Spectacular End For Ostend Spirit

Holy shipwrecks! If you've ever wondered what it would be like to stand on a beach with a ruddy great cross channel ferry steaming towards you at full tilt, then this is the video for you!

The ferry in question is none other than our own Ostend Spirit, which, after we forked out £700,000 in 2010 to dredge the Port of Ramsgate to accommodate it, spent a grand total of, er, not very long operating on behalf of the now defunct TransEuropa Ferries between here and Oostende. The very same Ostend Spirit, in fact, that was occupied by its Slovenian crew in Tilbury for weeks while they demanded unpaid wages after TransEuropa sank without trace, taking £3.4m of our council tax with it.

The very, very same Ostend Spirit that could have been seized in our port and sold to recoup some of our decimated dosh, had not Our Harvey been out to lunch when the harbour master rang to tell him it was about to set sail and request permission to nab it.

Well, it's junk now, having been sold to a breakers yard in Turkey for scrap, which is where the video comes from.

Meanwhile TDC's spin doctors have been rotating at 20,000rpm to bring you the news that Ramsgate has been granted £161K of eurofunding 'to build on the success of this increasingly busy port'. Well, that's what it says in the Maritime Journal, and who am I to disagree?!!

Deloitted To Meet You

So there you are, a dufferish district council that has attracted a fair amount of controversy over its asset disposal plans on a sea front in deepest, darkest Kent.

You're trying to reassign the leasehold to a listed building. The whole sorry saga has been mired in claims and counter-claims, to the point where you've even been accused of seriously misleading your electorate, the people who vote you in and pay your wages and expenses.

What you really want is a great, big pub company to take the whole thing off your hands. But now so many questions have been raised that you're going to have to at least pay lip service to public opinion and be seen to be doing the right thing.

Perhaps you need some independent advice to get yourself out of the mire? Call in some unbiased experts so that you could demonstrate there was no conflict of interest once the lease has been handed over to the pubco? Good thinking!

Now, who do you hire? Yes, that's right, the same people who do the accounts for the great, big pub company.

No, dear reader, I haven't made it up. You couldn't.

Update February 2014: Since this item was published, TDC have given Deloittes the boot. Another victory for me! Hurrah!

Taxing Question

Yikes! I see that the duffers in Cecil Square are proposing a 2.46% hike in council tax this year, followed by promised rises of 2.5% over the next four years! Quite why they should be getting any sort of increase, when there are people in Birchington who haven't had their rubbish collected for nine weeks is beyond me. Surely we should be getting a rebate?

Of course, here in the chi-chi south of the island we do pay a little more to keep it exclusive. In fact I would personally be prepared to pay double if Thanet Council promised to keep their grubby, shaky and rather dithery mitts off the place!

Click here for council press release

Council 'Adequate'

Which actually means pretty pisspoor in bureaucracyspeak. This seems to have slipped through the Thanet blogosphere unnoticed, but a new report last week by the Audit Commission, the government's government watchdog, and other major stakeholders (dreadful term, only appropriate for Dracula movies IMO) rated our beloved duffers in Cecil Square as performing merely 'adequately'.

By contrast Kent Cunty Cuncil (--ps, the '-' seems t- have g-ne -n my keyb-rd f-r a m-ment there) was rated as performing 'excellently'. Both are Tory strongholds. So how come their performance is drastically different? There's only one way to find out.... FIGHT!!!!!

Click here to read Audit Commission story on Gazunder website
Click here to read Audit Commission report on Thanet Council

Update: That ruddy faced man from KCC is due to attend a business breakfast at the Pegwell Bay Hotel on Thursday, although he has a habit of no-showing if it involves anything east of Canterbury. Perhaps some of you good taxpayers might like to bowl up and ask him what chance now of getting our £50m plus interest back from Iceland?!!?!

Margate 60,000,000 - 0 Ramsgate

Above is the banner headline for tonight's crunch meeting of the Ramsgate Society (7.30pm, The Media Centre, Cavendish Street) aimed at helping 'secure a future for Ramsgate'. Be there or be, er, unRamsgatonian!

They've sourced the £35m figure from the Margate Renewal Partnership website, but surely it's an underestimate? Add on the £17.5m for the Ike and Tina Turner Centre, another couple of mill for the de-dualling of Fart Hill and the snazzification of the old town, plus £3.7m just dished out to Dreamland, and by my reckoning it's closer to £60m.

And what do we get here in Ramsgate? A mill for a crumbling facelift for our crumbling East Cliff? There was meant to be £1.5m from the Lottery Heritage Fund, but nobody seems to know where that went. And where do all the harbour dues from our lovely marina and port go? Certainly not into dredging the flippin' thing, it seems. Apart from that, it's all closed toilets, asset sales, and knackered old jumbos 24/7! Not that the RamsgateSoc are even going to tackle the question of night flights over 900+ listed buildings, I hear.

Don't get me wrong. Margate is in desperate need of a transfusion before it dies, like the Mayor's cat, of anaemia. But although Ramsgate isn't doing so bad on its own, with new shops opening up almost on a daily basis, I'm not sure that any of us here on the sunny south side will be prepared to donate armfuls for very much longer!

Arson About

Reader Foxy writes:

I feel the local community needs to know what is currently happening in Ramsgate Cemetery allotments - my cabin was burned to the ground and there was another fire during the week. I also had to call the police a second time after spotting someone in the cemetry shooting the wildlife - recent count is 7 parakeets, 3 squirrels and 2 hedgehogs.

Considering the horrendous amount of money spent by Thanet Council on open prison type fencing all over Thanet including the Cecilia Rd allotments I am angry, especially since the vandalism here was minimal until the offending fencing was erected. Not to mention the entire destruction of my sanctuary by arsonists this week.

Sounds like the wild west over there, Foxy. Perhaps, instead of spending all that money on hideous fencing, the council would have been better off hiring a sheriff!

Old News

I bumped into that geriatric reprobate Angina on the way back from the Netto last night.

He's fuming because, he says, he predicted that flights to Nowhere, Virginia would be a dead loss when they were announced last year, but can't log into his blog to crow about it at the moment, having had several of his fingers amputated up at the QEQM the other week.

When I got home I searched his blog, and blow me down if he wasn't spot on the money!

Flight of Fancy

14 July 2006

I see yet more of our hard earned dosh is going to subsidise flights from Manston to Norfolk, Virginia, the home of the US Navy. Quite why we'd all want to go there, heaven only knows. I drove past it once. If you like big, grey battleships it might float your boat, I suppose.

And of course, all those US Navy ratings are just dying to get on a plane and come and see our newly opened Tudor house in Margate.

Next time I pay my council tax, I think I'll just get it out in cash, and go and stuff it straight down the nearest drain. It'll cut out the middle man.