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Preface

How to get a handle on the politics of an out-of-kilter country like Britain? In The Northern Question I wager that it requires an approach to the problem of regional division. There was a brief period in the late 2010s when this became something of a commonplace. Nothing else could account for the topsy-turvy quality of the pre-pandemic years, when, as the Financial Times put it, ‘a new national appetite for upheaval’ turned Britain into ‘the Western world’s box of surprises’.¹

The political temperature in the capital gave a misleading impression of where the crisis over Brexit was headed. Opinion in Westminster and the City was, for the most part, dead-set against leaving the EU. Fleet Street was more divided but just as flummoxed by the referendum result. The FT awoke with a start to a ‘roar of rage from alienated voters’ that toppled the prime minister, jeopardised the Union, diminished the UK’s international standing and destabilised the currency and bond markets, sending the pound to a thirty-year low. ‘Intense volatility was inevitable given how far prices had been bid up in anticipation of a Remain vote,’ it regretted.² Ordinary Londoners voted Remain in 2016 and Labour in 2017 and 2019; whoever was in charge through this period, it wasn’t them.³

Among the ‘devolved nations’, parliamentary arithmetic and the logistics of cross-border trade gave the Unionist majority in Belfast special leverage over the Theresa May government, but as beneficiary of the crisis on the mainland not prime mover. Scottish politics had stabilised after Labour’s 2015 implosion, while the Cardiff administration continued to be all but invisible.

It was instead northern England that propelled itself to the foreground of national attention, for the first time since the socio-economic crisis of the Thatcher years. Wasted by Whitehall spending cuts, the North voted down the Cameron government in the referendum, then declined to fall into line with Theresa May’s pro-Brexit but also pro-austerity administration at the subsequent general election, helping to land the Conservatives – against all expectations – in a hung Parliament. Following that debacle, I wrote a draft article for New Left Review arguing that Britain’s ruling institutions, having shot the industrial North dead on behalf of the conflicting policy requirements of the City of London, all of sudden found a northern albatross lying heavy around their necks. Editors at the journal objected to the metaphor of a dead bird, but otherwise kept the image. The weight of the North bore down on Westminster, imperilling any attempt to forestall the impending farewell from Brussels through the ruse of a second referendum.

Saying this much isn’t to figure rustbelt discontent as the sole dynamic in play. The pressure on Conservative seats from UKIP that edged Cameron towards the precipice of a Remain/Leave referendum, and the July 2019 election of Johnson as party leader on a hard-Brexit platform by a Tory membership concentrated in the Home Counties, suggest otherwise. The trumping of material predictors of a Remain position by an ideological adherence to Leave – call it ‘reassertion of ex-imperial national identity’ – was strongest in affluent Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.⁴ The South contributed a lower surplus of ‘Out’ ballots than the Midlands or the North, where the objective conditions for a protest vote were stronger, but it exercised a leading influence over the Conservatives’ path into and through the crisis.

That Johnson was ultimately able to drag his party and government clear of the Brexit morass, however, relied on the lifeline thrown him by traditionally Labour-voting constituencies in the North’s former industrial monotowns and coalfield communities. For the geographer Doreen Massey, writing after a second resounding election victory for Thatcher in 1987, Labour’s strongholds in the North, Scotland and Wales constituted the ‘heartlands of defeat’.⁵ If history repeats itself, its variations never fail to surprise. In 2019, support for Labour in the heads of the Valleys and West Wales dropped, the SNP consolidated its local hegemony north of the Border, and most strikingly of all, northern England powered the governing Conservatives to national victory. A section of the deracinated northern working class reeling from forty years of Thatcherism had ‘lent’ its support to a Tory administration first hoisted into power by John Bull pensioners in the southern shires.

Whatever one thinks of these proceedings – and exiting the European Union caught some on the left in no man’s land between Bennite Euroscepticism and hostility towards the Powellite Leave campaign mounted by Farage – a fuller contextualisation is needed for the protest votes that upended politics-as-usual before ushering in a restoration under a Conservative government whose distinctive mixture of late-Thatcherism, public-school amateurism and electoral populism will determine our passage through the more profound dislocations of the current decade.

The North held on to its unusual political prominence until the March 2020 budget, after which Westminster was overwhelmed by the coronavirus. The pandemic has placed new stresses on the UK’s territoriality: devolved administrations going their own way over how and when to unwind the spring lockdown; new metro mayors popping up on national media threatening to do likewise, though in reality powerless to manage the contagion; the more consequential tier of local authorities below them frustrating the government’s early reopening of English schools. But in spite of these irritants, the failure to control the coronavirus is a failure of the centralised, neoliberalised British state – one that, as I write, has delegated responsibility for post-lockdown contact tracing to the FTSE listed outsourcing firm Serco, routinely rated ‘piss poor’ by Private Eye, in preference to municipal directors of public health.

In theory, the non-metropolitan North ought to enjoy exceptional prominence ahead of the next election, due by 2024, the strategic calculations of Johnson’s Downing Street pivoting on the wants and needs of small-town rustbelt areas previously consigned to the political margins. But our present problems are so overwhelming, and so general, that Beltway politics is going to have its hands full. Britain-without-London, to adapt a term used by Anthony Barnett, may have to make do with Jubilee festivities and all the other rigmaroles of national togetherness – ‘one nation, indivisible’, as the republican tradition in France and America has it; ‘Better Together’ is all that the local bourgeoisie has recently come up with.⁶ Neither a modicum of capital investment nor a cushioning of the next round of cuts to revenue expenditure will close the regional gap. Nor, in all likelihood, will the collateral damage from the virus.

I won’t pretend that the North–South divide explains all the problems of English (still less, British) history. Yet by looking at the interaction between nation-state, social class and geographical region, we can let some light in through several windows. What follows isn’t comprehensive, but should contribute to (and if necessary, restart) an important debate. Whitehall’s long abandonment of the North needs to be explained, not merely deplored.