I RECKON Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has got a bloody cheek. He’s come along on his dashing white charger to throw ‘the North’ a £10 million sop to us hicks from the sticks because we apparently need to do a bit more on the tourism front.

As if, within our (very) limited means, we’re not doing enough already! After all, it wasn’t Whitehall that got the Tour de France here this summer was it, but Saint Gary Verity, the charismatic go-getting boss man of Welcome to Yorkshire.

But Clegg and his coalition cohorts reckon that more needs to be done to bring tourists to the North because 30 per cent of UK visitors chose not to travel beyond London ‘because they simply didn’t know what there was to see outside the capital.’

Well that’s a massive whack in the face to the tourism bodies up here who pull their puddings out to celebrate all that is great, good and wildly attractive so we can share our fabulous culture, heritage, and scenery with millions of others who come to our shores. And nowhere is that more true than here in Yorkshire.

It’s also a back-handed slap to the thousands of businesses large and small who work hard to show off their neck of the woods, whether they be a B&B in the dales, a fish and chip café on the coast, a visitor attraction on the moors or a hands-on museum in the city.

And why don’t 30 per cent of visitors here know what goes on outside the capital? Because it gets all the money spent on it, that’s why. On the day that Clegg was waxing lyrical about how we need a tourism strategy for the North, BBC Radio 4 was running a news story that £70 per head of National Lottery funding is spent on culture in the capital, compared to a mere £5 per head outside it.

Small wonder then, that if Clegg’s figures are to be believed, more people visited the British Museum than all tourist attractions in the North East put together last year. Yet again, another example of how we in the North are London’s poor relations.

And what does the government mean by ‘the North’ anyway? Is it everything north of Watford Gap, the Wash or Derbyshire? And how on earth do you implement a one-size-fits-all approach to tourism up north when what we collectively have to offer is so incredibly, wonderfully and richly diverse?

Let’s imagine you’re an American in California busy planning a trip to the ole’ country and you’re being encouraged to visit ‘the North’ after the obligatory whirlwind tour of London. Where do you go? The Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District? Blackpool or the Northumberland coast?

Which cathedral - York or Durham? A canter round the industrial heritage of Manchester or the Cutlers’ Hall in Sheffield? The South Pennines or the North York Moors? To see the Bronte landscape or Hockney’s?

As we Northerners know only too well, but Whitehall doesn’t seem able to grasp, the North is more than one region, so how would you divvy up this ten million quid? Which it has to be said is a pretty paltry sum of money to share out across the whole of the north of England when Yorkshire alone made short work of a similar sum for the Tour de France.

Let’s not forget that Yorkshire is the biggest county in the UK with a population the size of Scotland and an economy three times bigger than that of Wales, both of whom have devolved powers.

And while I don’t want to get into the wider devolution debate – not for the moment, anyway – for me, it’s clear that you can’t lump this fabulous county of ours into an amorphous area called the North and then market it as a holiday destination. And I’m pretty sure the proud folk of the North East and the tough, doughty inhabitants of the North West will be feeling exactly the same way.

Tourism is all about a sense of place, history, culture, experiences and events. It’s not about keeping the rabble-rousers north of Watford sweet in the hope they’ll vote for you in the next general election. And it’s certainly not about the London-centrics lumping all of our fabulous attractions together under one banner and parcelling them up as being ‘up north.’ We’ve had enough of that down the centuries, thank you very much…