LABOURNOMICS: £1 A YEAR FOR 199 YEARS

Shirebrook Town Hall. Born out of scandal. Financed by selling off STC assets, then partly rented out to Bolsover District Council for one pound per year. For 199 years. One pound. Per year. For 199 years. Welcome to Labournomics at its finest.

The deal that STC signed with BDC under the brilliant leadership of the Labour Party is so bad that your grandchildren’s grandchildren will have to pay for it. The contract is also so secret that when a councillor asked about it at an STC meeting, he was warned he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. As usual, Labour pulled this off while the residents of this town watched in silence.

I WAS WRONG
Why am I writing about this now, and how do I know these details? Some time ago, I mentioned this lease in passing — at the time, I thought it had been signed for 100 years. Tony Burns (an ex-councillor, like me) contacted me to correct my error and shared with me what he’d dug up. He gave me permission to publish the response he received from a BDC officer.

Honestly, when I was a councillor, the Town Hall lease wasn’t even on my radar. In my opinion, the net-zero contracts were (and still are) far more damaging to STC, and the Town Hall looked like a done deal sealed long before my time (and kept well out of my and the public’s). Nobody outside the Labour inner circle knew how little we were getting in return, how much we’d lost, and how long we’d be paying for this vanity project.

So I went after something I considered far more questionable. But the situation hasn’t gone away — and from comments at the last STC meeting, this deal is under new scrutiny.

THE NUMBERS THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE
The closer you look at the Town Hall deal, the stranger it gets. The lease agreement is secret, even though it was signed between two institutions funded entirely from residents’ pockets. The true cost of construction is also secret. “The Post” hid the numbers but claimed the success. And most residents still have no idea that, in exchange for half of ground level, STC handed over a substantial piece of land in a prime location and took out an interest-bearing loan from BDC.

What was BDC’s actual contribution? Only the Labour and BDC “elite” know.

LET’S DO THE MATHS LABOUR WON’T
If STC had taken on the full build cost itself and rented the same ground-floor space to BDC for just £200 a month (well below market rate for a property of this kind in this location) the income over 199 years would look like this:
£200 × 12 months × 199 years =£477,600
Now compare that to what Labour actually negotiated:
£1 × 199 years = £199

The difference: £477,401, walking out of Shirebrook and straight into BDC’s pocket. And that’s before we count the land STC gave up — prime location land which, in my view, is worth well in excess of £470,000 on its own — and the loan STC took on to fund its share. You’d have to be remarkably creative with arithmetic to think this deal is good for residents.

IN YOUR FACE — A TOWN HALL THAT ISN’T YOURS
Labour didn’t even try particularly hard to hide that the Town Hall wouldn’t really belong to STC. Their propaganda paper, “The Post”, ran several articles on it. No numbers, of course. No details. Just carefully managed facts. Look at what they wrote in issue 106:

“Lease.” Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? “Jointly financed.” Sounds fair, doesn’t it? But in reality, we lost money, paid interest, gave up prime land, and handed over part of the building, settling ourselves into a 199-year lease in return. BDC walked away with everything for £1 a year.

That isn’t a lease. It’s an insult. Labour spat in the face of residents once again. And residents… voted them back in.

WAKE UP, SHIREBROOK
Every single deal I’ve examined that was signed under Labour has been bad for Shirebrook. Toilets for £200,000. The pellet system. Solar panels. Grass cutting. The Town Hall rent. I’m certain I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

But while most of the other questionable deals are tucked away in committee papers and quietly forgotten, the Town Hall is impossible to hide — it stands in the most prominent spot in town.

And right now, inside STC, there’s a battle going on over the Town Hall’s future. Because, for reasons nobody has properly explained, Labour-led BDC has now built another building nobody asked for: the Pavilion on the Market Square.

WE CAN’T AFFORD IT
What can’t be hidden, however, is that STC cannot afford two buildings. The deficit STC has now run for two consecutive years means it can’t really afford even one. Labour has a plan for this problem — raise taxes, or run a third deficit and dump the whole mess on a new, inexperienced council elected in 2027.

Those new councillors will face a choice: cut spending and staffing (which Labour will use politically), or raise taxes (which Labour will also use politically). Heads, they win. Tails, you lose.

LEGAL ISSUE = MONEY ISSUE
This is exactly why I’m writing about it now. As I mentioned in my last article, old-Labour tried to push through a strange motion claiming the Town Hall was the best value for money. The motion lost. Badly.

That tells me a majority of new councillors are looking for a way to get rid of this dubious asset — and to do that, they need clarification on the details of the BDC “deal.” From what I remember, the councillor who asked about it was shut down with: “It’s with our legal people.” Translation: the lawyers.

STC IS BROKE
Winning anything — or even getting clarity on anything — won’t be easy. Under Labour, Shirebrook is on the verge of bankruptcy: two consecutive deficits, no savings, bloated staffing. There’s no wiggle room.

Yes, Labour lost one vote. But one swallow doesn’t make a summer — they still hold the majority. I’d bet that, given a chance, they’d vote in unity against any attempt to audit the pellet contract.

STC is a mess, and I’m afraid most residents don’t realise just how bad it is. The new councillors are still putting on a brave face and claiming they’ve “left politics at the door.” If that’s true — prove it, councillors. Table a motion for an independent audit of the pellet contract. I dare you. And again: I can pay for a forensic audit.

LABOUR PLAY POLITICS. THEY’RE BETTING YOU WON’T.
Old-Labour are practised political players with decades of experience. They will keep up the “everything-is-fine” act until the last possible moment. They’ve benefited for decades from low turnout and resident apathy. They were so good at convincing people that only they could run things that most residents came to believe it was impossible to win without taking a knee to the Labour overlords.

But the wind of change is strong, and they lost their first vote. Then their friends in other parts of the country lost the May elections. Badly. For the first time in decades, they can feel that the end is nigh.

LABOUR- OUT OF IDEAS, OUT OF STEAM, OUT OF MIND
All those old-Labour councillors have lost the will to fight. They see what they’ve done and, in my view, they’re not proud of it. Honestly, all they’re leaving behind is debt, deficits, crumbling infrastructure and nepotism. Nothing to be proud of. Nothing left to fight for. They’re all sitting comfortably on generous pensions, in homes they bought decades ago, far away from the modern problems younger generations struggle with every single day.

NEW GENERATION MUST BE TOUGHER
The truth is this: to fix the situation, the old arrangements have to be broken. The people who looked the other way need to go. The people who benefited need to answer for it. Nepotism has to end. Bad contracts must be challenged, renegotiated, or taken to court. Spending that drags down the budget needs to be cut. And the focus needs to return to what residents actually want.

From my point of view, the uniparty and the bureaucracy are not interested in what residents want. You can see it on a national scale and in our town. HMOs, The Pavilion and the Town Hall are the clearest evidence of that.

I’M A RESIDENT. HERE IS WHAT I WANT.
I want an audit of the net-zero deals. Look how deaf they are to that call. They know the questions are legitimate. And yet — for the comfort of the bureaucracy and Labour — they ignore an evidence-led demand for an investigation into a deal that, in my view, raises serious questions about value for money and accountability.

You pay for it. They’re fine with it.

The May 2027 ballot is your chance to change that.

Sylwester Zwierzyński
Lead picture: made with Midjourney 8.1
Comic strip: made with ChatGPT Image 2.0