- guardian.co.uk, Monday September 18 2000 12.21 BST
The change marks the commitment of more resources, staff and serious attention to the paper's old home - the north-west of both its founder, John Edward Taylor, and its greatest editor, CP Scott; and the Yorkshire of Jeremiah Garnett, Taylor's partner and the paper's first publisher and printer.
Differences will be modest to start with, but they will have a resonance outside the north; partly because of the prospects for other English regions and partly for the effect on the metropolitan mind. When Ken Livingstone finally moves into Lord Foster's glass testicle by Tower Bridge, he must not forget to hang up modern London's coat of arms: an inverted telescope crossed with a telephone receiver (or modem).
The first of these is a simple symbol of the old, old capital vice of seeing everything beyond the end of the Tube lines as dim and provincial; the second is more significant as an icon of how progress has played us a nasty, centralising trick. The very instruments designed to liberate, to make it irrelevant who worked where, to abolish the office and even, according to the wildest prophets, the city have had the opposite effect.
Modern outposts are limited to the strained conventions of telephone or emailspeak - essentially the problem of getting human warmth along a wire. They have none of the advantages of being physically at the centre of things, while forfeiting the past sense of independence which came from being out of instant reach. God forbid that such a thing should have happened, but if a feisty London underling of CP Scott had felt he knew the capital better than Mancunians did (for in those days, at least at the Guardian, the balance of power was the other way), he could act accordingly. Wrath would take time, and time would surely change the editor's famously fair mind.
Tony Blair has just had a similar, salutary lesson. Goodness knows what distortions of the phone, webmail and central government bureaucracy were kidding him about the national mood on fuel; but the crunch came appropriately here up north. When the prime minister couldn't even get to John Prescott's favourite Chinese restaurant because of the wrath of immobilised Hull, he at last called an emergency cabinet meeting. And this is a man, like his potential successor William Hague, who is supposed to represent a constituency in the north.
Actually, the congruence of Sedgefield and Richmond is just the place where national commentators might usefully be at the next general election; the wisdom in the post office, pub and pews of Croft, where the leaders' constituencies meet, will surely be particularly pure. Less glamorously, it can only be valuable for a London-heavy media to have a woman or man on the spot in the battered ex-coalfields or the sheep-farming fells. At the minimum, they write less about the toil and drama of getting here from Euston or King's Cross.
That is not to belittle the value of an outside eye, a device used famously by the Guardian from Arthur Ransome in Russia to Nick Davies in Sheffield's schools. But the yen to have authoritative voices with a regional base has echoes in every institution which has serious dealings outside London. Nothing revolutionary may come of the Yorkshire constitutional convention in York next month, but it is part of an unmistakable mood - at its most cautious, requesting more power and staff for the regional government offices; at its most exhilarating, demanding referenda on elected (or otherwise democratic) regional assemblies.
The other virtue of the regions which chimes with Guardian values is the different perspective and the willingness not to conform which comes with life at one remove from the centre of both valuable fashion and silly fad. There were serious weaknesses when this paper was actually based in Manchester, but that was an outstanding benefit. It is not a purely northern virtue (west country readers will be pleased to know that CP Scott was born in Bath), but one vividly associated in the nation's mind with gritty Methodists, plain speakers and those who won't do owt for nowt.
There was a sense of homecoming, encouraged by northern pleasure (an interesting emotion properly laced with scepticism) when hints about Guardian North first emerged. Three qualities marked the Guardian of John Edward Taylor and were made internationally famous by Scott: independence, accuracy and vigilance for the welfare of Manchester. The last is now generously and widely shared, but it is still here.
Guardian North is the Guardian, not a hybrid version, and it cannot carry long columns about cotton or the price of tops and noils on the worsted market. But it hopes to give the national news a northern tone and the north a fair hearing by the nation.
