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.