Any Lincolnshire farmer will tell you that in order to promote new growth you have to completely cut out, cut back and kill off the old.

Scunthorpe Town Centre is a cancer ridden, poisoned abscessed and diseased blight of its own making and it needs lancing, cutting out and irradiating out of existence in order to cleanse it. The opening of the proposed M&S development at Smiths Garden Centre couldn’t be better timed.

Like a sick and suffering old dog, Scunthorpe Town Centre needs putting out of it's misery - put it down. Boarded up premises, dive bars, rubbish strewn walkways, insufficient parking with Dick Turpinesque fees and harpy eyed Traffic Wardens gathering and twitching like rabid vultures lying in wait for the first kill of the day.

Of any weekend night the town centre becomes a no-go zone for those other than person’s hell bent on getting hammered at all costs. Taxpayer funded fenced off and road blocked areas with venues selling ALL drinks at 50p each and 20 Police officers ushering drunks from one state of oblivion to the next … while 80m away on Oswald Rd and in full view of the Stand Around Coppers, some drunk is kicking the shit out of his girlfriend and passers-by have to intervene. It took the Police 35 minutes to attend.

Landlords blatantly  allowing staff to serve the underage and the more-than-obviously-drunk-and incapable  who are going to stagger off into the night looking for the first person they can wade into, but only after they’ve stopped off first to take some practise swings at one of the Punch Bag machine situated in every Top Town venue. People being dragged from Doncaster Road taxi's to be beaten and robbed in full view of others and still there's a distinct absence of the Police presence you've been funding. Would you really want to park your car off Doncaster Road to vist an event at the new Baths Hall?

Bankrupt alcoholics in charge of drinking establishments and getting round the problem of being unable to obtain a license, by simply putting it in someone else’s name and carrying on as they please. Does someone really think that a pissed pisshead is not going to take the piss?

Off licenses where children as young as 15 drift in with school bags and out with alcohol and when the Police investigate they are met with complete contempt, as time and again the proprietors go unchecked and unpunished. There’s only one sentence for selling booze to kids – prison and banned from holding a shop license for life. 

And at 4.00am of a morning from Thursday through Sunday you can be assured that any resident of the Doncaster Road area is going to be awoken by the drunken profanity laden rants of some knickerless fat lass in inappropriate clothing, shoes in hand, arguing with her equally hammered boyfriend at the top of her screaming voice.

Kill it – kill it all. From Nat West to the Baths Hall – kill it. Let it die. Rate it out of existence, license it out of existence and CORRECTLY Police it out of existence.  And 5 years from now you can start to regenerate it into something Scunthorpe may be proud of.

Some idiot in Westminster came up with the notion of introducing a Continental Café Culture to Britain – so far, pissing in the street is the closest we’ve got.