Tory Post 23 August 2007
Posted by Anders Hanson in Conservatives, Politics, Sheffield.trackback
People in Sheffield can be pretty rude about the Yorkshire Post, (”Yorkshire’s National Newspaper”), basically saying that it is all about Leeds and very pro-Conservative. Unless you read the letters page which is full of pro-UKIP letter writers.
But even I was surprised by how blatantly pro-Tory today’s Yorkshire Post was, with two thirds of the front page devoted to them. Under a big heading “Cameron’s Cure”, it then had two big articles about the Conservatives with the headlines “Support the family and tackle social breakdown” and “Heseltine review to put Supertram back on track”.
Inside was a two page special report (remember this is still a broadsheet, and so that’s a lot of space) about his ‘vision to heal a broken society’ and with features on what he says about the North, local elections, constitution, his shadow cabinet, transport, NHS, family, crime, tax, Europe and his prospects at the next general election. Just in case you didn’t quite get Cameron’s own spin, the Yorkshire Post helpfully put in a table highlighting “Britain’s Crime Plague” and the crime rates for different types of crime in Yorkshire.
They then also give the main comment piece over to them, called “A sense of purpose: Cameron’s road map for Tories”. This includes wonderful lines like “There is much to hearten Conservatives in this newspaper’s wide-ranging interview with David Cameron” and “A seam of common sense runs through Mr Cameron’s ideas” and finally “Now it is time for his party to embrace that sense of purpose and give Mr Cameron its unstinting support as he develops promising ideas into a credible manifesto.”
YORKSHIRE POST: Support the family and tackle social breakdown
Living under the media lash of the Yorkshire Post is mere tickling compared to your northern outpost.
We get ‘covered’ by BBC North East in Newcastle and when our rather lovely Runswick Bay made it into the Guardian as one of Britain’s best beachcombing beaches (the article was tripe) BBC North East showed aerial footage of Staithes, the next village but one up the coast. I pointed this out to them and got and bleating apology. Couldn’t bring my self to reply ‘Google earth?”
On the politics, N. Yorks is still Tory in large swathes, Scarborough and Whitby went Con at the last election but we did do for them on the borough council. I think the YP is writing to its (probably shrinking) rural Tory aging readership. Give it a few years and the the Orange has spread, it’ll be praising Clegg’s ’seam of common sense’. Oh, no. He’s from Sheffield…