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Roger, re your remarks in #39:
"In your posting, you mention that Dover has benefited from enormous investment from the tax-payer amounting to billions of pounds and that the largest was the Admiralty Harbour a century ago. Has the taxpayer paid large sums into Dover Harbour Board in recent years do you know ?"
No, there is no reason to. Immense sums from the national purse have been invested in Dover over the centuries for defence reasons, far and away the largest investment being the encircling breakwaters of the Admiralty Harbour. The Navy departed and handed the harbour over to DHB in 1926, returning of course for WW2. DHB has inherited the advantage of all this taxpayer funded infrastructure and all the profits made from it have been continuously reinvested giving us the great sprawl of the Eastern Docks and all the other developments.
"I don't think the argument is over a few million quid, more that Liverpool will take a lot of business from Dover and the Town, the businesses here and of course, the Harbour Board - all will suffer."
There are ports all round the country attempting to attract calls by cruise ships. Liverpool has a tremendous maritime history and was a major transatlantic liner port until it lost most of the trade to Southampton. It deserves to have a bite of the cherry and is sufficiently remote from Dover that I doubt that it will have very much impact.
"If we aren't careful, Calais will take business from us too, when it's cruise terminals are finished. Lots more reasons why the Town needs brightening up now and moving forward - and I'm not just talking about the big regeneration projects, although they are very important."
I think there is only a single cruise berth contemplated in the Calais Port 2015 plans. One imagines that, as with Liverpool, it will cater largely for passengers from the hinterland, and port calls for passengers wishing to see a bit of France. We can hardly begrudge them this and again I would not expect it to have much effect on Dover.