Recent History
The region was created in 1994 and was originally defined as Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, County Durham and Cleveland. A reform of local government abolished Cleveland and created several unitary districts. The region is now considered to consist of four distinct 'sub-regions':
- County Durham, plus Darlington
- Northumberland
- Tyne and Wear
- Teesside, which was formerly part of Cleveland but is now associated with North Yorkshire and County Durham
A November 2004 referendum on whether a directly elected regional assembly should be set up for North East England resulted in a decisive "no" vote. The number of people who voted against the plans was 696,519 (78%), while 197,310 (22%) voted in favour. John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister of the time, admitted that his plans for regional devolution had suffered an "emphatic defeat". Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative spokesman for the regions, said the vote would mean the end of plans for a North East Assembly. He told the BBC: "The whole idea of regional government has been blown out of the water by this vote".
Read more about this topic: North East England
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)