Thursday 30 July 2015

Manston Parkway farce and RTC and Most Wanted

Manston/Parkway station: even worse than I thought. The elaborate consultation for a station in an airport has concluded this month. The 200 pages of plans thus detail:

o This supposedly isn’t a consultation but details of a project KCC has decided to implement despite lack of any support at all beyond the corridors and cement mixers of County Hall

o An improvement of 6 minutes in train times between London and Kent – but these would be achieved by 2019 - and were planned even without a Parkway

o The Parkway if built would delay times by 2 minutes. I know. You couldn’t make it up. It would delay trains

o The Parkway would cost £11M – not far off the cost of the Turner Gallery in Margate for what would be a small unmanned station in the middle of nowhere but too near the other rail stations

o The supposed 6 minute time improvement would be for travel to London – but only 23% of the public use the train for London – the 77% of journeys are 30 minutes or less to Canterbury etc, so again any claimed improvements would not be achieved but actually made worse with a 2 minute delay

o The report also bizarrely details the potential for multi-storey carparks at Ramsgate station – but 3 months of lavish improvements to the car park (anyone know the cost?) are just drawing to a close so again it seems both foolish and wasteful

My overall point is that this is utter waste and as with the Road to Nowhere and Manston (you will have seen the ongoing shambles of Operation Stack again) utterly idiotic KCC planning relying on Grand Projects and Cement regardless of whether they are needed or viable. I hope the DofT claims the c.£20M back from KCC (and curbs future cement funding) although much of it seems to have been already wasted on this nonsense.

£20m spent on the town centres of East Kent would make a huge difference rather than on yet more tarmac for the dead duck of Manston and worsening the rail service(!).

With Operation Stack now descending into not just strikes/weather delays but migrants breaking into the Channel Tunnel and dying (9 so far!), what is wrong with calling out the Ghurkas for a few weeks to patrol the tunnels and extra checks? It was done for the 2012 Olympics when Serco fell apart. And the Ghurkas would simply be sat in their barracks nearby anyway.

As with the KCC-Highways Agency supposed master stroke of a contraflow we have layers and layers of organisations doing nothing on the rates. Then when there is a disaster it becomes a bureaucratic turf war to ensure inaction.

Increasingly I'm hearing of nonsense from RTC on what they actually do and the cost of it - have the UKIPPERs given up on holding councils to scrutiny?

More later no doubt although at KCC now TDC and RTC UKIP seem to have no idea on doing anything.

Perhaps that's for the best after the nonsense and corruption we've ben paying for.

Why aren't they calling for a police investigation and a tax rebate for corruption? We seem to be funding councils to pay themselves to do almost nothing of value.

And increasingly I think we've had fake elections that should be rerun. Not just the blatant illegality of the LibDem EU civil servant candidate but now election promises simply ditched within weeks. LocalCraig was simply parroting saving Manston with no intention of doing anything. Same with Gale and UKIP. Now with the Parliament recess nothing will be done for months.

They were simply lying to us. And ignoring the aquifer pollution.

Time for Change

www.votegarbutt.co.uk
@timg33

Tim's Titbits:

* KORA and 2LB due shortly
* July Kent Public sector review underway
* KCC 2017 Leader manifesto underway
* Weird silence on 100Se Rd garden grabbing by Cllr Evans and Bambridge and TDC staff - they seem unable to explain how or why this has gone ahead beyond corruption or cockup and now just silence...
* Kent Police Most Wanted: curiouser and curiouser - they've updated their website now since my last post(see below) and reduced the 4 Most Wanted to 3 since yesterday (wanted for c.2 years) - yet Crimestoppers shows over 30 Most Wanted in Kent including one of the previously Most Wanted by Kent Police and at least one Ramsgate chap who I see wandering around. Are the cops on top of this looking for criminals and arresting them business? Are there really just 3 Most Wanted in Kent?
* Thor still no sign of pollution reports - and Environment Agency even refusing EIR requests for Thor without a Public Interest Test ie it would be in the public's interest for it not to know despite the right of the public to know the pollution etc. Give them a call yourself.
* First PM visit to Vietnam as part of the ASEAN emphasis for UK in the future
* Bizarre review by Westminster of FOI - to make it more difficult to obtain public information. Many councils simply refuse so any legislation should be on enforcing release of information. Why would any information except national security be kept hidden from the public that fund it?

Thursday 23 July 2015

Ramsgate animal exports farce and tax haven corruption. Again.

How ridiculous that every political party, and the council with its own port, opposes live animal exports.

It's even in the UKIP national manifesto to supposedly bolster Farage before his defeat.

Yet the exports will continue today.

To paraphrase the Boston Tea Party we seem to have taxation without - effective - representation.

With the exporters simply swapping between Ramsgate and Dover port, we will need a more organized approach to prevent this disgusting trade.

Whether its roadblocks, layered teams of demonstrators, tax strikes and other forms of civil disobedience.

Nobody wants live animal exports. And not from any Kent port.

It's disgusting and simply dragging Kent down.

A county now famous for racists and animal cruelty.

And even more ridiculous given the Calais delays/roadblocks due to French farmers protesting the low price of meat etc, and police being pulled away from Operation Stack and road accidents or rape trials or drug den raids, just so a junk ship like SS Joline can sail across the world's busiest sealanes with a few dozen sheep.

The RSPCA and TDC council could easily refuse any lorries.

And with the Pleasurama corruption back on I think we've reached the end of the road with UKIP: simply the same pensioners dithering and lead by the nose by Planning Director Crowley.

Rottenfuhrer Latchford is a lame duck awaiting General Winter - and Leader Carter much the same watching his cement freeze and pensioners' corpses stack up.

Empty grunting over yesteryear and ridiculous grand projects that would somehow instantly solve decades of decline.

All the more disgraceful in one of the world's top 5 largest economies and a county with GDP larger than Northern Ireland and next to Europe's largest and wealthiest cities.

Pathetic stagnation.

Describing cliffworks and scaffolding on the seafront next week as at the end of the Summer season is laughable.

As is the delay since February when the Pleasurama construction lease and now seem ludicrous payoff of a BVI tax haven that nobody wants - and Cardy were hired by originally!

It stinks.

What must our foreign student guests think of Broken Kent?

The election is over. Ukip have had their chance. I don't think the towns need months of dithering and inaction and bullshat.

We had that with the last lot. Increasingly I wonder what Ramsgate Town Council are doing? We seem to have c.£350k and 5 staff for allotments and halfday closing and weird pseudo-elections.

Are the towns so wonderful nothing needs doing? National cuts of 40% by government depot actually seems rather effective given dirty hospitals and the most excessive government salaries and pension in Kent so on.

Layers of 5to5ers doing nothing but tripping over each other.

Manson and Live Animal Exports and Pleasurama are the same failure.

Add in inaction over garden grabbing at 100Se Rd or seafront parking and the pensioners simply cannot manage TDC.

Increasingly I think we need a council-in-waiting to replace these Duffers and the chimps they replaced.

Dogdirt is their limit and the police are too scared.

Time for Garbutt KCC Leader 2017

Time for Change
www.votegarbutt.co.uk
@timg33

Tim's tidbits

* why the sudden rash of tramps begging in the town centre and cans of tramp lager littering the place - the cops don't take them back to their hostel or the DSS get them jobs? A Living Wage and Living Dole is not impossible and there's always jobs beach cleaning etc to improve the town
* an interesting Meiji meeting on central/local governance in Japan and Scotland - and I would urge every school, from primary to PHD, and university, in Kent, to be more active with Japanese language learning and Asian Studies courses - the range of material and support from the Great British Japanese Government is excellent
* Similarly with excellent organisations like the Almeria Group universities or Kasetsart university
* car reg no's appreciated for seafront parking to highlight here for the DVLA etc - and increasingly I think we need to pedestrianize the whole seafront/arches/High St and organize emergency access/deliveries etc for one of the world's most beautiful harbours
* who is the Broadstairs rape lawyer belittling the rape victim with over 85,000 rapes in UK?
* KORA and 2LB underway
* KCC Leader 2017 manifesto underway
* Kent Public Sector review for July a bit delayed - in particular I want to highlight the good folks of Royal Mail from overlooking them before

Friday 17 July 2015

The end of Manston and Latchford


Manston explodes into incompetence and rants yet again.

Roger Latchford of Kent UKIP and Gang of Four’s vote at KCC full council rejected by 70 votes to 12 amidst a litany of cries of incompetence and waste of money.

With the District election defeats, Latchford and NFHeale are finished.

But only silence on Manston and Thor contamination at KCC and TDC. What’s happening?

While TDC UKIP dance around Chris “Orson” Wells supporting wasting yet more money on some evaluation of something or other - and a plague of bizarre emergency meetings that last a few minutes with no debate at all.

TDC UKIP have the golden opportunity to not just cancel Manston airport but the foolishness of the $1 thousands of houses on the aquifer and seek Infratil’s extradition and fines for contamination under the TDC of Latchford.

The MP’s now scurry around blaming TDC for inaction despite it being their main/only policy.

It stinks.

And the ever more bizarre LocalCraigMP now suddenly supporting fracking and foxhunting – as the former was rejected in Kent months ago, and the latter cancelled as Westminster Village nonsense simply wasting parliament time.

Kent is rudderless with the mere scum and scoundrels we've elected.

I’ll write more fully on the July Public Sector Review next week.

Very briefly I’m pleased to highlight the following rankings:

1. Kent Police: a superb improvement in drug dens raids both in the towns and Ports. Absolutely sparkling with hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and heroin and hash seized in Frontline Kent with dozens of raids from both streetjunkies and drugs barons. And the Chief even getting the QPM somewhat earlier than most Chief Constables.Excellent.

But there still seems to be vestiges of Operation Lazybones as Kent Police's excellent Most Wanted is 5 people down from 12 initially:

http://www.kent.police.uk/appeals/most_wanted/most_wanted.html

Yet Crimestoppers Kent have 37:

https://crimestoppers-uk.org/most-wanted/?regions=-24

And then of course there’s the Costa Del Crime aspects of Operation Captura in Spain and Holland etc:

http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/campaigns/most-wanted-hub/operation-captura-spain


If nobody’s quite sure who the Most Wanted are then how can they be captured? Or Missing Persons found/Reoffending etc?

And more minor concerns over the Goldfinger shotgun death – although a horrifying UK increase in both rapes and knife crime, and excessive illegal parking requiring activity but I’ll write in more detail later.

Also the PCC Police election next year.

2. Kent Royal Mail/Post Office: an omission from previous reviews but a superb service often unrecognised.
3. Southern Trains: similar to point 2 and marvellous flourishes with station flower baskets etc but concern over overbuild, embankments and tickets. Why Roger Gale moans about Southern Trains I do not know: superb.
4. Kent Ambulance: excellent as always. 7 minute response on a 15 minute target is excellent and a drop in rankings due to the improvement of the above organisations.
5. Kent Fire: excellent especially the Road Safety Attraction but revisions needed of the Gucci Fire Station and road safety lead/coordination.

You can no doubt guess the Third World and criminal services of the worst performers.

Time to stop the pollution, stop the corruption, stop the construction.
Time for a Cleaner, Greener and Younger Kent.
Time for Meiji reforms.

Time for Change
www.votegarbutt.co.uk
@timg33

Tim's Titbits: Misc Points:

• Kent Leader 2017 manifesto to follow
• An interesting SEELEP reform – and Kent GDP the same size as Northern Ireland
• Wetherspoons share price drops – amidst the CEO's concerns over having to pay the Living Wage(!) hardly inspiriting for the Pav nor why the taxpayer should fund Big Businesses like Wetherspoons wages with tax credits etc
• Silence on 100 Se Rd garden fracking and Pleasurama tax haven and Hornby slipway – I have serious doubts over Planning Director Crowley
• Horrifying a 6 year global glut of food – along with the excess Climate Change heatwaves and storms and droughts – yet malnutrition increases: greater efforts on say rice stocks or supermarket waste needed
• Interesting the Year of Soil(!) university research highlights no more than 20 harvests left in the top soil
• BBC reforms – again Westminster Village fanaticism and who would want the TV licence system anyway? Simply scrap this 1930’s radio tax and save on collections and ringfence an annual fund from tax as per the DFID 0.7% or NATO 2%. A Great British institution brought low
• Frontline Kent WW2 phosphorous grenades and mines astonishing
• Myanmar joins the Chemical Weapons Convention and Aung San elections detailed for November 8th
* UNESCO lists heritage sites for Meiji Japan - and bizarrely a Fray Bentos factory in Uruguay: nothing better could be found?
* KORA and 2LB in progress

Tuesday 7 July 2015

Kent’s Cancer Harvest from Manston and Thor

A bumper crop of cancer tumours this year.

Melanomas the size of melons. Polyps like plums, and the lemony flush of leukaemia.

Why you may ask given, for example, Manston has closed? Almost everyone bar our MP’s and civil servants know the dire consequences of breathing aviation fuel.

Of course they do know how dangerous it is really - hence removing the monitors as Manston was due to expand with Infratil. No monitors, no pollution data and maybe those cysts are due to pixie dust not aviation fuel.

They just wanted to cover it up. Even now.

Kent's Bhopal is not an exaggeration given Thor was supposed to be banned. Or perhaps more accurately that's Kent's Cato Ridge.

But cancers don’t just end because aviation fuel droplets end. That’s just the start of it.

They flourish and bloom through children and the elderly in particular.

Rare cancers. Incurable cancers. Bred in the blood and bone.

And all the more so as Manston may have closed resulting in cleaner air – but the site hasn’t been cleared and cleaned.

And nor has MOD Fire, nor Thor mercury or even the old Sericol site at Poorhole Lane.

What sort of twits would allow MODFire to light fires and then douse them with chemicals on the drinking water supply?

Maybe the specialist cancer ward at the QEQM is there just for the heck of it, or waiting for patients.

And one of the most fatuous comments recently from LocalCraigMP was seeing improvements at Southern Water’s pumping facility – presumably no longer dumping tonnes of shit into the sea or Blue Flag beaches.

But his silence on the broken sewers is deafening. Sewers detailed by Southern Water themselves as unrepaired and leaking faeces into the water supply along with cholera-drains blocked to the brim with sand and mud for years.

But then LocalCraigMP’s not drinking the water nor bathing his children in it is he? Quartered safe in Chatham telling Thanet what it should be or do or have.

I’m not sure there’s much we can learn from a notorious Kent crap town like Chatham.

No. Cancer doesn’t suddenly doesn’t stop.

The guinea pigs of your children and grandchildren will be testament to the crimes and failings around Manston for years to come.

Not only do we have TDC and KCC covering up the Manston pollution. But also the Environment Agency refusing to disclose the pollution let alone clean it up.

They should be jailed. And as KCC Leader I will seek jail sentences.

Not fake internal whitewashes or payoffs or shuffling of job titles or taxfines that you will pay.

Jail.

The same prison cell as Infratil. Or the GlickQC and Hollingworth barrister fraudsters.

Why our MP wouldn’t call in any refusals to provide information and seek P45’s for gross misconduct beggars belief. Similarly failing to pull up breaches in service standards in replying to requests continues the Great British Disease of low public sector productivity.

We have the weird situation of funding public servants to not only waste their tax-salaries and tax-pensions but also waste the public’s time in chasing them for what they’re supposed to do. And then don’t want to do because it would reveal rank incompetence at best or crimes at worst.

Then we’re supposed to pay the tax fines so they can then claim higher taxes that you pay.

It stinks.

The cluster of dirty hospitals and disease outbreaks at Kent hospitals such as Pembury is testament to that. Or KCC Care Homes where the kids are going missing and being abused. Or the pensioners tied to a radiator or waterboarded by Nurse.

Or the rash of asbestos schools contaminating children and teachers - despite asbestos being banned in 1999.

Or the utter idiocy of KCC investing your tax in tobacco shares – while supposedly promoting public health. And concentrating on Noddy-policies like stay out of the sun and drink water for the hottest day ever last week.

And nothing on Climate Change other than pouring yet more cement.

The UNMDG review of the last 15 years is out as of yesterday focusing on Climate Change failure and more talking shop conferences in Paris in December – and the new raft of SDG Global goals (UNMDG2 if you prefer) again citing Climate Change – probably the weakest of the UNMDG goals achieved - as a massive 21st century problem.

A great success story though is Education with over 90% of children now in primary school. Really now only parts of Africa making up the bulk of 57M children not in school. But worryingly half of those will never go to school.

And if global literacy for under 24’s is now over 90% then it doesn’t say much for UK where we have literacy of 99% - but only to a reading age of 8 by age 16.

Barely Third World education despite over 100 years of public investment.

Anyway, you can read the Dirty Water issues in Kent at MP candidate Ed Targett’s blog here:

http://greentargett.com/2015/05/06/dirty-water/

Also the astonishing Edwina Crowley of TDC Planning establishing her own property company:

http://greentargett.com/2015/04/21/conflict-for-councils-property-boss/

After 2 months I think it’s clear UKIP have nothing to offer except similar Duffers probably slightly more racist than before but as inept. Certainly Farage has nothing to say about Thanet or Thor or Manston contamination.

Chris Wells along with Latchford as ex-Tories would have been intimately involved in the Manston contamination issues with Infratil. With the exception of the success of dogdirt littering tickets of c.170 in the last 2 months UKIP as the new broom at TDC has ground to a halt if not gone into reverse.

Manston and the PWC report have exposed the feebleness of their policies. And Messrs Gale and LocalCraigMP are now desperately ending their own policies on Manston and foisting it back to TDC and UKIP for a bit of party blame-gaming.

They were elected to open Manston yet less than 2 months later are doing backflips to deny any involvement. It’s tempting to urge calls for Recall if their main policies have failed so soon.

And of concern is Manston’s Charles Buchanan now heading up Lydd airport with fancy mega-expansion plans, yet why was he allowing banned aircraft into UK airspace? As importantly why did the Police and CAA have no idea of what was going on? Do they not get a daily list of planes into UK airports? Especially banned or late flights? Why not?

And why are our councillors keeping shtum on the matter?

Wells and Latchford need to account of the missing monitors and fines and contamination levels and breathtaking corruption during their time with the Gang of Four in regulating Manston.

Perhaps most bizarre of all is a UKIP emergency secret meeting last month to hurriedly payoff CEO Macgonigal an extra £91,000. Who voted for that? Would you? Surely the police should be called in to prosecute her for the 0% fraud and Manston contamination? Why do UKIP want to gloss over that?

The last pre-UKIP RTC meeting yielded no members of the public at all given the dissatisfaction and failure resulting in the electoral clearout of Everitt etc. We seem to have a busted flush already with UKIP at the least kowtowing to TDC.

Throw in a myriad of delays and wriggles such as the astonishing garden-grabbing at 100 SouthEasternRd or the strange Pavilion and Stone Hill/Manston consultations and it seem to me as though UKIP have lost control of the council already simply being led by the nose by the TDC civil servants or putting their head in the sand.

Another set of feeble and stupid pensioners riding the decline down at the expense of their children and grandchildren.

One anecdote from the Greek EU referendum farce (so many highly-paid EU institutions to do so little?) struck me of not just the police and army preparing for riots and revolt but one teenager berating a pensioner: “your generation have failed us by electing incompetent and corrupt governments for years”.

It could be the epitaph for Kent governance.

Even Kent Fire Brigade is shilly-shallying on FOI of the Gucci £2M new fire station-garage at the old swimming pool on the Kent Fire annual budget of £70M. With another automatic 1.99% increase that looks like too much money and nothing to spend it on to me.

A £2M council tax cut or reinvestment in the towns with another swimming pool would be of far more use than Millington’s Gucci Garage.

Especially – with the UK’s road deaths (a great British success story) slightly increasing this year – even increasing the road safety budget with zero drinkdriving, 20mph zones and designing out traffic blackspots rather than just sighing and scooping up the pieces and sweeping away the broken glass.

And even moving away from the usual multi-agency-muddled-partnerships-on-the rates and pass the buck twaddle to implementing clear pandemic procedures.

Just as with the cancer harvest, TB or MERS or Birdflu won’t wait as the vaccines run out again – especially if Discovery Park shifts into just taxbreaks for Hornby toy trainsets et al rather than developing East Kent’s - and Britain's - future jobs in antibiotics and vaccines.

And with the SDG Global Goals launching in September, not one public sector department has as yet included them on their website:

www.globalgoals.org

#globalgoals

Writing this on 4th July it’s clear that USA deserves its legacy of liberty and freedom – something that Britain struggles to develop even in the 21st century – still bumbling along with hereditary Lords, a broken voting system, pollution legacy, a corrupt High Court and Climate Change failure with a feeble and secretive democracy that’s no match for either Magna Carta or the US Constitution.

And already America is banning blatant health problems such as transfats or Styrofoam and various food chemicals - even pushing for sugary soda drinks bans/reductions like Coke to reduce the cancer of obesity and diabetes - while Britain bumbles and blathers along even allowing McDonalds and junk food in NHS hospitals, and still unable to provide full DNA screening.

Kent’s cancer harvest will blossom and grow for years - yet American children won’t face the scourge of asbestos or danger foods or DNA cures for cancer.

Clearly there are some issues that USA may struggle with but certainly ones already overcome by Canada, Japan or the Scandinavian democracies.

And Britain simply falls flat on its face.

Time for Meiji reform.

Time for Change

Time for Garbutt for KCC leader 2017
www.votegarbutt.co.uk
@timg33
#globalgoals

Tim's Titbits: random points:

1. Thanks to Asia Society for a copy of their superb WW1 Thailand document that details the Thai role with the Allies in Flanders and Germany from 1918:

http://www.siamese-heritage.org/jsspdf/2001/JSS_096_0f_Whyte_InscriptionOnWW1VolunteersMemorialBangkok.pdf

I can't wait to visit in BKK near the Chaopraya river and let's hope the query over some of the dates and Khun Sangayut's rank can be resolved

2. VFP: a marvellous advertising campaign on child soldiers in UK: one of only 19 nations allowing Army recruitment at age 16 rather than 18 #whennotif:

http://veteransforpeace.org.uk/

All the more relevant in Kent with the protests of Erbil drones in Broadstairs. Time for an EU arms export ban as led by Germany.

3. Deepcut Barracks: murder-suicide of young recruits now facing a further legal review to explain multiple bullet wounds and shots in the back etc. It seems astonishing that the Military Police would investigate such murders rather than the civilian police: Surrey Police in this instance. And again losing more evidence than the Met’s wipe-clean notebooks. Although with the Goldfinger criminal being found killed by a gunshot wound to the chest and Essex Police (the same Serious Crime Squad and Special Branch also responsible for Kent) mistaking it for a heart attack, you do wonder.

4. Seafront parking: only one TDC dustcart on double yellow lines today - hardly the best result for tourism towns is it?