“For the major media, almost all the campaign reporting focused on the candidates and polls. Almost nobody bothered to talk to the voters. The Chicago Tribune, the midwest’s biggest newspaper, doesn’t even have a midwestern beat any more and seldom sends reporters outside the Chicago metro area. Yet this was where the election was decided.” Reading your article (The rust belt strikes back, 21 November), I was reminded of the great days when the Guardian and other major papers had northern desks and northern editors.
I’m a lifelong Guardian reader and paid-up supporter who was born in Manchester and has lived in the north all my 72 years. In my day job as a standup comedian and folkie I saw what was happening to the great industrial cities and smaller towns here, from the once-busy ports of Hull and Goole to the coal towns of the Dearne Valley; from rust belt cities like Sheffield and Middlesbrough to the cotton towns of Lancashire.
Nothing of that managed decay and decline was understood inside the London bubble. A kind of cognitive dissonance settled on the media. A few documentaries and the occasional opinion piece appeared over the years but there were no howls of protest, no shock at the millions north of the Severn/Wash line dumped by laissez faire unfettered capitalism. The referendum was won by snake oil millionaire salesmen who convinced the benighted of the post industrial wastelands that the problem was Europe not London. The media didn’t see this coming because, fixated on polls and personalities and with no real presence north of Watford they hadn’t a clue what was happening in the wastelands (John Harris and Owen Jones excepted).
The (ex-Manchester) Guardian and other major media voices need to build a northern (and a Welsh, a Scots and a Midlands) presence. They need feet on the street and ears in the pubs and clubs and they need writers who understand the lives of the people that they are among. Otherwise we will end up in a JG Ballard world where shadowy figures stumble round a decayed hinterland while, snug in their rural fortresses and southern citadels, the higher orders sleep safe. And as for that much trumpeted “northern powerhouse” – don’t get me started – ask the man or woman on the Bury tram what he or she thinks about it and the answer will be a colloquial term for testicles.
Mike Harding
Manchester
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
