Friday the thirteenth, an auspicious day for Thanet District Council? Another councillor resigns the whip and other rambles about our little isle.

 The situation at the moment seems to be that we have now got 5 independent councillors as Ian Driver has resigned from the Thanet Labour group, I have to admit that this quite surprised me.

My reasoning being, having done this, how would a socialist in Thanet ever get elected as a councillor again without the support of the local Labour group? Perhaps I am missing something here but to me it seems that in Thanet there isn’t much political ground left of Labour or right of Conservative. I don’t think that standing as an independent candidate in the ground outside has much mileage.

 Do I think that these councillors that resign the whip should stand for re-election? Well frankly no I don’t think that party politics of the conventional sort is appropriate at district council level and I always vote for the individual and not the party.

At the moment I suppose what I want my councillors to be doing regardless of their political party is to try and get the best for the local area and to try to achieve something in the direction of what local people want in terms of the direction the council is moving in.

 Most of the local people I speak to are against the live animal exports and see to see Ian Driver more as a force in this area than a force for the political extreme left.

I guess this week most of us want to see our councillors supporting the council’s bid to get Dreamland and turn it into a visitor attraction and I am told that the lack of numbers at the public enquiry is being seen used by legal team who want to develop the site as mostly housing, as an indicator of lack of interest in the heritage leisure park.

 Obviously an important factor here is does this defection mean that the local Conservative group have a realistic chance of winning a confidence vote in the council and regaining Conservative control.

A busy Friday in the bookshop for me today, so I haven’t managed to get out and get a Gazette, obviously the leaked information about EKO Eurokent is of great interest to me, so here is the link to that story http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Councils-property-firm-lost-pound-300-000/story-14412242-detail/story.html

 I guess that some of you are wondering what EKO is all about, clicking on this link may help a bit http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/search/label/Eurokent as it takes you to the posts I put up when trying to find out from a somewhat reluctant council.

Like the Dreamland site this is about putting more housing where perhaps housing isn’t appropriate, only in this case the property developer seems to be our local councils and the land seems to be prime agricultural land and our children’s playing fields.    

I spent a fair bit of yesterday evening looking at the equality issues that John Worrow is now to champion, see http://www.stonewall.org.uk/what_we_do/2583.asp and am coming to the conclusion that there are still some very real issues here.

I suppose the problem for me is that being a white heterosexual male I don’t often come up against anything remotely like discrimination, I was one disabled but that was a long time ago when discrimination hadn’t really entered into the world of awareness.

Being in wheelchair meant being a cripple, if the disabled word had come along it was a new one, homosexuality was still theoretically illegal and the word gay meant carefree and happy.   

In the world of secondhand bookselling where almost everyone involved is fairly eccentric, I don’t think there is very much discrimination, certainly books have been a major factor in changing attitudes towards discrimination.

Although there are areas where there are surprising gaps, for instance you may wish to try and name three famous American feminist novelists, this isn’t as easy as you first would suppose. 

So now we come to what really bugs me about Ian Driver and that is total lack of any attempt to communicate why he has resigned the Labour whip to us lot the Thanet voters.

He has a blog http://redthanet.blogspot.com/ a twitter account https://twitter.com/#!/ianddriver so why not tell us, the local people what he is up to and why?


Mike Harrison is saying that this is a flowerpot issue see http://newingtonblogspot.blogspot.com/2012/01/expected-resignation-happens-again.html there are other indicators online see http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/back/Wnext6/Slp.html

I think and of course we won’t really know until he tells us that What Ian is against is the floral display budget about £20,000 and the events budget about £165,000, it think what he is saying is that there should be no council funded events and no council funded flowerpots next year, as this costs the council £185,000. This has to be put into the perspective of the council’s overall budget of about £22,500,000 which means that roughly for every thousand pounds the council spend about £1 is spent on events and flowers.

We now of course come to what happens at next Thursdays council meeting to approve the budget, see http://tdc-mg-dmz.thanet.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=141&MId=2612&Ver=4

Where for instance do the Conservatives stand, do they vote against the budget, because it is a Labour one on principle? I suppose the answer to that would be yes.

The rest of the independents, where do they stand, I would guess that they had considerable influence in the formation of this budget.

There is also of course where Ian stands, obtaining from the vote because he doesn’t want the flower pots is one thing, but obtaining on a vote of confidence, if this then means he lets the Conservatives get in could be something to live down for him.

So now we come to the really tricky bit and that is what are the solutions open to trying to deal with the serious problems that Thanet has.

Here in Ramsgate many of the problems that we have relate to council owned properties, Pleasurama, casino, museum, Albion House, Westcliff Hall and so on, so I suppose many of us here are waiting to see if the Labour group stay in power for any length of time whether any of these problems will get solved.

There is a perception in the town that many of these problems were related to spite towards a town that has mostly Labour councillors and I guess the Conservative stance that the business with the community centre in Broadstairs was an act of spite by the new Labour administration towards a town where the majority of councillors are Conservative lends more weight to this perception.

It does look as though Ian may have quite a lot on his plate at the moment as I think there were some interesting ramifications at last nights live animal export protest at Port Ramsgate, I think this facebook thingy will open even if you are not a member of it http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stop-Live-Exports-From-The-Port-of-Ramsgate/205331499512961 let me know if it doesn’t and I will fiddle with it.

I will ramble on here as the day progresses