Spiraling Debt, Interest, Inflation and Blood Money Payments will Leave Conservative County Council Plans Shipwrecked?

 

Massive changes to the way the floundering UK economy affects Councils will hit Northumberland County Council this year following its high profile release of news that they are going to embark on a £307M capital program in this financial year. Those spending plans may have to be urgently revised as they are no longer thought to be viable or sustainable.

The borrowing requirement (debt) of the Council which sat at £807M pre covid, will take the Council’s outstanding debt over the £1Bn mark and with rising levels of base rates will raise revenue repayments on capital debt from £21.4M in 2020 to on or around £37M this year and that figure may be revised if interest rates rise through the Bank of England having to raise rates to attempt to curb inflation.

With the real time effects of inflation on Council budgets, Northumberland County Council’s early projection is that the revenue budget of the Council is expected to take an additional £22M hit as fuel, energy and running costs soar through the mismanagement of post brexit Britain by the Conservatives. 

These levels of payments from the revenue budgets of the Council, that's the budget which pays for the services you receive as a Council taxpayer, will be heavily depleted and services both standards and quantity will fall this year. When coupled with the blood money payments made to the outgoing Chief Executive of the Council, Mrs Daljit Lally to stop all legal action against currently sitting Conservative Councillors you can see that the Council which sent out the nations highest council tax bills this year will want even more from you as we move rapidly towards the next Local Government County Council elections.

It doesn’t stop there either, as the ambitious and very costly capital program of the County Council must be serviced and managed using revenue funding and as we described above that fund has been slashed by circumstance and mismanagement of the economy by both the Council and its conservative Government in office and its hopes of raising additional funds from is residents have been dealt a real time blow as there appears to be no respite or help to be given to residents as the UK’s energy price cap could rise to an average of £3,840 in January, analysts have warned, after Russia further curbed gas supplies to Europe. 

The move sent wholesale prices for this winter soaring to all-time highs and means a typical household faces paying £500 for its energy in January alone. The latest forecast from consultants B.F.Y. is likely to put more pressure on the Government to increase support for consumers as 20% of the population currently sit in the new energy and poverty trap, a figure which is expected to grow massively this winter.

 

Conservatives Stop Parish Council spending £15,000 so they can waste £209,000 paying off someone they fell out with!

 

In recent days Northumberland Conservatives who control Northumberland County Council, have spun out a cover story and attacked a parish council, Blyth Town Council, for having the temerity to propose to buy new civic regalia for its deputy mayor.

The cover story from Northumberland Conservatives was backed up by their member of parliament for Blyth Valley the RH Ian Levy MP and a subsequent survey was issued by the regional top Tory Boy Richard Wearmouth the deputy leader of Northumberland County Council to capture the imagination of people suffering from the Conservatives mismanagement of the economy that the parish council proposed spend of between £10,000 and £15,000 was a waste of cash.

Within two days of the Conservatives ‘spin of the month’ media campaign against a minor authority, the mainstream press revealed what the attack on the lowest level of local government was all about?

Those same Conservatives have agreed to spend an amount 14 times greater than the parish council in order to rid themselves of a chief executive they had fallen out with. 

£209,000 of much needed public funds has been poured into the pockets of the County Council’s Chief Executive in a deal that stops Conservative Councillors having to appear in front of a number of lodged industrial tribunals and possibly for the first time in their whole lives have to tell the truth to the chairperson of the tribunal and admit what's been going on at County Hall for the last six years and how toxic the Council has become under Conservatives rule. Let's hope the deal also didn’t include the heaps of standards boards hearings against the same Conservatives where some of the unlawful acts Councillors have been accused of by the outgoing Chief Executive may be opened out into the public domain

We now also want to hear or read what the RH Ian Levy MP has to say to his constituents about this raid on hard pressed public funds and is Councillor Richard Wearmouth going to run a survey to see what the people of the County think about the Conservatives latest debacle which is totally against the public interests.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/northumberland-council-daljit-lally-payout-24605514#ICID=Android_ChronicleNewsApp_AppShare

Cover Story:

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/blyth-town-council-mayoral-chains-24594069

 

Why doesn't Ian Levy MP donate some of his bling to Blyth Town Council?

 

On his web site today, Ian Levy MP who has had plenty to say about his local parish council wishing to purchase a badge of office for its deputy mayor and consort, showed a picture of his own regalia.

His garish collection of bling is probably just what the parish council needs to fulfill its civic duty and as a historical gesture he should give some of it to help out his local community so that the Council can consider helping his campaign to offset the increasing poverty levels he and his Government have caused to residents and their families across the Town he represents.

We are of course not sure if it isn't just one of his exaggerations, similar to the one when he told his supporters and the unsuspecting public of Blyth Valley that he had been a nurse.

Come clean Mr Levy and drop some of your trashy looking regalia off at the Council offices and let your constituents get the help they need to cover the financial struggles and inadequacies your Government has landed residents of the town of Blyth in.

 

Labour Mayor to help Ashington after Tories break promises in favour of £9M support for Blyth’s MP

 

During April 2018 the Conservative leader of Northumberland County Council, Councillor Peter Jackson, ran out report after report in the press and TV media stating ‘King Coal is Dead’ followed by the statement “I will build an £8m cinema in Ashington on the site where a new Council office block had been planned” and stopped by the same Peter Jackson which became known by locals as the ‘Ashington Whole’.

 In one of the reports the local political writer Sean Seddon reported that the stoppage of the Council office block cost the Council taxpayers £10m and £150,000 in redesigning the 20 acre plot as well as hardening in Peter Jackson’s often repeated lie that the the fixed price £32M Council office build was going to cost the Council £80M.

 In 2020 the Council, under the same Leader of Council, was reported to have given the project to build a cinema on the site to its arms length company Advance Northumberland and a financial plan explained to the public how the costs panned out when planning permission was sought for the cinema.

 That cinema hasn’t been started and Ashington instead of having its deprivation improved through 900 workers being sited in the Town Centre after the new Council office block was built has slipped further back in the doldrums even after the announcements that the terminus for the AB&T rail line will sit centrally in the Town.

 Having been let down badly by the Tory County Council its a good job that the labour Mayor for the North of Tyne region Jamie Driscoll has been thinking how to improve Ashington’s commercial lot and has put aside funding to help the Town, while the cinema promised by the Tories in Ashington is now to be built in the Town of Blyth next door in open competition to the Tories Advance Northumberland cinema in the boom town of Cramlington to support the red wall Tory MP Ian Levy who can’t make his mind up in who to support in the forthcoming Conservative leadership ballot and is asking the public what to do?

 The new £9m cinema in Blyth known as a Tory ‘Culture Centre’, funded by levelling up cash is to be placed on the Towns market square, the only large market square in the County of Northumberland in order to help people forget the poverty brought about by the Conservative Government in office. 

 
Of course the spend of £9M depends on who wins the Tory Leadership races as neither current star in the making will be able to support levelling up as one wants to tax the backsides off the public until the pockets of offshore investors can’t take any more cash out the economy and one wants to stop all project spend to deliver tax cuts immediately,neither scenario will help either Ashington or Blyth and lets hope Jamie Driscoll can magic up some cash to help an extra Town Centre in his patch, Blyth, when funding plans are announced by a new Tory leader in the autumn statement.

 

 

It doesn’t matter who Conservative and Unionists vote for as leader the choice is still unbalanced against tradition.

 Conservative and Unionist Party members are about to vote in a new leader following the demise of the Tories pin up boy Boris Johnson who has been and will go down in history as the the most severe individualist and centrally controlling PM since the second world war.

The now accepted policies of ‘New Tory Britain’ are miles away from the middle class traditional Conservative view of how things should work as a ‘One Nation’ society with Britain’s rural and coastal, fishing and farming communities having to look on as power now sits totally with the free market and the leaching of profits to the largest investors who appear not to pay their dues back to the nation they make the profit from.

With Keynes monetary policies forgotten by the Tories, and Conservative Council’s and PCC’s allowed to run wild, confirmed by the news that Police Forces are deciding whether to charge hard pressed Councils if they are called out to an incident that can be labeled as being caused by mental illness rather than crime, society needs to take a step back to understand what society should look like but with the choice between Sunak and Truss the choice is clearly Hobsons.

In Northumberland we are about to see regional Tories pushing their own agendas onto voting party members and the ‘noise’ will be heard right across the peace on social media as Councillor Glen Sanderson’s recent garden party showed, with pictures of the lonely top regional Tory Councillor Richard Wearmouth sitting by himself with the One nation Conservatives milling around rebel Cramlington Councillor Wayne Daley’s table hanging on his every word with Glen Sanderson himself looking lost in the background. Hardly the best team building exercise following the findings within the recently released Max Caller report.

Having a factionalised leading political party in charge of such a diverse County does nothing to help with policy which is now five years behind reality and the will of the Tories to accept that on the ground they as the managers of change haven’t changed things to aid the needs of Communities when levelling up seems to be about infrastructure that can be profitably measured rather than people.

This week a report published by the charity Centrepoint and picked up by Northumberland Labour showed that 49% of young people aged between 16 and 25 have gone to bed hungry over the last year and have missed school and further education as they have struggled to afford to buy food. Labour claim that the County Council wrote out policies for this group in 2017 in favour of supporting educational change in the West of the County.

When coupled with the Northumberland hooray henry’s on social media praising DWP civil servants who want benefit claimants kept on a shelf and not allowed to leave their homes or consider a holiday either in the UK or abroad everyone will see how the choice between Truss and Sunak will maintain damage in society and how Tory led Councils will want that damage to continue as it drives people away from democratic action towards not bothering to vote at all.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/dwp-can-stop-your-universal-27515969

'Mateism' not for Northumberland Tories?

 

It's greasy pole selfism every time!

This week's west area planning committee was graced by the inclusion of a strategic decision. We believe the slippage of a planning matter that will affect a Northumberland village for ever onto a local agenda is a completely political decision and its been well stated on social media that the Leader of Council, Glen Sanderson JP would not have it accepted on to the strategic agenda in case it was turned down by those who know and follow the official rules as planning is supposed to be based on non-political decisions.

The matter, the sale and development of the former farmers mart at Bellingham for very expensive housing has also attracted cash from the North of Tyne Mayor, Jamie Driscoll's brown field site development fund. When issuing the order to aid this site we suspect Mayor Driscoll must not have known that two benefiting shareholders in the former farmers mart site,  Councillors John Ridell and Ian Hutchinson would be sitting on the decision making body. But we here at murky bet he's asking questions now?

A motion against acceptance of the planning application was put forward by a Councillor and sixteen points put forward as to why a decision on this application should not be made by a local committee and needed to be heard by a strategic committee where the North of Tyne Mayor could have his representatives and legal advisors in attendance to ensure a decision he was sponsoring with public funds from across the whole region was lawfully made in a non political fashion.

The motion against acceptance was defeated 5-4 but no reasons for turning down 16 points against the application were given by those who wanted it to succeed and the Northumberland Tories greasy pole was re-wrapped into brown paper to be erected again as soon as mates or members need to use it to fill their pokes to bursting at the next planning debacle from the continuing secret Council.

Dodgy for years Borisites planned to shift the blame for the last six years of malignancy.

 There's a known difference between being a lying, cheating, narcissistic, ideologically aligned Borisite and being a lying, cheating, narcissistic, ideologically aligned member of Northumberland Conservatives but how narrow is that difference, we would really like to know?

Watching last weeks televised debate on the extended Max Caller report was like viewing an old episode of Blake7, with a rapidly spinning deputy leader of Council, Richard Wearmouth making a complete and utter fool of himself in trying to move his critically locked in group away from the rigours, exposure and expected instruction following of the Masonic Lodge, attempting a leaning towards a direct slur on the actions of an independent Councillor who was embroiled with him in the poisoning of the Company ARCH and the Labour opposition both pre and post May 2017 through dodgy facebook pages and disgraceful emails directed at those they didn't care for.

This is on the back of their latest bullying attacks on their fellow men and women by spending public cash on having their prime employments investigated for as we know some derive income by working for MP's and others work for trade unions, and a number for charities and the NHS who hate their organisations to be exposed to the standard nastiness of the Tory Party in order to simply damage the futures of opposition councillors. We here, gazing through the murk, believe it's time that employers began asking  if workers are members of the disgraced at all levels Conservatives!

Of course with the spinning Conservatives planning to bring RL Stevenson's character Dick Johnson back from the briny to issue black spots to those they hate they caught themselves out yet again with the rudderless Tory leader, Glen Sanderson so enraged with the failures of his nasty crew following councillors telling the truth about their own experiences of hatred by the Conservatives that he was seen to almost break down on camera, but what does he expect, he has no control over his team and has allowed his crew to run wild and free in the manner of all bucolic borisites ever since 2020 when he had the opportunity to stop the rot and end the secret council.

One of the Councillors they tried to do in this week has exposed their antics in the local press and pressure has been brought to bare so much that according to open social media sites in Morpeth some Conservatives have admitted their involvement in the hate campaigns although we believe some of their change of direction comes after Councillor Wearmouths close friend from North Shields, Liam Bone, was caught openly attacking the former Labour Leader of North Tyneside Councillor Jim Allan who is very ill indeed and is having to stand down. We believe this incident shows the regional Tories in their true shades of darkness and we all now know that with Councillor Wearmouth being a top regional Tory, 'Northumberland residents deserve much better than the Conservatives'.

https://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/news/20263228.northumberland-county-councillor-georgina-hill-alleges-plot-silence/