UBoat in a Merchant Navy convoy in the Atlantic or Pacific - yet still having the failure of tsunami warning systems in East Asia with yet another typhoon causing mayhem in Philippines and previously in Burma, Thailand and Indonesia and Japan.
All nations who stood with us and we helped liberate.
And yet we cannot work with our allies to forward position supplies or helicopters or aircraft carriers for aid.
And yet spend billions on a new aircraft carrier that can only fly 7 jets or 8 helicopters - in 7 years time. Maybe.
Such waste as the generals bicker over the spoils and bloat of the MOD yet cannot provide boots or bullets or uniforms in the type of unified military the Canadians already have.
And the Royal Navy sailing around on pina colada tours when they could be building schools or removing the Pacific Plastic Patch.
Or the RAF watching its 400 helicopters and 200 jets rust when the CAA allows banned EU aircraft and gunrunners and drug smugglers into Ostend and Manston.
Or Margate citizen Joshua French held on Death Row in Congo and Tappin only just released from Death Row Texas. How many more UK citizens lost in foreign prisons or stranded abroad in countries we helped liberate?
The veterans would say nothing. They would continue. They would know things go wrong.
I do not think though they would expect their sacrifice to be in vain.
But we have forgotten them.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning we have forgotten them in Kent.
In fact let’s not pretend.
We already have forgotten them in Kent.
The sacrifices of our troops and citizens in WW1 and WW2 has been forgotten already.
Sure on Remembrance Sunday there’s a few warms words and faded flowers.
But the millions killed have been forgotten.
D-Day last year was forgotten in Kent. Not one piece of activity in East Kent.
And in previous years, the disgusting spectacle of the veterans having to scurry around to obtain funding from KCC, for what would most likely be their last visits to Normandy to see their pals graves.
Or the Ramsgate British Legion veterans besieged by skateboarders and vandals and tuppeny food vouchers requiring Mayor Green and Kent Police to step in.
Or the feeble preparations for the WW1 Centenary next year.
There are no preparations – yet Flanders and Mons are remembering the British dead already – a year in advance.
And only the War Graves Commission, what Rudyard Kipling described as “better than the work of the pharoahs”, tend the monuments and graves from Kohima to Kwai across Asia.
A contrast to the shame of the Long Tanh Australian memorial in ruins or Bien Hoa Cemetery or the failure to recognise Operation Masterdom of UK troops in Vietnam 1945.
And in Vietnam the millions of spotless graves from Ben Tre to Qui Nhon, so many dead from the French and American War that they are buried by village in the cemetery and dedicated women’s cemeteries.
And if the appalling war crime of the Royal Marines in Afghanistan – not just the murder but the video clips as war trophies passed around -becomes nothing next to the American massacres of My Lai or even the sickening routine of 400 villagers executed by the French in My Tho.
Then the failures of Bloody Sunday and Deepcut Barracks will be forgotten or whitewshed too.
And still in Syria we have the horrific plume of banned chemical weapons and banned napalm and phosphorous burns on children even today.
But the Korean veterans have been forgotten in this year of remembrance for the 60th anniversary before they too fade away.
Yet the Koreans remember our troops with over 1,000 dead in securing freedom for their nation.
And we forget.
And worse.
We ignore the wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan with horrific injuries and the thousands of troops that end up in prison.
Canada, always first to answer the call, from the military hospitals in Ramsgate and bloodshed of Vimy Ridge onwards, has a huge Veterans Department that puts us to shame – even in the Canadian Embassy in UK.
And Kent as likely cannot even be bothered to secure the memorial paving stones for our 10 Victoria Cross veterans of WW1.
And little done for the Channel Dash suicide-by-air pilots against the German warships and Luftwaffe.
And simply ignoring the Little Ships of Dunkirk in Ramsgate.
And nothing done in Dover for the White Cliffs and Battle of Britain and hundreds of Polish and Czech and Canadian and American Spitfire pilots.
A grubby little county, the shame of England, prepared to deny the memory of the veterans that secured our liberty.
What would the veterans in the trenches of Flanders or the beaches of Normandy or the jungles of Burma make of Kent now?
They’d likely ignore the failure to remember them.
The veterans of Burma and Korea are used to being forgotten.
They would likely just get on with it.
But the democracy they gave their lives for would certainly concern them.
Imagine fighting and dying in trench for corruption and deceit on the scale of Infratil and Thor. Or the 0% fraud or waste of EKO. By your own Kent councils?
Imagine being willing to be buried in the desert far from home, for your children to have pollution on the scale of the Medway and Stour or asbestos in schools.
Or your grandchildren funding stagnant organisations like the Environment Agency or TDC or Southern Water, featherbedding their salaries with your money for failure.
Or lawyer trash like Glick QC and Hollingworth and their clerks and solicitors using your courts as a cashpoint – and it being accepted as routine by the LSB and BSB regulatory bodies.
Imagine sitting in a POW camp for years but not having the vote at 16 for your children – yet Scotland has and Brazil and Austria and even the USA in local elections already.
Imagine not having equality laws like 40% of women in Parliament or business Boards – as they have in Norway a country we helped liberate, and they do not forget.
Or even fripperies like free internet access in Finland or essentials like free tablet PC’s for children in Thailand, again a nation we helped liberate and our Allies and they do not forget.
Or even a ban on payday loans and 10% interest rate cap in a Germany we helped liberate.
And never mind 57M children still not in school – a huge number but not impossible to resolve with the UNMDG2.
Or 91% of malaria victims African children under the age of 5 – for want of a $3 malaria net. Or TB epidemics blazing in London and Romania for want of a few pennies on injections.
And we cannot even provide the right boots and bullets yet fund white elephants like the new NATO Headquarters or delay removing troops from Germany when we have no enemies except dictators like Gadaffi or in Saudi banning the vote and even women drivers.
Or we support Brunei and Dubai former UK colonies refusing the vote to everyone - or Bahrain another UK former colony buying enough Korean tear gas to give each of their citizens a cannister for demonstrating for the freedoms we fought for.
And Britain still refusing to provide FOI on Police bullets and guns or even something as basic as costs and staffing for all civil service departments after 7 years of the FOI laws.
A democracy run by the civil service for the civil service – fought for and funded by you.
Or the Great British Flu Vaccine Farce that runs out in the first week of winter allowing us to stack the corpses of our pensioners higher than most battle defeats.
Imagine being torpedoed by a UBoat in a Merchant Navy convoy in the Atlantic or Pacific - yet still having the failure of tsunami warning systems in East Asia with yet another typhoon causing mayhem in Philippines and previously in Burma, Thailand and Indonesia and Japan.
All nations who stood with us and we helped liberate.
And yet we cannot work with our allies to forward position supplies or helicopters or aircraft carriers for aid.
And yet spend billions on a new aircraft carrier that can only fly 7 jets or 8 helicopters - in 7 years time. Maybe.
Such waste as the generals bicker over the spoils and bloat of the MOD yet cannot provide boots or bullets or uniforms in the type of unified military the Canadians already have.
And the Royal Navy sailing around on pina colada tours when they could be building schools or removing the Pacific Plastic Patch.
Or the RAF watching its 400 helicopters and 200 jets rust when the CAA allows banned EU aircraft and gunrunners and drug smugglers into Ostend and Manston.
Or Margate citizen Joshua French held on Death Row in Congo and Tappin only just released from Death Row Texas. How many more UK citizens lost in foreign prisons or stranded abroad in countries we helped liberate?
The veterans would say nothing. They would continue. They would know things go wrong.
I do not think though they would expect their sacrifice to be in vain.
But we have forgotten them.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning we have forgotten them in Kent.
Monday, 28 October 2013
Manston One Dollar. Free Chemo Bus.
Well actually both Manston and Prestwick airports sold for a quid.
Good.
The sooner Infratil leave Europe and the airports close the better.
The Kiwi Killers have breached every safety regulation repeatedly and seen the closure of all their European airports and now the last UK airports.
No doubt the last sites at Wellington and Rotorua will go too.
They did it here. They will do it there.
Ann Gloag of Stagecoach’s shell company is Infratil scurrying away.
Messrs Bogoieveski and Baker have done nothing more than tweak their financials at the last minute as extradition papers and corporate manslaughter charges edge nearer.
No doubt Fitzgerald and Clarke will be put in the frame and Buchanan – and rightly so.
Removing monitors, faking pollution reports, allowing banned-from-Europe aircraft and illegal flights such as sanction-busting Iran Air or gunrunners such as MK Airlines is horrifying.
Frontline Kent in the 21st century with gunrunners, drug smugglers and pollution and fake monitoring. For years. Even now.
Even now.
And highlights the failure of KCC and TDC in helping Infratil – even Gale and Sandys.
Delay as long as they can – the civil servants think they’ll keep their salaries and pensions.
And the toothless Environment Agency and CAA shuffling their paperclips rather than taking action.
For this we pay them and they poison us.
A new Chemo Unit at Margate and lots of room on the Chemo Bus.
No charge. Form a queue.
Not even one dollar.
But you've years to pay yet.
Time for Change
Bring Bogoievski and Baker Back. Bring Fitzgerald and Clarke Back. Close Manston.
Remove Infratil and Infratil from the NZ Stock Exchange and Wellington and Rotorua.
A scum company run by scum. A stain on the South Seas. And funded with your tax and your health and your children and grandchildren.
Time for Change.
Sad to see Chief Learmonth of Kent Police standing down after 40 years Police service.
Every Kent citizen must be keen to ensure we have the same high calibre of Chief after January.
I will place Kent Police at the No1 spot in my January review of the public sector - for reforms such as the 3 Police Districts, HGV, Drug Den Raid Every Day, Missing Persons, Most Wanted and monitoring KCC's Jimmy Savile Care Homes - just ahead ahead of the Ambulances and Fire Brigade with excellent smoke alarms, tower block and tobacco reforms.
And further reforms needed on machetes/Samurai swords, Learmonth's lear jet for emergency assistance, Margate's Joshua French on Death Row Congo, badge numbers, 43 Force reforms, Exchange programmes, vaccinations and language learning and guns/ammo FOI.
And every day a drug den raid.
Needless to say the Coastguard and TDC are as abysmal as ever.
The former should be merged with the coastal Fire Brigades and save on pretty uniforms and calling out the RNLI to their work for them. And TDC 30% cuts, tax rises pegged top inflation and salary reductions, pension cancellations and jail for MacGonigal.
More dismal tarmac bureaucracy from KCC with more housing for Manston Green and the laughable plans for Discovery Park shops and houses and hotel in some kind of Cement New Town on the rates.
Winter is here and the Flu Vaccine runs out. More dead pensioners just because it's cold. TB epidemics raging across Romania and Vietnam and London the TB capital of Europe. And the largest pharma site has not only lost most of Pfizer but is supposedly nothing more than a potential housing estate.
Laughable.
Except with the highest youth unemployment ever in Kent and horrifying Third World health statistics, Future Kent jobs are nothing more than shovelling tax-tarmac.
The same incompetence with the Manston Parkway and Westwood Cross that have destroyed the area.
The closure of the Port and FerryGate scandal and EKO waste.
Rampant civil service corruption with the 0% salary fraud.
Derelict Pleasurama and a closed swimming pool for a £5M(!) garage for a fire engine.
And still no full FOI after 7 years: salaries, staffing by dept, pensions, cars, expenses, offices etc.
Time for Change.
An aside on Vietnam – the shame of the Long Tan Australian war memorial in tatters for the sake of a few hundred dollars. Something the UK War Graves Commission would never allow from the thousands of graves from Kohima to Rangoon and Kwai. All spotless. Appalling failure at Long Tan for barely 19 graves. And more to be done with Operation Masterdom and the Bien Hoa cemetery.
And the WW1 commemorations next July of the Canadian contribution to Ramsgate and Flanders. First to answer the call. First to fall. And nothing done for the main anniversary.
The schools and colleges and universities across Kent are simply missing out on the ASEAN opportunities of language learning, translations and exchanges, sports programmes for the Asian Games 2019, digital skills, retail and design. The jobs of the future adrift while Kent sickens and rots and dies.
Thursday, 10 October 2013
Time for Vietnam
A busy few weeks for me around the excellent UK trade mission to Vietnam. I’m also close to opening the first Sincerity offices too.
Also interesting meetings on the next Surin Schools.
Why Vietnam? 90M people and an incredible culture. And after the China debacle of the UK failing to develop the greatest economic growth ever, now an increasing focus for the UK on ASEAN prior to the AEC launch in 2015 and especially Vietnam with the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations activity this year now concluded, and the preparation underway for the key Vietnam anniversaries in 2015, of April 1975 and September 1945.
And unfortunately one of the less positive and almost unknown aspects of the UK policy of the time with Operation Masterdom in 1945 when British troops landed to work with the Japanese troops(!) to pave the way for the reinstatement of the French colonial power despite the Vietnamese declaring independence (even citing the US Declaration of independence).
And so began almost 40 years of death and destruction involving France, America, Cambodia and China.
Not Britain’s finest hour although when you’re in London you’ll see the links to Ho Cho Minh living and working there eg the blue plaque on Regent St.
But that was then.
The sad death of General Giap this week is the last main link to that time – Vietnam is a modern nation facing at least a rapid 5% growth and a generation that has no recollection of the horrors of the past, and the potential for greater growth from the current APEC Summit.
And hopefully in the Age of Climate Change avoiding the mistakes of China and the West with excessive tarmac and pollution, and focusing on helath and education.
Despite massive smoking rates, appalling road traffic accidents, the sabre-rattling of the Spratlys and the UK trafficking/drug incidents highlighted in recent months Vietnam’s problems are few in comparison than previous decades.
Corruption and pollution are low compared to Infratil and Thor in Kent despite incidents such as Nicotex or Thanh Tanh commune, with a vibrant and comparatively open media, and a greater emphasis in the UNMDG2 from the UN sessions.
While the potential for Vietnamese tourism with only 6M visitors compared to 20M for Thailand or Malaysia, the ASEAN integration and expanded UK trade links and public sector exchange visits, and activity in the UK are keystones of the future.
Kent’s links with the Vietnam Trade Minister, the Pfizer/Discovery Park strategic vaccine facility for TB and flu (you can tell it’s Autumn in Britain because the leaves change and the flu vaccine runs out) and Kent tourism and language courses have massive potential for the future. As do the film studio and festival links.
The time is now for Vietnam. Whether Kent or Britain can grasp that fact or follow through on it is another matter.
Time for Change
Also interesting meetings on the next Surin Schools.
Why Vietnam? 90M people and an incredible culture. And after the China debacle of the UK failing to develop the greatest economic growth ever, now an increasing focus for the UK on ASEAN prior to the AEC launch in 2015 and especially Vietnam with the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations activity this year now concluded, and the preparation underway for the key Vietnam anniversaries in 2015, of April 1975 and September 1945.
And unfortunately one of the less positive and almost unknown aspects of the UK policy of the time with Operation Masterdom in 1945 when British troops landed to work with the Japanese troops(!) to pave the way for the reinstatement of the French colonial power despite the Vietnamese declaring independence (even citing the US Declaration of independence).
And so began almost 40 years of death and destruction involving France, America, Cambodia and China.
Not Britain’s finest hour although when you’re in London you’ll see the links to Ho Cho Minh living and working there eg the blue plaque on Regent St.
But that was then.
The sad death of General Giap this week is the last main link to that time – Vietnam is a modern nation facing at least a rapid 5% growth and a generation that has no recollection of the horrors of the past, and the potential for greater growth from the current APEC Summit.
And hopefully in the Age of Climate Change avoiding the mistakes of China and the West with excessive tarmac and pollution, and focusing on helath and education.
Despite massive smoking rates, appalling road traffic accidents, the sabre-rattling of the Spratlys and the UK trafficking/drug incidents highlighted in recent months Vietnam’s problems are few in comparison than previous decades.
Corruption and pollution are low compared to Infratil and Thor in Kent despite incidents such as Nicotex or Thanh Tanh commune, with a vibrant and comparatively open media, and a greater emphasis in the UNMDG2 from the UN sessions.
While the potential for Vietnamese tourism with only 6M visitors compared to 20M for Thailand or Malaysia, the ASEAN integration and expanded UK trade links and public sector exchange visits, and activity in the UK are keystones of the future.
Kent’s links with the Vietnam Trade Minister, the Pfizer/Discovery Park strategic vaccine facility for TB and flu (you can tell it’s Autumn in Britain because the leaves change and the flu vaccine runs out) and Kent tourism and language courses have massive potential for the future. As do the film studio and festival links.
The time is now for Vietnam. Whether Kent or Britain can grasp that fact or follow through on it is another matter.
Time for Change
Monday, 16 September 2013
Corrupt Kent and UKIP dictators
Like many an old soldier Colonel Latchford of UKIP is mistakenly fighting the last war given his letter in the Gazette a week ago.
Syria now is not Iraq in 2003: they definitely do have chemical weapons and have used them several times.
Saddam gassed many of his own citizens in 1988 and got away with it. And then invaded Kuwait two years later and was let off the hook and ran rings around the weapons inspectors and no fly zones until he was finally ousted in 2003.
Several tons of chemical weapons have been revealed since then by the existing Iraqi government, and Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden were then largely confined to Afghanistan.
A monster like Assad is now desperate to hand over his chemical weapons before a US-French-Arab missile strike, as with Kosovo or Libya or Yemen, wrecks his palaces and barracks and tanks and jets and warships. Such bombing attacks would undoubtedly aid the rebel alliance, we are already funding and arming, in toppling him. Or at best Assad could hope for an ICC war crimes trial in The Hague and the cell next to the Rwandans and Yugoslavs and Kenyans cluttering that place up.
Syria is already destroyed. The worst option would be further chemical attacks or the kind of limbo-land of Saddam's Iraq between 1990 and 2003 of further destruction.
While both the French intervention in Mali and the UN attack role in The Congo show both the necessity and possible success of intervention especially R2P.
Maybe Britain's generals could have done better in Basra and Helmand. Maybe not, with the usual MOD errors in equipment.
Maybe sat in their barracks surrounded by piles of expensive kit they daredn't use - or lose - is the future of our military?
To suggest intervention is always a failure or ineffective is simply not true. We have already have a disaster in Syria.
Shame on the British government and military for not being able to end his vicious and repulsive regime already as one of the last dictators alongside Mugabe, AlBashir, Nazarbayev, Obiang or Lukashenko - and far sooner than 100,000 casualties and millions of refugees requiring further UK aid.
No doubt the dictator's secret prisons and torture chambers will reveal more British armaments and handcuffs and sniper rifles as usual - this year we were even exporting chemical components for sarin to Assad. And next year's WW1 anniversary is the perfect time to celebrate confining chemical weapons along with napalm and landmines to the history books.
Why are we supporting Egypt with their chemical weapons stockpiles or Angola or Sudan?
While for Colonel Latchford to speak out on poisoning his own citizens when the removal of the Manston monitors by Infratil and TDC remains unexplained, and with 4x EU safety levels of air pollution endangering the Thanet public, is a disgrace.
When will he speak up on that?
Time for arrests.
Time for corporate manslaughter charges.
Time for misuse of public office and funds charges.
Time for jail sentences at Infratil and TDC.
Time for Change.
Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Kent corruption and yet more disaster on the rates.
What a disastrous Summer for Kent.
Yes the weather hasn’t been wonderful.
But that aside we’re seeing the faster spiral downwards now of years of
neglect and incompetence.
The shambles of the secretive FerryGate decisions and Port
closure.
Southern Water with more sewage leaks and permanently
blocked drains – an Environment Agency court case is the right direction bu t a
fine of £300k on £300M profits is laughable. And the funds will not be spent in
Kent.
More silence on Thor and Infratil and Cargolux/KLM deciding
that they will fly when and where they like and to heck with the pollution. Jail is best for Buchanan and Pedro and extradition for Bogoievski and Baker.
And the grubby corruption scoundrels of Moores and the 0%
salary fraud with Samuel and White – and McGonigal and Button and Berry and
Sproates silent on the missing monitors and fines.
And Latchford returning form the dead as an ex-Deputy
Leader to UKIP Leader but remaining equally tight-lipped on why monitors were
removed back in 2006.
And pollution levels 4x the EU safety levels.
And even now the illegal overflights and flights onto the
aquifer under the runway continue.
Deliberately endangering the public – for what? A few fines?
Party glory? Civil service pensions?
A disgusting, grubby little council of corrupt scoundrels.
A few miscellaneous items briefly:
1. 1. The global vote at 16 edges nearer (although in
Jersey, Austria and Brazil it’s happened) with Scotland in 2014 for the
referendum and Labour pledging the 16 vote before 2020. I must admit I thought
the Tories had announced it as policy from 2015 but maybe not. But positive anyway
given an ageing population.
2.
Labour also planning to ban zero hours
contracts, a cap on payday loans (but not all interest as in Germany or Eire)
and flat train fares.
3.
T2. The 400th anniversary of Japan-UK
relations www.400japan.com this year being fairly low-key but ramping up with
the Will Adams Festival and now the 2020 Olympics for Tokyo. More is required
in East Kent with Japanese links such as Fujifilm, Hitachi trains and the
various language schools.
4.
Worth mentioning 2 more universities in the
global top 200 – a superb achievement for a nation of 60M with the top 20 split
almost evenly between UK and USA. I believe more is required from Kent’s 4 –
excellent - universities with the rankings and Asian languages. Disaster for UK education when foreign
languages were removed as compulsory 10 years ago: the EU specifies 2 European
languages as ideal and I think at least 1 Asian language given the rise of East
Asia.
3. WW1 anniversary next year: little done in London
or Kent so opportunities for East Kent with Richboro Port, the White Cliffs of
Dover and Folkestone artworks – we should celebrate our Canadian friends in
Ramsgate and lesser-known stories such
as air bombing and Vimy Ridge and Passchendale. And Thailand’s contribution of
course.
6. 4. Portas Towns: the parliamentary review confirms
it as a bit of a disaster. Little of use to Margate.
7. 5. Dreamland: the right direction. Where are the
missing rides though?
8.
Pleasurama: the right direction. Clear and tidy
the site before winter.
9. 6. Death Row Congo: one death from malaria but
Margate’s Joshua French still alive. No doubt to the Foreign Office are doing
nothing. Stranded without money or passport? Get knotted. Injured in hospital?
Get knotted. In prison? Get knotted. Diplomacy on the rates at its best.
1 7. Drugs dens: excellent KP raids: as Mayor I will
ensure there is a drugs den raid every day and publish the haul each month along
with Most Wanted, Prison escapees and guns and knives.
E 8. EKFOS: the right direction with a presentation on
the activity. The specifics of film aside we’ve seen the failure of relevance
on Pfizer or tarmac or Big Industry White elephants like Infratil or TEF – how much
have we paid them? For nothing. Good businesses like Piper Windows or Thanet Press
go under with 100 jobs lost and not so much as a phone call from the councils for
support.
9. Fire Station/Newington Swimming Pool: the new
pool is terrific. And we need the Newington Pool refurbed and reopened. And
Poole’s Pool. Tourist towns need swimming pools. A £5M fire station is
ludicrous.
10. Almost 15 children start smoking every day in
East Kent- and KCC invest in tobacco, and plain packaging has been delayed and
stores still stock cigarettes for Britain’s biggest killer: 100k dead from
tobacco and only 3k from road accidents each year.
.
11. DSEI the huge arms fair starts in London this
week – guns for the dictator of your choice – and KCC funds BAE the arms
manufacturer, and UK providing sarin chemicals to Assad and sniper rifles to
Egypt with UK export credits and guns to the Saudi National Guard through the
mysterious GPT Projects part of EADS. When the dictator’s torture chambers are
opened there will be British gun and ammunition and handcuffs and leg irons and
pliers as usual.
12. Lough Erne and the G8 Declaration positive with disclosure
of tax havens required and asset tracing/tax systems for Third World countries
and the large corporations. The days of Cayman Islands bank accounts and
tuppence tax on billions of pounds profit are ending.
13.
TDC recycling: a step in the right direction,
but Canterbury already recycle plastic and plastic bottles and have done for
years. Sleepy old lazy old TDC.
And what have Sandys and Gale been doing over the Summer as
Thanet slides under the waves?
Nothing.
And we wonder why there are fewer Party members or voters
than ever. And yet they seek more Party funding from the State.
A corrupt and incompetent council and our MP’s stay silent.
Jail is required for Infratil and Southern Water and the
Environment Agency and TDC and KCC for these massive scandals.
Ramsgate 5th worst seaside town and Margate 7th
worst and Hastings 9th worst: the systemic failure of the South East.
Time for Change.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Time for Electoral Reform
With the UK economy struggling, much of Europe too and few answers from the politicians then electoral reform becomes more important. If the system is failing to provide answers then the system needs changing.
Or at least the pace of reform improved.
There are simple measures already underway:
* UK votes at 16 - following the Scottish referendum decision to allow 16 year old to vote in 2014. time for a global vote at 16 with Brazil and Austria leading the way already.
* World Parliament: a democratic assembly for the UN. Mired in delay with the EU and the UN itself agreeing that democracy is required amongst the unelected ministers and bureaucrat of the UN. Time for national elections to be held.
* 30% minimum election turnout or elections rerun. With the national party's' membership less than 1% and lower than the RSPB, we have representative democracy that's unrepresentative. And State funding of parties on the quiet. Rerunning elections would require better policies.
* Manifesto's published 6 months before elections and compulsory FOI. The charade of voting for a manifesto produced a fortnight before an election and no FOI at all. What are we voting for? As with UKIP we just don't know. Worryingly, neither do they. Elected in order to be elected in order to do nothing.
* Recall of MP's and Referenda and hereditary Lords: still not resolved in an Empty Parliament.
* Political exams: exams to raise the calibre of candidates. A UK first.
* IMF/World Bank/UNDP merger and reform: duplication and unelected - and create Treasury powers to fund UNMDG
* UNMDG1 andUNMDG2 as national UK policy: a failing. Philippines does it.
* 30% minimum gender quotas for Parliament and business: less than 20% of women in parliament and 2% of FTSE Boards.
* A global currency: the IMF's SDR's already provide the mechanism along with improved EU-focused credit ratings agencies to balance and scrutinise the dollar and yuan. Just look at the LIBOR failings for more impartial currency polices.
* 10% interest rate cap: as in Germany. The obscenity of 30%-plus credit card rates and even worse the 4,000% payday loans. If the German economy can thrive with cheap credit then so should the UK.
* Public Health improvements with UK mortality rates upto double the average with simple reforms: plain cigarette packaging delayed but introduced in Australia and Eire and unit pricing on strong alcohol and regular knife and gun amnesty's. And pharma funding for cancer vaccines eg P53 and DNA sampling and Third World vaccines.
* An education dividend: free tablet PC for schoolkids. they do it in Thailand. 3D printing and Raspberry Pc's for schools - boosting the UK economy too.
* Asian exports for UK: the greatest economic change in history through China and South East Asia and the UK needs to capitalise on it.
* EU signatories to the new Arms Trade Treaty and arms exports ban - the taxpayer subsidising arms bloat and repression form Bahrain to Brunei.
While here in Kent we have the shoddy farce of Pleasurama and Manston-Infratil criminals and EKO and ChinaGate and 0% public sector frauds and corruption. And the Medway and Stour some of the UK's worst polluted rivers, the Dartford Crossing tarmac splurge on the rates, and water companies racking up dividends for pollution.
Kent in freefall in Year Zero, Ground Zero.
Time for reform.
Failed.Failed. Failed.
Time for Change.
Or at least the pace of reform improved.
There are simple measures already underway:
* UK votes at 16 - following the Scottish referendum decision to allow 16 year old to vote in 2014. time for a global vote at 16 with Brazil and Austria leading the way already.
* World Parliament: a democratic assembly for the UN. Mired in delay with the EU and the UN itself agreeing that democracy is required amongst the unelected ministers and bureaucrat of the UN. Time for national elections to be held.
* 30% minimum election turnout or elections rerun. With the national party's' membership less than 1% and lower than the RSPB, we have representative democracy that's unrepresentative. And State funding of parties on the quiet. Rerunning elections would require better policies.
* Manifesto's published 6 months before elections and compulsory FOI. The charade of voting for a manifesto produced a fortnight before an election and no FOI at all. What are we voting for? As with UKIP we just don't know. Worryingly, neither do they. Elected in order to be elected in order to do nothing.
* Recall of MP's and Referenda and hereditary Lords: still not resolved in an Empty Parliament.
* Political exams: exams to raise the calibre of candidates. A UK first.
* IMF/World Bank/UNDP merger and reform: duplication and unelected - and create Treasury powers to fund UNMDG
* UNMDG1 andUNMDG2 as national UK policy: a failing. Philippines does it.
* 30% minimum gender quotas for Parliament and business: less than 20% of women in parliament and 2% of FTSE Boards.
* A global currency: the IMF's SDR's already provide the mechanism along with improved EU-focused credit ratings agencies to balance and scrutinise the dollar and yuan. Just look at the LIBOR failings for more impartial currency polices.
* 10% interest rate cap: as in Germany. The obscenity of 30%-plus credit card rates and even worse the 4,000% payday loans. If the German economy can thrive with cheap credit then so should the UK.
* Public Health improvements with UK mortality rates upto double the average with simple reforms: plain cigarette packaging delayed but introduced in Australia and Eire and unit pricing on strong alcohol and regular knife and gun amnesty's. And pharma funding for cancer vaccines eg P53 and DNA sampling and Third World vaccines.
* An education dividend: free tablet PC for schoolkids. they do it in Thailand. 3D printing and Raspberry Pc's for schools - boosting the UK economy too.
* Asian exports for UK: the greatest economic change in history through China and South East Asia and the UK needs to capitalise on it.
* EU signatories to the new Arms Trade Treaty and arms exports ban - the taxpayer subsidising arms bloat and repression form Bahrain to Brunei.
While here in Kent we have the shoddy farce of Pleasurama and Manston-Infratil criminals and EKO and ChinaGate and 0% public sector frauds and corruption. And the Medway and Stour some of the UK's worst polluted rivers, the Dartford Crossing tarmac splurge on the rates, and water companies racking up dividends for pollution.
Kent in freefall in Year Zero, Ground Zero.
Time for reform.
Failed.Failed. Failed.
Time for Change.
Thursday, 6 June 2013
Chief's Policiers
Speaking from the Maidstone police headquarters, Chief Constable Learmonth of Kent Police said:
“Not many people know that I am a keen film fan so here is some of my favourite police films what I like that I found in the mucky films cupboard after Pughsley took most of the really naughty ones home for review. These are classic though:
1. Scarface. Just goes to show what can happen if you can allow a flood of drugs into the region whether it be Florida with them Cubans or my patch with Belgium via Ostend then Manston and the like, with them narco-states like Guinea and Mali too. Crack down on crack dens is what I say! Nice use of electro-pop on the soundtrack as well. And unfortunately the only policeman is a rotten apple copper failing to root out the drugs dens and supply routes. The exception becomes the emphasis. Sigh.
2. Serpico. One policeman’s lone fight on rooting out corruption. Tell me about it. Within the bleedin’ police department as well. I ask you. Luckily in Kent it’s mainly the civil servants on the bung so we can focus our scarce resources on the council offices. I have got my eye on you McGonigal, don’t think I don’t. And don’t you think Carter that I’m patrolling your building sites either just so you can pour tarmac over The Garden. Three Dartford Crossings indeed. It ain’t Poulson and Parr all over again! I ain’t spent 40 years walking around in the rain to have all that again. Them days is gone Carter with you and your Toxic Three. It’s over. I says to Commissioner Barnes, it ain't Peters and Lee policing you know. I ain't blind to this 1970's corruption and it's no good you gyrating about in the background pretending you've some policies. Arrests need to be made!
3. Ask a Policeman. And so you should. What time is it? Time for bloomin’ change I says. And this is one of Will Hays finest comedy fillums. He lived in Ramsgate. Not a lot of people know that. And speaking of which…
4. ...The Black Windmill. Not strictly a cop film, although Special Branch are in there drinking tea, wearing raincoats or tapping phones or whatever it is they do. But if you look closely at the scene in Ramsgate Hoverport where it’s that Michael Caine himself what is breaching Kent’s immigration regulations. Which just goes to show the Border Agency and Coastguard have been useless for decades. But what’s that in the background? A young policeman with an Alsatian and a Chief Constable’s baton in his knapsack? I ain’t saying it’s me. But the clues are there!
5. Dixon of Dock Green. A bit rubbish really. How we laugh at the procedural errors down the cop shop now. And the whistles and cloaks. They don’t know they’re born these young coppers with their dodgy trousers, underpants on the rates and T-shirts. The Wrong Trousers I say! I tell ‘em it’s Kent Police though not the Fashion Police! My little joke. And I have told them to stop wearing that flat hat – that’s Chiefy’s. Get the bleedin’ Constabulary hat on I says! They didn’t teach you that at Hendon! But they never listen. Anyway. Don’t get me started. I’ve put Dixon of Dock Green in for completeness. You have to. And there is that tearaway Dirk Bogarde in it so it’s not all bad. Let’s hope the new reoffending procedures deterred him from a life of crime. Which they did. Because he stayed in films. Although it doesn’t work for anyone else.
6. The Boys in Blue. Cannon and Ball’s finest hour. So one to miss. Nice to see the curly-haired comic in Ramsgate for the Not Going Out telly show last week though. Even though they called it Eastbourne. Make that sort of elementary mistake in police work and that's the end of the line I can tell you!
7. Detective Story. Does what it says on the tin as the ads would say. But the film tin! Just my little joke. Detailed police procedures for the first time in cinema. And Kirk Douglas too. Marvellous. And we certainly need some detective work on the O'Leary murder case and Infratil's extradition and the Pleasurama tax haven developments.
8. The French Connection. Perhaps the greatest policier ever. “Did you pick your feet in Tenterden” and all that. Classic. And highlights the importance of a 20mph speed limit in urban areas. They should have called it The Belgian Connection though to be completely accurate what with 85% of drugs seizures in the EU in Belgium near my patch. But that’s creative license for you.
9. Fort Apache the Bronx. Paul Newman knocking on a bit but still holding his own against a crime wave and backdrop of failed regeneration. 1970’s New York looking like Gillingham today, but nicer. He should have got a desk job in my opinion. Review the Cold Case files. That sort of thing. Modern policing ain’t all about walking around in the rain or driving fast cars or showering with other men. No. Just ask the lesbians. It wouldn’t be a modern police force without the lesbians. And they are certainly not happy about these camp uniforms or not wearing the badge numbers I can tell you! Don’t get me started on that again.
10. Bambi. Not a cop film at all. But it’s my favourite after a hard day down the cop shop. It makes me cry. Not enough animation about these days I say. If only Garbutt’s East Kent Fillum Studio and Office was about to provide a range of live-action films within the BFI region strategies, animated shorts to replace the COI activity, and all integrating funding and regeneration streams with innovative employment opportunities across various socio-economic parameters. Or whatever. Don’t do it cheap though I says to him. Do it properly. A million or two or a quick fix it ain’t! But he knows that.
11. The Offence. Dodgy this. Paedos. And surprising to see Sean Connery in perhaps his second-best role after that Kipling film. Thank goodness we’re on with cleaning up KCC’s Jimmy Savile Homes for Wayward Children. Dearie me, what has been going on. You don’t have to be Sherlock ‘Olmes to find 200 missing children what have gone missing but are found and put in care but then go missing from care. Or do you? Speaking of which.
12. Sherlock Holmes. We like these down the cop shop. Them Basil Rathbone ones against the Nazis, or the new telly show and even them film ones filmed at Chatham Dockyard. Marvellous. A detective. But certainly not the right uniform! But why is the police always playing catch-up as that LeStrade fella, eh? I was saying that to Big Beautridge the other day when I was working on his obituary for the Thor mercury raid (…line of duty…brave to the end…told him not to rub his eyes…crushing bone cancer…transplants from Little Beautridge didn’t take…not the Environment Agency’s fault…not mine either…etc etc) that Kent Police are at the forefront of dealing with modern criminality. Yes, there’s the gunrunning at Manston, yes, Buchanan and Pedro in the control tower breaching every known aviation safety rule right under our noses, yes, the serial pollution and cancer incidents, and Infratil and TDC removing the noise and air monitors for an airport the size of Stansted, yes even the occasional hopscotch miscreant. But there’s so much we get right too. The 3 new policing divisions and back office and RapeNation reforms. The drug den raids. The 101 numbers. Counterfeit cigarettes. The Kiwi extraditions. That special HGV lorry. Never gets a mention though. Shame.
Anyway, so there we are, the Chief’s top ten Policiers. They certainly are Most Wanted! Except for that Cannon and Ball one, which is just criminal. That’s it. Move along I says. Nothing to see. At the moment.”
Time for Change.
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
East Kent’s Dunkirk?
On 3rd June 1940 the evacuation of 338,000 British troops from Dunkirk was completed.
The return to Dunkirk on 4th June removed 26,000 French troops just on that last day too.
The hundreds of Little Ships saved the army from total defeat - risking drowning and gunfire over days.
And all sailed from Ramsgate.
The archetypal example of the public sector failing and the public having to step forward and do it for them.
But this year’s anniversary?
Nothing.
Sunk without a trace.
The 70th anniversary of D-Day and Operation Fortitude tomorrow? Another of Kent’s finest hours.
Nothing.
Stuck in the mud.
We seem to have the complete collapse of tourism activity in East Kent now.
And the graves are not kept clean.
Ground Zero. Year Zero.
Failed.
Time for Change.
The return to Dunkirk on 4th June removed 26,000 French troops just on that last day too.
The hundreds of Little Ships saved the army from total defeat - risking drowning and gunfire over days.
And all sailed from Ramsgate.
The archetypal example of the public sector failing and the public having to step forward and do it for them.
But this year’s anniversary?
Nothing.
Sunk without a trace.
The 70th anniversary of D-Day and Operation Fortitude tomorrow? Another of Kent’s finest hours.
Nothing.
Stuck in the mud.
We seem to have the complete collapse of tourism activity in East Kent now.
And the graves are not kept clean.
Ground Zero. Year Zero.
Failed.
Time for Change.
Monday, 3 June 2013
Blockbuster: East Kent Film Office and Studios
Pinewood Studio has had its £200m expansion plan rejected by the local authorities as of two weeks ago.
The development of over 100acres of green belt was felt to be too intrusive – and many of the film set “streetscapes” to simply be more housing on green belt. The expansion plans would have doubled the studio capacity to over 100 acres as part of the filming plans for JJ Abrams’ Star Wars new franchises for next year, and the new James Bond movie.
Lord Grade, Pinewood’s Chairman confirmed development will allow the creation of 3,000 jobs and over £150M for the wider UK economy in securing the Star Wars franchises, along with further development of the existing Leavesden Studios.
Clearly UK film is expanding with the new Brad Pitt zombie and pandemic movie World War Z premiering yesterday with Angelina Jolie, and shot at Leavesden and also Pfizer’s Discovery Park laboratories in East Kent.
While, the BFI is reaching out to UK organisations to participate in its UK Audience Network as ‘Hub Lead Organisations’, which will help develop film diversity and access in parts of the UK currently under-served by the industry.
The BFI’s UK-wide Audience Network will consist of up to ten regional ‘Hubs,’ which are yet to be determined, with a remit to “bring a greater depth and breadth of film experiences to their local areas.”
Each hub will be led by a ‘Hub Lead Organisation’, described by the BFI as an “organisation with strength and experience in growing and developing audiences for specialised film, which can act as a cultural leader, facilitator and source of support to other Hub members”.
But the combining of the now defunct Film Council role with Film London may see the usual London-centric and cottage-industry approach for film-making to East Kent’s detriment.
Time for East Kent Film Office and Studios.
Time for Change.
The development of over 100acres of green belt was felt to be too intrusive – and many of the film set “streetscapes” to simply be more housing on green belt. The expansion plans would have doubled the studio capacity to over 100 acres as part of the filming plans for JJ Abrams’ Star Wars new franchises for next year, and the new James Bond movie.
Lord Grade, Pinewood’s Chairman confirmed development will allow the creation of 3,000 jobs and over £150M for the wider UK economy in securing the Star Wars franchises, along with further development of the existing Leavesden Studios.
Clearly UK film is expanding with the new Brad Pitt zombie and pandemic movie World War Z premiering yesterday with Angelina Jolie, and shot at Leavesden and also Pfizer’s Discovery Park laboratories in East Kent.
While, the BFI is reaching out to UK organisations to participate in its UK Audience Network as ‘Hub Lead Organisations’, which will help develop film diversity and access in parts of the UK currently under-served by the industry.
The BFI’s UK-wide Audience Network will consist of up to ten regional ‘Hubs,’ which are yet to be determined, with a remit to “bring a greater depth and breadth of film experiences to their local areas.”
Each hub will be led by a ‘Hub Lead Organisation’, described by the BFI as an “organisation with strength and experience in growing and developing audiences for specialised film, which can act as a cultural leader, facilitator and source of support to other Hub members”.
But the combining of the now defunct Film Council role with Film London may see the usual London-centric and cottage-industry approach for film-making to East Kent’s detriment.
Time for East Kent Film Office and Studios.
Time for Change.
Friday, 24 May 2013
Cannes-Kent? Is Kent’s future filming rather than farming?
The 66th Cannes Festival closes this week with all the glitz and drama you’d expect.
If Kent’s glory days of 2006 haven’t been achieved again with the Jury Prize at Cannes for Andrea Arnold’s Red Road then that’s part of a thin showing overall for the British film industry with no UK films showing at Cannes.
Zero.
But last week’s review of Kent film locations in the Kent on Sunday highlighted blockbuster shoots such as Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean and even Les Miserables to sit alongside home-grown talent such as Orlando Bloom of Canterbury and Brenda Blethyn and Timothy Spall of Ramsgate.
Albeit with most of the locations being either Chatham Dockyard (can there really be that many naval films?) or Knole Park (best-known for the Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever, the first pop video or the Magical Mystery Tour film) holding the end up for Kent’s TV small-screen industry with its heritage of Broadstairs’ Bagpuss and recent productions such as Margate’s Exodus, Gypo and John Hurt in the spooky Whistle and I’ll Come to You.
Yet should more be done?
I think so, having invested heavily in the East Kent Film Office and Studio project with Expansion East Kent now awaiting sign-off, having run film marketing agencies with the likes of James Bond and Mission Impossible movies and FilmLondon.
And there’s a wealth of grass-roots activity whether it’s the Canterbury Film Festival, the 28 Days of horror and film courses at Kent University all tapping into the rich film heritage in East Kent of A Canterbury Tale, and Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband.
Even Dreamland amusement park and its cinema is on the brink of resurrection, still fondly remembered for shoots such as Only Fools and Horses, along with newer long-term enterprises such as the Paramount theme park in North Kent.
Clearly these aren’t happening despite newer structural initiatives such as Kent TV or Kent Film Office – it’s some years since I had to turn down a Board role there. Yet the closure of the Film Council in London has been a retrograde step, even more so, at a time when the BFI is now emphasising regionalism in film. And hopefully not just a pale imitation of the Whitehall out of Whitehall strategy of, say, the BBC relocating to Salford.
But there’s a deeper hampering of film shorts and advertising via the COI closure, or the Advertising Museum languishing in the doldrums, or the painfully slow roll-out of broadband and wifi that has slowed the creative industries particularly and wider Kent economy unnecessarily.
A tighter lens on East Kent to generate film heat and light is required.
Earlier this month for example the CEBR/UKTI released an excellent report on the value of the creative industries to the UK economy. If public investment too often counts as selling guns to Arab dictators or another Tarmac Glory Project, then the film, advertising, television, videogames and arts represent an astonishing success story requiring just 0.1% of public spending, but generating 0.4% of national GDP.
An industry turnover of £12.4Bn and 110,000 jobs (some 0.45% of employment) plus double that number in indirect employment is higher than both the usual suspects of the arms industry and construction industry so favoured by government subsidy.
One particularly interesting statistic was that the arts add £26,817 of value to property in areas with high cultural diversity. And public investment develops creative properties such as War Horse from novel to stage to screen and back to stage again, as a form of creative recycling and certainty generating increased jobs and profits with every cross-arts cycle. Or there’s riskier arts ventures such as the staging of the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time now garnering Olivier awards, and fresh projects for the likes of Strange Cargo in Folkestone.
Perhaps more tangentially the report’s author banker, John Studzinki describes the arts in the globalisation race as developing critical thinking, creative problem-solving and communications skills. All linked to the bottom line and raw brass tacks of the UK economy highlighted by the Chancellor himself funding expansion at Leavesden for the plethora of new Star Wars films, animation and games franchises.
Increasingly perhaps the UK’s film industry will grow form its rather feeble cottage industry at present to a more substantial production arms benefitting, as the banks have done, from the benefits of time-zone, language and increasingly a 24/7 wired world.
Right now Kent will miss out of such a future.
Indeed we’re seeing the green shoots of recovery in East Kent with the Turner contemporary art gallery and plans for the Van Gogh Gallery as regeneration mechanisms. Too much of the activity though is broad-brush-stroke, one size fits-all-silver-bullet-wishful-thinking. Nothing beyond the Grand Projects has been done – and they stumble when the funding tap is turned off.
The Cannes and Kent analogy is certainly not untenable – the former was after all only a small village in 1947 in war-ravaged France seeking to stimulate the local economy. And fuller film activity could include deeper reliance on arts funding, for example Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was the 2010 Cannes winner yet failed to gain a UK release at all.
While sure-fire movies at this year’s Cannes such as Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Soderberghs’s Liberace biopic failed to gain studio funding in the USA. And the likes of Robert Redford now in All is Lost, were so hamstrung by the industry they developed that a separate strand of the Sundance Festival and roster of funding was required.
But is a full-blooded Kentish Hollywood viable with Tom Cruise hanging off Canterbury Cathedral in Mission Impossible 27? Or Bruce Willis in Die Hard 35 struggling to get home for Xmas after being locked in the gun cupboard at Maidstone Police HQ?
Probably not.
But Kent certainly should be at the front of the queue in LA and London – as well as the burgeoning film markets in India and China and East Asia. The established Busan and dynamic new-start Hua Hin Festivals have kick-started their film economies, with star-heat such as Ryan Gosling now debuting Bangkok noir at Cannes, in little more than a decade.
And a more realistic view would see an expansion of live TV and radio across say East Kent – like me are you bored if hearing “the news from Kent – today in Brighton” from the BBC as the news outlets consolidate?
A hardly inspiring world-view for those young Kent citizens that don’t want to plough a field, or tarmac it.
It’s time for lights, camera and action for East Kent.
Tim Garbutt is the Managing Director of Sincerity Agency in East Kent: www.sincerityagency.com and Patron of the Surin Village School Charity.
If Kent’s glory days of 2006 haven’t been achieved again with the Jury Prize at Cannes for Andrea Arnold’s Red Road then that’s part of a thin showing overall for the British film industry with no UK films showing at Cannes.
Zero.
But last week’s review of Kent film locations in the Kent on Sunday highlighted blockbuster shoots such as Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean and even Les Miserables to sit alongside home-grown talent such as Orlando Bloom of Canterbury and Brenda Blethyn and Timothy Spall of Ramsgate.
Albeit with most of the locations being either Chatham Dockyard (can there really be that many naval films?) or Knole Park (best-known for the Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever, the first pop video or the Magical Mystery Tour film) holding the end up for Kent’s TV small-screen industry with its heritage of Broadstairs’ Bagpuss and recent productions such as Margate’s Exodus, Gypo and John Hurt in the spooky Whistle and I’ll Come to You.
Yet should more be done?
I think so, having invested heavily in the East Kent Film Office and Studio project with Expansion East Kent now awaiting sign-off, having run film marketing agencies with the likes of James Bond and Mission Impossible movies and FilmLondon.
And there’s a wealth of grass-roots activity whether it’s the Canterbury Film Festival, the 28 Days of horror and film courses at Kent University all tapping into the rich film heritage in East Kent of A Canterbury Tale, and Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband.
Even Dreamland amusement park and its cinema is on the brink of resurrection, still fondly remembered for shoots such as Only Fools and Horses, along with newer long-term enterprises such as the Paramount theme park in North Kent.
Clearly these aren’t happening despite newer structural initiatives such as Kent TV or Kent Film Office – it’s some years since I had to turn down a Board role there. Yet the closure of the Film Council in London has been a retrograde step, even more so, at a time when the BFI is now emphasising regionalism in film. And hopefully not just a pale imitation of the Whitehall out of Whitehall strategy of, say, the BBC relocating to Salford.
But there’s a deeper hampering of film shorts and advertising via the COI closure, or the Advertising Museum languishing in the doldrums, or the painfully slow roll-out of broadband and wifi that has slowed the creative industries particularly and wider Kent economy unnecessarily.
A tighter lens on East Kent to generate film heat and light is required.
Earlier this month for example the CEBR/UKTI released an excellent report on the value of the creative industries to the UK economy. If public investment too often counts as selling guns to Arab dictators or another Tarmac Glory Project, then the film, advertising, television, videogames and arts represent an astonishing success story requiring just 0.1% of public spending, but generating 0.4% of national GDP.
An industry turnover of £12.4Bn and 110,000 jobs (some 0.45% of employment) plus double that number in indirect employment is higher than both the usual suspects of the arms industry and construction industry so favoured by government subsidy.
One particularly interesting statistic was that the arts add £26,817 of value to property in areas with high cultural diversity. And public investment develops creative properties such as War Horse from novel to stage to screen and back to stage again, as a form of creative recycling and certainty generating increased jobs and profits with every cross-arts cycle. Or there’s riskier arts ventures such as the staging of the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time now garnering Olivier awards, and fresh projects for the likes of Strange Cargo in Folkestone.
Perhaps more tangentially the report’s author banker, John Studzinki describes the arts in the globalisation race as developing critical thinking, creative problem-solving and communications skills. All linked to the bottom line and raw brass tacks of the UK economy highlighted by the Chancellor himself funding expansion at Leavesden for the plethora of new Star Wars films, animation and games franchises.
Increasingly perhaps the UK’s film industry will grow form its rather feeble cottage industry at present to a more substantial production arms benefitting, as the banks have done, from the benefits of time-zone, language and increasingly a 24/7 wired world.
Right now Kent will miss out of such a future.
Indeed we’re seeing the green shoots of recovery in East Kent with the Turner contemporary art gallery and plans for the Van Gogh Gallery as regeneration mechanisms. Too much of the activity though is broad-brush-stroke, one size fits-all-silver-bullet-wishful-thinking. Nothing beyond the Grand Projects has been done – and they stumble when the funding tap is turned off.
The Cannes and Kent analogy is certainly not untenable – the former was after all only a small village in 1947 in war-ravaged France seeking to stimulate the local economy. And fuller film activity could include deeper reliance on arts funding, for example Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was the 2010 Cannes winner yet failed to gain a UK release at all.
While sure-fire movies at this year’s Cannes such as Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Soderberghs’s Liberace biopic failed to gain studio funding in the USA. And the likes of Robert Redford now in All is Lost, were so hamstrung by the industry they developed that a separate strand of the Sundance Festival and roster of funding was required.
But is a full-blooded Kentish Hollywood viable with Tom Cruise hanging off Canterbury Cathedral in Mission Impossible 27? Or Bruce Willis in Die Hard 35 struggling to get home for Xmas after being locked in the gun cupboard at Maidstone Police HQ?
Probably not.
But Kent certainly should be at the front of the queue in LA and London – as well as the burgeoning film markets in India and China and East Asia. The established Busan and dynamic new-start Hua Hin Festivals have kick-started their film economies, with star-heat such as Ryan Gosling now debuting Bangkok noir at Cannes, in little more than a decade.
And a more realistic view would see an expansion of live TV and radio across say East Kent – like me are you bored if hearing “the news from Kent – today in Brighton” from the BBC as the news outlets consolidate?
A hardly inspiring world-view for those young Kent citizens that don’t want to plough a field, or tarmac it.
It’s time for lights, camera and action for East Kent.
Tim Garbutt is the Managing Director of Sincerity Agency in East Kent: www.sincerityagency.com and Patron of the Surin Village School Charity.
Friday, 17 May 2013
Dambusted.
Why Kent ignores the Dambuster heroes for their 70th anniversary?
The Dambusters Raid still seems incredible with its 70th anniversary today just gone, and yet the shame of its Kent connections going unrecognised.
With all of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and, in the lull of the airwar between the Blitz bombings on London and Kent airfields and the V1 and V2 rockets attacks on London and Kent, the Dambuster Raid of Operation Chastise on three dams in the Ruhr in May 1943 marked a quite extraordinary example of courage and innovation.
Nowadays a comical Carling Black Label ad or Shepherd Neame’s funny Spitfire ads and the Richard Todd film, now being remade by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, are the last few memories of the raid.
And the anniversary ignored in East Kent.
The Dambuster bouncing bombs were trialled off both the Broadstairs and Reculver coasts – designed to spin across the water, over torpedo nets, strike the Mohne, Eder and Sorpe dams and sink as depth charges to blow the dams open.
An almost unbelievable technical innovation matched only by daring if not suicidal flying skills.
With planes shot down over the Dutch coast both on the way out and on the way back, and 53 airmen out of 133, and 10 Lancaster bombers shot down the death toll was indeed high. Some planes were flying so low - even below treetop level! - and at night remember, that they were brought down by electricity pylons.
Yet the Mohne and Eder dams were successfully breached. The Sorpe dam remained largely intact – but after the spectacular heroism of nine attempted bomb runs in parallel to the dam by T for Tommy Lancaster bomber before successfully releasing its bombs.
10 bombing runs under fire at night over water and surrounded by steep mountains.
10.
The raid was so astonishing too in the medal haul: a Victoria Cross for Guy Gibson, just 24 years old – and no doubt UKIP would revel in his dog’s name today - and 10 Distinguished Flying Crosses amongst dozens of other medals. Even though the raid eventually turned out to be largely a morale-booster with some production of electricity restored within months and the dams rebuilt.
And yet, without the tragic necessity of total war, these raids would rightly be considered war crimes now – bombing dams was outlawed in the Geneva Convention in 1977. Along with the firebombing of Hamburg later that year and Tokyo over the following two years of the war – both raids even more damaging than the nuclear strikes on Japan - targeting the civilian populations became the main emphasis of the airwar.
Indeed the main casualties of 1,600 from the Dambuster floods were 749 Allied prisoners of war used as slave labour and the civilian German population. And perhaps equally of concern, even in this modern era of famine and UNMDG, was hundreds of acres of farmland put out of production until well into the 1950’s causing starvation in Germany and Netherlands, resulting in the formation of Oxfam amongst other charities.
And the legacy of the raid became the use of Tallboy bunker-buster bombs on the V1 and V2 rocket sites (and 1,000 bomber raid on Peenemunde and V1 factories), not dissimilar to the fuel-air bombs used on Taliban caves in modern day Afghanistan. As well as attacks on the V3 supergun sited near the French end of today’s Channel Tunnel (designed to bomb both Maidstone and London), and a forerunner of Saddam’s Scud strikes on Israel and planned Iraqi supergun.
While the heroism of the Dambusters may never be needed again, when the modern RAF is procuring 500 killer drones.
And over 349 push-button computer game drone attacks have taken place since 2008 in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen via spy drones from US airbases in Nevada and now RAF Waddington. The latter not so far from the 617 squadron airbase at RAF Scampton and Lancaster bombers of 70 years ago.
But what a shame that East Kent has confined its place in such an astonishing exploit to nothing – the heroism of the Dambusters is as ignored in its East Kent homeland as the Spanish Armada, Channel Dash heroes, or Dunkirk Little Ships
The Dambusters Raid still seems incredible with its 70th anniversary today just gone, and yet the shame of its Kent connections going unrecognised.
With all of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and, in the lull of the airwar between the Blitz bombings on London and Kent airfields and the V1 and V2 rockets attacks on London and Kent, the Dambuster Raid of Operation Chastise on three dams in the Ruhr in May 1943 marked a quite extraordinary example of courage and innovation.
Nowadays a comical Carling Black Label ad or Shepherd Neame’s funny Spitfire ads and the Richard Todd film, now being remade by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, are the last few memories of the raid.
And the anniversary ignored in East Kent.
The Dambuster bouncing bombs were trialled off both the Broadstairs and Reculver coasts – designed to spin across the water, over torpedo nets, strike the Mohne, Eder and Sorpe dams and sink as depth charges to blow the dams open.
An almost unbelievable technical innovation matched only by daring if not suicidal flying skills.
With planes shot down over the Dutch coast both on the way out and on the way back, and 53 airmen out of 133, and 10 Lancaster bombers shot down the death toll was indeed high. Some planes were flying so low - even below treetop level! - and at night remember, that they were brought down by electricity pylons.
Yet the Mohne and Eder dams were successfully breached. The Sorpe dam remained largely intact – but after the spectacular heroism of nine attempted bomb runs in parallel to the dam by T for Tommy Lancaster bomber before successfully releasing its bombs.
10 bombing runs under fire at night over water and surrounded by steep mountains.
10.
The raid was so astonishing too in the medal haul: a Victoria Cross for Guy Gibson, just 24 years old – and no doubt UKIP would revel in his dog’s name today - and 10 Distinguished Flying Crosses amongst dozens of other medals. Even though the raid eventually turned out to be largely a morale-booster with some production of electricity restored within months and the dams rebuilt.
And yet, without the tragic necessity of total war, these raids would rightly be considered war crimes now – bombing dams was outlawed in the Geneva Convention in 1977. Along with the firebombing of Hamburg later that year and Tokyo over the following two years of the war – both raids even more damaging than the nuclear strikes on Japan - targeting the civilian populations became the main emphasis of the airwar.
Indeed the main casualties of 1,600 from the Dambuster floods were 749 Allied prisoners of war used as slave labour and the civilian German population. And perhaps equally of concern, even in this modern era of famine and UNMDG, was hundreds of acres of farmland put out of production until well into the 1950’s causing starvation in Germany and Netherlands, resulting in the formation of Oxfam amongst other charities.
And the legacy of the raid became the use of Tallboy bunker-buster bombs on the V1 and V2 rocket sites (and 1,000 bomber raid on Peenemunde and V1 factories), not dissimilar to the fuel-air bombs used on Taliban caves in modern day Afghanistan. As well as attacks on the V3 supergun sited near the French end of today’s Channel Tunnel (designed to bomb both Maidstone and London), and a forerunner of Saddam’s Scud strikes on Israel and planned Iraqi supergun.
While the heroism of the Dambusters may never be needed again, when the modern RAF is procuring 500 killer drones.
And over 349 push-button computer game drone attacks have taken place since 2008 in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen via spy drones from US airbases in Nevada and now RAF Waddington. The latter not so far from the 617 squadron airbase at RAF Scampton and Lancaster bombers of 70 years ago.
But what a shame that East Kent has confined its place in such an astonishing exploit to nothing – the heroism of the Dambusters is as ignored in its East Kent homeland as the Spanish Armada, Channel Dash heroes, or Dunkirk Little Ships
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Toxic Three – now Two - and Dog in a Manger politics
They're dropping like flies. the Gang of Four gone. And now, after the KCC elections Alex King has been demoted from Deputy Leader.
So, the Toxic Three are now reduced to Carter and Wild: deliberately polluting Kent’s citizens with Infratil by removing the required monitors and ignoring the overflights by KLM and Cargolux now - and, previously banned aircraft.
Alex was previously the architect of the disasters of EUJet and KCCUSA so the chop was long overdue – but a new role of Chair of Policy Skills/HR which to some extent is the Deputy role.
The problem with politics as any doublehatter will know – is it’s hard to vote them out even when they’ve failed or are incompetent.
A mix of Buggins Turn of any old fool in the role and Dog in a Manger politics of preventing anyone else from doing the job, even if they’re more capable.
The rest of the KCC Cabinet is much the same – John Simmonds taking over as Deputy/Finance which is not ideal as he’s a supporter of the ridiculous KCC booze and guns and tobacco investments. These should have been divested long ago for investments in solar panels and Kent businesses.
Bright sparks like Mark Dance and Roger Gough have economy roles and there are one or two new faces.
And of course the main change will be UKIP and Roger Latchford as Opposition Leader. Interesting how many of the UKIPs were surprised themselves at being elected – they were on holiday on election day!
Der Kolonel is of course also notorious in the Gang of Four of resigning after the racist Moslem jokes and covering up the Manston monitors, it’s appalling and brazen that he’s resurfaced. After many years’ service in the Army Latchford’s panzers have reached their Stalingrad on the Medway: a cursory review of their policies will be laughable over the next few weeks.
And no votes for poisoning your own citizens.
Little will be done by UKIP but the concern is their closet racism will colour debates in Kent. Already we’ve had the racist nonsense of 29M Romanians and Bulgarians supposedly arriving in Kent next year.
Westminster certainly doesn’t think so – as 29M would be the total population of Romania and Bulgaria (!). And having entered the EU in 2005 they already can and do live and work in UK – and Kent has the highest concentration of Romanians in Canterbury, studying as students and working and paying tax.
Little has been said of the whole population of Croatia moving to Kent when they join the EU next month as it’s not much of a scare story.
The real concern I have is the very real problem of pandemics for Kent as a border county. The UK Chief Medical officer has issued a TB warning with some outbreaks in Romania. These facts will be distorted and coloured as dirty foreigners etc. etc., driving the problems underground.
When we need people at risk of epidemics to come forward and be vaccinated for everybody’s safety.
London is seen as the TB capital of Europe already.
While Kent, through the Pfizer/Discovery park site could be leading the way in regenerating the economy and ensuring safety as a strategic vaccine facility. From next year every child will be vaccinated with the flu vaccine for example. And Third World vaccine production is due to increase ahead of UNMDG2 in 2015.
While removing rabies restrictions at Ramsgate Port is inept and part of the changeover of Public Health roles from the NHS to Kent Council.
As Mayor and MP I will make sure these are prioritised.
From the RTC and TDC and KCC elections it’s clear Kent governance has collapsed into failure.
The new Mayor is simply part of the Buggins Turn and Dog in a Manger approach of the doublehatters crowding out any opposition through technicalities. I’m stumped as to how direct elections of Mayor are somehow not possible when they’re not forbidden under the constitution.
Or how a Mayor can be unanimously elected – without stating any policies.
Just the usual twist the facts to fit and backroom stage management.
No FOI – even after 8 years. Your tax is simply to prop up the civil servants to not actually do anything.
Ramsgate Port closed.
Pleasurama derelict.
Silence on Thor.
ModFire training fires on the aquifer.
Animal exports shifted to Dover.
The corruption of 0% salaries by Moores and McGonigal, and Infratil and ChinaGate and EKO – and coverup.
Pandemics as above, yet 3,000 jobs lost at Pfizer.
The destruction of the town centres with Westwood Cross.
No Climate Change policies at all – one brief highlight of the KCC election was the first-ever Green councillor for the Garden of England which will be the wave of the future: UKIP and Old Labour are simply of the past.
And worth mentioning some of the more dynamic civil servants with innovative water-embedded policies for ethical policies on water management with desalination plants rather than reservoirs on farmland.
But the proposed “Garden City” between Canterbury and Ramsgate of 15,000 extra houses (announced at midnight (!) on election day last week) is abysmal, undemocratic and pointless. Part of the usual developer’s charter to rape East Kent.
Dave Green the outgoing Mayor vaguely mentioned turning Albion House into a hotel then fell silent – no doubt anticipating the cramped council having to move back there and a review of the antiques/artefacts that seem to have been sold off.
And tree-planting needs fast-forwarding via schools with a tree for every adult planted: last week saw the highest ever CO2 concentrations recorded at 400ppm in Hawaii - carbon levels not seen for millions of years.
No Climate Change policies at all in Kent or even basic public safety such as tsunami sensors in the North Sea and English Channel and improved flood defences or sewer repairs leave the County adrift.
While with FTSE100 companies declaring over 8,311 subsidiaries in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands and Jersey it makes Pleasurama look part of a pattern of tax avoidance ahead of the G8 Summit and astonishing KCC and TDC remain silent.
Yet, the reality is we could give the Duffers billions more in tax and almost nothing would be done.
With youth unemployment at 20% Thanet’s older generation have failed us.
Time for Change.
Garbutt4Mayor 2014 and Garbutt4MP May 2015 (or sooner if the elections are called earlier)
Time for Change
A slightly different look to future blog posts with these regular features updated:
1. Manston overflights
KLM and Cargolux – Buchanan and Pedro in the control tower are the problem
Write to them: here are their emails:
Charles.buchanan@infratil.com and peter.thompson@infratil.com
And a suggested draft email for you to amend/send:
Dear (xyz)
There are overflights by KLM and Cargolux. The latest was at (xyz). These are forbidden under the airport operating guidelines due to noise and air pollution and safety.
Please advise on fines, aircraft registration and pilot name details and how future overflights will be prevented.
Also water pollution from the Environment Agency requirement to clean up the site.
(your name)
A copy can be forwarded onto the CAA and Environment Agency.
2. J’accuse Scoundrels
A miscellany of scoundrels at KCC, TDC and RTC:
• Toxic Three: Carter, King and Wild – knowing of the pollution and monitors removal by Infratil they worked with them to try and gain £20M of further funding for 20 jobs, and the mysterious VisitKent £100k funding still not explained
• Roger Latchford: Gang of Four – missing air monitors when Deputy Leader at TDC and on KIACC public airport committee
• Everitt and Styles: RTC councillor and clerk – both dancing around the flimsy RTC audit and sign-off and salary costs from last year
• Moores and McGonigal: 0% salaries fraud: publicly stating 0% salary increases for Samuel and White of the Gang of Four – yet provided salary increases. The shtum payoffs still unknown.
• Ken Aids Gregory and Mike Shirtlifting Bint Harrison – just appalling councillors, why have they not resigned or been sacked. We can do without them.
3. Jobs! Jobs!! Jobs!!!
Don’t kid yourself there is an economic strategy for Thanet and job creation.
There isn’t.
Nothing.
The 24 hour cargo airport/ChinaGate/EKO/Road to Nowhere and Westwood Cross 4th town centre(!) were it.
Pleasurama and Dreamland are both derelict so nothing will happen for a year or two at the earliest. And then only a few dozen construction jobs initially.
Tourism has flatlined. Nothing is being done.
I need staff: paid and volunteers and office space for: MP campaign, East Kent Film Office and Studio awaiting KC signoff of funding and Pavilion.
I’m also interested in a CCU/KBS role and TEFL/CELTA at Churchill/KSE.
And working with Discovery Park/Pfizer and Kent Science Park and pharma companies.
The reality is nothing has been done. No jobs created and none to be created.
Ramsgate’s £17M council tax, TDC’s £60M tax and KCC’s £2.3Bn tax is simply wasted on hiring more and more civil servants to tell us there’s no money and nothing can be done.
And your councillors go along with it: better to do nothing and leave everything derelict in their last few years.
Time for Change
Friday, 10 May 2013
Manston. J'accuse.
J'accuse Infratil: Fitzgerald removing the required monitors from 2006 and Clarke and Buchanan continuing the lie of reporting pollution. Bring them back with Bogoievski and Baker for trial.
J'accuse TDC: assisting Infratil and covering up the lack of reporting and fines: McGonigal, Berry, Button and Sproates.
J'accuse the politicians of silence and complicity with Infratil: both MP's Sandys and Gale, the KCC Toxic Three and TDC Gang of Four, the Leaders of TDC and Chairs of the Airport Committees.
J'accuse KIACC: feeble control of public reporting on the pollution and Infratil and TDC's antics.
J'accuse Environment Agency: failing to enforce the required pollution standards and cleanup ignored by Infratil.
J'accuse Kent Police: failure to make the required arrests for endangering the public.
Time for Change.
Even now the water and air is polluted and there is no monitoring.
Even now there are illegal overflights by KLM and Cargolux.
J'accuse.
These are not mistakes.
Removing the detailed monitoring form a school and tower block and refusing to replace it.
Banned aircraft and overflights.
These are deliberate and calculated acts of pollution of the public to create an airport the size of Stansted by stealth.
And funded through public money.
A toxic mix of lies and corporate manslaughter over years.
They knew exactly what they were doing and now it's cover-up as much as possible to keep their salaries and pensions for as long as possible.
J'accuse.
Time for Manston to close and arrests at Infratil and TDC.
No runway. No buildings. No control tower. a field and the water supply underneath.
And jail sentences and fines.
The most blatant Kent pollution scandal ever.
J'accuse.
Time for Change.
Garbutt4Mayor 2014 and Garbutt4MP 2015.
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Same old same old Duffocracy at RTC
Apparently the Mayor can only be elected by being elected by elected councillors. But they can’t elect members of the public. I didn't understand that either. Again Duffers world bumbles along on the rates.
So Dave resigned with warm words on inaction.
Nothing on Manston monitoring, fines and overflights.
Or Thor.
Or Pleasurama.
Or Port.
Then pre-arranged candidates and votes for Kim Gibson as Mayor – previously recommending a prison as an economic step forward for Ramsgate so we shouldn't expect too much.
I couldn’t see who was the new Deputy Mayor but very ceremonial for a ceremonial council so irrelevant, and didn’t wait for the farce of the accounts and Manston fines, Pleasurama contracts etc.
One for the Police eventually.
About 10 members of the public so mainly outnumbered by councillors and civil servants.
Unless you're over 60 it's not the council for you.
Almost all the councillors doublehatters with TDC, and TDC to blame for everything – they still don’t get that that’s them.
Oh well, another year wasted and another one to be wasted.
A tax strike and business rates strike always perks up the councillors: cancel your direct debits, pay it late, pay it wrong.
Ask for FOI on Manston fines and overflights and monitors.
Or allow the pollution and corruption to continue.
Shush.
Keep quiet.
Garbutt4Mayor - May 2014, and MP 2015 or sooner.
Time for Change.
Tuesday, 7 May 2013
Garbutt4Mayor 7pm RTC
Tomorrow (Wednesday 8th May) the Ramsgate Town Council Mayor election.
Time for Change.
Dave Green the current Mayor has resigned.
Time for Change.
The collapse of Ramsgate.
Time for Change.
Racist UKIP on the rise and return of the Gang of Four.
Time for Change.
Please turn up and vote for me.
Stop the Pollution. Stop the Corruption. Stop the Construction.
A Mayor for East Kent, East Europe and East Asia.
The pensioners have failed us: Thanet's worst generation.
Year Zero. Ground Zero.
Time for Change.
Thursday, 2 May 2013
KCC: the corporate manslaughter, cancer and corruption election
Today’s your chance to vote on peripheral issues and faceless candidates.
If you do want to waste your vote then choose a non-Conservative candidate to reduce the KCC West Kent One-Party bias.
Or not vote and reduce the turnout.
Or spoil your ballot.
It’s up to you.
You can’t vote on Manston and Infratil and the air monitors removed – no candidate mentions it.
You can’t vote on the 0% salary fraud of senior civil servants – no candidate mentions it.
Nor top Temps staffing up on the rates.
Or Icelandic banks tax funds.
Or Thor mercury banned but open.
Or FOI of all salaries and expenses and staffing.
Or EKO.
Or the Labour Chinagate bungs.
Or Pleasurama BVI corruption.
Nothing.
So vote.
Pretend it’s a democracy.
Rather you’re electing Party fanatics to raise their hand when told to do so. Or with the MP’s like Sandys Party fanatics parachuted into a constituency to do as they’re told.
The main policy being increasing tax to pay for politicians and civil servants to tell you there’s no money to do anything.
And shtum payments for secrecy and coverup.
£200k salaries and no FOI even though it's been the law for 8 years. Because the civil servants want to keep the gravy train rolling while the wheels come off Kent.
A bit unfair on the hardworking politicians and civil servants - but there’s more than a grain of truth in it isn’t there. Especially in Kent.
Infratil run the council not you. Buchanan and Pedro do as they like and are funded by KCC and TDC. To pollute you. Even though they shouldn’t. It’s better to remove the monitors so there’s no pesky pollution data to contradict cancer jobs and tarmac projects on the rates.
Infratil deliberately polluted you. Even now. And your council helped them.
Shut up. Pay your tax. Vote. Do as you’re told.
Manston is corporate manslaughter. Infratil’s directors are so worried they’ve put the airport up for sale to reduce the risk of extradition.
KLM and Cargolux are deliberately and illegally overflying and polluting the towns.
HSE have denied any role in Thor even though they have site visits – they’re playing the blame game with the Environment Agency.
Southern Water are polluting with sewage spills and then passing claims to an insurance loss adjustor to reject them.
None of it mentioned for elections to Britain’s best council and £2Bntax-budget.
Shut up. Pay your tax. Vote. Do as you’re told.
Time for Change.
Time to close Manston.
Time to close Thor.
Time to close MODFire.
Time for full FOI.
And time for jobs.
The Kent economy has collapsed. Youth unemployment is 20% or higher – the worst ever.
Nothing has been done.
Nothing on Climate Change.
Nothing on Third World growth policies - when Britain has achieved perhaps its greatest policy since the abolition of slavery 200 years ago, by last week achieving 0.7% in aid. The first G8 nation to do so after 40 years.
Nothing on UNMDG after 13 years and 1,000 days to go.
Jobs! Jobs!! Jobs!!! Nothing. With £17M for the District and £2Bn for the county.
Nothing.
A Third World Thanet of stagnant democracy, corruption and failure.
I offered to take on the Pavillion years ago and open it and create jobs. I will.
I will create Poole’s Pool.
I will create the East Kent Film Office and Studio.
I will turf Pleasurama for the Summer.
I will bring a passenger ferry to the Port.
I will pedestrianize the seafront.
I will reform and reduce Ramsgate Town Council.
I will peg council tax to inflation.
I will publish full FOI for your scrutiny.
I will reclaim 0% salaries, EKO, Manston fines and bung money.
All these will create sustainable, productive jobs for you, your children and grandchildren. Not tarmac schemes.
You need to help though.
It's not easy.
We're at Year Zero. Ground Zero. The towns have died. It's worse than you think.
You need to help.
I need volunteers, staff and office space.
You need to stop paying your £17M Ramsgate council tax to TDC. Cancel the direct debits. Ring your bank today or go online and cancel it. That’s more useful than your vote today.
I'll open the RTC bank account and ask the Chief Constable to sign off every penny and publish it all online each month. Every penny.
No tax for poisoning your own citizens.
Your KCC vote for cancer and corporate manslaughter is wasted.
Time for Pentonville and the perp walk for Buchanan and Infratil.
No votes for poisoning your own citizens.
If they could have improved things they would have. They can’t, and they won’t.
They've failed.
Stop the Pollution. Stop the Corruption. Stop the Construction.
Time for Garbutt4Mayor: Wednesday 8th May.
Time for Change.
Wednesday, 1 May 2013
KCC corruption elections and Ramsgate Town Council: Garbutt4Mayor.
KCC elections? Silence on Manston and Pleasurama and 0% salaries. No public meetings. No policies.
So much for democracy. Fill in a form. Stay quiet, Hide behind the rosette. Get elected on a minimal turnout.
Don't vote. Don't pay your council tax. Pay it short. Pay it late. No tax for no democracy.
And Ramsgate Town Council and emergency meeting to sign off the accounts but exclude the public. The same manipulation through bureaucracy-bumf.
Don't attend.
If nobody supports them they haveno legitimacy.
And the Mayor ceremony next week withDave laready resigned.
Time for Garbutt4Mayor.
Time to stop the pollution, stop the corruption, stop the construction.
Your MP's and councillors and civil servants are corrupt and incompetent.
Time for Change.
So much for democracy. Fill in a form. Stay quiet, Hide behind the rosette. Get elected on a minimal turnout.
Don't vote. Don't pay your council tax. Pay it short. Pay it late. No tax for no democracy.
And Ramsgate Town Council and emergency meeting to sign off the accounts but exclude the public. The same manipulation through bureaucracy-bumf.
Don't attend.
If nobody supports them they haveno legitimacy.
And the Mayor ceremony next week withDave laready resigned.
Time for Garbutt4Mayor.
Time to stop the pollution, stop the corruption, stop the construction.
Your MP's and councillors and civil servants are corrupt and incompetent.
Time for Change.
Tuesday, 23 April 2013
KCC Corruption election
With Kent on Sunday describing KCC as “stifling democracy” then elected governance is clearly at a low point in Kent. With over 90% of councillors from the Conservatives then a one-party state is the reality.
Throw in double-hatters where the same person sits on various councils, and falling turnouts (as low as 15% in by-elections and the Police elections), and monotone politics is the order of the day.
Declaring an interest, I’ve stood as MP and now Mayor in Ramsgate as an Independent, to “Stop the Pollution. Stop the Corruption. Stop the Construction.”, against the worst excesses of County governance. We seem cursed with an almost wilfully backward political system: KCC funding Infratil at Manston knowing that the airport is on the water supply, and Infratil and TDC removing the air monitors are heinous crimes.
Or there’s the silence over the banned EU aircraft such as Afghanistan’s Kam Air or known gunrunners and blood diamond shippers such as DAS Air, or Jihadist flights such as IranAir – effectively making Manston and Ostend and Luxembourg the hub for the dirty trade of guns and drugs into Africa. Just last week yet another airline, Germany’s ACG, was banned from the skies over Kent.
Or there’s the quieter horror of KCC investing in tobacco, booze and BAE shares – while tasked with improving public health. All the more concerning with my predecessor Jonathan Aitken jailed for the ongoing Al-Yamamah corrupt Saudi arms deals or now Sangcom. Or Thor mercury banned in Margate 20 years ago for poisoning its workers and the public, doing the same in Cato Ridge, South Africa – and remaining open to this day at the Margate site.
Clearly many of these aren’t councillor issues as such, the ageing councillors can hardly keep up with the pace of modern events or desire much more for Kent than an indoor privy, but rather a bloated and failing public sector still exempt from full FOI after 7 years. The alphabet soup of the Environment Agency, HSE, Southern Water, Police, and CAA have all shied away from action preferring silence and cover-up and pension protectionism rather than protecting the public. The Belgian civil service, just a few miles away and speaking English and paid for from UK tax, could run the place better and cheaper?
A similar picture exists with blatant corruption such as the ChinaGate bung to Ramsgate Labour – its largest ever donation for Kent’s largest ever development shrouded in secrecy. Or Pleasurama, Kent’s largest seafront development again shrouded in secrecy with its directors registered in the British Virgin Islands. Hardly sensible for KCC, supposedly one of the largest and best UK’s top two councils – especially with George Osborne clamping down on tax havens ahead of the G8 Summit this Summer in Northern Ireland.
While Top Temps, effectively a front company for KCC staffing-up or Top Travel also undercutting the private sector with public funds, the failed investments in Icelandic banks, the million pound Laser fraud, the 0% salaries fraud of the senior civil servants and Cabinet at TDC, and Two Carters salaries and – Manston again – the failure of EUJet and KCCUSA investments and now shuttling money to Infratil via Visit Kent hardly inspire confidence in a £2.3Bn tax organisation – almost Malawi’s total GDP and larger per capita than India, Cambodia or Uganda.
Clearly we have First World funding but Third World services.
I make no bones that the Toxic Three of Carter, King and Wild have not just failed Kent, but deliberately and repeatedly endangered the public and, as with the Gang of Four and Gale and Sandys, have no place in Kent public life. The doodlebug did less damage.
Rather, as with the Infratil Directors they should face criminal charges and jail.
What must other Counties think? What must your children and grandchildren think if this represents the best of County governance? How bad must failed councils such as TDC or Tower Hamlets or Hackney or Birmingham be if this is Great Britain at its greatest? What must our international partners in Virginia or Hungary or dozens of European towns think?
The recent Vietnam Trade Mission must wonder what is going on, although the Vietnamese Foreign Minister having described over a third of his department as completely useless, would no doubt feel at home.
And we seem to have a two-speed Kent not dissimilar to the Jim Crow period of the US Deep South with East Kent as a plantation state lorded over by the West Kent dormitory towns. And we could have had town planning to create Venices rather than the verrucas of Gillingham or Ashford or Dover or Dartford or any of the tarmac slop that passes for regenerating Kent’s towns.
I maintain we need deep reforms to make Kent fit for the twentieth century at least: a directly-elected Leader, more vibrant opposition parties and independents, political exams, void and rerun elections under 30% turnout for better policies and candidates, and manifestos published 6 months before elections. And specified recall, referenda criteria and of course full FOI- all over 7 years late now for civil service protectionism.
For the challenges of the 21st century far more is required: detailed public health and pandemic policies to mitigate the foolishness of lifting rabies restrictions at Kent ports and live animal exports bans, and coping with the TB alert across London and Romania - and even the measles outbreak in Wales.
SARS, Bird flu and Swine flu are a plane flight away and would surely blitz dozing Kent with its surfeit of ports, airports, Chunnel, language schools and tourists. We struggle to provide a flu vaccine for more than the first few weeks of winter and scandalously allow thousands of our pensioners to die like flies.
And with Manston flying in guns and cocaine – 85% of illegal drugs are seized in Belgium on the transit routes from Afghanistan, Turkey and Amsterdam, illegal immigrants are the least of our problems as they could have a first class seat day or night in any Jumbo jet into Kent.
While Police reforms are underway such as tighter Cold casework in Kent with the O’Leary case or Surrey Police and Magnitsky, Missing Persons and Drug den and counterfeit tobacco raids and even FOI on guns, spydrones and uniform improvements on procurement and international partnerships with Mexico, Thailand, Cambodia and Romania – and even dragging the Coastguard up by its bootstraps with oil tankers berthed off the Blue flag coast.
Yet British citizens are largely stranded on Death Row in Congo or Indonesia or extradited to USA at the drop of a hat and left to the idle mercies of a cocktail party Foreign Office.
And Kent’s schoolchildren face the ignominy, not of homes and schools for heroes promised to their grandparents and great-grandparents but asbestos schooling, the vote at 16 provided to Scotland first and slum town planning and overbuild. Yet countries such as Finland and Thailand easily lead the way for a digital future with free wifi, FabLabs and tablet PC’s. Junky towns in a RapeNation, and a horsemeat burger for school lunch is thin gruel indeed, but perhaps a fitting end for the Kent white horse conquered by apathy, incompetence and corruption.
And now with less than 1,000 days to go – after 12 years of inaction - to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals it’s time to fast-forward Kent with every public sector organisation and NGO adopting and adapting the goals. Initial UK elections for the UN World Parliament. Every organisation needs to adopt Climate Change and Fairtrade principles and a County-wide economic plan to drive growth. Those civil servants working hard on embedded water policies, desalination plants or tourism policies must rightly feel ignored. They are. So are Lord Heseltine’s recommendations on growth.
I’m not confident if can be done. The rot has set in and worked its way deep. The Northfleet children with their intestines growing out of their stomachs are ignored, the KCC vulnerable children abandoned to the night, Lydd airport expansion detailing in high Court bungs to councillors, the 2012 greatest games in a generation been and gone, Dreamland derelict and Pfizer losing over 2,000 jobs in the last 2 years.
Frontline Kent seems to have collapsed – British heroes such as Ramsgate’s Channel Dash airmen, or the victory over the Spanish Armada off Margate are ignored. Britain’s Korean War heroes, staving off Communism to create a vibrant South Korean democracy and economy, forgotten 70 years on. Kent’s legions of troops creating democracy from the beaches of Normandy to the jungles of Burma left to rot.
And the cruel political farce of next month’s 70th anniversary of The Dambusters celebrated not in Broadstairs with the trials of the bouncing bomb, but in Kings Hill as a political vanity.
Kent has fallen low. Kent’s worst generation has failed us. The County elections are on Thursday 2nd May: hold your nose and vote if you dare.
Throw in double-hatters where the same person sits on various councils, and falling turnouts (as low as 15% in by-elections and the Police elections), and monotone politics is the order of the day.
Declaring an interest, I’ve stood as MP and now Mayor in Ramsgate as an Independent, to “Stop the Pollution. Stop the Corruption. Stop the Construction.”, against the worst excesses of County governance. We seem cursed with an almost wilfully backward political system: KCC funding Infratil at Manston knowing that the airport is on the water supply, and Infratil and TDC removing the air monitors are heinous crimes.
Or there’s the silence over the banned EU aircraft such as Afghanistan’s Kam Air or known gunrunners and blood diamond shippers such as DAS Air, or Jihadist flights such as IranAir – effectively making Manston and Ostend and Luxembourg the hub for the dirty trade of guns and drugs into Africa. Just last week yet another airline, Germany’s ACG, was banned from the skies over Kent.
Or there’s the quieter horror of KCC investing in tobacco, booze and BAE shares – while tasked with improving public health. All the more concerning with my predecessor Jonathan Aitken jailed for the ongoing Al-Yamamah corrupt Saudi arms deals or now Sangcom. Or Thor mercury banned in Margate 20 years ago for poisoning its workers and the public, doing the same in Cato Ridge, South Africa – and remaining open to this day at the Margate site.
Clearly many of these aren’t councillor issues as such, the ageing councillors can hardly keep up with the pace of modern events or desire much more for Kent than an indoor privy, but rather a bloated and failing public sector still exempt from full FOI after 7 years. The alphabet soup of the Environment Agency, HSE, Southern Water, Police, and CAA have all shied away from action preferring silence and cover-up and pension protectionism rather than protecting the public. The Belgian civil service, just a few miles away and speaking English and paid for from UK tax, could run the place better and cheaper?
A similar picture exists with blatant corruption such as the ChinaGate bung to Ramsgate Labour – its largest ever donation for Kent’s largest ever development shrouded in secrecy. Or Pleasurama, Kent’s largest seafront development again shrouded in secrecy with its directors registered in the British Virgin Islands. Hardly sensible for KCC, supposedly one of the largest and best UK’s top two councils – especially with George Osborne clamping down on tax havens ahead of the G8 Summit this Summer in Northern Ireland.
While Top Temps, effectively a front company for KCC staffing-up or Top Travel also undercutting the private sector with public funds, the failed investments in Icelandic banks, the million pound Laser fraud, the 0% salaries fraud of the senior civil servants and Cabinet at TDC, and Two Carters salaries and – Manston again – the failure of EUJet and KCCUSA investments and now shuttling money to Infratil via Visit Kent hardly inspire confidence in a £2.3Bn tax organisation – almost Malawi’s total GDP and larger per capita than India, Cambodia or Uganda.
Clearly we have First World funding but Third World services.
I make no bones that the Toxic Three of Carter, King and Wild have not just failed Kent, but deliberately and repeatedly endangered the public and, as with the Gang of Four and Gale and Sandys, have no place in Kent public life. The doodlebug did less damage.
Rather, as with the Infratil Directors they should face criminal charges and jail.
What must other Counties think? What must your children and grandchildren think if this represents the best of County governance? How bad must failed councils such as TDC or Tower Hamlets or Hackney or Birmingham be if this is Great Britain at its greatest? What must our international partners in Virginia or Hungary or dozens of European towns think?
The recent Vietnam Trade Mission must wonder what is going on, although the Vietnamese Foreign Minister having described over a third of his department as completely useless, would no doubt feel at home.
And we seem to have a two-speed Kent not dissimilar to the Jim Crow period of the US Deep South with East Kent as a plantation state lorded over by the West Kent dormitory towns. And we could have had town planning to create Venices rather than the verrucas of Gillingham or Ashford or Dover or Dartford or any of the tarmac slop that passes for regenerating Kent’s towns.
I maintain we need deep reforms to make Kent fit for the twentieth century at least: a directly-elected Leader, more vibrant opposition parties and independents, political exams, void and rerun elections under 30% turnout for better policies and candidates, and manifestos published 6 months before elections. And specified recall, referenda criteria and of course full FOI- all over 7 years late now for civil service protectionism.
For the challenges of the 21st century far more is required: detailed public health and pandemic policies to mitigate the foolishness of lifting rabies restrictions at Kent ports and live animal exports bans, and coping with the TB alert across London and Romania - and even the measles outbreak in Wales.
SARS, Bird flu and Swine flu are a plane flight away and would surely blitz dozing Kent with its surfeit of ports, airports, Chunnel, language schools and tourists. We struggle to provide a flu vaccine for more than the first few weeks of winter and scandalously allow thousands of our pensioners to die like flies.
And with Manston flying in guns and cocaine – 85% of illegal drugs are seized in Belgium on the transit routes from Afghanistan, Turkey and Amsterdam, illegal immigrants are the least of our problems as they could have a first class seat day or night in any Jumbo jet into Kent.
While Police reforms are underway such as tighter Cold casework in Kent with the O’Leary case or Surrey Police and Magnitsky, Missing Persons and Drug den and counterfeit tobacco raids and even FOI on guns, spydrones and uniform improvements on procurement and international partnerships with Mexico, Thailand, Cambodia and Romania – and even dragging the Coastguard up by its bootstraps with oil tankers berthed off the Blue flag coast.
Yet British citizens are largely stranded on Death Row in Congo or Indonesia or extradited to USA at the drop of a hat and left to the idle mercies of a cocktail party Foreign Office.
And Kent’s schoolchildren face the ignominy, not of homes and schools for heroes promised to their grandparents and great-grandparents but asbestos schooling, the vote at 16 provided to Scotland first and slum town planning and overbuild. Yet countries such as Finland and Thailand easily lead the way for a digital future with free wifi, FabLabs and tablet PC’s. Junky towns in a RapeNation, and a horsemeat burger for school lunch is thin gruel indeed, but perhaps a fitting end for the Kent white horse conquered by apathy, incompetence and corruption.
And now with less than 1,000 days to go – after 12 years of inaction - to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals it’s time to fast-forward Kent with every public sector organisation and NGO adopting and adapting the goals. Initial UK elections for the UN World Parliament. Every organisation needs to adopt Climate Change and Fairtrade principles and a County-wide economic plan to drive growth. Those civil servants working hard on embedded water policies, desalination plants or tourism policies must rightly feel ignored. They are. So are Lord Heseltine’s recommendations on growth.
I’m not confident if can be done. The rot has set in and worked its way deep. The Northfleet children with their intestines growing out of their stomachs are ignored, the KCC vulnerable children abandoned to the night, Lydd airport expansion detailing in high Court bungs to councillors, the 2012 greatest games in a generation been and gone, Dreamland derelict and Pfizer losing over 2,000 jobs in the last 2 years.
Frontline Kent seems to have collapsed – British heroes such as Ramsgate’s Channel Dash airmen, or the victory over the Spanish Armada off Margate are ignored. Britain’s Korean War heroes, staving off Communism to create a vibrant South Korean democracy and economy, forgotten 70 years on. Kent’s legions of troops creating democracy from the beaches of Normandy to the jungles of Burma left to rot.
And the cruel political farce of next month’s 70th anniversary of The Dambusters celebrated not in Broadstairs with the trials of the bouncing bomb, but in Kings Hill as a political vanity.
Kent has fallen low. Kent’s worst generation has failed us. The County elections are on Thursday 2nd May: hold your nose and vote if you dare.
Sunday, 21 April 2013
Manston's last flights banned
Report on ACG banned from flying:
"ACG provides global aircargo transportation with scheduled and chartered long-haul capacity. Besides general cargo they are specialized for heavy and oversized freight, perishables, live animals and dangerous goods.[5] On the 18th of April the company announced that it would temporarily suspend flight operations,[6] this because the airline's Air Operators Certificate was suspended by the German National Aviation Authority; the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt."
Abysmal Infratil and TDC and KCC have allowed numerous such flights into Manston.
Appart from the new KLM flights last month I think that means there are now no flights into Manston. Perhaps occasional a Lear jet or Cargolux. Nothing - and onto the water supply and with the air monitors removed since 2006.
Time for arrests.
Time for Manston to close.
Time for Thor mercury to close and cleanup.
Time for MODFire to close and not pollute the water with fires and chemicals.
Time for a clearout of councillors and civil servants.
Time for full FOI: staffing, salaries, pensions, offices, cars - DFID does it.
Time for FOI on police drugs seizures and weapons.
Time for Garbutt4Mayor 7th May.
Volunteers, staff and offices needed: email timgarbutt@yahoo.com
The TDC pensioners have failed us. Thanet's worst generation poisoning their own children and grandchildren and coverup.
April's council tax is yours: cancel your direct debit and simply refuse to pay.
A Friday school strike: simply don't return to school after Friday lunch. 2 hours of missed school won't make you stupid - and no asbestos in schools and a free tablet PC.
Tie a green ribbon on the railings of Eastcliff bandstand for the cancer victims.
No votes for poisoning your own citizens.
No tax for poisoning your own citizens.
Time for ECGD publication of Third World debt held by UK.
Time for banks to follow Barclays and end speculation on food, creating famine.
Time for Change.
"ACG provides global aircargo transportation with scheduled and chartered long-haul capacity. Besides general cargo they are specialized for heavy and oversized freight, perishables, live animals and dangerous goods.[5] On the 18th of April the company announced that it would temporarily suspend flight operations,[6] this because the airline's Air Operators Certificate was suspended by the German National Aviation Authority; the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt."
Abysmal Infratil and TDC and KCC have allowed numerous such flights into Manston.
Appart from the new KLM flights last month I think that means there are now no flights into Manston. Perhaps occasional a Lear jet or Cargolux. Nothing - and onto the water supply and with the air monitors removed since 2006.
Time for arrests.
Time for Manston to close.
Time for Thor mercury to close and cleanup.
Time for MODFire to close and not pollute the water with fires and chemicals.
Time for a clearout of councillors and civil servants.
Time for full FOI: staffing, salaries, pensions, offices, cars - DFID does it.
Time for FOI on police drugs seizures and weapons.
Time for Garbutt4Mayor 7th May.
Volunteers, staff and offices needed: email timgarbutt@yahoo.com
The TDC pensioners have failed us. Thanet's worst generation poisoning their own children and grandchildren and coverup.
April's council tax is yours: cancel your direct debit and simply refuse to pay.
A Friday school strike: simply don't return to school after Friday lunch. 2 hours of missed school won't make you stupid - and no asbestos in schools and a free tablet PC.
Tie a green ribbon on the railings of Eastcliff bandstand for the cancer victims.
No votes for poisoning your own citizens.
No tax for poisoning your own citizens.
Time for ECGD publication of Third World debt held by UK.
Time for banks to follow Barclays and end speculation on food, creating famine.
Time for Change.
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