A bit of a random blog points below on the Collapse of East Kent:
1. Operation Stack/Manston: yawn how silly a designated lorry park at Manston with a 60 mile roundtrip in the opposite direction to Dover/Calais. And it would only happen if Stack is at its worst. With Stack only 3x a year for a day or two it seems not much of a problem and certainly not worth concreting over more of Kent for a 3 day lorry park. Silly.
2. Calais Jungle: the result of the collapse of UK/EU/USA foreign policy in Syria/Eritrea/Yemen/Somalia/Libya/Sudan. Farcical. And disgusting that such squalid conditions in Calais are allowed rather than refugees being fingerprinted etc and processed further away. While the Italian Navy pleading for EU funds is equally farcical: the ships and petrol allowance exist. I’ve no issue with the UK helping stem the 3k deaths in the Med but where are the Spanish and French ships?
3. Manston/Riveroak: yawn and laughable again. $2M in an escrow account where TDC couldn’t get hold it? And to fund lawyers quibbling for months? And TDC deployed on such nonsense. And no cleanup of the aquifer – and shouldn’t we be funding the extradition of Infratil? What happened to Sproates and Button on the monitors?
4. Manston corporate manslaughter: speaking to lawyers I completely forgot not just the removal of the noise monitor from Clarendon school but also the superduper Kentmere air monitor removed too. So between 2006 and 2009 Infratil removing every major monitor. and http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Noise-monitoring-Manston-Airport-comes-scrutiny/story-13501985-detail/story.html
5. £95k Macgonigal payoff: after the 0% fraud it’s clear that if the councillors are criminals then they’re closely followed by the civil servants
6. Pleasurama: same corruption – and when the UK is clamping down on offshore owners/funds – let’s hope Steve Keegan and Cardy detail the supposed buyout
7. 100 SE Rd gardengrabbing: just the weirdest TDC activity. 2 months of silence and 13 emails before Douglas Carswell intervenes to find out what they’re playing at. Cllr Peter Evans could well be TDC’s most ineffective Planning head yet. And bizarre silence from TDC’s Albon and Gregory too
8. Kent Police Most Wanted http://www.kent.police.uk/appeals/most_wanted/most_wanted.html : a bit strange: it’s reduced from 12 over a year or so then to 4 to 3 last week– then upto 4 and back to 3 in a day this week. And today back to 4. And still Crimestoppers c.30 Kent criminals https://crimestoppers-uk.org/most-wanted/?regions=-24
I’m reluctant to mention the chaps as they could be innocent or an out of date offence but one of them was on the Most Wanted list and one of them I see wandering around Ramsgate. And on Missing Persons: Kent Police are looking for no-one yet there’s one person on Ramsgate police station door? The reason I mention it is one of the UK’s weaknesses is policing Most Wanted and Missing Persons - and Kent Police are certainly not the worst of the bunch. But the tripping over each other of 43 forces means criminal or prison escapees don’t get found for an unfair trial in closed courts, no jury etc
9. UK prisoners: 23 on Death Row is astonishing – and no details of those stranded/hospitalised. I can assure you if it happens to you or a relative abroad you’re stuffed despite paying tax.
10. Seafront parking: every seaside town has problems with parking – although Ramsgate has an empty NCP multi-storey car park and at least 200 spaces in other car parks and funding TDC’s parking – but bizarre the kiosk owners are parking on the prom or the TDC dustman’s holiday of parking on double yellow lines for their teabreak. Not just a cheeky 5 minutes to drop something off but a sod-you-we’ll-do-what-we-want approach. Every piece of research points to pedestrianisation improving towns: as KCC Leader 2017 I will pedestrianise the harbour from Miles Bar to The Bench, all the Marina and High St – except for a few Disabled/RNLI slots. What would the last few visitors think? It would be interesting to have a view on the tourist economy to East Kent. Kent Uni and CCU estimated c.£700M just for their foreign students.
11. Slipway/Hornby: again the cutting your own throat school of town development: a working port and one of UK’s only Royal harbours and closing the slipways for a BandQ shed?
12. As with Discovery Park increasingly I just think it’s think pensioners deliberately or by accident destroying the towns and future generations – while the end of TopMan etc at Westwood Cross is just yet more decline of both the town centres and now the out of town centres
13. Climate Change: Kent Off Oil: every public sector building/vehicle switched to solar and no-nukes. It’s not difficult is it? Never mind more detailed activity such as Desertec or Khosla Ventures
14. Road Safety: UK road deaths some of the best safety in the work climbs up the wrong way with a few dozen ore deaths than last year – UK weak on Road Safety Day in November or 112 Day in February and 112 rollout/promotion
15. 2 bizarre FOI refusals then agreements from RTC and Kent Fire: I’ll detail these later but on the latter the Ramsgate Fire Station instead of a swimming pool is farcical
16. KORA and 2LB: coming soon
17. The Chief Pughsley’s done one of his film reviews while he’s waiting for the drug den raids to come back in but I haven’t had a chance to type it up for him – maybe next week
18. KCC Leader 2017: manifesto out for initial consultation with people I like and trust and respect
19. Kent Police PCC May 2016 manifesto: several people have asked me but I’ve no view on this as yet as I’m concentrating on the KCC 2017 arrests – but clearly Ann Barnes has achieved nothing and should go. The idea that the PCC is somehow another cheerleader for the Police is as ridiculous as the Met’s wipeclean notebooks or Plebgate fake testimony http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24548645
20. Corrupt Courts: this you really couldn’t make up. Smithy’s suitcases: http://www.legalcheek.com/2015/07/full-transcript-of-judges-luggage-rant-at-british-airways-lawyers-emerges/
A judge in a completely separate British Airways case threatening to jail the BA CEO for Judge Smith’s lost suitcases from his holiday! And funnily enough Smithy was one of the Glick QC Judges – and one of the better ones along with the Crying Judge – compared to the Grey Scotsman or Teacup Judge or Justice Mann.
21. Embarrassing when Canterbury Festival are celebrating the Van Gogh Anniversary but Ramsgate where he lived misses it: http://vangogheurope.eu/125th-anniversary-of-vincent-van-goghs-death-in-2015-widely-commemorated-with-an-international-programme-2/
Time for Garbutt KCC Leader 2017
Time to Stop the Pollution. Stop the Corruption. Stop then Construction.
Time for Change
www.votegarbutt.co.uk
@timg33
Tim’s Titibits: misc bits
• I’m reading a fascinating book on American war production in WW2 (sounds terrible doesn’t it but absolutely fascinating) and there were 2 points that just leaped out at me that I'm trying to use:
o USA war production was so effective that the rule of thumb was in the first year production tripled, then in year 2 it was a 7x increase and in the 3rd year was quite literally unlimited. In effect the Horn of Plenty that would put even Great British Argos to shame
o Eisenhower wrote back to USA to stop the production of Sherman tanks as he had too many. In the middle of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. 60k tanks produced in a little more than 2 years. Quite extraordinary. Yet here we are in the 21st century with 600K deaths form malaria for the lack of a $3 malaria net. By my maths that would cost less than $2M plus some waste and shipping. Yet it will take a decade or more to eradicate malaria. And yet the good folks of Rotary have reduced polio by 99% since 1989 (just this week Africa declaring it’s first ever poliofree year so only Pakistan and Afghanistan left with a few hundred polio cases – a far more difficult task involving vaccines and without the internet and with the Cold War etc.
• In contrast here’s some MOD twaddle:
o Buying 60 Chinook helicopters: more than the rest of the EU put together. Why?
o 539 armoured cars? End to end how far would they stretch?
o The Eurofighter and F35 jets almost cancelled after years of waste and billions and billions of dollars- as USAF Mildenhall closes one of the largest USAF bases in EU - to be replaced by a £1m drone to fire £1M missiles into mudhuts or motorbikes or wedding parties
o SANGCOM: wider publicity of the Saudi/MOD corruption of guns-for-bungs (one of the few Eurofighter/Typhoon arms deals)
And for what? They’re never used. 3 helicopters in Afghanistan? 6 jets now in the Baltics? 8 in Syria? Where’s the other 400? Too expensive to transport or shoot down. Rusting away on the rates.
• Panasonic/Toshiba/Hitachi/Kawasaki/Samsung – town centre screen, hispeed rail work etc
• I’m doing a bit more on Surin Charity for the first time in weeks. I must thank in detail the good folks of Ramsgate who’ve donated to the charity: photo s and info here www.surincharityschool.org I want to finish of various bits and pieces at that school: sports kit, musical instruments, swings/slide and a swimming pool. £5k. Can you help?
• Also developing schools in the poorest nations in Africa and Asia
• Great British Sports: the Premiership in Asia is huge: Arsenal, Chelsea, ManU etc. Even the rest of the Football League in the back of beyond in Asia you can be sat in a Stoke City bar or watching Ipswich live. Also cycling and swimming and golf. All Great British Sports. Nothing done.
