There was an article in the Yorkshire Post at the weekend about Beal Homes which claimed that Goole is the most up and coming town in Yorkshire (https://www.facebook.com/groups/312024966842992/permalink/1242527040459442/?).

In terms of Beal Home’s objectives, the company is a success story. All credit and respect to its founder and leader for hard work and entrepreneurship. Beal Homes is part of the broader Junction 36 project, which itself can boast some significant success stories.

The comments on the Facebook link to the Yorkshire Post article from Goole people continue to show a lot of unhappiness with the town’s direction of travel. So if business leaders and local political figures are extremely satisfied and think everything is going great, why is it the case that many Goole people do not feel that?

The Town Deal has posted on X about careers events to encourage Goole people to take up jobs in the hospitality sector. While it is very important to the economy, and socially, the hospitality sector is not very well paid – people working on the front line are unlikely to be able to afford one of the Beal Homes out of their wages. Many of homes in the more established parts of Goole are lived in by people who do jobs that are not well paid, but are vital to society. Filling the shelves in supermarkets, driving delivery trucks, cleaning buildings, streets and emptying bins, caring for the elderly and infirm.

Nationally, an organisation called Led by Donkeys has published a video about Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s life (see: https://x.com/bydonkeys/status/1797872238676599121?s=61&t=weYhVhx9fsk8PvakKaa20w)

When you look at how the current Prime Minister made his millions, you can’t help thinking that it isn’t very much different to having a good win on the gee gees. Is that the sort of career we want to encourage young people to aim for? Is that the sort of hard work that creates wealth for the country and makes the majority of lives better? The video also says he worked at a Hedge Fund whose actions led to Barclays Bank having to be bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of £45 billion. None of this has been denied since the video was published. 

Successive governments from the Cameron administration onwards have systematically cut funding for public services to the point now where we pay through the nose for nothing to work. The people who have been most affected by austerity – argued as being necessary due to the banking crisis – are the least well off. People who helped bring about the banking crisis live a life of ostentatious luxury, but people who are not well off are ground down by bills, and can’t get doctor and hospital appointments. Small businesses, the lifeblood of the British economy, built through hard work, dedication, and with love, have been destroyed by the financial crisis and succession of economic problems since – and many feel that Govt policies are hostile to them rather than designed to help them to succeed.

Hand in hand with austerity has been a programme of drastically reducing the accountability of the wealthy and powerful. The result: we have the Post Office scandal, what has happened with water companies and other utilities, the billions that were paid out to suppliers of ineffective equipment through the Government’s VIP lane during the Pandemic.

Through all this, those with power and wealth have been controlling the narrative – the Govt, the Post Office, the water companies. We see repeatedly that East Riding Council and the governing party very effectively control the narrative in the media.

Those who are hungry for power will always do anything that is necessary to gain it and hold on to it. Important questions for members of the public include what sort of values do we want our society to have, and what are people willing to do to make sure those are the values that count?

Do Goole people want a two tier town – a showpiece Junction 36 which gives some people the life they want to be accustomed to, with the more established part of town abandoned to permanent decline, trashed so those in power can fulfil their ambitions? And if not, what are Goole people going to do about it? Do we want more win+wins for residents?