[Puffer Fish]

Labour Party-Run Birmingham Council Declares Effective Bankruptcy


Local leftist officials have been blasted for mismanagement in Birmingham as the city council has declared that it is effectively bankrupt.

In the latest example of a Labour Party-run area running out of money, Birmingham City Council issued a spending freeze Section 114 notice, meaning that the local government of England’s second-largest city will only be able to dole out funds to maintain core services.

The decision was made after the council failed to settle a bill that it owed to settle equal pay claims following a lawsuit from 174 female council workers, who successfully sued the local government for failing to provide bonuses to traditionally female jobs such as cooks and cleaners while offering bonuses to jobs typically staffed by men such as gravediggers, trash collectors, and street cleaners.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/0 ... y24886217/

And here comes the revelations of corruption in the labour councils. Why are lefties so corrupt and dishonest?

Bosses at five councils facing bankruptcy are pocketing more pay than the PM with CEO of cash-strapped Birmingham getting wage rise of nearly a third since last year | Daily Mail Online

[B0ycey]

Every city that hosts the Commonwealth Games goes bust. And we wonder why no city wants to host it.

[ingliz]

Labour Party-Run Birmingham Council Declares Effective Bankruptcy

Breitbart? LOL.

You are telling only half the tale.

The Conservative-run Northamptonshire County Council was forced to issue a section 114 notice after years of financial mismanagement that resulted in debts of close to £1 billion.

Tory-led Thurrock Council gambled hundreds of millions of pounds on risky commercial investments while attempting to silence critics. Forced to grapple with a £500 million deficit in late 2022, it issued a section 114 notice.

Woking Council declared its effective bankruptcy following a series of risky investments in hotels and skyscrapers under the previous Conservative administration.

That nearly a third of councils in poor areas of the UK are considering bankruptcy due to a Conservative-led government imposing financially crippling austerity measures is the bigger story.

Why don't you tell us about that?

[Puffer Fish]

That is an excellent counterargument, ingliz.
However, there are two points I'd like to make.

First this does (I think) demonstrate the absolute absurd nature of some of these lawsuits. (Seems like the Lefties are eating their own in the court system) In this case a discrimination lawsuit for millions of pounds that bankrupted (or at least played a prime contributory role in bankrupting -- the final straw) the local government.
I've complained about the fundamental absurdity of these lawsuits in other threads, how they don't make sense in the bigger picture of logic, but I think this situation helps illustrate.

Secondly, if the larger UK government is imposing budget cuts and austerity, that may again be the fault of the Left, if we think of the previous government.

As I explained in this thread: If we run deficits now, it means cuts in the future

However, we can argue about austerity, whether it is necessary and a good policy, and who is actually to blame, in another discussion.
(The Left does have a tendency to borrow to much money and then when it comes time to make cuts in the future to compensate, they complain, and blame the leader doing the responsible thing)

You are correct that Northern England is poorer. It's always been this way (at least ever since deindustrialisation, which was a long slow process, from about 1862 when the mills in northern towns closed, starting to fall behind by 1905, to the end of world war 2, 1950, and receiving the final death knell by the mid-1980s). Northern England is analogous to the Rust Belt region in the United States.

But Birmingham still is the second largest city in the U.K.
(to be totally fair and technical, Manchester might actually be just a little bigger, in second place, if we count the surrounding outlying areas, but that's really besides the point)