Monday 14 March 2016

Will Canterbury, Ashford, Dover, Shepway and Thanet councils merge to form a super council and a ramble about local council politics and Manston.

I suppose the current talks between these councils are one of the main local news items this week, here is the link to the Kent Online article http://www.kentonline.co.uk/canterbury/news/momentum-grows-for-merger-to-92513/ 

Thanet council politics and stances are also on the change at the moment, particularly within the Thanet Labour group.

Last Monday I did a blog post which was mainly about the TDC Thanet Labour group changing their stance on the Manston airport site to supporting the site owners, who also own Discovery Park at Sandwich and are the area’s largest employer, in their redevelopment into a mixed use light industry and housing development.

Now the labour group has had a change of leadership Margate councillor Iris Johnston, who has stepped down from the post due to ill health to Broadstairs councillor Jenny Matterface.

How this relates to Manston is difficult to tell, obviously in terms of health and life expectancy Broadstairs, being up wind from Manston would be significantly affected were Manston to become an airfreight hub.

With Manston we seem to be generating three different paths of support.

UKIP

Seem to favour some sort of airport there, based on finding a new indemnity partner for TDC to mount a cpo.

Labour

Seem to be favouring the current owners redevelopment into a mixed-use light industry and housing development.

Conservative

Seem to be favouring only redevelopment by American real estate hedge fund managers RiverOak into an airfreight hub.

There is also The Democratic Independent Group at TDC, which seem to be the political wing of Save Manston Airport and seem to broadly want the same as the Conservative group do for Manston.


I suppose that as Manston has been the dominant factor at TDC since the elections it’s very difficult to tell if there are any other differences between the political parties at TDC.

Oh and finally the council are planning to replace the plaque commemorating the opening of Ramsgate's Westcliff has apparently gone missing and will be replaced by the council.

It seemed they didn't have a photo of it and it took me all of lunchtime to find one, if anyone has a better one please let me know.

cropped out it isn't much better


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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.