So! The Deputy Prime Minster is a man of the people after all. He has visited Medway and seen for himself some of the issues confronting us.
Let‘s take the visit first. He arrived at Chatham Maritime by helicopter, stayed for a mind-blowing 15 minutes and then left in a chauffeur-driven Jaguar car.
His visit was part of a tour of the Thames Gateway. He later went on to announce £446 million over the next three years for regenerating Thames Gateway, but was careful not to be too precise in terms of where, when and for what the funding would be available. I often wonder how government comes up with such precise figures. Why not £450 million, or some other rounded figure. Surely not to give the mistaken impression that plans have been carefully thought out!
How much of that money will come to Medway remains to be seen. But one thing we do know is that this all forms part of the Deputy Prime Minister‘s grand plan to cover the south-east in new housing.
As far as Medway is concerned new housing is one thing, but without the accompanying infrastructure and support — schools, hospital capacity etc. — all that will be achieved is for Medway to further grind to a halt.
This is also all part of the grand scheme to shift the population southward, the perversity of this is that government funding is being shifted in the other direction!
So more people and more pressure for the south-east, and less money to offset it! There is some logic in this perhaps, but most of us have difficulty in understanding it.
Labour spin works overtime to justify all this. Take last week‘s meeting of Medway Council as an example.
The leader of the Labour Group proclaimed that under this government 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of new green land have been created. What!
Anyone who has done any amount of travelling over the last 6 years or so will know every conceivable open space has been disappearing under concrete at an ever-increasing rate.
Even when the truth is there for us all to see on a daily basis Labour spins and spins again to cover every eventuality.