Home Rule

Well if Tony Blair's serious about the devolution thing...

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There's a feeling I get when I pass those tell tale signs. An unmistakable lifting of the spirits. You know the signs I mean. They have a white rose on them. Some are pretty huge and sit on the motorways, like those near junction 29 on the M1. Others are pretty well hidden and off the beaten track, but have just the same giddying impact - on the A65 not long out of Kendal, or on the A628 from Manchester to Barnsley on the way back from The Dark Side. Other journeys into the county are even more spectacular. The Humber Bridge is probably the finest journey home - Late at night's best, after a summer day dossing in Cleethorpes. And there's also the road that bypasses Billingham south past the ICI complex.

Trips in on the train are special too. London St Pancras for Leeds and Sheffield. Kings Cross for Donny, Wakefield and York. That's not to say that I'm recommending a £39 super saver ticket to stand beside some sweaty midlands backpackers for a couple of hundred miles, or the Leicester City / Derby fans heading back from getting tonked by some cockney footie team. Its just the journey home. Thats all. We all make it in different ways. I've never flown into Leeds / Bradford but I can imagine it too has it's charm.

Then there's the "What the chuffin' eck were you doing out 'the county anyway" brigade out to pop your bubble. And its fair comment. We have everything you need to have a perfectly civilised life without having to use them new fangled motorways, and what was the M62 built for anyway. It gets snowed under so often, its clear that the road is against the natural laws of nature. As for the Snake Pass, well it's only ever used by traitor Manchester United fans sneaking across for matches anyway.

So maybe the Home Rule brigade have a point. We've enough rugger and footie teams to run a perfectly good league. We've got a good clutch of mouthy politicos ("Order! Order!") and some proper Flat-Cap-and-Bronte-Sisters culture to put on the adverts. Reet gradely. We'd probably have a big row about the capital city status between traditional Yorkists and upstart West Yorks and South Yorks "newcomers" who only came to the county to cut canals and weave cotton... But it would be great fun.

Earlier this summer the legendary Yorkshire Posts website saw hot debate about stuff like the National Anthem and several interesting candidates emerged. "On Ilkley Moor" would be my granddad's favourite, but I've never been up Ilkley way...(always confused it with Emley Moor when I was a kid and I could never figure out why someone would be hanging about the telly mast without a hat anyroad).... Other notables are the Hovis Ad music - Dvorak's 'Largo In Ee-Miner'- beloved of brassed off cornet players across the county; The mysterious Holmfirth anthem and the immortal "Here We Go, Here We Go" in honour of the ill-fated miners' strike. "We'll Play All The Way For Leeds Utd" is disqualified, so don't even go there. More modern outsiders could be New Model Army's "Vengeance", Human League's "Dare", Pulps "Disco 2000 or Joe Cocker's "Get By with a Little Help From My Friends". My brother reckons on Embrace's "The Good Will Out" or something by Terrorvision, Shed 7, Longpigs or Cabaret Voltaire. "Nag, Nag, Nag".

And as for Prime Minister, well it's Captain Jean Luc Picard, in't it. No contest. William Hague and John Prescott can just go and get a proper job. We'll have a space for Mo Molem ready in honour of her working at Barnsley Tech for so long, though. And we'll get in a lifetimes supply of bones from Albert Hirst's for David Blunkett's dog.

We'll chase all the schoolkids from inside o'the National Centre for Popular Music and hold sessions in there. Jimmy Saville will be the speaker. Rodney Bickerstaffe will look after jobs. Maureen Lipman and Alan Ayckbourne will write the opening speeches, Lesley Garratt can come too, so long as she doesn't sing and she visits her dad more. Even Richard Whiteley's welcome (but not in that jacket, eh, Dickie?). And Richard Ingrams can appear on breakfast telly the next day and tell us all how it wouldn't have happened in Maggie's day. Surely not. She tried to abolish Yorkshire in the eighties if I remember...

NORTHERNER_____________________