Against Northernism

Given the omerta that hangs over Andy Burnham’s vision for Britain, the Labour Party’s decision to bring him in as Keir Starmer’s replacement might well be understood as a preference for the aesthetics of the North-West over those of North London.

On all of the important questions, Starmer and Burnham are functionally identical. Neither wants a fundamental reordering of the British state; both believe that our current model of social democracy can be fixed with a few adjustments at the margins. Both are committed to the undemocratic project of multiculturalism, and both have developed a belief in the value of strategic ambiguity. Whoever is in charge, both Parliamentary arithmetic and the country’s problems remain the same.

This change at the top can only really be explained by an aesthetic preference — but the rapid rise of Andy Burnham is far from the first political moment shaped by a belief in the narrative power of “the North”.

Before the deindustrialisation of the late 20th century, the story was simpler — Labour won the North (as well as Wales and Scotland), the Tories won the South, and everybody agreed to ignore the Midlands. This was because, basically, the economy of the North was sustained by state-subsidised industries, and held hostage by industrial labour unions, while the South was not. 

Of course, the story on the ground was never this simple — the South was home to many working-class towns, the North home to bucolic villages — but this was the narrative. It was basically a question of where in the country certain material interests were concentrated. People voted for the party that represented the interests which bore relation to their lives; those people were more or less concentrated in a given place. Thus, the North was for Labour, and the South for the Tories.

Politicians naturally wished to affect the cultural markers of the region from which their support was drawn. Harold Wilson, an Oxford Don, did much to cultivate and promote his image as a Yorkshireman — from flat caps to pipe smoking.

But, it must be noted, Wilson was a “Yorkshireman” — and not a “Northerner”. In both North and South, people were from a county, or a city, but rarely did they identify with such a broad and heterogenous region as “the North”.

The political idea of “Northerness”, so masterfully deployed by Andy Burnham, is a later invention. It is largely an invention of the political class, one which both ignores the lack of homogeneity within the North of England, and greatly exaggerates the degree of difference that exists between the North and the rest of the country.

Following the economic reforms of the Thatcher years, “the North” has come to mean a few things. First, it’s become short-hand for “economically left-behind, and marginalised by the institutions of state”. When people talk about “the North”, they often just mean “bits of the country which aren’t doing very well for themselves”.

As less and less of the country is now doing well for itself, “the North” has become short-hand in Westminster for “where normal people live”. The millions of people who live in the North are all assumed to be straight-talking, no-nonsense, hard-up folks — who, through their fundamental “common sense”, often spot things that the political establishment has missed. 

And more than that, for people who came to maturity in the 1990s and early 2000s, “the North” also possessed a kind of counter-cultural coolness — and Manchester in particular was the fulcrum of this. Oasis, The Smiths, Joy Division, Northern Soul, The Stone Roses, Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, the Hacienda.

Thus, in the crucible of 1980s economic decline and 1990s cultural ascendancy, the homogenising “North” was built. Everywhere north of Birmingham was defined, from Westminster, by these traits. County and civic identities were flattened. Everybody “up there” was seen to be economically struggling, straight-talking, cool and, most importantly, “normal”.

And this new identity was accompanied by a new political logic. If you can win in “the North”, you can win with the everyman; your political agenda, whatever it may be, enjoys the moral legitimacy of support from “normal people”. If you can revive the economic fortunes of “the North”, you can revive the economic fortunes of “normal people” across the country. 

His credentials with Labour’s traditional base already in question, Tony Blair made the pugilistic John Prescott his Deputy. Despite being born in Wales, Prescott was the northern stereotype made flesh. The North played a major role in the “Cool Britannia” propaganda of early Blairism. So too did New Labour pump billions of pounds into expensive and ill-fated projects in the North, including through the ill-fated “Northern Way” scheme.

Cameron and Osborne did the same, this time under the guise of the “Northern Powerhouse”, and the creation of new directly-elected mayors in Manchester and Liverpool. 

Then came Brexit — too many columns to count have been written about the importance of “the North” in getting the Leave campaign over the line. Perhaps even more columns have been written about the “Red Wall”, a set of traditionally Labour-voting seats in “the North” which backed Brexit, backed Boris, and abandoned the Tories in 2024 after their disastrous handling of migration and the economy.

According to conventional SW1 wisdom, while Northerners may be straight-talking, common sensical, and “resilient”, they’re also not very politically astute. They can be bought off, basically, by communicating to them in language that they understand (presumed to be very simple), and by throwing vast sums of money at them.

The Burnham phenomenon is the most extreme example of Northern memetic power yet

For many politicos, “the North” is not a large and diverse part of the country, inhabited by rational people who are quite a lot like those living elsewhere in the country. It is a political monolith, which can be cowed and bought off, in order to win the moral legitimacy that it conveys.

The Burnham phenomenon is the most extreme example of Northern memetic power yet; it also reveals the more condescending side of Westminster’s obsession with the place. Burnham has the right accent. He “talks like a normal person” and so seems like he “gets it”. He was successful in Manchester because he threw lots of taxpayer money (mostly from the South) at showy infrastructure projects. He is, for the Labour Party, the perfect candidate — he can win over the North, without actually having to deal with the grievances of those who live there.

But the lazy Westminster fixation on this imagined “North” is profoundly unhelpful. It starts from the wrong place, and reaches the wrong conclusions.

For a start, the North of England is a fairly diverse place, with varied economic interests and cultural orientations. The Irish Catholic, working class cities of Liverpool and Manchester are quite different to the uplands of North Yorkshire, and both are quite different to leafy Cheshire. Many in Newcastle wouldn’t even consider Manchester to be part of the north, being some three hours away by road; for those on the banks of the Tyne, Edinburgh is physically closer.

But, more importantly, the North is just not that different from the rest of the country, and certainly not as far as politics is concerned. 

When asked whether immigration has been too high over the last decade, 72 per cent of people in the North say that it has been according to YouGov’s latest tracker. But, 73 per cent of people in the non-London South, and the same number in the Midlands, agree with them. 

73 per cent of people in the North say that the Government is handling the economy badly — the exact same proportion as in the non-London South.

The average salary in the North West is higher than that in the South West. The North East may have the lowest salaries in the country, but it isn’t much behind the East Midlands. According to the ONS, a town like Blackpool, where 35 percent of people are “deprived” in one way or another, is doing better than many coastal communities in the South — places like Torbay, Gosport, Thanet, and Clacton. 

The truer story is that London, and a ring of commuter communities around it, is doing relatively well. Everywhere else is doing pretty badly. The divide is “core-periphery”, and not “North-South”.

This is largely because, for most of the past century, the British state has pursued a set of policies which try to keep the country’s economic geography in exactly the same place as it was in 1945; there is little scope for places to grow or shrink, in accordance with their relative prosperity. This is a remarkable lapse in form for a country which has, for centuries, built a political economy on the assumption that people will move to where the opportunities are.

Instead, our planning policy keeps people trapped where they are, our industrial strategy is built on the assumption that old industrial communities must be revived, and where even state investment doesn’t yield employment, successive governments have simply decided to pay people to keep living exactly where they are.

This has been terrible for places beyond London, many of which sprung up or expanded rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, in accordance with the economic logic of the time. Industrialisation saw Manchester grow from a market town of 9,000 people in 1700, to a metropolis of half a million by 1900. Blackburn was home to 5,000 people in 1700, and to 130,000 by 1900. New economic opportunities created new places, without state direction.

Though it professes to speak for the left-behind, “Northernism” is more of the same

But when the economic logic of these places, at this size, ceased to make sense, the state’s response was to freeze the population influxes of the Industrial era through deliberate policy. By strangling the emergence of new industries with interventionist planning policy and a stifling regulatory environment, many millions of people across the country have been denied access to the same kind of productive economic reordering that their ancestors enjoyed.

Though it professes to speak for the left-behind, “Northernism” is more of the same. It is a political brand which promises favourable treatment for one left-behind part of a left-behind country, but no fundamental change to the political settlement responsible.