Sunday 29 June 2014

Country Matters

This site moans about the BBC. But the Corporation is self-aware and self-critical like no other part of the media. Of course, it ought to be. Nevertheless, it is.

Where it often falls down is on what to do about the problems that is quite capable of identifying in itself.

No, the concerns of rural England hardly ever do make it onto the national news. Stories from the rest of the Kingdom that attract attention outside their respective jurisdictions are rarely rural, either.

Coverage of the countryside does concentrate on environmental rather than on economic and social questions, with a heavy dependence on certain grand, and rather politicised, charities.

Not mentioned in the BBC's internal report, but no less important, is the complete failure to reflect the political diversity here.

All of these criticisms apply to the media at large.

Look at the areas that were recently found to be poorer than Eastern Europe: the Highlands and Islands, East Yorkshire, County Durham, South Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Devon, Cornwall, West Wales, the Welsh Valleys, Merseyside, and Northern Ireland.

Only Merseyside is heavily urban, and most are very rural indeed.

In the Highlands and Islands, County Durham and the Welsh Valleys, three of the most socially conservative rural areas in Western Europe never return so much as one Conservative MP, with two of them voting Labour as a kind of ethnic or religious identity, simply not open to question. The old coal belt of South Yorkshire is in a very similar position.

But the Highlands and Islands have never returned many Labour MPs, either, and currently have none. The same or similar is true of East Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Devon, Cornwall (the poorest place of all, and with no Labour MPs), and West Wales.

Northern Ireland is of course a thing apart. But by no stretch of the imagination is that thing less than interesting socially, culturally or politically.

Yet look at that list of localities, and then look at the entire media. We might as well be on the moon.

That is not because we are poor.

Rather, we are poor because we might as well be on the moon.

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