Revolt of the Rustbelt

In the space of less than a year, the established political order of Ukania has received two successive, jolting blows—a referendum in which a population voted, against the express will of the leadership of all three major parties and an overwhelming majority of the country’s parliament, to leave the European Union; followed by an election in which a 20 per cent lead in opinion polls for the sitting government vanished overnight, and the most radical opposition programme since Thatcherism, presented by the most vilified leader in the history of the country’s media, came close enough to victory to generate a hung parliament—one now confronted with fraught negotiations over the terms of departure from the eu. The dismay of bourgeois opinion at the plight of the state is the best register of the effect of the two temblors. ‘Chronic instability’, lamented the Economist, ‘has taken hold of British politics’, and it ‘will be hard to suppress’. Readers had to ask themselves: ‘What can come of this chaos?’footnote¹ The answer from the Financial Times was grimly tight-lipped: ‘The stablest of democracies has become the western world’s box of surprises.’footnote²

To understand the dynamics that have produced this situation, the starting-point has to be a closer analysis of the pattern of Brexit. Like any popular poll, the 23 June 2016 referendum can be broken down in a variety of ways. But as the dust has started to settle, some facts stand out. Nationalist dynamics produced wins for Remain in Scotland and Northern Ireland, while Wales’s 80,000 net votes for Leave amounted to only 6 per cent of Brexit’s winning margin. Cameron met his Singapore closer to home: every part of England voted ‘Out’ with the single exception of London, the previous Conservative administration of John Major having designated the capital city—swollen in size, wealth and self-esteem—a region in its own right. There was more than enough support for the eu in London and Scotland to cancel out both the modest surplus of Leave votes in southern England and the strong Euroscepticism of eastern counties. But coming on top of these setbacks, the six million Leave votes cast in England’s historic industrial regions proved indigestible. Out of 72 counting areas in the North, fewer than a dozen answered the call from the Conservative government, the Labour opposition, Obama, Merkel and the imf to support the European status quo. Had England’s three northern regions—North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber—and the West Midlands been excluded from the count, Remain would have scraped home by 200,000 votes instead of finishing 1.3 million short. In 2014 Vernon Bogdanor—a tv regular on the mysteries of the British constitution—confidently declared there was little regional feeling in England, assuring the New York Times that ‘the regions are ghosts’.footnote³ If so, could Ukania still be haunted by them?

This journal has noted how the Brexit poll exposed a set of interlinked fractures: national, regional, social, ideological.footnote⁴ National: the contraflow ‘In’ verdicts of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Regional: London and the South East boast the uk’s highest economic output per head and delivered the best numbers for Remain—60 and 48 per cent respectively—outside the devolved nations. The Midlands, in sharp relative decline over the past two decades, voted most firmly the other way.footnote⁵ Social: the ‘Out’ vote correlated with lower levels of education, income and occupational grade. At the same time, a racially charged Leave campaign denied Brexit the support of most black and minority-ethnic voters and many socialists of all backgrounds.footnote⁶ Ideological: not regions, which were alive, but memories were the real ghosts abroad in England, ghosts of industry and of empire. Like the leading Brexiteers, affluent John Bull pensioners in the Tory shires prefer their shareholder capitalism wrapped in a Union Jack.

But though the North–South divide isn’t England’s only fault line, it’s no accident that the deindustrialized periphery ranged itself against the London establishment in the referendum, sealing Remain’s fate. Culturally the regional divide may not be so pronounced—provincial identities have been levelled out by a millennium of centralized rule and the modern impress of powerful institutions like the Fleet Street of old and the bbc; what most binds the North together is industrial tradition plus political discontent—but it shows up across the whole gamut of socio-economic indicators: output, jobs, incomes, house prices, education, life expectancy. The aggregated statistics point to a fissure running east to west between the Humber and Severn estuaries, stranding the northern regions, the West Midlands except Warwickshire and the East Midland counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in the zone of relative economic disadvantage. So marked an objective rift cannot fail to have subjective consequences. Only one in ten Northerners and Midlanders believe that London doesn’t receive preferential treatment over most other parts of the uk.footnote⁷

The effects of London’s outsize nature on the rest of the country have, of course, been a historic feature of the national landscape. ‘The capital city created and directed England from start to finish’, Fernand Braudel once wrote.footnote⁸ The dual character of British capitalism became distinctive in modern times, split between northern industry—the factory system first systematically elaborated in loosely regulated Lancashire, during and after the Napoleonic Wars—and metropolitan commerce.footnote⁹ An international-facing City of London and a largely Southern English investor class reaped the benefits of the uk’s head-start mercantilism to funnel the world’s goods and funds through the wharves and counting houses of the capital, indifferent to a provincial manufacturing complex which would develop in parallel to it. No less critical would be the concentration of political power within the golden triangle of Whitehall, Westminster and St James’s: a West End counterpart to the accumulation of economic power in the Square Mile. Such remain the boundary markers of ‘opinion-forming Britain’, viewed from whence the travails of depressed areas could seem, until Brexit, like small beer.footnote¹⁰

Against this background, differences in economic structure began to tell decisively against northern England a century ago, in the bumpy aftermath of the First World War. Lancashire, the West Riding, the North East coast and west Cumberland were overinvested in Victorian export industries struggling with mountains of debt and a shrinking world market. West-central Scotland and south Wales were in the same boat. Together they came to constitute a chronically depressed, heavy-industrial Outer Britain cut adrift from the consumer prosperity and booming light industries of the South and the Midlands. After 1945 the imperative for these smokestack regions was to overhaul their manufacturing base before the resumption of overseas competition. Burnt by the Depression, however, staple industries opted to coast along in a temporary buyers’ market. Nor, crucially, was there any dirigisme from Westminster or the City. Unlike war-ravaged Europe and Japan, the uk didn’t absolutely require a large-scale, modernized industrial base to recover a position in the world. Instead the imperial mentality satirized by Belloc—‘Whatever happens we have got/the Maxim gun, and they have not’—persisted. A nuclear-weapons programme, Attlee’s forgotten legacy, reasserted this military vanity under changed conditions. The pound sterling offered another ‘ticket to the world’s top table’.footnote¹¹ Amidst the currency crises of the mid-sixties, Tom Nairn observed that ‘the role of world banker has proved the toughest, most resistant sector of imperialism’.footnote¹² If the deflationary supports needed for a strong pound clashed with the investment requirements of domestic industry, it was so much the worse for the latter. In relative terms the North didn’t even tread water during the ‘golden age of capitalism’, its share of national output falling from 28 to 25 per cent between 1951 and 1971 while that of London and the South East increased from 34 to 36 per cent—the gap between them virtually doubling.footnote¹³

Once the long downturn brought Thatcher to power at the end of the seventies, the divide deepened. Under her rule, the Conservatives tightened the austerity introduced by Callaghan’s Labour; carried through the industrial shakeout Edward Heath had attempted a decade earlier; broke the back of a labour movement responsible for bringing down the last two administrations; and completed the transformation of the City of London from a British into a free-wheeling international oligarchy. With an electoral coalition based in England’s lower half—three-quarters of Tory seats won in the South and the Midlands, as the ‘wealth generated by London’s booming financial-services industry turned neighbouring regions a deeper shade of blue’—the New Right saw off inner-city riots, steel and coal strikes, and protests against cuts in northern and London municipalities.footnote¹⁴ Scargill’s Yorkshire miners, seeking to fight the idea that ‘any industry inside capitalist society—whether public or private sectors—has the right to destroy the livelihood of men and women at the stroke of an accountant’s pen’, went down to complete defeat, demonstrating that Whitehall at least had the power to do so. The legitimacy of bottom-line capitalism would not be challenged in like fashion again.footnote¹⁵