Lies, false dawns, a ruined economy and not one thought about helping poorer people other than ‘let's build some cinemas’ is still throttling South East Northumberland and will do for quite some time.
During March 2024 the Guardian Newspaper printed 10 charts showing how disastrous the stagnant UK economy had become through the Conservative Government’s mismanagement of the economy and the utter failure of levelling up has been for ordinary people.
Those same 10 charts can be applied to the County of Northumberland where unexposed secrets if accidently slipped out of the pursed lips of cabinet members are then covered off in the press with ‘weasel words’ from the slithering politicians in charge at County Hall whose Leader instead of apologizing for his Councils inability to deliver even ordinary services to a deserving public and never being able to deliver Best Value using his own Government's measures since Labour were last in charge at County Hall in 2016/17, went out into the trade press recently to whinge about having a bit of a bad profit year at his ranch deep in the fabulous Northumberland Countryside.
The local Conservatives ‘spin at all cost’ has been used to confuse and delay everything other than their destruction of the commercial heartland of the Town of Blyth and the spin to delay the Modernisation of Bedlington by blaming the new Government’s lack of clarity over the release of Borderlands levelling up cash or improvement plans for the ‘Hole’ site at Ashington where they promised a new cinema for the Town in February 2018 in order to stop the development of a much smaller and much cheaper to run County Hall in Ashington in favour of spending £millions modernising the massive monolith of a building in Morpeth where deprivation and poverty are used by Conservatives as expletives.
The public would like to see the ‘secret papers’ where the Borderlands partnership agreed to fund Bedlington’s High Street or even the Cabinet Papers which illustrated that when the County Council was pouring cash into Hexham academy school and Pontelands equivalent where they expected to find the cash to build a second County sponsored Cinema in Ashington.
The serious spin from the Tories was also backed up by their Government MP’s and the fiasco surrounding the creation of 8000 jobs centered on a former Council owned site in Cambois through the Britvolt project kept local folk who wished to improve their lives through gaining access to high quality highly paid employment in South East Northumberland on a string for five years.
Then the County Council agreed to sell the site to a power hungry data centre at a fire sale price Data centers tend to be relatively low on employment. With the press stating typical headquarters, manufacturing, or shared service operations serving other industries can have between 200 and 1,000 jobs on site. By comparison, the number of jobs at a typical data center can be anywhere between five and 30. A real kick in the teeth for local people with aspirations.
Instead of concentrating on delivering traditional services people want such as street cleaning, weed spraying, potholes, grass cutting, Council housing growth etc., the Council have ignored such matters as youth services while still concentrating on a service that was ended by most Councils in November 2020 when Covid lockdown ended that of their communities together program, recently heavily criticised for feeding several millionaires from Riding Mill fish and chips while people in other areas are struggling and food bank use is growing out of all proportion.
That lack of proportion from the Tories both locally and nationally was exposed just before the 2024 spring budget by Gordon Brown who said “In 2010, I predicted a decade of austerity when we (Labour) left office. We have actually had a decade and a half of austerity.”
Brown says that “what motivated the Conservatives in 2010 was the idea of a small state, to be achieved through austerity and debt reduction. But austerity did not work. Slow growth meant deficit targets were missed and the public finances suffered from a chronic malaise. Productivity growth in the past 14 years has been the weakest since the Industrial Revolution”, the former prime minister and chancellor also said. “We no longer have stop-go, we have different levels of stop, with crisis after crisis.
“Britain is a low-growth, low-productivity, low-investment, low-wage economy. And that means higher levels of poverty, destitution and inequality. We are entering a doom loop,”
That doom loop is mirrored exactly right across Northumberland with small state mentality at the top running big cost projects into the ground through lack of forethought and planning
Notes on 8000 jobs for editors:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2023-01-25/debates/3A6ED1B2-6609-457A-B2F9-8DF97B7AF8AE/Britishvolt?__cf_chl_f_tk=zMTyI7lraSJha2QAvopJ28hBil0dhu_.
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