Now stop me if I am wrong but councillor remuneration should reflect our expectation of the amount of hours and effort a councillor puts in. So assuming the rate of pay from my job last year (£35k) then the £4k a council member gets suggests that a councillor should put in about four and a half hours per week. Even if we apply basic minimum wage rules we are only asking our councillors to work 14 hours a week. That's two to three hours on an average working day. An amount of time accounted for entirely by meetings.

Add in taking part in various community boards and meetings, holding surgeries, replying to emails and letters and preparing for council meetings and you get a group of people who work for peanuts.

Our councillors are, therefore, the worst paid administrators in the world.

If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Now as far as I can see it the local Conservatives are basically bent. Not bent so you could call the Old Bill but bent never-the-less. I don't know if it's because they're all following their own selfish agenda or because if slime clibs together with other slim, even slime they hate then they can obtain power.

We've certainly seen every evidance of it from the arragance Simon Day's deliberate flouting the planning permission his own department handed out; The self centred way Sandy Ezekiel tried to blag his way through everything like enough agression and self importance would get the job done; Councillors living it up half the globe away on our money; And the bent way the consultation on ellecting the leadership was run.

How many chats over a glass of single malt arranged that little sham?

The Tory croud are going to buy the farm come the ellections and we all know it. Sure some of the safe seaters will hang on. The one's with the money and the right amount of arse kissing stored away for this rainy day will be fine. But for the rest this will be the Dane valley by-ellection all over again.

What bothers me is that if Clive Hart knew that the Kay Dark was too lazy to do any paperwork then he promoted her interests ahead of Mark's because his faction could own her vote. After all they'd have to cover for the fact that she was picking up £4,000 a year for not working.

If that ist he case Mark Nottingham has just shown us that the Labour party are as bent as the Conservatives.

So maybe what's wrong with Thanet is that we've been flip-flopping between two indipendantly bent parties. It truely doesn't mater if Labour or Conservative get in because the controlling faction is bent. Bent as in deliberatly co-ordinating the minor inconsistancies to make sure that the ellections become about not party politics but about two factions fighting over hand-outs of £4,000 per member and a controling interest in the way Thanet tax money is spent.

The only thing the Conservative party did wrong is drop the ball by letting "our man in panama" go a wee bit too far.

Which means that

(a) Tony Flaig is right about voting Liberal Democrat

(b) Without a change to the way we cast votes blind, party-political votes will keep these two bent groups ... well what I want to say is un-printable but I suggest that we all vote yes in the May Referendum.

I appeal the sense of honour in the Labour party - someone must know something and you need to step forward.

There seems to be mixed messages coming from the Conservative camp regarding the Margate Caves (the Labour camp having gone silent)

We have one trustworthy Conservative telling us that the caves will cost £100,000 to £150,000 to put back into operation and another trustworthy Conservative telling me directly that this is a a spurious invented figure of my own devising.

The estimate regarding the costs of getting the caves to good order comes from Cllr Simon Moores who himself is a businessman. While I feel Dr Moores might have erred on the side of caution with a slightly enlarged estimate I see no reason to doubt his good intentions or indeed the quality of his estimates in this. Sure with something more solid (like a site survey and some actual quotes) the true figure might emerge but £100,000 seems a reasonable ballpark figure.

Understandably, I hope, I was upset when I learned from a number of trustworthy sources that the Chief Executive was being paid off to the tune of £200,000 to £230,000 while the Margate Caves were left to rot. This opinion Cllr Chris Wells called self righteous shock and horrer (sic).

Cllr Chris Wells' has spent some considerable effort to convince me that the Chief Executives pay off is a fiction without backing up his claims with anything approaching facts. He rightly points out to me at some point you have to trust someone's word and the word I currently have the most trust for said the figure was £200,000 plus £30,000. What throws dust into the air over the Margate Caves issue is that Mr Wells went on to say You then link a spurious invented figure to another spurious invented figure regarding Margate Caves in what he calls one of the best examples of the unctious fantasy world of bloggers I have yet seen.

Yeah that last one really convinced me Chris. It convinced me that Simon and Chris need to sit down and have a chat. With an election looming I am note sure that the Conservative Party can afford to have one member referring to the work of another as spurious, invented and unctious fantasy however impressive it is to see a councillor with a decent command of language.

I am positive that both Cllr Chris Wells and Cllr Simon Moores truly mean well and wish to provide an explanation to the rather grieved public. However all that has been achieved is the muddying of the water and the throwing of dust into the air.

Sometimes a little trust is all that is needed but we are talking about an area of local governance where the average person only trusts the authority to rip them off and do them over. Where the man on the street almost expects his council members to line their own pocket and is not the least bit surprised if they do. In such an environment the word of strangers has little value. The word of anyone has little value. Cold hard facts, on the other hand, demonstrate trustworthiness and in time might create a situation where at least some people are trusted a bit.

For the Dance of Vroomfondel and Majikthise we might have demanded rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty in which to disagree violently and slag each other off for the benefit of our own publicity but in this mater we demand solid, verifiable, documented facts. The Conservative Party need solid facts to back up their election chances the tax paying public need solid facts to know what their money is being spent on and those supporting the Margate Caves also need solid facts with which to work.

Dear Clive and Other High standing spokesperson for Labour Thanet,

It has come to our attention that you have failed to answer the questions of the press and public in regards to your reply to Mark Nottingham. With the ellection looming we am sure that you want to be about the business of slagging of the Conservatives so if you would be so kind as to come back and post a few more answers we can have this matter cleared up by lunchtime.

Question Number One: (Submitted by Thanet Star readers)
Did Kay Dark deceive the selection process?

Question Number Two: (Submitted by Matt B, Thanet Star)
Would Clive Hart as leader have known if Kay Dark was attending the meetings she Mark Nottingham has suggested she is not being fully truethful about?

Question Three: (Asked by Tony of Big News Margate)
Is Clive resigning?

Question Number 3b: (Logical follow up)
Who will replace Clive?

Question Number Four: (Submitted by Thanet Star readers)
Did Councillor Hart write a favourable report for the selection process about Kay Dark suitability as a candidate?

Question Number Five: (Asked by almost everyone)
Why doesn't Councillor Hart publish his evidence? He claims that there were reviews and such - well, where are the findings?