The Northern Question
The Northern Question
A History of aDivided Country
Tom Hazeldine
First published by Verso 2020
© Tom Hazeldine 2020
An earlier version of Chapter 9 appeared as ‘Revolt of the Rustbelt’,
New Left Review 105, May–June 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-406-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-408-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-407-8 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941831
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
For Anton, my Londoner
The lamented ‘growing abyss’ between North and South should not really be a subject for mere figures, nor for moral outrage, nor for futile retreads of Westminster-inspired ‘modernisation’: it can’t be tackled within the existing State, because it is the existing State, the dominance of the Crown (or ‘anti-industrial’) culture, the thriving pseudo-nationalism of the Old Regime.
Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass (1988)
Contents
3. Industrialisation and Revolt
4. The Tide Turns
5. Dereliction
6. Forged in Yorkshire
7. Freedom of the City
8. Enemy Damage
9. The Bank of South-East England
10. Taking a Stand
Conclusion
Notes
Index
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
