prole, dance’ genre.53 On the small screen, Peter Flannery’s keynote saga Our Friends in the North (also 1996) – contrasting sixties working-class Newcastle and seedy swinging London, united by the endemic corruption of public life – concluded with two of its Geordie protagonists edging towards the New Labour law-and-order establishment, the third flourishing as an entrepreneur, the fourth a down-and-out but urged not to follow the example of John Osborne’s play of 1956, Look Back in Anger. The past is history, just so much water under the Tyne Bridge. A depoliticised, bepuzzled North entered the new millennium a basket case of eccentric small-town traditionals (Count Arthur Strong, League of Gentlemen) and council estate ‘chavs’ (Shameless or, in a more affectionate register, The Royle Family), with some room afforded for bohemian enclaves in the major cities (Queer as Folk).
If these are the rough historical outlines of England’s sociocultural regional divide, what is the question such a mapping exercise sets us on the way to answering? Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s approach to Italy’s ‘Southern Question’, from which the title of this book takes its cue, offers some pointers. His thinking on the subject went through three iterations. The first appeared on 5 January 1920 in the pages of L’Ordine Nuovo, journal of Socialist Party leftists in Turin shortly to break away to form the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci had enrolled at Turin University following a youth spent on the impoverished island of Sardinia, where separatist feeling ran high. Its school-yard rendering, in his recollection, was ‘Throw the mainlanders into the sea!’54 The move to Turin set him down among these very mainlanders. The Piedmontese capital had lain at the centre of the Italian national project for several decades either side of the Risorgimento of 1861, and had gone on to become the beating heart of the country’s late-developing manufacturing sector. Immersion in its industrial politics modified Gramsci’s insular political formation, bringing the dynamics of region and class into productive tension.
As he penned his article on ‘Workers and peasants’, the Bolshevik revolution still belonged to the realm of current affairs and the road seemingly lay open for communist advances in Italy as well as across the Alps in the defeated Central Powers. Gramsci set out the strategic imperative of ranging both northern factory worker and southern agricultural labourer against Giolitti’s faltering liberal–bourgeois state. ‘The northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies,’ he protested. Parliamentary reformism was never going to set them free. Only a proletarian state could do that, liberating the peasant masses from the yoke of northern banking and industrial giants. In turn, it was in the interests of the Turin militants – this was the essential burden of his argument – to enlist the support of the peasantry, not least to avoid the Mezzogiorno becoming a safe-house for counterrevolutionary forces.55
To this theme he returned in ‘Notes on the southern problem’, an essay written in the weeks preceding his arrest by Mussolini’s Fascists on 8 November 1926 and prompted by a mischaracterisation of his views on agrarian policy by an upstart socialist publication in Milan. The Turin communists, he insisted, had correctly identified the Southern Question as ‘one of the essential problems of the national politics of the revolutionary proletariat’. In a country like Italy, where industrial workers were largely confined to a triangle of northern cities – Turin, Milan, Genoa – they could only hope to become hegemonic (‘leading and dominant’) through a system of class alliances to organise the consent of the immiserated population living further down the peninsula. Bourgeois-derived prejudices against the South as ‘a ball and chain that prevents a more rapid progress in the civil development of Italy’ had to be broken to prevent a retreat into the cul-de-sac of regional particularism.56
During his decade of incarceration, writing under the censor’s scrutiny, the Southern Question underwent a change of time span and of protagonist. From the looked-for proletarian revolution on the horizon, Gramsci switched his gaze to its truncated bourgeois predecessor of 1861, in a reconstruction of Italian political development reaching deep into the past. The medieval bourgeoisie, he observed, created ‘molecular’ urban communes in the North – Bologna, Genoa, Milan, Padua and so on – without ever cohering around a national-popular programme. Intellectuals instead assumed a cosmopolitan character, modelled after the resident Catholic Church. (The Holy Roman Empire exercised a similar retarding influence on German national development.) Machiavelli’s hopes for a nation state capable of resisting foreign domination during the Renaissance were dashed. Formal unification, when it came in the nineteenth century, completely failed to create any kind of genuine peninsular unity, which required popular integration of the masses in North and South alike into the new state, of the kind that had been achieved in Revolutionary France. The prime minister of Piedmont, Count Cavour, carried the North and Centre with a minimum of popular engagement. Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand toppled the dilapidated structure of Bourbon rule in Sicily and Naples at a stroke, only to hand the South over to the Piedmontese monarchy and its Mezzogiorno latifundist associates. Garibaldi was too much in thrall to the House of Savoy to raise the peasantry as part of a rival liberal-national republican formation. (The French Jacobins, binding rural France to the hegemony of Paris, had shown how this was to be done.) Instead, Italy’s rulers held the South by an admixture of military force – the war against brigandage – fiscal imposition and public–payroll clientelism. The tasks this historical inheritance posed the revolutionary movement of Gramsci’s own time were those he had been adumbrating since 1920. ‘Any organization of national popular will is impossible, unless the great mass of peasant farmers bursts simultaneously into political life.’57
If the feebleness of Italian nationhood called forth, from Gramsci’s pen, an unmatched working-through of the geographical complexity of social stratification under ‘real’ historical conditions, what relevance can this have to England, one of the strongest national formations of all? There is at least a family resemblance between chauvinist disparagement of the Mezzogiorno and the condescension of London intellectuals towards unfashionable outlying stretches of the UK. The Spectator judged Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey ‘the inside story of a savage culture observed by a genuine cannibal’, while the present century has seen a libertarian think tank in Westminster describe north-east England as one of ‘Whitehall’s last colonies’, a sink of welfare dependency that ought to be cut adrift of state aid.58
More than parallelism, however, Gramsci’s writing provides the occasion for contrastive reflection. In the nineteenth century, southern Italy and northern England occupied inverse positions in their national orders: respectively, those of an overwhelmingly rural economy and a thriving modern industrial zone. Upon unification, Cavour imposed Piedmont’s liberalised commercial arrangements on the rest of the peninsula in short order, killing off petty workshops in the Mezzogiorno previously sheltered by high tariffs. The industrialists of Lancashire, on the other hand, were Britain’s foremost champions of free trade, secure for the time being in their commercial superiority over foreign competitors. The economic backwardness of southern Italy persisted through the twentieth century, even as modern industry thrived in the North. In Britain, meanwhile, a fallen industrial North was reduced to pleading for state rescue, only to be given short shrift by London governments in thrall to a flourishing financial and commercial South. From different starting positions, the two regions had fallen into distinct but analogous states of ill fortune.
In some ways, the North–South divide in Britain is more qualified than in Italy. The Midlands is an intermediate zone of greater weight than Lazio/Romagna, and there is also the looming presence of Scotland as a much more distinct part of the UK than northern England, with a long past of previous statehood. Northern identity in England is weaker than the insular southern identity in Italy, due to the prior centuries of differential statehoods in the Mezzogiorno, as against the lack of any of these beyond the Trent.
But whereas the South in Britain is defined above all by possession of London, in Italy the capital isn’t in the North, and Rome in cultural connection and character
