Politics makes strange bedfellows, but few as strange as these. On 12 December 2019 (it seems a long time ago now), a Conservative prime minister and former London mayor of broadly Thatcherite cast sealed a rapprochement with the towns and pit communities eviscerated by the neoliberal restructuring of the Thatcher, Major and Blair years. Boris Johnson is praiseful of Thatcher’s legacy, ‘whose benefits we enjoy to this day’, but he has succeeded where Conservatives of her generation feared to tread.* He won twenty-eight northern and sixteen Midland constituencies from Labour: forty-four seats in total, out of a national net gain of forty-eight. As a result, one in five Conservative MPs represents a northern constituency, the highest proportion in half a century. Without these regional additions, Johnson would have a working Commons majority of minus one.
It was Labour’s blocking of EU withdrawal that precipitated a general election in which the Party inevitably leaked support on both flanks, to the pro-Brexit Conservatives and hard-Remain Lib Dems. But the concentration of Labour losses gains in Leavevoting, working-class areas of the North was overwhelming. Constituents in Ashton-under-Lyne on the outskirts of Manchester were ‘more despondent than in 2017’, Angela Rayner told the Guardian ahead of the poll. ‘They wanted one thing done and it’s not happened – and they hate us all’. Two years earlier, when Corbyn had pledged to respect the referendum decision while seeking a close relationship with the EU-27, he boosted the Party’s vote share in the North by 10 percentage points. In 2019 it dropped by the same margin. Although the Tony Blair Institute accuses Corbyn’s leadership and politics of causing a ‘rupture with long-held loyalties’, the Party’s malaise in its heartlands is more deeply rooted. Even in defeat, Corbyn polled more votes in the region than New Labour, once in power, ever attracted.
Two types of response to the loss of ‘Red Wall’ constituencies emerged on the Labour left. ‘Why should Labour’s support be eternally in the North?’ pondered Richard Seymour in Salvage:
Suppose the new working class, less organised than its forebear, expands outside of these former heartland towns? Suppose the left’s purchase is indeed found in new parts of the South? If so, isn’t that a trend we just have to get ahead of?
Alternatively, Craig Gent of Novara argued for the scaling up of community organising in coalfield seats ‘not out of calculation but because it’s the right thing to do. Only then will people start “coming home” to Labour.’*
These reflections came before Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader. ‘Britain now has someone at the forefront of public life who has, throughout his career, inclined toward caution and the status quo,’ celebrates the Spectator.* The problem with Gent’s proposal, therefore, is that by continuing to work through the Labour Party, former Corbynistas may expend a lot of effort just to function as foot soldiers for a hard-boiled pro-capitalist, pro-NATO party leadership.
For socialists to abandon the deindustrialised English rustbelt wholesale, on the other hand, would be to cede a lot of ground to the neoliberals and risk political headwinds from these quarters, such as the pro-Leave sentiment that sank Corbyn in 2019. National hegemony can’t be mustered from the cities alone, and the average southern town – not the likes of hippy Stroud – has its share of political-cultural reaction. Owen Hatherley suggests in Tribune that English culture is defined by its nastiness, and the emotional temperature is noticeably cooler in southern parts.
Northern England and the Midlands are predominantly working-class societies; southern England is not. At the last census, the C2DE social grades (manual workers, casual workers, the unemployed) made up 52 per cent of the population in the North and 51 per cent in the Midlands compared to 38 per cent in London and 43 per cent in the rest of the South. It would still be possible to pursue the Bennite objective of ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people’ by organising in the latter regions, though one should expect the politics of the salariat to loom larger.
Will Johnson’s electoral coalition hold? Presentationally, the prime minister got off to a good start: a Brexit-day meeting of the Cabinet in Sunderland; nationalisation of the hopeless Northern Rail; plans for a Treasury ‘economic decision-making campus’ in the region, possibly on Teesside; talk of moving the House of Lords to York, and of creating a second Conservative Party headquarters in the North or Midlands (somewhere ‘well placed in political terms’, according to ConservativeHome). Johnson followed up a post-election visit to Sedgefield with the offer of £70 million towards conversion of the former Redcar steelworks – sold off by Thatcher in 1988 and shuttered by Thai multinational SSI under Cameron in 2015 – into a private-sector business park. Redcar had become Bluecar, the prime minister joked with his aides: it needed to be looked after. Atop all this, there is his pledge to ‘level up’ a country with some of the worst regional disparities in the advanced capitalist world.
Every Westminster government promises something of the sort. How should Johnson’s commitment be assessed, and is it made more or less plausible in light of the 2020 crash?
Few writers discuss the North–South divide for long without reaching for Orwell. Let’s leave The Road to Wigan Pier to one side, for a change, and consult Down and Out in Paris and London instead. I’m thinking of his pungent description of life in the grand ‘Hôtel X.’ near the Place de la Concorde, and the contrast he draws between the waiters’ outward show of polished manners and their slovenly behaviour in the kitchens. There is a fatal tension in the whole business of fine dining, Orwell argues:
In a hotel a huge and complicated machine is kept running by an inadequate staff, because every man has a well-defined job and does it scrupulously. But there is a weak point, and it is this – that the job the staff are doing is not necessarily what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the boulot – meaning, as a rule, an imitation of good service.
This is what UK regional policy has always previously amounted to: an imitation of good service, to avoid political embarrassment from worsening economic disparities. ‘It is not a question of spending a great deal of money, but of showing that the matter has not been pigeon-holed, and that the government is doing its best to help matters’, Neville Chamberlain told the National Government in 1934; or, as Chancellor Derick Heathcoat-Amory advised Harold Macmillan in 1958, ‘We must take all the action we reasonably can to deal with this problem; and, equally important, we must be seen to be doing so.’
The same dynamic has played out time and again, because the country’s spatial hierarchies – the City of London at the summit, the South-East stockbroker belt just below it, outlying industrial or post-industrial regions bottommost – have only become more entrenched as the years pass. Harold Wilson ramped up spending on regional industrial subsidies to deflect criticism over colliery closures and the collapse of his National Plan under financial market pressure. Thatcher forced a shakeout among domestic manufacturers while renovating the Square Mile, but confessed grudging admiration for Michael Heseltine’s ‘skilful public relations’ in showing an interest in recession-ravaged Merseyside after the Toxteth riots.
Blair assured the Northern Echo and his County Durham constituents that ‘there is a North–South divide’ and ‘we do have to bridge it’. At the same time, he and Brown defended the Bank of England’s policy to raise interest rates to dampen inflationary pressure in the South East, no matter if its effect on the currency exchanges was to price industrial exporters out of world markets. Blair’s chief press secretary orchestrated national headlines stating that the regional gap was in fact ‘over’, ‘dead’ and a ‘myth’. Cameron and Osborne protested that the UK was too London-centric, then proceeded to inflate another asset price bubble in the City through quantitative easing, while towns such as Blackpool bore the brunt of austerity.
So what’s new? Writing in New Left Review in 2016, William Davies sketched out three ethical–historical phases of neoliberalism: the combative Thatcherite and Reaganite variety of 1979–89; the uncontested normative neoliberalism of 1989–2008; and the punitive type of recent years, organised around austerity and benefit sanctions. The coming to power of Johnson and Cummings in summer 2019 may have signalled a local shift to a more populist iteration. Davies thought not, dismissing the pair in the Guardian as ideological bankrupts with nothing but Brexit in the locker. But it’s arguable that they represent one of neoliberalism’s more creative rearguard responses to the travails of the post-2008 period. Their back-to-back victories in the Brexit referendum and 2019 general election came through a willingness to trade in the four freedoms of the EU single market – unhindered cross-border movement of goods, capital, services and persons – for an electoral compact with the UK’s left-behind regions, one that kept Corbynism at bay while protecting market imperatives within the national economic arena.
Before the coronavirus struck, Conservative regional policy continued to place a New Labour-ish emphasis on supply-side improvements: skills training, infrastructure investment. Chancellor Rishi Sunak – a former City hedge fund manager and MP for the picturesque castle town of Richmond in the Yorkshire Dales – set aside large sums for capital spending in his March 2020 Budget. He also confirmed that the assessment criteria of the Green Book (used by the Treasury to calculate return on investment for public infrastructure), which tilts transport investment towards London and the South East, were to be reviewed. Any loosening of the purse-strings would help regional economies damaged by the spending cuts of 2010–19. Services account for 76 per cent of economic output in the North and public services are easily the largest subsector. The planned increases in current expenditure were fairly modest – some of the sums involved merely replace EU funding – but it’s fair to say that the pre-Covid Johnson administration combined an intent to dish Labour through higher day-to-day spending with a commitment to ‘boosterism’ on the capital account.
The timing of the Budget caught Sunak torn between the election pledges of 2019 and a worsening public health emergency. Every judgement is provisional in the wake of the pandemic. However, either London or the South East has bounced back strongest from every national recession since at least the 1973 OPEC price shock, and there is no ipso facto reason to suppose things will be different this time. The North West posted the largest initial rise in the unemployment claimant rate during the spring 2020 lockdown, while the steepest expected falls in GDP in the second quarter of the year were in northern and Midland areas especially reliant on lockdown-prone sectors – manufacturing, for example, in the case of Corby, Pendle and the Ribble Valley. Financial and insurance services in the City of London and Edinburgh were forecast to weather the economic storm better (as were deprived areas with large health and social work sectors, from Middlesbrough to Tower Hamlets).
Over the longer term, the corona-related drag on economic activity will impair balance sheets in all institutional sectors of the economy. The Treasury accepts that central government debt-to-GDP levels must rise but urges a fiscal consolidation to plug a forecast annual budget deficit of £340bn, twice the gap that opened up after the financial crisis. In the corporate world, any repeat of the regionalised credit crunch of 2008–10, when the UK’s centralised banking system rebalanced loan portfolios to favour firms closest to headquarters, will hurt northern and Midland SMEs more than their southern counterparts. Among households, whereas median debt excluding mortgages doesn’t vary widely between regions, median net property wealth rose by 51 per cent in London in the post-2008 decade to £410,000 while falling 12 per cent in the North East to £115,000. Another round of quantitative easing – including £200bn from the Bank of England, equivalent to 9 per cent of GDP – has partially corrected the slump in equity prices of February–March 2020, important for London in particular where financial wealth makes an unusually large contribution to overall household wealth.
The contraction of global capitalist supply chains now predicted by David Harvey among others could create opportunities for producers in rustbelt regions in the West.* The prime minister’s senior advisor, Dominic Cummings, is bent on overhauling the state bureaucracy – as he writes on his blog, ‘changing the wiring of power in Whitehall so decisions are better’. He also has at least a hobby-horse interest in private sector technological innovation, modelled on Californian precedents. Raised in Durham, like Blair, and retaining more of an accent, might he foster a programme of industrial–scientific modernisation in his home region? It seems unlikely. Awed reverence for market rationality won’t dispose him to intervene in firms’ locational decisions. Only electoral motives would cause the government to send corporate R&D support further north than, say, Cheltenham and Cambridge. But then, such motives are real forces.
If COVID-19 forced a general shift to massive state intervention across the OECD, it became clear as national lockdowns eased that neoliberalism in one form or another had merely been suspended, pending a return, when market relations could once more dictate social life. In those UK regions stranded by the market, grievances will extend beyond the millennial and post-millennial precariat that powers the post-Corbyn left to also include many of Johnson’s small-town voters; as dismayed as anyone by the government’s mishandling of the crisis, they expected good service from the Conservatives and have no party loyalties to cause them to settle for less. Any socialist movement worth its salt would marry up these malcontents.
__________
* Boris Johnson, ‘What Would Maggie Do Today?’, speech at the Centre for Policy Studies, 27 November 2013. See also Emma Duncan, ‘The New North’, Sunday Times, 6 May 1990, a defence of Thatcher’s regional record.
* Richard Seymour, ‘Losing the North’, Salvage, 26 January 2020; Craig Gent, ‘Learning the Lessons of Labour’s Northern Nightmare Will Take Longer Than a Weekend’, Novara, 17 December 2019.
* ‘Given a choice between the new and unknown and the familiar and safe, he has always opted for the latter’: David Patrikarakos, ‘Keir Starmer Is the Conservative We Need in this Time of Crisis’, Spectator, 15 April 2020. Cf. Oliver Eagleton, ‘What Keir Starmer’s Ambition of “Unity” Really Means’, Novara, 4 April 2020.
* David Harvey, ‘Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19’, Jacobin, 20 March 2020.