William Wallace has been writing for the Yorkshire Post, to mark the celebration of Yorkshire Day earlier this week:

In David Cameron’s response to the referendum result, he announced that the Government would consult the Scots, the Welsh and Northern Ireland administrations throughout the negotiations, as well as ‘other regional centres of power’ – by which he mainly meant London.

Theresa May has made a demonstration of that commitment by making early visits to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. But who would she come to consult in northern England? Will she even feel any need to do so?

Self-government in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales has built into the structure of UK government regular procedures to take their interests into account. I sat on several government committees in the coalition Government in which separate agenda items were included for the presentation of Scots, Welsh and Ulster perspectives, while the interests of England were taken as understood.

Conservative MPs, predominantly from the south of England, have responded to Scottish devolution by calling for ‘English voters for English laws’ in Parliament, but this assumes that the interests of Yorkshire and the North East are little different from Kensington, Surrey and Kent.

On the doorstep across the North during the referendum campaign, there was as much resentment against London and its wealthy ‘establishment’ as against Brussels. Both were seen as having let down England’s old wealth-producing areas, as international finance and immigration transformed their old identity. The gap between the South East and the North has widened sharply over the last three decades, as closures and takeovers have left gaps in the northern economy and London has soared ahead.

Public spending has supported London’s rise, with massive investment in regional transport – in contrast to the dribble of funding for Northern schemes. Local authority budgets have been cut more sharply in Northern cities, while free schools have mushroomed with public subsidies across London and the Home Counties.

William concludes:

We need representatives of all parties, business and trade unions, churches, charities and others to argue the case for institutionalised representation, alongside the devolved administrations, in negotiations that will reshape the United Kingdom as well as the UK’s relationship with the European continent.

Without that, as the Northern city leaders put it in their letter to Theresa May, the north of England will be ‘caught between an economically and politically powerful London and an increasingly politically important Scotland’.

You can read the full piece here.