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

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...

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, ...

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 j...

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 fr...

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 ai...

Marvellous to see East Kent’s role in Waterloo celebrated at Broadstairs with the landing of the Napoleonic Eagles from HMS Northumberland on their way to London to declare the victory over Napoleon 200 years ago. A shame that Wellington’s headquarters in Ramsgate and the Arches built for the embarkation to Waterloo were ignored but there we are. And Walmer Castle near Deal Wellington’s retirement home will be celebrated in the future which is good. East Kent really should be thinking though of commemorating Waterloo more substantially with an Eagles Museum for example. And fun to see Nigel Farage turning up at Waterloo described as “a man in a pinstripe suit drinking beer from a plastic cup and joking with Napoleon”. After the Farage defeat in last month’s election and a month into the UKIP district council it looks like the wheels are coming off in slow-motion. Nationally this week UKIP dissolved into more bickering - with Farage’s deputy Suzanne Evans both insulting him a...

David Cameron at the G7 Summit cites both the "cancer of corruption" that needs exposing and "disease detectives" to combat pandemics. Clearly that's relevant in Kent with the silence around the Pleasurama BVI tax haven over the years - surely Bayford as an accountant and senior cabinet member can cast light on this? Or the strange issue of Edwina Crowley the TDC property chief setting up her own property company cited on Ed Targett's blog. Or Infratil and the missing monitors and fines at Manston: several million quid ignored by the council but without a vote. As secretive as the Port multimillion writeoffs of our tax or MOD Fire pollution. Or the laughable disastrous delays again at Dreamland. Money that could have been spent on say the Cyberknife hitech removal of cancer tumours sprouting from the lack of pollution controls or the MIT medical mirror to improve health. All the more peculiar as Gloag is currently in the USA citing her billion...