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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday September 19 2002 08.56 BST
The last two years have been a giddy ride for the north of England, from the miseries of foot and mouth to the triumph of Manchester's Commonwealth Games. Allowing for the human tendency to classify and tidy, we have seen a year of pyres and riots followed by one of glory; the Stirling prize for architecture went to Rotherham's Magna. Bradford, Liverpool and Newcastle-Gateshead are hot bets for the shortlist of Europe's Capital of Culture 2008.
A fifth of southerners don't know where these places are, according to a survey yesterday, but that doesn't wobble the bobbins; it was ever thus. Self-confidence is back to the Victorian days of big city power; that sense of zest when Manchester and Leeds felt unfettered by a restraining hand down south.
And it is so much more widespread. Bolton Institute, surely Britain's next university, gets an "excellent" grade - along with Oxford and Cambridge - for its teaching of philosophy. Saltaire mill village rubs shoulders with Angkor Wat and the pyramids as a Unesco world heritage site.
But before we get carried away with today's second birthday of Guardian North, which has covered these dramas in more detail ... yes, the metropolitan yoke still chafes. Regional economic discrepancies grow to our disadvantage, and the centre of power continues to concentrate in the south-east.
True to that survey, the establishment reaction to Manchester's Games tour-de-force has been: aha, now let's put in a bid to hold the Olympics - in London. The discussion of airport space to relieve Heathrow and Gatwick ignores Manchester and Finningley, near Doncaster, where the longest runway in Europe virtually connects the M1 and A1M.
To rehearse these points is to risk sounding like one of those birds which knows only three notes; but if we are whistling up here, it is because we are also building political nests. Within the next two years, we will be reporting requests for referenda on regional government from the north-east, Yorkshire and the Humber and the north-west.
Debate will then fizz in the three regions - healthily, because the disagreements are about the shape, rather than substance of restoring a sense of local control. It was no coincidence when Neil Herron, Sunderland's "metric martyr", launched an anti-regional assembly campaign last week, that his group chose the acronym Neara (north-east against a regional assembly). The message is: forget London, which might as well be on the moon; don't let the Geordies on Tyneside seize power over Wearside and Teeside at last.
That discussion can degenerate into the sort of internecine quarrel which warms the heart of centralisers; but it also gives a foretaste of what vigorous gatherings the assemblies will be. Like the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, we have crucibles for all manner of experiments with representative democracy which Westminster finds so hard to apply to itself. The north-east could have the first triangular one, to satisfy its three great riversides.
This will be within the bosom of the union flag. Some of the best northerners are students from elsewhere who share the sense of excitement and power in our regional characteristics. Look what warm, chirpy accents have brought us: not just call centres, but every TV voice-over and compering spot from Big Brother to I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
Yorkshire architecture? North-west cinema? North-east fashion? They already happen, but they need a stronger local pole to counter the magnetism of London and the myth (as in those Braine/Barstow novels) that departure to King's Cross/Euston is the way to Arrive. Robust practitioners such as Pollyanna in Barnsley or Sir Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough prove the point but - as outstanding exceptions - they unfortunately also prove the rule.
And who, above all, do the less resolute souls in the regional world copy? Blush with shame, politicians from the north who represent the three regions but spend so much of the time in London. When will we see a northern equivalent of Donald Dewar or Sir David Steel announce that a healthy new chamber is more worthwhile than that gothic stuff by the Thames?
We already have Peter Kilfoyle spending much of his time to good effect in the north-west, and last week Joyce Quin became the first MP this session to announce her resignation at the next election to stand for the north-east assembly. Wanted now: a siren from the Humber to swim up to the Commons terrace and whisper to John Prescott: "Yorkshire needs you - and life is so much nicer, cheaper and in every way better in Hull."
· Martin Wainwright is northern editor of the Guardian.
martin.wainwright@guardian.co.uk
