Holy joysticks! You pop off oop north for a few days to film a couple of pilots for Dave (Wags Or Nags? and Celebrity Cake Mix), and what do you find when you get back? 100s of comments about the flippin' airport, that's what!
Oh well, the news today that Boris Island is going to be built just off the north Kent coast means there shouldn't be any more debate about the future of Manston. It hasn't got one!
That said, I expect the sight of a plan to build a six-runway lump on their doorstep will be giving the good people of Whitstable and Herne Bay a few sleepless nights. They'd better move to Ramsgate toute de suite before property prices plummet, it's going to sooooo quiet here in the Millionaires' Playground!
As regular readers will know, I rarely make any serious political comments here, except to take the proverbial out of our local Jurassic junta on occasion. It's probably because, as the only Lib Dem in the village, there never really appears to be any point. However, with Cllr Moores' 'popular but beseiged' Tory Thanet Life blog comatose, the chances of me being labelled a 'paedophile', 'welfare sponger', 'living gloating metaphor of all that's wrong with society', or a 'left wing c*nt' just for expressing an alternative political view seem to have diminished, so I'll take a chance and pop the old barnet above the parapet.
There is currently a mass debate going on elsewhere in the Thanet blogosphere about who's who in the zoo, which independents did what to who and when, and whether they were wearing brown shoes or Hush Puppies at the time, etc etc. Whilst this is all no doubt very interesting to the, er, mass debaters, it will do nothing to unseat the rabble who currently run our island, who will happily continue lunching with the Big Three (you know who they are) and bowing and scraping to their every whim, secure in the knowledge that it's not the electorate they answer to but their own and others' pockets. Yes, they chuck us the odd Big Event or Water Skiing Week occasionally, but that's bread and circuses to keep the masses happy, while they get on with the much more important business of feathering their not insubstantial nests.
I'm not saying the other mob would be any better. Years of pendulum politics have scarred Thanet and got us to the position we enjoy today - deprivation, underinvestment, and dereliction. Any independents that surface invariably seem to be the Tories, UKIP, or (heaven help us) the BNP in disguise, so we are effectively living in a two party state, where the incumbents feel at liberty to bully, intimidate and threaten voters and petitioners in a way that would make even the vile Mugabe blush.
Over in Hooray Henley yesterday, the Lib Dems ran the Conservatives a not very close second in the by-election precipitated by my old chum BoJo's elevation to the London Mayorage. But at least they gave them more of a run for their money than poor old New Labour, who limped home fifth and lost their deposit. The moral being that, if we really want a change here in Thanet, we have to start thinking seriously about a realistic third way. I'm not suggesting the path necessarily lies in the direction of the Lib Dems. After all, I for one can't even remember who their leader is these days, and I support them! But for the sake of this potentially lovely little island, someone, somewhere has surely got to come up with a serious alternative?
Update: My thanks to regular contributor Mr X for sniffing out this clip from BoobTube which demonstrates quite aptly the kind of frustration many Thanet voters must feel!
