David Cameron in wellies won’t mollify flood victims in the north | Martin Kettle

Northerners are angry and feel the government would never have allowed this to happen in the south of England

Growing up in postwar Leeds, you always knew where the Yorkshire Post stood on the issues of the day. You knew where its sister paper the Yorkshire Evening Post stood, too. The clue was in the name of the Victorian-era company that owned them both – Yorkshire Conservative Newspapers Limited.

These were monopoly local papers which, in the manner of Tories of the Harold Macmillan era, routinely refused to use the word Labour, always preferring to talk about the Socialists. The Tory bias was a big reason why, though we lived in Yorkshire, my family always took, along with the Daily Worker, the more liberal Manchester Guardian.

Related: North-south divide cited as factor in Yorkshire flooding devastation

Only the absence of nationalism stops the north being, politically speaking, another Scotland

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