What are you drinking, the water or the wave? A review of drinking water pollution in Thanet

First, DON’T PANIC, make sure you are carrying your towel, engineering hat on for a mo. Before you read any of this stuff be assured that apart from swimming in the sea in Thanet after heavy rain, you aren’t likely to be drinking high concentrations of raw sewage, weedkiller and other nasties.

The environment Agency started to produce a leaflet groundwater quality in Thanet, if this is available on their website then I can’t find it, but I have managed to get hold of the first three of these leaflets covering the period from October 2009 to June 2010.

Thanet sits on its own drinking water reservoir, the chalk under Thanet acts like a big sponge and anything liquid that falls on the ground is soaked up and since pre history there have been wells dug into this chalk sponge, water drawn from these wells has been drunk by the people of Thanet.

The chalk filters some of the nasties out, some get through with the water and some parts of this underground reservoir have been so badly damaged by toxic chemical spills that the only thing to do is to keep pumping contaminated water from wells around the spill, so that it doesn’t spread to other parts of the chalk.

If you look at the rather splodgy map above you will see it has red bits on it, the red circles show the area around the drinking water pumping stations, and wiggly sausage like lines extending from these are “adits” underground tunnels for water leading to the pumping stations.

There are quite tight controls about what you can pour into the ground over the red bits, hence all the fuss over China Gateway, where the firm involved intended to let out lots of industrial units with their own septic tanks, draining into the red bit.

The green bits are not so sensitive, if you get caught short in the country, but not really a good place to throw away the contents of the bottle at the back of the shed with the skull and crossbones on it.

The blue bits are even less sensitive, but what goes in there will probably eventually come out.

Issue one says that the EA have helped get £30m to mend our Victorian sewers and redirect sewage pipes that lead directly to the chalk and lots over other reassuring things see http://www.thanetonline.com/gwqn/

I am assuming that having boiled your water or whatever you are now ready for issue two, this tells us among other things that the environmentally conscious Thanet Earth wanted to pour their effluent into the drinking water, but that after discussions with the EA has now got permission to build a sewage pipe. It’s a bit vague about where the effluent is going at the moment, perhaps they are crossing their legs, see http://www.thanetonline.com/gwqn/id3.htm

Issue three interestingly enough doesn’t contain the interesting page 4 “Site Specific Updates” that I read with interest in issues one and two, possibly nothing of note occurred at specific sites in Thanet during that period. Here is the link to issue three http://www.thanetonline.com/gwqn/id4.htm

1 Granville Marina Ramsgate 2nd floor goes in and a day off ramble

After taking the children to school today I noticed considerable activity on Marina Esplanade, this was due to another floor going into the Marina Restaurant project.

There are a few pros and cons to this project, on the positive side there has been a flood risk assessment and this has caused the ground floor level to be raised up by about a metre than the Pleasurama development ground floor level.

This should make the building reasonably protected from a combination of high tides and storms, the negative side to this is that there is no emergency escape for the people inside to the cliff road above, so if there is a big storm they remain inside the building until the storm is over.

Also on the positive side the quality of the building work seems to be of a high standard, I have been keeping an eye on this one and haven’t seen any nasties going on there, no covered up shoddy workmanship, building waste dumped in building voids and so on.

My main concern relates to the part of the building that wasn’t there before and the cliff behind it, this is a large concrete covered lump of chalk, as far as I can tell, the top of which is in a bad state.

Here are the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id9.htm published using my small netbook so I didn’t get a chance to look at them before publication.

Another reservation I have is the heavy lorries using the Marina Road viaduct, I am not sure it is really up to taking the weight, the signs at the top saying NO CONSTRUCTION TRAFFIC are all very well, but there really isn’t another way of accessing the site, because of the way the Pleasurama site hoardings make the promenade too narrow.

I will add to this post as the day continues and if I get a WiFi connection also add some more pictures, uploading a hundred or so pictures via a mobile phone connection isn’t really viable.

You can also see the work on the Pleasurama site from above, the concrete pads could conceivably be for a tower crane, I have asked the contractor to tell us what they are up to and am hopeful that I will get a reply.

Herne Bay today, interesting if you live in Ramsgate or Margate as like Deal it's a very close about 14 miles town centre to town centre.

Taking photographs as I do the first thing one notices is the absence of dog's mess on the promenade, this can be a major problem when looking at the world through a viewfinder.

Here’s the first batch of Deal pictures, published in the café while eating my lunch http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id10.htm

Another thing I noticed was the parking, the first 2 hours on the seafront was free and when I moved the to a car park nearer to a shop I had bought a lot of heavy books from, the parking charge was £1.10 for all day.

Not as many pictures after lunch as I would have liked, due to the amount of books I had bought, combined with the problem of getting back to collect the children from school.

Café brunch, very fast service and good value at £4.99, right in the middle of the town centre, green blinds, I think it was called Greenfields, good WiFi connection too, I was in a hurry and published the previous lot of pictures while eating.


Anyway here are the rest of the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id11.htm

I don’t know exactly where the problem lies here in Thanet, the truth is that both Ramsgate and Margate both had town centres at least as good as Herne Bay’s or Deal’s, when I first opened the bookshop in Ramsgate 23 years ago, and not all of the shops that have closed in Ramsgate Margate have any competition in Westwood Cross.

Something I notice particularly is the independent antique and junk shops that have mostly closed in Ramsgate still seem to be thriving in Herne Bay have mostly gone in Thanet.

You don’t always get what you expect at Kent Terrace in Ramsgate.

My lunchtime walk was added to by the fire brigade practicing for an incident on Augusta Stairs, the last one of note being in 1967 when the cliff collapsed there, particularly embarrassing as this was just after they had had a major survey, saying that the cliff there was sound and safe.

This next bit is a game of spot the difference, just after I pointed out that there appeared to be some disparity between the plans passed by the council and the building under construction on Kent Terrace, the developer put tarpaulins over the front of the scaffolding there so that you couldn’t see what was going on.

I had assumed that this covered up them quietly changing the building to conform to the plans, however the tarpaulin has partly blown away revealing windows not quite where the plans say they should be.

The pictures should expand if you click on them.

As you can see the top of the top floor windows of the new building there are supposed to be at about the same level as the top of Pier Castle, or the Belgian Café if you navigate by bars.

With the bottom floor being at the same level as the house next door and the top floor being so much lower I wonder what happens on the floor in between, perhaps this is a floor for dwarfs, perhaps in this politically correct age I should say the vertically disadvantaged.

The rest of the pictures are here http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/211/ the other main thing of note was work on the Pleasurama development, I will probably be corrected on this one but they seemed to laying concrete foundations, in the form of a load spreading pad, at the north eastern, Augusta Stairs end of the site.

Interesting to me as I assumed that the whole construction was to be the steel cage type supported on bored piles.
Perhaps there has been another design change or perhaps they are concerned about causing vibration so close to the cliff façade.

Thanet councillor’s allowances in The Daily Mail and a mad bad ramble.

Among this mornings emails was one pointing me at this Daily Mail article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1357034/Councillors-payouts-soared-local-services-face-savage-cuts.html you will notice that Thanet gets a mention.

I have mixed feelings about this one, I suppose on the one hand we have some councillors just doing the bare minimum to get their allowances and I suppose it’s inevitable that some of the councillors have come to rely on their allowances to make ends meet.

Occasionally I hear of councillors using their positions in a way that benefits them financially, this usually involves councillors buying property from the council or getting planning consents that could be construed as dubious.

Over the years the council has attracted a few dodgy individuals like any other part of government, probably best not to go into detail.

I think what The Daily mail is saying is something on the lines of, “is there any relationship between how much councillors are paid and their benefits” well something like that.

Perhaps the way local authorities work is the key to the problem, the change from borough councils to a district council, had certain problems here in Thanet. Not the least of which is that Margate and Ramsgate have a history of being rival towns, that extends back hundreds of years. Having the seat of government in one rival town, governing the other rival town isn’t necessarily a recipe for success.

Possibly the number of councillors that I think was probably carried over from the old borough system is part of the problem. By this I mean would fewer better paid councillors be the answer. Perhaps some sort of test should be applied to those seeking to hold the office of councillor, intelligence or something I don’t really know.

Perhaps part of the problem, that is if you see it as a problem, is the way that councillors are trained to their job, there is a bit of a sense of the foxes running the chicken farm here. The idea of the system we have, democracy that is, is that people have some say in how they are governed. At the moment we keep hearing about the big society, I can’t help Orwellian coming into my mind every time the phrase is mentioned, and not just the farm. So we elect ordinary members of the public to control the way the civil servants run our community and the first thing that happens when the new councillors turn up to represent us, is that these civil servants train the members of the public in how to control the civil servants. Well of course I lied, they must be shown where the toilets are and so on first.

One thing I find when I post this sort of thing is that there seems to be some confusion, among some people between, pay, allowances, expenses, council officers and councillors.

The councillors are our elected representatives and they get a basic allowance plus allowances for added responsibility, like cabinet membership, or even being the leader, not to be confused with the chief executive who is the salaried civil servant. So two chiefs or leaders and then a lot of senior Indians, some elected some not.

Keeping to the Orwellian theme for a moment, here in Thanet we are on the beginning of a great experiment in Conservatism, we have Conservative control at national, county and district level.

This is doubly interesting if you live in a part of Thanet where all of your active councillors are Labour, a very large part of the Animal Farm is the excuse game. Ask a Labour councillor and they say the can’t do anything because the Tories are in charge, this used to be translated to ask a conservative councillor and they would say the can’t do anything because of the Labour Government. Perhaps if we have continued Conservative government at all levels, there will be no more excuses.

The sign of this Brave New World – sorry wrong author – at the doors of perception – damn done it again – you will wake up in the morning to, yes, the sign, and it will be that senior elected members have sent emails to senior civil servants saying. “You’re fired.” While we wake up in the morning to news headlines, saying, senior civil servants have sent emails to front line workers, saying, “You’re fired.” I think this is becoming increasingly less likely. Makes one wonder what happened to our new MPs after being shown where the toilet is and so on.

The problem we have is that we have to get rid of masses of civil servants and essentially the only people who can decide which civil servants to get rid of are other civil servants.

Perhaps this is the time for the Conservatives to look to private enterprise, the problem here is that the civil servants have created a whole sector within private enterprise called the government contractor.

Anyway I will digress for a moment and use my old standby the Pleasurama cliff as an example, I have had a long term disagreement about the state of this cliff with various members of the council, even normally reasonable councillors like Simon Moores get annoyed if I mention the cliff, indeed Simon recently asked me not to mention it on his blog.

One aspect of this cliff that all of the engineers agree on, is that it is dangerous for heavy lorries to drive on the footpath next to the cliff edge. The councillors senior engineer agrees, the councils supervising engineering contractors engineer agrees.

However despite agreeing with me for several years now that we need a sign at each end of this footpath saying “NO LORRIES” the actual business of translating this into a frontline worker putting up a sign, never happens.

So I put the sign business to the health and safety executive, this was several months ago, still no sign, of a sign, no one disputes that we need signs, and my thoughts about this have gone up the lines from inspector, to senior inspector, to principle inspector, all referring back to the same engineer.

Anyway in between writing to various civil servants about Pleasurama and writing the blog post, I performed two small miracles here in Thanet. One was working as a shop assistant in an independent shop, in a Thanet town, I still know a few other people who do this. The other was I took ink, paper and card, and used machinery to turn it into books, some of which will sell outside of Thanet and some even outside of the UK. this is called manufacturing and I am wondering if the fact that I hardly know anyone else who does this could have something to do with the problem.

Kennedy House Fire Ramsgate, pictures

Tower block fire in Ramsgate at around 5pm today, it looks as though this fire broke out in a ground floor flat of the fifteen story block of flats.

Some people have obviously been injured I would think smoke inhalation although I am not certain.

Here is the link to the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/khfr/ I don’t think this a serious fire I would think one flat gutted but not the whole tower block.

Update from Kent Fire and Rescue

15 February 2011
Fire and Research Investigators are examining the cause of a fire in a block of flats in Ramsgate.
Firefighters were sent to the sixteen storey building in Newcastle Hill at 4.48pm yesterday (14 February) following reports of a fire in a first floor flat.

Initially, four appliances from Ramsgate, Margate and Thanet were sent to the scene, but fire crews soon called for support from other resources, including a height vehicle, from Canterbury, Westgate, Deal, Herne Bay and Eastry.

While one team of firefighters wearing breathing apparatus tackled the fire, a second team evacuated the first floor flats.

Crews were joined by their Ambulance and Police counterparts.

Thanks to some aggressive firefighting, crews managed to contain the fire to the affected flat, extinguishing the fire by 5.36pm.

Firefighters then spent a further hour ventilating the smoke - logged building and ensuring that it was safe for them to leave the scene.

Four people, including two elderly adults, suffered smoke inhalation and were treated at the scene. One of the casualties - a woman - was taken to hospital after falling eight feet from her flat. Her injuries are not thought to be life-threatening.

Residents living on the first floor of the building stayed with family and friends overnight as a consequence of the fire, but are due to return to their flats shortly.The cause of the fire is not yet known, but is being investigated.

Sunday Ramble, the power of the press and the church of responsible blogging

I really don’t believe web statistics anymore than I believe newspaper circulation figures, but they are something that interests me, looking at the various different web statistics for this blog it seems that around 500 people read this blog every day, another lot of statistics say it’s 10,000 people a month. My own rather limited tracking software is registering about 4,000 different ip addresses a month.

However you look at it the blog readership is getting up to the level of local paper readership and I feel that when I do something like ask the local council or a local politician a question that I am no longer just asking it for myself.

Reading Bignews Margate’s post http://bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/2011/02/council-pay-offs-what-is-truth.html it is obvious that the council are beginning to think along similar lines when dealing with blog writers. This post related to a post on Thanet Star http://networkedblogs.com/dOFCu but the really interesting part for me was that the council’s senior press officer said. “I can confirm that the figures quoted in the Thanet Star article are wildly inaccurate. The facts in the article were not checked with the council prior to publication.”

This suggests to me that I should be using the council’s press department much more and that the council hopes and expects that local bloggers will check information, about the council, with them before publication

I did this with yesterday’s post about the Royal Victoria Pavilion and got a very prompt response.

The council have various methods of giving out information and being the council they do this in the most expensive way that I can imagine. With much public domain information their preferred method is to have one view it in the presence of a member of their staff. If you want to actually get a copy of the information sent to you, often the only way is a foi request and this often results in great bundles of paper.

This doesn’t just apply to obscure documents but applies to important general information documents like the contaminated land register or the notifications of licensing applications. Where the council do publish documents on the internet they do this on a verity of different websites often in a way that the information is impossible to find.

The simple expedient of insisting that all council documents are submitted electronically in preferred file formats with a proviso that they will be published on the councils website and charging an administrative cost for any that aren’t doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.

Enough of that, watching the council burn our money annoys me.

Back to the ramble and the local blogs I will start with Bignews Margate as I missed Tony out last week, something he pointed out in his post on Monday http://bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/2011/02/cllr-mark-nottingham-winning-here-and.html part of this is about the relative popularity of local blogs. I think if you used the number of comments on posts then Tony is probably in the lead.

Also two posts on the landlord tax from Tony, generally the landlord tenant problems tend to come up where the government is involved, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a problem where working people are renting and when problems do happen the landlord is often the villain.

Here in Thanet the problem seems mostly to occur where the government are paying the rent via housing benefit and a maze of housing associations with government funding mean that the landlord is often the government too.

This seems to have produced a degree of social engineering with ghettos of deprivation and an almost impossible situation for some private landlords, since housing benefit is paid directly to even the worst of tenants.

At the other end of the scale Tony’s post, that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this relates to the monies paid to the top council officers, the seven council officers who are paid between £1,500 and £2,000 per week.

I have already caused some trouble here when I did my post http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/03/thanet-district-council-pleasurama-and.html that linked to a page http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/foi/id17.htm where I substituted nicknames based on their weekly income.

Here in Thanet where the average pay is about £340 per week these figures for our public servants seem almost obscene, so anyway what sort of golden handshake does someone getting paid £112,500 plus £5,000 car allowance plus petrol plus other expenses per year, actually get.

The council say the figure of £230,000 first mooted by Thanet Star and then picked up by Bignews is wildly inaccurate, I for one wonder which direction the wild inaccuracy points.

Having coverd Bignews I will start at the top of the sidebar, with new kid on the blog INthanet or In2thanet depending how you look at it, the latest post there picks up on something I covered recently, that he pointed out to me in the first place, the inaccuracies in the power output from a proposed solar energy site, in a council press release, see http://in2thanet.blogspot.com/2011/02/error-or-mis-information.html

Putting my engineering hat on for a mo, I would expect the average power output from this site based on the 4.5 MWp figure, which is what it would produce under laboratory conditions, (By this I mean with all the solar panels recently cleaned and working at peak efficiency, pointing directly at the sun, on a sunny day.) to be about 1 MW and not the figure in the council’s press release that is 4,500 times larger.

Even with the council’s slightly warped view of Thanet, where the sun always shines night and day and never moves in the sky the figure they produced is still 1,000 times larger than it should be.

From a planning perspective I suppose if solving the energy crisis is ever grounds for planning consent, then the best use of the land for that purpose ought to be a consideration.

The rest of the blog http://in2thanet.blogspot.com/ is well worth a look and in terms of popularity it is slowly climbing my list based my own rather primitive technology, it seems that more people are looking there now, than are looking to see if Mark Nottingham has posted another revelation and then deleted it.

Blog post of the week has to go to Councillor Ken Gregory and his post in support of Hosni Mubarak http://villagevoices.blogspot.com/2011/02/egyptian-democracy.html it has to be recommended, both for its literary clarity and as an indicator of Thanet’s political future.

Assuming Ken is elected in May, pretty much a forgone conclusion I would think, we can expect a flowering of local democracy in Thanet, as his more radical ideas take hold.

Staying with Conservative councillor bloggers, Simon Moores on Thanet Life has a post about blogging, the press, democracy and everything http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/itson-weblog-so-it-must-be-true.html

Simon produces a mixture of university level posts and more accessible items and as the Conservative group press spokesman is truly Metreonic, jumping from Acta Diurna, to Notizie scritte, as he does. Sorry about that, I failed my eleven plus and just wanted to show that I could write something incomprehensible to those of you who haven’t discovered Google.

Far from being patronising, Simon makes the self deprecating point that he too gets a bit carried away with the importance of his own blog. One thing I like about Simon is that he is bright enough to tease a bit and usually takes it in good spirit.

But he like me seems to be walking around the interesting landscape, of where blogs stand in the pecking order of media, and he has some interesting thoughts on this.

But in all of this there is a fundamental question based on fact, to explain what I mean here I had better put the facts before the question. Soon I will find some imagines paste this text, a hurried bit of touch typing - done between commitments relating to children and family life - between the pictures publish it to the web and read it to see if it makes sense, well that’s one reader.

Over the next 24 hours the webpage containing this post will be opened about 700 times by about 400 ip addresses most of which represent individual readers, they will on average spend enough time with the page open to read it. Of course I can’t tell if any of them actually read what I said, unless they comment and even then in some cases this may be doubtful. But the question is when I ask the council, or some other organisation, a question that relates to something I am going to write on this blog, should they see me as an individual, or as representing the people who read what I write here?

A quick glance at what I wrote last week, Monday’s post being about mobile internet phones, the main point of this being that this is now very much cheaper than it used to be and at about £80 for a year including equipment costs, it represents the most economical way to a personal internet connection.

Entry level costs for connecting to the internet are very important, particularly for those on low incomes, being able to send and receive emails could be the difference between getting a job and not getting one.

The Margate Football Club development post, I hope was to some degree responsible for a written statement from the council saying that there will be public consultation about this development and I hope this will put people minds at rest regardless of whether they are for or against the development.

The Roger Gale and excluding the press from his meeting with Thanet College students was a rather bizarre post this week, I was interested in the mechanics of it as much as anything else. By this I mean, how does he arrange it? Does he just have to say to the college, no press on site today? Perhaps it is more complicated, I won’t come if you don’t ban the press sort of thing and interestingly where would this leave a blogger like me who happened to be there and decided to write about his exchange with the students? Perhaps he moves in a sort of aura of divine arrogance, the trouble is that after the expenses scandal, I will always think of him as TV Gale.

And yes I did ask his office for some sort of comment on excluding the press, no reply, not even an acknowledgment, just in case you are one of his constituents reading this.

The tragic post this week I think is my one about the Pavilion, this is a case of a large and wealthy company making profits out of gambling, destroying one of Ramsgate’s tourist and historical assets. I can’t see the local press making much fuss about this one because of the advertising revenue involved.

I can't see the council taking a HOOT approach to the issue and frankly I expect that Rank’s lawyers are more expensive than the council’s. I wonder if the Turner Contemporary building will be in a similar position in 100 years, trashed with its windows boarded up I mean.

Historical note now these pictures down at the bottom of this post are of Princess Louise opening the Royal Victoria Pavillion in 1904, a long way away from what we have now.

The other royal pavilion I know of is at Brighton admission about a tenner or family ticket £25 perhaps the council should consider the economics of this and borrow some money to sort it out so it makes some money. I believe the concept is called capitalism.

I will probably ramble on a bit more

Ramsgate, Rank the council and how the Royal Victoria Pavillion got trashed

Assuming that you are a normal law abiding citizen then you know that if you fall fowl – sorry must have been thinking of chickens – foul of the council, don’t pay your council tax, abide by the conditions of your lease (if you rent a council owned property – even a beach hut) then the council will take you to court and you will have to pay up.

When it comes to large companies that fall foul of the council then things are a bit different – I am not saying that this always the council’s fault, just what happens – the trouble is that as time goes on a council can get a bit of a name as a soft touch.

Sometime back in 1969 the council leased the Pav to Fortes, at this time the Pav was the main music venue in the town, from memory the Golden Goose Showbar – correct me if I’m wrong I was 16 at the time and had other things on my mind – live music most evenings.

Over time with company takeovers, mergers and so on this lease became the responsibility of the Rank Organisation and Rank and the companies they took over, trashed the Pav.

If they obtained planning permission for the things they did to the building then I can’t find any record of it, if they took any notice of the listed building consent then I can’t find any record of that either.

I suppose much of the fault here lies with the council who just didn’t keep an eye on this important building that had been entrusted to them. As you know eventually the Rank Organisation decided that they didn’t need the building anymore and walked away from it leaving it derelict.

Eventually in April 2008 the council wrote them a letter with a list of things that Rank needed to do to be compliant with the lease, here it is http://thanetonline.com/rvpds other letters followed, much the same and the Rank Organisation painted the outside of the building.

I think that the council saw this as some sort of victory (perhaps it was) and issued a press release, here it is http://www.thanet.gov.uk/news/latest_press_releases/pavilion_work_finishes.aspx saying that work had been completed down the Pav.

I didn’t like the look of the work on the outside, in many places they have just painted over where the building has been boarded up and frankly didn’t believe the press release.

Fortunately there was still some work going on down there so I thought I had better go and have a look, at what the building was really like inside, this I did, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/11/pictures-of-inside-of-royal-victoria.html

The dreadful condition of the inside of the pavillion or pavilion – don’t know which is right – The Pav, was beyond anything I could describe so I took some pictures, see
http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pav2010/index.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pav2010/id3.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pav2010/id4.htm

after this nothing seemed to be happening with the building at all, so yesterday I asked the council what is going on with it .

This is what I asked:

“Do the council have any intention of getting Rank repair the inside of the building that is now derelict?

Is there anything on the cards apart from it standing for many more years as an empty and derelict white elephant?

Of course if you have anything else to say that I may not have thought about, say it and I will change the post accordingly.”

And this is their reply:

"The council is legally limited by what it can do in statute and in case law.

"As this was an interim schedule of dilapidations, the internal works that can be required by the landlord are very limited. Works within those parameters have now been concluded.


"Rank has a lease and they have now fulfilled their obligations within that lease."

The problem for us here in Ramsgate, is one of where do we go from here? a wealthy and major company has trashed one of main heritage and tourist assets.

The council while happy to engage in expensive legal wrangles with residents, won’t take on the Rank Organisation, probably wisely I should add.

Roger Gale Gags Gazette at Thanet College

Don’t quite know what this is all about, click on the link to read http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=195196673841254&id=130587156970738#!/pages/Isle-of-Thanet-Gazette/130587156970738 or click on the picture to enlarge.

I don’t really understand Facebook so I didn’t know how to link to this so it won’t vanish, hence the pageshot.

I think this may be about “Education Maintenance Allowance” EMA this is a payment made to students to help them stay in education that the government is abolishing.

£30 per week for those whose household income is under £20,817 p.a.;
£20 per week for those whose household income is between £20,818 and £25,521 p.a.;
£10 per week for those whose household income is between £25,522 and £30,810 p.a.

Understandably students are pretty annoyed about this.

Along the lines of you budget your life to do some sort of educational course and then the government remove all of your independent income, before the course is finished.

It just wasn’t a fair decision, if the government had cut their money in proportion with all the other cuts I don’t think this would have been unreasonable, but to take the group in society aged from 16 to 19 and remove their entire benefit seems just crass.

I can fully understand why Roger doesn’t want the press there when he tries to tackle the students questions about this.

One does wonder though about freedom of the press and democracy in Thanet it seems that Ken Gregory thinks that Hosni Mubarak has suffered some sort of injustice, that has caused him to resign.

Well what he actually says is “it seems that somewhat less than 7% of the made a fuss and the President was forced into exile.” See http://villagevoices.blogspot.com/2011/02/egyptian-democracy.html

After the rigging of the leadership consultation I suppose we should expect some of our local politicians to be concerned about press freedom and democracy. It’s certainly good to see Roger and Ken taking an interest.