Line 18: Sky's Nick Martin explains why he is proud to be Northern I have always been extremely proud to say that I'm from the North.I'm not one of those people who bang on about it, but I am proud of my roots.I was born in Newcastle a year before Margaret Thatcher was elected as the first female British prime minister and embarked on 11 years of Conservative rule that, depending on who you talk to, was either an overwhelming success or complete disaster.When I entered the world my dad worked in the shipyards on the Tyne, helping to design and build aircraft carriers and oil tankers. View Nick Martin’s profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. He’s also reported from around the world on some of the biggest global stories of the last two decades, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, three presidential elections as well as natural disasters.
In the sky. Nick Martin I was 16.I have spent the last few months working on a story about why, in 2018, men in the North are still living shorter lives than men in the South.With the help of researchers at the University of Manchester, we have analysed rates of excess morbidity, which is the number of premature deaths in the North compared to the South.It is nothing new to say that northern men live shorter lives than southern men, but we were staggered by new figures revealing the big killers - suicide, drugs, alcohol and accidents.The vast majority of premature deaths can be put down to higher rates of social deprivation in the North, including a poor diet and increased levels of smoking and drinking.I have been trying to find out to what extent this shorter life can be blamed on deprivation alone or whether there is such a thing as "northern machismo" - or an attitude that prevents men from seeking help when they need it.A doctor told me after my dad's postmortem, he would have had symptoms to suggest things were not right. He had worked his way up from apprentice in the 1960s to draughtsman.The North East has a proud tradition of heavy industry, not just building ships, but mining coal to generate electricity and landing fresh fish to feed the nation.I did not know it at the time, but I was born into a period of huge social and economic change - a period that would cause untold damage to the North, its industry, its people and especially its men.By November 1979, oil prices and rising wages led interest rates to soar to an all-time high of 17%.This crippled manufacturing and across the north of England businesses closed and national unemployment crept up to three million.By the time the 1990s came along, shipbuilding, mining, steel production and coal had been pretty much obliterated.People like my father were either unemployed, working abroad or had managed to cling on to work locally.This turbulent period in British history was captured rather well in the cult TV series Auf Wiedersein, Pet, a comedy-drama about a gang of seven British workers escaping the mile-long dole queues in England to take up cash-in-hand jobs in West Germany.Men and their roles in society were changing in a way that would be depicted two decades later in The Full Monty, a film which told the story of a group of out-of-work steel workers stripping to make money and rebuild their self-esteem.When I say their roles in society were changing, I do not just mean they were at a loose end, I mean they were on a course to live shorter lives than men in the South.My dad struggled to find regular work, accepting short term contracts and working six days a week.By the mid-1990s, interest rates had reached 15% and a lot of families, mine included, were struggling to make ends meet.In March 1995, at the age of 48, my dad collapsed and died in front of me. But how can this be?Successive governments have either ignored the problem or deliberately diverted money to the South, where the perceived benefits to the national economy are greater.The reality is that the North-South divide is a black mark on the whole of Britain. Manchester But it is my webpage, and you are looking at it (for some reason I can't really fathom).
Nick has made documentaries on a wide range of issues from Mexico’s drug cartels, terrorism and the threat posed by plastics in the oceans. Sky News has approximately 600 staff of which approximately 50 work on-screen. Anyway, welcome. PGP Key. Nick Martin Look. It's a blog. Line 18: Sky's Nick Martin explains why he is proud to be Northern Successive governments have failed to address the invisible line splitting the UK in two, and the inequalities it breeds. Even at this tender age he knew music was to be the foremost interest in his life!