NEW COUNCIL’S £104M BAILOUT

By Peter T’ Paypaul

TO stop it from going bankrupt Crumberland Council has now racked up a taxpayer-funded bailout totalling £104 million that it will have to PAY back.

The Labour-run socialist paradise – already on the naughty step with external auditors – has gone cap-in-hand to the Government for a THIRD time to claim under the Exceptional Financial Support scheme.

This time the Council, just two years old in April, receives £23.4m roubles after £41.2m last year and £40m before that, the News & Scar has revealed.

(What happened to Local Government Reorganisation in Cumbria saving us money?)

Incredibly, Josh MacAlister – the world’s greatest living politician and Labour MP for Whitehaven & Workington – has managed to pull off a ‘rabbit hypnotised by rattlesnake’ routine.

He’s quoted in our local media as suggesting that the bailout is his Labour Government providing a financial “boost” to the Council as compensation for Tory austerity!

That’s certainly one interpretation.

But it’s not one unanimously shared outside his cult of devotees.

Councils at risk of bankruptcy are usually slapped with a Section 114 Notice by the Government.

A Section 114 is a screaming financial handbrake to stop all non-essential spending for those authorities spending MORE than they BRING IN.

Crumberland has thus far managed to avoid one of these.

Why?

Possibly because the LAST thing an incoming Labour Gov wants are over-spending Councils around the country going KAPUT on its watch.

Especially Councils run by, er, Labour councillors in Labour MP constituencies like Cumberland.

Predictably, the Government’s answer to any problem in Local Government is to shovel ever more millions down the blackhole of our Town Halls.

The Chronic has long held the view that Councils have far outgrown what they were invented for.

They need to be stripped back to statutory services until they can prove competency – as unspeakable and radical as this might be.

But rather than live within their means and cutting bills for taxpayers – ruling Councillors recoil from embarking on a financial slash-fest because they don’t like surrendering their Ivory Towers.

(Taking a chainsaw to Council services has never been wildly popular with voters, Council staff, Council unions, or assembled young socialists on our left-leaning local newspapers).

A bonfire of public services creates a wave of unflattering headlines and results in Councillors being unceremoniously booted out of office – something only crackpot councillors on the Chronic’s own ‘Kamikaze Party’ would ever advocate.

So political preservation will always come BEFORE parsimony in the public purse.

Which inevitably means that our unsustainable status quo remains.

It allows chief executives, directors and assistant directors to continue to be paid stupidly high salaries and Council officers to build their own little fiefdoms and worker’s co-operatives – irrespective of their general all-round lack of productivity and pointlessness.

As always, residents and businesses have to cough-up ever higher Council Tax bills to pay for these costly indulgencies.

Kudos to the Reporter on the N&S who did at least do some research rather than swallowing what she was told.