Who fancies explaining to me the North South divide?

[Dogsandbabies]

Foreigner here. Increasingly, (amplified by this government's hideous local response to the covid pandemic) I see people joining in at bashing southerners a northerners.

Why is that? Why is there such a divide? And what drives it? Reading here it seems to be mainly directed at southerners so I was wondering what you think drives it.

The stereo types belie the fact that there is real wealth and privileges up north. Visited my local Booths yesterday ...

There is also the small matter of Wales, Scotland and Ireland who just hate the English. HTH.

I don't think that's true at all. Certainly not in my experience anyway, but others will have a different view of course. But if it were, my question would be why?

There's the North which isn't really the North as Scotland is more Northern.

Its more industrial and not as wealthy as the South . At lot of industries have gone over the last number of years and this has impacted millions of people living in the North (of England).

Its not the only area this has happened too, bit sometimes you would think it is.

The South is a lot wealthier and the jobs are traditionally better paid. Lots of money goes into the South and quite rightly people in the North get annoyed at that.

Then there is the Midlands (of England) which nobody gives a fuck about. It doesn't get any airtime as its not North or South.

I think historically the industrial Revolution happened differently in the north than the south. Up north you had mass factories and mills - with a mass proletariat. Of course there were loads of working class people in the south too- agricultural, London dockers etc but a different quality to it than eg Bolton Wigan Halifax where everyone worked in the factory/mill.

There were some good bosses but many were not and it led to working class protest and distrust of authority. Which I think you still see in the distrust of government.

@Dogsandbabies If you've live in france you'll know how Parisians are seen and see others. It's pretty similar between London and the North.

I'm a northerner who moved to London and seeing the nastiness directed towards the South (don't get me wrong I know southerners do this too, it's just the North laughing at us at the min, whereas was other way around earlier) it makes me so so sad! It's turned so personal when we didn't make any of these bloody decisions so the anger is directed the wrong way. It's actually really affected my mood this morning, that this was an opportunity for everyone to come together but with BLM and all this shit people soon event further apart than before'

A good starting point is to watch Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

The big issue for me is that our Parliament sits in the SE, and those who sit in it seem to forget what day to day life is like outside that small area.
It’s the same in Scotland where central belt issues drive thinking.

For example - transportation infrastructure, bans on non electric cars, curbs on wood burners - all work a treat when your in NE Scotland - no trains, few buses, bloody cold.

@ChristmasTreeFairy5000

Money. Money. Money.

There is also the small matter of Wales, Scotland and Ireland who just hate the English. HTH.

Oh for goodness sake! This nonsense again!

Surely Italy has a similar, even more stark divide? But for different reasons.

Here, there being really significant differences between north and south, goes back centuries. Look at the waves of invasion and immigration over the last 2,000 years; Romans, Danelaw, Anglo-Saxon immigration. The history, laws, customs and populations of parts of the country(s) have been very, very different and traces of that remain.

In the last 300 years it's been the story of industrialisation and Empire, then the loss of both. Northern and Scottish cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow were rich and powered Empire but the mass of their populations worked in the 'dark satanic mills', or, in the NE in coal mining communities, and that image, of poor, urban, slaves to industry, persists.

That switched quite rapidly to de-industrialised unemployment, particularly in the Thatcher years, while the financial services industry prospered in London. A lot of really visceral anger and resentment persists from that time and the lack of large-scale investment since.

So southerners see northerners as all living in tight, urban, working-class communities (and forget the beautiful rural areas, which seem a bit cold and bleak to them, as they look south to France for 'nice countryside to holiday and relax in'). Whereas northerners see southerners as soft, incapable in practical ways and rather like spoilt children.

It’s a core/ periphery thing. Some people think that the seeds were sown as far back as William the Conqueror’s ‘Harrying of the North’ (his brutal response to northern rebellion).
It’s also a southern snobbery thing and a northern inverted snobbery thing. Both feel morally superior to the other.
I’d argue the physical landscape is a factor - hills vs lowland easy farming. The landscape creates different landholding patterns and different relative numbers in the different social classes. You could have a comfortable income as a farmer from less land in the south. Weirdly the mineral resources are largely in the north (unlike in Italy where the resources are in the rich part) but the great port is London , nearest to our neighbours in Europe.

I've lived in the south most of my life but have 'northern' family. I've never noticed people slagging off the north. I have heard people say they dont like the sound of some accents (but the specific example I can think of they were Welsh themselves). Queens english snobbery applies equally to people with estuary english (if not more so as I think that's seen as more 'common' than a northern dialect).

I dont think people in London think about people in the north much at all - part of the problem from the northerners perspective! But how much do you spend time thinking about what people in Norfolk are up to when you're up in Newcastle - probably not at all just thinking about London really ...and a privileged section of that not the whole of it.

Personally, I live in the south and I'm jealous that house prices are so much cheaper in the north.

Differences have been highlighted by others. I think the divide is more between London/South East and the rest of the country, other than the pronunciation difference being north and south.

A great example of current London-centric thinking determining large-scale investment priorities, even when it's supposedly designed to benefit 'the north', is HS2.

This is all about being able to get to London 10 or 20 minutes faster (and onwards into Europe, ooops!), from a handful of Midlands and Northern locations.

There is congestion on the existing N/S train lines which needs tackling but many business travellers don't actually seem that bothered about an extra 10 minutes on a train, where they can work anyway. The real challenge for businesses in most Midlands and Northern cities, is East / West routes, from one northern city to another, which are woefully slow and undeveloped and which do cause daily costs and delays.

But tackling those real barriers to northern economic growth wouldn't be a single big glory project and, by not centring London, would be seen by many as a 'regional project' not a 'national' one.

I agree with pp that part of the 'soft southerners' vs 'hard northerners' idea comes from landscape, weather and farming, before industrialisation added another layer to it.

Not just between North and south England. Scotland hates England.
You can't be otoynd if being English because you'll be seen as racist you have to be british.. But it fine to be proud of being Welsh, Scottish or Irish... Makes zero sense

I think Scotland and northern England have a lot more in common with each other, than either do with London and the SE.

For the last 5 years it has been the government policy that determines that 80% of all government money gets spent in 20% of the wealthiest boroughs..... recently changed and branded out to the rest of the country as "levelling Up".

@IEat

Not just between North and south England. Scotland hates England. You can't be otoynd if being English because you'll be seen as racist you have to be british.. But it fine to be proud of being Welsh, Scottish or Irish... Makes zero sense

This is a narrow-minded view of Scotland, which is a country of millions of people, not one big blob

I'm English, and sadly I associate the St George's cross with quite a few negative things - it is hard to be proud when so many unpleasant people and causes use the flag.

I've lived in both and found the South much more grim and depressing. A concrete congested jungle stretching for miles from Basildon to Slough. I'd never seen anything like the levels of deprivation in places like Woolwich. Full of stuck up defensive people. Even "naice" places like Oxford, yeah the city centre is nice but then miles of grim council estates. Cambridge full of ugly 1970s buildings. I found Yorkshire much nicer, lovely countryside, friendly people, wholesome food, small pockets of deprivation but nothing like the huge hopeless swathes of the South

#IEat What do you actually mean when you say 'Scotland hates England'? It's a bit of a sweeping statement without any further comment. What are your own experiences of this?

The long story? Research all about the miners’ crisis, the socio-economic structure of this country, the investment into schooling, public services etc in the north vs the south, the number of children living in poverty on both ends of the country and look at the sheer number of inconsistencies between the two areas of the country in how COVID management has been handled. The differences are staggering.

The short? Here’s a shitty stick. The south grab the clean end first because that’s where the rich people and the politicians live, the north get what’s left over - the shitty end.

I'd say the divide is a bit different currently. I grew up in the North and now live in London.

I totally get the anger about lack of investment in the North because it is real, and Londoners do tend to dismiss the provinces in a very irritating way.

Equally London -not the South of England necessarily- does not show otherwise bigoted thinking in the way that northern towns do. That's not to say there are no open minded people in northern towns, of course, but it is not the norm to be accepting of difference.

That the North voted in this Tory government, voted for brexit, and are now being really fucking horrible about Londoners missing our Xmas has widened the fracture. I won't be going back. I miss the scenery but currently would never mind but hearing the expression 'I speak as I find' EVER again.

I am a born East Anglian who was schooled in the South and now lives up North (25 years).

The thing that strikes me now, thinking back, was that when I lived in the South as a teen, the North was just completely unimportant - off the radar. We used to make jokes about Watford Gap. We thought of the North, if we thought of it at all, as a cultural wasteland with tiny houses and grinding poverty.

I remember one of the groundbreaking things about Cold Feet was that it seemed like the first time middle class Northerners were depicted on TV - previously it had been Kes, Billy Elliot, the Full Monty, Rita Sue and Bob too etc all depicting the same "it's grim up North" vibe.

I might have thought this had long since changed but my friend married a Londoner who steadfastly refused to live anywhere other than London because he "needs high culture". They came to visit us one weekend and he was genuinely, genuinely amazed that our suburb had an organic supermarket and "naice" shops.