howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
how do you see this panning out ed, the governmnent seem perplexed by it all.
what will be their decision?
Keith Sansum1
- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
blimey ed
i think we finally agree on something
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 673- Registered: 16 Jun 2008
- Posts: 1,388
Your guess is as good as mine, Howard. I would prefer it to remain a Trust Port, owned by the nation and with all the profits reinvested. Possibly the government has belatedly realised that this is the best business model but I doubt it. Perhaps the LibDems are keeping their privatisation urges in check.
Perhaps they are realising just how trivial a sum they can expect to receive, the £200m on offer from the Peoples Port is a drop in the ocean when you have a trillion pound debt. They keep asking for DHB to increase the baubles they are dangling in front of the locals so I suspect that they are just waiting to approve the DHB scheme. DHB is restricted from offering the earth because it is all public money and the more they promise the locals then the less there is to give to the government, i.e. the nation.
The admirable but amateur effort by the Peoples Port is all based on putative borrowings and there is nothing to stop them promising anything they like since it is all monopoly money anyway.
Guest 653- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,540
Over to you Neil and/or Peter.
Roger
Guest 698- Registered: 28 May 2010
- Posts: 8,664
Roger, it has all been said before.
The Ports Act 1991 provides a framework for the disposal of Trust Ports and it is under that Act that DHB's transfer scheme (i.e. naked privatisation) was proposed. Had Dr Goldfield not initiated that scheme the People's Port movement would never have been born. It is an attempt to prevent such a privatisation; and an attempt to bring the port under local public ownership in perpetuity instead.
Had Dr G not opened Pandora's box Dover would have remained a Trust Port; but until the Act is repealed Dover would always in the future have remained 'in play' and susceptible to future generations of port management to pull the same trick, lining their own pockets along the way.
Ed, in calling us amateur you ignore the fact that we have professional advisors who are at least the equal of DHB's; and that we have board members with far superior business records than theirs.
And if the Secretary of State should decide that it should remain a Trust Port, so be it; she now has, under the new Public Bodies Act, the power to decide without fear of judicial review.
I'm an optimist. But I'm an optimist who takes my raincoat - Harold Wilson
Guest 649- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 14,118
It takes alot to get me posting now,but hit the jackpot with this one.
I have always said it should stay a trust port under a updated Royal Charter,and I think that will still happen .the p/port was never going to happen It was only last week I was talking to Neil and the editor of the Dover Express about it in the old war bunker.
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
my impression is that they want to approve the "community port" idea otherwise they would not have asked them to come back with new proposals.
