Tha’ can allus tell Yorkshire

8:11am Tuesday 1st April 2008

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ONE of the "might have beens" of history I have occasionally run through my head is wondering what sort of a country Yorkshire would have made.

I'm not absolutely sure what originally set this train of thought steaming through the station of my imagination.

It might have been a steady drip of "Yorkshire is the biggest and best county" propaganda from an early age, or the fact that at primary school we had an "educational jigsaw" in which the challenge was to fit the counties of England and Wales in the right spaces, when the physical predominance of the White Rose territory was pretty evident.

My nation-building thoughts did tend to focus on one particular component of the Tyke empire - the West Riding. That entity did not, of course, correspond exactly to today's West Yorkshire.

Instead it swept all the way from Cumbria in the north-west to the steel city of Sheffield in the south, taking in most of the Yorkshire industrial heartland in the process.

The West Riding had major manufacturing industries, energy from its coalfields, and a potent mixture of spectacular countryside and bustling towns and cities. A senior official boasted it was the biggest education authority in the country outside inner London.

It was lacking some features considered important to the development of nation states, such as access to the sea.

But never fear, because Yorkshire wasn't just about one Riding. Look to the North and East, and you got rolling, productive farmland, more spectacular scenery, and a coastline with a scattering of smaller towns and the major port of Kingston-upon-Hull.

Last but not least, chuck in York and you had the historic capital of the north of England, complete with the Minster and all the history you could wish for, and thriving confectionery and railway industries as added bonuses.

The South Riding only existed in books, and we had plenty of literature anyway, from Charlotte Bronte to JB Priestley to Philip Larkin - even Dracula turned up as an asylum seeker in Whitby.

Not a bad mix, eh? At some point in our relatively recent history, Yorkshire would have surely packed more of a punch than many actual sovereign states could. And we had a striking floral symbol for a national flag.

The argument doesn't hold together quite so well nowadays, of course.

The industries that gave Yorkshire its economic power have disappeared or gone into near-terminal decline, taking some of its urban areas down with them.

To replace them, we have much the same mix of service industries and retail parks as the rest of the country - plus, of course, tourism. These days we do our best to encourage people to come and share the joys of our beloved county.

It was to boost this industry, apparently worth £6.1 billion to us, that a huge sign with "Yorkshire.com" on it was placed in a field at Cattal, west of York, intended to be visible from outer space. Fair enough, we've already had vampiric visitors, so why not aliens?

But, important though tourism may be, it doesn't strike me as quite so potent a sign of nationhood as those dark satanic mills in their heyday, pollution-producers though they certainly were.

Even in sport, while the Rhinos rule the rugby league world, Yorkshire doesn't dominate the England cricket team as it once did, and we haven't a single team in football's Premier League.

So the time to declare independence may be behind us.

In fact, it probably came and went in the early 1970s, when a bunch of control freak politicians not only got rid of the Ridings, but sliced bits off the West Riding and gave them to other counties, including - in a move almost designed to provoke insurrection - Lancashire. But the moment passed, possibly for good.

We've probably still got as good a case for independence as the Scots, but who wants to be copying them?