Westgate-on-Sea election special

I have incorporated the Westgate bits from the book I publish “Margate and Westgate With Birchington 1903-04”  in order to try and make this post a bit more interesting than the average local political post, the link to the page to buy the book is http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/margate_and_westgate_with_birchington_1903_04.htm

The following is a statement of the persons nominated for election as a District Councillor for Westgate-on-Sea

*Decision of the Returning Officer that the nomination is invalid or other reason why a person nominated no longer stands nominated.

Name of Candidate	Home Address	Description (if any)	Reason why no longer nominated*
ASHBEE Ash	20 Canute Road, Birchington, Kent, CT7 9QJ	Independent
ELENOR Jeffrey	30 Ramsgate Road, Margate, Kent, CT9 5RU	UK Independence Party
FURNESS Bill	25 Cross Road, Birchington­on-Sea, CT7 9HN	Liberal Democrat
HIBBERT Jodie Sharon	65 Grosvenor Place, Margate, CT9 1UX	The Labour Party Candidate
MASKELL James Kelvin	32 Hawley Sq, Margate, Kent, CT9 1PH	The Conservative Party Candidate
MENDELSOHN Claire	38 Royal Road, Ramsgate, Kent, CT11 9LE	Independent

 Extracting the table of persons nominated from the council’s pdf file, so I could publish it above was a computing test that I don’t recommend trying.

I am aiming to come up with some politically impartial post there, but having already been slated as a Labour supporter today, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/britains-no1-coming-to-broadstairs.html I guess it’s going to be an uphill struggle.

 Here are the Westgate-on-Sea Ward results for the election in May 2011.

           

 Thomas George King            Independent    853            17%            Elected

 Simon Moores            The Conservative Party Candidate            793            16%            Elected

 Brian Goodwin            The Conservative Party Candidate            751            15%            Elected

 Richard Chapman            The Conservative Party Candidate            675            14%            Not elected

 David Michael Bull      The Labour Party Candidate            555            11%            Not elected

 Lynda Diane Robinson            The Labour Party Candidate            528            11%            Not elected

 Meg Harvey            The Labour Party Candidate            444            9%            Not elected

 Rosamund Mary Parker            UK Independence Party    283            6%            Not elected

 One way or another it looks as though this is going to be a pretty close run thing, with the most like result being either the Labour candidate or the Conservative candidate getting elected. I will ramble on about this once I see that this rather complicated post of tables and images looks ok published, the bookshop is pretty quiet today due to the weather so I should get time.

Both the Labour and Conservative candidates are young people and I would say the young people of Thanet are very under represented when it comes to councillors.

I guess we all know James Maskell as a sensible local blogger http://villeviews.blogspot.co.uk/ who goes to considerable efforts to record council meetings.

I also guess a lot of us have met Jodie Hibbert, who I first met when she was getting signatures for the Save Dreamland campaign here in Ramsgate.   

Assuming that a large proportion of the electorate would vote for a hat stand if it was Labour or Conservative this leaves the actual decision down to the floating voters like me. Usually voting in Thanet seems to be more about keeping one party out than getting the party with the best ideas in.

Interesting in this case where I would think either Jodie or James would make good councillors, certainly much better than some of the existing councillors, some of which fall into the bracket of being both so offensive and so stupid that I would consider them to be unemployable.    

Ramsgate, poker, motorbikes, is The Stig a woman, Hells Angels and photography, a Sunday Ramble

The pictures decorating this post are of the poker run, basically what happens is that this is a charity motorcycle event where motorcyclists pay a fee to take part that goes to charity.

 At each destination they are given a poker card and the one who wins the poker hand at the end wins the event

 Breakfast conversation this morning was along the lines of as the Williams test driver Suzi Wolff is of the female persuasion could The Stig in fact be a woman.

 I am a bit wary of posting motorcycle pictures after last week, I went to the Margate Meltdown took abut about a thousand pictures of the event, put them on the internet and then got rather a bizarre communication from one of the Hells Angels there asking me to remove the pictures containing Hells Angels.

 Whereas I am fairly happy to publish pictures that KCC, local developers and so on don’t want published, aging secondhand booksellers aren’t really in a position to take on a chapter of Hells Angels so I took the lot down.

 At some time in the future I may go through all of the pictures and try and work out which ones contain who and try to republish some of them, frankly with about a thousand pictures containing several thousand motorcyclists mostly wearing leathers this wouldn’t be an easy task.

 I guess much of the problem here relates to people assuming that I must have some ulterior and probably commercial motive for publishing pictures of local events, the truth of the matter is that I do it because I can.

 If you go to any event there will be loads of people there with cameras taking thousands of pictures but round here, apart form the odd handful of shots it is only the ones I have taken that seem to appear in any quantity on the internet.

 Here are is the link to blog post I did about Margate Meltdown 2011 about 600 photos and about seven videos http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/margate-meltdown-2011-pictures.html so you can have a look and if you want try to expose any commercial motive, in fact any motive apart from trying to publicise the event, so that it continues and is successful. 

 Anyway if you find a photo that you want removed for one reason or another the way to approach this is to email me, address on the sidebar, the web address of the page it appears on, how many pictures down the page it is and a rough description of the picture. If the request is reasonable I will remove it.

I will endeavour to ramble on here.............   Rambling on now.

Have you noticed how you don’t seem to get as much lead in your pencil these days? Brushes seem much as they were, but pencils seem to be thinner on the inside.

I have been working on sketching while standing up today, you wouldn’t think this would be particularly difficult, but I find it so.

We have been shopping at Westwood Cross, this started well as I spent some time in Hobbycraft unscrewing the tops of watercolour tubes to see what colour the paint was and eventually bought a very large sheet of paper.

But sooner or later the question of what I could actually do in clothes shops raised its head and as you can see from the picture above, the answer has resolved into learning to sketch standing up. 

Anyway as I don’t think I can watercolour paint standing up unless I make some specialist paint box that clips to my sketchpad in some way and contains water I have been looking at the dry media.

I think chalk is out of the question, so it is some form of crayon, pencil or pen. 

 We went to Walmer Castle last Thursday and working through my sketchpad I thought I would try a watercolour from one of the sketches I drew when we were there.

I don’t really like painting from photographs and can’t really explain why, there is plenty one can say but that’s how it is.

Photographing paintings is not that easy either the photo above is with flash and the one below without, same painting which doesn’t really look like either of the photos. 

 I am in the very early stages of using better and drastically more expensive paper.

Here is the sketch I used for the painting, drawn looking at the castle mostly through trees, so you couldn’t really tell what shape it is at all.

I used my big paintbox which has loads of colours that I don’t understand, Vandyke Brown, Cadmium Yellow and Brown Madder were the extra ones i used in this picture, I use Brown Madder Alizarin quite a bit and didn’t realise that they haven’t made that colour for about thirty years, the replacement tube wasn’t what I expected. 

Update on the sewage leak situation.

I received the following update from the council’s chief executive on the sewage leak situation earlier today, which may help to give some idea of the council’s take on the situation.

Dear Michael,

The facts are:

* A significant part of the  main sewage system in Thanet operates

mainly under gravity down to the pumping station at Foreness and then

gets pumped to the Weatherlees sewage treatment plant in Ramsgate where

it is treated. The treated sewage is then pumped back up a parallel pipe

to Foreness and through the long outfall pipe into the sea.

* Southern Water had 2 of the 4 pumps fail at Foreness, which combined

with the rain meant that the facility overflowed untreated sewage into

the sea. The main incident of this was from the early hours of Sunday

morning to mid-afternoon which has led to the sewage in the sea and back

onto the coast. There was also damage to the screening plant at Foreness

that meant that the pumps had to be turned off regularly to be cleared,

which compounded the problem.

* There are now 3 pumps operational and in addition they had 5 tankers

for overpumping there yesterday.

* This main incident is not related to the large number of overflows

that exist around the coast that can on occasions overflow and can

impact on water quality.

* Overall the water quality last year was excellent across the season

resulting in 9 blue flags and 1 quality coast award which put us back at

the top of the chart again.

It is Southern Water's responsibility to put measures in place to

prevent the system from failing. The Enviroment Agency were working on

this last year with them and this continues.

The Council has a role in providing advice and guidance and for posting

notices of failure. However, this can only be timely if we are alerted

of the failure in good time. We always act promptly on receiving notice

of failure and sewerage contamination and did so on this occasion.

We erected signs and used the RNLI staff to try and prevent access to

the sea as much as possible, which is still carrying on. We are waiting

for further test results from EA (due today) to see if we can open the

beaches, but need to be absolutely certain that it is appropriate to do

so and that we are not going to get a recurrence. The Award Flags have

been taken down for the time being.

I trust this answers your points,

Regards,

Sue

Sue McGonigal

Chief Executive and Chief Financial Officer

Thanet District Council

Council Offices, Cecil Street, Margate, Thanet CT9 1X  

Thanet Beaches and the sewage leak

Thanet Beaches and the sewage leak

This will be the third year running that I have tried to sort out something sensible to resolve this issue, and I should make it quite clear that that problem isn’t so much a pollution issue as a communication issue.

There is no way that pollution incidences can be avoided, it just isn’t possible because we have far too many people living in the world today, there is no way of reverting to a pre industrial society.

In this particular area of pollution i.e. the contamination of our beaches with sewage, the problem isn’t just a Thanet one, but applies pretty much everywhere in the world where there is a fairly high population living close to the sea.

What happens is that the sewage and the rainwater in fact everything that goes down the drain has to be processed and then discharged into the sea and periodically something goes wrong. 

We now know that the sewage leak started last Wednesday and indeed last Thursday I took my family to Westbrook beach where my children swam in the sea. The problem for me is not that the sewage leaked into the sea but that the council didn’t issue any warning until the following Monday and still seem to failing to fly red flags put precautionary notices and beach entrances.

My guess is that this behaviour will once again result in the withdrawal of most of our blue flags and the resultant damage to the local economy.

I tried to sort this one out last year when Thanet lost most of its blue flags, this link takes you to my correspondence with the council’s Commercial Services Manager http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/thanet-blue-flags-some-thoughts-from.html

I also made as much fuss as seemed reasonable during the 2010 pollution incident http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/blue-flags-summer-sewage-sand-and.html

I think the main difficulty here is that the council and councillors have for years gone down the road of covering pollution issues up rather than trying to look for solutions, here is an example of what I mean from Simon Moores on Thanet Life http://birchington.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/interesting-times.html don’t get me wrong here I am not singling out Simon over this issue, rather the reverse as at least he publishes his views on the internet where we can all read them.

But the thread there does I hope illustrate what I am talking about and were proper measures set up to deal with this problem last year or the year before, swimming around in sewage would be a thing of the past.

Simon has obviously revised his position on this issue as he has posted about the information and communication problems today see http://birchington.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/closed.html   

The picture above is a watercolour of Margate Lighthouse viewed from Westbrook, sorry about the splodgey bits, watercolour painting while supervising ones children on the beach is not an exact art.   

I will ramble on if I get time.  

Man fights with tree.

I am trying to learn to paint trees this evening. The picture above is my latest attempt, up to now I have mostly avoided them, however waiting by the car in the car park in Deal today I made the quick notational sketch below, as I thought the church windows could be gravestones or vice versa, well even the bloke in the pictures head for that matter and as you see there was tree in the way.

 As you can see there is a lot of room for improvement with my trees.

Bucket and Spade Ramsgate Run 2012 photos

Click on the links for the pages of photos, they are publishing to the internet now so it may be about half an hour before they all appear there.

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/bs2012/

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/bs2012/id2.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/bs2012/id3.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/bs2012/id4.htm

I wasn’t there for very long, haven’t seen the pictures yet so sorry for any bad ones fraid I have other commitments today but did my best in the short time available. 

Institutional homophobia and Thanet District Council and a ramble about the problems facing the council.

Inbetween the jobs in what for me is a working Saturday I generally try to catch up on any local news and one method I use is to put Thanet into Google and click on the news tab on the left, you can see from the screen shot, picture above, the news isn’t something one would necessarily want to see on the first day of the jubilee holiday weekend.

I guess over the years I have come to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong with our council, the priorities that one would hope and expect for from a council just don’t seem to be there.

Here in Ramsgate the acid test for me has been the management of council owned assets, the main leisure site in the town Pleasurama (our equivalent to Margate’s Dreamland) derelict for 12 years, the town’s royal residence Albion House empty unused, The Royal Victoria Pavillion empty and derelict, Westcliff Hall (our equivalent to Margate’s Winter Garden’s) empty and derelict.

One or two of these unfortunate occurrences could be viewed as coincidental but not the number we have and have had. Recently talking to councillors particularly with respect to the maritime museum, I came to the unhappy conclusion that to a greater or lesser extent some of our local problems were spite related. This spite being directed towards parts of Thanet where the ward councillors were out of favour with the governing councillors.

An added problem here is that local politics in Thanet has become a two party system, theoretically Labour and Conservative although it would seem that in many cases standing under one party or another has little to do with any political ideology and a lot to do with getting elected.

Outside of the council, perceptions of why councillors stand to be elected are not as one would hope and few of the people I speak to here, perceive councillors as public-spirited people who represent the community.

Ask a Conservative councillor why they think a Labour councillor stood for elections and they will mostly say for the allowances. Ask a Labour Councillor why a conservative councillor why a Conservative councillor stood and the answer will probably be more directed towards the power and the enhancement of business opportunities.  

Of course ask any councillor why they stood themselves and they will say, for the benefit of the community.

I guess I think it probably boils down to a bit of most of the above.

Anyway on to the homophobia issue, starting with the question. Are all the councillors homophobic? Personally I think the answer to this is, yes.

Here in the UK, up until recently homosexuality was illegal, camp homosexuals real or acted are funny and homophobia to a greater or lesser extent I would think exists in pretty much everyone in the UK including homosexuals. We are all products of our society and the framework of the language we use to think with, it is unavoidable.

I would say that there are areas where homophobia is acceptable, but frankly where the dividing lines are exactly I don’t know. Perhaps an example here, gay men often make jokes about homosexuality, I guess they always will, this often happens in the media and the effect on young people forming their impressions is probably negative.

There is also another whole set of problems, you may for instance just dislike someone, perhaps just because the are dislikeable, but if they are both dislikeable and homosexual this could be construed as homophobia.  

There is also the other side of the coin, pretending to homosexual or publicising of homosexuality or bisexuality so that one can call any opposition or insult to you homophobic. It is a bit of a minefield this.

One thing I am fairly certain of and that is there has to be some set standards that people in public life abide by and this includes councillors.

At the moment we have two openly bisexual councillors and the furthest you could go with this is to say they can never be the but of any joke and can never be called less than perfect, in case this is construed as homophobia. Well his can’t be right one has to draw the line somewhere.

 I would say that, calling one of the “the shirt lifting gender bender” is not the behaviour that we would want or expect from a serving councillor. Mind you I am not happy about calling another councillor, presumably David Green, Fat Bastard.

So is this a sacking from the Labour group issue, is it a resigning as a councillor issue? If this individual was working for me and had posted either comment on the internet about another member of staff, it would have been immediate dismissal.

This brings us around to the institutional part, and the part about the whole issue that I found most worrying and offensive, which was Bob Bayford’s deaf ear on the BBC.

As I have already said, I think all of us start off homophobic and this is unavoidable, the thing to do is to learn how not to be by not behaving in a homophobic way, sometimes this all breaks down as it has in the cases of Mike Harrison and Ken Gregory.

Then of course the victim, or the concerned right minded people in whatever group it is goes to the leader of that group who acts in a right and proper way, or turns a blind eye, deaf ear, blocked nose etc to the situation.

If this happens then the whole situation moves into the realms of institutional homophobia, where it is effectively impossible for a homosexual to be part of the group.

Obviously in the case of Ken Gregory the offence was far more serious for three reasons, one being that he holds and has held senior positions in the council, another being that this was directed anonymously and deliberately towards the victim, another being that the homophobia was much more vicious and would have been enough in my opinion to be a resigning sacking issue without the homophobic connotations.   

This begs the question, should both offences carry the same punishment?

As I have already pointed out, if they worked for me, they would have both got dismissed immediately, but I don’t think either of them can be sacked as councillors, this leaves us with the difficulty that they may remain councillors and possibly even form yet another group.

As Tony Bignews has already pointed out, the nature of the police action leaves them forbidden to communicate with their victims who are other councillors, however the main part of a councillors function is to communicate with the other councillors.

Lets for a moment here put the shoe on the other foot and say that one if the TIGs left a voicemail on Simon Moores’s phone, saying the he hoped his plane crashed and he died a slow and painful death.

I would have thought a bit more than police caution would have been appropriate.

God alone knows what Simon would have had to say if the voicemail had been played to the TIG group leader on the BBC news and the TIG group leader had tried the blind eye, deaf ear, card.

I guess this brings us back to us all still being homophobic and that includes the police and their very restrained action, sic. “As this is the first time you have left a voicemail wishing someone dead, raped, beaten up or whatever, we will let you off with a caution.       

Having said all this and rather laboured some of my points because I don’t really think I was getting my message across, it is evident that we have a problem and that I think even the most die hard party supporters must realise that all is not right with their parties.

The councillors and officers rode completely over the leadership consultation and decided to stay with the cabinet system, so rightly or wrongly this is the system we have.

In most cases the selection of councillors isn’t really democratic because we the electorate can only vote for the candidates selected by the parties, most of which relate to safe seats and national political swings dictated by the government in parliament.

So a message to councillors, stop blaming the other party, finding their faults is far too easy, a mugs game where you will always find plenty at fault, look to your own parties faults and do your best to sort them out.

Stupid to ask foxes and chickens to cooperate I suppose, but at the moment there are so many problems in Thanet far to evident to disagree about that you could probably find some common ground.     

Another councillor cops it for homophobia

This is from Ian Driver’s facebook wall, the caps are his not mine.

TODAY I COMPLAINED TO KENT POLICE ABOUT HARRASMENT AND HOMOPHOBIC COMMENTS MADE ABOUT ME BY THANET COUNCILLOR MIKE HARRISON. THE POLICE ARE GOING TO ISSUE HIM WITH AN HARRASMENT NOTICE. IF HARRISON MAKES ANY FURTHER PUBLIC COMMENTS ABOUT ME HE IS LIABLE TO BE ARRESTED. 
YESTERDAY THANET COUNCIL STANDARDS BOARD FOUND HARRISON GUILTY OF BRINGING THE COUNCIL. INTO DISREPUTE FOR DESCRIBING A WOMAN WHO OBJECTED TO BEING CALLED LOVE A FRUSTRATED DRIED UP OLD BINT NEED I SAY ANY MORE

A newspaper article with comments from both councillors has now appeared online here is the link http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Thanet-councillor-Mike-Harrison-warned-police/story-16250868-detail/story.html