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.