Saturday, November 14 

Briefly Inactive

If you visit http://www.meteox.com/ you'll have a good picture of what the weather is doing today.

Lots of larger ships sheltering off the Margate Roads now and I would expect to see some structural damage. A little earlier, while I was out in Westgate buying a paper, the road works signs scattered across the street and I found myself stopping the traffic while I dragged them back to lie flat against the pavement kerb.


Reading the Thanet Gazette I once again marvel at the incisive quality of the journalism. If three passers-by and an ageing Corgi, picked at random, were asked for an opinion on any local topic any reader might be forgiven for believing that the answers represented a groundswell of public opinion. If there's any doubt of course, then look for the regular letter from Westgate's Mr Muir and his one-man campaign against MP Roger Gale. Is the Gazette, I wonder, so short of good letters that they give his opinions space, week-in and week-out? Is he now a regular columnist I wonder?


On today's news, we hear that 21% of the total population are now economically inactive. For the younger generation looking for work inside this oveall figure, this is apparently the highest since records began. Reading the local paper, which publishes the size of the budget deficit facing your local council, I'm again struck by the evidence that neither Labour nor Independent councillors quoted in the pages appear to fully grasp the seriousness of the picture facing this country. One of the latter told me recently that he was convinced that the council had money hidden away somewhere that would fund the schemes he wanted. I'm not sure the paper understands the size of the problem either. You can slice and dice costs as much as you like but in the end, Government are not going to deliver the money we need, simply to stand still, that annual 60% of the cake which balances the 40% raised in council tax.


Let's look at this another way perhaps. I read yesterday that to afford a family an income of £25,000 a year is required; unless of course you happen to be one of the 100,000 or so families that receive up to £25,000 in benefits. Now imagine that the family income is cut to £22,000 and possibly down to £20,000 and that's roughly where we are in local government today. Without a doubt, any household extravagancies can go, any holidays; Sky TV perhaps and more but with bills going up there are much tougher decisions to be made simply to stay afloat.


The weather outside is now so bad that Sky News has given up the ghost as the satellite signal can no longer reach through the rain clouds. I think I'll settle down with my Amazon 'Kindle' reader. I have to confess that two weeks in to using an electronic book, it's quite changed my reading habits in a way I couldn't have imagined before. The convenience of having a best-seller delivered electronically, within seconds of ordering it from the Amazon website is remarkable and the shape of things to come. For any readers who might wish to try it, you can download the reader software for the PC and the Apple iPhone, free from the Amazon website.

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Friday, November 13 

Political Tribalism at its Best

Watching the BBC News coverage of the Glasgow by-election, won by Labour, I have to wonder at the point of democracy.

People being interviewed, simply stated that they had always voted Labour and always would, with no thought whatsoever of policies or indeed record. To me, this isn't politics, it's simple tribalism and straight out of the pages of George Orwell's 1984.

For Labour, you could just as easily substitute Glasgow Rangers; I've always supported them too.

Once again, this result is straight out of the welfare trap report from last Sunday's papers. The constituencies with the highest numbers of people on benefits vote Labour and this creates a vicious circle of deprivation because it remains in the interests of the party to keep them that way, because as constituencies become more affluent and employed, their voting patterns start to change, invariably starting with a tinge of LibDem yellow before turning Blue.

What does it take, I wonder to jog such populations out of their absolute confidence in a brand rather than a policy or a record of performance? Clearly not the worst recession since the War or Iraq or Afghanistan or a public sector debt now reportedly equal to £84,000 for every man woman and child in the country.

Is it a fear of change or a better life that keeps them loyal and even the Scottish Nationalists at bay? Someone somewhere must have done some research on this phenomenon.

Thursday, November 12 

Black and White

I just noticed that our missing Eastcliff Richard has re-appeared or indeed been resurrected, once again, on his website, with a statement of apology which appears to have been drafted by a solicitor.

It comes in the week that I read and approved a blogging 'protocol' offering practical guidance for councillors and in the same period, that another local councillor, Mark Nottingham, (see Tony Flaig's comments on Big News Margate) appears to disregard the sensible recommendations and advice given in the same document.

Readers will be familiar with my views on blogging in regard to the risk it carries where the law governing defamation and libel is involved. I am directly responsible for what appears on this weblog and should someone leave a malicious and false, un-moderated comment, that person can be sued as well.

It's all a question of money and how deep the pockets of the offended party might be. The average man in the street can't afford the expensive solicitors fees involved in pursuing a libel action and the cost of a court order being placed on a company, such as Google, to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger. A big company can frequently afford to protect its reputation and pursue a blogger through the courts.

From what I understand, perhaps two of our local bloggers are reportedly the subject of litigation, as a consequence of publishing unsubstantiated rumours which might send any good libel lawyer pale. From experience of such things, I'm guessing that the cost of good specialist advice in such matters is close to £3,000, in simply dealing with a preliminary complaint; defending any potential libel action being an expensive business.

So perhaps some good will come from this example, in that those who believe that blogging offers unrestrained and unaccountable free-speech will understand that it's an illusion and that blogging carries the same responsibilities and consequences as any other form of self-expression.

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Wednesday, November 11 

Who Alone Was Great

Today, marking the official Remembrance Day, I tried explaining what it was all about to a group of school children before the 11 O'clock silence.

The only way I could think of to put the losses in context for them, was to describe the 'Pals' units of the First World War. "Imagine", I said, "if you all decided to go to war together, some of these young soldiers barely older than you; all the young men of a town joining up for a single great adventure, which unless they were quick, might be over by Christmas."

Then, I told all the boys in the room to stand up and then made them all sit down except for a handful. "Now imagine, I said, "that the boys left standing up were the only ones left alive from your class at the end of the war and those sitting down are among the names written on the town's war memorial."


This seemed to make it easier for them to grasp and let me lead the discussion on the Second World War and Afghanistan today.


But talking about the sacrifices now being made by our armed forces, also reminded me of two excerpts from T.E. Lawrence's (of Arabia) 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' writing on a different war:


'The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.'


And ..


'The Bedouin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an everyday-ness of this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by the decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables'.


It's almost one hundred years since Lawrence fought his way across the deserts of Trans-Jordan, Palestine, Syria and what is now Saudi Arabia and another sixty years since my uncle, then an officer in the Gurkhas, was fighting on the same North-west frontier that our own soldiers are trying to hold today, with the same level of success. Little has changed it seems in all that time. The same deeply held religious conviction of the people who would resist us and the seeming futility of trying to win that same piece of barren, mountainous land fought over by Alexander the Great, Ghengis Khan, the British Empire and the Soviet Empire.

It seems that the personal sacrifices and lessons of history and Afghanistan are quite lost on a Government that clearly doesn't read it. I do wonder if a single Minister has ever read the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

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Tuesday, November 10 

Good News for Pfizer in Thanet

Some encouraging local news, gleaned a few minutes ago from watching a Sky News Business report from New York.

Pfizer will close six research and development sites and trim jobs in the United States and the United Kingdom, following the acquisition of drugs giant, Wyeth. However, Sandwich will continue as one of the company's five main R&D centres, down from twenty such units across the globe, which will reassure local people who were worried it might feature in the cuts.

While Pfizer may still further streamline its local operation, it very much sounds as if the future of the majority of people working for the company here in Thanet is secure. However, I should add that this is taken from the lunchtime news and a Reuters report and I haven't any more details at present.

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Dog Day Afternoon

It's a newspaper headline that makes me think of Thanet and areas of Margate in particular:

"Concern about the proliferation of illegal breeds in deprived areas, where legal species such as the Staffordshire bull terrier are also seen by young gang members as status symbols, has led the Conservative Party to call for a new Dog Control Act to force owners to take responsibility for their pets."


I've two dogs of my own. A very old Yorkshire terrier (pictured) and a young puppy. Last weekend, even on the beach at St Mildred's Bay, I felt intimidated and considered it wise to turn the dogs around, because one young man had two boisterous 'pit bulls' running off the lead and were dominating the entire beach. A second and much older individual exercises his two dogs on the tennis courts and increasingly, I find that I have to keep a good look-out when I'm walking, to avoid being 'bounced' by dogs of all types roaming off the lead away from their owners.

On those occasions when I felt compelled to pass polite comment, "Would you please control your dog sir", the normal response from the owners of the more aggressive breeds is predictably unhelpful, hostile and even threatening. Women owners invariably insist: "He's only playing" as an excitable 'Rover' paws at my trousers trying to reach the trembling puppy I'm protecting in my arms.

Playing or not, the sight of two Staffordshire Bull Terriers (one local owner has three), charging across the beach in your direction and focused on the two small dogs in your care is likely to give cause for alarm.


The explosion in popularity of these so-called "weapon dogs", which are brutalised and trained by their owners to make them more vicious, has led animal welfare groups and politicans to call for urgent measures, including new laws, to tackle a phenomenon that threatens to overwhelm animal refuges.

A walk through the streets of Margate on any day leaves me to wonder whether the Dangerous Dogs Act was something that happened in another country. Out of work young men in 'hoodies' hanging around with the obligatory Staffordshire cross-breed, sitting on the benches outside the library or the wall outside the Jobcentre.

In today's Independent, the paper reports that the situation in some London boroughs is already "out of hand." The Deputy Mayor of London, Kit Malthouse, said consideration should also be given to banning all bull breeds which were inherently more aggressive than other dogs and were "canine weapons that terrorise the streets of Peckham, Toxteth and Moss Side" and Claire Robinson, a spokesman for the RSPCA, said: "The breed-specific issue is a red herring. What we need is a fundamental overhaul of legislation to tackle the problem of irresponsible ownership. "We need to be looking at measures such as tenancy agreements which can be used to ensure council properties are not used for indiscriminate breeding."

I wonder how many other people across Thanet have noticed the almost remarkable expansion of more aggressive breeds in the company of younger owners. What we can do about it other than express worry, I don't know but it's time that Government; any Government took decisive action to reverse the unhappy social consequences of removing the dog license in the first place.

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Monday, November 9 

Facts About Thanet

I''m constantly reading on a handful of local weblogs the accusation that the 'Council' is uniquely responsible for the burden of decline suffered by Margate or Thanet in general, over the last twenty years. The fact that all seaside towns, perhaps with the exception of Brighton, have found themselves in a similar economic position, goes quite unnoticed or is simply ignored and those who use inflammatory words such as "criminal neglect", appear to have no real idea of why the great British seaside has suffered so and indeed who is responsible, unless of course, its, "The council."

There is however a much bigger picture involved here than a local council working hard to deliver against a strategy of economic development and regeneration. Let's examine a few hard facts, mostly from council and Office of National Statistics sources, about the challenges we face about our island. An ageing population and twenty years of demographic change; accelerated by this Government's recently revealed 'Dispersal' and 'Inward migration' policy to seaside towns such as Margate, Hastings and Dover, has dramatically changed the face of the place where I grew-up:

  • Thanet has a disproportionately large population of elderly residents and the lowest life expectancy in Kent. The health of people in Thanet is the worst in the South-east.

  • Those residents over the age of 50 (which includes me) now account for 40.8% of the population, the highest proportion of 50+ adults in the country. This figure will continue to increase as time goes by and presents tough financial challenges to the statutory agencies at a time when central Government budgets are in unprecedented crisis.

  • Adults over 65 and 85 are once again higher than the national picture and annual incomes are lower. This has significant implications in regard to sustaining the local economy of our towns where disposable income is involved.

  • Thanet is characterized by household incomes significantly below the national and regional average but demand for new housing continues to increase and in particular those with disabled access. Meanwhile, Government is reducing its support for disabled facilities grants for the many homes that require it locally, leaving Thanet to find the funding and a £2.3 million backlog in applications.

  • There are over 4,000 people on the housing register and 35% of all homes in Thanet fail to meet the decent homes standard

  • Thanet has the highest levels of domestic abuse in Kent.

  • Unemployment is more than twice that of the South-east as a whole but qualifications are below the average.

  • Thanet experiences the highest levels of criminal damage in Kent.

  • The demographic mix in Thanet is changing rapidly with significant increases in ethnic groups.
I could go on but I think readers will have the picture by now.

Recently, I wrote that my own back-of-an-envelope calculation from a recent presentation suggested that every man, woman and child on the island has been subsidized by Government, in terms of services to the sum of £7,000 each. I also reminded people that collected council tax only pays 40% of what we need to deliver all our local services and that the balance of 60% comes from Government. This is about to be slashed, leaving the close to £6 million gap over five years, reported in Your Thanet last week.

This last decade of Labour government policies has proved disasterous for the island and yesterday's papers revealed what may have been going on behind the scenes in regard to Labour's efforts to win new seats through the simple expedient of making them poorer and more diverse. From looking at the published league of local deprivation, Thanet North sticks out like a sore thumb. It should be Labour but it's not, a tiny island of blue surrounded by a sea of red. But you draw your own conclusions; don't take my word for it.

Most of us have, at one time or another played the board game 'Monopoly', so you'll understand the principles that lie at the heart of any local economy, the value of property and the disposable income of the population or indeed, the visitors to the area.

So, Thanet Bloggers and local papers and local film producers who are so quick to criticize, tell me where the money comes from to deliver on all your grand plans, if efforts to rebuild and regenerate our local economy are frustrated? We need to give local people jobs, homes, opportunities and a future and these can't be found by turning back the clock or even under this Government, which seems so cynically intent on perpetuating and growing our benefits dependent culture, keeping us poor by sending us its poor and homeless in large numbers and against our wishes.

Thanet needs investment and encouragement and new ideas and industries to put people in work and above all, it needs money, lots of it, to reverse the damage done not by the council which simply delivers services within its budget but by a dysfunctional Labour government with its own agenda and which is now being seen for what it really is.

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BBC Plays Politics

North Thanet`s MP, Roger Gale, has described as "crass and inappropriate" the inclusion of an item relating to the Kelly report in an edition of The Politics Show (South East) otherwise devoted to Remembrance Sunday.

'"I was telephoned earlier in the week by a programme researcher" says the MP "and asked if I would participate in a live broadcast taking place from the home of the Lord Mayor of Canterbury. I explained very explicitly that I was committing the whole of Remembrance Sunday to relevant services and to the Royal British Legion and that I would not, in any event, take part in a discussion about the employment of MPs' wives and husbands in the middle of a programme devoted, quite properly, to a recognition of the service and sacrifice of our armed forces. I could not have made my position more clear.

I was therefore dismayed to find a clip lifted from an interview that I gave to BBC South East and recorded at another time and for a wholly different purpose being used to set up comment between two other parliamentary colleagues about a subject that I had plainly indicated that I did not wish to participate in.

There are important issues arising from the Kelly Report that may have a profound effect upon our parliamentary democracy and that may influence the kind of people that participate in it as Members of Parliament. Those issues do need to be responsibly and appropriately discussed and I have not been reluctant to raise them publicly myself.

I think that to include this item on Remembrance Sunday, however, reveals an insensitivity and lack of judgement that is breathtaking and to use the clip that was recorded for another programme in this way was, I believe, little short of editorially dishonest.

I would like the BBC to make it publicly clear that I did not consent to take part in this aspect of this programme, emphatically indicated that I did not wish to do so and believe that anything that detracts from the recognition, today of all days, of the valour of those who have sacrificed everything in the cause of our protection and our freedom is to be deplored.'

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Saturday, November 7 

In Parade

I'm joining MP, Roger Gale for his regular surgery at Westgate library today and looking at the appointments, it looks to be a busy one, through to 1'O'clock and broadly reflective of the troubled circumstances that the country now finds itself in.

At the council's cabinet meeting on Thursday, the jaw-dropping size of our share of the bill for our 'Boom and Bust' economy became clear, with the publication of the budget and medium term financial strategy report, which the local paper reports as being close to £6 million over the next five years. People often forget that approximately 60% of the council's funding of the net revenue budget, (the costs of providing core council services), comes from central Government and with the lights now being switched-off at the Treasury and money being frantically printed across the road at The Bank of England, councils across the land will soon feel the harsh consequences of what is now £200 billion of public debt.


Normally, the Labour group promptly sends out a press release after Cabinet meetings in an effort to convince anyone who might bother to read it that they weren't asleep after all. This time they appear strangely silent, although we did hear, with regular interruptions through the evening, Councillor Iris Johnston, bobbing up and down and forcefully reminding us of the manifest wonders and unappreciated benefits of a Labour Government . This, in the same week that we were given the news of the longest period of negative growth since the Second World War. Thanet's own budget challenges, we are told are all uniquely the fault of Lehman Brothers. Nothing whatsoever to do with Gordon Brown and Alasdair Darling and Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS and Afghanistan and Iraq and all those other inconvenient stories which never happened in New Labour's revisionist wonderland of shifting truths.


I really think it's time that Labour and its apostles stopped trying to convince us, locally and nationally about its wonderful track-record in Government and instead did a more convincing job of reassuring us that they have some idea of how to handle the consequences of a decade of mismanagement. and a national debt of almost unimaginable size!


Changing the subject to a more important matter of history , it's Remembrance Sunday tomorrow and I will be walking the wreath, donated by the Margate Charter Trustees, in the parade to the Westgate war memorial in Sea Road from St Saviours Church at 11:30. I hope to see some of you there.

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A personal view of Thanet stories, humour, photos, politics, opinions, links and news from Simon Moores.

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