MPs income the great gravy train, Turner and other Sunday ramblings

The average MP costs us about £4,000 per week, this figure is based on the current annual salary for an MP is £64,766 and an average £120,000 per annum in expenses, with 645 MPs this a tidy sum.

I also gather they can claim for items costing up to £250 without having to show a receipt.

I would say that the average man in the street struggling to survive the recession is none too pleased about this state of affairs but frankly it’s only the tip of the iceberg when compared to civil servants pay and expenses.

I was chatting to a KCC IT officer yesterday who evidently found yesterdays post rather amusing, something he said that I found interesting is that there is an attitude within KCC of Turner Contemporary at any price. He said there seems to be no limit to the funds available for this project and that a lot of KCC officers that have to keep within budgets were getting heartily sick of the project.

This is a simple case of government spending our money inappropriately, the whole system is upside down and the state of Margate is a reflection of poor governance at local and national levels.

The problem with Turner Contemporary is that government says a pretty much bottomless pot of money is available to regenerate Margate provided that this money is spent on the arts.

Of course the money should have been spent on revitalising Dreamland to a state of the art modern theme park and a new indoor swimming pool near to the beach, but once again back to the way government money is spent, grants are only available for a historic amusement site and much of the prime leisure site in the town will be lost to residential development.

It’s a similar problem with Ramsgate and the Pleasurama site once a seaside town loses its main leisure sites to mostly residential development and associated car parking there is no going back.

The resource that we have to offer that other towns haven’t is our natural coastline and the only way that we can compete with other seaside towns is by having better leisure facilities very close to our main leisure beaches, it’s not rocket science.

We have the meeting at the airport to receive the report on night flying in a couple of days, the problem with the airport is that it has bumbled along for years with different operators trying to be competitive by operating far less stringent environmental controls than would be acceptable elsewhere and this looks like a move to continue down the same path.

I have given up with trying to get TDC to publish the Ramsgate parish council elections list of candidates on a HTML website with proper tags for search engines and have done it myself see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts2/id104.htm do feel free to link to it. If TDC ever get round to doing a proper job of publishing it I wonder if they will copy my source code.

I am off to by a TV some furniture and food to eat on my business expenses so I imagine that the Inland Revenue will prosecute me and I may be out of circulation for a while.