Gateshead Sages

Why not have the Turner Prize actually judged by the people of the North East?

Once upon a time, full employment, workers’ rights, strong trade unions, municipal services (including council housing), public ownership and the Welfare State made possible the civilised and civilising world of the trade unions and the co-operatives, of the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, of the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, of the brass and silver bands, of the male voice choirs, of the people’s papers rather than the redtop rags, of the grammar schools, and of the Secondary Moderns that were so much better than what has replaced them.

Here as elsewhere, terribly damage was done by Thatcher and Blair. But these things do still linger on, if one knows where to look for them. Why not assemble a panel of such persons and let them, by reference to that heritage, decide both the relative and the absolute worth of the Turner Prize entrants? It is the tragedy of Brian Sewell that the people sensible enough to agree with him are concentrated hundreds of miles from the city in which he inexplicably imagines all sensible people to reside.