Thanet Life

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.

"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.

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.
  

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.

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.

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.