In november 2020, Britain’s company register welcomed a curious newcomer onto its rolls: the Northern Independence Party. With the slogan of ‘A free Northumbria and fairer North for all’, the private company was to run for elections in 2024. Like the Brexit Party, or for that matter the Scottish Nationalists, the outfit’s ambitions were openly plebiscitary—a referendum on Northern secession, completing a miniature of Britain’s European uncoupling. The nip is demanding that the uk Parliament hold a referendum on an Independent Northern England, with a ‘yes’ vote leading to ‘the establishment of a sovereign Northern Republic.’ The petition ended with a quote from a Guardian article by Tom Hazeldine: ‘It is a mistake to present the North–South divide as a challenge for a well-intentioned government to overcome, rather than a geographical reflection of how Britain is run, and for whom.’footnote¹

The nip is no British unicum. One of the most striking by-products of the age of globalization has been a remarkable rise in regionalist sentiment; conflicts between Catalans, Basques and Spaniards, Northerners and mezzogiornisti, Flemings and Walloons all puncture the post-national age. Political economy remains a major driver. As Wolfgang Streeck noted in 2017, a ‘new nation-state nationalism in Europe shares with regional separatism its opposition to market-opening political centralization: the one fights to prevent, the other to undo it.’footnote² Amid these cases, Britain has undulated with a centre–periphery dynamic unlike any other. The United Kingdom is the most regionally unequal country in the European Union, with a political system more reminiscent of Jacobin centralism than its French neighbour. As Perry Anderson noted in 2014, not France, but ‘the regnant bulk of the United Kingdom’ is by far the most centralized major society in Europe.footnote³ In the past decade, a series of successive shocks have hit the ‘regnant bulk’, disturbing complacency about the British Union and reigniting London’s fears of Scottish separation. The region known as ‘the North’ played an instrumental role in these upsets. In 2016, it returned majorities for the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum; in 2019, its voters defected from Labour and returned Boris Johnson to Downing Street.

Tom Hazeldine’s The Northern Question imposes a much-needed historical lens on the discussion.footnote⁴ Rather than trade in essentialism about a North hesitant to change, Hazeldine deploys a Marxist method to explain the region’s woes. His first point of reference is Antonio Gramsci, whose reflections on the ‘Southern Question’ inflect the opening pages of his book. The Italian Marxist saw his party as the challenger to a timid Northern bourgeoisie that had failed to rally the peninsula around a popular-democratic Jacobin programme; instead, it brokered deals with Southern landowners and ecclesiastical classes, burdening the unified Italian nation-state with its typically hybrid character. Only a party with Machiavellian ambitions for national renewal could complete the task shirked by Italy’s Northern leaders, unwilling and unable to bury the old order. Hazeldine proposes a measured projection of this Gramscian frame onto Britain. The Northern Question takes as its epigraph the words of Gramsci’s prodigious Scottish pupil, Tom Nairn:

The lamented ‘growing abyss’ between North and South should not really be a subject for mere figures, nor for moral outrage, nor for futile retreads of Westminster-inspired ‘modernization’: it can’t be tackled within the existing State, because it is the existing State, the dominance of the Crown (or ‘anti-industrial’) culture, the thriving pseudo-nationalism of the Old Regime.footnote⁵

Any analysis of the North must of course begin with the question of whether ‘it’ actually exists. Hazeldine is clear that there is more to the region than cultural affect, an aggregate of accents and music scenes. Geographic definitions have varied: north of the River Trent, the Mersey, the Ribble—or the Severn–Wash divide, which would include the economically blighted Midlands? Hazeldine’s answer is structural. He wants to explore the relation of the rise and fall of the North, as an industrial powerhouse, to the rise and rise of London, as a capital of empire and high finance. As he notes, deindustrialization has meant that contemporary regional disparities in England have been blurred; they are now characterized less by a national division of labour than by ‘the positional superiority of London in a services-dominated national economic space’. In this context, the northern rustbelt acts as the ‘senior representative’ of a much larger left-behind England.footnote⁶ Yet the North has never achieved the ‘escape velocity’ needed to free itself from its industrial past: where the mills and coal-pits started, the North begins.

So defined, Hazeldine’s North centres on the old Lancashire–Yorkshire textile belt, the coalfields and the former heavy-industrial districts, from North Derbyshire up to Newcastle and Carlisle. The Midlands, he says, has its own tale to tell. Unsurprisingly, evidence to date the first birth pangs of Northern regional consciousness is found in the mid-19th-century ‘industrial novel’: Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). A sense of cultural belonging certainly exists here still, Hazeldine thinks, although it is ‘low-wattage’ compared to the Basque Country and Catalonia, with their distinctive languages and aspirations for self-rule. Regional identities in England have been ‘levelled out’ by a millennium of centralized rule and powerful national media.footnote⁷

Hazeldine travels far back to establish the differentia specifica of the North. Roman settlements were concentrated in the more hospitable South, with Chester and York as distant outposts amid the upland moors and mountains; beyond them lay only ‘the garrison economy of the border country’. Northern resistance to the Norman Conquest was crushed with scorched-earth tactics, and vast holdings were parcelled out to the new lords. Seignorial supervision was always more thinly stretched here, compared to the South; but literacy was lower, too. The North’s liegemen never enjoyed the same degree of legal centralization that enabled enclosure and agrarian improvement in Southern England, where an enterprising gentry helped to kickstart the agricultural revolution and grow London into one of the largest early-modern cities. By the mid-16th century, England north of the Trent accounted for only 8 per cent of taxable wealth. In the struggles of the early-modern era, the North was a stronghold for the conservative cause: traditional religion, baronial privilege, Crown against Parliament.