Yorkshire versus lies

Some thoughts from a critical friend to the Yorkshire Party

In the last post, I said that politics has to avoid two big lies. One lie is that place doesn’t matter, that politics can be the same everywhere: you just apply the universal rules and away you go. The opposite lie is that place is easy, that if you’re from Wharfedale then that’s enough for you to represent Wharfedale: you just have to follow the feeling in your bones about what is right. Both of these lies have the same effect. They let policymakers ignore reality.

In this post, I’m going to use the idea of the two lies to think about the public face of the Yorkshire Party. For those that don’t know, this is a political party that campaigns for ‘greater devolution for Yorkshire and its five million people’. I’m not a member, but I have voted for them. I also think that they are part of an important change that has happened.

A quote often misattributed to Gandhi says ‘First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you’. For Westminster, the idea of the regions of England having significant power is still in the first or second phase, it is something that can be dismissed in a lazy sentence by a southerner whose entire knowledge of the county is that he once saw a map.

These days, things are different in Yorkshire itself.

If you talked about devolution in Yorkshire in, say, 2012, then you usually got the same reaction that it still gets in Parliament. It wasn’t taken seriously. I know this because I did it. Things have changed. When people asked who I was voting for in the last general election, I said ‘the Yorkshire Party’. The same pattern then played out every single time. They would ask ‘really?’ in a surprised voice. That ‘really?’ is the sound of somebody moving out of the ‘ignore’ stage and getting ready for the ‘ridicule’ stage.

What happened next is the revealing bit. When I said something along the lines of ‘the national parties won’t pay attention to Yorkshire unless we force them’, everyone took the point seriously. The ‘ridicule’ phase was dropped, and not because people had moved on to the ‘attack you’ phase. That one never happened, not even at the level of mildly vigorous debate. Barely anyone in Yorkshire likes the Westminster parties enough to even verbally defend them. It’s no wonder that electoral turnout is poor. Some of the people I talked to, not all of them, even ended up voting the same way as me; and I am the opposite of pushy when it comes to these things.

What this adds up to is that the Overton Window, the range of generally acceptable views, within Yorkshire has broadened to include devolution (although not independence). This isn’t due to the Yorkshire Party so much as disgust with the political mainstream, but by offering a concrete alternative the party does play an important role. If I had said that I was spoiling my ballot paper or voting for the ‘least bad’ of the national parties, then people would have responded differently to my devolutionist sentiments. I know this because I had those conversations in earlier years. Knowing about the Yorkshire Party’s existence and meeting one person who intends to vote for them broadens people’s sense of what is possible.

So I think the Yorkshire Party is doing important and good work. It is also difficult work, far more difficult than being an anonymous bloke with a Substack account. At the same time, though, a politics that seeks to represent a place needs a bustle of ideas. I’m not saying it needs a worked-out philosophy, and much less an ideology; but it does need something that Oakeshott called ‘atmosphere’: a ‘tradition of ideas’ that can be discussed, internalised, fought over, and developed. A tradition of ideas is not the stuff that ends up in policy papers and manifesto promises. It is bigger, woollier, and less obviously political. It must include ideas about the nature of human beings, what is good and bad for them, the role of the state, its relationship to other social institutions, and arguments about all of those things as well. If this Substack has a purpose, it is to contribute to a distinctively Yorkshire tradition of ideas in this broadly political sense.

That’s why I talk about ideas like the two lies: simple, perhaps exaggerated, descriptions of the ways that politics can go wrong. It is also why I talk about the work of political philosophers like Judith Shklar. These things do not give neat answers to the problems of the moment. They are not supposed to. Instead, they raise hard questions, and it is only by taking hard questions seriously that a tradition of ideas can grow.

So as a critical friend, how well does the website of the Yorkshire Party avoid the two lies: the lie that place doesn’t matter and the lie that place is easy?

You would not expect this party to fall into the lie that place doesn’t matter; and, on the surface, its website doesn’t. The first link in their ‘Our Policies’ menu is about devolution. Right or wrong, that is taking place seriously. Many of the other policy pages make some mention of particular issues in the county, although some (such as ‘Health and Social Care’) are more generic. Even the more generic pages, though, talk about the need for devolution. The same slightly mixed picture is true of the news currently on the front page. Some articles, such as the one about Sheffield Council’s CEO breaching COVID regulations, are about Yorkshire. Others, such as the similar article about the Prime Minister and COVID regulations, are not about Yorkshire, but do underline problems with Westminster.

In other ways, though, the website hasn’t avoided the lie that place doesn’t matter. Its overall political position is a generic social democratic one that could have come from anywhere in Europe. This is not ‘social democracy with Yorkshire features’. It is social democracy off the shelf. There is no attempt to adapt the implicitly universal values to the particular society and geography of Yorkshire, to put them into close dialogue with the place. Instead, they stand apart, abstract: ‘subsidiarity, dignity, community and cooperation’.

Generic social democracy, like all universal positions, relies on the lie that place doesn’t matter. This is a problem, but not a fatal one. Partly, it is just a result of insufficient detail. The website tells us that a Yorkshire Assembly is key to the party’s position, but not what they think the Assembly should look like: its powers, how elections would operate, its procedures, where it would it sit. It is in details like this that a politics becomes responsive to place: even if the details are tentative and debated; especially when they are tentative and debated. From the website, I don’t think this process has really begun, but then the party is not even a decade old.

The other lie, that representing a place is easy, is tempting for regionalists. If the reason the party exists is to represent Yorkshire, then it easy to assume that it must be able to do it. Yorkshire, though, is big and complicated, bigger than we can hold in our minds. Doing political justice to it can only ever be an endless task.

The Yorkshire Party website does not fall into any obvious form of this lie. Instead of arguing that they can represent Yorkshire, it argues that devolution would allow Yorkshire and the areas within it to better represent themselves. If they do fall into the lie that representing a place is easy, it is in the same way that they fall into the other lie: through a lack of detail. They say so little how they would like an Assembly to operate that you could get the impression that they think an Assembly is the single solution to all the county’s problems. I doubt they do think this. It is obvious that a truly grounded politics needs more. As with the other lie, though, the idea that representing a place is easy can hide in the silences.

Once again, the obvious answer is that the party is new. Less than a decade ago, few in Yorkshire were even taking conversations about devolution seriously. That has changed. Sooner or later, Westminster will realise this, and its creatures will stop ignoring and laughing at the North. Instead, they will ‘attack’ and ‘want to burn’ a threat to their powers. When that happens, those that believe in a politics of place will need to be ready. It will mean fighting the two big lies, which the centre depends on so heavily. It will also require a tradition of ideas capable of withstanding a propaganda war.