Sadly my knowledge of English history is too meagre to allow me to form any sort of judgement as to whether this picture is wholly faithful to reality. But for me, it is quite brilliant and should be true, even if it isn’t! Thank you.
Stanley Beardshall
3 years ago
I’m old now, but remember, as a young student at Manchester university, being informed by a lecturer that “there are only two kinds of people: Englishmen and those who wish they had been born Englishmen”. He also shared the whole university’s belief that southerners were an effete and snobbish bunch….
Do they want to be Englishmen or just the perceived benefits of being in England?
Nathan Ramsden
3 years ago
This is fascinating history, and perhaps the author will be proven right when we look back, say, fifty years from now, but his reading of the contemporary politics is somewhat peculiar. The predominant divide in English politics today is between the graduate and non-graduate classes. Brexit, as well as the 2019 election, can be understood much more coherently in this framework than within that of a North-South divide. The Tories assembled a coalition of people dissatisfied with the cultural dominance of cities and university towns, aggrieved by the obstruction of Brexit, and horrified by what had been allowed to happen to the Labour Party. The levelling-up agenda was among the less salient election issues. Indeed, Labour had promised a great deal of levelling-up itself.
There is an element of geography to this, of course. England’s economy is driven by financial, legal and affiliated services, which form what is essentially a closed shop with the much-expanded university sector. Much of the public and third sector also works within this ecosystem. This concentrates power in cities, and since London dwarfs all other English cities, it makes London very powerful. The other major cities and university towns essentially are satellites to the London economy, and they are all interdependent. The rest of the country has been for the past ten years rediscovering an English nationalism as the only means of asserting itself.
It is plausible that Labour will form a government after the next election. And yet it is unlikely that they will reclaim significant sections of their former Red Wall, but rather that they will win in those parts of the graduate economy that have spilled over into the Home Counties and the suburbs of Northern cities.
Ray Hall
3 years ago
Thanks for the article . A sort of application of Jared Diamond’s idea that geography and geology can be destiny .
Yes, and no. Geography (weather) does play a certain role (think about food and the Med), but people can make themselves better. Singapore (70% chinese) vs. Malaysia (majority Muslim).
cjhartnett1
3 years ago
Bit silly , bit of a stretch to say that Boris’ efforts to bring the north up to speed with London , won him the election Not at all. We wanted Brexit and to punish the labour liberal quislings and appeasers who’d tried to prevent our 2016 wishes from being enacted And , good though your history is; the Covidiocy of today is no north south thing. There’s no jobs, wealth or support for a global new order in the north, and Boris can hardly put London into lockdown, seeing as the elites all live there, and your ethnic boroughs know that all of this is crap . As indeed do ours in Birmingham and Manchester too. And there’s no possible honest media portrayal of the wanton righteous contempt for Boris and his ignored, random guidelines. They’re not adhered to in any but the media friendly parts of our cities. BLM free passes for the rest of us.
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
Very interesting article indeed. I had nursed the idea of turning the UK into a true federation by giving the English Home Nation its own parliament. If James Hawes is right, it would be better to create two parliaments for England, one for the South and one for the North. A Southern English entity would not dominate the UK federation as much as an English entity would and would still not be an overgoverned federation. (There would be just five regional parliaments; Canada, with a smaller population, has 10 provinces and three territories.) I would still like to expand the federation to include the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands (seven or eight regional parliaments), which would in a small way also help to reduce the danger of dominance by any one federal entity.
I would go further and taking London as the measure…10 million or so…split the country across the old Roman and medieval *national* boundaries (which are pointless really) and (tongue in cheek to illustrate the point) go back to the pre-Vicking era to find trans border entities that actually have 21st Century economic interests.
An Edinburgh to Humber (Northumbria) would have that London sized population and some heft…along with a Strathclyde from Glasgow to Manchester…and Liverpool and North wales, Midlands, east Midland and so on.
In the 21st century the more rural areas could make up one federal entity, separated geographically but far more united in underlying interests.
Any federal structure for the UK fails if based on the medieval lines, Balkanising the island would permanently harm future propsperity and in so many other ways…it fails if England must remain as now, and it fails if the constituent entities are not of a size similar to London…which in effect is a global super city that happens to be located here.
These large entitiies could combine *against* London where necessary much more effectively, and happily would not embed either the nascent xenophobia that the purely Scottish and Welsh settlements are creating (as they are too small to countervail) or even that *North Vs South* thing that other proposals do.
I think a federal UK that transcending the narrower nationalism of that medieval border settlement (which is essentially Roman) could be a very powerful, innovative and throughly modern iteration of Britain for a 21st Century Post-Brexit Britain.
Richard Middleton
3 years ago
The ‘reopening’ of the North-South divide wouldn’t be anything to do with Labour politicians trying to reaffirm the North as Labour and the south as Conservative, in order to take back the ‘Red Wall’, would it?
Dave Smith
3 years ago
One of the many things I have done is to act as a courier for American buyers. That was in the 80s. I had to go to all parts. To do my job properly but I was always wary of the North. That is anywhere north of Warwickshire and Leics. There were often misunderstandings and sometimes it was not easy to smooth things over. The south was no problem neither the West nor Ireland. Nor was Normandy funnily enough. Most of my clients were from the Southern states and did not like what they saw as abrupt rudeness . They liked us southerners. Quieter and more talkative and not so difficult if things did not go their way. Also the tendency in the north to think a hard bargaining attitude verging on rudeness was the only way used to grate on many. . We are different people and this is a most interesting take on it.
Jeremy Smith
3 years ago
Levelling down is not going to work. BoJo, BSing aside, has no money. W. Germany has transferred c.€2 trillion (c.65bn a year) to E. Germany over 30 years. It did that thanks to – government debt (it doubled during the 90s) – new taxes (solidarity tax) – reasonable economic growth (its GDP per capita has more doubled during the same period)
Let’s say that UK GOV decided to transfer £30 billion a year for the next 20 years -that is £600b. Where is the money?
Travelling from North to South I’d say they’ve been investing heavily in the North for years, the South’s roads are awful by comparison, much of the BBC has been moved to Manchester, but as ever it’s easier to claim your hard done by as a Northern Labour politician to create hatred for the Tory South.
A good article but maybe more on what is happening now (and over the last 10 years) would have helped – e.g. the emergence of regionalist groups and parties in the North of England. There needs to be political expression given to Northern identity, but one that isn’t insular and reactionary. It isn’t about hating/disliking anyone. Personally, I feel more in common with the Scotland and the Scots than with the South of England. And I’m not the only one…
Stephen Griffiths
3 years ago
The North is already pushing back against the liberal political vision generated in the South. The Brexit vote result was the North’s signal to the country that there is an English identity which they are willing to protect at all costs.
Paul Hunt
3 years ago
This is why I read unHerd, good old dose of reality from the history books when a few men in silly dresses sorted everything out. I’d disagree with the view of the 20th Century is North-South though, there are always vast Blue swathes of rural Yorkshire, Cumbira and Lancs, particularly in the heartland Viking counties, whilst the home counties and Norfolk voted overwhelmingly for Clem Atlee and 1997 was the first time in a long time you couldn’t walk from John O Groats to Berwick through only Tory seats. ‘Democracy’ has brought complex and constantly flowing demographics into play that can be swung by an election promise, but are fundamentally about people on the ground making a gut call, hence why polls are so often so terribly wrong.
Jessica Alliston
3 years ago
It might only be a matter of time before localism takes the shape of the old divide. For instance: https://www.yorkshireparty….
stephensjpriest
3 years ago
Great Barrington Declaration co-author
Dr Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration: “The current lockdown strategy seeks herd immunity. That is the end point. The question is how much death and suffering will there be in the meantime?”
stephensjpriest
3 years ago
Great Barrington Declaration co-author:
Dr Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration: “The current lockdown strategy seeks herd immunity. That is the end point. The question is how much death and suffering will there be in the meantime?”
By the way there is appalling clip of Hancock dismissing the Great Barrington Declaration 14 Oct 2020 youtube watch?v=ivVuUqLDqAk
Ted Ditchburn
3 years ago
I think one thing I would question is the image of a kind of Tory ruling elite redoubt in the South when the Labour Party seems to have become basically a North London Supper Club without any real connexion to what used to be knownas it’s Northern or Welsh, or Scottish *Heartlands*.
Having gone down some kind of theoretical neo-marxist or post-marxist or whatever-marxist rabbit hole they not only seem unable to recognise what they used to call their core vote, and vice versa, but in all honesty to not even like them.
I also think left out of the analysis is the vastly greater social mobility nowadays in which millions of *northerners* go down and live in the South and millions of Southerners head North and West as well (notwithstanding the glitches in this caused by the crackers abolition of Grammar Schools by Anthony Crossland).
I also think that in the Thatcher part there was no mention of the Urban Development and Enterprise zones that created what these days are usually recognised as the *iconic* areas of cities..the Albert Dock and riverside at Liverpool, the Quayside at newcastle and Gateshead, the Stockton riverside etc etc.
Nor the fact that *The North* or the *South* aren’t coherent places either, for example in the early years of this century all four political parties, most local media, most employers organisations and local councils, quangos and charities were overwhelmingly in favour of a North East devolved assembly and campaigned energetically for it… *A geordie Parliament* modelled on the then not yet discredited Scottish one.
In that campaign , a footnote being that Dominic Cummings was an influential figure in the grouping opposing this, the vote eventually went 78 against 22 almost 4-1 against.
The main reason was Cummings and the campaign leader John Elliott (a regional businessman) and the inflatable white elphant they took to veery media event and interview latched onto that idea of the *geordie Parliament* and turned it into ‘yet another Newcastle talkiign shop for failed politicians’, which appealed to the vast majority of people who don’t see themselves as Geordies in the North east…and see Geordieland as the ruling redoubt.
It was interesting that Blair, Kennedy, Howard and the local advocates had such a tin ear for the reality of the fissiparous North East (let alone North) that what started as a cakewalk ended in a rout.
But nobody in Mackemland, (Sunderland) or the Smoggies (Teessiders) let alone Durham County and Northumberland (The Wild Wannies) ever really wanted to split away from the Tynesiders, they just realise there is a power dynamic and it demands touches on the tiller now and again.
Jon Walmsley
3 years ago
Turns out history can tell you as much about the present as it does the past, because the past is found in the present.
Sadly my knowledge of English history is too meagre to allow me to form any sort of judgement as to whether this picture is wholly faithful to reality. But for me, it is quite brilliant and should be true, even if it isn’t! Thank you.
I’m old now, but remember, as a young student at Manchester university, being informed by a lecturer that “there are only two kinds of people: Englishmen and those who wish they had been born Englishmen”. He also shared the whole university’s belief that southerners were an effete and snobbish bunch….
That must have been a long time ago. It seems like no-one wants to claim to be English nowadays.
What about the dinghy – borne 300 a day landing on the south coast ?
Do they want to be Englishmen or just the perceived benefits of being in England?
This is fascinating history, and perhaps the author will be proven right when we look back, say, fifty years from now, but his reading of the contemporary politics is somewhat peculiar. The predominant divide in English politics today is between the graduate and non-graduate classes. Brexit, as well as the 2019 election, can be understood much more coherently in this framework than within that of a North-South divide. The Tories assembled a coalition of people dissatisfied with the cultural dominance of cities and university towns, aggrieved by the obstruction of Brexit, and horrified by what had been allowed to happen to the Labour Party. The levelling-up agenda was among the less salient election issues. Indeed, Labour had promised a great deal of levelling-up itself.
There is an element of geography to this, of course. England’s economy is driven by financial, legal and affiliated services, which form what is essentially a closed shop with the much-expanded university sector. Much of the public and third sector also works within this ecosystem. This concentrates power in cities, and since London dwarfs all other English cities, it makes London very powerful. The other major cities and university towns essentially are satellites to the London economy, and they are all interdependent. The rest of the country has been for the past ten years rediscovering an English nationalism as the only means of asserting itself.
It is plausible that Labour will form a government after the next election. And yet it is unlikely that they will reclaim significant sections of their former Red Wall, but rather that they will win in those parts of the graduate economy that have spilled over into the Home Counties and the suburbs of Northern cities.
Thanks for the article . A sort of application of Jared Diamond’s idea that geography and geology can be destiny .
Yes, and no.
Geography (weather) does play a certain role (think about food and the Med), but people can make themselves better. Singapore (70% chinese) vs. Malaysia (majority Muslim).
Bit silly , bit of a stretch to say that Boris’ efforts to bring the north up to speed with London , won him the election
Not at all. We wanted Brexit and to punish the labour liberal quislings and appeasers who’d tried to prevent our 2016 wishes from being enacted
And , good though your history is; the Covidiocy of today is no north south thing. There’s no jobs, wealth or support for a global new order in the north, and Boris can hardly put London into lockdown, seeing as the elites all live there, and your ethnic boroughs know that all of this is crap . As indeed do ours in Birmingham and Manchester too. And there’s no possible honest media portrayal of the wanton righteous contempt for Boris and his ignored, random guidelines. They’re not adhered to in any but the media friendly parts of our cities. BLM free passes for the rest of us.
Very interesting article indeed. I had nursed the idea of turning the UK into a true federation by giving the English Home Nation its own parliament. If James Hawes is right, it would be better to create two parliaments for England, one for the South and one for the North. A Southern English entity would not dominate the UK federation as much as an English entity would and would still not be an overgoverned federation. (There would be just five regional parliaments; Canada, with a smaller population, has 10 provinces and three territories.) I would still like to expand the federation to include the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands (seven or eight regional parliaments), which would in a small way also help to reduce the danger of dominance by any one federal entity.
I would go further and taking London as the measure…10 million or so…split the country across the old Roman and medieval *national* boundaries (which are pointless really) and (tongue in cheek to illustrate the point) go back to the pre-Vicking era to find trans border entities that actually have 21st Century economic interests.
An Edinburgh to Humber (Northumbria) would have that London sized population and some heft…along with a Strathclyde from Glasgow to Manchester…and Liverpool and North wales, Midlands, east Midland and so on.
In the 21st century the more rural areas could make up one federal entity, separated geographically but far more united in underlying interests.
Any federal structure for the UK fails if based on the medieval lines, Balkanising the island would permanently harm future propsperity and in so many other ways…it fails if England must remain as now, and it fails if the constituent entities are not of a size similar to London…which in effect is a global super city that happens to be located here.
These large entitiies could combine *against* London where necessary much more effectively, and happily would not embed either the nascent xenophobia that the purely Scottish and Welsh settlements are creating (as they are too small to countervail) or even that *North Vs South* thing that other proposals do.
I think a federal UK that transcending the narrower nationalism of that medieval border settlement (which is essentially Roman) could be a very powerful, innovative and throughly modern iteration of Britain for a 21st Century Post-Brexit Britain.
The ‘reopening’ of the North-South divide wouldn’t be anything to do with Labour politicians trying to reaffirm the North as Labour and the south as Conservative, in order to take back the ‘Red Wall’, would it?
One of the many things I have done is to act as a courier for American buyers. That was in the 80s. I had to go to all parts. To do my job properly but I was always wary of the North. That is anywhere north of Warwickshire and Leics. There were often misunderstandings and sometimes it was not easy to smooth things over. The south was no problem neither the West nor Ireland. Nor was Normandy funnily enough.
Most of my clients were from the Southern states and did not like what they saw as abrupt rudeness . They liked us southerners. Quieter and more talkative and not so difficult if things did not go their way. Also the tendency in the north to think a hard bargaining attitude verging on rudeness was the only way used to grate on many. . We are different people and this is a most interesting take on it.
Levelling down is not going to work. BoJo, BSing aside, has no money. W. Germany has transferred c.€2 trillion (c.65bn a year) to E. Germany over 30 years. It did that thanks to
– government debt (it doubled during the 90s)
– new taxes (solidarity tax)
– reasonable economic growth (its GDP per capita has more doubled during the same period)
Let’s say that UK GOV decided to transfer £30 billion a year for the next 20 years -that is £600b. Where is the money?
Travelling from North to South I’d say they’ve been investing heavily in the North for years, the South’s roads are awful by comparison, much of the BBC has been moved to Manchester, but as ever it’s easier to claim your hard done by as a Northern Labour politician to create hatred for the Tory South.
Salford, not Manchester (it matters).
A good article but maybe more on what is happening now (and over the last 10 years) would have helped – e.g. the emergence of regionalist groups and parties in the North of England. There needs to be political expression given to Northern identity, but one that isn’t insular and reactionary. It isn’t about hating/disliking anyone. Personally, I feel more in common with the Scotland and the Scots than with the South of England. And I’m not the only one…
The North is already pushing back against the liberal political vision generated in the South. The Brexit vote result was the North’s signal to the country that there is an English identity which they are willing to protect at all costs.
This is why I read unHerd, good old dose of reality from the history books when a few men in silly dresses sorted everything out. I’d disagree with the view of the 20th Century is North-South though, there are always vast Blue swathes of rural Yorkshire, Cumbira and Lancs, particularly in the heartland Viking counties, whilst the home counties and Norfolk voted overwhelmingly for Clem Atlee and 1997 was the first time in a long time you couldn’t walk from John O Groats to Berwick through only Tory seats.
‘Democracy’ has brought complex and constantly flowing demographics into play that can be swung by an election promise, but are fundamentally about people on the ground making a gut call, hence why polls are so often so terribly wrong.
It might only be a matter of time before localism takes the shape of the old divide. For instance: https://www.yorkshireparty….
Great Barrington Declaration co-author
Dr Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration: “The current lockdown strategy seeks herd immunity. That is the end point. The question is how much death and suffering will there be in the meantime?”
Great Barrington Declaration co-author:
Dr Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration: “The current lockdown strategy seeks herd immunity. That is the end point. The question is how much death and suffering will there be in the meantime?”
By the way there is appalling clip of Hancock dismissing the Great Barrington Declaration
14 Oct 2020
youtube watch?v=ivVuUqLDqAk
I think one thing I would question is the image of a kind of Tory ruling elite redoubt in the South when the Labour Party seems to have become basically a North London Supper Club without any real connexion to what used to be knownas it’s Northern or Welsh, or Scottish *Heartlands*.
Having gone down some kind of theoretical neo-marxist or post-marxist or whatever-marxist rabbit hole they not only seem unable to recognise what they used to call their core vote, and vice versa, but in all honesty to not even like them.
I also think left out of the analysis is the vastly greater social mobility nowadays in which millions of *northerners* go down and live in the South and millions of Southerners head North and West as well (notwithstanding the glitches in this caused by the crackers abolition of Grammar Schools by Anthony Crossland).
I also think that in the Thatcher part there was no mention of the Urban Development and Enterprise zones that created what these days are usually recognised as the *iconic* areas of cities..the Albert Dock and riverside at Liverpool, the Quayside at newcastle and Gateshead, the Stockton riverside etc etc.
Nor the fact that *The North* or the *South* aren’t coherent places either, for example in the early years of this century all four political parties, most local media, most employers organisations and local councils, quangos and charities were overwhelmingly in favour of a North East devolved assembly and campaigned energetically for it… *A geordie Parliament* modelled on the then not yet discredited Scottish one.
In that campaign , a footnote being that Dominic Cummings was an influential figure in the grouping opposing this, the vote eventually went 78 against 22 almost 4-1 against.
The main reason was Cummings and the campaign leader John Elliott (a regional businessman) and the inflatable white elphant they took to veery media event and interview latched onto that idea of the *geordie Parliament* and turned it into ‘yet another Newcastle talkiign shop for failed politicians’, which appealed to the vast majority of people who don’t see themselves as Geordies in the North east…and see Geordieland as the ruling redoubt.
It was interesting that Blair, Kennedy, Howard and the local advocates had such a tin ear for the reality of the fissiparous North East (let alone North) that what started as a cakewalk ended in a rout.
But nobody in Mackemland, (Sunderland) or the Smoggies (Teessiders) let alone Durham County and Northumberland (The Wild Wannies) ever really wanted to split away from the Tynesiders, they just realise there is a power dynamic and it demands touches on the tiller now and again.
Turns out history can tell you as much about the present as it does the past, because the past is found in the present.
Fantastic post
Thanks