Tuesday 10 January 2012

Ferry Thoughts and pictures.

 With the end of Sea France and Flybe pulling out of Manston I was thinking what a tenuous business the short haul passenger travel business is, so have bunged up some pictures of earlier contenders in this part of the world.    
It always surprises me that the Ramsgate to Ostende ferry is viable and with Sea France not being seen as viable even by the French courts it does make one wonder how a channel crossing that is much further can work as well as it evidently does.       

I have bunged in a fairly mild complaint to the council about their tourism websites, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/112/ the idea being not to waste too much officer time answering it, but in the hope that they will try and get the situation sorted out.

I used the council’s automated complaints form, something that didn’t work that well last time I used it, so it will be interesting to see if it works this time. 

Yet another press release from the Conservative group, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2012/01/labour-punish-broadstairs-in.html strange how after all those years in power and a decided reluctance to communicate what they were up to, they seem to have gone critical.

Long may it last is my view and hopefully next time they are back in power they will continue to publish their view of what is going on at the council.   

Something that really does concern me is the extent to which council decisions are aimed at political spite towards parts of Thanet where the opposition holds the majority.

Certainly the Conservative press release seems to suggest that this is how the business with Broadstairs community centre is being viewed by the Conservative group.

My own guess here is that the people for the community centre completely messed up by not taking part in the asset disposal consultation process.

However it is fairly strange that with Broadstairs just down the road from me I genuinely don’t have anything like an unbiased view on what really happened here.    

I guess if the Conservative group had made much of an effort to communicate with us locals before they went out of power, then we may have had some more idea of the ins and outs of the issue.

Not that I am saying that any of the local political groups or any of the local councils have mastered using the internet to reach out to people.

I suppose that in terms of success it is the local councillors blogs that come closest, with the only real consistency coming from Thanet Life. 






8 comments:

  1. Whatever happened to all the Sally Line boats when they ceased trading, the Sally vessel looks more modern than the current operator's fleet?

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  2. I read about two offers to keep the company going, one was denied due to anti-competition regulation and the other as "too many staff would be made redundant"... Given that everyone has or soon will be made redundant don't those decisions now seem flawed?

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  3. Rob. Don't believe everything you read. Seafrance failed because they were uncompetitive. They employed nearly three times as many crew as any of their competitors - crew that went on strike at the drop of a chapeau.- and used the several illegal subsidies that they received from the French government to reduce their prices below cost. One of their ships has been built with a further illegal subsidy. Their French staff have frankly been relying on government cave-in for too long

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  4. The Transeuropa ferry with 2 funnels that serves Ramsgate is the old Sally Sky ferry.

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  5. Got any more great pictures of the Royal Daffodil pleasure steamer.... if so would love to see them. Many thanks
    Paul (wakegeol@globalnet.co.uk)

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  6. Interesting site,and I notice that you have used three of my paintings as illustrations as well, nice to see them getting a bit of an airing on the web !
    All the best ,
    Ian H Boyd
    Hillcrest ,South Africa
    ianb@ledom.co.za

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    Replies
    1. Ian apologies for the lack of accreditation I had assumed they were contemporary pictures, until I had a closer look.

      If you email me michaelchild@aol.com I will add any accreditation text and links you want.

      I usually publish several hundred local interest pictures in a month and don’t usually slip up as badly as this.

      Delete

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.