It was political
16 June 2016

I first heard the BBC Radio 4 announce the death of the Labour MP for the Spen Valley, West Yorkshire while I was driving along the A62 from Manchester, where I work, to the Colne Valley, where I live. My commute follows an ancient trade route that crosses the fold of the Pennines at Standedge Edge to enter the West Riding, a political region still known as West Yorkshire, even today with its multicultural cities of Leeds, Halifax, Bradford, and Huddersfield. The county is an interlocking series of valleys running east and west, in which large derelict textile mill sites cast long shadows along the same canals and roads that once carried their products away to the rest of the world. In the previous year on the occasion of her first address to the UK Parliament, the MP had called up West Yorkshire’s history, which was her own history:
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