CRUMBRIA: 28.3.2027
DON’T buy a local rag! We’ve got it all covered in our weekly round up of the political stories they featured or FORGOT.
Wokeington Labour fanzine the Times & Starmer devoted another week to flattering local Labour MPs.
Penrith & Solway’s Martyr Campbell-Savours got filler puff pieces on pages 5 and 14.
Carlisle’s Julie Spins turned up on page 13, where her questionable remarks about a Carlisle business were passed on without any right of reply.
Why did the alleged Workington paper give publicity to the Carlisle MP? Well, this is the Times & Starmer.
Perhaps it likes to remind readers how great Labour MPs are in constituencies other than their own?
CATCH UP: Our Julie Spins story: MP LAYS INTO LANDLORDS.
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Wokeington MP Tosh MacAlister got his weekly Talking Tosh “opinion” slot in this week’s Times & Starmer.
“Opinion” flatters what is essentially relentless free advertising for the Labour Government.
It’s always a tough read, being full of Tosh’s Blairite power phrases that you imagine he practices with hand gestures infront of a full-length mirror.
“A clear plan”, “strong local partnership”, “engagement at the highest levels of Government”.
If only Workington Labour had had the chance to select a local candidate rather than a super-slick Rochdale parachute.
Readers might occasionally get a snapshot of daily reality in West Cumbria, rather than the daily delusions of life in Westminster.
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Bizarrely, all of the Times & Starmer’s energy this week seemed to go on a 900-word epic on the future of Cockermouth Town Council’s mayoral chains.
This trivial civic squabble – important only to those in the room when it was taking place – was whether more links should be added to the mayoral bling.
900 words on a necklace suggests either a lack of news or a serious lack of news judgement.
The outcome, after 40 paragraphs of frantic tedium in which the reporter’s desperation to wring drama from a story involving Cockermouth far exceeded the drama of the subject itself?
The Council is undecided!
Later in the Times & Starmer, the Scroogequest Group Editor, occupied a space on page 15 that might once have been used for news, explaining to readers how important news is.
“Locally-based journalists are vital to local democracy,” she solemnly declared.
Quite right!
Without them, ceremonial bling could go entirely unscrutinised.
To be fair, the Times & Starmer did at least report the ridiculous salaries agreed by the new Crumbria Combined Gravy Train, otherwise known as the Mayor’s Office.
“CEO of new authority will earn £138,960-plus!” said the page 20 lead.
Yet 38 days earlier, the same reporter, writing in a sister title, told readers:
The discrepancy could be because the poor lad responsible for both articles is evidently busting his beans trying to fill space in place of his less energetic colleagues.
Also missing from the Times & Starmer story was the fact that the Crumbria Mayor’s Office wage bill will be a mere £3.7m which has allowed it to splash £60,000 on tempting north a seasoned former hackette as its new Spin Doctoress.
From her point of view, new PR goddess, Emily Woolfe, (left), may consider it “job done” that the Times & Starmer kept her OUT of its story.
You’ll notice we didn’t.
CATCH UP: MAYOR’S £3.7m STAFF SPAFF!
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SLUGGISH Penrith Snoozepaper, the Slumberland & Westmoreland Imperilled, spent this week making a front-page hash of a second-hand story.
It was Penrith Town News that broke the exclusive earlier this week that Wokemoreland & Farcical Clowncil is spending £830,000 on repairs to its ‘new’ £8.3m Penrith headquarters, Voreda House.
Penrith Town did the reporting. The Imperilled merely passed the story off as it own, wrapped, as ever, in Council cotton wool.
Despite having a few days to dig deeper into the issue, the unathletic snoozepaper simply dropped a line to its friends in the Council Press Office for a statement to help smooth over the stink.
The semi-retired newspaper in Penrith didn’t give any push back to the Council on who signed off the building, why it’s taken so long for this news to come out and what political accountability follows?
How much public money has been clawed back, when is the spending on this building going to stop, and where’s the £830,000 coming from?
Who? Why? What? When? Where?
It’s hardly revolutionary.
Even the Editor’s trembling “comment” – always petrified of ever expressing an actual opinion – massively underplayed the mood in Penrith towards this bungled vanity project.
People in Penrith are up-in-arms that another small fortune of taxpayers money looks like it’s going down the drain.
One letter writer to the paper has even called for a public inquiry.
In its front-page story, the paper also omitted a really important detail:
Voreda House was hailed by the Lib Dem-dictatorship as a Net Zero flagship, yet it seems to be leaving them with Zero credibility.
The only bigger waste of money in Penrith than Voreda House is paying £1.90 for the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald.
READ the CHRONIC’S VERSION of the Voreda House mess!
OR the original by PENRITH TOWN NEWS.
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HAS The Crumbling News, Carlisle, jacked in reporting council news?
We ask because of its commercially suicidal habit of including long, limp planning stories in place of actual Council scoops.
Bid to convert former surgery. Nando’s revamp. Bakery in barn.
These are justifiable if you do the other Council stuff, but if it’s the sum total of the paper’s interest in Council matters, it’s in big trouble.
None of these planning applications require reporting skills. They merely require a trainee to move into Crumberland Council’s planning department and work from there.
If the paper folds, it will be because nobody in authority on The Crumbling News thought that small failures like this were worth stopping.
No wonder the former great of Cumbrian Newspapers is haemorrhaging roughly 1,200 readers a year.
CATCH UP: LOCAL RAG’S SALES DISASTER
Even when the Crumbling News does attempt something political, it still cannot manage the most basic questions.
Its Penrith Mansion House story (p10) reports that Wokemoreland & Farcical Council is once again trying to offload the former HQ — but never asks why this attempt will succeed when the others failed, or how much is it on the market for?
Newspapers do not die from a single event. They die like this, week after week.
In the very same edition, the Scroogequest ‘Group Editor’, had the absolute brass neck to tell readers, over the course of an entire page (below):
“Where there is no local journalism, trust declines. Local reporting brings problems to the Council’s attention that matter to our readers.”
The “Editor’s” self-flattery is also plain wrong and she is not describing reporting.
The paper’s job is not to bring problems to the Council’s attention like an administrative lapdog. Its job is to bring the Council’s deeply-concealed failures to the public’s attention.
Yet few readers would know that Crumberland Council has needed successive multi-million pound government bailouts, had more than 200 staff off sick on a single day, and is throwing more than £5 million at a new firm to get on top of absences.
You’d only know that this week if you’d be reading the Cumbria Chronic.
ENDS
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