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North and South

The rise and fall of northern England as an industrial power is one of the signal processes in modern British history: something to set alongside the rise and rise of the City of London. Its pioneering Industrial Revolution has a stronger case for priority in the world-historical reckoning than anything the rest of the country can boast; only London as capital of empire and high finance will bear the comparison. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the economies of the South East (including London) and the North were roughly on level pegging, accounting for 35 and 30 per cent of British gross domestic product respectively. By the end of the twentieth century, the South East’s share had risen to 40 while the North’s had dropped to 21 per cent. From a position near parity, the regions had so diverged in their fortunes that the output of one was twice that of the other. Through boom and bust, London then increased its share by another 5 percentage points between 1997 and 2017.¹

Regional disparities grounded in successive rounds of uneven development and the biases of official policy are not peculiar to Britain. As David Harvey has written, ‘Capitalism is uneven geographical development’ – and, if anything, becoming more so. The era of neoliberal globalisation multiplied opportunities for ‘the uneven insertion of different territories and social formations into the capitalist world market’.² As regulatory powers are stripped away, wealth is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of the opulent few. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a mouthpiece for free-market economies, notes that ‘while gaps in GDP per capita across OECD countries have narrowed over the last two decades, within their own borders countries are witnessing increasing income gaps among regions, cities and people’.³

If this is the common pattern, Britain is nevertheless a special case in a European context: more lopsided economically than Italy, despite its notoriously incomplete Risorgimento; than Spain, with its historic polarity of Catalan–Basque industry and Andalusian latifundia; than Germany, where a quarter of a century after reunification GDP per head in the East was still only two-thirds of that in the West; than France, enshadowed by a metropolis great enough to warrant comparison with its cross-Channel neighbour. At the time of Cameron’s Brexit referendum, output per head was eight times higher in inner west London than in West Wales and the Valleys, the largest difference to be found in any EU member state from Bantry Bay to the Dniester.⁴ So it is that a former regional-policy adviser at the European Commission could observe that ‘the economic geography of the UK nowadays increasingly reflects the patterns typically observed in developing or former-transition economies rather than in other advanced economies’. In several peripheral states – Ireland and Portugal in the far west; the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia to the east – only the capital city region achieves output per capita above the EU average.⁵ The UK is richer, but aside from the intermezzo of the Industrial Revolution, its development has been similarly monocentric.

The enmeshing of low-wage Asian and east European economies in Western capitalist supply chains in the last quarter of the twentieth century caused the manufacturing bases of all West European and North American countries to contract to some degree. But northern England has tumbled from a unique pedestal, that of the world’s first industrial region, and fallen further than the world-economic conjuncture demanded. The contribution of manufacturing to national output in the UK has flatlined at just 10 per cent since 2007, barely a third of the figure for Germany and a smaller proportion also than for other comparable economies.⁶

One would have struggled to get a sense, however, from panegyrics to the North – whether by writers in residence or those exiled in London – of any sort of regional crisis brewing. According to Martin Wainwright’s True North (2009), published toward the end of the New Labour period, the region has it all: breath-taking countryside, the Sellafield nuclear complex, fish and chips.⁷ Through all their ups and downs, northerners have retained their inventiveness and independence of mind. Derelict industrial sites have found new life as heritage parks, leisure attractions and loft conversions. Manchester has been ‘utterly, wonderfully transformed’ since an IRA bombing in 1996 blasted away the city’s declinist mentality. Likewise, Liverpool is an ‘astonishingly different’ place to the decaying, demoralised hulk of the eighties. The credit for the latter’s revival belongs to Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s minister for Merseyside, whose diagnosis of the city’s ills – sidelined and demoralised local leadership, weak corporate management and belligerent trade unions – was ‘spot on’.⁷ Forget, for a moment, that Liverpool still had one of the worst real unemployment rates in Britain, and that Manchester suffered the largest decrease in gross disposable household income per head, relative to the UK average, of any local area under New Labour and the Cameron coalition.⁸

In language reminiscent of Thatcher’s diatribe about ‘moaning minnies’ when challenged by a Tyne Tees reporter about high unemployment in the North East, Wainwright warns about a victim mentality spreading out from coalfields: a misplaced suspicion that London will never play fair by the region. It would be much better, in his view, to accentuate the positive. ‘I know there is a downside to life up here, just as there is everywhere in the world. But we really don’t need to go on about it.’ Northern editor of what was once the Manchester Guardian, Wainwright would probably agree that the North has a reputation for plain speaking: it warrants sharper treatment than this.⁹

Part of the problem in writing about the North is how to characterise a region which constitutionally doesn’t exist. For as long as it lasts, the United Kingdom is a unitary, not a federal, state: political power is focussed on the golden triangle of Whitehall, Westminster and St James’s – a West End counterpart to the concentration of financial power within the Square Mile. Devolved parliaments and assemblies in the Celtic fringe exist purely at Westminster’s pleasure, as periodic reversions to direct rule over Northern Ireland attest. Delegation of executive functions from London to the English regions is officially countenanced only in contingency planning for a nuclear attack or – almost as bad – large-scale trade-union strike action.¹⁰ There used to be a Northern region running along the Scottish border until the Major government, tinkering with the structure as it looked to draw in EU funding, reassigned Cumbria to the North West and created a North East region out of the remainder. So much for the official North: no more than a caprice of the Whitehall mind.

If the North isn’t a hand-me-down from the UK’s archaic constitutional arrangements, nor is it a product of simple geography. The old riverine markers – Defoe likened his foray beyond the Trent to crossing the Rubicon – weren’t clinching facts even in feudal times. According to a recent appraisal, the medieval North could be said to have comprised the five and a half counties above the Humber, Ouse and Ribble; the eight counties north of the Humber, Trent and Mersey; or these eight together with Cheshire and Lincolnshire.¹¹

Does the North announce itself with any clarity? A sense of cultural belonging certainly exists, but it’s low-wattage compared to the nationalist imaginaries of the Basque Country and Catalonia, with their separatist movements, distinctive languages and jealously guarded autonomies. Unlike Spain, regional identities in England have been levelled out by a millennium of centralised rule and the modern impress of powerful institutions like the Fleet Street of old and the BBC. The British state may have independence movements to contend with in Northern Ireland and Scotland but there is no prospect of the English core coming unstuck. Despite a regional inflection to voting patterns, the English choose between national political parties and consume the same news. The Northern Echo, self-styled ‘Great Daily of the North’, has a circulation of just 23,000 spread across County Durham, north Yorkshire and Teesside. Another ‘national newspaper for the North’, called 24, launched in Carlisle in 2016 only to close within a few weeks, squeezed out by the Fleet Street dailies. Three northern regionalist parties emerged either side of the 2014 European Parliament elections, beginning with Yorkshire First, founded by an expat Holmfirth businessman, but it would require the introduction of regional assemblies elected by proportional representation to give such groups a foothold, and the Holyrood model looks increasingly foolhardy from a Whitehall perspective – devolution is ‘a dangerous game to play’, says Blair – so there will be no significant loosening of centralist shackles.¹² Taken together, the current North East, North West and Yorkshire–Humber regions are two-and-a-half times the size of Scotland in terms of population and economic output, apparently without meriting any relaxation of direct rule from London.

In academic literature, ‘a consensus emerges that northern consciousness is both extremely fragile and generally secondary to other systems of identification.’¹³ Even smaller regional groupings struggle to overcome local particularities. The North East is ‘incoherent and barely self-conscious’; Lancashire ‘more a geographical expression than a cultural unity’; Yorkshire the butt of Conservative jokes on account of infighting between its municipal elites.¹⁴ Simon Green, co-editor of the Northern History journal at the University of Leeds, concedes that

England’s historic regions seldom enjoyed much more than the trappings of independent government. As a result, they always wanted, and now self-evidently lack, many of the most important political dimensions of modern regionalism. That institutional poverty had inevitable cultural implications too. Put bluntly, English regionalism was and is comparatively weak.¹⁵

Remarkably, Northern History nevertheless managed to pull together a working model of the North in short order. When it launched in 1966, the journal defined its target region, without further ado, in terms of ‘the six northern counties’: Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire. Six shortly became seven with the surreptitious addition of Cheshire at the behest of editorial committee member Arthur Taylor. ‘The change was not only silent, it was unexplained in private as well as in public sources. It remains, largely, unexplained,’ comments Green quizzically.¹⁶ The selection may apparently serve as its own justification.

Northern History grew out of a campus study group established in Leeds in the late fifties by Asa Briggs, liberal historian of Victorian Britain, just as fresh ideas like new social history were emerging onto the academic scene. ‘Professional historians have begun to pull apart “nation”, “economy” and “society” and to examine the nature and significance of local differentiation,’ wrote Briggs. His edited volume Chartist Studies, a set of area-based studies, dates to this period. Outside the academy, public agencies and private-sector developers were combining to transform the face of the North – slums and smokestacks giving way to highrise flats, industrial estates, shopping precincts, ring roads and motorways. ‘The North of England is changing so rapidly,’ Briggs observed, ‘that now is the time to clarify some issues in its history which it may be difficult to sort out in the future.’¹⁷ The idea of the region was also in political vogue. Macmillan appointed a minister for the North East; Wilson pledged to create economic planning machinery in every region.¹⁸

In Northern History’s inaugural issue, Briggs urged contributors to keep away from the parish-pump, antiquarian school of local history. ‘Outward-looking rather than inward-looking northern history is what is most needed, the kind of history which sets out to compare.’ But he was writing from a new billet at the University of Sussex, and founder editor Gordon Forster instead aimed for a balance between comparative analysis and more conventional town and county history. Forster’s own interests were weighted towards the latter: he contributed well-rounded pieces on early modern Beverley, Hull and York to the famously antiquarian Victoria County History series.¹⁹ In the event, Northern History’s publication record has favoured local and discrete studies – the evolution of the Doncaster corn market, burial practices in the northern Danelaw – over wide-angled or unorthodox perspectives. Comparative pieces tend to be confined to northern territory: the strength of Methodism in three contrasting areas of the Durham coalfield; Second World War civilian morale in Hull, Liverpool and Manchester. On Green’s count, the proportion of articles taking up a general regional theme has risen over time from a quarter to closer to a third. A 2013 retrospective by Sheffield historian David Hey to mark the publication of Northern History’s fiftieth volume jettisoned the ‘old tradition’ of a North–South divide on the ground that the sheer diversity of the North, amply demonstrated in the journal’s pages, defied generalisation. The journal has accumulated a rich storehouse of scholarly work, but as an intellectual project it amounts to northern history virtually without a North.²⁰

The only serious general history of the North has been Frank Musgrove’s The North of England: A History from Roman Times to the Present (1990), which originated outside the history faculty – as does this present venture. Musgrove was a professor of education at the University of Manchester and a headstrong, combustible writer inflected with the libertarian impulses of the New Right. He had taught in schools on the Nottinghamshire coalfield and in colonial Uganda (the British ‘certainly left Africa far too early’).²¹ A Nottingham grammar school boy, he became a trenchant critic of the move under Wilson and Heath to all-ability comprehensive education. Mass schooling of adolescents was a disaster. It was up to society, not overworked teachers, to solve ‘the already serious problem of massive surpluses of human beings in post-industrial states’.²² Evincing a patrician disgust for the sordid business of electoral politics, he endorsed the Maastricht Treaty on the unorthodox ground that ‘when a significant amount of our political life has been displaced across the Channel we may at last devote appropriate time, talent and resources to other vital areas of our national life like philosophy, science, literature, industry and technology’.²³

These conservative reflexes are evident in his history of the North, which highlights ‘four periods of particular northern distinction, importance and power’: Roman times, including York’s brief fame as an imperial capital; the Northumbrian renaissance of the seventh and eighth centuries; the Wars of the Roses; and the Industrial Revolution. The principal dynamic is the ebb and flow of power between centre and circumference. In Musgrove’s telling, the North has not so much been transformed through its history as periodically set free. Instances of government neglect, whether of medieval border defences or today’s inner cities, ought to be occasions for provincial flourishing. ‘The essential conflict of the later twentieth century is not against a dominant “class” but against a dominant and over-extended centre.’ Thatcher’s sell-offs of public corporations heralded a welcome new phase of decentralisation. He makes no mention of privatisation’s corporate beneficiaries or of the Conservatives’ simultaneous assault on local-government freedoms. Instead the book closes with a broadside against the 1984–5 miners’ strike, condemned as an outrageous example of regional sectionalism. The pits were a drain on the Exchequer and had to go.²⁴ While the strike was on, Musgrove exploited his academic credentials to denigrate the miners in the Murdoch press as ill-educated dupes, ‘diluted human residues’, whose ‘conceptual range does not extend much beyond “scab”’.²⁵

The North was due a historian but hardly deserved becoming a target of this wretched social Darwinism. Nevertheless, frothing obiter dicta don’t lessen the significance of Musgrove’s book; indeed, one could fairly say it towers over the rest of what is available, if only because it offers a historical take on the North in a longue durée going back to Roman times; is consistently class-focussed; sets the region in a context wider than just the South – above all its relation to Scotland, but also Europe; and integrates the intellectual–cultural aspects of the region fully along with the economic and political dimensions. Criticism, in a case like this, can never be simple dismissal.

Within the academy, though, The North of England was out of step with the cultural turn overtaking northern studies in this period. Musgrove’s colleague at Manchester Patrick Joyce indicates the postmodern mood of the times in Visions of the People (1991), an anti-Marxist polemic wrapped up in an account of mass culture in industrial Lancashire between the decline of Chartism and the First World War. Class consciousness, argues Joyce – ‘the term has indeed an antiquated ring to it’ – was not strongly in evidence outside the factory and trade-union chapel. In other settings, non-economic and populist conceptions of the social order prevailed. Of course, Joyce was hardly the first to remark on the ‘essentially bourgeois ideas and viewpoints’ of English workers.²⁶

One of the better books to come out of the cultural-studies complex, Dave Russell’s Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (2004), examines the amount of cultural autonomy enjoyed by the North in fields ranging from dialect literature to the big screen. ‘The North has never been able to enjoy a sustained or broad-based cultural leadership,’ Russell observes. English national culture ‘has always been largely constructed from within London and its immediate environs’. Breakthrough moments for the region – the industrial novels of the 1840s, the Wigan Pier era, the kitchen-sink dramas of the late fifties and early sixties, post-industrial Manchester’s music scene – were flash-in-the-pan affairs, even if Factory Records still enjoys plenty of cachet.²⁷

DJ Dave Haslam and NME writer Paul Morley have each hazarded Hacienda-tinged reflections on the historical personality of ‘Madchester’.²⁸ Morley’s euphoric place-memoir and montage book The North (and Almost Everything in It) (2013) venerates ‘a North packed with intrepid people handing on the North, as they see it, all that history, and nature, and difference. A North, all on its own.’ There isn’t much concession to London-centrism here. As an exercise in style and rhetoric, Morley’s offering is ambitious. It alternates between localized, micro-Stockport reminiscence/self-presentation and a collage of decontextualized figures, from or connected to, the North – comedians, writers, musicians, artists, scientists, politicians – plus chronological oddments going back to the Middle Ages. The method, according to the author, is a combination of Tristram Shandy and trawling the internet. Morley’s lead hero, because he comes from Oldham, is Labour frontbencher J. R. Clynes, best known for his ignominious role in helping to break the General Strike (the year 1926 is conspicuously missing from Morley’s chronological landmarks). There is a reverent tribute to Clynes’s refusal to fight the class war from David Miliband, while another former New Labour minister praises Barbara Castle for her valiant effort to tighten industrial-relations law. Harold Wilson, meanwhile, is converted into ‘one of the outstanding scholars of his generation’. A hymn to the ‘brilliance of the North’ and its ‘twenty-first-century Renaissance’, The North (and Almost Everything in It) is, in its own account, ‘hallucination, not history’. In this excitable company, literary critic Terry Eagleton, also formerly of Manchester University, is probably right to caution that ‘there’s no need to get too misty-eyed about the region’.²⁹

Let’s instead pick up the trail laid down by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), when he observes that ‘it was the industrialisation of the North that gave the North–South antithesis its peculiar slant.’³⁰ The proliferation of cotton mills, coalmines and shipyards in a hitherto backwater region lent British capitalism an unusual dual character. During the factory capitalism of the long nineteenth century, stretching from the Napoleonic Wars to 1914, England was split between older capitalist sectors in the South – commerce, finance, agriculture – and leading-edge industrial concerns upcountry.³¹ The small traditional manufactories of southern counties were driven out of business; in consequence, the shires were turned over more fully to the agricultural and leisured classes. ‘London was once the very focus of national thought and industry, surrounded on every side by the most flourishing parts of the country,’ the Cornhill Magazine, a bastion of the metropolitan literati, wistfully remarked in 1881. But the South had been reduced to ‘a succession of quiet rural districts’, while the Great Wen depended for continued greatness upon its traditional administrative functions, its enormous number of inhabitants, its centrality in the national transport network and its unrivalled amenities for high society.³²

Surveying the pattern of party affiliation shortly afterwards, in the Edwardian period, the liberal economist J. A. Hobson noted a hardening electoral divide between a Unionist, non-industrial South and an industrial North which voted Liberal or Labour. Each bloc had a distinct pattern of money making, lifestyle and culture. They amounted, in these matters, to separate countries:

One England in which the well-to-do classes, from their numbers, wealth, leisure and influence, mould the external character of the civilisation and determine the habits, feelings and opinions of the people, the other England in which the structure and activities of large organised industries, carried on by great associated masses of artisans, factory hands and miners, are the dominating facts and forces.³³

The distinction between an industrial North and genteel– commercial South persisted in the interwar period. Even though the South East had by this point amassed more manufacturing jobs than the North West, as new consumer industries clustered around the enormous London market, there still wasn’t much of an industrial stamp about the Home Counties, which continued to function as a pleasure park for the moneyed classes despite the wealth-sapping effects of the war and a bumpy world economy. ‘There is at least a tinge of truth in that picture of southern England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards,’ commented Orwell.

For climatic reasons the parasitic dividend-drawing class tend to settle in the South. In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without once hearing an ‘educated’ accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.

The North, by contrast, remained home to most of the coal industry and other Victorian staples, and therefore also to ‘the most typical section of the English working class’. The region had become a byword, however, not for earnest industry – Hobson’s phrase – but for mass industrial unemployment. ‘To study unemployment and its effects you have got to go to the industrial areas,’ wrote Orwell. ‘In the South unemployment exists, but it is scattered and queerly unobtrusive. There are plenty of rural districts where a man out of work is almost unheard-of, and you don’t anywhere see the spectacle of whole blocks of cities living on the dole and the [Public Assistance Committee].’³⁴

The North reflated during the Second World War, but in the post-1945 period its smokestack industries were no match for the newer manufacturing plant and bustling service economy of the South, which soon began to pull away again. To deflect criticism over this discrepancy, Labour and the Conservatives between them extended a modest state-aid regime across the whole of northern England, Scotland and Wales. Private-sector manufacturers were cajoled, but not directed, into siting overspill plant in the former depressed areas. ‘To the southerner, the North, like the poor, is “always with us”: and to assist the unluckier half of this island is a work of expensive charity,’ observed Neil Ascherson in 1962.³⁵ Drifting into difficulty a decade later, British capitalism threw the burden of provincial manufacturing overboard. The real value of regional industrial assistance fell by two-thirds between 1975 and 1985.³⁶

Industrial decline, retrenchment of the state’s social functions and, latterly, market-driven urban redevelopment have combined to blight large swathes of the North. ‘Staring out the window, the strangest thing I saw was how desolate and empty the streets are now. We would drive for minutes without seeing anyone,’ remarked journalist Stephen Armstrong, surveying the legacy of New Labour’s urban-regeneration programme in bulldozed east Manchester in 2011. ‘Instead of dirty, closely packed housing there were acres and acres of desolate ground all grassed over. You could still see the outline of streets, where houses used to be – but now, nothing. It was as if the Triffids had arrived.’ Armstrong’s previous work, The Super-Rich Shall Inherit the Earth (2010), had given an ambivalent assessment of the doings of the global economic elite on the British scene. The UK had become ‘a kind of damp Monte Carlo’, the world-financial hub of London attracting billionaires from around the world on account of its money-laundering facilities, property portfolios and enviable lifestyle options. Just as J. A. Hobson had written a century earlier, south-east England remains, for the privileged classes, ‘a place of residence and a playground’.³⁷

Deindustrialisation has meant that contemporary regional disparities are characterised less by industry versus finance than by the positional superiority of London in a services-dominated national economic space – the northern rustbelt acting, in effect, as senior representative of left-behind England. However, since the North has never achieved the escape velocity needed to free itself from its industrial past, we may have licence to approach the region by way of the original sites of the manufacturing revolution, in order to see how they have fared. So defined, the North centres on the old Lancashire–Yorkshire textile belt, flanked by the ports of Liverpool and Hull; the former heavy-industrial zones of west Lancashire, west Cumberland, south Yorkshire and the North East coast; and the abandoned coalfields these conurbations grew up on and around. This North encompasses the major urban areas of the official North East, North West and Yorkshire– Humber regions while also taking in High Peak textile towns such as Glossop and New Mills as well as the north Derbyshire coalfield, which ‘looked to Sheffield as a natural centre’.³⁸

On a statistical basis, much more of the Midlands belongs on the northern side of the regional divide. The aggregated socioeconomic indicators point to a fissure running east to west between the Humber and Severn estuaries, stranding not just the northern regions but also the West Midlands except Warwickshire and the East Midland counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in the zone of relative economic disadvantage.³⁹ In the aftermath of the deep industrial recession inflicted by the first Thatcher administration, Beatrix Campbell penned Wigan Pier Revisited (1984) in dialogue with Orwell’s original commentary. ‘The crisis of the eighties occasions a return visit,’ she explained. But Wigan, shorn of its cotton and coal, was now a town ‘much like anywhere else, with a bit of light engineering and service industries’. Campbell therefore extended her remit to the recession-blighted West Midlands. Its auto trade had been one of the twentieth century’s major growth industries; the car worker, not the coal miner, was ‘the modern paradigm of the working class’. When this industry hit the buffers in the seventies, it supplanted Lancashire cotton as the emblem of British manufacturing decline. To study mass unemployment and its effects, you didn’t any more need to travel further north than Coventry, where ‘on whole housing estates half the population are on the dole.’⁴⁰

Crucially, though, the Midlands arrived at this sorry pass via a different route. Until the eighteenth century it had been

bound into a nexus of economic and social values which connected it to the prevailing county interests of the South. Anglican, Tory, protectionist, this ‘estate’ culture was inimical even to the pre-industrial values of the less heavily ‘countified’ North … Later, the eclipse of the [rural] Warwickshire interest and the rise of industry in the Midland towns appears to re-centre the region in the general scheme of things, bringing its character (if not its exact structure) more into line with the North and causing some renegotiation of its currency.⁴¹

Closer to the North, but still structurally distinct, the Midlands hosted some notable early experiments in factory production: Boulton’s Soho manufactory near Birmingham, Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, Wedgwood’s Staffordshire pottery works. But once Manchester had cornered the steam-powered cotton trade, the East Midlands was relegated to also-ran status – busy in the manufacture of hosiery and lace, boots and shoes, and subsequently also of locomotives, but no industrial behemoth – while Birmingham and the Black Country met the booming demand for a miscellany of domestic metal goods (pots and pans, locks, light arms, etc.) by multiplying the number of workshops and sweatshops instead of concentrating production in big factories. What the Industrial Revolution required, wrote Hobsbawm, was ‘the special kind of expansion which produced Manchester rather than Birmingham’.⁴² When J. A. Hobson in 1910 accused Birmingham of severing itself from the bulk of industrial Britain through its defection from Liberalism to Unionism, he explained this shift not only in terms of the charisma and political machine of former mayor Joseph Chamberlain, but also by reference to the city’s peculiar industrial structure: ‘small factories or workshops which do not favour effective trade unionism, and are engaged in making goods which are exposed to close foreign competition, to an unusual extent’.⁴³ An artisanal centre slow to switch over to the factory system, Birmingham followed its own distinct trajectory; it has a different story to tell.⁴⁴

Such are the objective coordinates that have historically differentiated England’s North, Midlands and South. On the other side of the coin is the question of when, and in what ways, the North became a subjective category of widely received social or political significance. What were the stages and markers of this process? Once again, the answer appears to lie in the industrial era. Although Helen Jewell’s book The North–South Divide (1994), subtitled The Origin of Northern Consciousness in England, purports to track regional self-consciousness back to Northumbrian times, what emerges from her trawl of the archives is instead the cultural othering of a backwater region – in her rendering, ‘ferocious, obstinate and unyielding’ – within the upper ranks of southern English society. In other words, it shows the all but complete absence of regional self-consciousness in the period she covers, roughly 600–1750. What at the end she does concede, to her credit, is that in so far as there were conceptions of the ‘North’ as a separate region/culture within England, these came from the South, not the North itself. But they were themselves at most casual and sporadic.⁴⁵

Genuine crystallisation of a systematic identification of the North as a region seems to date only from the 1850s, the moment of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel. For Raymond Williams, ‘the mood of England in the Industrial Revolution is a mood of contrasts’. North and South captured it best of all the industrial novels. The book is an adventure in binaries: town and country, Anglicanism and Dissent, rich and poor, paternalism and laissez-faire, even a little pride and prejudice.⁴⁶ It is also the strongest dramatisation of the changed regional equation resulting from the spatial concentration of the factory system. Gaskell’s protagonist, Margaret Hale, is a young gentlewoman from Hampshire with London tastes cultivated during visits to an aunt in Harley Street. When her clerical father has Doubts, the family must relocate to Milton-Northern, a fictionalised Manchester. Unfortunately, Margaret has ‘almost a detestation for all she had ever heard of the North of England’. The Hales travel to Milton via London, where Margaret’s mother rhapsodises about the fine carriages and vast plate-glass shop windows. On arriving at Milton, a different cityscape confronts them:

Long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly built houses, all small and of brick. Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black ‘unparliamentary’ smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain. As they drove through the larger and wider streets, from the station to the hotel, they had to stop constantly; great loaded lorries blocked up the not over-wide thoroughfares. Margaret had now and then been into the city [of London] in her drives with her aunt. But there the heavy lumbering vehicles seemed various in their purposes and intent; here every van, every wagon and truck, bore cotton, either in the raw shape in bags, or the woven shape in bales of calico. People thronged the footpaths, most of them well-dressed as regarded the material, but with a slovenly looseness which struck Margaret as different from the shabby, threadbare smartness of a similar class in London.⁴⁷

Manchester versus London: a smoke-ridden monoculture dealing in a single commodity, juxtaposed with the varied commercial life of the capital, its high-end retail outlets and better-turned-out common folk. While it is possible to match up certain functionally equivalent towns on either side of the North–South divide – cathedral cities Canterbury and York; spa towns Bath and Harrogate; the ports of Bristol and Newcastle – there are no southern counterparts to the great industrial cities of the North. As Gaskell puts it, ‘Milton is a much more smoky, dirty town than you will ever meet with in the South.’⁴⁸

Margaret’s impression of a difference in social mores in her new home is soon vindicated. The factory hands are brassy; the mill owners bluff. ‘One had need to learn a different language, and measure by a different standard, up here in Milton.’ Disagreements multiply about social ethics and standards of living. Margaret is appalled by the poisonous industrial relations in the town. Her paternalistic instincts are perhaps in keeping with the Hale family’s accustomed milieu of clergymen and country squires; they may also reflect Gaskell’s reading of Thomas Carlyle. But in Milton they run up against the hard-faced Manchester school of self-help. This from cotton magnate John Thornton:

I value my own independence so highly that I fancy no degradation greater than that of having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturing me, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He might be the wisest of men, or the most powerful – I should equally rebel and resent his interference. I imagine this is a stronger feeling in the North of England than in the South.⁴⁹

Margaret defends the southern way against Thornton but changes tack when quizzed by careworn factory hands about a land where, according to her wistful remembrances, ‘food is cheap and wages good, and all the folk, rich and poor, master and man, friendly like’. No, she insists, the South would not suit them:

You would not bear the dullness of the life; you don’t know what it is; it would eat you away like rust. Those that have lived there all their lives, are used to soaking in the stagnant waters. They labour on, from day to day, in the great solitude of steaming fields – never speaking or lifting up their poor, bent, downcast heads … You could not stir them up into any companionship, which you get in a town as plentiful as the air you breathe, whether it be good or bad.

This overcooked passage ignores a tradition of agricultural protest, most conspicuously the Swing riots of 1830–31, but serves its purpose of bringing England’s two halves back into essential balance. One of Margaret’s interlocutors obligingly concludes, ‘North an’ South have each getten their own troubles. If work’s sure and steady theer, labour’s paid at starvation prices; while here we’n rucks o’ money coming in one quarter, and ne’er a farthing th’ next.’⁵⁰

Identification of the North as a society composed of just two classes, industrialists and factory workers, neither of whom existed in the South, underwent two subsequent, crucial modifications. Next came the moment when, the industrial bourgeoisie having so completely either fused with capital or the ruling class at large or just faded away, the North became identified essentially solely with the working class that remained in situ, forming anyway the great majority of the population. This wasn’t necessarily at all a negative projection. It dates from a century later, between the late 1950s and the arrival of the Beatles in 1962 – the years of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, kitchen-sink dramas such as A Taste of Honey and Room at the Top, and the beginnings of Granada television in Lancashire and Yorkshire, whose success would force BBC output onto northern terrain (The Likely Lads, Z Cars).⁵¹ For a brief period, this heady brew took the character of a creative insurgency against the southern citadels of cultural complacency. Arguably it was ultimately incorporated (a first wave of corporate ‘diversity’) into the renewal/déclassement of the London cultural–intellectual establishment, but the work of northern novelists, film directors and television writers, as well as the music scene, asserted a preponderantly positive image of the region’s post-war working class.

Then came, in a sharp twist, crystallisation of the North’s – unequivocally negative – identity as the loser in the divide between two regions. This happened in the Thatcher years, and ironically succeeded a prior phase in which identification of the North with popular life and working-class culture in a positive register actually peaked.⁵² The recession of the early 1980s afforded the backdrop for Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff in high-unemployment Liverpool, with its ‘Gizza job’ refrain, complemented later in the decade by Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ persona on Saturday Live, a satire of the self-made Essex man.

Moral indignation at this turn of events, of the sort articulated in Mark Herman’s film Brassed Off (1996), set in a south Yorkshire colliery slated for closure, was drowned out by the feel-good musicals of the New Labour boom (The Full Monty and Herman’s follow-up Little Voice), termed by the critic Owen Hatherley the ‘dance, prole, dance’ genre.⁵³ On the small screen, Peter Flannery’s keynote saga Our Friends in the North (also 1996) – contrasting sixties working-class Newcastle and seedy swinging London, united by the endemic corruption of public life – concluded with two of its Geordie protagonists edging towards the New Labour law-and-order establishment, the third flourishing as an entrepreneur, the fourth a down-and-out but urged not to follow the example of John Osborne’s play of 1956, Look Back in Anger. The past is history, just so much water under the Tyne Bridge. A depoliticised, bepuzzled North entered the new millennium a basket case of eccentric small-town traditionals (Count Arthur Strong, League of Gentlemen) and council estate ‘chavs’ (Shameless or, in a more affectionate register, The Royle Family), with some room afforded for bohemian enclaves in the major cities (Queer as Folk).

If these are the rough historical outlines of England’s sociocultural regional divide, what is the question such a mapping exercise sets us on the way to answering? Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s approach to Italy’s ‘Southern Question’, from which the title of this book takes its cue, offers some pointers. His thinking on the subject went through three iterations. The first appeared on 5 January 1920 in the pages of L’Ordine Nuovo, journal of Socialist Party leftists in Turin shortly to break away to form the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci had enrolled at Turin University following a youth spent on the impoverished island of Sardinia, where separatist feeling ran high. Its school-yard rendering, in his recollection, was ‘Throw the mainlanders into the sea!’⁵⁴ The move to Turin set him down among these very mainlanders. The Piedmontese capital had lain at the centre of the Italian national project for several decades either side of the Risorgimento of 1861, and had gone on to become the beating heart of the country’s late-developing manufacturing sector. Immersion in its industrial politics modified Gramsci’s insular political formation, bringing the dynamics of region and class into productive tension.

As he penned his article on ‘Workers and peasants’, the Bolshevik revolution still belonged to the realm of current affairs and the road seemingly lay open for communist advances in Italy as well as across the Alps in the defeated Central Powers. Gramsci set out the strategic imperative of ranging both northern factory worker and southern agricultural labourer against Giolitti’s faltering liberal–bourgeois state. ‘The northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies,’ he protested. Parliamentary reformism was never going to set them free. Only a proletarian state could do that, liberating the peasant masses from the yoke of northern banking and industrial giants. In turn, it was in the interests of the Turin militants – this was the essential burden of his argument – to enlist the support of the peasantry, not least to avoid the Mezzogiorno becoming a safe-house for counterrevolutionary forces.⁵⁵

To this theme he returned in ‘Notes on the southern problem’, an essay written in the weeks preceding his arrest by Mussolini’s Fascists on 8 November 1926 and prompted by a mischaracterisation of his views on agrarian policy by an upstart socialist publication in Milan. The Turin communists, he insisted, had correctly identified the Southern Question as ‘one of the essential problems of the national politics of the revolutionary proletariat’. In a country like Italy, where industrial workers were largely confined to a triangle of northern cities – Turin, Milan, Genoa – they could only hope to become hegemonic (‘leading and dominant’) through a system of class alliances to organise the consent of the immiserated population living further down the peninsula. Bourgeois-derived prejudices against the South as ‘a ball and chain that prevents a more rapid progress in the civil development of Italy’ had to be broken to prevent a retreat into the cul-de-sac of regional particularism.⁵⁶

During his decade of incarceration, writing under the censor’s scrutiny, the Southern Question underwent a change of time span and of protagonist. From the looked-for proletarian revolution on the horizon, Gramsci switched his gaze to its truncated bourgeois predecessor of 1861, in a reconstruction of Italian political development reaching deep into the past. The medieval bourgeoisie, he observed, created ‘molecular’ urban communes in the North – Bologna, Genoa, Milan, Padua and so on – without ever cohering around a national-popular programme. Intellectuals instead assumed a cosmopolitan character, modelled after the resident Catholic Church. (The Holy Roman Empire exercised a similar retarding influence on German national development.) Machiavelli’s hopes for a nation state capable of resisting foreign domination during the Renaissance were dashed. Formal unification, when it came in the nineteenth century, completely failed to create any kind of genuine peninsular unity, which required popular integration of the masses in North and South alike into the new state, of the kind that had been achieved in Revolutionary France. The prime minister of Piedmont, Count Cavour, carried the North and Centre with a minimum of popular engagement. Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand toppled the dilapidated structure of Bourbon rule in Sicily and Naples at a stroke, only to hand the South over to the Piedmontese monarchy and its Mezzogiorno latifundist associates. Garibaldi was too much in thrall to the House of Savoy to raise the peasantry as part of a rival liberal-national republican formation. (The French Jacobins, binding rural France to the hegemony of Paris, had shown how this was to be done.) Instead, Italy’s rulers held the South by an admixture of military force – the war against brigandage – fiscal imposition and public–payroll clientelism. The tasks this historical inheritance posed the revolutionary movement of Gramsci’s own time were those he had been adumbrating since 1920. ‘Any organization of national popular will is impossible, unless the great mass of peasant farmers bursts simultaneously into political life.’⁵⁷

If the feebleness of Italian nationhood called forth, from Gramsci’s pen, an unmatched working-through of the geographical complexity of social stratification under ‘real’ historical conditions, what relevance can this have to England, one of the strongest national formations of all? There is at least a family resemblance between chauvinist disparagement of the Mezzogiorno and the condescension of London intellectuals towards unfashionable outlying stretches of the UK. The Spectator judged Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey ‘the inside story of a savage culture observed by a genuine cannibal’, while the present century has seen a libertarian think tank in Westminster describe north-east England as one of ‘Whitehall’s last colonies’, a sink of welfare dependency that ought to be cut adrift of state aid.⁵⁸

More than parallelism, however, Gramsci’s writing provides the occasion for contrastive reflection. In the nineteenth century, southern Italy and northern England occupied inverse positions in their national orders: respectively, those of an overwhelmingly rural economy and a thriving modern industrial zone. Upon unification, Cavour imposed Piedmont’s liberalised commercial arrangements on the rest of the peninsula in short order, killing off petty workshops in the Mezzogiorno previously sheltered by high tariffs. The industrialists of Lancashire, on the other hand, were Britain’s foremost champions of free trade, secure for the time being in their commercial superiority over foreign competitors. The economic backwardness of southern Italy persisted through the twentieth century, even as modern industry thrived in the North. In Britain, meanwhile, a fallen industrial North was reduced to pleading for state rescue, only to be given short shrift by London governments in thrall to a flourishing financial and commercial South. From different starting positions, the two regions had fallen into distinct but analogous states of ill fortune.

In some ways, the North–South divide in Britain is more qualified than in Italy. The Midlands is an intermediate zone of greater weight than Lazio/Romagna, and there is also the looming presence of Scotland as a much more distinct part of the UK than northern England, with a long past of previous statehood. Northern identity in England is weaker than the insular southern identity in Italy, due to the prior centuries of differential statehoods in the Mezzogiorno, as against the lack of any of these beyond the Trent.

But whereas the South in Britain is defined above all by possession of London, in Italy the capital isn’t in the North, and Rome in cultural connection and character is closer to the South, qualifying the polarity in counterbalancing fashion. Southerners have played a much greater modern role in the political class and bureaucracy of united Italy than northerners have in Britain. As Gramsci observed, while the urbanised society of northern Italy produced industrial technicians, the southern rural bourgeoisie sent forth state officials and professionals.⁵⁹ Since his time, the South has supplied as many Italian prime ministers as the North, not to mention the two most recent heads of state, whereas in postwar Britain, London and the Home Counties have accounted for ten prime ministers, the North only two, Eden and Wilson, both of whom had drifted away from the region by early adulthood.⁶⁰ Italy, for all its fissures, is a modern nation state with considerable provincial autonomies. The UK is the opposite: a hyper-centralised administration set within a pre-modern, composite kingdom – ‘not really a national state’, argued Tom Nairn, but rather ‘a southernlowland hegemonic bloc uniting a hereditary elite to the central processing unit of commercial and financial capital’.⁶¹

This text, far too long in the making, began life immediately preceding the 2008 financial crisis, when left politics was in the doldrums. It made sense, at the time, to follow the precedent of Gramsci’s third and final iteration of the Southern Question, in the Prison Notebooks, and shift the burden of the regional question from the revolutionary left to the liberal-conservative centre. The overarching problematic was conceived like this: what challenges did the rise and fall of the industrial North present to a remote and unsympathetic British state, and how have policy decisions taken in London – rarely for the best of motives – guided the region’s economic parabola from manufacturing powerhouse to twentyfirst-century also-ran?

The crash of 2008 put paid to the New Labour ‘economic miracle’ against which the book polemicises, but the 2016 Brexit vote then threw the regional question into high relief. Although the northern economy was in worse shape than before, a mass protest vote had made it politically salient again. This prompted fresh considerations. What roles has the North, and the social groups within it, played within the social-power configurations of the British Isles? Only in fits and starts have social classes within the region threatened to become ‘leading and dominant’ on the national stage. It is unusual, of course, for a historically less populous and less wealthy region to hegemonise a richer and better-located one: Prussia’s rule over the Rhineland was gifted by outside powers, in a conjuncture that prized military over economic strength. The North of England may not have Scotland’s power of secession, but it’s always exerted pressure, from a subaltern position, on the affairs of state, in ways particular to the historical moment: the ructions of a medieval borderland, its magnates wont to tread on kings, aren’t those of a precocious industrial society or subsiding post-industrial one, where different social forces are in motion. In this sense, what’s been termed the ‘problem of the North’ changes from one era to the next.⁶²

Retreating into a pure form of regional history would provide few answers to any of these points. Northern questions aren’t resolved on home territory: sovereign power and political accountability lie elsewhere. So we delve into the politics of Westminster and Whitehall, observing these proceedings from a northern perspective, to see what English history looks like when stood upon its head.