In the aftermath of the First World War, the economies of the South-East and the North were ‘roughly on level pegging’, contributing 35 and 30 per cent of GDP respectively; by the end of the 20th century, the figures were 40 and 21 per cent, with London gaining another 5 percentage points between 1997 and 2017. Regional disparities within states widened globally over this same period, but the severity of Britain’s North-South divide is unique, worse than in famously imbalanced countries like Spain, Germany and Italy, as well as France, with its massive metropolitan core.
Examining English history from a northern perspective helps to explain this. The determination of Westminster politicians – Liberal, Labour and Tory – to maintain the economic predominance of London and the South-East (in finance, the wider service sector and cutting-edge manufactures) has an appalling consistency: in Blackburn in 1931, 42 per cent of women were unemployed compared to 3 per cent in Luton; in Lancashire in the late 1950s, Harold Macmillan’s efforts to maintain the price of sterling finally turned cotton into a net import; in the North as a whole from 1979 onwards, inflation and union power were conquered at the cost of industry’s often terminal decline. The preoccupation of the British ruling class with its world-leading financial sector is a vital part of the explanation for the long decay of the 19th-century ascendancy of the North.
