I’m afraid to say that I just couldn’t seem to squeeze out
the words for the Manston DCO, TDC Local Plan issue yesterday. It’s a very
tangled issue and I do wonder if there is a place in it for anyone who would be
prepared to change their mind about anything, related to any of it.
The last couple of weeks have produced various bombshell
statements related to the antics at our local council and Manston, but I think one of the
most important is the question. Does rejecting the local plan mean a
considerable reduction of the impact local people can have on the future of
Thanet?
This is based around the idea that there would have been
consultation stages to the local planmand theoretically local people should have been able to
influence things like where the housing, shops, roads, stations etc go. In practice
it’s a bit difficult to tell if, for instance, someone living say in London –
and of course someone who is prepared to go through the rigmarole of filling in
the online forms, would have any more or less influence than someone who
actually lives here.
There is of course the whole area of using lawyers in
the consultation business, the main reason I don’t do this, although I hate
online forms, is my lawyer charges £195 per hour plus VAT to fill in forms.
So whether there has been a serious impact on our democratic wosisname I don't really know.
The Manston DCO Consultation Sessions are next week and the invites they were supposed to be sending out don't seem to have turned up. This has the tricky implication that because the invites not turning up may invalidate the consultation - no one knows if it worth taking the trouble, or paying a lawyer to fill in the online forms, turn up at the sessions and so on.
To me this sounds a bit like, “a job for everyone, a
car for everyone and then the small print about killing people.
I have put it to a few different people and replies
vary between, oh well we all got to die sometimes, to I told you so.
Next this spray can writing in what I take to be part of the Canterbury conservation area
All in all influence of local people on local government
isn’t what it says on the packet. So if you have a foreign company and can see
a bit of an earner here in Thanet, you can pay clever people to fill out online
forms for you.
The Manston issue for me centres on this lump of land, which
during the thirty years I have had the bookshop here in Ramsgate has changed
hands for various amounts of money between around twenty million pounds and one
pound, actually being worth around a thousand million pounds as building land.
So whether there has been a serious impact on our democratic wosisname I don't really know.
The Manston DCO Consultation Sessions are next week and the invites they were supposed to be sending out don't seem to have turned up. This has the tricky implication that because the invites not turning up may invalidate the consultation - no one knows if it worth taking the trouble, or paying a lawyer to fill in the online forms, turn up at the sessions and so on.
The Manston bombshell was, as I think everyone with the
slightest interest in the future of the Manston Airport site is aware, was the bit in
the new consultation documents published by RiverOak, where it seems to say
that RiverOak’s team are going to work out how many local people the pollution created
by their freight hub will kill.
What it actually says in RiverOak’s document is phrased in a
rather strange way, here is the quote. “There is health evidence drawn from the
scientific literature that allows potential impacts on mortality and rates of
certain diseases due to changes in noise and air pollutant exposure to be
predicted quantitatively (in numerical terms). The scientific evidence shows
that, depending on the level of noise or air pollution concentration, these may
affect diseases of the heart, lungs and circulation system, mental health and
wellbeing, and the overall risk of premature death. Whether there is a health
risk and the magnitude of any impact on public health depends on the size of
change in noise or air pollution and the population affected.”
To me it looks like the person who wrote this both didn't like what they were writing and partly couldn't believe it, to me "to be predicted quantitatively (in numerical terms)" seems to be saying they are now going to work out how many people they intend to kill.
To me it looks like the person who wrote this both didn't like what they were writing and partly couldn't believe it, to me "to be predicted quantitatively (in numerical terms)" seems to be saying they are now going to work out how many people they intend to kill.
As someone who was once what I can loosely only call a type
of mechanic, I think the other thing that occurs to me, but may not occur to
some other people is the difference between finding something is killing people
and trying to do something about it and starting out on a course of action that
you know will kill people.
In the world of mechanics, asbestos went along this sort of
road and it was quite some time after it was discovered that asbestos dust
kills people and when it stopped being used, particularly for building schools
and hospitals.
I think if RSP, RiverOak or whatever you like to call them
were to say to us that they were going to build a huge airport at Manston and
that all the hangers, walkways, departure lounges excreta were going to be
built of asbestos it would be fairly easy to sort out.
The particulate air pollution which is what most of this
relates to is a bit of new kid on the block and the people who are of the
looking at this, mechanics of a sort, have already told the government to scrap
diesel cars.
I still read journals and it looks as though it is
particulate air pollution that is likely to be the main cause of alzheimer's
and dementia, well apart from getting old that is.
The arguments around this one are not simple and clear cut
like the are for asbestos, which for the most part are just use some other
material. We haven’t developed a large and therefore economical freight plane
that doesn’t pump out huge amounts of particulates, we haven’t worked out a way
of putting a filter, catalytic converter, wosisname on the back of a jet
engine.
Coming back to the council, something that I have
never understood about the current UKIP administration is why they didn’t put
up a leader with a bit of a history as a supporter of UKIP, instead of Chris
who mostly had a history of being a prominent local Conservative, does anyone
have any ideas on this one?
I went to Canterbury Cathedral for a bit today
and did more to my watercolour painting Becket’s martyrdom, some issues with
the perspective, this is a problem in the area between what you can do with a
painting that assumes you can’t rotate your head so it has the conventional
vanishing points and a paining like this which assumes you can so it has
several more.
Next the old local photos Ramsgate Margate and Broadstairs, including some with writing on them
The whole business of Canterbury Cathedral is something that
I find very difficult to understand, it is certainly improving as a site of
major historic interest and as a world class tourist attraction. As a place of
worship I am not so sure, it doesn’t seem to have a quiet bit anywhere, which I
sort of feel is pretty much essential to a place of worship. But like Manston
and the council it is much more complicated and the solutions don’t look easy.
I may add a bit more to this post.
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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.