Friday 1 August 2014

No tenth transmitter of a foolish face

Today is Yorkshire Day and as has long been my practice I am spending it elsewhere. Despite having lived there for many years I have never reconciled myself to the locals constantly banging on about how good they are, and the thought of a special day when they are officially encouraged to do it even more drives me to despair.


Nonetheless, and despite being a Londoner - indeed a cockney, born within the sound of...well you know what I mean - London is frankly no better. The Evening Standard is a paper every bit as bad as the Yorkshire Post (possibly with fewer reader's letters calling for the return of apartheid or declaring that Pinochet was right) and seems to spend all its time claiming that London gets a raw deal and calling for more investment in transport in the capital. Who are these clowns?


If Scotland votes for independence - and I hope that they don't - then the imbalance between London and the rest will tip even further. The only logic then would be for independence for Yorkshire or preferably the whole of the north. Or perhaps we could ask the Scots nicely if we could join them.

The president and the first lady
And, this being a wargaming blog, someone is bound to refer to the fact that Yorkshire Day commemorates the Battle of Minden. I prefer to cherish the link to the emancipation of slaves within the British Empire on this day, for which we thank William Wilberforce, a Yorkshireman.

1 comment:

  1. Perhaps things are the wrong way round - if London were to vote to split off from the rest of the UK, now, then they would be free of us whingeing benefit-scroungers, they could concentrate on selling their houses to each other, abandon Europe to protect the wizards in the City (which might be a rather quiet place without Europe, I think) and the rest of us could all get a bloody break - for a start, we could have new national radio stations which didn't force us to listen to the entire weather forecast for the South East before we got to hear something useful. I'd be interested to consider what the political set-up would be, since the proportion of residents of the new Kingdom of London who could speak English would be pretty low.

    I am sincerely hoping that Scotland votes "No", too, and I suspect that Mr Salmond is as well, or his bluff will be called mightily. Mr Salmond's best result would be a narrow "No", so that he can argue the case for greater devolution, and he doesn't have to melt, like the Wicked Witch. Heads you lose, and there are no tails.

    Local pride is a perennial, and it's mostly a pain in the backside wherever it is.

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