Blyth to receive half of promised funding to rebuild a decade of Tory destruction on their high street!

Austerity, is a Tory Government enforced program of huge cutbacks to Council budgets. This has led to the lack of local investment into high street improvements, a problem which has been massively exacerbated over the last four years as Euro funding to deprived areas disappeared following the Brexit vote. That disappearance led the current Government to promise reasonable investment levels into East coast high streets taking the data found in the Marmot Report into deprivation levels nationally.

Austerity which drove down prosperity in already deprived areas allowed absentee investors to scoop up commercial property on deprived high streets particularly in seaside towns for a song. Damaging new businesses from chancing startups as Commercial property rents rose to a new unaffordable level and were left empty to blight high streets further.

Following the 2019 General Election where the Tories gained numerous seats from Labour in areas known as the ‘red wall’, Blyth Valley was one of those seats and the funding mechanism spun towards protecting the new Tory MP’s in red wall constituencies. 

The slow handling of this funding through the pandemic lockdowns allowed the Sun newspaper to get off the stocks and survey its readers in the red wall seats one year on. They found that 36 of the 45 red wall conservative seats would immediately return to Labour hands.

 

The cash stream, the Future High Streets fund brought out both Government and Tory Councillors spin doctor teams over the last year, stating the huge amounts they were expecting to receive for their townships with Northumberland boasting about a £25M grant and labeling it as a marvelous kickstart to the £45M the Town Forum needs to bring about outstanding change to the Town of Blyth. The Tory led County Council hired a team of planning consultants to help spend the expected wealth.

 

On Xmas Day 2020, the Homes and Communities agency announced the winners of its Future High Street Fund and in their gift box giveaway Blyth will receive less than half the spun out amount. The Tories scrooges have cut the promises down to £11,121,059 an amount too small for the County Council to bridge the gap. Cash wise, Northumberland County Council have slipped into dire straits through the serious politicised handling of finance under their charge. In the last almost four years they have not had their accounts pass the test of delivering best value to the public by their external auditors and are currently embroiled in a series of investigations into among other matters corruption. Lets see what spin the current crop of Tories put on this derisory amount which certainly reflects their lack of belief that Blyth Valley or Northumberland will remain in Tory hands after the forthcoming local and the next general elections.

Oh! lifes so simple, all Jags and Wardrobes until the officers began fighting back?

Ten days ago rumours began to abound in our office that even after the great shakeup at the expensive to keep Morpeth County Hall things were still not moving forward and that great battles were going on in the civil war within Northumberland Conservatives with the bullying of staff at an all time high as the blue Knights charged forward only to be hacked down by the dogs of war now in charge at Morpeth.

Unfortunately for the dogs they have very little etiquette and most have a history of not being nice even to members of their own team. So toning down the similies a little ‘the scrum is a nasty place to be’.

Several months ago the nastiness of the current crop of right -wingers at County Hall was brought out into the open in leaked emails which exposed the working conditions of staff and the misdemeanours and horror stories surrounding the Councils company ADVANCE Northumberland.

Some of the rumours a list of which looked like the cover of a Fleetwood Mac album sleeve were clarified and personified through a statement recorded by the local democracy reporter for the area who quoted the Chief Executive of Northumberland County Council and single shareholder representative for the Council of ADVANCE Northumberland, at the Councils Audit Committee, Mrs Dajit Lally said “As shareholder representative. I have expressed some fairly serious concerns about the issues surrounding ADVANCE Northumberland currently. I have put into the work programme a report, likely to come in February, about a number of those issues, so it was just to give the committee assurance that we are looking at these issues and reporting on them.”

So the fightback on behalf of seriously bullied officers has begun against the alleged corrupt Tory regime and its arms length company and our rumour miller on the ground thought that on hearing this statement Councillor Nick Oliver looked as if he was going to be sick!

But back to the tale: Councillor Richard Wearmouth is the Chairman of ADVANCE Northumberland and he thinks he is above all when it comes to politics. He is under immense pressure following this revolt by officers and looking at the Fleetwood Mac list we would like to know if its the ‘Chain’ of that office or the ‘Dreams’ of how to avoid the legal proceedings expected to come following release of Mrs Lally’s report but we have heard he is going to ‘Go my own way’ and have a run at becoming the Mayor of North Tyneside on behalf of the Tories at the May election and complete with Jag and Wardrobe will then live happily ever after near the banks of the Tyne.

Even with the poor reputations held by both Tynemouth and North Tyneside Tories they wouldn’t want to consider him as their candidate unless it's already cut and dried or is it just him saying ‘I’m never going back again’ once the lawyers get on his tail?

 

British Volt used as spin following Suns first research on Red Wall Constituencies

 

 

It's interesting that Boris Johnson turned up in Blyth to help the local MP Ian Levy announce a factory for the production of batteries proposed to be built in the constituency next door, Wansbeck, where Ian Lavery is the sitting MP.

We nutters believe that this had to be in response to the Sun Newspapers fist annual poll in the ‘Red Wall’ seats lost by Labour to the Tories in 2019. This first poll among their readers came up with the unsurprising conclusion that at this very early stage of the Boris Johnson parliamentary administration 36 of the 45 seats which changed hands would return into Labours hands today and that includes the constituency of Blyth Valley which slipped over to the Tories on the retirement of Ronnie Campbell the long serving Labour Party stalwart.

The reason we believe that spin is all this is from the Tories driven by its policy makers at Northumberland County Council who have been accused of all sorts of corrupt and vile acts in leaked emails is that the BBC in Wales exposed this company and the charlatans who make up the board of the company during July 2020 when they were courting the Welsh Assembly for the cash to develop their plant in the principality.     https://the-eye.wales/flat-battery/

Locally we hear that this organisation, one of whom is a Swedish national registered as living in Saudi Arabia, needs millions gifted to them in order to float a share package to raise the remainder of the £1.2Bn needed to service this project. Unlike Wales Northumberland does not have a regional development agency to fork out this kind of Government cash and its Local Enterprise Partnership is not the vehicle which can support that kind of spend. So we need to ask, is it utter spin to keep some kind of Tory vote in Blyth Valley or has the new Cabinet Member for all things green has made her first grave error in guiding her boss BJ into the hands of this organisation?

Investigations, netting in the small fish first?

Investigations into the activities of ADVANCE Northumberland and the Tory led County Council have taken a number of twists and turns.

The investigators appear to have left no stone unturned with rumours that community spend is now a strand that's being looked at forensically by at least one of the teams involved in the inquiries.

It seems that looking after your pals has become a little common place and have those pals followed the rules regarding spend? If the tab packet list we have seen is anything to go by then the pals seem to have ‘lost their way a little’ in the use of the cash and the County Council Tories are now desperate to get it back before the iron doors clash behind them and their relatives forget who they are

One of the smaller amounts to be handed over, but possibly one of the most interesting, this one through the County Councils Community Chest gifting program was a £5000 award to Loobiggin by the Sea Town Council.

Allegedly it hasn’t been spent on the work it was supplied for and under the rules of the ‘Chest’ must be paid back. We hear that the request for payback has been lodged but has not yet appeared on anyone’s desk at County Hall.

The fear from residents who are aware of this matter is that it has been put into the ‘buy a bog’ fund set up by the Tories at Loobiggin Town Council to purchase and modernise a redundant and costly to refurbish blot on the landscape near to the Cresswell Arms in this wonderful seaside village.

The Town Council have proposed to buy the loos at great expense to their precept from their fellow Tory led County Council in a capital asset venture. Local people are incensed at the planned purchase of what was labelled as a health hazard. It has now developed into a neighbourhood territorial dispute between the Town Council and residents who don’t want a rise in their precept to support a second class facility.

Locals and regular visitors to the Town are so upset about the antics of the Town Council they have launched a petition to try to halt the purchase the link sits below.

https://online.northumberland.gov.uk/citizenportal/form.aspx?form=epetition_signature&txt_petitiontitle=To+stop+the+asset+transfer+of+derelict+toilets+to+Newbiggin+Town+Council