Introduction

Summary

The North East is different. The people of the region share a history and culture which is unique.

So began a manifesto of the Constitutional Convention, the campaign for regional devolution in the north east, in 2000. That campaign has been successful to the degree that a referendum is to be held in 2004 as to whether these same people really want a regional assembly with barely more power than the London Assembly. There already is a regional government office, a regional development agency, a regional museums, libraries and archives council, a regional arts body, a regional Tourist Board (the only one I think to use the word ‘Northumbria’) and even a ‘Unis4Ne’, a consortium of the five English universities in the region acting together to promote its development. Regionalism is all the rage.

Underlying the rhetoric deployed by those campaigning for greater regional autonomy (and thereby bringing to the plethora of regional quangos some degree of democratic answerability) lies an assumption that the north east has a deeply rooted historical identity, and that it is this deep root that makes it the most ‘natural’ of the English regions. The idea that the north east has a distinctive history is the most frequently stated justification for regional government. Peter Hetherington opened a piece in The Guardian on 16 June 2003 entitled ‘Geordies look to saint for inspiration’ with the words, ‘with a distinctive history, culture and musical heritage, it is a region set apart from the rest of England’. Hetherington proceeded to quote amply from an unreferenced article by John Tomaney in which St Cuthbert was invoked as a symbol of the region's political and cultural identity and a long proud period of selfdetermination going back to the Middle Ages was asserted. Peter Scott, vicechancellor of Kingston University, singing from a slightly different hymn sheet for The Guardian on 2 April 2002, declared more cautiously that, ‘regions are difficult to define … The north east can claim coherence based on mish-mash memories of the age of Bede, its boundaries established by the ambitions of Northumbrian warrior kings, and when the industrial revolution was engineered on the banks of the Tyne.’