MP should reflect on ‘God’s own’ comment

We all say things in the heat of a council debate which we later regret, and I would hope Mr Reesmogg was also regretting his claims in Parliament about Somerset being God’s Own Country, not Yorkshire.

The fact that he lives in Somerset and represents North East Somerset does not give the county a special relationship to God, who loves all humankind, and as Jesus pointed out, makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike.

It is a very odd thing to say, given how much money the Chancellor has gifted the so called ‘red wall’ constituencies in Yorkshire, though not the ones which really need it, like Barnsley.

All those misguided Yorkshiremen who voted Conservative in the last election might have second thoughts about the way they voted, were it not for the fact that as Geoffrey Boycott, the cricketer who popularised the phrase, said, insults are like water off a ducks back to Yorkshire people.

Perhaps that is because we are born with a stick of rhubarb in one hand a cricket bat in the other. I recommend Roy Hattersley’s book, Goodbye to Yorkshire, to explain the situation (when the old county was divided up)

So why ‘God’s own country’’? Speaking as someone from Scarborough, with its incomparable fish and chips, fish freshly caught offshore…. I would say the claim is based on cricket – Boycott could bat for an eternity, as I know from watching him in Bangalore against India in the 1980s.

Secondly there is the county anthem, ‘Jerusalem,’ certainly in my family sung at weddings and funerals, with its ideals of transforming the bleak industrial landscape into a land with social justice.

Of course ‘green and pleasant land’ meant environmentally friendly, William Blake being a prophet ahead of his time and finally we all call a spade a spade and say things as they are, without pretence or hypocrisy (well, most of the time), like God does.

But if Somerset want to join the club, that’s fine.