Northern Weekly Salvo 256

Here's your latest Salvo, with stuff about community station galas, The Penrhyn Lock-out, Jo Cox, Brexit and the North, last days of steam, book reviews and houses for sale (well, mine anyway) ...There's also a new bit about small Northern presses.

https://www.paulsalveson.org.uk/2018/07/12/northern-weekly-salvo-256/

Here's the general gossips...

So, our adventure in the World Cup is over. As most readers will be aware, the editor isn’t a huge football fan. Standing on cold terraces at Burnden Park in the early 60s had the effect of putting me off the game for life. But I confess to having watched some of the quarter final match against Sweden and most of Wednesday night’s semi-final match against Croatia. I’m not going to comment on the game; it would be ridiculous to anyone who knows anything about football. But I enjoyed it and was sad when Croatia scored what was bound to be the winning goal, in extra time. The New Statesman may well be right in its optimistic assumption that the England team, and their likeable manager Gareth Southgate, represent a new, more diverse and progressive kind of ‘Englishness’. I hope so. We have to reckon with an increasingly right-wing Conservative Party which is starting to occupy the space of ugly right-wing English nationalism that UKIP has vacated. Can a new form of Englishness embrace not only cultural diversity but also recognise that England is a big and complex nation that doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of political governance that works for Wales and Scotland? An ‘English parliament’ would still be centred on London and the South-east and dominate its smaller partners in any federal arrangement. The North would be just as marginalised as it is now. An ‘England of the Regions’, with assemblies having similar powers to those of Scotland, seems a far better approach.