The Front Page - Copy No 70. ( Hospital and The Allotment accolade)
22 February 2010
The Allotment:
and all the right sort of Headlines too!
The Allotment continues to have much praised heaped upon it. You may remember when it started out just a few short years ago, how different it was from everything else. It encouraged local growers with allotments to bring their homegrown vegetables in , so that the team there at The Allotment would always have the freshest of ingredients on their menu everyday for the benefit of local diners. Likewise this was the policy too when sourcing the full range of local foods, meat from Aylesham, and fish from the trawler fleet from Folkestone and so on.
And what they did initially with all those superfresh ingredients caught the attention of the Good Food Guide itself..so much so that Dave Flynn's restaurant became the only restaurant in central Dover to be included in that illustrious publication. A badge of honour if ever there was one....and as I say in just a few short years. Just a little over two years to be precise.
Now that other illustrious and high gloss publication of all things good in our fair county..Kent Life, has just given Dave further top class coverage in its excellent march edition...out now!. Sometimes it appears that Dover doesnt have too many places to shout about, but certainly not so, not when we can boast a restaurant like this in our midst. If other people are recognising its quality...then us locals should do so as well. The Allotment is at 9 High St, Dover. PB.
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Conservatives
See the Comments Below
This latest leaflet from local Conservative Candidate for Dover and Deal Charlie Elphicke thundered onto my doormat a day or so ago. It coincided with the latest debate on the hospital situation in the Members Club forum, and we have had many. As you can see it attempts to rally up the local population to join forces with the new Tory wave, to fight the mortal injustice of us not having a general hospital. All well and good you might think, but is this just wild speculative electioneering.
Sure we all want a hospital..who would say NO to a hospital. But the reality of it all was summed up by fellow top Conservative, the Leader of Dover District Council himself, Paul Watkins, who pointed out that you need a population of 500,000 to qualify for a general hospital and Dover has nothing like that amount of people.
Paul Watkins went on to say in the relevent Doverforum thread ( called..Dover and District General Hospital) that with a population of 600,000, East Kent already has three general hospitals...so in other words we are already overstocked with general hospitals in relation to our level of population. A sobering thought. I quote from Paul Watkins..
"East Kent has Ashford DGH, Thanet DGH, and a diluted Canterbury DGH for 600K+ population. End of case."
So doesnt all this leave Charlie Elphicke out on a populist but unsustainable limb. Charlie has aligned himself with campaigners like Reg Hansell and David Hannent, but aligned himself to a campaign that seems to have nowhere to go, and a campaign at odds with local Tories.
Paul Watkins, who knows a thing or two about the intricate manouverings of local government, clearly sees no future in this campaign at all. So this mixed Conservative message and leaflet seems to have left us more intune with confused.com than doverforum.com !
Bearing in mind this confused situation, would it not have been better all round to have grabbed with both hands the small cottage hospital idea.
PaulB
"This makes for a fun story - "Tory splits" and all that - but it's complete nonsense. The basic problem is that it mixes up what I am trying to get for our community with a DGH.
"The case I am making is the same case I have been making with the support of the Shadow Health Secretary for the last two years. That we should have a proper hospital. With care beds and with doctor led emergency services. This would enable more to be done in our community. My concern is that the location of the new facility should be in a location to enable a future Conservative Government to expand Labour's planned polyclinic to a proper hospital. And that access and parking should be assured. I totally agree with Cllr Paul Watkins that this location is the worst of all possible worlds. The ability to expand the services is critical to me as it is a major priority of the people.
"While we would all want an all singing all dancing DGH, that battle was lost in that late 1990s as Cllr Watkins says. I have to fight for what is deliverable rather than populist. The case I am making is considered, costed, fundable and deliverable. The local GPs tell me they want this, the Shadow Health Secretary is supportive and the people of our community are desperate to have fewer journeys to Ashford and Margate, with more done locally."
** **
The Allotment:
Stilll Making the Headlines!
and all the right sort of Headlines too!
The Allotment continues to have much praised heaped upon it. You may remember when it started out just a few short years ago, how different it was from everything else. It encouraged local growers with allotments to bring their homegrown vegetables in , so that the team there at The Allotment would always have the freshest of ingredients on their menu everyday for the benefit of local diners. Likewise this was the policy too when sourcing the full range of local foods, meat from Aylesham, and fish from the trawler fleet from Folkestone and so on.
And what they did initially with all those superfresh ingredients caught the attention of the Good Food Guide itself..so much so that Dave Flynn's restaurant became the only restaurant in central Dover to be included in that illustrious publication. A badge of honour if ever there was one....and as I say in just a few short years. Just a little over two years to be precise.
Now that other illustrious and high gloss publication of all things good in our fair county..Kent Life, has just given Dave further top class coverage in its excellent march edition...out now!. Sometimes it appears that Dover doesnt have too many places to shout about, but certainly not so, not when we can boast a restaurant like this in our midst. If other people are recognising its quality...then us locals should do so as well. The Allotment is at 9 High St, Dover. PB.
** **
Conservatives
Confused
on Hospital?
See the Comments Below
This latest leaflet from local Conservative Candidate for Dover and Deal Charlie Elphicke thundered onto my doormat a day or so ago. It coincided with the latest debate on the hospital situation in the Members Club forum, and we have had many. As you can see it attempts to rally up the local population to join forces with the new Tory wave, to fight the mortal injustice of us not having a general hospital. All well and good you might think, but is this just wild speculative electioneering.
Sure we all want a hospital..who would say NO to a hospital. But the reality of it all was summed up by fellow top Conservative, the Leader of Dover District Council himself, Paul Watkins, who pointed out that you need a population of 500,000 to qualify for a general hospital and Dover has nothing like that amount of people.
Paul Watkins went on to say in the relevent Doverforum thread ( called..Dover and District General Hospital) that with a population of 600,000, East Kent already has three general hospitals...so in other words we are already overstocked with general hospitals in relation to our level of population. A sobering thought.
"East Kent has Ashford DGH, Thanet DGH, and a diluted Canterbury DGH for 600K+ population. End of case."
So doesnt all this leave Charlie Elphicke out on a populist but unsustainable limb. Charlie has aligned himself with campaigners like Reg Hansell and David Hannent, but aligned himself to a campaign that seems to have nowhere to go, and a campaign at odds with local Tories.
Paul Watkins, who knows a thing or two about the intricate manouverings of local government, clearly sees no future in this campaign at all. So this mixed Conservative message and leaflet seems to have left us more intune with confused.com than doverforum.com !
Bearing in mind this confused situation, would it not have been better all round to have grabbed with both hands the small cottage hospital idea.
PaulB
Conservative Candidate Charlie Elphicke says in response...
"This makes for a fun story - "Tory splits" and all that - but it's complete nonsense. The basic problem is that it mixes up what I am trying to get for our community with a DGH.
"The case I am making is the same case I have been making with the support of the Shadow Health Secretary for the last two years. That we should have a proper hospital. With care beds and with doctor led emergency services. This would enable more to be done in our community. My concern is that the location of the new facility should be in a location to enable a future Conservative Government to expand Labour's planned polyclinic to a proper hospital. And that access and parking should be assured. I totally agree with Cllr Paul Watkins that this location is the worst of all possible worlds. The ability to expand the services is critical to me as it is a major priority of the people.
"While we would all want an all singing all dancing DGH, that battle was lost in that late 1990s as Cllr Watkins says. I have to fight for what is deliverable rather than populist. The case I am making is considered, costed, fundable and deliverable. The local GPs tell me they want this, the Shadow Health Secretary is supportive and the people of our community are desperate to have fewer journeys to Ashford and Margate, with more done locally."
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