I was quite surprised that as many as 41 of our 53 councillors voted in favour of passing the plans, as at least 2 of them that I know of didn’t vote as they had been to China, so it was carried by a very large majority indeed.
Those councillors I have spoken to about this say that they received a lot of correspondence from people who were against the development, combined with the views of my friends and customers, the great majority of whom also say they are against it, does make me wonder how representative the 41 councillors of the electorate they are supposed to represent.
As Ken Wills said on the BBC inside out program that all three phases are essential, it would seem unlikely that anything will happen, until a decision is made about the agricultural land for phases 2 and 3, I understand this has to be done at a national level and is unlikely to be obtained.
I still haven’t heard from anyone who can explain how the surface drainage could possibly work given the site layout on the plans, nor can I see how Acol can have acceptable levels of air, light and noise pollution.
So now we have approved plans with conditions that seem impossible to fulfil, the planning department can’t tell me how they could be conformed to within the confines of the laws of nature, so perhaps now they are allowed to speak freely about it some of the 41 councillors that approved the plans could enlighten me.
News, Local history and Thanet issues from Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 200 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.
Friday, 10 October 2008
Ramsgate Town Council vote approved at last nights council meeting
Press Release from Ramsgate First 10th October, 2008“One small step for a town council, one giant leap for Ramsgate.”
Perhaps the district councillors were tired after the bruising three hour pitched battle over the China Gateway. Perhaps.
The churlishness with which they voted in a parish/town council for Ramsgate spoke volumes about the institutional malady that infects the district council chamber.
Sandy Ezekiel baldly stated that the Ramsgate Town Council will be brought into effect after the 1st April 2009 and that elections to it would take place “probably” in September 2009. No words of congratulation for the people of Ramsgate who, he acknowledged, had voted for their own town council in the District Council’s Referendum. There was no wishing them well. Just a minimalist statement that made you feel it was a molar being extracted without anaesthetic.
Richard Nicholson, seconding the motion, was his usual ungracious self and offered no words of good will for the people of Ramsgate.
Nor were there any words of congratulation from any of the other Ramsgate District councillors. The people of Ramsgate should take note.
And then came the vote.
As chairman of Ramsgate First it was a wonderful moment. The shine was not taken off by the miserliness in which the motion was carried. Four years of hard, tiring, often frustrating work. But it was for Ramsgate, and for me and the supporters of Ramsgate First that was reason enough.
I believe that Ramsgate now has an opportunity to build itself a better future with a Town Council that will more jealously guard its inheritance and more boldly assert its future potential. No longer will Ramsgate be an afterthought in the District Council’s deliberations.
Now the really hard work begins. We must make sure we elect Town Councillors that really care about the town and who are willing to work.
Well done Ramsgate.
Gerry O’Donnell
Please copy
Thursday, 9 October 2008
Manston Airport V China Gateway
I was interested to see the plans for the airport expansion http://www.kentinternationalairport-manston.com/masterplan.html you may remember back in August I posted their letter about this and how it conflicts with China Gateway sorry that it’s difficult to read http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/drink/id40.htm once again though the main question is why haven’t the safety issues been addressed, before proceeding? My own interest here is protection of the water supply see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/drink/ they have been avoiding resolving this issue since June 2006 see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blog/id4.htm
Now at the moment as activity at Manston increases the risk of pollution both of Pegwell Bay and our water supply increases with it, it must be time for TDC to commission a proper assessment of these risks and have a contingency plan for a pollution incident.
If they can’t find a workable solution to a major pollution incident i.e. if we don’t have sufficient alternative water supply for both our agriculture and our drinking water then neither project can be allowed to go ahead without major changes .
Personally I think the airport is wrongly situated like Port Ramsgate it can never compete with the competition because of its remote geographical location, the risk here is a failed airport and an irreversibly damaged water supply.
Now at the moment as activity at Manston increases the risk of pollution both of Pegwell Bay and our water supply increases with it, it must be time for TDC to commission a proper assessment of these risks and have a contingency plan for a pollution incident.
If they can’t find a workable solution to a major pollution incident i.e. if we don’t have sufficient alternative water supply for both our agriculture and our drinking water then neither project can be allowed to go ahead without major changes .
Personally I think the airport is wrongly situated like Port Ramsgate it can never compete with the competition because of its remote geographical location, the risk here is a failed airport and an irreversibly damaged water supply.
The picture of the airport comes from one of my publications Twilight of Pistons http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tp/
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
Thanatos or Hypnos?
Let us for a moment assume that China Gateway gets its planning permission and in a few years time is a thriving manufacturing base, in the heart of Thanet’s agricultural land.Thousands of lorries will be taking away the manufactured products and delivering the raw materials used in manufacturing them. Some of those raw materials will be the deadly poisons used in many manufacturing processes, and the lorries will be coming from countries all over the world.
Now let us assume sooner or later there is a spillage of poison in one of the lorry parks which goes into the drain.
With one system this is via the interceptors into a soakaway, (the interceptors are traps to remove oil spillage and work on the fact that oil is lighter than water) the poison goes into the aquifer.
With another system this goes via interceptors into the mains drainage, there is a problem here that the water has to be pumped uphill to get it into the main drain. So we have a major storm lightening strikes an electric cable, the lights go out a tanker backs into something, as the electric pump won’t be working because of the power cut, the poison goes straight in the aquifer.
With the system demanded for all of the other businesses there, the poison goes via interceptors and is fed by gravity into ponds, the wildlife in the ponds dies alerting the people managing them that there has been a poison spillage, the poison is pumped out and disposed of safely. As you see this system isn’t reliant on the lorry driver reporting the spillage or the electricity supply.
O.K. the water gets into the aquifer, the lorry driver doesn’t report the incident, but as Southern Water test our drinking water the poison probably won’t get into the water supply and be coming out of our taps.
We have to put up with a greatly reduced water supply and a much higher price, a disaster but not a catastrophe.
End of problem, well not quite the whole of the aquifer is dotted with boreholes for agricultural irrigation and crop washing, the water from these boreholes is seldom tested and the testing is not regulated by the environment agency. Not only is our agriculture including Thanet Earth reliant on the water from these boreholes, but if the poison reaches one first (before the Southern water extraction point) and your food is washed with it, the poison enters you. As the amount of a lethal dose of some poisons used in industry is measured in fractions of parts per million this may well be the last problem you have.
I suppose that there must be people who think that the existing plans should be passed, I don’t seem to be meeting any in the bookshop, if you happen to be one I would appreciate it if you could explain anything that you think is wrong with my reasoning here. At the moment the recommendation to approve seems to be going for the pumping uphill option, perhaps you consider this to be a reasonable risk, I wonder will greengrocers have to label food “not grown in Thanet” in order to sell it.
The picture shows Hypnos, Greek god of sleep, and his brother, Thanatos, god of death, as painted by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917).
“Thanet” thought to be derived from Thanatos or Thanatus the Greek god or daimon of non-violent death.
Breast Cancer
I have received the following from Gerry O’Donnell so get clicking.
Dear People, The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on their site daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on 'donating a mammogram' for free (pink window in the middle).This doesn't cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.Here's the web site! Pass it along to people you know
http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=2
Dear People, The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on their site daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on 'donating a mammogram' for free (pink window in the middle).This doesn't cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.Here's the web site! Pass it along to people you know
http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=2
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Chinagate and China Gateway the ruminations of a garrulous retailer
The China Gateway development is undoubtedly the largest planning application, the eventual size that the property speculator appears to envisage dwarfs even Westwood Cross, it’s also probably the most controversial that there has ever been in Thanet.
The three biggest questions being: Will the thousands of extra traffic movements both of HGVs and cars visiting the site cause gridlock? Will our water supply be safe and if there is some sort of accidental spillage permanently damaging our reservoir where do we go from there? Will the noise, air and light pollution make life in Acol awful?
The traffic question seems pretty much unanswered, as we don’t know where the HGVs are coming from and going to, obviously the proportion going to and from London and that going to Dover harbour or Port Ramsgate will be very significant.
As far as one can see from examining the plans they are much more for a distribution hub than a manufacturing base and that would tie in with what one knows about China where manufacturing costs are much lower than in the U.K.
With the rising cost of air freight and Chinese imports being based around the products being cheaper than those manufactured in Europe, one wouldn’t expect much to come and go via Manston airport.
There is also the fact that neither Dover nor Ramsgate can handle ocean-going freighters, which begs some questions in itself, like are the Chinese aware of this?
The main problem here is the very sparse information about which Chinese companies are going to lease units and what they are going use them for.
The water pollution question is still totally unresolved the vast majority of the hundreds of pages about it in the planning application can’t be used as they don’t comply with what Southern Water insists on. The architects haven’t come up with any plans for drainage that would comply although they have had considerable time to do so, that leaves us all in the dark there.
The biggest warehouses set to run 24 7 and surrounded by parking for over 100 lorries are right up the Acol end of the site, so that doesn’t look very promising either.
There are all sorts of other unanswered questions, like the explosives manufacturer in the middle of the site, who doesn’t want to go and employs local people.
Then there is the relationship between senior councillors, council officers and the property speculator, I will remind you that when documents showing irregularities in this relationship were shown to 3 prominent Conservative councillors they threatened to resign and eventually reached a compromise where they withdrew their support for the cabinet. Now this matter is being investigated by the serious economic crime unit at Kent police HQ, right and proper thing to do however I think a lot of us would like to know the outcome before the development gets to go ahead.
Aspects of the way we are protected from dangerous or unwise developments by some government bodies have shown weaknesses, for instance when I read the drainage plans and found they were inadequate, I wrote to the environment agency about this and they told me that they didn’t have the resources to read the drainage assessment properly.
Then there is the nonsensical rule that councillors can’t discuss the issue in case they appear to have an opinion about it before the meeting, so we have the biggest thing to hit Thanet probably ever, the main people one wants to discuss it with are the people you have elected to represent you on this issue and they are scared that if the discuss it, they won’t be allowed to take part in the decision making process.
Since it takes several days to read and comprehend the planning application, the notion that anyone could possibly read it and then fail to form any opinion until they had been to the meeting seems a little suspect to me.
My concern here is that all of the councillors have read and understood the application properly, so they can make an informed decision.
There is an interesting post on David Green’s site about the lack of comment on the issue by councillors and other aspects of the issue http://eastclifframsgate.blogspot.com/2008/10/china-gateway.html
Also an interesting article by Chris Wells in the paper http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/eastkent/Chris-Wells-writes-China-Gateway-decision-Thursday/article-374126-detail/article.html
Well in fact plenty of coverage in the local papers links on sidebar and the other local blogs and even the bbc this morning.
I have published up many of the related documents about it on a series of web pages http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/drink/
The plans and most of the documents from the statuary consultees are on the Thanet planning website http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet planning reference F/TH/08/0400
The two biggest emotive issues jobs for Thanet and Chinese human rights are not planning issues, however as this will have such a huge effect on our island for many years one can hardly put them completely aside from the issue.
I think the real question is, is it a good and viable planning application or is it a bad and unworkable application? I don’t think the Chinese, the pro lobby the anti lobby, the council, the local economy or anything else will benefit from passing bad plans.
The three biggest questions being: Will the thousands of extra traffic movements both of HGVs and cars visiting the site cause gridlock? Will our water supply be safe and if there is some sort of accidental spillage permanently damaging our reservoir where do we go from there? Will the noise, air and light pollution make life in Acol awful?
The traffic question seems pretty much unanswered, as we don’t know where the HGVs are coming from and going to, obviously the proportion going to and from London and that going to Dover harbour or Port Ramsgate will be very significant.
As far as one can see from examining the plans they are much more for a distribution hub than a manufacturing base and that would tie in with what one knows about China where manufacturing costs are much lower than in the U.K.
With the rising cost of air freight and Chinese imports being based around the products being cheaper than those manufactured in Europe, one wouldn’t expect much to come and go via Manston airport.
There is also the fact that neither Dover nor Ramsgate can handle ocean-going freighters, which begs some questions in itself, like are the Chinese aware of this?
The main problem here is the very sparse information about which Chinese companies are going to lease units and what they are going use them for.
The water pollution question is still totally unresolved the vast majority of the hundreds of pages about it in the planning application can’t be used as they don’t comply with what Southern Water insists on. The architects haven’t come up with any plans for drainage that would comply although they have had considerable time to do so, that leaves us all in the dark there.
The biggest warehouses set to run 24 7 and surrounded by parking for over 100 lorries are right up the Acol end of the site, so that doesn’t look very promising either.
There are all sorts of other unanswered questions, like the explosives manufacturer in the middle of the site, who doesn’t want to go and employs local people.
Then there is the relationship between senior councillors, council officers and the property speculator, I will remind you that when documents showing irregularities in this relationship were shown to 3 prominent Conservative councillors they threatened to resign and eventually reached a compromise where they withdrew their support for the cabinet. Now this matter is being investigated by the serious economic crime unit at Kent police HQ, right and proper thing to do however I think a lot of us would like to know the outcome before the development gets to go ahead.
Aspects of the way we are protected from dangerous or unwise developments by some government bodies have shown weaknesses, for instance when I read the drainage plans and found they were inadequate, I wrote to the environment agency about this and they told me that they didn’t have the resources to read the drainage assessment properly.
Then there is the nonsensical rule that councillors can’t discuss the issue in case they appear to have an opinion about it before the meeting, so we have the biggest thing to hit Thanet probably ever, the main people one wants to discuss it with are the people you have elected to represent you on this issue and they are scared that if the discuss it, they won’t be allowed to take part in the decision making process.
Since it takes several days to read and comprehend the planning application, the notion that anyone could possibly read it and then fail to form any opinion until they had been to the meeting seems a little suspect to me.
My concern here is that all of the councillors have read and understood the application properly, so they can make an informed decision.
There is an interesting post on David Green’s site about the lack of comment on the issue by councillors and other aspects of the issue http://eastclifframsgate.blogspot.com/2008/10/china-gateway.html
Also an interesting article by Chris Wells in the paper http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/eastkent/Chris-Wells-writes-China-Gateway-decision-Thursday/article-374126-detail/article.html
Well in fact plenty of coverage in the local papers links on sidebar and the other local blogs and even the bbc this morning.
I have published up many of the related documents about it on a series of web pages http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/drink/
The plans and most of the documents from the statuary consultees are on the Thanet planning website http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet planning reference F/TH/08/0400
The two biggest emotive issues jobs for Thanet and Chinese human rights are not planning issues, however as this will have such a huge effect on our island for many years one can hardly put them completely aside from the issue.
I think the real question is, is it a good and viable planning application or is it a bad and unworkable application? I don’t think the Chinese, the pro lobby the anti lobby, the council, the local economy or anything else will benefit from passing bad plans.
Whole lot of blogging going on
Whole lot of blogging going on
I have discovered two new Thanet blogs in one day http://thanethope.blogspot.com/ and http://thanetleisure.blogspot.com/ which seems to be called Margate Leisure in name but not url.
If anyone notices I have missed any local blogs off the latest posts on the sidebar please let me know.
I have discovered two new Thanet blogs in one day http://thanethope.blogspot.com/ and http://thanetleisure.blogspot.com/ which seems to be called Margate Leisure in name but not url.
If anyone notices I have missed any local blogs off the latest posts on the sidebar please let me know.
The youth of today
My son who is studying for three science A levels at Chatham House went into Smiths yesterday to get some stationary for study purposes, however they wouldn’t sell him Tipex as he is under 18, he thought it rather humorous.
To me having a law that prevents students from buying basic items of stationery is an interesting reflection on how we treat out youth, perhaps rather than having a situation where they all have to carry ID cards to prove their age and not letting them have any responsibilities until the are 18, we could issue them with an ID card at a much younger age and remove privileges from it if they abused them.
I get the feeling that things like the youths hanging around the streets drinking lager would be greatly reduced if the faced the loss of their right to drink in a bar at 16, age related legislation for secondary school students is all stick and no carrot and frankly it shows in a lot of our youth.
To me having a law that prevents students from buying basic items of stationery is an interesting reflection on how we treat out youth, perhaps rather than having a situation where they all have to carry ID cards to prove their age and not letting them have any responsibilities until the are 18, we could issue them with an ID card at a much younger age and remove privileges from it if they abused them.
I get the feeling that things like the youths hanging around the streets drinking lager would be greatly reduced if the faced the loss of their right to drink in a bar at 16, age related legislation for secondary school students is all stick and no carrot and frankly it shows in a lot of our youth.
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