It had been 70 years since that FA Cup victory in 1955, 70 years in which a once-mighty club had swapped trophies for atrophy. It was a story all the more poignant for it mirroring the simultaneous industrial decline of the city and region. And now the story had a happy ending.

This is a city whose football club is its spiritual heart. Walk out of Central Station and you will see St James’ Park, a vertiginous and imposing old stadium, towering over you. In Newcastle, the club is at the center of civic life. As Wembley basked in the glow of regional pride, one could imagine Sir Bobby Charlton, his brother Jack, his uncle Jackie Milburn as well as the likes of Sir Bobby Robson, English football legends all, looking down with pleasure. Nobody could have appreciated this victory more than Newcastle United fans. Only an extreme curmudgeon, or a Sunderland fan, would have remained unmoved.

We might never know whether the news of Newcastle’s win reached Malaz Prison, in Riyadh. Here, the fitness instructor Manahel al-Otaibi is serving 11 years, some of it in solitary confinement, for opposing male guardianship, campaigning against the hijab, and, according to her prosecutors, “going to the shops without wearing an abaya, photographing this, and publishing it on Snapchat”.

So much for the reforms promised by Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. MBS. His close ally, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is the governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund and the chairman of Newcastle United. As al-Otaibi sat in jail, al-Rumayyan lifted the League Cup.

It is an uneasy contrast, and the imprisonment of al-Otaibi is only one example of the MBS regime behaving barbarically. Take the dismemberment, in 2018, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi: an operation approved, according to the USA’s Director of National Intelligence, by MBS. Or the 2017 “Sheikh-down”, when the nation’s billionaires and captains of industry were corralled into Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel. Amid accusations of abuse and torture, they handed over their assets and paid fines to the state, now embodied by its Crown Prince, in return for their freedom.

Al-Rumayyan is the Crown Prince’s henchman in matters of sport, in which the Saudis are heavily invested. There is the LIV golf tour, viewed by critics as a hostile takeover of the sport, and there was the successful bid to host the 2034 Football World Cup. The kingdom has thrown money at the Saudi Pro League, signing expensive luminaries such as Cristiano Ronaldo, and has hosted numerous boxing world title fights and Formula 1 Grands Prix. One of MBS’ ambitions appears to be that young Saudi nationals — 60% of the population is under 30 — consume sport as a quasi-religion, it being a safer opiate than the extreme Islam that forged the nation’s most famous citizen, Osama bin Laden. Adherents of this kind of worldview might ask awkward questions about the legitimacy of the al-Saud dynasty.

Given that all this is taking place in a faraway land over which we have little influence, it is hard for football fans to know what to feel. Is the appropriate response revulsion at the sight of another British cultural institution being hawked to the highest bidder, regardless of human rights concerns, as the nation accepts its status as a post-imperial supplicant? Or should fans accept that they can’t change these circumstances and allow themselves to revel in a glorious sporting storyline?

Understandably, most Newcastle fans settle for the latter. A few, including the lifelong fan John Hird, have set up a campaign group called NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, which campaigns for al-Otaibi and the like. The group holds vigils outside St James’ Park – vigils that are often lonely.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is playing a central role in current geo-political stakes. Last week, in the run-up to the final, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was meeting Mohammed bin Salman, and Saudi Arabia was hosting talks between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Ukraine delegation. The Saudis, in short, were brokering peace between Russia and the West. In that context, the Carabao Cup seems a tiny footnote in the kingdom’s broader project.

In keeping with this central role for Saudi, President Trump directed his first phone call after his election victory to MBS. Trump’s first foreign trip, as it was in 2017, is likely to be to Riyadh. The world genuflects at the court of MBS, including the former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister, who visited in December, has said his “No 1 mission is for economic growth and for that we need Saudi Arabia”. Indeed we do, especially in a volatile world of Trumpian tariffs and a downgraded economic forecast from the OECD.

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How MBS won the peace talks

By Malise Ruthven

Newcastle fans, though, have been burdened with the outsourced moral angst of a nation. Governments can sup with the Saudis with near-impunity, but football is held to a higher standard, castigated when it joins the gold rush to Riyadh. Naturally, Newcastle fans resent those questioning their joy. The country accepts Saudi money for its regeneration projects in the north of England, clean energy investments and stakes in Uber, Heathrow and Selfridges. Newcastle United happens to be the most visible target.

Newcastle City Council, controlled by Labour until a spate of resignations last November, recently met ALQST, a Saudi-focused human rights organization. But we shouldn’t expect the council to issue excoriations of the city’s new overlords. Aside from needing the votes of Newcastle United fans, the council is hoping that the Saudi state might emulate what Abu Dhabi did in east Manchester when the emirate bought Manchester City.  The area around the City of Manchester Stadium has been transformed: new housing, a health center, and sports facilities, as well as the Co-op Live Arena. The projected PIF takeover of Newcastle Airport may be the first local dividend outside of the football club.

Five years ago, when campaigners tore down the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol, many cheered, not least those on the Left concerned with human rights. It is easy to be clear-sighted, 300 years later, about the awful contradiction of taking money from slavers to build wonderful churches, schools and civic amenities; it is harder to turn down Saudi money now. That money might improve the lives of ordinary people and regenerate the local economy – just as Colston’s money once did in the South-West.

Though Britain can seem a mere vassal state, the relationship isn’t quite as clear-cut as it appears. In his book States of Play, Miguel Delaney quotes the human rights activist Iyad el-Baghdadi on MBS. “He wants to be loved. And he wants his image [as a reformer] back.”  Another campaigner told me: “The Saudi authorities really don’t like it when you write about human rights issues. They want to be seen as reformers.”

Therein lies the contradiction. Saudi Arabia looks to Mecca in its prayers, but for investment assets and a degree of approval, it looks to London, New York and Paris. This approval is the only leverage that remains. Resisting the lure of Saudi money is like shouting at the moon: all well and good for purists, but ineffectual. Newcastle fans, being impotent, have little option other than to enjoy their moment. But our society should ask tougher questions of the Saudis, and we should not give in to the temptation to ignore the kingdom’s manifold human rights abuses. It is that Saudi longing for approval that provides the best hope of change.

In a sober moment, after the cup final hangovers have faded, perhaps we can remind ourselves that we have been here before. Not so long ago, we embraced an exciting geopolitical and trade partner. Its leaders’ henchmen were investing in soccer clubs and transforming London’s economy. That President Putin seemed such a nice guy.

Yet for weeks now, local members of the Labour Party have been in open revolt against their leadership. Jamie Driscoll, the Labour mayor of the North of Tyne, has been blocked from standing as its candidate for a new mayoralty which will cover most of the area, from Durham to Northumbria. Administratively, this may seem like a minor regional snub. But it was Driscoll, a former engineer, who led the negotiations by local council leaders to secure the impressive £1.4 billion devolution settlement to establish the authority in the first place. It was just one victory among many in his current role: he’s created thousands of new jobs, extended rural broadband, and, unlike in the neighbouring Teesside Valley, has seen off the Tory threat.

It seems churlish, then, of the Labour high command to allow the leading architect of this new post stand for it. Starmer’s close ally, Baroness Jenny Chapman — best known for her role in Labour’s defeat in the 2021 Hartlepool by-election — has said Driscoll’s exclusion was “simply guaranteeing the highest quality candidates”. Everyone, however, knows it’s because of Driscoll’s reputation as the “last Corbynista in power”, a provincial leftover from that era of turmoil and defeat which Keir Starmer is desperate to forget. But this time, he seems to have miscalculated; this time, there’s talk that Starmer’s “purges” have finally gone too far.

It is true that Driscoll was backed by Momentum and by Left-wing unions such as Unite. But when Driscoll last stood, these were endorsements for a Labour candidate, not shameful baggage. The Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham supported him too, on the basis of his existing record as mayor, and Burnham is no rabid Marxist, no “enemy within”. It has been said that Driscoll’s proximate crime had been to interview the socialist film director Ken Loach in an event at a local theatre four months ago. (Loach was expelled from the Labour Party in 2021 for refusing to disown Labour members who had been expelled for alleged antisemitism.) But Driscoll’s discussion with Loach was a cultural event, not political, and made sense given that Loach has set two of his most recent films on Tyneside, including I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme d’Or.

In any case, Keir Starmer himself has even stronger links with Loach. His film on the celebrated McLibel case included substantial footage of the young Starmer who worked on the case, in the days when he was nothing more than a fanciable young barrister who fought for free speech and human rights. And, if it’s the Corbyn era that Driscoll is being shamed for, Starmer himself is far from innocent. Even if he’s made the successful swerve from “Jeremy Corbyn is my friend” to “we were never friends”, some of us couldn’t bear the whiplash. The two statements can’t both be true. And there is a sheen of inconsistency and disingenuousness which now taints Starmer’s leadership — and arguably his entire project in the Party.

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Starmer will regret purging the Left

By Michael Crick

Only this week, an Asian member of Labour’s National Executive Committee [NEC], Mish Rahman, was barred from the selection to become a candidate in Wolverhampton South West. Rahman, a Momentum supporter, believes he upset Starmer by voting against the disciplinary structures introduced after the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on antisemitism in the party. And yet, just last September, Starmer was pictured presenting Rahman with flowers and a certificate in recognition of his service on the NEC (the photo adorns Rahman’s Twitter site). What’s more, as an NEC member, Rahman has chaired a couple of the party panels that have drawn up selection longlists in other seats — exactly the same type of panel which excluded him. If he was fit to chair such panels, Rahman quite reasonably asks, why is he unfit to be on a longlist himself?

Even people on the Right of the party feel Labour is being far too authoritarian. It was reported this week that when Starmer defended his decision to stick with the government’s two-child benefit cap, nobody in the Shadow Cabinet dared to challenge him, presumably for fear of reprisals. And the relentless ideological moderation has fulfilled every Left-wing stereotype of Starmer as a ruthless politic cynic, “laser-focused” (to use a Starmer cliché) on power but never change.

The case of Driscoll has extended this hostility from Corbynite liabilities to anyone with a strong commitment to trade unionism. Today, even having a working-class background seems to be regarded as suspect, in a party where the leadership has allowed selection processes to become dominated by outside agencies which charge contenders thousands of pounds to advise their campaigns.  And they wholeheartedly believe this is a winning strategy. One of Starmer’s henchmen, Luke Akehurst, happily admitted to me that potential candidates are chosen not on quality, but politics. Anticipating a slim majority after the next election, he argued, Labour cannot afford dissidents who might rebel against official policy.

Strong, self-confident leaders welcome internal debate, while weak leaders who lack confidence are terrified of opposition. When John F. Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election, he sought out the “best and the brightest” to join his Camelot administration. And truly great leaders relish having people around them who will generate fresh ideas and challenge existing thinking. A hundred years before JFK, Abraham Lincoln famously constructed his cabinet as a “team of rivals”. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher loved a good barney in Downing Street, and admired underlings who debated with her. Clement Attlee regarded himself as a primus inter pares, and thrived on having four major figures in his Cabinet — Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan. Attlee skilfully orchestrated their abilities and ambitions to produce the greatest peacetime government of the last century. But, more than even the New Labour era, senior Starmer ministers look set to be side-lined. Power will reside with a small group of individuals whose names mean nothing to the general public.

Jamie Driscoll represents a new breed of regional lieutenant that Starmer should be encouraging. His background as an engineer, and director of a software company, could have been assets to his party. Instead, he is now a martyr, a permanent memory of ruthless mismanagement. Since announcing his independent candidacy, he has already raised more than £100,000 towards his crowd-funding target of £150,000. When he stands, he will badly divide Labour in the once ultra-loyal North East — another heartland which may no longer recognise its historic party. And symbolically he threatens party unity nationwide, even if, as widely expected, Labour wins all three by-elections today.

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By Nicholas Harris

In popular discourse, Starmer is widely thought to be descended from Blair, while Jamie Driscoll personally compares his situation to Ken Livingstone’s back in 2000. And, when Blair spoke to Starmer this week at his Future of Britain conference, he should have reminded him of how he managed his own rebellious regional mayor. Ahead of the inaugural mayoral election in London, Blair had very publicly denounced Livingstone’s bid to become Labour candidate, dismissing him despite his local loyalties and socialist roots. It was a decision Blair later regretted: Livingstone quit the party and trounced Blair’s stooge candidate, Frank Dobson, into a humiliating third place. Recognising his error, Blair later had to allow the popular Livingstone into the party, and backed him in the following mayoral contest in 2004.

In his quest to sanitise Labour’s brand, Starmer’s diktats have worked like pure alcohol, cleansing only as much as they corrode. He believes that he is operating within Labour’s established traditions: Wilson and, of course, Blair were known as ruthless, determined manoeuvrers. But they both understood that Labour leans on several pillars — including its unions links, its idealism and its localism. Somewhere on the road from London to the North East, there is a pit stop where the Durham Miners’ Gala can break bread with the Islingtonian cadres. At this rate, neither will bother to make the journey. And, come 2024, the worst fate for Starmer will be making his victory speech to an empty hall.

It is little-known that in 1642, the Scots-born King Charles I — increasingly desperate for resources to prosecute his war against parliament — asked his uncle, King Christian IV of Denmark-Norway, for military aid. In return, the Danes wanted the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and to “gain possession of Newcastle in pawn”. It was Northumbria’s lucrative coal trade that appealed. A large shipment of weapons and supplies duly arrived at Holy Island in September 1642, but it is unclear whether Charles ever paid his uncle back. The Danish king certainly didn’t seize the collateral on his loan.

Had he done so, there would have been a precedent. Holy Island was the site of a rather less peaceable Danish excursion in 793, when the Vikings sacked Lindisfarne, possibly in retribution for Christian missionary activity in Scandinavia. They were undoubtedly also itching to get their hands on the great wealth of the Northumbrian church. “The church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God,” lamented a Bishop of Lindisfarne, “stripped of all its furnishings, and exposed to the plundering of pagans.” The shock of this event cast a long shadow in the North East, perhaps partly explaining the overemphasis of Scandinavia’s influence on Northumbrian history, and its people.

True, the Viking raids are depicted in William Bell Scott’s great cycle of Northumbrian history murals at Wallington Hall, and Nordic influence can seemingly still be detected in Northumbrian speech. The similarities between the Scandinavian “gå hjem” and Northumbrian “gan yem” — both expressions meaning “go home” — seem obvious. The Dano-Norwegian word for barley, “bygg“, lives on in the name of Newcastle’s famous Bigg Market. These linguistic parallels might suggest Scandinavian roots, but such words are not so much a Viking import as an indication that Northumbria’s is a very conservative English dialect, which shares a common Germanic root with modern Danish. For the Angles that first settled in Britain, after the Romans left, came from Angeln, in the southern part of the Jutland peninsula, where the borders of Germany and Denmark now meet. These Angles established the kingdoms of Deira, centred in what is now Yorkshire, and then Bernicia, in what is now Northumberland and County Durham.

When the Vikings came along a few centuries later, they became infamous for raiding the North East coast. But the Norsemen only tended to settle further south, around the great city of Jorvik and into the Midlands. To this day, members of the Yorkshire Society recite a Declaration of Integrity, which asserts the traditional boundaries of Yorkshire, established by Halfdan Ragnarsson in 875AD. But to the North, the Anglo-Saxons centred on the old kingdom of Bernicia remained unconquered by the invaders (or at least not settled). It is certainly noticeable how all those Scandinavian “-thorpes”, “-thwaites” and “-bys” scattered across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire peter out at the river Tees. Here, the Anglo-Saxon “-worth” is more conspicuous: Backworth, Heworth, Killingworth. Indeed, for a time in the ninth and tenth centuries, the rump of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria between the Tweed and Tees may even have become a centre of resistance against the Vikings.

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The North East will rise again

By Dan Jackson

A teleological version of English history would have it that the mission to unify the patchwork of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was inevitable — first under Alfred and then his grandson Æthelstan, with the latter the first to call himself “King of the English”. But this unity did not long survive Æthelstan’s death in 939. For Scandinavian loyalty had remained potent across the “Danelaw” areas of the North, the northern Midlands and East Anglia. In fact, when the Danish King Cnut invaded in 1014, he met so many sympathisers that England was quickly added to his empire. As James Hawes has observed, “the first united ‘England’ was thus created under colonial rule”. And given this disunity, it is not surprising perhaps that William of Normandy “conquered the entire country after a single major battle in 1066, an outcome that would have been much less likely if Anglo-Scandinavian ‘Englalonde’ had in fact been the ancient, united realm of some historians’ fantasies”.

After 1066, overt Scandinavian political influence in England declined rapidly, with only traces left. The word hustings, for instance, derives from the Old Norse “hústhing” — in other words, a “household assembly held by a leader” — from “hús” (house) plus “thing’ (assembly, parliament). In fact, there remain several “Things” across the Nordic world — from the Folketing (“People’s Thing”) in Denmark, to the Storting (“Great Thing”) in Norway, to the Tynwald (“Thing Meadow”) on the Isle of Man — probably the oldest continuous parliamentary body in the world.  

The picture was different in Scotland, where Norwegian overlordship of the western isles persisted until the 13th century. A few hundred years later, in the early modern period, Scottish mercenaries distinguished themselves in the service of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Norwegian partisans actually fought off a Scottish invasion of their homeland in 1612. And even after Scotland unified with England in 1707, the Nordic kingdoms remained serious geopolitical rivals — to the extent that, in 1717, the Swedish Foreign Ministry planned to send an invading force to Scotland in support of the Jacobite cause.

Admittedly, this might have been to counter the Hanoverian George I’s designs on Swedish territory in Northern Germany. Britain as a whole was not sentimental about Scandinavia. In the Napoleonic Wars, Britain ruthlessly attacked Denmark twice to ensure the Danish fleet did not fall into French hands: first in 1801 (“I really do not see the signal,” said Nelson, ignoring his commander’s orders to withdraw from the bombardment of Copenhagen); and again in 1807, when the Danish capital was occupied by British troops, including Sir Arthur Wellesley, who named his famous horse after the battle.

The 19th century saw the Scandinavian kingdoms gradually withdraw from great power politics. The Second Schleswig War of 1864 is usually seen as the first key staging post in German unification, but it was also the twilight of Scandinavian power in Europe. Palmerston’s much-quoted quip about the Schleswig-Holstein Question being so complicated that “only three people ever understood it” was probably just blether to obscure the fact that Britain had (probably wisely) betrayed a solemn promise to maintain Danish territorial integrity, and instead decided to sit out the war between Denmark and its Prussian and Austrian invaders. For proud Danes such as the British Queen Alexandra, the humiliation of 1864 was hard to forgive or forget. She always railed against the protocols that required her son, George V, to dress as a “filthy blue-coat Prussian soldier” whenever he visited the new German Empire.

But with the bloody rivalries of the Dark Ages now ancient history, relations between the British and Scandinavian royal houses grew increasingly cordial. Queen Alexandra’s daughter Maud became the Queen of newly independent Norway after its separation from Sweden in 1905. And harking back to the Viking Kings of East Anglia, Maud’s own son Olav was born in Norfolk — at Sandringham in 1903. Olav’s birth came after a long period of deepening Anglo-Scandinavian trade: the housebuilding boom in British cities relied on Norwegian and Swedish softwoods, and Scandinavian timber was essential to the coal trade, used for pit props and railway sleepers. Danish butter and bacon became staples of the British breakfast table. Many British port towns and cities had great Scandinavian churches, like the spectacular Gustav Adolfs kyrka in Liverpool, home of the Scousers, and the Nordic diaspora gave us Cardiff’s Roald Dahl, Newcastle’s Sir Ove Arup, and hat-trick hero Stan Mortensen from South Shields, the grandson of a Norwegian sailor.

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In 1968, King Olav V himself was invited to open the modernist Civic Centre at Newcastle upon Tyne, home of the Danish merchant navy in the Second World War, when 4,000 Danish sailors relocated from their occupied homeland to live on Tyneside. The building was modelled on the Stockholm Stadhus, as a nod to the Tyne’s modern Hanseatic ties. Although the King was attended by Lutheran ministers in 16th-century ruffs and gowns, the civic centre was seen as an emblem of progressive Nordic modernity. This was part of a process that was recasting Scandinavians as peaceable and stylish, representatives of the very best social democracy. But even the darker history of the Vikings, whose cruelty and sadism was almost unsurpassed, has now been rehabilitated through popular books and TV series like The Last Kingdom, in which uptight and sexually repressed Christians are contrasted unfavourably with the fun-loving Norsemen such as the smoulderingly handsome Uhtred of Bebbanburg.

From one of pillage and rapine, Scandinavia’s reputation has completely turned around in the last 1,000 years — but it’s surely their wealth as much as their cultural achievements that attracts us now. As I have argued, “the one thing that will change attitudes to Britishness in Scotland is for the UK to just be a wealthier and more successful country”. Returning to the restive streets of Orkney, it is perhaps not surprising that a territory that was Norse for longer than it was British now wishes to re-establish its Scandi ties. Yet, there was no Orcadian agitation when Britain was richer and more powerful, with a vast fleet at Scapa Flow. The difference now is that, unlike modern Britain, Norway is happy, successful, and stinking rich.

Roughly 20 miles away, a similar scene was playing out in Newcastle. There, a group of Labour members walked out after the chair refused to allow a proposal to boycott the mayoral selection process.

Both incidents were unprecedented in recent Labour history; and both illustrate the ruthless manner in which Keir Starmer and his aides have purged even relatively mild Left-wingers from the party.

Driscoll, who has served as the Labour mayor for the much smaller North of Tyne area since 2019, is routinely described as the “last Corbynista in power”, though this probably exaggerates how Left-wing he really is. His offence, it soon emerged, was guilt by association.

In March, in his role as mayor, Driscoll had hosted an “in conversation” event with the socialist film director Ken Loach, two of whose recent films were set on Tyneside. Loach is persona non grata in Labour, cast out for directing a production of Perdition, a play accused of antisemitism, in 1987. Party officials seemed not to realise that one of Loach’s subsequent works — his 1997 documentary McLibel — had included a substantial interview with a young human rights lawyer called Keir Starmer. Sometimes guilt by association matters; sometimes it doesn’t.

The rapid decline of the Labour Left since 2019 has been astonishing. Earlier this year, Labour announced that under no circumstances could Jeremy Corbyn stand as Labour’s candidate in his Islington North seat at the next election. At the same time, of the 123 new Labour candidates so far chosen to stand in vacated or target seats, only two are firmly on the Left: Faiza Shaheen, an economist who will again challenge Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Woodford Green, and Chris Webb in Blackpool South.

Under Starmer, the party apparatus has gone to extraordinary lengths to stop Left-wingers from getting on to the longlist. And in many cases, the victims are trades unionists and socialists whose politics — like Driscoll’s — are not exactly Corbynite. This week, l learnt of two would-be MPs in north Lancashire who have just been told by party officials that there is no point in applying as they will be excluded at the “due diligence” stage.

Indeed, the problem seems especially acute in the North West and Northern regions. In Copeland, for instance, Joe Ghayouba, a popular councillor who is half-Egyptian and has campaigned for Palestinian rights, was excluded; in Carlisle, Louise Atkinson, a black councillor and teacher who is president of the National Education Union, was mysteriously omitted without explanation. Even when reasons are provided, they are often trivial. One contender was told their offence was to “like” a past tweet in which Nicola Sturgeon said she’d tested negative for Covid.

If this seems ruthless, it’s only because Starmer is able to be. His aides have conducted by far the most tightly organised operation the party has ever known. Candidate selection is overseen by the two Matts — Matt Faulding and Matt Pound — and greatly assisted by long-standing Labour NEC member Luke Akehurst. Faulding was once deputy director of the Blairite think tank Progress, while Pound used to run Labour First, which represents the “Old Labour Right”, and organised to get Blairites picked as candidates during the Corbyn years. Labour First is now run by Akehurst, who as an NEC member gets to chair many of the panels that have been excluding Left-wingers. In other words, these three unknown men are now running the operation to choose the next generation of Labour politicians. Each is easily more powerful than most members of the shadow cabinet.

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True, Labour’s due-diligence process certainly needed beefing up; in February, Jared O’Mara became the second Labour MP elected in 2017, following Fiona Onasanya, to be sent to jail for offences of dishonesty. But Labour’s due diligence process isn’t just about character flaws or past misdemeanours. As Akehurst admitted to me last week, there is a strong “political element” behind blocking candidates: “Maybe they’ve been incredibly publicly disrespectful of the current leadership… or they’ve got a constant record of breaking the whip as a local councillor… If we’re in a… hung Parliament situation, or a very narrow majority at the next election, I don’t want to have allowed people to become Labour MPs who are not solid votes for the Labour Party.”

Here, of course, Starmer’s hitmen are partly emulating the ruthless tactics of Corbyn and his allies. Under his regime, loyalty rather than ability also seemed to be the main qualification for selection. The Corbynites, for instance, felt not the slightest guilt in brazenly overturning the selection of Camden councillor Sally Gimson in Bassetlaw on what were obviously trumped up and minor charges.

Yet Starmer’s high command has gone far beyond the harsh rule of the Corbyn years, even pitting MPs against each other in some seats. When Left-winger Beth Winter was defeated by loyalist Gerald Jones in the new Merthyr Tydfil and Cynon Valley seat this week, she complained that the Welsh party had fixed the process against her. Such is the strength of the Starmerite machine that many on the Left have simply given up trying.

And why wouldn’t they? Under the Akehurst criteria, it’s unthinkable that Neil Kinnock, John Prescott, Clare Short and Robin Cook, all of whom were rebels in their early careers, would be selected. Nor do I think Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, would get on the Labour list today — she couldn’t be described as a Corbynite, but her trade-union background would make her suspect to some of those working for Starmer.

Past Labour governments, by contrast, have always thrived on being a “broad church”. Attlee’s cabinet counted Nye Bevan and Stafford Cripps among its towering figures, yet both had suffered periods of expulsion from the party only a few years before. Wilson’s benefited from the presence of Dick Crossman and Barbara Castle; Callaghan had Tony Benn and Michael Foot (another former expellee), while Blair’s deputy John Prescott had been one of the “tightly knit group of politically motivated men” denounced by Wilson during the 1966 seamen’s strike.

As the experiences of both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss demonstrated, it’s a mistake to confine one’s government to a narrow band of loyal yes-men and women. Cabinet government needs the odd maverick, people who are willing to come up with alternative ideas and scrutinise and challenge existing policy. “Keir is blocking off his exits,” a former Corbyn aide recently told him. “You need some people who are creating space, and who enable the party to be a bit bolder.”

Meanwhile Team Starmer’s treatment of Corbyn and, to some extent, Diane Abbott has also instilled a sense of fear among the three dozen die-hard MPs who still belong to the Socialist Campaign Group in Westminster. They’ve deliberately kept quiet in recent months, terrified that the leadership will jump on the slightest excuse to deprive them of the whip and disqualify them from standing for Labour.

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By Tom McTague

“People are very worried that anything that is in any way challenging will be used in a disciplinary process against them,” John McDonnell said recently. “You don’t want to put yourself in a position of vulnerability and then let other people down as well.” McDonnell advises colleagues to keep their heads down, to keep their noses clean. But he also attempted to cheer up Left-wing MPs by reminding them that if Labour gets a small majority next time — of just 20, say — then they could suddenly be back in business, effectively holding the balance of power in the Commons, as the old Tribune Group did during the Wilson/Callaghan government of the Seventies. And that, of course, is what the two Matts and Luke Akehurst fear.

The Labour Left aren’t just victims of a Starmerite plot, of course. They lack leadership, ideas and confidence. The 2019 election defeat knocked the stuffing out of them. Yet tens of thousands of people who took part in the Corbynite movement haven’t just vanished or died. Many have ripped up their Labour membership cards, but many are still active in politics — in unions, pressure groups and single-issue campaigns. Consider the Corbynite group Momentum, which has refocused its work on issues such as climate change and getting people elected to local government councils.

What’s more, history suggests the Left will be back. The Attlee government spawned the Bevanite surge of the Fifties, while disillusionment with the Wilson and Callaghan governments led to the rise of Tony Benn and the Bennites in the Seventies and Eighties. More recently, the Iraq war and other alleged “betrayals” of the Blair-Brown era eventually prompted the most astonishing Left-wing turn of all — the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

And when this happens, the fight rarely ends. Like mafia factions engaged in a perpetual tit-for-tat vendetta, the Labour Right and Left closely observe each other’s tactics, then adopt them, with ever more draconian reprisals. If and when the Labour Left returns, it will be with a great sense of vengeance — and Labour’s politics will get more bloody than ever.

Gateshead may still be overshadowed, but its greatest monument has become legendary. Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North celebrates its 25th birthday this month: a worthy occasion to remind ourselves that the town in which it stands is a microcosm of North East England, and its guardian angel represents both the past and the future of a region that continues to evolve.

If industrial Gateshead appeared to visitors like Priestley as a squalid anthill, then this was the consequence of the modernity that that had come to Tyneside as early as the seventeenth century. Nearby Whickham has a good claim to be Britain’s first truly industrial society; by 1700, over 75% of the residents worked in mines and factories. The pride of neighbouring Winlaton was Sir Ambrose Crowley’s ironworks, reputedly the greatest manufactory of ironware anywhere in Europe, which churned out pots and pans, shackles for the slave trade, and the nails that held together the wooden walls of the Royal Navy. To house the expanding workforce, a sort of model village sprang up, which prefigured the terraced streets that went on to so characterise the North of England.

Places like Whickham were built on the mountain of coal that lay beneath the rolling landscape of northern County Durham. By 1911, fully one third of the county’s working age population were mining it, sending their output up to the Tyne for export, via the mighty Dunston Staiths in Gateshead. The ACDC frontman Brian Johnson grew up in Dunston and recalls that the pits and steelworks would “declare a truce on Mondays” so washing could be hung out without getting filthy. The quote from Virgil’s Aeneid that appeared on Gateshead’s civic arms — Caput Inter Nubila Condit (“Its head is in the clouds”) — was a nod to the smoke that usually wreathed the town.

Gateshead, then, was a firmly working-class place, a sort of proletarian backstage to the grandeur of Georgian Newcastle, and a place where some of the richest, most mellifluous Geordie is spoken by the natives. Brian Johnson himself has an accent as thick as a submarine window, and the folk culture of Northumbria is replete with references to the children of Gateshead. It is the home of the fictional Cushie Butterfield, the star of a well-known Geordie drinking song. (“She’s a big lass, and a bonnie lass, and she likes her beor.”) It is also the site of that riotous bacchanal of 1862, the famous Blaydon Races — which is the subject of Tyneside’s national anthem — as well as the once-mighty Federation Brewery, a huge structure by the Tyne that looked like a Soviet power plant, and whose output was served in the Palace of Westminster. The town’s traditions run as deep as the coal seams under County Durham.

But Gateshead was also a site of modernism. Thomas Wright, the first astronomer to speculate that faint nebulae were distant galaxies, was educated there. In the nineteenth century, the lightbulb inventor Sir Joseph Swan lived in Low Fell, the town’s grandest suburb, where his house, Underhill, was the first in the world to be illuminated by electricity. And in 1984, a housebound Gateshead pensioner called Jane Snowball became the world’s first online shopper when she took part in an innovative council scheme to place an order from her local Tesco using her TV’s remote control. She bought cornflakes, eggs, and margarine.

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And beneath where the Angel of the North now spreads its wings lies a site of huge significance for Britain’s modern industrial history. It was in the Team Valley in 1934 — amid a depression that had cratered demand for coal and ships, and therefore crippled the North East’s economy — that the national government decided to build Europe’s first ever industrial estate. Its aim was to create “facilities required by industrialists engaged in starting fresh enterprises” — of the type that were then booming in the South. The locale had been rural until a colliery opened there in 1842 — one of many operated by our new King’s stupendously wealthy ancestors, the Bowes family. But by the Thirties, 57% of Gateshead’s population was out of work — so, in the words of the commissioner appointed to help Britain’s “special areas” by the surprisingly forward-thinking Chancellor Neville Chamberlain, “novel and unorthodox” measures were required.

Over £2million of government funding was awarded to transform the boggy, 700-acre site. The designs were produced by 29-year-old William Holford — a key figure in twentieth-century urban planning, who worked on the masterplans for Durban and Canberra. The industrial estate enabled Gateshead to diversify. After it was opened by King George VI in 1939, the first tenants were very different to the usual heavy industries, with haulage contractors, coachbuilders, and clothing factories proliferating. This was Tyneside’s answer to the Golden Mile in West London — with its grand, art deco Hoover and Firestone factories — and by the Sixties, more than 16,000 people worked at the Team Valley Trading Estate. And it’s still thriving, with more than 20,000 employed there in firms as diverse as Express Engineering and Primula Cheese.

Driven by a similar sense of reinvention, by the Nineties Gateshead Council started to conceive of a new landmark that would welcome travellers to Tyneside, acting as a “millennial image that would be a marker and guardian for our town”. When Anthony Gormley was first approached by the council, he was unconvinced, dismissive as he was of “roundabout art”. But then he saw a photo of the mound where the old pithead baths had been; it reminded him of the tumuli at Wayland’s Smithy, the evocative bronze age barrow grave in Oxfordshire. What Gormley then created — a 20-metre-tall steel colossus, based on a cast of his own body — has a similar ineffability: the North’s response to the great priapic giant of the South at Cerne Abbas in Dorset.

The Angel’s site, at the southern approaches to Gateshead Fell, presents a 360 degree sweep of Northumbrian history. To the North lie the heights of Sheriff Hill, an eleventh-century battlefield and the spot where the burghers of Newcastle would turn out to meet the justices before they crossed the Tyne. Slightly to the West are the ancient Anglo-Saxon settlements of Ravensworth and Kibblesworth, and the valley of the Derwent River, one of the great crucibles of the industrial revolution. In the South is Birtley, once the site of the sprawling munitions plant of “Elisabethville”, which was home to 6,000 refugees from war-torn Flanders during the First World War, when it was run as a Belgian colony by the government in Brussels. To the South-East lies the Sixties new town of Washington, and its vast Nissan factory, which churns out more cars in a year than the whole of Italy. Finally, lying deep beneath the site is a former colliery, where miners toiled (and frequently died) for 200 years. Few locations can evoke the richness of Tyneside’s history, and to stand here on a bright and windy day, while the diggers and cranes puff and pant nearby to widen the A1, reminds you that this place is always on the move.

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“People are always asking, why an angel?” Gormley once said. It isn’t a specifically Tyneside symbol. The so-called “Dirty Angel” on a column in Newcastle’s Haymarket is actually a rather Wagnerian depiction of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, brandishing a sword and laurel wreath and raised in memory of the Northumbrians who fell in the Boer War. Gateshead itself — home of the formidable “Gateshead Gurkhas”, spearpoint of the British Army in the Second World War — has on its cenotaph a stern depiction of “manhood in the attitude of defence” above the Latin proverb MORS JANUA VITAE: “Death is the Gate to Life”. Despite its 208-tonne weathered Corten steel bulk, and 177ft wingspan, the Angel of the North is more benign and irenic — its wings subtly angled forward by 3.5 degrees to create a sense of embrace.

Made of the same quarter inch-thick plate that was the staple of Tyneside shipyards, the sculpture was inspired by a conversation between Gormley and a local councillor, Pat Conaty, who had migrated from County Cavan to Gateshead in the Fifties — just as so many belonging to the Irish Diaspora before him had come to the coalfields and steelworks of North-East England. “What we need Mr Gormley,” said Cllr Conaty as they walked up the site, “is one of your angels.” From the late Eighties, Gormley had played with angelic imagery in a sculptural series called The Case for an Angel, and this suggestion captured his imagination — and may also have appealed to his own Irish Catholic background (his parents chose his initials to spell out the old Jesuit motto AMDG).

The result was a masterpiece of monumental sculpture: a work of public art utterly different from the reactionary and totalitarian monumentalism that Gormley had wanted so much to avoid. And it soon inspired genuine local affection — so much so that before Newcastle United’s appearance in the 1998 FA Cup Final, the Angel was vested in a huge black and white shirt bearing the name of local hero Alan Shearer. “I was very moved,” said Gormley later. “That was a baptism.”

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What does the Angel represent, 25 years after its birth? It has certainly become a cynosure for Gateshead itself, even replacing the goat’s head on the local football club’s crest, and whenever I drive past it on the A1, I’m always struck by its enduring power and dignity. The word angel comes from the Greek angelos, itself a translation of a Hebrew word meaning “messenger”, and has been used in that sense, both secularly and spiritually, since its first manifestation in Old English. Can this Angel bring a hopeful message to a region of England that has not enjoyed a happy transition from the industrial to the information age?

In numerous interviews, Gormley has mused on what this great structure had meant to him and the people who built it, how rooted it is — literally, with 20-metre-deep foundations to stop the North winds blowing it over — and how it transcended individual lives. But when asked the simplest question, why he chose an angel, Gormley replied simply: “The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them.” Given everything that has gone before the Angel, and the enduring hardship of its hometown, we need to keep reimagining what places like Gateshead — and the wider North East — could be like, too.

Given its distinctiveness, it’s hardly surprising that the region has a long history of being run as a separate political unit. By holding out against Viking invasion, the Northern Anglo-Saxons established an Earldom of Northumbria that reached from the Forth to the Tees (before pressure from the Scots pushed its northern boundary south to the Tweed). Not only was this territory topographically encapsulated — “between the brine and the high ground and the fresh stream water” — but it was also defined by its sheer distance from London and the centres of royal power. The armigerous families who then controlled the medieval North East, such as the Percys and the Nevilles, had an unusual degree of independence within an English polity that had centralised much earlier than its European neighbours.

To a historian, therefore, there is something very satisfying about the recent news that the Government has approved a “devolution deal” to create a new “North East Mayoral Combined Authority” with an elected Mayor. This is an important milestone in the evolution of what is arguably England’s most well-defined region, as the new entity will cover the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham — the land from the Tweed to the Tees — and the cities, within them, of Durham, Sunderland and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The hope is that the North East will thrive under a unified political leadership; and the region’s history suggests this optimism is not unfounded. In the Early Medieval period, the Prince Bishop of Durham presided over his Palatinate from his palace at Bishop Auckland like a Rhineland Fürstbischof. He had the powers of a king to hold courts, raise armies (to defend the border against the Scots) and even mint his own coinage — with silver Durham pennies issuing from Silver Street by the River Wear. This quasi-independence created a cadre of educated clerks to manage the county palatine’s legal, financial and administrative affairs. The presence of this proto-civil service contributed to both local economic development — the Prince Bishops were enthusiastic participants in the coal trade — and perhaps even the unusually high levels of literacy in the far North of England.

This was a sort of English devolution, avant la lettre, and meant that by the 17th century, County Durham was the only part of England which returned no members of parliament. The first MPs for Durham were elected in 1675, a full 410 years after a comparable cathedral city such as Lincoln; the Prince Bishop only returned his powers to the crown in 1836. So there is a sense that the governance of the North East was only settled around the same time as the United Kingdom itself was forming. Some excitable Northumbrian patriots (probably including me) might even consider us to be the fifth nation in the union.

But if the region’s political independence was dwindling, its economic independence was growing. The early modern period saw the temporal power of the Prince Bishops eclipsed by that of the coal barons who grew fantastically rich from the collieries of Northumberland and Durham. By the 18th century, control of the northern coal trade had fallen into the hands of a cartel of wealthy families known as the “Grand Allies”, whose price-setting so irritated the City of London that they nicknamed them “the Newcastle Parliament”.

This oligarchic and proto-corporatist approach to conducting business was typical of the North East, and would recur in the 19th century, when a handful of plutocratic industrialists dominated the civic life of the region, and wielded almost feudal power: men such as the armaments tycoon Lord Armstrong, the shipbuilder Sir Mark Palmer, or the great ironmaster Sir Lowthian Bell. Studying the region for his report on “Industrial Tyneside” in 1928, the sociologist Henry Mess observed that “the feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland”, “and there is not the sharp divorce between it and the new industrialism which is found in most areas”.

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In many respects the Trade Union barons who emerged in the 20th century to challenge the oligarchs could be similarly feudal — especially Durham miners’ leaders such as John Wilson, Peter Lee and Sam Watson. And yet the Trade Unions in the North East achieved much for their members — not just better pay and conditions, but in their pioneering work on housing, schools, sanitation and care for the elderly. Organisations such as the Durham Miners Association achieved something approaching a welfare state while William Beveridge was still in short trousers. For as John Tomaney has argued so cogently, “County Durham thrived when it had the power collectively to help itself”. History offers something of a blueprint to a region thinking anew about how to exercise local power to improve the lives of its people.

A word that was often depicted on miners’ banners in shimmering gold like the Name of God was “nationalisation”, and yet nationalisation turned out to be a mixed blessing. For as much as it delivered gains in living standards — which my grandparents from the Northumberland coalfield spoke about with wonder for the rest of their lives — it inevitably led to centralisation. It left the North East vulnerable to capricious and parsimonious Westminster governments. Not only that, it disempowered the civic and associational institutions that had once had the confidence to tackle the scourge of poverty in old age, or build something as beautiful as South Shields Town Hall, where the debates “had the importance of those in Cicero’s Senate or Pitt’s House of Commons“.

The North East has been hammered by austerity, with funding cuts to councils of 79% since 2010. These have come close to undermining the functioning of local government altogether. But municipal leaders themselves have come to recognise that the principle of devolving power matters almost as much as the funds that come with devolution.

Reading about the latest development, I was particularly delighted (and not a little surprised) that the seven North East councils have managed to overcome the parochialism and local rivalries that have stymied municipal coordination in the region. “They have a beef that goes back centuries”: what Tony Soprano once said of the Balkans could be said of Newcastle and Sunderland. From the English Civil War, during which they took different sides, to the previous attempt at regional governance — the short-lived Tyne and Wear County Council, which was perceived to favour Tyneside excessively — mistrust and bad feeling have for too long percolated from the football terrace and message board to the political sphere. Despite evidence that shows that people in the North East have the greatest sense of belonging to their region than anywhere else in England, we’ve memed ourselves into thinking that Tyneside and Wearside are so totally incompatible that we can’t present a united front — even as the North of England’s other great conurbations have surged ahead with their own elected mayors.

That’s not what the North East wants anyway, some would argue. The shadow of a 2004 referendum hangs over any debate over devolution in the region. Rejected by almost 78% of voters, it’s often held up as evidence that there is no appetite for devolved power. But it took place in a different time, when there was a Labour government in office that was spending big in the region. The cabinet was stuffed full of North Eastern MPs, including the PM himself. And the Yes campaign was vague and complacent, while the No campaign tapped into a burgeoning anti-politician rhetoric, as well as the fears in the south of the region that this would be an assembly run from, and in the interests of, Tyneside (fears exploited skilfully by a trainee political Svengali from County Durham called Dominic Cummings, a key figure in the No campaign).

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The question remains, then, as to whether this new mayoral authority will receive a public mandate. But the North East only ever thrived under local political leadership. As a distant outpost of the over-centralised British state — still reeling from the effects of the First World War, let alone the Second — it has been declining for over a century. For all the boosterism about being the only region with a positive balance of trade, the North East is now the poorest, unhealthiest and unhappiest region of England. It regularly tops the charts for “deaths of despair”, with a suicide rate twice that of London; 38% of local children live in poverty; and GDP per capita has plummeted in the North East from 93% of the national average in 1981 to 73% by 2017. No other English region has suffered such decay.

But something is stirring in the North. A phalanx of City Region “Metro Mayors” are establishing new centres of independent power and influence, while attempting to move beyond the belief that Westminster is both the cause of — and the solution to — all our problems. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that whatever the problem, it is always someone else’s fault. Especially in politics,” wrote Jamie Driscoll, one of the likely contenders for the North East mayoralty, recently. “What, though, if there are some genuinely difficult problems to solve?”

There certainly are. Labour Together’s recent “Plan for National Infrastructure” argued that Britain’s “urban hinterlands, small cities, towns, coastal and rural areas… are experiencing forms of economic ‘undevelopment’”. This would present a daunting prospect to any government, but could an elected mayor for the lands between the Tweed and the Tees catalyse a Northumbrian renaissance?

Maybe. Certainly, the nationalising and centralising tendencies of the British state over the past century have disenfranchised the regions of England that might look enviously at the thriving German Länder — with their networks of regional banks and vocational training centres — and wonder what went wrong. For there’s a prize to be seized in the North East. The region that arguably did more than most to carbonise the planet might lead the way in decarbonisation, and create meaningful work. It might even rediscover the traditions of bottom-up social and economic development, and become one of the great heartlands of technical innovation, associationism, self-help and co-operation. Never again, we must hope, will talented locals like Dr Fiona Hill — recently installed as Chancellor of Durham University — be told that “There’s Nothing for You Here”.

Were Britain’s cultural geography more widely distributed, Dobson would be rightly renowned as one of our greatest architects. For where John Vanburugh or Gilbert Scott built mansions or churches, Dobson created streets. And what streets! Newcastle was made, economically and physically, by the coals beneath it and the waters running through it, gouging a steep valley through the sandstones, mudstones and coal seams beneath the city.

They crafted the stage for England’s greatest street, Grey Street, whose name, appropriately for a radical borough, celebrates Earl Grey’s 1832 Great Reform Act and whose form moulds itself into the sheer banks of the city curling down from Grey’s Monument to the quays of  the great mercantile River Tyne. With the high steel bridges spanning the river and the merchants’ palaces beneath them, you might almost be in New York rather than Newcastle.

The city started life as a bulwark against revolt: first as the eastern anchor of Hadrian’s wall against the Scots (fragments still remain) and then as the Norman Novum Castellum against the rebellious north Saxons of the Kingdom of Northumbria. But if the city’s name comes from war, her nature comes from commerce — and geography.

At some point, probably in the late 12th or early 13th century, the good burghers of Newcastle began shipping coal down the coast to London where it was known as “seacoal” and was unloaded at Seacoal and Newcastle Wharfs on the River Fleet, still recalled in their modern street names, Old Seacoal Lane and Newcastle Close.

The trade caught on fast, mentioned in Royal Charters from 1253 and used to fuel the smiths and lime-burners of Westminster Abbey’s 13^th-century reconstruction. By 1306, as lords temporal, lords spiritual and commoners gathered for Parliament in the week after Whit Sunday, they were greeted by a new and unfamiliar acrid smell. It was burning coal, arriving from Newcastle, landed on the Fleet and consumed by blacksmiths, artisans and households across the capital. Coal burned longer, hotter and slower than mere wood. It also stank. Revolted, parliament passed a ban on burning coal while it was in session. Had anyone paid any attention to this official attempt to ban innovation then the history of Britain, Newcastle and indeed the world might be completely different. But no one did.

The world liked coal because it was cheaper and more efficient than wood; a poor family in London spent about 10% of its income on coal. To enjoy the same heat from firewood would have cost two-to-five times as much. Coals from Newcastle kept the poor warm and made Newcastle rich.

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Successful places are never one-trick ponies, or at least not for long. Mineral wealth must be transferred into human capital or invested in other trades or manufactories if it is not to be dissipated within a generation. The hard-working Geordies did just that, publishing books, building ships, blowing glass.

They also turned their industrial town into a world city. The high point came in the early 19th century when the city had accumulated sufficient wealth to be cultured but not enough to become sclerotic. It had vigour and faith. All the best developers are self-made men and Richard Grainger was no exception. The son of a seamstress and a Quayside porter, he started life as a carpenter but he married well and had both the gift of the gab and the gift of making money. By the time he was 44 he had master-planned, financed and built the 90-acre Grainger Town: one monument (to Earl Grey), one theatre, one meat market, nine streets, 10 inns, 12 taverns, 40 houses, 325 shops and pilasters and porticos without number, all curving down or cutting across the steep slopes to the Tyne and all sheathed in Northumberland’s radiantly golden sandstone.

If Grainger was Newcastle’s producer, then the director was his principal architect, John Dobson. Dobson was a self-made man as well. The son of a market gardener and a draughtsman of genius, he was designing damask cloths from the age of 11 and apprenticed as an architect by the age of 15. His designs, or those of his office subordinates, spanned out across the city centre, carving it anew in “Newcastle Classical” if not as an Athens for the North then certainly as a Sparta, Memphis or Delphi: Eldon Square, Grey Street, the Royal Arcade, Clayton Street.

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Arguably Dobson’s greatest feat was Newcastle Central Station, an epic poem in glass and iron besides Grey Street’s sinuous sonnet. Commissioned by the “Railway King”, the Victorian railway promotor and fraudster, George Hudson, it was opened by Queen Victoria and, alongside Liverpool’s Lime Street Station, was the first railway station in the world to use curved iron ribs to support an arching roof. It is also breathtakingly beautiful: power and innovation made scintillatingly carnate. Thank heavens the Victorians built our railways.

But if few cities flew as high, few subsequently fell so low or so nearly committed total self-immolation. Industrial Newcastle promptly besmirched its city centre, be-griming it in smog and smuts. And post-industrial Newcastle abandoned it and tried to destroy the city’s glory. If Richard Grainger and John Dobson are Newcastle’s heroes, then her villain is the Sixties council leader, T. Dan Smith, described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a “local government leader and criminal”. Visionary and energetic but venal and wrong-headed, he was imprisoned for corruption. His greatest victim, however, was not financial probity but Newcastle herself whom he very nearly “unseamed from the nave to the chops”. The formal and monumental Eldon Square was needlessly sacrificed for an ugly and introverted shopping centre. The exquisite Royal Arcade, modelled by Dobson on Parisian and London templates, was murdered for a roundabout. Town Hall, Corn Exchange, much of St Nicholas Square and many grand terraces were likewise pillaged and ransacked. Too often today in the city centre you turn a corner from dignified splendour into the bathos of a brick wall or a flyover. As the architectural historian, Gavin Stamp, put it: “Newcastle remains a magnificent city, but it would look even better… had T. Dan Smith been rumbled and imprisoned much earlier.” It would be richer too.

Sixties Newcastle is a nightmarish maze of underpass, overpass, dual carriageway and roundabout; the planning and design is idiotic ugly, stressful, de-humanising and, critically, constraining. The town centre is hemmed in by “big roads” in a pattern which makes city centres poorer and less prosperous.

But this could be fixed. No immutable law of economics or physics says that fast roads must pass through city centres or sequestrate them from their hinterlands. Gravity does not demand that new buildings be super-scaled and faceless. What a corrupt Sixties politician willed can be unwilled. An unseamed street can be restitched. And the road to “levelling up” (or whatever our new Prime Minister calls it) winds through Newcastle, and Hull and Grimsby and Darlington and Carlisle and Rochdale. The sheer glory and grandeur and wealth and opulence of our industrial urban infrastructure is shamefully underused. All could provide attractive, purposeful fulcrums for so many more lives lived, schools created, meetings made and jobs worked.

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We are still prisoners of our geography. If our great industrial towns no longer enjoy proximity to seams of coal or fast flowing water, they do enjoy the potential for sustainable lives led with neighbourliness, comradeship and dignity. Their ability to provide the pleasurable and cultural agglomeration effects of the Italian renaissance town or the Greek city state lies in their streets and their physical beauty, and is ever more attractive in the age of the zoom call and global warming. Who would want to live in burning Toulouse or Florence when balmy Newcastle or Sunderland awaits?

Come on Newcastle: abandon the idea of “regeneration” as a merely technical exercise. Put the love back in. You have one of England’s greatest city centres. Grow it. Restitch it back into the surrounding suburbs. Unravel the knotted, air-polluting, dual-carriageway nonsense that strangles it. Mess up the mess they call an urban motorway. Create new buildings that people actually like. Sing more loudly and shamelessly of your city’s beauties and beneficence. You have nothing to lose but your roundabouts.

This corner of North-East England is still not much visited by out-of-towners — competing as it does with the bright lights of Newcastle, Hadrian’s Wall country, and the grandeur of the castles strung along the Northumberland coast from Warkworth to Bamburgh. But this original Geordie Shore has long been Tyneside’s playground.

Just as the Victorians invented industrial life, and the discipline of the factory hooter and dockyard clock, so too did they conceive of leisure as a commodity — best consumed at certain times and in certain demarcated zones, where the railways could whisk you away from the grime and regimentation of industrial towns to the fresh air and freedom of the seaside. In the North-East, the centre of all this was the bottom right-hand coastal corner of Northumberland, where the 12 miles of metal-bashing industry from Newcastle to the sea transformed suddenly into a sea-front dreamland for the middle and working classes. The abrupt change of mood is still palpable, as Tyneside turns to seaside, business turns to pleasure, production to consumption.

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By 1911, Britain had over 100 substantial seaside resorts, from the big boys of Blackpool and Brighton to lower league Largs and Llandudno. In its size and proximity to its larger urban neighbours, the Northumbrian Riviera fits somewhere in between these poles, more akin to the maritime resort suburbs of Penarth or Southsea; but like all of them it was a place of beaches, bathing and boarding houses — with a big slug of hedonism.

The ying and yang of refinement and raffishness, primness and vulgarity, recurs both within and between British seaside towns: think of neighbouring Lytham and Blackpool, Hove and Brighton, even Portstewart and Portrush. The Geordie Riviera was like this too, where Tyneside’s wealthy coastal suburbs of stockbrokers’ Tudor villas, Masonic lodges and pristine golf clubs chafed alongside the fleshpots, arcades and rollercoasters of Whitley Bay’s South Parade and Spanish City — where Bank Holidays in my youth were always a grisly bacchanal of fighting and fornication.

Yet Whitley had once been “the Blackpool of the North East”, a major destination for holiday-makers who regularly filled up the B&Bs and caravan sites well into my Eighties childhood, and its attractions were primped and packaged by great commercial artists like Fred Taylor and Tom Purvis for LNER, whose colourful posters are all masterpieces. The most exciting buildings were born in the Riviera’s pleasure-seeking Edwardian heyday — all, tellingly, in the neo-Baroque style. Whitley Bay’s cheerful station, for instance, was built in 1910; with its swagged and garlanded clock tower and Paris Metro style canopy, it became the destination for Tyneside day-trippers and vacationing Glaswegians heading south for marginally warmer climes.

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This taste for voluptuous neo-Baroque was in some ways an Edwardian reaction to the severity of Victorian Gothic. So, when the Spanish City was built in 1910, its mammarian dome was second only in size to St Paul’s Cathedral. It was influenced by and contemporaneous with the development of Atlantic City in New Jersey, where the stupendous Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel had been built in 1906. Both places specialised in the architecture of pleasure and sybaritic escapism.

Tynesiders had much to escape from. Northumbria offered the worst housing conditions in England: more Geordies lived in flats and tenements than anywhere outside Scotland. And its staple industries were known as “the hardest work under heaven” — even if the trades were relatively well-paid, providing disposable income for fun and frolics. That Geordies flocked to an Iberian building that exudes the Moorish sensuality of El Andalus, or the dazzlingly white Mediterranean sunlight of a Sorolla painting — decades before the great victory of the Spanish costas over the British seaside — speaks to a yearning romanticism in the Northumbrian soul.

On a summer’s day, it remains a wonderful spot to drink in the scenic views of the coal-streaked sands of Whitley, with the North Sea shimmering like the Bay of Naples. In the distance, perched on a tidal island, is St Mary’s Lighthouse, surrounded by a picturesque setting of cottages, rockpools and the lapping waters of Tyne, Dogger and German Bight. But in the final decade of the 20th century, Whitley suffered years of decline. The peeling paint on the Spanish City’s “Corkscrew” rollercoaster matched the corroding metalwork on the Tyne. When great coastal landmarks like the Tynemouth Plaza — a vast Second Empire-style ballroom and winter gardens — burned to the ground in 1996, it felt like a portent. It was hard to see a bright future for a place whose rise and fall had corresponded so closely to the economic fortunes of Tyneside.

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And yet the Northumbrian Riviera is bustling once again. Largely gone are the boarding houses and sticky-carpet bars for hen and stag parties; instead, it’s all about surf cafés, hipster boutiques and vegan cake shops. Not long ago, the Guardian even named Whitley Bay as one of the coolest places to shop. This growing embourgeoisement has been mirrored by the changing politics of the coast. The constituency of Tynemouth — which was once one of the few Tory strongholds in the North-East, home to the very grand Conservative MPs Dame Irene Ward and then Sir Neville Trotter — has been solidly Labour since 1997. Meanwhile, neighbouring Blyth Valley, in the Northumbrian rust belt, having been rock solid Labour since the Thirties, flipped to the Tories in 2019.

The resurgence of this Geordie Shore has been in part down to an active local authority, and the boost from Covid that the British seaside received from day-trippers instead of holiday-makers. But the demographics of the coast have changed too, with growing numbers of younger professionals and their families moving close by. A spot of paddle-boarding out of Cullercoats harbour, a park run along the links, or even just a Di Meo’s ice cream and a bimble along the sea front: these have become favourite pastimes of the aspirational Geordie.

The uses of this place may have changed, but what continues to draw people here is the great beauty of the land and seascape. The American artist Winslow Homer lived in Cullercoats in 1881, and honed his watercolour technique painting the local fisher lasses and the changing moods of the North Sea. The working-class novelist Jack Common recalled sallying forth in the Twenties from industrial Newcastle to North Shields, where “the air was full of the sea glow, a salt radiance brightened all the long Tynemouth streets”.  Even Charles Dickens himself came here in 1867, walking from Newcastle to Tynemouth, and, after being knocked over by a wave on Longsands, recorded that “spanning the restless uproar of the waves was a quiet rainbow of transcendental beauty. The scene was quite wonderful.”

That scene, today, is often reminiscent of one of the most reproduced of those railway posters from this riviera’s golden age: British Rail’s depiction of an impossibly good-looking young family, optimistically dressed for the Northumbrian climate, bobbing in the waters by St Mary’s Island, above the legend “Life is Gay at Whitley Bay”. The Geordie Shore is back, if it ever went away.

Take Tyneside in the early 20th century for example. You could write a history of the North East as a tale of integrated industrial elites, families tied together by business and in some cases marriage. Armstrong dredged the Tyne into a world-class river. Stephenson (father and son) built the world’s first railway nation. Joseph Swan invented the electric lightbulb. C A Parsons built the first steam turbine vessel. Charles Merz built the first interconnected electricity supply. John Wigham Richardson (his uncle) persuaded fellow shipbuilders to use it.

When Yevgeni Zamyatin went to oversee the building of Russian ice-breakers on Tyneside in 1916, he saw shipyards so advanced he based his dystopian novel We on them. In 1906, Wigham Richardson and Swan Hunter launched the four-funnelled RMS Mauretania, the largest, the fastest, and the most beautiful coal-powered steam-turbine ship in the world. And just in case you think strong trade unions and great companies don’t go together, Sidney and Beatrice Webb viewed the North East as one of the best union organised regions in the country, and Tyneside shipyard platers the best paid.

Indeed, as late as the Sixties, Parsons’s steam turbines employed 6,000 skilled draughtsmen and engineers, while A C Reyrolle’s electrical switchgear employed 12,000. Lads wanted to work there because the apprenticeships were famous and the sports facilities unrivalled.

Peter Chapman’s Tyneside Heritage (2021) is exactly the kind of work we need to understand how ‘levelling up’ happened on the ground. Not only is it the first history of South Shields for a very long time, it is also the narrative of the Chapman family and their rise from early 19th century shipwrights, to mid-century drapers, to late-century chartered accountants and significant civic leaders.

At the heart of the story stands Lt Col Sir Robert Chapman (1880-1963), who joined his father’s firm and who, with his wife Lady Helene, became Tory celebrities in a rock-solid Labour town. How could this be? The Chapmans could have lived anywhere they chose (nice Northumbrian rectory perhaps, or dappled Durham farm house) but they chose to live in Westoe village, a mile from the one of the highest death-rate boroughs in the land, a place caught in the teeth of the Great Depression. 

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That’s the dignified part of their tale. The efficient part concerns Chapman’s role in developing commercial enterprises, as you’d expect perhaps from a chartered accountant with fingers in a lot of pies, but also in social housing, clean water, Harton Hospital, the Shields Gazette, the Boys’ High School, and almost every aspect of public life, from member of parliament for nearby Houghton-le-Spring to lord mayor of South Shields, from magistrates’ bench to colonel in the Northumbrian 74th Regiment (with a full chest of family medals, including a VC).

When in 1938 Chapman fell out with the Labour council over re-armament (they were against, in spite of new shipbuilding orders), he resigned and he and Lady Helene marched off to don their masks as the town’s first Air Raid Wardens. Whether ladling soup in downtown Zion Hall, or hosting charity fetes up at Undercliff, their baronial sub-suburban pile, or leading the floor at fundraisers, when we talk about levelling-up, we need to bear in mind those who didn’t leave it to others.

If Sir Robert was a local hero, Sir Arthur Munro Sutherland (1867-1953) was a industrial titan when the North East was the most heavily industrialised region in the world. He owned shipping lines, coal mines and shipyards. He ran an extensive Baltic trade in coke and timber.

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Like many other great northern industrialists, Sutherland believed in an ancient Northumbrian homeland that had preceded England, that had brought Christianity and Industrialisation, that had special qualities of skill and character. Marx thought the time would come when advanced societies would have no need for homeland or religion. He was wrong. Not only did Sutherland have a penchant for old Northumbrian castles (he bought one), and New Northumbrian myths (he was one), he was also a committed Methodist.

 His wife’s family, the Hood Haggies of Willington were the biggest makers of steel hawsers in the world. They were also active Methodists. Newcastle department store pioneers the Bainbridges and the Fenwicks were Methodists too, along with the great ship-owning Shields Runcimans, close family friends of the Chapmans.

A picture emerges, then, of an integrated business elite knowing each other and working together in the markets and in the chapels, in the suburbs and civil society, and in the two great hubs of Newcastle business, the Commercial Exchange down on the Quayside, and the Union Club up by Central Station. Sutherland’s head office was in walking distance of both. Of course, networking can mean cronyism too, and Sutherland was up in court for it in 1943. But it can also take you out of yourself. Chapman enjoyed his middle-class coteries it is true, but he also served with distinction in a war where men like him saw not only how the other half lived, but how it died as well.

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Long before “levelling-up”, therefore, the northern regions were able to foment indigenous growth where self-belief and belonging were part of an economics of agglomeration.

In 1945 Tyneside to Teesside was still one of the world’s great techno-industrial regions. In ruined Germany, by contrast, Bavaria was nichts. Now the positions are nearly reversed. Bavaria is one of the world’s great techno-industrial regions and the North East, if not nowt, is certainly not what it was.

Why so? First, after the war, Bavarian small to medium-sized firms surged while North East England remained dominated by three heavy industries, one of which (the National Coal Board) actively campaigned against the introduction of new industries. By the Eighties, public sector employment in the region stood at 63%, and the age of the entrepreneurial elite was all but over.

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Today Bavaria has a cluster of technical universities, colleges and linked apprenticeships, and manages to retain its graduates. The North East hasn’t, and doesn’t. In small to medium high-tech businesses there is much talk of “brain capital” and “spin out”. That the top British spinners are Oxford and Cambridge comes as no surprise because the economics of cultural agglomeration doesn’t just happen in the business hubs. It happens, it especially happens, in ancient colleges as well.

The North East may lack some or all these Bavarian features, but one thing it has in abundance is positivity. In spite of years of decline, and declinism (a North East trope), the people remain upbeat, friendly, and drawn to their own regional myths. Love of the craic is one of the first things visitors notice and although everybody talks about it, nobody sees it as an economic quality. 

Positivity is a form of entrepreneurial activity. How people feel about who they are and where they live can be transformative. This is easy to see in the hospitality industry, say, or in teaching, or sales and marketing, but how it relates to more technical fields, or R&D, or business start-ups, is harder to explain even though all these activities demand positive relationships whether in matters of trust, or problem solving, or training, or site location. Not everything is down to money.

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All market activity is as much social as economic, and all contracts, as Durkheim reminded us in a brilliant insight, depend on non-contractual obligations. In what he called the “Protestant Ethic” Max Weber recognised what he called the “Spirit of Capitalism” and “Ethic”, in this sense, meant a power within. And ‘power within’ is what is missing from the government’s levelling-up strategy.

Their white paper is a remarkable document nevertheless, promising to “unleash” and “empower” “every part of England that wants it” with generous and sustained funding settlements, six kinds of “capital”, five kinds of policy (“pillars”), 12 kinds of target (“missions”), hundreds of promises, application forms and god knows how many acronyms holding untold pots of money. The basic idea is that although the South won’t get less, the North will get more. Orwell would have loved this, but the real question is does Michael Gove mean it?

For sure, his white paper is a huge statement of belief in the regions, but unfortunately not in the people. It invokes the Industrial Revolution, but there’s not much business history. It calls for new forms of capital, but there’s little on accumulation. It talks about culture, but only as galleries and museums up from London, not inside the north’s own traditions and certainly not as something you might find on the street. If motorway service stations are anything to go by, business has not exactly shown us the way. Go to Costa at Woolley Edge, for example, and look for Yorkshire. Indeed, look for anywhere. We have come a long way from the days when Parsons’s steam turbines stood for the north.

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My question is how does a regional business elite grow and to what end? I realise that another way of describing the Chapmans and the Sutherlands is in terms of a capitalist class. In the past, I have made my own modest contribution to this way of looking. This essay, however, is about something different. Given that not everything can, or should, come from the state, levelling-up has no other choice than to think in terms of regional pride and purpose.

The North East continues to make things — Nissan cars, for instance — and some very good companies are locally owned. Barbours of South Shields for instance is listed in the region’s top 50. Founded in 1894 to make hard-wearing clothes for seafarers then motorcyclists, Barbour showed its drive and adaptability by re-inventing itself for the third time as a world-leading fashion brand.

If you want to see how Geordie pride and purpose matters in manufacturing go and see the woman who leads it and the 600 women who work there. Michael Gove is a clever man and his civil servants mean well, but if they are serious about levelling-up, they need to start with the people, stupid, before all else. 

Yet it’s seldom explained why the Durham miners should have been so hostile to the idea of European integration; or, indeed, why the opinion of such a body was seen to be decisive in matters of state. Even though the Labour Government was to fall in October of 1951, the six years of Attleeism had represented the triumph of a distinctively conservative socialism that prevailed in the North East coalfields, and did much to shape Labour’s agenda in the 1940s.

Clement Attlee’s 1945 cabinet included several prominent North East MPs, including the Chancellor, Hugh Dalton (who sat for Bishop Auckland), the martinet Home Secretary James Chuter Ede (MP for South Shields), and Jack Lawson of Chester-le-Street as Secretary of State for War. In fact, Lawson, a former miner, was described by John Bew in his biography of Attlee as the Labour leader’s “personal mentor” and “closest friend in politics”, who gave him invaluable insight into the trade union movement and its northern heartlands.

What made the unions of the Great Northern Coalfield so distinctive was how cautious and non-confrontational they were – in sharp contrast to other areas, notably South Wales and Yorkshire. Much of this was shaped by a history of crushing industrial defeats going back as far as the 1830s – when the army had been deployed in support of strike-breakers – and then by a generation of sober, respectable Methodists who ran the Northumbrian miners’ unions and preferred conciliation and the pursuit of incremental progress, to what they saw as futile clashes between labour and capital. With nationalisation of their industry in 1947 the miners of Durham and Northumberland thought that their patience had been justified, and the grim industrial struggles of the last 100 years had been won.

Full-employment, decent housing and free healthcare created a sort of paradise in the coalfields – what Nye Bevan called working class “serenity”. The miners had the added satisfaction that their jobs were seen as fundamental to Britain’s greatness — as Ernest Bevin said to them at the time: “give me a million tons of coal and I’ll give you a foreign policy”. For even in the depths of austerity, Labour squeezed welfare and NHS budgets to spend 10% of GDP on defence – a huge boon to the shipbuilders and coal-miners.

All this made the North East a stronghold of the pro-NATO “Old Labour Right”, embodied by men like Sam Watson, the all-powerful and fiercely anti-Communist Durham Miners’ Leader in the 1950s, who even invited the American ambassador to the Durham Miners’ Gala (allegedly at the instruction of his CIA handlers). There was simply no way that the miners’ unions would risk jeopardising their hard-won influence over the economic and political direction of the country – and the improved living standards that this had brought – by submitting to the control of a supranational body in Strasbourg.

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Indeed, the Attlee government’s socialist agenda has obscured its old-fashioned patriotism, even its nationalism. As David Edgerton has written, after 1945 Labour built “not only a new Jerusalem, but a new Sparta” and British society in the era of the hydrogen bomb, National Service and relentless war movies was militarised to an almost unprecedented degree, and this contributed to a definite “masculinisation of the public sphere”.

This suited the North East of England perfectly, where a deeply patriarchal and macho culture was expressed through heavy industries – chiefly coal, shipbuilding and armaments – and a well-paid Northumbrian Stakhanovism was celebrated in local culture and rewarded with beer in the pubs and working men’s clubs; the ubiquity of these water holes did much to shape the enduring perceptions of places like Newcastle as one of the world’s great party cities.

But the “arsenal economy” of Tyne and Wear was merely the latest manifestation of a centuries-long militarism that had long defined this frontier region; it had found its most recent expression in the record-breaking response of North East England to Kitchener’s call for volunteers in 1914, and by the fact that the formidable 50th (Northumbrian) Division were the most experienced combat unit in the British Army in the Second World War.

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Now if the North East’s Brexit vote was as much an expression of discontent with the status quo as it was about attitudes to the EU (although we shouldn’t assume that C2DEs can’t understand complex political questions just as well – or as badly – as the ABC1s), then the changing nature of work itself, especially male work, might be at the heart of it. For despite the death and danger of coal-mining and shipbuilding these were highly skilled professions, and some of the most romantic and rewarding ever undertaken by British working classes.

My grandfather was a miner, and although he’d seen men die underground, and was present when his marra lost an arm, he adored the mental stimulation and the sheer thrill of mining for coal under the North Sea. This was not like making hats, or lace, or jute-sacks or any of the other myriad trades that British towns once specialised in. Nothing could compare to the excitement and satisfaction of winning a new coal-seam or launching a battleship.

But not only that, these trades provided a real sense of masculine purpose, of camaraderie, and even a sense of playing one’s part in a heroic national narrative. As much as the economic decline that followed the decline and death of the pits and shipyards, the North East still hasn’t got over the psychic loss of these industries.

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For all that the traditions of Northumbrian Stakhanovism might live on at the production lines at Nissan – where union officials describe the work as “very hard and physically demanding,” for the men (and it is largely men) who spend eight hours on their feet at an unrelenting assembly line – there is a sense that many find this work as alienating as Charlie Chaplin did in Modern Times. As one Sunderland Remain voter pointed out (to those who think the North East should have been more grateful for the status quo): “the truth is that people in Sunderland need more from life than hard-to-come-by work in car plants. [Nissan is] a hard way to earn a living and it leaves many men bitter and disillusioned.”

As true as this is, political solutions seem as elusive as ever. Community life in the pit villages might’ve been incredibly strong – even claustrophobically so – but that world’s reliance on a single male breadwinner and rigidly enforced gender roles was undone by the pincer of economic and social liberalism.

It’s interesting that female perspectives might not be as nostalgic for this lost world as men seem to be, and one of the most clear-eyed takes on all this has come from Bridget Philipson, Labour MP for Houghton and Sunderland, who expressed a certain impatience with “various manifestations of communitarian reinvention, from ‘community organising’ to ‘Blue Labour’ — all variations on the premise ‘that it is possible to deal with cultural and industrial change by wishing it hadn’t happened.'” Well it has happened, and the North East still hasn’t got over it.

Dan Jackson is the author of The Northumbrians: The North East of England and its People. A New History, published by Hurst (2019)

Some believe the loan should be permanent. “Stephenson’s Rocket is our Elgin marbles,” says Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle city council: “It should be here all the time.”

In equating Stephenson’s workaday wrought iron with the marmoreal art of the Parthenon, Councillor Forbes risks hyperbole, but he knows it will get the sympathy of his party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Corbyn’s views on the Elgin marbles are for him unusually clear: they should be returned to Greece.

But what is so important about Stephenson and his Rocket, and why does Councillor Forbes believe it should stay in the city?

Rocket was a steam locomotive built in 1829 for the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway – the first railway built to carry passengers rather than coal. Rocket was by no means the first locomotive, but she (it’s discourteous to call a steam engine “it”) incorporated several innovations which made her the first engine really capable of hauling passenger trains. Rocket was the template for steam engines for the next century and a half, and is, quite simply, the most famous locomotive in the world.

Rocket was designed and built at the Forth Street works of Robert Stephenson and Company, just round the corner from the Discovery Museum in which she now sits – the first company formed specifically to build railway engines. As such, Rocket is emblematic of the North East’s heavy engineering heritage. Coal mining and ironworking, together with shipbuilding and seafaring, gave “Geordieland” its gritty character – industries now gone.

It’s not surprising therefore that today’s Geordies are keen to see the greatest symbol of the city’s tough, pioneering history. Or that schoolchildren facing an uncertain future in this post-industrial age should be brought by their teachers to see how one of its most famous sons took the Industrial Revolution to a new level.

Tyneside today is brooding as well as depressed. The area voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in a sort of modern-day Jarrow March. Those who visit the Discovery Museum are being inspired by the past – by their cultural heritage. Should Rocket therefore remain in the city indefinitely? Or should it return to London, where visitors from around the world, as well as the whole of Britain, can see what Tyneside could once do – and still might? Would it not serve the region better if Rocket continued to take pride of technological place in the Capital of the nation that once led the world – and has aspirations to do so again – in engineering, technology and innovation?

This in essence is the Elgin Marbles argument too. Isn’t Greece better served by showing the best of its exquisite ancient civilization to millions of visitors from around the world each year (6.25 million people visited the British Museum in 2016-17) – a far greater and more international footfall than could ever be achieved in Athens? “The sculptures are part of everyone’s shared heritage and transcend cultural boundaries” says the museum’s website. It’s a strong intellectual case.

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Indeed, Councillor Forbes does Newcastle no good by equating Rocket’s case with that of the Elgin Marbles. “Stephenson’s Rocket is our Elgin marbles” is a clever sound bite, but historically the circumstances of the acquisition of the two artefacts were entirely different. The Elgin Marbles were either purloined or rescued, depending on your viewpoint, but Rocket was bought – legally – by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. And after being sold on, in 1862 was given by the then owners (a mining company in Cumberland) to the Patent Office Museum, forerunner of the Science Museum.

The leader of Newcastle City Council would do better to make the case that Rocket’s intended final resting place (or, strictly, “long-term display”) – the National Railway Museum in York – fails both of what we might call the ‘Elgin Marbles tests’: it neither returns the artefact to its cherished place of manufacture, nor does it maximise its “shared heritage” by being displayed in one of the greatest tourist centres of the world. The National Railway Museum – for all its appeal – is a comparatively niche attraction. Its footfall is barely 50% more than Newcastle’s. It’s not Rocket science.