Any comments or information welcome. The comment below was provided in January 2004, many thanks.

HEY DUDE! WHERE'S MY MONEY?

The New Deal for the Community looked too good to be true. It was. A personal look back at an episode of cynical manipulation and jobbery by SPINDLE.

THE LONG RUNNING BBC TV soap opera EASTENDERS is set in a fictional London borough called Walford, made up, presumably, from two real east end place names along the River Thames. When Newcastle City Council wanted to milk the government gravy train it similarly descended into the realms of make-believe. It created WESTGATE, the fictional home for the New Deal for The Community cash cow. As a suffix, the Oxford English Dictionary today defines one use of ‘–gate' as the shorthand for dirty tricks, or worse, following on from WaterGATE, IranGATE, LewinskiGATE, KellyGATE, etc., etc. You get the general idea.

Rumours of a pile of money just waiting for the asking mounted steadily on Arthur's Hill's jungle telegraph in the late nineties. One or two loyal Hill dwellers travelled far and sat through exhaustive meetings to learn how to make the pitch and press the right buttons to secure the kind of money that could seriously reverse decades of under investment in Arthur's Hill's infrastructure; money that the City Council did not have, or would not spend. Locals dreamed dreams and wish lists were drawn up on the back of dud lottery tickets…

It was the proposal to build an Olympic standard swimming pool that first gave pause to all the local excitement. Our dear Council, not content with being in the midst of a terrific row over a ham fisted attempt to ‘give' Leazes Park away, had decided that the ‘wisest' use of any incoming dosh for the West End would be to spend it for us, building a pool on the Scotswood Road, on a site somewhere between Newcastle College and the Telewest Arena. Quite apart from the fact we did not ask for a swimming pool, that's nearly a mile and three hundred feet below Arthur's Hill isn't it? Yes! Off the bus routes isn't it? Yes! How many old dears, such as yours truly, would want to skateboard down to use the footbath? Anyway, it isn't part of Arthur's Hill. Look at the map!

Part of the genius of the old British Empire was that it went around drawing maps on other people's countries. People went to sleep in one place and woke up in quite another. We suspect the Council a) does not care much for the memory of the British Empire and b) knows little about its legacies. But they certainly know how to gerrymander a map. The pool proposal was, in fact, a non-starter except in the dreadful local press; the idea was dumped (but keep an eye open for it; in this city what goes around comes around) together with the plot to disbar the community from it's own Public Open Space (a.k.a. Leazes Park). However, with our money and plenty of spare imaginative capacity they came back with – WestGate!

The WestGate map conjured out of thin air by the Council defied belief. In one of the most arbitrary carve-up's of land since the Anglo Irish Treaty of 1922, New Mills Estate was excluded, while the Jubilee Estate and part of Scotswood Road were drawn together with the Victorian Terraces that are the core of Arthur's Hill. It was an extraordinary piece of cartography, clearly done by someone who had never been to look for themselves. A walk around this new entity would require a brilliant sense of direction or satellite global positioning. It was, and is, a complete geographic nonsense. Which made the opening sentence of the infamous launch document all the more memorably mendacious

 

“We (sic) call ourselves WestGate …” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No, pet, we don't, do we? Here, have another pillow …

ONE WE MADE EARLIER

THE COUNCIL'S STANDARD TECHNIQUE in achieving its goals is to wear down the local opposition either directly through ‘meetings' thereby dragging out a process which is going nowhere, or collapsing the process and substituting one conclusions of its own, sometimes cooked up by ‘independent' consultants. We well remember a series of ‘community consultations' for the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) some years ago. Details of what residents would like done for the betterment of Arthur's Hill were ironed out over many weeks and months. Whole forests were laid flat to make the paper which flowed from the pen-pushers' desks; when it finally emerged, the SRB bid had been completely re-written as (I quote form memory) The Healthier City, and consisted of a string of health initiatives for the West city as a whole, nothing of which had ever been discussed in the long and often tediously patronizing meetings. (i.e. anyone living west of the football ground is assumed to be either mental or hiding from the authorities). Turn up to a community forum and you were subjected to a mixture of babytalk and soppy-stern political correctness. One ‘community worker' – a rich oxymoron of which time and space forbids, alas, a deeper examination – was accustomed to speak in some quaint accent of his own devising, one in which it was appropriate to communicate with the local Hotentots. Another long shadow of colonialism …

But! I hear you cry, we got the New Deal for the Communities award! Yes! And a New Deal supervisor and several local committees to decide how to spend the fifty million quid. Yes! Yes! Yes!

What does fifty million look like? This: £50,000,000.

Even using the Council's dodgy map, that amounts to, oh, about a million quid a street. All right, less. Say seven hundred and fifty thousand a street. Five hundred thousand? Enough, anyway.

The New Deal process needed a deprived area to lever money out of the government's coffer's: Enter Arhtur's Hill. In which case, where in God's name has it gone? To pay for public services that ought to be met by general taxation? To make up the for cash not spent on repairs and renovations in previous years? Is this what the New Deal amounts to?

Once again the people have been sold a dud prospectus under the flag of ‘renewal'. So I ask again -

Hey Dude! Where's my money?

Barry Larking 2003 email: larking03@blueyonder.co.uk