Parliamentary election in Thanet South and a bit of a ramble

Well it’s exactly 70 years since VE day and here in Thanet we seem to have had some small effect on the UK’s relationship with Europe.

It looks as though UKIP will now be going off down the road towards proportional representation so popular in Europe, there is more irony inasmuch as at the same time that UKIP did so well in the KCC election the electorate also decided not to adopt a different voting system.

The Conservatives would have been my second choice this time around and mainly because I wanted an MP who lived in and understood Thanet’s problems. However there are distinct advantages to having an MP who is part of a majority government and hopefully Thanet will benefit from this.

Business wise, the best you can get is usually the nearest to what you have just had, combined with an experienced majority government that is likely to be decisive. Certainly today’s takings in my bookshop reflected the upwards trend that has been pretty much consistent since the beginning of last summer. People with the confidence to spend their money on non-essentials, if you consider books to be not essential.

Tomorrow we should get the results for the district council elections, I guess the swing towards the Conservatives may mean they get a working majority, although just how much the political part of TDC influences what the officers would have done anyway is a bit of a moot point. I don’t say this particularly unkindly as the council has to do a lot with a very limited budget and there isn’t really much room for anything but essentials. Personally I think Labour could have done better in South Thanet if some of the TDC decisions had been different, but this wasn’t the case.

Lurking in the background is the TDC cpo to turn Manston into an airfreight hub under the guise of saving a regional airport, I guess where the Labour lead council really messed up on this one was not holding a proper and regulated public consultation on the issue.  Perhaps the new TDC administration will do this although I rather doubt it.

I would say the main perceived problem in Thanet is TDC and much of this relates to the recourses the council does have not being spread fairly across the district. You can always do a where in Ramsgate and which Ramsgate Mayor on the picture.