I Hope You're All Proud Of Yourselves

Having finally made it to a computer after a day of ... well, let's not go into the day I've had, I checked my emails and found more than a dozen from people saying that (based on the comments, which I have yet to read) their point was proved: that my local readership was incapable of engaging with questions such as those set out in the posts below on constitutional reform and on the need for a new political movement, and, moreover, that this was because they came from the North East (not necessarily the term used). One of those emailing me (a very well-connected and supposedly left-wing person whom I knew years ago) said that the only other place full of people like that was Liverpool!

Well, that set me thinking. The North East and Merseyside are both treated as cut off (like Wales, or Northern Ireland, or East Anglia, or the West Country, or even the Midlands with their large numbers of marginal seats) by the political and media classes.

Just contrast the number of regular or occasional television programmes set in the Greater Manchester-West Yorkshire-South Yorkshire belt, which is what London-based commissioning editors almost always seem to mean by "the North". The more picturesque parts of Yorkshire also get quite a look-in, even if Heartbeat, or Last of the Summer Wine, or even Emmerdale is not exactly on the over-realistic side.

Look at the honours heaped on Manchester United when it wins a European title, but not on Liverpool Football Club when it does the same thing. Who could have told, from recent coverage, that the recent shooting of an 11-year-old boy in Liverpool took place, not only quite a smart part of town, but in fact in a city with a better record on gun-related deaths than Birmingham, Manchester or (wait for it) London? And so one could go on.

Going all the way back to the Seventies, the Callaghan Government's proposals for Scottish and Welsh devolution were rightly and vigorously opposed by Labour MPs from the North East and from Merseyside, whom and whose constituents nobody had bothered to ask in advance. (But then, nobody had bothered to ask the Welsh or many of the Scots, either; just look what happened when somebody did.) This negligence was to be repeated by the Blair Government, but where were the North Eastern and Merseyside Labour MPs then? Negligence all round that time.

Oh, and please, no comments saying that the regional assembly would have made things better for the North East. If anything, it would have made them worse.

But by far the biggest thing always making things worse here is the Uncle Tom tendency to act out a ridiculous stereotype of the place. A tendency manifest, apparently, among those posting comments to my previous posts. You're not doing yourselves any favours, you know. And you're not doing the people around you any, either.