Friday 5 September 2014

County Set

Patrick West makes some very important points.

I have long wondered quite who paid for spiked. Perhaps they could see their way to funding something like a weekly comment magazine with a contributor from each of the nine British areas among the 10 poorest in Northern Europe: West Wales, Cornwall, Durham and Tees Valley, Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire, Lancashire, Northern Ireland, and East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire?

A contributor from each of the 11 British areas that are poorer than Poland: Highlands and Islands, Durham and Tees Valley, East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, Devon, West Wales and The Valleys, Lancashire, Merseyside, and Northern Ireland?

A contributor from the most deprived village in England, namely Jaywick, in the constituency and the very near vicinity of topical Clacton?

And a contributor from among those who recently elected the Reverend Dr William Campbell-Taylor as the first ever Labour member of the Common Council of the City of London?

There is not an area on those first two lists without some very rich areas indeed in it. But I have lived in Lanchester for two thirds of my life, and I served on Lanchester Parish Council, mostly with two attendant school governorships, for a third of it.

No one needs to tell me about the need to look just below the surface. I know all about poverty in the midst of affluence, as surely as I know all about affluence in the midst of poverty.

(Of local interest, even during the boom years, the number of people in Lanchester dependent on state benefits was equal to the entire population of Burnhope, by no means all of which was so dependent.)

But it would not be hard to find people who fitted the bill. And this would need to be a print publication, perhaps costing a pound, and thus distributed through pound shops, among other outlets. We could call it The Lanchester Guardian.

Since more powers are going to the Scottish Parliament and to the Welsh Assembly, so at least the powers previously enjoyed by the latter ought then to go to those places which are obviously so neglected and ill-served under those bodies: the Highlands and Islands, West Wales, the Welsh Valleys.

South Yorkshire, Merseyside and Cleveland are presumably going to be city regions, although such rule by, from and for Sheffield, Liverpool and Middlesbrough will go down very badly indeed in many places. But so are the strikingly less needy areas of the other former Metropolitan Counties.

In which case, the same devolution, even if called something else, ought to go to each of Cornwall, County Durham, Lincolnshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Lancashire, East Yorkshire, North Lincolnshire (the part of historic Lincolnshire that used to be in Humberside, in other words), and the Isles of Scilly.

In which case, why not to every county? Why not, indeed?

Ed Miliband, over to you.

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