46 England
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.
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.
It was the Industrial Revolution that transformed the region from ‘an obscure, ill-cultivated swamp’ (Engels) into the hub of an industrial-capitalist system that would be emulated the world over.
Hazeldine argues that the North has been the launch pad for three successive attempts to challenge the hegemony of the Southern-based regime of landed-finance capital.