Looking at British politics right now, this magazine’s American readership must be mightily puzzled. In Andy Burnham, the UK is about to get a new Prime Minister whose entire justification for leadership is that he hails from Manchester—the capital of “the North.”
What, you may be asking, is “the North” (other than “that bit above the South”)?
A central theme of this island’s politics is that there exists a yawning gap between England’s northern and southern halves.
Northern England is poor, neglected, and failing, its plight symbolized by the post-industrial cities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Newcastle.
Southern England, anchored by the gold-paved capital of London, is by contrast rich, contented, and thriving.
It’s a simple stereotype, one that turns a complex situation into a morality tale and, incidentally, ignores the two other directions of the compass (leaving out the aptly named regions of the West Country and East Anglia, which are by many metrics in worse shape than the North). And it is foundational to Andy Burnham’s heavily self-mythologized reputation: Burnham, the longtime Mayor of Manchester, found his city a blighted ruin and single-handedly turned it into an economic success story.
Now he promises to do the same for the rest of the North, which his political prospects require be painted as a vast wasteland crying out for a hometown savior.
But it isn’t true. The economic picture across the purportedly monolithic North is in fact very mixed. I should know. I live in the same part of the country as Burnham, in an ordinary, brick-and-mortar semi-detached house–not a collapsing shanty or a cardboard box. Some of my neighbors even own their own motorcars!
What is true is that all parts of what Burnham reflexively calls “the North” are net recipients of Treasury cash, receiving more in central government expenditure than they pay back in tax. But this is less exceptional than it seems: every region of the UK, barring only London and its immediate environs, gets more from the government than it gives. Thus, the prevailing political narrative that Burnham’s “North” is particularly deprived does not compute. The vast majority of the country is failing to pay its way these days.
It is also true that this was not always the case. Northern England was the country’s industrial powerhouse, and the traditional stronghold of Burnham’s own Labour Party, with many of its MPs coming from the area’s coal miners, factory workers, and furnace stokers. Beginning in the 1990s, however, Labour was captured by upper-middle-class liberal Northerners of a different kind: North Londoners, including what you might call “North Londoners of the mind”: those who, like Burnham himself, were born outside the capital but ran off to Oxbridge and Westminster at the first opportunity.
Even as this change unfolded, Northern voters continued to support Labour almost instinctively. But no longer: this reflexive backing is falling off as it becomes increasingly clear that most of the London-centric MPs Labour sent out to man the ramparts of its “Red Wall” in the North have nothing in common with their constituents.
The classic example was Peter Mandelson, Labour’s disgraced former Ambassador to Washington, best known to U.S. audiences as a long-term resident of Epstein Island, but more famous here as Labour’s chief spin doctor in the ‘80s.
Before he was Ambassador, Mandelson was MP for Hartlepool, an archetypal Northern post-industrial economic disaster area. There, a story was told about him entering what he might call a “casual dining establishment,” pointing out the exotic-looking dish of mushy peas (a working-class staple; essentially, peas mashed into a state resembling something Kermit the Frog might vomit up) and asking for some of that wonderful guacamole, please.
The tale, I should note, was apocryphal. As Mandelson later explained, it was actually a different Labour Party staff member who made this faux pas, not himself. Mandy was more sophisticated; an experienced player of the game, he knew precisely how to pose with a genuine portion of lower-class pigswill for a photo (before tossing it aside once the cameras were off).
Although actually from England’s North, in his social and political outlook Burnham is every bit the “Plastic Northerner” Mandelson was.
To speak generically of “the North,” as Burnham cannot stop himself from doing, is to exploit outsiders’ ignorance about the place. Thinking Northerners are all the same is the domestic English equivalent of thinking Africa is a single country. There are vast differences even between the most significant Northern cities of Liverpool (a former port center) and nearby Manchester (a former factory town), never mind between those and the coal and steel cities of Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. And let’s not forget the even more northerly Scotland, an entire country within our united kingdom that has no place in Burnham’s schema.
Consider, for example, Burnham’s scheme to make Manchester his new part-time prime ministerial and Treasury base, the so-called “Number 10 of the North.” Quite apart from all the cost and duplication of administrative effort, this is going to seriously annoy inhabitants of other Northern towns, who will come to resent Burnham’s political base as a money-leeching “second London”. Many other Northerners hate Manchester’s guts already (especially in Liverpool and Leeds).
As evidence, consider a social psychology experiment conducted in 2013. Manchester United soccer fans were invited to complete a survey about their favorite team. Partway through, actors were employed to perform staged accidents, such as falling down a nearby hill in agony with a “broken” ankle. Half of the actors wore a Liverpool Football Club shirt, and half a Manchester United jersey. In response, 92 percent of duped survey-takers ran over to help the fellow United fan, but only 30 percent bothered to aid the despised Liverpool supporter. Hardly “Northern unity.”
There is no automatic solidarity between the various residents of “the North”, as Andy fondly imagines, any more than there is automatic solidarity between the peoples of Sudan and Somalia (to return to the Africa analogy). Burnham’s image of “The North” is a curiously metropolitan one, as his professional life outside Westminster has been spent catering to the economic and social needs of residents, businesses, and workers of city centers in large, regeneration-cash-flush conurbations like Liverpool and Manchester. That’s nothing like the center of the small Northern town I inhabit, which, only 30 minutes away from the pleasant outer suburbs, is full of vape shops, empty premises, cheap bakery chains, strangely shaped welfare recipients on free mobility scooters, and recently arrived immigrants running fake shopfronts. Plus, much of the region is rural, not urban.
It has been persuasively argued that, by claiming “The North” has been the subject of a decades-long “class racism” from Southern Londoners, cosplayers like Burnham are seeking to claim the same systemic discrimination—and thus, the same entitlement to special treatment—as other purportedly oppressed groups (gays, Muslims, etc.) because they come from “oop North”, as people “oop” here supposedly say (but actually don’t).
In a book co-written with the similarly minded Mayor of Liverpool (“Self-Pity City,” as its detractors call it), Burnham once complained that he and his regional brothers had “lived the experience of being treated as second-class citizens in our [own] country.” You’d think he was Henry Nowak. What Burnham really meant was he didn’t get a job at a top consultancy firm immediately after leaving university, supposedly because he didn’t come from London.
The real challenges facing “The North” are not unique to the region. Rather, they are the common problems of Great Britain: mass immigration, sky-high taxes, crime, crippling “green” energy policies, a parasitic public sector, DEI run rampant, an unsustainable welfare system, two-tier policing, decaying infrastructure, and the accelerating destruction of our traditional culture. Rather than engaging in an endless celebration of victimhood, Burnham should stay down in London and apply himself to these issues. That, more than anything else, would improve the lives of the deprived, Dickensian residents of NorthernTown™.
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