As we move forward towards the general election,
we will notice all sorts of claims from Northumberland Conservatives, for instance a local town Councillor from Blyth Daniel Carr made a claim on social media just after the House of Lords cleared the calling of the election that Blyth had been awarded £25m by the Government and that people should rally around and tell him how to spend it, this was a completely false and spurious claim.
The truth is that a forum partnership has been set up in the Town of Blyth Northumberland to see how its prospects can be improved through the public and commercial sector working in harmony together.
Following a series of meetings it was agreed by the parties involved to put in a bid to the Governments regeneration funding mechanisms in an attempt to bring in a small, by development standards £25m, to form the basis of funding matches with the regional agency, the LEP, the County Council, whilst involving both the the major energy companies moving into the port of Blyth and the long term commercial operators sited around the Town.
The initial bid failed at the first hurdle and the only town offered cash in the County of Northumberland was Hexham, which may happen to have a slowing high street but doesn’t have the deprivation levels found in the town of Blyth with six of its eight wards sitting in the 10% of most deprived wards in the U.K., but it does have some of the closest links with the farming communities in the County, who will suffer most from Boris Johnson’s version of BREXIT and its beleaguered MP Guy Opperman is an ardent leaver and quietly despised by his communities through his opposition to the safeguarding of the positions of the major families in his constituency.
This picture in words shows how political the doling out of Government funds by the Tories has become. Blyth, possibly the most needy Town in the County has been ravaged since May 2017 through the closure or removal of support for agencies geared towards helping in deprived areas and the delivery of nothing directly by the Tory led County Council at all apart from promises that they may deliver items in the future after the 2021 local government elections!
The Government then moved Blyth into a second string ‘bidding list’ and threw a peppercorn amount of cash towards the County Council to formulate a scheme that may possibly win a £25m bid against 50 other towns across the Country.
This new scheme is being led by Councillor Richard Wearmouth a man who since his election in 2017 was tasked by the Conservative Group at County Hall to manage and grow the Councils Business Improvement District schemes, a task he has magnificently failed in. One scheme in Hexham and probably another reason Hexham has had some cash thrown towards it was shut down following the owners of commercial businesses being prepared to go to jail rather than support a scheme pushed by their MP and pay bills that would in many cases bankrupt them and for which they felt they would gain no benefit. Hexham TV a web based news organisation showed how Councillor Wearmouths team used bailiffs to force payments from businesses into the BID scheme and how Council officers were used to harass those who did not want to be part of it.
He then went on to fail to deliver Business Improvement Schemes in his home town of Morpeth and in the Town of Blyth.
As lay observers we are extremely concerned that this scheme supposedly designed to help Blyth is another designed to fail project that will actually deliver very little apart from the opportunity for Northumberland Conservatives to run out publicity on the back of it.
Getting back to our title for this item relating to how this bid if received would ‘shortchange’ Blyth, we need to ask ourselves what would £25m in money that can only be used to deliver something physical, known as Capital expenditure deliver for Blyth?.
£25m is a third of the cost of building a new high school in Hexham.
Approximately half of what’s it’s already cost to modernise County Hall in Morpeth, possibles the Norths biggest white elephant project this decade.
It may deliver two thirds of the cost of a new Blyth relief road.
So you can see quite clearly that the spend made by the Conservatives in Blyth will not move any of its most deprived wards out of difficulty, will not raise the survival rate of people born in Cowpen, Croft and Kitty Brewster to the level of Cramlington North and will not stop school exclusions, lower the crime rate or get the disabled help to fight for their benefits, but it will mean ever more people using food banks, more deby for the poor, higher drug use and indiscriminate private landlords screwing not only the benefit system but depriving their tenants as well.
