I am writing to welcome the Times & Star’s announcement it is a partner in the “Power up the North” campaign (June 14) intended to address “decades of under-investment in key services” in the North of England compared to London and the South East.
The published manifesto referred to Lord Kerslake, former head of the Civil Service and ex Sheffield City Council chief executive, “who has warned that the yawning economic divide between London and the North will take 50 years to reverse”.
Subtract 50 years from 2019 and we are back in 1969 – four years before the UK joined the then Common Market (subsequently re-badged as the EEC, the European Community and most recently the European Union).
One feature of that institution is its Regional Development Fund specifically intended to invest in relatively poorer economies. And yet throughout the time the UK has been a member of the EEC/EC/EU, London and the South East have prospered at the expense of other poorer English regions including the North. 
Is that the fault of the ‘Common Market’? I would argue no. It is rather overwhelmingly the responsibility of successive UK governments – Conservative, Labour and on occasion each in partnership with the Liberal/Liberal Democrat party – that have been so mesmerised by the get-rich-quick politics of London and its satellites that they have never backed any serious attempts to redress England’s regional economic imbalances. This political blind-spot has reached the ridiculous extent that there are even now only four truly devolved regional assemblies in the UK – Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland – and London. None in the rest of England.
This continuing failure to govern in the interest of everyone equally led to the unexpected (but with hindsight clearly predictable) result of the 2016 referendum when the majority in favour of leaving the EU was markedly concentrated in the economically disenfranchised English Regions.
The political message follows the logic of Abraham Lincoln’s famous adage “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”.
Can we apply lessons to Allerdale?
Over decades and certainly over the last eight years we have seen policies encouraging investment concentrated in Workington reinforced by Allerdale’s Local Plans from 1999 and 2014. But Workington contains less than a third of the population of Allerdale. At some point the majority were bound to cotton on – hence the local election results in May 2019.
Have lessons been learned? It would appear not when the proposed Community Stadium is concerned.
Last week’s Times & Star letters pages contained some in support of the proposal, justifying it not in terms of its primary function but rather that it could be “a venue for weddings, parties, concerts and conferences” while another justified the project on the grounds that it “would be financed through the office blocks” to be built there. There was also an article regarding a march of “Allerdale people to give a show of support for the proposed stadium”.
Supporters claim the proposed stadium is for the benefit of all the people of Allerdale, and yet only around 500 joined in the march (timesandstar.co.uk online, June 15) with at least six Labour councillors or ex-councillors within the crowd. The absence of the overwhelming majority of Allerdale’s population of 97,213 is striking.
The proposed community stadium will cost at least £26million to build while the office blocks – for Sellafield Ltd  and a combined NHS surgery and pharmacy – would cost an additional £10million. 
If the entire cost of £95million once interest is added is to be financed almost entirely from rents charged to Sellafield Ltd and the NHS, that adds up to two important bodies being expected to be willingly fleeced to subsidise the pastimes of a few hundred sports fans.
I would argue that managing the largest accumulation of nuclear waste in Europe and providing ever more expensive NHS services requires concentrated investment without encouraging leakage to subsidise sports events, let alone weddings, parties, concerts and conferences.
If the pro-stadium campaigners could convince the absent vast majority that their safety downwind from the biggest radioactive dump in Europe, plus maintaining their cherished overstretched NHS are less important than a vanity sports facility in Workington, you’ll have my vote.
Or maybe not – I suspect I’m way past fooling on this one.
Bill Finlay
Hayton