Mine didn't. I can't repeat some of the descriptions I read about that display.

Yes. There's no electorate for minimal state libertarianiam, certainly not in peripheral northern towns.

The magic of the Kop?

This replies on this platform though. Clearly the idea is to normalise the idea of the UK joining Russia and it's client state. Labour probably need to be louder on this.

'Coming home Newcastle' by Busker still floors her. She's from Hampshire, we live up here and she finds the mawkish Geordie stuff hilarious. Has done since shortly after we got together and I was drunk and almost tearful watching the 1999 FA cup final in a London pub.

Newcastle United FC have commissioned a recording of Blaydon Races and it’s predictably, cringingly awful. I’m going to have to find a way of keeping it from Dr Mitchell for a long as possible. When she discovers it, she will torment me.

Sunderland's population is smaller than it was thirty/forty years ago. That's true whatever anyone thinks about the fairness of where the home office houses people claiming asylum, or the state of public services.

I expect people blamed the council.

I’m not sure what the rationale for using OA is other than the small population turns out an agreeably high % of people claiming social security, so everybody can pearl clutch about it and demand punishment.

So Centre for Social Justice have uncovered that people who've got nowt often live in less well off areas. Bombshell news.

I’d guess the idea is that if anon X accounts flood the zone with extremely vague insinuations of municipal corruption then people might eventualy think there must be something in it.

Never thought of that. They could be playing Gateshead and South Shields.

If these lads want to use the "provincial mayor" attack line then let them crack on and let the electorate decide.

It's on the council website. Maybe elements of grass roots Reform are more pragmatic durham.gov.uk/article/37393

No Gateshead doesn't have city status but it's not in any functional sense a separate place. When people in Gateshead say they’re going into town they usually mean Newcastle City Centre. Always have done in my adult lifetime.

People will look you in the eye and say Gateshead isn't a city and is a completely different place from Newcastle. It’s there in anything about Sam Fender who a reasonable person might think was from the small, isolated Northumberland village of North Shields

I sort of love this stuff. It's partly why I continue to push the hugely unpopular but obviously right idea that Durham County Cricket Club would be better off (finance and sporting) near a metro Station in Sunderland or Gateshead. It’s like road pricing but north east sport.

Probably about as well as a typical British person knows e.g Rotterdam, Nantes or Essen, which I'd guess are mostly more productive than British comparator cities.

I've been following the debates on your timeline and I now understand this is largely because people from other countries want to visit London and probably don't know where Mancheter is.

Dunno. It’s one thing to recognise the difficult economic (and fiscal) environment but another altogether to imply it comes in the context of a bloated state ripe for cutting back.