Please note: these Jottings are purely personal comment, and do not necessarily or directly represent the policy of either the Conservative Party or the Conservative Group on Medway Council.
I have noticed that our political opponents have been trying to put about false ideas of what is going on with the issue of Rochester Airport.
Both the Liberal Democrats and (more vocally) Medway's Labour Party, including former Councillors, have not only continued to oppose flying from the airport, but have more recently tried to suggest that the Conservatives are secretly trying to close the airport
What we must never forget is that those two political groups—and the Independents from the previous administration, one of whom is still on the Council—consistently voted and argued for closure of the airport and concreting it over for built development. By contrast, the Conservatives have never once wavered from their stated stance in support of continued operation of Rochester Airport.
Meetings between June and August 2003 involving the airport's operators, the chairman of the statutory consultative committee, the Council's Leader and Deputy Leader, and all three ward Councillors for Rochester South and Horsted, have reaffirmed the Council's Conservative administration's intentions regarding the airport and pointed the way forward for the future of this important asset.
Not only that, but all the work of these past several months has now borne fruit in the form of an extension to the leases to the airport's operating company (due to be agpproved at the next Cabinet meeting) to give time for a long-term lease to be negotiated. This long lease will be for decades rather than just a handful of years, and will encourage investment in the airport's future.
The failure of other political parties in Medway to understand what is fully accepted by both the Conservative administration of Medway Council and the national government (clearly expressed in at least two of the government's Planning Policy Guidance documents) shows that they really have no concept of the true value of assets such as Rochester Airport.
Thankfully the Burghers of this area had vastly more sense than today's Labour and LibDem parties when they wisely created the airport back in the 1930s and sited it at its present high altitude. While those other parties have willingly dumped tens of millions of your hard-earned pounds into the mud at Rochester Riverside (heading towards bankrupting the Council in the process), the Conservatives will as always concentrate on achieving real worth from any resource that Medway possesses.