The Secretary of State for Business dropped a clanger this week, referring to Tory peer Ben Houchen as the Tyne Tees Mayor. It was a slip which drew the inevitable suggestion that perhaps the Conservatives weren’t really paying attention to the North. The Labour Party, on the other hand, confirmed it most definitely was paying …
There’s every likelihood that the North East mayor elected today will be chosen with the backing of less than 15% of the region’s electorate. That’s not to say they’ll be illegitimate. The winner will probably get somewhere around 35-40% of the vote, but if previous local elections are a good guide, turnout will be about …
Every politician’s nemesis: the ordinary voter. For our elected representatives, there’s no higher stakes moment than a conversation out in the wild. On such interactions are elections won and lost, and careers made or destroyed. There’s a long history of things getting ugly. In 1880, Joseph Cowen Jr, the founder of the Tyne Theatre, owner …
Is there one North East? Or are there many? There’s a tendency to talk about the North East as if every one of the 2.7 million of us experience it exactly the same. The North East needs X, we’ll confidently say, it wants Y. Reality is, of course, much different and quality of life and …
If you’re someone who reads the news — maybe you even subscribe to a high-quality, regionally-focused online outlet — it’s easy to forget how little of what makes the headlines actually cuts through. To the average person on Stockton High Street on a Saturday afternoon, or at Morpeth Morrisons on a Wednesday evening, their knowledge …
How do you get what you want? You ask for it. It’s time that as a region we got better at that, and doing it in a unified way. This is, afterall, the region which gave the world the phrase ‘Shy Bairns Get Nowt’. We ought to be better at asking for things and making …
Typically there’s not an awful lot of mystery left when it comes to Budget day. However, Jeremy Hunt had a few positive surprises for the North East. Most notably, the Chancellor announced a ‘trailblazer’ devolution deal for the North East, which the official Budget documents say ‘will provide a package of new funding potentially worth …
Next week’s Budget is likely to be the final set piece fiscal event before the next General Election. The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will stand at the Despatch Box after weeks of speculation that he will use what headroom he has to fund tax cuts. At November’s Autumn Statement, Hunt’s big headline was a cut to …
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