ROAD QUESTIONS ARE BYPASSED!

CRUMBRIA: 14.06.2026

NOT everyone is quaffing on champers following the opening of the Carlisle Southern Link Road.

The five-mile scheme has just opened after three years of traffic cones, but started life as a £144m project, which then swelled to £225m, and finally rolled in at £259m.

In other words, wuh-huh-haaay over budget.

It was also supposed to be open by, er, May 2024.

The attending News & Shrug newspaper knew all this because it had already said so in its “live blog” on opening day which did at least touch on some of the road’s problematic back story.

But when the former newspaper tagged along for the grand opening on Friday, it appears not to have asked too many uncomfortable questions about the spiralling costs and wonky timetable, preferring instead to take a battery of photographs of the great and the good.

Naturally, the distinguished gathering grinned like Cheshire cats beside their road — equivalent to £52m a mile by the Chronic’s back-of-a-fag-packet maths.

The N&S snapped an entire gallery of 14 photographs, many showing the Labour-daft Crumberland Council leadership and Carlisle Labour MP Julie Spins enjoying the red-carpet paparazzi treatment, their backs red raw from all the slapping.

Readers were not explicitly told in the main story that the project came in more than £100m dearer than the original figure floated in 2020 — roughly 80% higher.

At least the dwindling readership of the paper have a functioning memory.

On its comments section, reactions to the civic self congratulation were distinctly unfavourable.

One asked whether there would be an official inquiry into how the scheme had ended up so far over budget.

Most scary of all is that this is the same Council which insists on having involvement in how £333m of taxpayers money is spent in Crumbria via a new mayor.

What could possibly go wrong?