Early on in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s famous fixer, returns from a mission to the north of England and reports to Cardinal Wolsey, an early patron and master. “What do they eat?” Wolsey asks. “Londoners, when they can get them,” Thomas answers. “You have never seen such heathens.” They are, of course, riffing (and this is fiction). The Tudors knew full well that some areas of a country would be less prosperous than others. They were subtle enough, or mature enough, to know that differences in degree were not differences in kind. They didn’t think that people who lived in the North were essentially different from them; they didn’t think it was a place where Henry’s writ did not run.
Jibes about North and South are an old staple, but in the Britain of 2023 they have become deathly serious. The victory of Boris Johnson in 2019, masterminded by another eminence grise, Dominic Cummings, could be ascribed to votes from the North, but the North under a different guise. It was now ‘The Red Wall’: a strip of Labour seats that had changed their allegiance, perhaps for good. The Red Wall, it was said, had turned to Toryism as a Hail Mary after decades of neglect. The Red Wall had unique problems to be solved, and its own voice to be heard. We were assured therefore that Red Wall Toryism would be more authoritarian, more economically statist, and, somehow, gruffer, than its southern cousin.
Assertions of a unique Red Wallness are based on deaf and leaden tropes, most of which are from TV. An old cliché of hard Northerners and Southern fairies reappeared right on cue, an absurd conceit – it is Londoners who have, uniquely in the Western world, perfected the art of joyous proletarian violence. We are also informed that Northerners do not want free-market economics, and this is because of an industrial heritage unique to themselves. If this was the case, then it is a distinction that no longer exists. Most of the pits and factories have now disappeared; what now goes on in these towns is the usual Late Windsorite economic activity: retail, call centres, self-employed small traders. In 2023, the material interests of Bolton and Romford are identical. What Northern voters saw in Boris Johnson was not the promise of a new economy based on sharing, but the impression, real or not, of low taxes, less migration, cheap energy and national swagger. Given that there are no other true differences – ethnic, linguistic or confessional – what we must instead accept is a North and South that are more alike than ever.
Tories deploy Red Wallism promiscuously. But this approach is fraught with danger. It leaves the British people easier to control. The assertion of Northern difference has revived the project of English devolution, which had collapsed in failure by 2004. New, sometimes unsolicited powers have been duly granted to local Northern authorities – with the miniature politicians, ready cash and venal offices to match. Local authority flourishes in its own sated fug. To strengthen it is not to empower ordinary people in their own lives, but to lock them in with the worst kind of petty tyrants. The Welsh executive has banned the construction of new roads; the Scottish Government will not drill for oil, its main export. It is to be remembered that the victims of the Rotherham atrocity were failed first and foremost by their local government; if there is ever to be any justice for these women it will come from central Government in London. By detaching itself from the Westminster Parliament, all that Red Wallism accomplishes is to cut the North off from the only body with the sovereign power to bring people like Dominic Beck to heel.
Red Wallism makes particular the conflicts that should be general. It infantilises national life. A few months ago, the new deputy chairman of the Conservative Party Lee Anderson revealed that he hoped for a return of the death penalty. This took no small courage. But the debate which followed became solely about Lee’s identity. We were solemnly reminded that Lee was of the Red Wall; his views, popular there, are a local custom beyond our Southern understanding. His ideas could therefore not be criticised, or agreed with, or even debated. This is a tedious kind of Orientalism. That the cry of ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ is somehow essentially Northern is absurd – are Millwall fans averse to executing criminals? How about the beachgoers of Frinton-on-Sea? This is an attempt to flee from the issues. It hopes that by associating ideas with an invented subaltern identity it can avoid having to grapple with the ideas themselves. In so doing, it gives up on any idea of a national policy, that what’s valid in Bishop Auckland might also be valid in Brighton.
Britain’s extended civil service is all too happy to let national life decline into empty wittering on regions. It is altogether easier for it to manage a collection of petty provinces than a united patrie, represented in a sovereign Parliament. The English, and later the British, have long possessed the advantage of being able to grow up and get over slight variations in food, accent and beer; we should not squander it.
J. Sorel is a pseudonym.
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