Manston Matters

I attended Friday nights meeting of KIACC at Manston that was wrongly advertised as “tonight's night flight blight meeting “ ECR or “one more reason to go and berate the snout in the trough leader tomorrow night.” by SEMG on Big News and lord alone knows what on the “voice of the minority” from Herne Bay.
Apart from the collection of usual nimby anti everything suspects there were quite a few, I counted about 60 to 70, other interested members of the public and local luminaries. Among them Dave Green Chairman of RTC, Clive Hart, Labour Group Leader TDC, Liz Green and Chris Wells KCC Councillors and a couple of other District and Town Councillors including Gerry O’Donnell.
Notable by his absence, again, was Paul Carter the Leader of KCC who sent some feeble excuse about ‘a prior family event’ I am not the brightest person in the world but if ever I am asked if I can do something not in the Council diary I always ask the Domestic Authority if I am free. And I don’t have an office full of staff to organize me and I had dragged Myself out there despite feeling absolute rubbish as anyone who heard me coughing, hacking and barking at the back will testify, if I can do it so can he. I may be doing him an injustice but I think he just plain chickened out of coming to Thanet to explain his odd pronouncement that ‘planes from Manston take off straight out to sea’ and in any case Manston Airport is a Thanet matter any decisions about its future operations will be taken by TDC not KCC.
On to the meeting itself, the Chairman Paul Twyman gave a couple of short reports on various issues with a couple of contributions from members of the committee.
We then had a presentation from someone from Minster Church about what they had done with the non existent money from the non existent fines that are apparently not being collected to be distributed among local groups and organizations also cash from the same non existent fund had been given to a group from Herne Bay who provided a visual display.
Then on to the ‘Main Event’, The Public Speaking. To be honest it was a all a bit of a let down really, as expected Steve Higgins and Peter Binding stood up and vainly tried to justify their position re the Airport, a lady from one of the suburbs of Herne Bay, Ros McIntyre from Broomfield, gave quite a good presentation on why planes shouldn’t be flying over her house, some speakers defended the Airport and I would guess that the audience was split about 50/50 for and against although some antis were a bit undecided and seemed to support the Airport but with adequate controls.
As the meeting was for the Public I didn’t say anything although it was doubtful if I could have got a full sentence out the way I was feeling.
Right at the end an old fella got up and spoke against the Airport and edging ever closer to the Chairman ended his speech with a flourish and produced a banner that said something like ‘No To Night Flights and No To Training Flights’.
One thing that did strike me was the appalling acoustics in the place, added to the fact that obviously many of the speakers were not used to public speaking, (no criticism intended) and merely mumbled into their chest area it made it very difficult to hear what was actually being said by some of them, of course the same comments could be made about some members of the Committee!
What if any conclusions can be drawn from this I don’t know but I expect that the hardcore antis will hail it as a triumph and insist that this was the voice of the majority of Ramsgate Residents.
By now I had almost lost the will to live and dragged Myself off home and into My pit.
You can also read another report HERE.