Sunday 7 December 2008

Sunday morning reflections

A bit of a strange and rather nonsensical story going around relating to Edinburgh Woollen Mill Gate this morning, this was about the conduct of Sandy Ezekiel and Roger Latchford towards Iris Johnston at the Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

I would seem that the protagonists have got it into their heads that it was me who arranged for this incident to be witnessed by two local paper’s journalists, this was certainly news to me.

I also gather that there have been some attempts to discredit at least one of the journalists who gave evidence to the solicitor acting for the standards monitoring officer at TDC, by calling him devious. I wouldn’t have thought a journalist who wasn’t devious would be much good at his job, nor would I think many people would be bothering to read this if I wasn’t at least a bit.

I understand the full report that has been published and was considered at a standards committee meeting of TDC on Tuesday night makes interesting reading.

ECR put a bit up on Eastcliff Richard blog (link on sidebar) about the need for bloggers to put feeds from other blogs like the ones on my sidebar, under the title of Recent Posts on Other Blogs.

One interesting aspect of this is you can determine the relative popularity of local blogs from the traffic (the number of people who click on the link on another blog to get to this one) you get from them, below is a list of the traffic from other blogs during November.

http://www.eastcliffrichard.blogspot.com/ 970
http://www.bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/ 234
http://www.eastclifframsgate.blogspot.com/ 190
http://www.thanetcoastlife.blogspot.com/ 96
http://www.nakedinthanet.blogspot.com/ 90
http://www.thanetbloglist.co.uk/ 83
http://www.thegreatdaktari.blogspot.com/ 50
http://www.villagevoices.blogspot.com/ 13
http://www.save-kent.blogspot.com/ 12
http://www.thanethope.blogspot.com/ 6
http://www.thanetstar.com/ 6

Links are very important on any website, because without them search engines like google tend to ignore it, and if you are going to write something presumably you want people to read it.

There is an interesting post on Thanet Life about the fantasy economy we have been living in where a very high proportion of jobs generated over the last few years have been in the public sector click here to read it.

Quite a lot of my dealings with the public sector recently have been far from satisfactory, and when you look at the salaries and pensions of civil servants it begs some questions over value for money.

Click here to read about some obtained by Tim under the freedom of information act.

Click here for some more old pictures of Ramsgate

I have also just noticed that Thanet Underground has added considerably to the post about Wellington Caves (aka HMS Fervent) it really is a most interesting post and comes highly recommended click here to go there.

5 comments:

  1. Perhaps the protagonists are using this as a diversion ?

    Standards Committee once managed to avoid considering whether a Head of a TDC Dept had fired to endanger life at 6th Thanet Gun Range. (By the expedient of allowing the Chair to withhold the evidence file)

    But apparently a wee spat outside a shop is a red hot public order
    issue to pull the wool over our eyes.

    Hey let us talk about a street incident and forget:
    (1) mixed solvents being remediated at Thor
    (2) cyclohexanone being remediated at Sericol
    (3) Common Law Informations naming a councillor in Treason Law
    (4) Unanswered FOI requests about appointments and retirements of TDC Heads of Dept and Town sergeant. (And end of employment appeal proceedings in which a former Head of Dept allegedly based his case that certain cllrs had persecuted him for the help he had given police to investigate links between IRA and far right wing groups in Thanet. It is not clear if he was helping Royal Ulster Constabulary at that time)
    (5) Unanswered FOI request about a Chief Executive caution to tory Cllr Maison for mail intercept at TDC
    (6) Thanet tories are not answering whether Roger Gale did support Cllr George Maison against those who opposed an issue of a firearms certificate in 88/89. Whether police dropped inquiry, issued a firearms certificate (which they had to withdraw in 96 after a paramilitary assault on Mrs Mortlock then suing Maison for libel) and in dropping inquiry also dropped the requested review of Deal barracks security.(Bombed killing 11 Marines 22.9.89) Whether Cllr Hayton lied on oath in 98 to the High Court to stop any hint of these matters reaching a Judicial ear.


    So the logic of the protagonists is that you were so anxious to take Thanet eyes off the bigger issues that you deployued the press to the Edinburgh Wool Mill ?

    Mind boggles.

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  2. Rick - interesting ideas as ever - but please bear this in mind. The Edinburgh Woollen Mill incident happened in mid June - long before Sericol and Thor became hot potatoes once again (if you see what I mean). The press were invited to attend by Cllr Johnston. Woger and Eeezikill found out by their own devious means about the event and had their with Margate's Red Rose inside the shop - not outdoors. The discussion Tuesday night about the report was not listed on the standards committee agenda. It may have in fact been discussed in private, excluding the press and public.

    ReplyDelete
  3. As to popularity it might be worth noting that some blogs publish daily and twice daily, just to get to the top of the list.

    You rather skew the picture by only linking the last five posts, also worth pointing out is your number two posted twice, number three trice in the week and your first posting eight times, still its not a competetive sport, statistics wonderful things michael

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  4. I'm afraid Sandy cant see the reality that he is the one at fault - always trying to throw the flack around. Come on if not for the sake of the Tory party stand aside man and let those without a temper take over and those who have the good of the towns only at heart - you are thick skinned not to see everyone wants a change - isnt being booed at the lights ceremony enough of a hint!

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  5. 13.19 If you look under the five links you will see it says show all if you do so it does just that. As far as statistics go these are the only ones I have that show anything about the popularity of the other Thanet blogs and as the subject is of interest I thought I would publish them.

    I believe it was Shaw who said; lies damned lies and statistics, but even so there are much larger disparities between these figures than I expected.

    13.33 I am afraid at both local and national levels many of our elected representatives seem to have lost sight of their purpose, which is to represent the electorate and keep local government in check, so the carry out our wishes and not their own.

    I am afraid some of our civil servants seem to see Sandy as rather malleable, only recently they took away his email address leader@thanet.gov.uk I had to threaten them with an official complaint before they reinstated it.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.