As the eagle-eyed will know from the What's On in Thanet section in my sidebar on the right, Margate has played host for the last two days to a national conference on regeneration, and the launch of a new 'Coastal Handbook'. Oh the irony! Anyhow, fresh from the fray, one of my (Labour, you'll no doubt correctly surmise) spies has sent this report:From someone who attended the Coastal Communities Alliance two-day event. You are free to use any of it if you wish, bearing in mind TDC tried to prevent Labour councillors from attending.
Wednesday commenced with two separate trips, one for the Margate regeneration/history and the other for commercial sites. When we went into Dreamland, who should be there to open the gates? Only the supposedly very ill Mayor of Margate [And alleged kitten killer - Ed] Ted Watt-Ruffell. He seemed fine as he strode to open two heavy security gates.
Also on Wednesday a very hot and flushed Latchford came rushing over to Ezekiel with the Yourthanet. Page 2 (the report of the ECR poll to find a new leader for Thanet Tories) has got him rattled. This was in the middle of the conference!
The conference was okay, but repeating everything we all know already. The book was £20 but free to delegates. Steve Ladyman had not been on the list to speak as they didn't really want Labour there, but as the Labour national spokesperson Gordon Marsden couldn’t get there they asked Steve to fill in. He was excellent. Roger Gale chaired the session and referred to Laura Sandys, his fellow Tory candidate for South Thanet, as ‘the lady over there’, as if he had never seen her before!
I put them straight on all the Government has been doing for Thanet… Surestart, Building Schools for the Future, doctors' surgeries, better hospital and promised poly clinics. As it was the Tories in Lincolnshire who suggested to the Tories in Thanet that they should run the event, the last thing some of them wanted was a good news Labour story.
I have been to much better conferences and fortunately some of the people there knew how Thanet has gone down under the Tories. The good news items were done in our time.
I had complaints about Smith Court Hotel from 4 people. The rooms were freezing and apparently the radiators that were working were on timers, and this was the recommended hotel for delegates!!
25 comments:
i used to work at a firm where a department were so inept, huge errors would occur through poor procedure, planning and managers who were not managing.
How I laughed when praise was heaped on the same department with the same people when they rectified the errors and got themselves back to square one.
Seems Thanet District Council have the same agenda. Degenerate to Regenerate.
I think someone is making a lot of money out of Thanet being a deprived area.
This event was totally misrepresented and I don't think many of the business community were present.
It was more a case of speakers stating the obvious and another saying Thanet's economy was mainly the Black Economy based on smuggling of booze and fags.
There was nothing new to offer other than a book which they could have promoted in our new town-centre in Waterstone's and saved everyone lots of money.
What a load of rubbish, the
labour lady mentioned saying how marvellous she was, how everything was right when her party were in power in Thanet,tell that to all the people who gave the tories such a monumental increase in members in 2007, I was at the Conference as a visitor and yes she had her say, but the rest of the garbage in the blog under her quotes denegrating the tories is just that garbage . I personally thought the Conference was very good , well run, and from my observation both main parties had the same number of delegates. Perhaps your spies ECR would like to comment that under her Government, the former leader is being subject to an enquiry, our credit rating has droped to AA affecting the value of our currency,we have the largest national debt since world war 2 and under her prudent chancellor and now leader,the only avenue now open for our labour lovies is to attack tory councillors, which seems now to be a common theme through the webs. what a sad bunch.
As usual Irish poisons the well. When are we going to get the decent labour human being politicians like Harry and Ann speaking up? They must be thoroughly fed up up with all this spite being prattled in their name.
The Irish as you call her is the only one who seems to stand up for decent people - who is honest, and works hard for the good of Thanet and not self interest, the same cannot be said for most tories !
Now then, now then. I was there too! It was indeed very difficult to find out about this conference if you didn't know it was already on. But some intrepid Thanet bloggers had it publicised with TDC's very own publicity flier from mid December. Said flier stated tickets had to be requested by the 12th of Jan at the latest, yet TDC didn't PR the event until the 21st of Jan. See their press and events section of the website for info.
Delegates that were taken on an economic regeneration tour were actually given an official handout dated 27th Jan 2010. The tour was used for another delegation over a year ago. Inside was a series of gems such as:
1. The Royal Sea Bathing heralded as 'brought back into use as 272 apartments through private investment.' No mention of the 100s of extra apartments above the original application squeezed into the site that neighbours are up in arms about, the gas supply that has been condemned or the developers in liquidation.
2. The M&S building being used as the Turner Project Space.
3. The successful Royal Sands development in Ramsgate.
oh dear. Have the delegates been told the truth?
Delegates complained to me about the freezing temperature at the Walpole too. So that's two frosty official hotels then.
Perhaps they should have held the conference in a certain scottish wool shop, they are used to holding cross (LOL) party debates rather than the 1 sided aren't we wonderful debates.
Irish is like clive, a self righteous and opiniated publicity seeker who will jump on any bandwagon to win a friend. She will be great to your face but then stab you in the back. Group meetings are always more productive when she is not there. Time for her to take the next broomstick back to the old country.
Wow! If I didn't know you were only joking, I'd think you were a racist, sexist pr*ck!
Well done 10.46 you have summed the lady up to a T, whatever it is she's done it,all you get from her is when i was in the Cabinet I ........................zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz yes a self opiniated biggot
i hear the Labour backbenchers are already fed up with their new leader and are pushing for his much more canny deputy to take his place in May. Can you shed any light on that 1046?
You've got some nasty people posting on here slagging off some very hard-working councillors who believe in doing the right thing for the area. No, I don't mean Tories as they are the ones posting vicious comments about two Labour stalwarts.
Those vicious comments must be from members of the 'nasty party', in other words members of what Bertie B. calls the Ezekiel Party.
8.35 pm - 1. Royal Sea Bathing residents locked out from their car parks by the administrators due to a conflict over maintenance fees (all fees and no maintenance)
I find it interesting that all the comments here are anonymous, with attributions from anonymous people claiming to know who the other anonymous people are. I was able to attend the morning of the second day, and I paid to get in because there was no other way, as although TDC was administering the conference, it was run by the Coastal Communities Alliance.
I saw Iris, David Green, Alan Poole all there; Sandy Ezekiel, Roger Latchford, and a number of officers from TDC and KCC. Clive Hart was on the list, but I personally did not see him, although he could have attended part of the day which was different from the part of the day I attended!
Your quoted source ECR has given a very biased version of the parts of the day I saw. Neither do they give a particularly accurate picture of the range of speakers or debate and questions. Their reference to their speech is a give away as to who they are, as Iris did give an inappropriate and out of place party political ad for herself and her government.
Laura Sandys was there, and asked a question, and other speakers included Dr Phyllis Starkey, a Labour Chair of Select Committee, and Mark Simmonds MP, Conservative spokesperson on health, from a coastal seat in Lincolnshire.
I felt from what I heard the debate was a little stilted and formal, but the idea was to share experiences and identify where as a group the coastal towns could work together to influence government - whoever that might be - after the next election.
From that point of view the purpose of the exercise was to put Thanet into the frame of reference with other coastal towns for the forthcoming processes and campaigns to government. Only time will tell of that has been achieved, but there was a clear effort to make a start on being an integral part of the process. That should be non political in the sense that all should want us to be involved, and reap any benefit from membership of this group. Attempts to make this point scoring on a local party political level say far more about the writer than anything else - especially when they choose to remain anonymous, and then identify themselves with their reference to their own speech!
To be fair the posting is derived from an e-mail sent with no intention it be posted anywhere. The author never intended it to be made public so 'mea culpa. It should not have been sent to Richard and was never intended to be made public and is clearly the private view of an attendee.
Interesting in that it brought the racist rats out of their holes though.
I think you are a bit hard on 10:46 ECR. Nobody can deny that the lady is as described, an opiniated and self-righteous publicity seeker. That's not half as nasty as some of the other things posted on your site, even by you. Seems to me like its the truth that many on all sides of the political spectrum, and officers, see every time we come across her.
But actually that makes it even more intersting, Margaret, as this is clearly a very one sided view of an event which we should at least try to show in the best light for the good of us all.
Many have believed for some time that politicians cannot be trusted to tell the truth, and moments like this make one despair of the constant complaints that politicians have at not being believed...one can see why!
rumour of a pending crossing the floor, dissatisfaction with the new leaders ability to lead, huge anger at nottinghams repeated appearance at Standards. All points to meltdown at local as well as national level. Time to get back to proper socialist policy where wages and housing are mlore important than posing for the camera.
As ever, Cllr Wells makes some sensible points there.
I'm glad that he's redressed the balance without resorting to vicious personal attack, which seems to be the hallmark of Thanet politics.
In my defence, I made it clear from the start that this was a biased contribution. The email came with a note, as you can see, that I was free to publish any of it.
I've heard to that there is discontentment within the red camp! new leaders all round then eh?
By the way, I exempt myself from viciously attacking Thanet politicians, as I ain't one!
The only person who stands up for the decent British non-immigrent people in Thanet is, and i know you will hate this 'richard', Tony Flaig.
Tony Flaig probably calls them "immigrents" too (or is that "to"?).
You're right, 1:52pm. I do hate it!
What's Tony Flaig doing sucking up to the Lib Dems anyway? Surely he'd be more at home in UKIP ;-)
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