Just to note the under-reported Southmead estate riots which took place a couple of days later in Bristol: When I was eleven years old, my mother gave me a pair of gold sandals. These were for ‘best’, and no… Karen Langley blogs at kaggsysbookishramblings and is always drawn to the North… ( www.kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com) The temporality of this section is, probably intentionally, very hard to follow. The speaker, Joe Totale, has not yet been born, and he is speaking of the future death of his father, R. Totale XVII. The younger Totale seems to drop out of the narrative at the point where Smith says "shift!" It is rather naive of the author to believe that the imposition of a political mayor on the North East region of England will make the slightest contribution to its prosperity. The prosperity of the North East lay entirely in its coal deposits and the industries these spawned.

The North Will Rise Again’: Manchester and Liverpool to host ‘The North Will Rise Again’: Manchester and Liverpool to host

This is the million-dollar question! As I say in the book, I think it would be foolhardy for me to offer some kind of magic bullet remedy for the North’s problems. Nonetheless, I outline some suggestions, which all centre on the idea of large-scale devolved regional government – probably as part of an overhaul of the British system on federal lines. This would almost certainly lead to a more equal distribution of power and wealth throughout the country – and guarantee a basic level of equality between the regions. The more general point made in the book is that whatever happens, you have to go beyond short-termist slogans like ‘levelling up’ and ‘Northern Powerhouse’ to offer radical reform of the North and its relation to the centralised British system. Like the West German government bringing over yellow trains, when apparently the Metro trains were manufactured in Birmingham, this could be another case where a real-world inspiration is adapted in the writing of the text.J Temperance points out the consonance with the common southern post-Civil WarAmerican slogan, "The South Will Rise Again." The great industrial and mercantile developments of the North East all had their basis in the coal industry. The prosperity that brought underpinned the other commercial enterprises. Any enterprise involves risk and without a basis of prosperity men are generally unwilling to take the risk. My great grandfather was involved in offering a scheme to share the profits of the mines with the workers but it foundered on the perfectly understandable reluctance of the workers to take on the risk of sharing in losses.

The North Will Rise Again - Tribune The North Will Rise Again - Tribune

As well as looking at the North’s industrial heritage, Niven explores the resurgences of creativity and culture which took place during the 20th century. Although the North’s high watermark could be regarded as the Industrial Revolution, there have been points where its profile has risen again. Niven’s wide-ranging cultural analysis takes in the modernist history of the North from the Vorticist magazine “Blast” onwards, through the radical poetical flowering of the Morden Tower poets in the 1960s, the musical success of bands like Lindisfarne, the wider Northern music scenes of the 1980s and 1990s, and the attempts at regeneration which have taken place at several points from the 1960s to now. Although these have been periods of optimism, it’s clear that there is never a consistent plan of action to improve conditions in the North, and that’s down to the actions of successive Governments, of whatever political stripe. Her second play, the wonderful, moving, and bitingly funny Rita, Sue and Bob Too, opened at the same theater two years later, when Dunbar was just nineteen. Alan Clarke later made it into a film, which premiered in 1987. Barely three years after the film’s release, aged just twenty-nine, Dunbar died of a brain hemorrhage after collapsing on the floor of a local pub.You say in the prologue that this is, above all, “a story about hope rising above despair”, which is a particularly resonant theme for today’s world. Is hope what you’d like readers to take away from reading it? It is quite a North East-centric book, largely because it is oriented around memoir, but also because there were so many more untold or neglected narratives in modern North East history in comparison with Manchester and its environs. I think there’s a place for drawing distinctions between different parts of the North. That said, I also think there’s a sort of self-directed divide-and-rule tendency whenever the North is discussed, by which people start off by saying the North East is nothing like the North West, and end up saying Salford is nothing like Manchester, the west end of Newcastle is nothing like the east end, the centre of Harrogate is completely different from the outskirts, and so on ad absurdum. R. Totale he was an ex cabaret artist and an underground being. He's got tentacles that's why he had to go underground, it's like his face started leaking, I've always imagined him as some sort of a Big Youth character cursed with this mystical insight." Joe Totale, in the Totale mythos, is in indeed Roman Totale's son. He appears in sleevenotes etc post-Roman's death. Indeed, the lyric tells us who Joe is.

the north” - New Statesman The myths of “the north” - New Statesman

The definition of child poverty is actually a measure of inequality, not poverty. That might be an issue, but it is not the same issue. On the current basis of comparing it to median incomes, the child poverty rate given a particular income distribution would be completely unchanged by a ten-, hundred- or thousand-fold increase in incomes.

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Well, Niven’s argument is for a more regionalised government of England, one first brokered in his earlier book New Model Island, and this is at the heart of The North… He explores deeply the concept of splitting the country into regional assemblies with more autonomy to self-govern and a fairer share of funding to every area. This is a forward-thinking concept, and one which has gained traction in recent years with the formation of the Northern Independence Party, a semi-serious attempt at a Northern separatist group. Niven applauds the initiative, though in the end he seems to recognise that this kind of massive shake-up of a country entrenched in conservatism is going to be very difficult.