Hypocrites14 Aug 2008 09:24 am
By Nelson
“Are northern cities beyond revival?”
I am a Londoner born and bred and proud of it. However, I find comments like those proposed by the so-called “think tank” to be highly offensive. Just as Leeds and Manchester have been revived, so too, will other “northern” cities. Give it time, but stop being so patronizing.
[Socratic_Acolyte], London, United Kingdom
Perhaps you could join a voluntary organisation and spend a “gap year” helping us revive our cities? After we’ve installed indoor toilets, we’re planning on digging a new canal so that we can import fine wines from Surrey.
51 Responses to “Not Patronising”
I’ll come help you guys dig a humous well if you like.
As a Surrey resident I was deeply offened by your comment about fine wines, Nelson.
There’s no fucking way we would let the uneducated palates of “The North” at our Chablis. I’m not being patronising but it really would be wasted on you.
We do have some rather cheap and cheerful chardonnay you could have though. It normally goes in the cooking but its perfectly fine to drink if you chill it enough.
Are you planning to use some of those foreign jonnies to build your canal? They are SO industrious aren’t they.
Him and Katie can host a ‘LONDON’S GRATE!’ party with Union Jack bunting galore and watch that Monty Python ‘Luxury sheer luxury’ sketch on repeat, as it is a valid and truth-filled representation of life ‘Oop North’.
PS I lived in London, it was RUBBISH. it need regenerating much more than Leeds or Manchester, where you can actually afford to live properly without being a Russian oligarch.
I hear they’re even encouraging Northerners to move south. Don’t get me wrong,I’m not prejudiced or anything but would you really want one moving in next door to you?
It’s political correctness gone mad!1!!!
I agree, Leeds and Manchester are “northern”. However, Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesborough are Northern without the ironic quotation marks.
As a Teessider, I remember calling a guy from Sheffield a soft southern shandy-drinker.
Princess_B on SYB
Topsy Turvey on HYS
Life imitating art imitating life?
What came first – the Topsy or the Princess?
I personally like this comment
Its just funny seeing someone from Coventry (where “they send” people) putting the boot into another city. I bet the humble folk of Coventry have been waiting all their lives for any opportunity to pay people back for an eternity of city-related-badmouthing.
NooooOOOOooooo! You couldn’t make it up! I’ve even got a proper HYS-tastic typo in there!
I am torn, should I end my life now, or go on the long and ultimately painful voyage of discovery where I find out I am Topsy’s long-lost daughter and we sit around together watching Clarkson ‘talk sense’ and moaning about London? TELL ME?!?!!11
Yeah, the Heathrow part of London is the worst. All those bloody foreigners – where do they all come from!?
Oh nooooo, Topsy Turvy is having a weekend in Liverpool at the same time as me!
This whole thing got me a tad angry, being a Bradfordian.
To be serious (I know, shocking) these right-wing, badger’s beef curtains are actually slow on the uptake, this is already government policy:
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/spending_review/spend_csr07/reviews/subnational_econ_review.cfm
Anyway, who votes that all copies of the Daily Mail should contain parcel bombs instead of DVDs of bad films?
Start of. Northern inner cities are full of British-born immigrants with suicide bomb factories in their bathrooms. FACT. Most of them have dual Pakistani citizenship and are commited to overthrowing England. End of. Next thing we know Gordon Clown will allow the muslim council to declare the Independent Isamlic Shires of Northen England and ethnically cleanse it of indigenous (Christian) males. The women will be forced to stay there and will have to wear burkas. You couldn’t make it up.
I love north/south debates. Two things guaranteed to be said almost immediately are:
Non Londoner – I went to London once and didn’t like it.
Londoner/Southerner – I went to the north once and was surprised to find it wasn’t all that bad.
The conversation will generally then progress with variants of these comments ad infinitum.
Sooooooo many Star Wars references there. Especially with a name like Princess.
Is that some sort of Eleanor Rigby driven homage to the Beatles and all things Liverpool?
Hilary Benson has obviously never “stepped outside heathrow airport” if she did she’d realise that Hayes and Harlington, the home of Heathrow has a pretty large Sikh community. So she’s not even being racist with regards to the right continent. If there’s one thing worse than a racist it’s a daft racist.
“…If there’s one thing worse than a racist it’s a daft racist.”
These are not just racists, these are HYS racists.
Are you goat snoots planning on doing anything about these regular Internal Server Errors or is 773 (metric) going to have come across to the poor, degenerate “midlands” and choke a bitch?
For reference, the error code is 41 2/3 dozen.
i went to the north once. i was surprised to find it was alright, once you got past the comedy accents.
On Behalf of the denizens of Newcastle (the proper one, not the small one in the Midlands), you can all fucking well stay right where you are, thanks. It’s perfectly nice here, so don’t come and spoil it. Personally, I can’t wait for globally-warmed floodwaters to engulf Essex, so we can treat its newly-destitute BNP voters the way they would treat flood-ravaged Bangladeshis.
How do you stop a Bangladeshi from drowning in flood water?
By sustained investment in infrastructure of course.
@ Mr Cat – I think it must have been, but entirely subconsciously I admit.
What I don’t understand about the whole thing is the idea of “move south to areas like Oxford”. Why is Oxford so nice? Because it is small. You add more people and housing it will become just like any other big city, not some f**king utopian Oxford but bigger.
Cheers AndyS, we feel the same about bladdy cockernys, and awl that farmer tawk, roit.
The think tank is a special needs effort, he was a pleb on the news too. It costs 5% more to live down south, and you earn about 5% more…so congratulations you just made absolutely zero difference.
What I don’t understand is that, of the people in Liverpool who’re likely to move south – surely it’s the unemployed? Are there more jobs in Oxford than they’re actually advertising – because 4% of that population doesn’t seem to think so.
It must be really grim up north, if Birmingham council had to put pictures of Birmingham, Alabama on leaflets just to make it look better.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/7560392.stm
Or perhaps it was some arse in a PR company Googling public domain images so they wouldn’t have to pay the imagebank and forgetting to specify Birmingham, UK.
You know, Leeds doesn’t even have its own John Lewis. END OF.
Relax, I’m northern.
What I don’t understand is that the people on this board are actually continuing a debate that this site has ridiculed.
I mean
SYB
HYS
And that’s just a tongue in cheek comparison… can we not just laugh at the hilarity as Northerns and Southerners screech HYS driven abuse at one another instead of foreigners for a change?
and what about the Mid-Landers? Eh? Where’s their regionally ridiculed voice in all of this (apart from that one for Coventry, obviously)?
I once got on a plane bound for Kenya from Heathrow airport and it was like going to a foreign country that was full of Africans…
Etc.
Bollocks. That serves me right for hitting refresh…
*goes to hide*
erm can someone help out my blockqquote.
I’m ashamed to be me
What? They printed 720,000 paper leaflets to tell people that they were doing well at recycling ? Isn’t that missing the point somewhat? You couldn’t make it up!!!!
Aside from being a bit patronising, I’m not sure what makes this particularly SYB-worthy…
Not a lot I can do… it’s Dreamhost, who I’d recommend heartily if you want some occasional, cheap webspace. But not if you have a site you’d actually like to be available for more than 2/3rds of the time. They’re very cheap, but also balls. The traffic here (approx 3,700 visitors a day) would maybe generate £50pcm if I put google ads on here.. so that’d pay for a decent server (e.g. 1&1 cheapo root box). But I fucking hate adverts.
I always find it weird when people refer to cities like Bradford and Liverpool as “northern” and I only live in Glasgow. God knows what people from Kirkwall or Lerwick must think (not that you’d want them moving down South, bringing their strange accents and their big twirly balls of fire with them, I had an Orkney family as neighbours once, the smell of dried puffin was terrible, and they wouldn’t lean the language, etc etc etc…)
Try and ignore it.
Let me know how you get on with trying to ignore it though.
Ar, me too. I’m midlands really, Black Country originally, but Nottingham now. It’s just easier for the shandy-poofs if you call everything past Luton something simple like “The North”.
Luton?
Anything beyond the Holloway Road is uncharted waters really.
Relax, i’m married to a Yorkshire lass.
Ha ha – Nelson is a yam yam.
The north is called “the north” because all the motorways have big signs where they can’t be bothered to name all the cities so they just say “the north”
Problem solved.
ps I DARE you to publish this
Actually I think you’ll find The North starts at Watford. Luton is The Far North, anything above Northampton is The Frozen North and the girl I met in Lingard’s in Bradford in 1996 is The Frigid North(ener).
Fucking Northern Monkeys!
Relax, I’m married to a scahser.
@Philbert.
I used to live in Lerwick and I found that half the people there seem to be from Nottingham. Lord only knows why so many people from Nottingham move to Shetland though. Or is that the odd accent?
As for Orkney, people from there are odd anyway (Ask anyone from Shetland)
Did anyone else who saw the policy twat on the news think he’s the spit of Harry Enfield’s ‘Tory Boy’. Unsurprisingly.
I give you; Dr Tim Leunig, tory boy incarnate. Only much, much creepier.
Google him and LSE for a picture.
PS did love the bit in the report where it said ‘There’s nothing that can be done for Sunderland’, but that’s probably because I live in Newcastle.
I’m *from* Sunderland, and he’s right. We should ask the Luftwaffe if they’d be kind enough to come over &tidy up the job they did in WW2. Thwey missed some of it.
A Yam Yam?!!1!??!
…
Mwahahahaaahaaa…. etc
Shit! I’m now utterley doubled up and I’ve got a stitch. For some reason I seem to have found the phrase ‘A Yam Yam’for a Brummie/Black-country completely and ridiculously, wonderfully funny.
Cheers Mr. Cat!
(I’ll send you the bill for the cleaning)
Hull.
Why?
“Let me know how you get on with trying to ignore it though.”
This is TYPICAL syb bias!!! These ‘nelson’s'” efforts to placate the armed PC brigades and stop their 500 Error cyber-attacks he’ll actually ask us to tell him how we get on with ignoring something without even telling us what it is we’re supposed to ignore. Then he gives us a blank text box with a “Submit Comment” button that I suppose we’re not supposed to press!!! You couldn’t make it up.
What next? Gordon Clown will introduce a Submit Button Tax and redirect the momey to helping immigrants fill in their eighty grand a year social security claims. You couldn’t make that up either.
Believe me people, this is not the ‘end of’. End of.
Fuck!!!
I forgot to add that the post above will NEVER get posted.
Fucking pc-censorship gone mad.
Um, maybe I’m being a bit thick, but won’t “the North” become empty if we all move south? Oh, and this island we reside on may tip over, spilling us all into the sea! Aaargh – am scared now, my swimming isn’t really up to scratch.
Relax – I’m simple.
They are hoping that everyone moving to the SE will push their house prices back up.
My least favourite thing about The South was the number of conversations wherein people told me that I “don’t sound Northern”. In annoyed tones as though I were somehow a fiendish deceitful whore for not being exactly as their tiny brains expected.
Oh, and the tap water’s crap.
alt-f4, ye, I bet they woulden’t dare!
If fifty thousand Scousers were forcibly moved from Liverpool to Slough, it would improve the quality of life in both places immensely.
I waded through the sixty-odd pages of the coyote-crack-produced report, and it is obvious that the author has not been on a SE commuter train, the tube or the M1 on a Friday night. FACT1.
Also the rancid armadillo cockpit seems to think Swindon is a nice place, thereby proving he’s never been there.
Dai from Teesside really should know how to spell Middlesbrough. Even the Guardian gets it right (most of the time) these days.
“We do have some rather cheap and cheerful chardonnay you could have though. It normally goes in the cooking but its perfectly fine to drink if you chill it enough.”
aye but nah then ollie lad, whs tha use t’chill thar wine? dust tha liv it int’ ginnel overnight?