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  Ross - Yes, pensioners are people. However, they are the wrong people. They are not the people of the People's Port. They are senior citizens who can be drawing their pensions anywhere from the Costa Brava to the suburbs of Melbourne. They will expect the contributions they have made to their pension funds to be used to support them in their retirement and not to be siphoned off to enrich the denizens of Dover.
  
  The raison d'etre for the People's Port proposal is to extract sums from the Port of Dover to pass to all the inhabitants of the Town of Dover, from the mewling infant to the check-out girl to the middle manager to the retired seadog.
  
  It is indeed a good idea that the ferry companies take a share in the proposed new structure. They are the foundation of the ports prosperity and are notoriously ill-served by the current lamentable harbour board. There are, however, two minor drawbacks to this proposal. One is that they are all foreign-owned and that this contradicts the stated aspiration to retain the port in British ownership. The other is that they don't have any money.
  
  Large sums have been taken off them by the harbour board to put towards privatisation and they have been promised even higher charges in the years to come.
  
  P&O is committed to building two new superferries at huge expense and is owned by Dubai which is sinking in the sands of suffocating debt.
  
  Norfolkline has just been taken over by the Danish company DFDS who are required to find immense sums to fund the purchase from their Danish compatriots Maersk who are themselves suffering grievously from the global recession, with boxboats laid up the world over.
  
  SeaFrance is in meltdown and has applied to the Paris Commercial Court for judicial protection.
  
  LD Lines are a newcomer and still establishing themselves.
  
  The parent companies of SeaFrance and LD Lines - SNCF and Louis Dreyfus respectively - might possibly be interested but French ownership would send Daily Mail readers into uncontrolled fits of rampant xenophobia.
  
  You state that the People's Port principle is more to do with governance than supplying funds but go on to say that a community trust fund will be created to filter a proportion of the profits, i.e. supply funds.
  
  This is the crux of the matter. The reason for wanting to have a say in the governance of the Port is so that some of the port's income can be diverted to be spent on the Town instead of being used exclusively for maintenance and expansion of the Port.
  
  Whether this is sustainable, given that astronomic interest payments will also need to be extracted to send to the new owners, is another matter.

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