Liverpool

A fascinating programme about the Scouse character on Radio Four this morning.

The North East and Merseyside are both treated as cut off 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. Last year, who could have told, from national media coverage, that the shooting of an 11-year-old boy in Liverpool took place, not only in 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 1970s, 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. This negligence was to be, and continues to be, repeated by the Blair-Brown Government, not only over devolution, but also over a whole host of other issues.

A vital part of the solution to this is to have strong MPs from Merseyside, from the North East, and from other neglected, patronised areas, drawn from a party which is most strongly committed to the economic, social, cultural and political representation and betterment of those areas.