The Cumberland & Westmorland Herald – Page 8

CRUMBRIA: 1/08/2025

By Rich Pickings

WOKEMORELAND & Farcical Council has been let off the hook today by one of Cumbria’s weakly snoozepapers.

“Huge surge in fines for parents taking children out of school!” screeched today’s edition of the Slumberland & Westmoreland Imperilled, Penrith.

(More regular readers will know that the page 1 headline is frequently more assertive than the bureaucratic bollocks that inevitably follow below.)

It reports that 1,539 fines have been imposed on parents for taking their kids on holiday in term time.

What it failed to answer was the million-dollar question all readers were asking: How much cash has the Council raked in from this?

With parents fined £80 at the outset, it wouldn’t have taken a maths prodigy on the newspaper to calculate that the Council has levelled, irrespective of whether they’ve been paid or not, a grand total of £123,000 worth of fines.

If parents don’t pay up within 21 days – (and you’d imagine many would refuse) – the Council’s fine helpfully doubles to £160!

The “newspaper”, which timidly balances every story it does out of existence, also missed an open goal to emphasise that the number of fines issued is 13 times higher than the year before.

The Council, controlled by a Lib Dem dictatorship, seems to have been waging a silent state-supported WAR against parents.

Yet the all-important “why?” was never explained by the “newspaper”.

In the absence of these obvious questions, reams and reams of paragraphs were instead given over to allow a shadowy and unnamed “Council spokesperson” to explain away why it’s okay to squeeze the pips of hard-pressed parents.

Also not interrogated was the anonymous spokesperson’s highly questionable claim that the income generated is reinvested in “improving attendance for our pupils.”

Prove it!

And instead of finding angry parents hit in the pocket by these fines, the paper padded out the rest of its incomplete exclusive by explaining at length why officialdom believes that taking children out of school in term time “harms” their education!

Let’s also remember a recent story unreported by The Imperilled and every other “newspaper”.

Wokemoreland Council officers went softly-softly on market traders suspected of brazenly flogging counterfeit goods at this year’s week-long Appleby Horse Farce!

With Council officers and police present and goods changing hands before their eyes, why wasn’t there a flourish of Fixed Penalty Notices handed out then?

(See story below).

It’s clear our Councils go after the low-hanging fruit that pays their Council Tax, which they know will pay up after a couple of bully letters.