No 'North'
Sir: The 'Campaign for the North' has 8 distinctly chocolate flavour. It owes the hospitality of Birchcliffe Centre, Hebden Bridge, to the trustees of the Rowntree Trust, of which Mr Richard Wainwright, MP, is one. This is not a movement of the North; it is Yorkshire. There is no 'North'; there is the North East (Tyneside), North West (Merseyside), and Yorkshire (and Humberside), The two MPs present at the recent inaugural meeting were both 'Yorkshire'.
For anyone interested there is plenty about English regionalism in the report of the Royal Commission on the Constitution, published in 1973. If it takes regional pat' riotism to make a campaign, rather more than economic interest (as I believe it does), it is more likely to gain force in Cornwall where a nationalist movement exists already. It was there that we on the Commission found the strongest regional patriotism outside Scotland and central Wales. We also found that there was no single region of 'the North'.
In any case, I cannot see the flag of the Northern National Party being unfurled in Hebden Bridge. More likely, if at all, from neighbouring Heptonstall with its splendid record of recruitment to the nonconformist pulpits of England. But why so impatient? Scotland and Wales have not got lib' yet,
Ifld Yorkshire, so far, has no oil. Houghton of Sowerby
(MP for Hebden Bridge 1949-1974) House of Lords, London SW1
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