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.
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