Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Concert to raise cash for life-saving op
This is important. My friend Lemon Otter, the singer and singing teacher, is staging a concert in Canterbury on Saturday night to raise money for Kelly Turner. Kelly, 16, suffers from an aggressive form of cancer which will kill her in less than two years unless she undergoes life-saving surgery at a specialist centre in New York. The procedure will cost £1 million and, according to Kelly’s Just Giving page, she has achieved 30% of the target. Lemon promises her concert will be “Christmassy, have a musical theatre element, feel a bit like a pop festival and have lots of harmonies”. And she is hoping it will be a sell-out so that the benefit to Kelly is as great as possible. The concert at the Salvation Army Hall in White Horse Lane starts at 7pm on Saturday. Tickets are available on the door and cost £7 for adults or £5 for children and students. If they are sold out in the well of the hall, then seats on the balcony with restricted viewing will be offered for a reduced price. Log on to www.justgiving. com/fundraising/kellyTurner2000 donate to Kelly’s fund.
I’m curious about the system whereby someone who, like Kelly, is unable to have the operation in the UK must instead find the money themselves. Now, I appreciate that there isn’t the odd million rattling around the NHS biscuit tin, but two things spring to mind. By not having the capability to carry out Kelly’s op, the health service is saving itself a massive amount of money. And, secondly, the NHS doesn’t seem to mind coughing up when some woman from Lagos turns up to have her kid here rather than in Nigeria. A report earlier this year stated that health tourism had cost the UK £6 billion in the last eight years. Yet Kelly’s parents, who have paid their taxes for decades, find themselves needing to raise £1 million. “Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.”
That is how the American wit Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) defined the word in his Devil’s Dictionary.
In Britain a century on from Bierce’s death, we are constantly invited to take public consultations. Sounds good, doesn’t it – asking people what they think?
Except that few people actually believe that anyone is really listening. Just take the thousands of representations over the proposed Mountfield Park development in south Canterbury.
Corinthian, the scheme’s developer, has made some adjustments to its proposals as a result of some comments.
But the fact is that most of those people who supplied their thoughts either don’t want the development to go ahead at all or want it to be greatly reduced.
If that is so, then their contributions to any consultation amount to nothing because it will still go ahead with the planned 4,000 houses.
Indeed, the council’s own Local Plan, the planning blueprint for the district, has been subjected to a public consultation. How many people who responded welcome the projected 16,000 proposed homes?
Very few, I reckon. I was in the audience at the first full council meeting where members of the public were permitted to address councillors about the plan. It was a procession of people telling the authority how reckless and stupid it was being.
It’s not that public consultations aren’t without merit, especially as they can be used to generate ideas or to spot faults which may have been overlooked. It’s just that these will always touch on fairly minor detail rather than the nub of the issue.
Take the east Kent hospitals trust, for example. It is to embark on a public consultation next summer over the planned reorganisation of services, which the Gazette covered in detail last week.
The result will be the creation of a super hospital with most experts agreeing that the William Harvey in Ashford will get the job while Margate and Canterbury will see reduced services.
This means that the populations of two districts – most likely Thanet and Canterbury – whose input to any consultation is “we want to retain or improve services at our hospital” will be effectively wasting their breath.
Having drawn up a plan to put to the public next year, the trust is hardly going to rip it up on the say-so of a few comments.
Elsewhere, Canterbury Christ Church University is consulting on its plans for a new arts building on the North Holmes Road campus.
Two of the questions it is asking stand out: “Are you in favour of protecting and better revealing the site’s archaeology, including the 14th Century abbey wall?”
And: “Are you in support of an enhanced pedestrian environment, including creating a shared surface street to the east of the proposed building, which limits vehicle movement to service, disabled, visitor and emergency access?”
In other words, would you like good stuff to happen or not?
While every organisation knows it is obliged to carry out these inquiries into the public’s state of mind, it also knows it doesn’t really have to listen.
If this sounds like the voice of a cynic then let’s ask old Ambrose Bierce for a definition of the word: “Cynic, noun: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
Can you remember last year how the Labour Party flew into a rage after the Gazette reported that a cat from Chartham had been among those who helped secure Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide leadership victory? Chef Ted Phillips told us that he had registered his cat Leon for the election. Like many people, Ted is no fan of the Labour Party and thought he’d have a joke at its expense. This enraged the party, which denied the story’s veracity and claimed there was no way that anyone who isn’t on the electoral roll could have become a member of the party and therefore vote in its leadership elections. This despite the fact that there were numerous stories circulating in the regional and national Press about all sorts of joke registrations. ITN and The Guardian reported that a cat called Ned had voted for Corbyn. Unfortunately, Ted hadn’t kept any of the registration documents by the time Labour had its laughable hissy-fit. Ted wasn’t so careless the second time around. Yes, Ted has since registered Leon as a full member of the Labour Party. Leon, a beautiful seven-yearold Tonkinese, now has a Labour Party membership card in the name Leon Catt. He even received this card signed by the leader which reads: “Dear Leon. All my best wishes! Jeremy.” Ah, isn’t that lovely...
According to Facebook, there’s a business operating out of Castle Street in Canterbury called The Pie Place. Its page asks the perennial question: smooth mash or lumpy? What do you think?