If you live in Ramsgate, Broadstairs or a couple of the
Thanet villages then you will get and extra ballot paper as well as the one to
vote for an MP and the one to vote for TDC councillors.
I had rather a bizarre conversation about this with one of
my customers yesterday. The gist of what this lady said is. I got postal voting
papers for Moses Montefiore Parish. They had exactly the same candidates on as
the TDC one, as Moses Montefiore isn’t a parish, I put them through the
shredder.
This may have been a bit of a bad move, as this particular
ballot paper, which says The Parish of Ramsgate on it is actually the one for
Ramsgate Town council, which is something you pay extra council tax for.
Here in Ramsgate we petitioned for and then voted in a
referendum to pay more for a town council, mainly to represent Ramsgate’s
interests to the Margate dominated Thanet District Council.
The big problem is that most people when the come to vote
just tend think of the council and not of us having three different councils.
This means that in practice what we got last time around was a Labour town
council and a Labour district council. Frankly this didn’t seem to work that
well for Ramsgate, for instance the district council are converting what was
probably the biggest shop in Ramsgate town centre into social housing. I don’t think
this sort of nonsense would have happened if the district council wasn’t of the
same political party as the town council.
Another example is that the district council have moved the
town centre rubbish collection from 6am on a quiet shopping day to around 11.30 am on market day. Now I understand that the district council has made a huge
investment in Margate and that anything they can do to encourage people not to
go to Ramsgate in the hope they will go to Margate and support Dreamland and
the old town will help justify this. But I don’t really think this sort of
nonsense would happen if the town council was run by a different political
party from the town council.
We are very lucky here in Thanet as we have experience of all three of the political parties that are likely to win seats here at most levels of government.
We have had mostly UKIP councillors representing us at Kent County Council for nearly two years with evident benefits for Thanet.
We have had UKP European Members of Parliament for nearly two years with evident benefits for Thanet.
We have a had Labour Thanet District Council for the last roughly four years and before that around eight years of Conservative dominance, with two of the Conservative cabinet members from those years now standing for UKIP, all providing great benefits for Thanet.
Whatever happens with the local elections I am sure will be a great improvement for some people.
I have added this picture and hopefully link to the right Twitter post https://twitter.com/cmackinlay/status/591980912319004672?utm_source=fb&fb_ref=Default&utm_content=591980912319004672&utm_campaign=cmackinlay&utm_medium=fb
We are very lucky here in Thanet as we have experience of all three of the political parties that are likely to win seats here at most levels of government.
We have had mostly UKIP councillors representing us at Kent County Council for nearly two years with evident benefits for Thanet.
We have had UKP European Members of Parliament for nearly two years with evident benefits for Thanet.
We have a had Labour Thanet District Council for the last roughly four years and before that around eight years of Conservative dominance, with two of the Conservative cabinet members from those years now standing for UKIP, all providing great benefits for Thanet.
Whatever happens with the local elections I am sure will be a great improvement for some people.
I have added this picture and hopefully link to the right Twitter post https://twitter.com/cmackinlay/status/591980912319004672?utm_source=fb&fb_ref=Default&utm_content=591980912319004672&utm_campaign=cmackinlay&utm_medium=fb
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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.