Kent has failed.
Deep structural Meiji-style reforms are required.
25% youth unemployment is a disastrous legacy from Kent’s pensioners.
Manston airport is yet another failure. And the councils removing the air pollution monitors to poison their own citizens for this vanity project of tarmac.
Discovery Park is mired in the mud of building more housing estates.
90% of the Garden of England’s orchards have gone – when food security is ever more important in a Climate Change world.
The grinning Deaths-Head of cattle-truck UKIP racists of like Farage and Latchford blaming the Romanians or Bulgarians or Swiss for Britain's problems or borders.
And no Climate Change policies at all.
The County with the longest coastline in an era of hotter summers and wetter winters will slip beneath the waves. Or at least the rows of empty housing estates built on flood plains will.
All policies designed to cut Kent’s own throat.
Kamikaze Kent.
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way.
Discovery Park can focus on science jobs and a TB focus. We’re already seeing TB mutate from animals such as cattle and cats and dogs to humans.
In the Third World 1M people die every year from TB. Why? Not enough vaccines. It’s completely preventable. IT just needs some research and production of the vaccine. Discovery Park and the Rotary folks did that before with polio.
And good jobs. High-end research jobs. Production jobs. Shipping jobs through the ports of Ramsgate and Dover. Clean jobs. Jobs for Kent Youth. Low Climate Change impact.
Tourism jobs with conferences and delegations to East Kent.
And spin-off production with Sittingbourne Science Park. Flu vaccine. No more dead pensioners stacked up in the morgue each Winter. More than in Sweden. 20,000 wrinkly lives cut short.
Tetanus and other antibiotic research not done.
Cancer drugs in remission.
And Kaizen Kent.
Foolishly Britain banned learning a foreign language in school.
How silly in the Global Age - and for Kent when we live next to Europe.
That policy has been reversed though.
But the EU recommends at least two foreign languages to be learnt.
That’s what they’re studying in Germany and Italy and Spain – and speaking better English than you or me.
And where are the Asian languages?
Half the world’s population. The focus of UK economic growth in the 21st century.
Just 3,000 British students studying Chinese.
Even worse: just 300 studying Japanese.
The world’s largest economies and we struggle to speak to them.
Thai speakers? 60M people: the same population as UK? 2 University graduates each year. Vietnam? 90M people? I don’t think there’s any.
Myanmar? 60M people emerging into democracy? The prospect of hispeed rail from London to Long Thanh at last. Zero again.
Indonesia? 250M people? Maybe a dozen. You tell me.
Cambodia? 15M people? Have a guess. Not even a phrase book.
Korean? Different types of Chinese? Go whistle.
And dozens of UK radio and TV channels? Not one on language learning. Whither the Open University and BBC and Sky?
Time for Kaizen Kent with Meiji reforms and learning 2 European languages – and one Asian language.
Giving Kent’s young people the best chance of work in the 21st century.
Jobs as teachers. Jobs as website programmers. Mobile phones and wifi installers. As film and television programme-makers. Translators. Even jobs building schools or cleaning out asbestos.
Kent’s 400 schools should be able to choose the languages of the future – Japan certainly provides enough effort and incentive to learn their language and culture with books, games, conferences, films, courses etc. The UK’s Teacher of the Year teaches Japanese.
Britain should sit at Japan’s knee and learn – and Kaizen Kent with every Kent school and University offering an Asian language rather than Beckham Studies nonsense.
Hispeed rail 1 as a benchmark for HS2, and Hitachi Ashford (and a new UK depot in Newcastle and London) and Fujifilm Broadstairs and in Kent we are not maximising opportunities in Asia.
With 2015 and the end of WW2 only months away. And so little done so far for WW1 Centenary.
And Kent’s 4 Universities should provide Asian language and translation courses, East Asia and South East Asia Studies programmes. Half the world and we know nothing.
Kent has the language schools already. Time for growth not stagnation.
And in Asia time for British English to be the focus of growth.
Kaizen Kent not Kamikaze Kent.
I urge every Kent headmaster and teacher and pupil to explore the possibilities of 2 EU languages and 1 Asian language.
It’s your future.
Time for Meiji Kent. Time for Kaizen Kent. Time for Change.
The pensioners at KCC and TDC and RTC councils have failed us. Just dog-in-a-manger politics clinging on for another month for a paycheck and their pension despite the failure.
Skulking around appointing each other to non-jobs and ceremonial guff rather than democratic elections.
I am Ramsgate’s Mayor-in-Waiting.
I am the future.
The pensioners have failed us.
They are the past.
You know that.
They know that.
Time for a list of councillors to resign. Sandys has done so and Gale will too.
Time for a Police investigation into Manston and Infratil.
Time to reverse the failure of Kamikaze Kent spiralling down into oblivion.
Time for Meiji Kent reforms. Time for Kaizen Kent and Asian languages.
Time for Change.
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