When Blair & Co. were voted into office in 1997 we thought that a significant difference our new Labour Overlords (and I, for one, welcomed them) would make would be the proposed constitutional changes. House of Lords reform, Assemblies for Wales and Scotland, and so on. Now the North-East is being invited to vote in a referendum for a regional Assembly.
Andrew Marr on BBC Radio 4 yesterday was chatting to the irritating Satanic ritual abuse enthusiast, Bea Campbell about a North-East identity; Campbell seemed to be making an unusually sensible observation that the North is defined negatively, as not being the South; others on Marr’s show observed the North lacked a cohesive identity or cultural hegemony.
Grey Street, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Photo : Ian Burton, Freefoto.com
The first time I stood in the main shopping street of Newcastle, just above Grey Street, I felt there was something odd about the sea of faces in front of me and it took a good 10 minutes before I twigged that every face was white. It’s a bit like West Wales.
My first job in the North-East was in Sunderland. Sunderland and Newcastle are about 12 miles apart and to nearly everyone else in the UK there’s no difference between the two. But the two populations absolutely hate each other. The hatred is played out formally in their football allegiances and less formally in the fights that explode every Saturday night on the Quayside. A bit like Wales again.
The Welsh-speaking West loathes the English-speaking South-East. The South-East thinks of itself as cosmopolitan and cultured - which is true only in contrast to the impoverished Welsh-speaking West and North-West. In contrast, the West thinks of itself as the torchbearer for a real Welsh culture, holding out against the louche English sympathisers in Cardiff: it flirts with neo-fascism and produces endless Welsh-language tv programmes about singing, harp-playing and Max Boyce.
‘The Welsh’, said the Doctor :’ are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing’,he said with disgust : ’sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.’
Evelyn Waugh, in the excellent ‘Decline And Fall’
Our experience of the Welsh Assembly has been unconvincing. Without tax-raising powers and with no chance of disturbing the Labour Party’s current monpoly on power, the Assembly has operated as a corrupt dispenser of patronage and other peoples’ money.
The Welsh Assembly’s mangement of the NHS in Wales has been disastrous and it’s been unwilling to investigate properly some specific concerns about mismanagement of funds - that is, my money and your money.
Coming back to the North-East: I can’t see how another regional assembly in an area defined by an atlas rather than a shared sense of purpose, with even fewer powers than the Welsh Assembly, would be a useful devolution of democracy.
When we lived in the North-East I discovered that some people often called each other Billy
. Two managers in the first company I worked at in Sunderland called each other Billy
. It’s in Newcastle I first heard someone described as Billy No-mates
; and nearby was a place called Billy Mill
I thought all this Billy stuff might be vaguely related to a Protestant / Catholic tribalism (Billy = William of Orange, Protestant) but I didn’t find any confirmation of that.
