Andrew Vine

Travel on a bus, queue in a shop or visit a pub and you’ll overhear plenty of offensive things being said. Depending on your viewpoint, visit an edgy stand-up comedian’s show and you’re likely to hear the same.

A starring role in a hit television show works wonders for a village’s tourist trade, and so it has proved for Askrigg over the course of more than 40 years.

Everybody dismayed and angered by the fouling of Yorkshire’s rivers and seas with filth will have applauded the government’s pledge to get tough on water companies.

A couple of weeks ago while visiting family in Essex, I was struck by how glaring the contrast is between the affluent south-east and the north.

Yorkshire’s magnificent countryside hides many secrets. The glorious landscapes and picture-postcard market towns and villages can be a lot less idyllic for the people living there than they seem to visitors.

I won’t be rushing down to my local bookshop on Thursday to snap up a copy of Boris Johnson’s autobiography, Unleashed, when it goes on sale.

There isn’t another county in England with as much to offer visitors as Yorkshire. That isn’t simply the opinion of someone born and bred here who loves this county of ours and still marvels at the beauty of the landscapes despite having known them all my life. It’s a fact.

If there’s a bigger rip-off in the lives of everyone who drives a car than motor insurance, I don’t know what it is. We’re being fleeced mercilessly by insurance companies who have us in a trap which they are exploiting for all they’re worth to enrich themselves.

When the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, stands up in the Commons tomorrow to deliver her first budget, she may determine the fate of a great British institution.

If anybody needed an illustration of how ridiculously bad things are on public transport, it was provided last week by a relic of 1980s technology which turns out to be a vital cog in running the trains.