Why we have had to raise our cover price

TODAY’S rise in the cover price of the Barnsley Chronicle is the first in more than six years.

We appreciate it comes at a bad time but just like everyone, our costs have risen substantially.

Newsprint – clearly one of our biggest costs – has soared and every newspaper in the country has had to increase its cover price in the last year, some of them several times.

As an independently-owned family business, we have tried to absorb these costs for as long as we possibly can.

But in order to protect the future of a newspaper that has served the people of Barnsley for more than 160 years, our price has to be more reflective of what it costs to produce.

Even at our new price, we remain one of the cheapest weekly newspapers in the country.

Locally, the Doncaster Free Press and Wakefield Free Press cost £1.60 while the Rotherham Advertiser is £1.30.

As the price rise is all about the newsprint costs, if you subscribe to the digital version of our newspaper, your subscription cost remains unchanged.

We hope you will see value in the uniquely local service that we offer. Thanks for your support.

I had a visit to Barnsley General last week (yes, fine now thank you, as long as I apply the ointment). Getting in was the first problem with the traffic nightmare outside and I urge everyone to sign the park and ride petition to try and ease this gridlock. Ambulance drivers must tear their hair out. Having read some letters here from Tory councillors and others I expected to have to battle my way through masses of immigrants to get seen.

I spent two hours waiting in three different areas and every face I saw was white, every voice I heard was from ‘tarn.

There was a woman with a limp who sounded like she came from Hull?

Maybe we can erect some sort of wall to keep these people out?

There is, of course, a myriad of skin tones and dialects on the OTHER side of the doors, you know, the people who put us back together when we are broken. Mismanagement of Covid and Brexit has left the UK short of staff, we have all seen it from transport to hospitals.

Barnsley Hospital now has a waiting list of 19,000. Anyone who believed the government’s ‘build 40 new hospitals’ routine, well, there’s this Nigerian prince and his millions I need to talk to you about...

There’s no doubt that global immigration is a complex economic and social issue which requires multi-layered grownup thinking.

All we get from the government is flag waving “keep the blighters out” talk while imprisoning foreigners in hotels and detention centres and paying the French a fortune to laugh at us. Our biggest problem doesn’t come from Calais – it comes from Eton.

Individually there’s not a lot we can do about the hospital waiting list, it’s out of our hands at least ‘til election day.

But we can try and make access to the hospital easier, currently Gawber Road is a hostile environment.

Barnsley council are thinking about a park and ride scheme, but they think slowly, so the more signatures on this petition here www.libdembarnsley.org.uk then the more notice they are likely to take.

Doncaster has one, and they just became a city!