On the stage at the Yorkshire party’s annual conference, a man who claims to have once been “Britain’s leading cage-fighting journalist” has just finished entertaining the crowd with an alternate interpretation of Ken Loach's 1969 film Kes when he makes the fatal mistake of saying the words “South Yorkshire”. The mere mention of the modern administrative region covering Sheffield, Rotherham and Barnsley attracts a deep cry of pain from the back of the room, where a representative of the more fundamentalist Yorkshire Ridings Society is sitting.



“Wash your mouth out!” shouts Judith Anderson, who refuses to accept the 1974 boundary changes that redrew Yorkshire’s borders, and has dedicated her life to issues such as reinstating the traditional name of the West Riding in the Sheffield region, or ensuring the white rose flag once again flies over various small packages of land ceded to Cumbria and Lancashire.

Suitably chastened, the speaker, a cheery and solidly built man from Rotherham called Mick Bower, who is standing as the Yorkshire party’s mayoral candidate for the newly devolved Sheffield City Region, regains his composure. He continues with his speech on how the political party should form policy: “We are blunt! We call a spade a spade! It’s important we don’t act like other political parties and fanny about!”

Then comes a finale with a fiery Yorkshire call to action: “We need less statistics and more Sean Bean as Geoff Boycott! We need common sense and community! That’s the way forward!”

The Yorkshire party is a strange, stubborn, tiny political entity, currently perched on the edge of political irrelevance, but which has attracted a motley crew of activists drawn from almost every political background who are all committed to one thing: the establishment of a devolved Yorkshire parliament, on the basis that if it’s good enough for Scotland and Wales then it’s damn well good enough for Yorkshire.