The day Prescott's regional assembly ambitions died
Ah, remember, remember the Fourth of November, referendums, regional assemblies and routs.
We're marking an anniversary on this weekend's Politics Show.
It was five years ago next week that the North East delivered a resounding raspberry to John Prescott's plans for a regional assembly.
In case you've forgotten, a region which was supposed to embrace the idea with enthusiasm rejected it by a margin of four to one.
The plans to roll out referendums in the North West (including Cumbria) and Yorkshire were hastily dumped by a chastened Prezza.
And unsurprisingly there's been little clamour for their revival since.
Indeed the unelected assembly that had pre-existed the vote, and was supposed to pave the way for its successor, has also subsequently been abolished.
You can read my thoughts on why the campaign failed here.
And you can even test your recall of the events of 2004 by taking a quiz.
But of course despite the demise of the assembly idea, we still are governed in some ways in regional form.
Government offices are organised into regions, there's the regional development agencies, regional housing boards and there are still plans to get regional fire control rooms off the ground.
All organisations that are pretty unaccountable to voters.
The Conservative solution is to scrap, or in the odd case, reform them, and hand their powers to councils.
Labour insist though that some things are better done by region, even if the assembly idea is dead.
My colleague Mark Denten has though found three people who voted no to an assembly who've now had a rethink.
Of course, no sane government is about to hold a vote again, but it'll be interesting to hear their reasoning.
I'm Richard Moss, the BBC's Political Editor for the North East and Cumbria. Welcome to my irreverent - but hopefully insightful - northern take on reporting politics for Look North and the Politics Show. 
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