Some Old Pictures of Ramsgate and Margate and a low key ramble.

 A steady sort of day at work here at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate
link to photos of the books we put out
The usual steady stream of local history questions.

There was a fair amount of comment relating to yesterday's post about Pleasurama, on the Facebook groups I linked it to.

Not really any more information, I have written to the council on numerous occasions about the site but I don't see any progress of that much point in writing again.

 The usual mix of old local photos today, some you will have seen before but some I hope you won't have.

The old issue of what could be done about out local government is drifting about again and from the point of view of the electorate the only option on the table would be an elected leader referendum petition.

 The old problem of Ramsgate not getting a fair share comes up over and over, whether having a council leader elected by local people would bring up a different leader and or a better council than the present system where the leader is chosen by the councilors is a bit uncertain.

 Politically the party system doesn't seem to work very well at local council level and I think that's the crux of the problem.

with this sort of a post I'm not really trying to put over an opinion, more trying to clarify thoughts and ideas, the main issues for me with our tiers of local government are along the lines of

county council KCC too focused on West Kent..

district council TDC too focused on Margate and a transport infrastructure for the 1970s

town council RTC too much involvement in a long and expensive lease for The Customs House.

But I guess these are just my perceptions. Certainly Ramsgate and for that matter Margate seemed to thrive better when they had their own councils, before the formation of TDC.

Westgate used to be called Westonville

The problem is that Margate and Ramsgate have been rival towns for hundreds of years, added to this there is nothing we the ordinary taxpayers can do to change them both mainly being run by TDC.

As I said the only thing we do have a say in is whether the leader is elected by us or chosen by the councillors. An elected leader would be a political mayor of Thanet, nothing to do with the ceremonial mayors we have at the moment.

A lot of the problem is that the party political system means that when people vote for a councillor they vote for the same party they would for a parliamentary election.

Politics is a funny thing, the first thing I thought when Boris announced building a new hospital in Canterbury was, will it result in no A&E at QEQM

BREXIT is still grinding away in the background, I wonder if there is anything I could do to prepare the bookshop for a no deal scenario, but I don't think there is.

We only sell a tiny proportion of our books online - these are mostly ones our walk in customers didn't buy, but are too good to suffer a 5p or 10p fate in our ongoing sale. I guess our export turnover is around 0.5% of our overall turnover and about 75% of that goes to English speaking countries outside of the EU. 

I guess the main impact will be on shop sales related to how many of my customers work for companies that won't be able to function if no deal is what we get.