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15 years ago I had a letter in the News Post leader proposing passport controls on Stakeford Bridge and people thought I was daft! We now need then on the Morpeth road to County Hall! This whole 'Unitary Authority' thingamajig has handicapped us even further and not just for the reason's Merlin mentions. It is supposed to bring decision making closer to the localities but in reality it has made an Authority which has always been described as being too remote by government inspectors even more so. It would be easier to find the 'Holy Grail' than it is to access officers! I wouldn't care but just over 50,000 people voted for this option, single tier, while over 60,000 people voted for a 2 tier system, what did we get, oh yes the democratic option, single tier???????? This has been imposed by central government against the wishes of the majority of the people who took part in the referendum so the noun to be used does begin with a 'D' but it isn't democracy! We have lost a whole swathe of our elected representatives, maybe not a bad thing considering the costs involved but, and seen services centralised in what for my money is little to do with service delivery but more to do with county balancing its own deplorable budget state. We now have a handful of parish councils who oversee the flotsam and jetsam of services councils provide. Anything with a real budget has disappeared into the hallowed halls of county. As an example we have just seen the decision to close our libraries deferred (that word again!) yet at the same time a new state of the art library opened in Haltwhistle? It would seem cuts in services in one part of the county are paying towards upgrades in another, hardly the level playing field we have been promised even just considering the population figures of each! Another example is in the area of leisure facilities. I know the hard work and dedication it took to get the money for this feasibility study into recreational facilities in Bedlington yet we see Ashington is to get one handed to them on a plate. The cynic in me would suggest mass demonstrations just before an election might just be a lesson we need to learn! Could we have had something else, yes. We should have reintroduced the old Shire boundaries and ran along the lines of the old BUDC, one council for the whole Shire. We have the infrastructure in place, we own, or did own, the council offices on Front Street, no need to use the community centre Merlin we have a bespoke suite of offices. We could have contracted the major services off county, health, education, fire, police etc, yet kept most of the day to day stuff and made our own decisions about the way we would like to see our own area develop. Local decisions made by locally accountable people not by faceless autocrats in the warrens of county hall! Come the revolution brothers and sisters, first against the wall.............

Blank Please stop putting words in my mouth. I never once mentioned the price of a starter being connected in any way to someone's intelligence. The intellectual level of the people on this forum can be clearly measured by the value and quality of their comments, not by how much they're prepared to spend on a starter. I just get fed-up with the defeatist attitudes that exist around here. I've never been to the Accolade Brasserie but from what people have said on this fourm thread I think I'll be paying them a visit sometime in the near future, as I feel we should be supporting our local businesses wherever possible, rather than bad mouth them - heaven knows, there are few enough of them to begin with, without people criticising the ones we've got. It's time that the people of Bedlington woke up to the fact that there's a world that exists beyond it's boundaries and it's a world where people are able to change things for the better if they're prepared to get off their backsides and do something about it, instead of harping back to the threadbare "ah yes, but this is Bedlington" whinge.