THE NORTH/SOUTH DIVIDE?

[Stanley]

THE NORTH/SOUTH DIVIDE?

30 June 2004

The more I think about this topic the more complicated it becomes. Part of the problem is that many people think they have to be partisan and come down on one side or the other. This is a misapprehension because I don’t think that it’s a matter of two sides, life in general and history in particular is never as simple as that. So my instinct is that I think the term 'North/South divide’ is misleading. Firstly because it isn’t a simple matter of North versus South and secondly because there is no clear cut divide, more a gradual shift in attitude, custom and culture as one moves outwards from London. There is as much difference between London and Cornwall or Norfolk as there is between the ‘Home Counties’ (what a dreadfully smug term) and the northern shires. There is even more difference between London and Ireland, Wales and Scotland.
The next term we have to define is what do we mean by ‘divide’? What factors make up the perceived difference? Are we talking about income, job opportunities and house prices? Do we use quality of life or standard of living as our criteria? Does the provision for health and education affect our judgement? I could go on with this list but I think we have enough here to demonstrate that this is a very complex subject and one about which large volumes could be written. So, the first conclusion I come to in trying to explain my view of this fact of life is that I will use a broad brush and keep it as simple as possible.
Let’s deal with historical fact, not a bad place to start from. I suppose the first indicator of what we are dealing with is the fact that the north was sterilised by the last ice age longer than the south. Add to this the fact that the south is nearer to continental influences than the north and you have two very powerful factors tending to produce a difference.
Factor in the fact that the north and to a certain extent, the parts of the east coast down to the Humber were more accessible to influence from the Norsemen. The west coast was influenced by the Celts from Ireland, both directly and indirectly via the Celtic migrations to Western Scotland. These incursions by other genetic stocks left an imprint which can still be detected in varying proportions all over the north of England. So here we have the another major factor, a different genetic strain in the north than in the south. A parallel can be found in the west country in the close links with what we now call Brittany. The reason why these isles were first called ‘Great Britain’ was to distinguish them from ‘Lesser Britain’, in fact Brittany.
Consider the Italian incursions of the last century BC and the first century AD, what we commonly refer to as the Roman invasion. The Romans penetrated as far as Southern Scotland but they regarded Hadrian’s Wall as the bounds of their empire. Inside Britannia itself they made a clear distinction between the lower half of what we now call England and the upper part. The south was governed by Roman Civil rule, in other words it was regarded as part of Rome. North of the Midlands never attained civil rule, it was always under military rule and regarded as unstable. The major towns in the north that the Romans developed were all military centres, they were hubs of power and and communications used to keep the surrounding areas subjugated.
The effect of these factors plus the softer climate in the south meant that an agrarian based export economy flourished in the south and in the north it was basically subsistence. Look at the distribution of Romano-British villas, temples and oppida, the vast proportion are in the south. These Romano-Britons had strong trading links with the rest of the Roman Empire, money and influence was concentrated there. By the sixth century royal and ecclesiastical power was firmly controlled from the south.
The invasion of the Normans in the 11th century did nothing to alter this balance as their preferred method of controlling the country was to retain the existing administrative structures, replacing the Saxon lords with Norman Barons. Social control was effected by the church, military by the regional strong-points, the castles. Power followed wealth and was firmly centred in the south where the King was. Domesday was William's way of stamping legal authority on his possession of the kingdom.
For the next 500 years nothing changed. The north was regarded almost as a group of colonies, this view is perpetuated even to this day in the ugly description ‘The Provinces’. ‘Provincial’ is still almost a pejorative term signifying crude and uncultured.
The closest the north ever came to emancipation was with the evolution of industry in the 17th century. The north became a centre of resources and manufacturing industry. The great industrial cities grew in power and wealth to the stage where Mancunians could say with a degree of truth, ‘What Manchester does today the world will do tomorrow’. The new industrial barons ousted landed wealth and it looked as though the balance of power might switch to the Midlands and further north but government and cultural power was still entrenched in the south, the industrialists couldn’t beat them and so they had to join them. Wealth flowed south into London which became the richest city in the world. The Establishment had pulled off the greatest escape of all time. Once again, nothing changed, London had the wealth, the north had the disadvantages of having the manufacturing industries. Whole districts were made wastelands and the workers suffered all the consequences of bad living and working conditions.
By the end of the 19th century it was becoming obvious that there was a major problem. During recruitment for the Crimean and Boer wars it was noted that a high proportion of the potential cannon fodder from the industrial districts were unfit for service. This set the alarm bells ringing and triggered off what historians call the ‘Physical Efficiency’ debate. The 1851 Great Exhibition glorified England as the workshop of the world, we were the greatest and most wealthy manufacturing nation, the Empire stretched round the world but our working classes were sickly runts. There was reform, conditions were improved but only as far as was needed to ensure a healthy reserve of factory and cannon fodder. It took the decline of the then radical Liberal Party and the trauma of WW1 to trigger the next changes.
Revolution abroad and the fear of political unrest at home forced radical measures on the government. ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ became the cry and measures like the Addison Housing Act started much needed programmes of municipal building of workers housing. Some were triggered into left-wing thinking, men like Harold Macmillan and Oswald Mosley came back from the war fired with ambition to change the country. Some fell into despair, Elgar never wrote any significant music again and Kipling wrote two of the saddest lines of poetry ever penned, ‘If they ask you why we died, tell them that our fathers lied’. Within five years the post-war world depression had stifled any threat of revolution and it was business as usual, the distribution of wealth was rigidly controlled and the struggle to survive ensured the subjugation of the northern working classes.
There was a brief revival in the fortunes of the north when once again, industrial production was needed to enable us to fight WW2. It is no accident that between the wars in Barlick a whole industry was allowed to die and no effort was made to replace it or compensate for the loss but as soon as the war started Barlick was seen as the ideal place for the essential aero industries to scuttle to for the duration. We owe more in terms of industrial survival in Barlick to Hitler than our own government! (I keep suggesting that we should have a statue of him in the town.)
After WW2 there was the usual period of austerity followed by an industrial boom fuelled by what seemed to be an insatiable appetite for manufactured goods. By the 1960s it was becoming clear that global competition from the developing countries was reaching the stage where many of our basic industries were uneconomical. Workers conditions worsened, the unions fought for their members and a point was reached where in terms of days lost by strikes Britain was seen as the sick man of Europe. The advent of North Sea oil revenues gave the government of the day the financial muscle to break the unions by creating a pool of unemployment. The excuse for doing this was that manufacturing industry was dead and service industries were the way to the future. Once more the north suffered, mining, steel, shipbuilding and the rail transport industries were almost completely destroyed. More wasteland, more unemployment, more poverty and bad health.
So where are we today? There was an opportune news item broadcast this morning about this. Researchers have published their findings based on the 2001 census, one of their firm conclusions is that the economic north/south divide is not only a fact but it is growing, the gap between wealthy and poor individuals is also growing. Financial and governmental power is concentrated even more strongly in the south east. London is sucking in bright young graduates and workers. The City is one of the three most powerful financial centres in the world. All this at a time when we are the fourth largest economy in the world and possibly in better shape than any of the others.
So, is there a north south divide? Of course there is, it’s been alive and well for the last 13,000 years and there aren’t any signs that anything is about to change. Where does this leave us? Where we’ve always been, surviving and prospering to a small degree. True there are pockets of deprivation and poverty in all areas that are a blot on the collective conscience of this country but this has always been so, all we can do is carry on fighting. There is poverty in the south as well.
All this sounds very negative but there is a positive side as well. As the south becomes more polluted and overcrowded we can look out of our back gardens at the fields and hills within walking distance, smell the fresh air coming down off the Weets after being washed by 3,000 miles of the Atlantic and reflect that things could be worse. True, I’m old now and have no ambitions beyond survival until tomorrow, I leave it to the young and ambitious to decide for themselves how attractive the Great Wen is. The bottom line is a distinction I made earlier between standard of living and quality of life. If you were born in the north and understand and enjoy the culture you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. The vehement statements, often personalised, that people descend to when the debate about the divide becomes heated are simply a natural reaction intended to bolster our sense of being different and superior. In truth there is little to choose between the people in terms of affability and sociability but there is a difference and people tend to mistrust that which they don’t understand.
Some years ago I was sat in a kitchen up in the Dales one Sunday morning supping tea and eating a bacon butty while a Jack Russell dog vigorously (and seemingly endlessly) lined a Jack Russell bitch on the hearth rug in front of a roaring coal fire. I reflected that the segment of people in the south who firmly believe that we all wear clogs and flat caps and shout ‘Eeh ba goom!’ at each other might just have a point. They are mistaken in the detail but may be right in the basic truth, ‘North of Watford there be dragons’. That’s the real divide.

30 June 2004