Friday 16 October 2009

Slash and burn; a quick round up for the blog.


As I have been concentrating on Pleasurama some things have been missed, here are a few of them.

Ramsgate Town council Minutes Town Council 05 October 2009 published see http://www.ramsgatetc.kentparishes.gov.uk/default.cfm?pid=minutes&minutesid=3696 if I have one big gripe with the new town council website http://www.ramsgatetc.kentparishes.gov.uk/ it is that it has no feeds, in other words there is no way of getting it to inform you or another website when something new has appeared on it.

Sticking with council websites the new Thanet District Council website is up and running http://www.thanet.gov.uk/ it is a great improvement on the old one although it still has lots of faults, most of which I take to be teething troubles.

If you write websites you will appreciate the enormous amount of work that has gone into it so I am reluctant to be critical while they sort their problems out.

My biggest gripes are that the Reports and Minutes part of the site which is where most of the new material is published is almost impossible to find and has no feeds so that you can produce a live link that changes when they publish something new.

That the licensing applications that are published in the local press don’t get published on the council’s website.

That planning drawings don’t have a liner scale on them so you cant actually tell the dimensions of anything.

Better stop here as I want to encourage the improvements, not snd the IT department off to top themselves.

One funny thing though is the councils website is supposed to tick you off if you haven’t got the latest version of Internet Explorer, however once you have downloaded and installed the latest version you will find that some of the councils new web pages don’t work properly in it.

Nuff of that here is the latest missive from Clive Hart

Copy of a formal letter passed to the Chairman of Thanet District Council
at Thursday evenings meeting of the council (where Cllr. Broadhurst once
more failed to attend) demanding a full enquiry into the Conservative
councillors actual home/residence during his years as a councillor at TDC.

Cllr. Clive Hart

28 Clarence Avenue, Cliftonville,

Margate, Kent. CT9 3DP

Leader of the Opposition - TDC

15/10/2009

Dear Cllr. Sheldrick

Since the local elections in 2007 the council has been ridiculed in the press and on the internet because of the behaviour of Conservative councillor Stephen Broadhurst who has apparently spent a great deal of time on the other side of the world in Panama.

On 30th July, at a one-to-one meeting with Cllr. Ezekiel shortly before the TDC Leader left for his summer holidays, I asked him exactly what he was going to do about Cllr. Broadhurst, his apparent lack of availability for the residents of Dane Valley Ward and the excessive time he spends in Panama? Cllr. Ezekiel responded with the words "if and when it should become a problem, I'll ask him for his resignation".



On the morning of the 27th August, in a written communication I then formally called on Conservative Deputy Leader - Roger Latchford - to take the action that Cllr. Ezekiel appeared extremely hesitant to take himself and call for the resignation of his Conservative colleague - Cllr. Stephen Broadhurst.



On the afternoon of 27th August, Cllr. Latchford phoned me to inform me that Cllr. Stephen Broadhurst would now be resigning his post at long last. Cllr. Latchford's actual words were "the resignation letter may take a little time; it's got to come by snail mail from Panama".



On the 4th September, the TDC Chief Executive confirmed in writing to Council Members that he had received a letter of resignation from Cllr. Broadhurst and that it would be effective from the 30th September.



On the morning of the 2nd October I contacted TDC to ask why Cllr. Broadhurst's resignation of 30th September was not on display at the TDC offices.



On the afternoon of the 2nd October Councillor Broadhurst's resignation letter was announced ineffective by TDC.

I was later informed that Cllr. Broadhurst has since supplied his resignation yet again (that is - since the 2nd October) but that it was this time dated for a day, well after tonight’s council meeting.

With the current feeling in the country as a whole regarding MP’s and their expenses, I therefore write to demand a full enquiry into Councillor Stephen Broadhurst, his actual home/residence during his years as a councillor at TDC and up to what point his allowance will or is being paid by TDC.

To restore any kind of confidence in TDC it is essential that these facts are made public ASAP!

Regards

Cllr. Clive Hart

(Leader of the Opposition).

Tel. 01843 298770

Mob. 07980 652 896”

Not a good time to be a politician, what with the prime minister having to pay back the money he (is nicked from the taxpayer the right word here) and one thing and another.

Every time I have dealings with our local politicians recently my mind is drawn back to the one that said the other day that he thought it was ok to let council properties out to Satanists. It makes me think that I should do some sort of opinion pole, you know the type of thing; put the following in order of those you think should be most publicly acceptable, concentration camp guards, sex offenders, politicians, Satanists, war criminals, vivisectionists, neo nazis. Oh well one could go on, make your own list up if you like, the youf of today said “na no satanists ceremonies in Fanet they all went away as they couldn’t find no virgins to sacrifice.

Anyway the dreaded Pleasurama still looms and I must get back to asking the right people the right questions, doing another post about it and answering the comments.

Trouble is that other minor issues pale into insignificance next to the prospect of something like the cliff collapsing on a building with over a thousand people in it and at the moment I can’t get the reassurances from the experts involved that this isn’t a distinct probability.

Oh yes I nearly forgot this one from Norman Thomas:

“IMS PRODUCTIONS
11 Grosvenor Rd, Broadstairs CT10 2BT
Tel 01843 604 253

PRESS RELEASE
OCTOBER 2009

THANET GOES TO WAR IN NEW FILM

Thanet erupts in war in a sensational new film which gets its first ever screening in Broadstairs on Sunday October 25th at 5pm.

The film, a black comedy called “The Singing Cowboy”, was shot on location in Thanet and features a cast of local Thanet people.

It tells the story of the singer Wesley Wheatsheaf , played by Steven Todd from Broadstairs. Wesley joins the US army in the hope of becoming the new Elvis Presley, but then finds himself in a deadly war zone

Scenes for the film were shot in Ramsgate, Margate and Broadstairs and in rural locations across the isle.

The film is the first ever feature film of Broadstairs-based production outfit, IMS productions.

Norman Thomas of IMS said: “Thanet was just great as the setting for the film – it’s got so many kinds of interesting and atmospheric places. Bits of Margate look like they’ve been a war zone for years!”

But there were unexpected finds, too. Mr Thomas said: “For example, we needed somewhere to be a prison cell and we thought that would hard, but then we found a wonderfully atmospheric cellar under a pub in one of Thanet’s towns which fitted just right.”

The film features an array of extraordinary characters including a supernatural colonel, a sadistic female torturer and a seductive con-woman.

The special screening at Broadstairs’ Palace Cinema will give people a unique sneak preview of the film – and a chance to suggest improvements. Mr Thomas said: “We will be looking for people to give feedback on the film. Any ideas and opinions will be received with thanks.”

“The Singing Cowboy” gets a special preview screening at 5pm on Thursday October 25 DATE CORRECTION: the film is on Sunday 25th at 5pm, Palace Cinema Broadstairs. at the Palace Cinema, Harbour St, Broadstairs. Admission is £4 for members of Thanet Film Society, £5 for non-members. Telephone 01843 604253 for more details."

I have used the picture attached to illustrate this post it looks a bit more promising than Holly Wood, I wont say what the youf of today had to say about that one, reminds me of when I thought I would test the filtering on one of the specialist websites that my youngest children belong to by commenting with a swear word and got one of them banned for 28 days.

7 comments:

  1. Michael,

    I think a bit of cynasism has crept into your comments regarding MP's expenses.
    I agree that some MP's are guilty of blantant fraud and some redirected expenses to spend on things they knew they couldn't claim for. However, many MP's (the majority) including the Prime Minister claimed for things the system told them they could claim for and now they are being put in the same catergory as the fiddlers by moving the goal posts which is unfair.

    ReplyDelete
  2. People holding public office should know what is acceptable.
    The fact that the system allowed many to claim for items to which a lay person would define as excessive wholly undermines the majority of MPs and councillors.
    They created a structure which they themselves policed and many took full advantage. To say the system allowed it is no excuse!
    The system is corrupt and we shouldn`t forget it.
    What has changed since the scandal broke? Could you have imagined a day when we had to say thanks to the Daily Telegraph, without whom the story would not have broke?

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  3. If the expenses fell within the rules they should probably not be demanded back.When however these politicians are busy resurecting the never very dead national sport of blaming the poor as benefit scroungers it leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.

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  4. Tony you may be right, but from the perspective of one of the self employed saying that you didn’t know that they had changed the rules because they didn’t tell you is no defence.

    If I had claimed for the sort of thing our prime minister did on my expenses and got caught at the very least the fines would have probably bankrupted me.

    To all of you the thing that most worries me, that comes out of all of this are my concerns about peoples motives for entering politics, it is either to line their own pockets or to benefit the community.

    What some of them seem to be trying to get us to believe is that it is both.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Michael,

    It has always intrigued me why certain people enter politics and what are their motives.

    My motives are plain and simple it is class war politics and if the opinion polls are accurate we are going to see a lot of this in the next few years.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  7. 12.41 sorry anonymous comments that are potentially libellous have to be deleted, you may consider that it is this sort of thing that causes blog administrators to apply comment moderation, something that stifles debate.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.