Looking at Thanet Facebook today resign seems to be the
universal solution to all the problems at TDC. Conversely what seems to be singularly lacking are any suggestions as to which of the other councilors should take over as leader of the council.
There is of course another solution here which is that we could change the system of selecting a leader for TDC. At the moment the councillors select the leader from one of the councillors and the leader selects the cabinet members. This results in a system of favours that produce lucrative allowances for the selected leader and the cabinet members the leader selects.
The other option is that we can petition for a system where we elect the leader of the council, I think this may be a good idea for Thanet, or at least worth a try.
The problem with local democracy is that while we are supposed to vote for local people to represent us, for the most part we get to choose from people that we have never heard of. This is compounded by holding the local elections on the same day as the national elections, so people - given a list of names they have never heard of - inclined to vote for the people standing for the party they voted for to represent us in parliament.
Perhaps the voting age would help, there is often talk of lowering the minimum age from 18 to 16, but does anyone think there should be a maximum age?
With Thanet District Council, the majority vote last time around was for UKIP candidates, although there wasn't really anything that the council could do on the in or out of Europe issue, in some way UKIP was thought of as the party for saving Manston Airport.
There is of course another solution here which is that we could change the system of selecting a leader for TDC. At the moment the councillors select the leader from one of the councillors and the leader selects the cabinet members. This results in a system of favours that produce lucrative allowances for the selected leader and the cabinet members the leader selects.
The other option is that we can petition for a system where we elect the leader of the council, I think this may be a good idea for Thanet, or at least worth a try.
The problem with local democracy is that while we are supposed to vote for local people to represent us, for the most part we get to choose from people that we have never heard of. This is compounded by holding the local elections on the same day as the national elections, so people - given a list of names they have never heard of - inclined to vote for the people standing for the party they voted for to represent us in parliament.
Perhaps the voting age would help, there is often talk of lowering the minimum age from 18 to 16, but does anyone think there should be a maximum age?
With Thanet District Council, the majority vote last time around was for UKIP candidates, although there wasn't really anything that the council could do on the in or out of Europe issue, in some way UKIP was thought of as the party for saving Manston Airport.
So there are a whole group who seem to think that Chris Wells resignation will
save the airport and instead of having nasty polluting houses or a nasty
polluting airfreight hub we will be back in 1967 when what? Actually one flight
took off from Manston and flew into a mountain killing everyone onboard https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19670603-1
and another one, well I guess you get the general gist.
You can overdo aviation enthusiasm at Manston and at the
moment the problem remains that while there are great many people who would
like to see Manston Airport reopen, the issue that the pollution generated by
an airfreight hub is likely to kill a lot of people means that any aviation use
isn’t the answer.
My personal understanding of saving the airport would mean an airport for passengers to fly from, an airport servicing local freight demands has issues related to common sense that the people supporting it don't seem to find easy to explain.
So here we are with calls of resign and the system we have at the moment means that a new leader would have to be chosen from the existing councillors, so who would make a good replacement?
On more mundane matters I have been working on one of the window displays in the bookshop so that it will hold more books and that the books in it will be easier for me to get out when people ask to look at them.
The other window holds books that are priced between 50p and 5p and I have opened it up so that customers can just walk into it and pick them up themselves.
My personal understanding of saving the airport would mean an airport for passengers to fly from, an airport servicing local freight demands has issues related to common sense that the people supporting it don't seem to find easy to explain.
So here we are with calls of resign and the system we have at the moment means that a new leader would have to be chosen from the existing councillors, so who would make a good replacement?
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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.