The North-South divide in England

The North-South Divide Gets Ideology

At the 1924 election, former Southern Liberal voters went Tory, and stayed there; former Northern Liberal voters went with Labour, and stayed there. This finally locked down the political North-South divide. The Liberal Party was English, with an ancestry going back beyond the Union of 1707. Although it had come to be identified with Outer Britain during the struggles of the 19th century, it never completely lost traction in the South - until now. The Labour Party was a very different animal. It was born of the United Kingdom, its first five leaders were Scotsmen, and for the first two decades of its existence it had zero impact south of the Trent except in the poor quarters of London's vast city-state.

The Conservatives were no longer facing off against a genuine rival English party. The opposition now was the Party of Outer Britain (Northern English + Celts) a.k.a. Labour. This hardened the age-old suspicion among Southerners that the North was somehow not properly English. Essentially the battle-lines were the same as in 1461, 1642 or 1848 (or, for that matter, as when Northern thegns and Welsh princelings had united against the Godwins of Wessex under Edward the Confessor).

The ancient struggle was now window-dressed with fashionable, 20th-century ideologies. Labour, the new incarnation of the Outer British Alliance, claimed its members were all somehow instinctively peace-loving, communitarian, and internationalist. This self-image remains central to many Scots, Welsh, and Northern English.

Men live by their generosities, by their loyalties; not by their interests, and their self-regarding impulses... that is the aim of the Socialist inspiration that gives us power in our Labour Movement.

- Ramsay MacDonald, Labour leader, 1924

Meanwhile, the latest version of the Party of the South claimed to represent a Deep Ethnic England. This vision is still widespread among those who love Barbour coats, the Cotswolds and suchlike.

The preservation of the individuality of the Englishman is essential to the preservation of the type of the race... To me, England is the country, and the country is England... The sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone...

- Stanley Baldwin, Conservative leader, 1924

- James Hawes, The Shortest History of England, London, 2020, p.204-206.

See also:
Books: A NZer makes powerful enemies at the BBC, 28 February 2023
Books: It seemed now that only a miracle could save Chamberlain, 20 December 2022
Books: The rotten boroughs, 2 April 2017