Within hours of me publishing an article criticising Labour Mayor of Margate, Rob Yates, and his Charter Trustees for wasting public money on expensive freedom of the town ceremonies, when many residents are struggling to make ends meets, Yates hastily announced the return of the Mayor’s Community Awards which have not taken place for several years.
Was this a genuine act of community engagement by Yates? I don’t think so!
The truth is that it was my article, not the generous public spiritedness of Yates and his mates, which shamed this disreputable ragbag of ne’er do-wells into action, by exposing just how out of touch these posturing, wealth worshipping, robed and hatted cos-players are with the desperate needs of the community they are supposed to represent.
The Isle of Thanet News reports Yates as saying:-
The Margate community is the backbone of our town and this is driven not by profit, but by kindness. This event is our way of saying thank you and giving these organisations a voice, so we can hear from them, look to solve their problems and make our town even stronger
If Yates and his Charter Trustees genuinely believed this to be true then why do they think it’s OK to spend tens of thousands of tax payers cash on Freedom of Margate awards for wealthy folks like Tracey Emin and Arnold Schwartzman and on polluting, animal scaring, firework displays to commemorate and celebrate uber-rich monarchs who more and more people want rid of anyway.
Surely, if as Yates says the local community is the backbone of Margate then it is they, their organisations, and leaders who merit being awarded the highest accolades and honours the town can bestow. And it is the community organisations who serve the people of Margate who should be awarded the cash wasted on feting rich celebrities and outdated monarchs, and the lions of share of the £120,000 which has been sitting in the Mayor’s and Charter Trustees bank accounts for several years.
A hastily planned, bring your own food, community awards
ceremony, cobbled together to save the faces of an embarrassed Mayor Yates’ and his trustees is the not the answer. In fact this pathetic knee-jerk gesture makes the matter a whole lot worse by demonstrating that the rich and powerful get the hats, gowns, scrolls and banquets, whilst the “backbone of the town” get nothing at all apart from cheap ceramic gifts and wet knickers from sitting on the grass at the sunken gardens.
Labour Mayor of Margate Yates and his Charter Trustees have, through their actions, demonstrated that when it comes to a pecking order of importance the hard-pressed Margate community is firmly at the bottom pile and that the town’s inhabitants, apart from theose who are rich and famous, are looked down on by these medieval muppets as second class citizens deserving of nothing.
What makes this discriminatory civic injustice even worse is the fact that it is being perpetrated by politicians who claim to be socialists and who are supposed to be the champions of the low paid, poor, vulnerable and downtrodden, who sadly make up a significant number of Margate’s population.
These are the very same hard pressed people who pay, through their council taxes, to fund Mayor Yates and his Trustees, who in turn use these ill-gotten gains to pay tribute to the rich and famous whilst laughing behid their hands at the “backbone of the town”.
Bearing in mind his flamboyant medieval costume and those of his trustees its fair to say that Labour Mayor Rob ain't no Robin Hood. Mayor Rob is in fact Robin Hood reversed. Something no doubt Labour Boss, Keir Starmer, would be proud of. Maybe Keir might offer him a knighthood?
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