INCREASINGLY, the Conservatives can't even be bothered to hide the way in which they regard public funds as a bottomless pot of cash to be used to further the personal and political interests of senior Conservatives. A case in point is the £330,000 of public money from the so-called "levelling up" fund which Michael Gove's department has decided to award to a Conservative peer in order to repair potholes on a driveway on his 3400-acre Firle country estate in the Conservative constituency of Lewes in East Sussex.
The Firle estate advertises itself online as a wedding venue, and offers clay shooting and simulated game shooting. Firle Place, the Georgian mansion at the heart of the estate, is also hired out to film and television production companies. It featured as "Hartfield", the home of the heroine Emma Woodhouse in the 2020 period drama Emma, based on the Jane Austin classic of the same name.
Firle Place and the Firle Estate are the property of Tory peer Viscount Gage, who is reported to have a personal fortune of some £15 million. Both are very much commercial and private concerns. However, Firle is also the location of Charleston, an independently-run museum and gallery located within the grounds of the estate. The museum is the former home of artists Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf, and Duncan Grant, a painter and designer of textiles, pottery, theatre sets and costumes who was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
Bell and Grant had a complex relationship. Although Grant was almost exclusively gay and had numerous lasting relationships with other men with Bell's knowledge and consent, he had a daughter with Bell. Much to the horror of both her parents, she later married one of her father's lovers.
Although the Firle estate is very much the money-making concern of an already wealthy man, the Charleston museum is run and maintained by a charitable trust – it is ostensibly this trust which has been awarded the £330,000 by Gove's department in order to improve the access road which also services other areas of the Firle Estate. There does appear to have been any question of the Tory peer who owns the estate dipping into his already deep pockets in order to fund improvements to his own property.
The "levelling-up" fund was supposed to be used to aid the most deprived parts of the UK. In fact, the Conservatives have quite shamelessly used it to inject public cash into already well-off Conservative supporting areas and constituencies where they seek to boost their vote. Lewes, where the Firle estate is located, has received the ninth-largest per capita award from the levelling-up fund despite being among the least deprived 40% of local authorities.
According to a recent investigation by The Guardian, two councils in England represented by Tory ministers have received money under the Government’s “levelling-up” fund despite being among the least deprived local authorities in England.
This is the fund that the Conservatives are also using in order to bypass the Scottish Parliament and spend directly on devolved matters, a weakening of the devolution settlement which Michael Gove disingenuously described as "augmenting devolution". The Conservatives will not hesitate to repeat in Scotland the trick they have played in Conservative areas of England and to use UK Government funds in an attempt to boost their faltering support in Scotland.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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