Cramlington will be hardest hit by no-deal BREXIT.

It’s not often that the CBI and the TUC completely agree on matters but when it comes to the effect on towns and cities in North East England of a no-deal Brexit you would think they were joined at the hip.

Both massive and powerful organisations commissioned work in 2018 to locate the areas that will be worst hit and north east England topped the list when the outturns were revealed. Since then both sets of data have been scrutinised and expanded on by a number of data specialists.

Francis O’Grady said that “a no-deal Brexit would be devastating fo working people in the North-East”. and went on to say “employers are losing confidence in Brexit.” As Boris Johnson prepares the nation for a no-deal outcome.

The CBI reported that “North-East England would suffer the biggest decline in economic output of any U.K. regions if the country leaves the EU without a comprise agreement with Brussels. The gross value added (GVA) a measure of economic value of goods and services could be reduced by as much as 10.5% when compared against the current U.K. Arrangements”.

Exports from the region as a total of total exports is as high as 59% meaning that the region and the council areas within it are exposed to a higher risk of being affected by tariffs and trade costs.

Experts have looked at localised affects on jobs across the region and in Northumberland, where some of its most well off, formerly resilient to recession towns will be hit hardest by a Johnson no-deal scenario. Cramlington, Morpeth, Ponteland along with some towns who‘s economy is or they rely on the economic base of agricultural wealth may slip into serious recession through this process, Hexham, Rothbury, Alnwick and Berwick are possibly facing a bleak future.

This whole process manipulated by the brexiteers to suit their own and their supporters agendas is unbelievably dangerous for Northumberland who have recently joined in a combined authority with two large Scottish Councils, known as the Borderlands CA, which covers 10% of the U.K. geographically It allows Northumberland to access a share of £395m yet Brexit may remove 50% of the geographical area of the Borderlands into another country, Scotland, that is to remain part of the EU and that huge sum of money will be lost to Northumberland for ever.

With Labour now against a no-deal brexit and firmly against accepting a poor deal from the new PM and with the Tories folding up and collapsing in a number of recent elections we may see some change in the County of Northumberland for the better.
 

Residents concerned about proposed development,Tory Council dumping Homes of Multiple Occupancy on Blyth

A recent planning application being dealt with by Northumberland County Council for the empty former Pal Joey shop in Blyth, is being strongly questioned on social media by residents who are set against another home of multiple occupancy, being developed in their town.

An e-petition has started that will be considered by the council from the petitioners against the 17 bedroom home which is subject to criticism on social media due to the number of other HMO properties being used to house those on bail or awaiting sentencing.

The developer of this particular home, Holy Eagle property ltd., has a number of other similar homes in Northumberland one of which in Carlton Street, has been criticised heavily on Facebook.

The Council do have a policy to develop quality housing in It’s town centres. Those who are questioning this development do not believe this is a quality development as described in the Councils new Local Plan and are challenging it in their hundreds.

The experience of the people who live, work and shop in Blyth with Homes of Multiple Occupancy is that they are filled with those who have great social need and are asked to leave the premises during the day to wander the streets, sometimes causing problems for shoppers and visitors to the town.

Concerns that another Home of Multiple Occupancy sited in Blyth could lead to a rise in the fear of crime, drive down the shopping experience in Blyth Town Centre the profile of which the local Town Council is trying desperately to raise and decrease further the reputation of Northumberland County Council in the eyes of the general public in Blyth.

To sign the petition please click on the link below

https://www.change.org/p/northumberland-county-council-planning-permission-no-new-bedsit

 

Calls for Northumberland leader to resign Northumberland Labour Members have called for the Council Leader to resign following the emergence of serious issues with the Councils Procedures and Accounts.

By The Ed

Castle Morpeth History Repeats itself for Conservative and Council Leader Peter Jackson.
Labour Party members both on social media and at meetings across the County are calling for the resignation from office of Northumberland County Councils, Conservative Leader Peter Jackson, following release of the news that the Governments auditor for Northumberland County Council, Ernst Young,  has refused to sign off the Councils annual accounts and is investigating reports from whistleblowers.
The resignation call comes in the wake of  Coun Jackson, who became leader of Northumberland County Council in May 2017 being regularly in the press regarding the bullying of staff and the treatment of building developers in Northumberland. Labour members reminded our Ed. that Councillor Jackson forced the Council to give him a shield of £1M public indemnity to protect himself from his accusers who were workers for the Council and or its group of attached companies. The Council has been exposed for the amount of cash they have paid out to case winning ex-employees in compensation and that bill to the ratepayers of Northumberland is expanding on a regular basis.
As the leader of the council, he runs an out-of-control administration with a regeneration company in the form of Advance Northumberland which has not delivered on any major projects since May2017 and a leisure company, Active Northumberland where he decided to remove all Council control from its Board at a time period when the Council has pledged to invest £90M over the next five years into that company. 
His Council and its companies have delivered nothing to help communities since May 2017 and have adopted a completely secretive stance which Labour members believe has brought shame to Northumberland.
A Leading Labour activist said “Coun Jackson should resign as Conservative leader and as a councillor. If not, it is about time the Northumberland Conservative party removed him from office along with all those Councillors involved in the bullying of staff and County Hall spending scandals.”
 Our reports from Morpeth where members reminded us that both Councillor Jackson and his closest confidant Councillor Sanderson were leading conservative members of Castle Morpeth Council when auditors refused to sign off its accounts, and that through his own mechanisms and wishes, has led the county council screaming headlong into a multimillion-pound lawsuit from a developer, has poured millions into conserving a obviously shocking out of date monolith, County Hall on the outskirts of Morpeth and has been found guilty by taking the option of compensating victims of his bullying. It was also said he has “damaged the council’s reputation through blindly supporting the cuts his party are ladling onto the poorest in society”.

 

 

 

North East Coastal and Former Industrial Towns to Benefit as Cities and their Neighbours slip into Recession.

Whether Boris takes us out of Europe or not, as a nation we are signed up to the United Nations framework convention on climate change and as the worlds fifth richest nation we are looked upon by others to set an example and that example is set in stone through the 2018 Paris Agreement, drawing together 179 nations to ratify the treaty and accept that we all must change our habits and thinking over the next few years. The very high temperatures experienced this summer are but a small reminder of things to come.

Internationally and enshrined within the agreements are that cities, world wide must take the brunt of this change and city dwellers must pay for the privilege of taking the strain. So how will that affect us here in the UK.

For those of us who have an interest in the worlds future, our first example of how things will change is the enforced level of congestion charging that cities must face. London is being used as the prime example of how to de-vehicle a city whilst still enjoying regular growth in commerce and harvesting cash from both the motorist and delivery driver forcing people to engage with public transport to enjoy their centralised work and play.

Former Industrial Cities and large towns in the North of England which have been targeted in the first wave of out of central congestion charging are concerned that their way of life is about to go into steep decline through the potential charging regimes that are not wanted and are unaffordable in areas of lower wages and even lower business profit margins.

Newcastle Gateshead and North Tyneside are faced with charging in the first wave in the North East. Drivers have petitioned their Councils and the administrations have backed off while they think of other methods on handling the problems that beset them and how they retain business when the austerity cuts have slashed their ability to deliver services let alone find the money to invest heavily in public transport, considering they have very little control over that transport without the help of a Government whom history has shown will not invest in the North to anywhere near the same level as it does in the South.

That said, Retail businesses have been very actively looking towards the future and many have been actively investing in peripheral towns sitting just outside city congestion charging boundaries particularly those which have the potential to park an increasing number of vehicles. The building society Nationwide, is one of the companies investing heavily into its property stock outside of city centres. They have followed up their long term thinking and  have given a long term promise not to close branches to its members. Other are seriously looking to relocate into the potential growth areas.

The towns currently being eyed up for Town Centre Growth within easy commuting distance from the city are Ashington, Blyth and South Shields. South Shields is first off the stocks through the renovation of its metro station and transport hub. Ashington and Blyth will follow quickly behind with the promise from the North of Tyne Mayor to invest in the reopening of the AB&T Rail Line (which links in with the Metro service) and the fact that Blyth in particular is only a fifteen minute commute from two thirds of North Tyneside along the coast by car and its quicker by express bus from Newcastle to access Blyth than it is to visit South Shields by Metro.

In Northumberland, both Ashington and Blyth now have established partnerships between politicians and commerce with the Duke of Northumberland’s estates leading the way being heavily involved in attracting new business to its shopping centre in the heart of Blyth.

It will be great to see the improvements predicted by Government for East Coast Towns but its only now that we fully realise that growth will come at a cost to cities and heavily populated urban environments.
 

70th Anniversary of the Northumberland Tory Mantra

Just over seventy years ago, June 8th 1949 in fact, a novel was first published about the future by George Orwell. He had written it in the previous year and called it 1984, it went on to become a huge classic and if he was alive today he would have been shocked at how much of his vision is true and elements of the secret society led by ‘Big Brother’ have been used to suppress sections of society ever since.

Although thought very futuristic when published featuring mind control and set in a police state, elements of his ideas can be seen in the dark world of PR surrounding some of our controlling bodies today.

Northumberland Tories who run the County Council have shown over the last decade how with a few activists an organisation can ‘change the minds’ of the many through their use of social media by putting a little effort into ‘matters sites’ and since May 2017 press control of the spin and history of achievement using Orwell’s techniques of newspeak and doublethink. When these processes are mixed with the pre-Orwellian, Stalin and Hitler’s methodology of changing history through writing people out of stories and removing pictures of them from archives to let people believe that the truth was something else, processes then grow and breed to become ever more secretive and dangerous.

Our lay group find it strange that the archives of a number of Northumberland’s weekly newspapers are now not available to view and can only wonder of the strange goings on surrounding the well criticised removal of the Councils ‘core strategy’ from inspection by Government and the fabric of deceit run out about the Councils company ARCH when the databases of information are now hidden from view. It’s a good job that Northumbria Police were able to find no criminality in that company before the public information to prove the innocence of people was dumped.

Luckily the law courts up to this moment in time still allow access to information and the Orwellian use of ‘room 101’ tactics in the bullying cases that have cost the ratepayers of Northumberland millions of pounds to either defend, compensate or indemnify councillors and their staff for are available to view.

Through this small group of Tories and their ‘murky’ social media sites Orwell’s well used ‘two minute hate’ schemes became a norm and getting supporters to keep an eye on each other and report them to the powers that be who run matters sites is well described in the novel 1984 and well practiced in Northumberland and was used to great effect in East Germany but in this local, a helmet with a door in to let a hungry rat eat your face has been replaced with the mental torture of running fake news through official meetings to verify its ‘truth’ allowing the public to scarify the reputations of those named. Centred around a managed plan containing connotations of military strategy that was hatched by Northumberland Tories well before the May 2017 elections.

Other big brother activities currently taking place is the phasing of things which reduce the benefit for the 46% of people who live in Northumberland’s most deprived areas under the cover of austerity and unafordability then attempting in all cases to blame other politicians and/or Government for the need for what in most cases is detrimental change.

In George Orwells book the heroine was Julia and the hero, Winston Smith who fought their way through the Trump like fake news to wake up the nation to what’s happening on the dark side to them and their families. With so many of their leading members decried and damaged through the processes used  by Northumberland Tories in recent years including false accusations against MP’s, the local Labour Party need to find a Julia and a Winston as quickly as possible but we as lay people are not seeing Labour managing to grasp the social media strength on an ever ongoing basis to fight back this now well embedded Tory spin machine and without the promotion of an ‘air marshal’ and a team of cross county assistant marshals to undertake this work and challenge the Tories they will be unfortunately driven back further as the local Tories ‘murky spindoctors’ bring in even more Trump like methods already well practiced on their doorstep by the owners of Newcastle United.

We, the lay-group, are concerned that since the change of leadership within Northumberland Labour that their press site has closed down and their social media links have become non-political photo opportunity shoots for the egotistic leader and deputy who seem to be promoting tourism rather than politics.

Labour need to get a grip of this failing situation as quickly as they can or the opposition to a massively well heeled publicity machine will also be resigned to history and Big Brothers fabrications and lies will cost the ratepayers even more than they do know as support for the practice of ‘mateism’ in dishing out the privatisation of services program will be as acceptable in Northumberland as is it is in many sub Saharan countries.

With some planning and a change of the Labour mindset locally to embrace modern politics instead of relying completely on the outdated brush salesmen’s door stepping, Labour need to develop a marketing strategy that includes a strong message delivery through social media which doesn’t always rely on ‘positive messaging’. The only time Labour embraced a non-1930’s election theory program, Tony Blair engaged Sachi and Sachi to manage their news stories and as history shows they and Mandelson managed the pro Tory Fleet Street very well indeed.

But recent by election history in Northumberland has shown that well planned messages can destroy all of the hard work that door steppers have undertaken, in the North of the County Labour embraced the new methodology and won a by election but in two elections in Bedlington the message most repeated via the ‘Matters’ sites was “Labour thugs have just been bashing on my door”, and as society moves towards being ever insular and reliant on social media for social inclusion this type of message will resonate with the public.

We all know that the local Labour Party cant have access to Sachi and Sachi but they can and should learn from what the Tories did to them and at least expose them by telling the truths surrounding their spin machine to the public regularly and often by creating messages that are marketed towards the public using demographic and psychographic information that they have readily to hand and tell the people what the Tories are really doing in their County.

PS just a thought that you may wish to think on, in Orwell’s novel everyone was known by numbers and if you phone Northumberland County Council for any query they ask you your date of birth to supposedly ensure you are who you say you are. As the author of this hopefully thought provoking tale for our lay group and living on the edge of Northumberland and not in it you may be surprised to know that my date of birth and therefore my number is 21011950 the day Orwell died.

 

Conservative led Northumberland County Council

In a fanfare of spin this week, Conservative led Northumberland County Council announced they would make an application to their Governments ‘Transport for the North’ fund to develop a link and relief road combo for the town of Blyth, possibly in financial year 2024/25 five years time. This followed a bid with an unknown outcome to the same Governments High Street fund to finance a chat with the public of Blyth and form a vision for their high street and their town. Some of that chat has already happened during a short public consultation on the proposed link and relief road. The cost of this highway is in local government terms, tiny at £22m.

This highway has been in train since the 1980’s and has been subject to a number of ‘pinch point bids’ to the former Highways Agency. As they were the decisive power who would be needed to determine any Compulsory land purchase required to complete the project. The Highways Agency refused this bid on a number of occasions choosing instead to support other schemes County-wide, such as Ashington, Haltwhistle, Haydon Bridge, Morpeth North and Prudhoe bypasses and not a link road in an urban area.

As part of the formation of the North of Tyne combined authority and the devolution agreements across the Northern Powerhouse, the need for the Highways Agency to manage matters has now, this year, come down to a local level and transport for the north are to be approached for the funding and if this work was not so essential it would be considered prudent to wait another year for the outcome of this bid and five years to deliver this scheme.

Northumberland Conservative’s who would have you think they are managing the Councils finances in an orderly fashion are hiding the truth behind their well developed veil of secret service style PR, and with their portfolio holder for finance crowing about not borrowing any more capital finance one needs to wonder when they are going to pay for the projects they have spun their story threads on.

In order to help people who live in Blyth understand how the Tories are letting them down now that the handcuffs of the Highways Agency have been removed let’s look at other projects they have in train in communities that have no links with Blyth, a town where it has been said Councillor Peter Jackson doesn’t want to deliver anything at all.

£5.5m paid to Galliford Try to stop the development of a new NCC office block in Ashington.

Ponteland, a new high school and leisure centre is underway currently valued at £46m white its legal costs.

New primary school in Morpeth on Loansdean site £6.85m.

New roadway to open up Ashington ‘hole’ site £9m

The cost of refurbishing County Hall in excess of £25m with £17m already spent.

New council owned cinema in Ashington £7m

New Berwick Leisure Centre £18m

New Morpeth Leisure Centre £18m plus estimated land stabilisation costs of £6m as its sited in a flood plain. (That’s beside it being designed too small for the towns growth.).

A recent loan to Advance Northumberland of £27m.

Redundancy costs of £8.16m over the two years the Tories have held power at County Hall.

£1m to safeguard Councillor Peter Jackson and his Chief Executive from liability in a series of bullying cases.

These are but a few items of headline borrowing and spend valued at £178m planned for other places outside Blyth.

The Blyth scheme isn’t just a singular highway as is the case of the other bypasses mentioned in this article. It is a series of small roads knitting the Blyth communities together opening up the network and spreading traffic over a far wider road surface than at present. As Blyth residents all know cross town and school run traffic is a huge element of the towns traffic problems.

At the secret Councils announcement meeting Councillor Jackson stated too many houses have been built in Blyth, May we remind you Councillor Jackson that Blyth is your largest town and when your spending cash or borrowing for projects in your more favoured areas you are reliant on the income from your largest town to economically drive the well P R’d Conservative economy.

Therefore if the £9m costs paid by Advance Northumberland for the new road at Portland Park in Ashington is anything to go by the estimated £22m application will only cover the road from the A189 to its junction with the Towns network so we Blyth residents all need to know why this work isn’t planned to start immediately, the cross town road and its tributaries can be built and are not reliant on the bid scheme that as we can now see if your a Blyth resident, may be planned to fail.

Murky Towers spend to take precedence over Poisoning more Children

For over two decades, both District and County Council have measured pollution near to schools on Northumberland’s busiest highway, Cowpen Road in Blyth.

Those levels of pollution or so we have been told, have been used as a major part of various County Council bids to the highways agency, now Highways England to attempt to cure this major pinch point by developing a new highway link to the A189 spine road from the centre of Northumberland’s largest town.

Various political obstacles and well managed press campaigns by the Counties weekly newspapers have moved incoming cash from Government agencies to other projects to suit the needs of communities and much lower pollution levels than found on Cowpen Road were put forward To develop Haydon Bridge, Prudhoe, Ashington and Haltwhistle bypasses and the last Labour administration at County Hall found it was locked in to developing a Morpeth North bypass moving the development of the new Blyth highway to this moment in time. 

This moment in time is the major obstacle that Blyth residents and their children face in being able to breath air at least as good as other communities. This moment in time is when the Tories,who’s financial portfolio holder Councillor Nick Oliver from clean air zone Corbridge has decided he is not going to borrow to deliver projects for the 22

months they have left of this administration.

At their one party cabinet where the opposition aren’t allowed to speak this week, the Tories began to rattle off the blame, it is Labour‘s fault we can’t (not don’t want to) fund this highway, it’s down to Labour that we’re in this position. Putting the earmarked £3.3m funding into the next Councils spend, and hoping it will be named in the regional funding plans for five years time.

Then let us remind Northumberland Conservatives, that as your elderly death rate figures remains at a constant and COPD cases don’t drop  and asthma in children in Blyth doesn’t fall, it is your decisions at this moment in time to fund the retention of a costly building in Morpeth and fail the residents of Blyth that will go down in

history not the aren’t we good for not borrowing story.